Today was a Yale Law School reunion devoted to entrepreneurship.  It wasn't my year to reune, but, heck, it's only a train ride away and I was curious what this particular law school would have to say about entrepreneurs.

I talked to Dean Koh very briefly, and said that the energy and sense of humor of the people talking was truly remarkable.  He smiled.  He wanted to show the law students that they have a lot of options -- they can certainly work for law firms, but they can also build all kinds of institutions.  It was a splendid idea for an alumni weekend.  (But, boy, does Yale have to shape up in terms of its tech approach.  Stanford's technology law program is much stronger than Yale's.  The last Stanford LS alumni magazine had on its cover the GCs of MSN, Google, Cisco, eBay, Yahoo!, Qualcomm, Autodesk, and Oracle -- all Stanford alums.  We need to have a technology law building at Yale, like those Berkman people, or at least a few rooms where people can hang around and feel entrepreneurial. C'mon, guys, compete!)

One of the panels featured Tom Bernstein of Chelsea Piers (and the Texas Rangers, and many other projects) fame.  He said that his approach had always been to have big ideas about crying needs, and then to carry them out with passion, persistence, and patience.  (These successful business people carry around "alliterative rules of three" in their pockets.)  So, for example, it was a big idea to build an enormous sports complex on a wasteland waterfront in NYC.   It took a while (and a lot of sales and marketing) to bring the project to completion, but it met a crucial need in NYC, and now kids in NYC grow up going to Chelsea Piers.

Daniel Egger made the point that lawyers are sometimes a little bashful about selling, and that they have to get over that in order to be successful entrepreneurs.  Bernstein agreed, and said he is now shameless about selling because he truly believes in his projects and knows they'll benefit they people he's talking to.

All very inspiring.  But I was sitting in the third row thinking about ICANN, and it came to me that all of this relates. 

The ICANN experiment is a big idea that meets a crucial need.  It's not a regulatory agency.  It's a forum for the discussion of global policies for domain names.  Its form of standard-setting (which includes policymaking), done right, should match the way the internet works:  most things should be left to local control, with only a few global rules imposed with which most people are willing to go along. 

But maybe (I'm not on the board yet, I'm not speaking for anyone except myself, I have an enormous amount of learning to do, and I'll be in listening mode for months to come) ICANN has been a little bashful about marketing.  For whatever reason, the word isn't getting across.  ICANN has some tremendous institutional comparative advantages ("value-add," as a Tom Bernstein might say) that perhaps should be emphasized.  Done right, this big idea can benefit the entire world.  It just takes some passion, persistence, and patience.  Or time, trust, and technique.  You get the idea.