Praise for tips from Maurer

I enjoyed [Mickey Maurer’s Dec. 13] closing commentary on “The Ten Essential Principles of Entrepreneurship You Didn’t Learn in School,” along with the previous nine.

Great foresight on cable and radio. I have said for years that most of the successful entrepreneurial endeavors have come from ideas that are “industry-disruptive.”

The most classic and pervasive example is cellular phones over land lines. Satellite radio and dish TV are examples that you point out. Interactive Intelligence was disruptive to the business communications industry of clunky, staid, proprietary telephony hardware (the likes of Nortel, Lucent, Siemens, etc.) with the notion of computer telephony and replacing all that hardware with software, which is malleable, customizable, dynamic and smart with greater functionality, and able to operate as voice over Internet protocol, all at a lower price to operate and maintain. Interactive Intelligence is now worth about half a billion dollars.

I also enjoyed the Forefront insert, especially on gerrymandering. I suggested to [Gov.] Mitch [Daniels] when he was running for re-election that I felt it should be changed for the interests of the citizenry, and to use the largest granularity possible, such as using counties to determine districts, and not the crazy, convoluted shapes you see in congressional districts.

The key effect is to not have one district that covers rural and industrial, and suburbia and inner city (and splits down the middle of a neighborhood). As you know, only 15 percent of congressional districts are “competitive.”

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John Gibbs