The Venture Cafe

Chapter One
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MIND
A year ago my husband and I took a train ride through Germany's Rhine River valley. As I looked out the window at the gorgeous scenery, I noticed a curious event going on in the seat across from me. A four-year-old girl had dropped her ticket between the slats of the train's heating unit, and this carelessness had caused her mother to become extremely frustrated. The four-year-old was not at all sorry about dropping her ticket, but the mother was fighting back tears. She pressed her hand against her forehead and tried to avoid looking at her daughter.
A cyclist in a nearby seat noticed the woman's duress and removed a tool kit from his backpack. After a short conference with the woman, he began to disassemble the heating unit. While the cyclist labored over the air grate, the four-year-old pouted. "It's not my fault," she seemed to say. "I didn't do anything wrong." She made her hands into fists and kicked the side of the train.
Although the cyclist tried every screwdriver in his tool kit, he wasn't able to extract the fallen ticket. After fifteen minutes of tinkering, he reassembled the heating unit and went back to his seat.
The situation was eventually resolved when the ticket taker came around to collect our fares. He took one look at the angry four-year-old and let the family ride.
As I watched the scene play itself out, I began to feel sorry for the girl's mother. It must have been devastating to watch one's four-year-old drop an expensive ticket down an air vent. To have the child stage a tantrum about it must have been simply unbearable. Next time, I thought, the woman would have to do a better job of teaching her four-year- old to hold on to her ticket. Or perhaps she would learn that it's a bad idea to put train tickets into the hands of four-year-olds.
After the group had left the train, I asked my husband, Pehr Anderson, whether he had noticed the ticket incident.
"Of course," he snapped. "I could hardly ignore it."
I told him that I felt bad for the woman, since the lost ticket must have represented a significant financial hardship. I was glad that the ticket taker had allowed the family to ride, anyway.
"Eurail shouldn't be issuing paper-based tickets," Pehr retorted. "The airlines have switched to electronic ticketing. I don't know why the trains are still using paper."
I was surprised by Pehr's reaction, since it reminded me so much of the expression I had seen on the four-year-old's face. Pehr shared the four-year-old's view that the lost ticket was not the girl's fault. The system was broken, and it needed to be changed. The little girl had done the world a favor by pointing this out.
"Do you have any idea how impossible it would be to convince every train station in Europe to switch over to an electronic ticketing system?" I asked Pehr. "You'd have to negotiate with representatives from all sorts of different countries, and none of them would speak English as a first language."
"Paper-based tickets are obsolete," Pehr grumbled. "There's no reason to make people carry around paper tickets."
I thought about how difficult it would be to convince Eurail to change its ticketing system and how easy it would be to simply purchase another ticket. In my mind, there was no question about the better option. If riding Eurail meant keeping track of a paper ticket, then I would figure out a way to keep track of a paper ticket.
But then, I'm not an entrepreneur.
Instead of trying to change the world to meet my needs, I'm perfectly willing to alter my behavior to meet the world on its terms. When I encounter unpleasant situations, I try to resolve them quickly and then go on to other matters.
When the ticket problem was resolved, I opened my travel book and read about different places we could go for dinner. "There's a really famous cathedral in Cologne," I told Pehr. "Maybe we should look at it."
But Pehr was not interested in thinking about an ancient cathedral. Instead of being happy that the ticket situation had resolved itself, Pehr spent the remainder of the train ride scribbling notes onto his Palm Pilot. The ticket incident had provided him with an amazing entrepreneurial opportunity, and he was determined to figure out how much it was worth.
Pehr had no interest in worrying about something as boring as eating, since that was not the sort of problem that could be permanently solved. "We eat, and we get hungry again," he said. "If we fix the ticket problem, no one else will ever have to worry about losing a paper ticket."
Instead of helping evaluate the different restaurants in my guidebook, Pehr suggested that we grab a bag of doughnuts and jump back on the train. The little girl did not have the resources she needed to bring electronic tickets to Eurail, but Pehr might.