Marc Phillips

Once upon a time there were two entrepreneurs.    One was a little spider, the other a bright green caterpillar. The spider built a little web between two branches of an old willow tree. The caterpillar chose a large patch of big, broad leaves that provided shelter from the rain and birds.    As long as there was more food to catch, the spider continued to spin. Expanding here, retreating a little there. The spider’s domain grew and shifted nimbly with the market inside the forest.    The caterpillar had bigger plans than the spider. Much bigger. The caterpillar...

He cut off his son’s hand. He choked his management team. He threw his boss down a ventilation shaft. Darth Vader was a crappy father, an uninspiring leader, and a nightmare employee.    But what if Obi-Wan and Liam Neeson had never found the young Anakin Skywalker on Tatooine so long ago? What if that adorable little kid had simply grown up in the desert and started his own business? Could he have been a successful entrepreneur? Judging from how he ran his department at the Empire, it’s clear his startup would have turned to the dark side—as in...

The sun rose slow on August 5th, 1864, exhaling a crisp breeze across Mobile Bay, the last gap in the Union blockade.  Three Confederate forts—Powell, Gaines and Morgan—stood over the water, their huge guns bristling in the cold. A squadron of warships, including the ironclad CSS Tennessee bobbed inside the Bay behind a field of 67 “torpedoes” floating just beneath the surface, predecessors of the naval mines used today. A hostile business climate for sure.    Know What You Know  To David G. Farragut, a Rear Admiral in the Union Navy, there were known challenges that could sink his fleet...

Raise your hand if you remember the Ear Mouse.    An early Internet meme, this humble rodent sparked a wave of protests and fears of genetic engineering gone wild. Long before Pizza Rat swept the planet, the science experiment known officially as the Vacanti mouse was hailed as the first sign of a terrifying future.    One activist group ran a full page ad in The New York Times under the banner “Who plays God in the 21st century?” The caption read “This is an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back.”    In reality, the...

Back in 2008, just months before the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) completed work on the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, two men, Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit to stop it.    Their claim? That if CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) succeeded in its goal of smashing together tiny particles at extremely high speeds, it would create a black hole and cause the total annihilation of the Earth. Their implication was clear: The LHC would be bad for business.    The suit was filed in Hawaii, whose jurisdiction over intergovernmental European organizations is, well, questionable....