When pitching to VC’s, entrepreneurs hype the heck out of their ideas, years of experience and management teams. But I’ve never heard of anyone touting their luck or connection to God. After reading the posts on TechCrunch, one could easily get the impression that God doesn’t play much of role in Silicon Valley. But ask any successful entrepreneur in private what made them successful, and you might just hear a different story. In a research project my team just completed, the majority of 549 company founders told us that their most important success factor, after “experience” and “management team”, was “good fortune”. Many respondents wrote in comments stressing the extreme importance of faith and God.

You didn’t think that successful entrepreneurs were this pious did you? Neither did I. After all, what did God have to do with Google aside from Jeff Jarvis stealing his book title from fans of Jesus and their much copied meme? Did God build the Internet? Did he build the microchip? I’ve never been religious myself and have always believed that with hard work and determination, you can surmount just about any obstacles. But I also learned the hard way that you can do everything right and fail. Sometimes you do just about everything wrong and make it big. My belief: success is 51% luck and 49% execution. You need to execute with precision, but a little luck goes a long way. It is always good to have God on your side. So it was interesting and illuminating (pun intended) to see what other entrepreneurs thought about this.

When Americans think of the Indian technology sector, they still perceive a nation of call center workers and low-level computer programmers administering databases and updating websites. But while the West was sleeping, Indian IT morphed into a giant R&D machine. Indian companies that started out doing call center and low-level IT work have climbed the value chain to become outsourced providers of critical R&D in sophisticated areas such as semiconductor design, aerospace, automotive, network equipment and medical devices.

This is happening as multi-nationals set up their own R&D operations in India and partner with local shops. Both the Palm Pre smart phone and the Amazon Kindle, two of the hottest consumer electronics devices on the market, have key components designed in India. Intel designed its six-core Xeon processor in India. IBM has over 100,000 employees in India. A large number of these are building Big Blue’s most sophisticated software products. Cisco is developing cutting edge networking technologies for futuristic “intelligent cities” in Bangalore. Adobe, Cadence, Oracle, Microsoft and most of the large software companies are developing mainstream products in India.

Equally important are the arrival of Indian multi-nationals who are tackling global markets, such as Tata with its dirt cheap Nano car that the company is now positioning for a European market entry and Reva, which recently announced it was planning to build an electric car factory in New York state to address the U.S. market for electric vehicles.

What has been missing to date in India, however, is early stage venture activity and the type of grass-roots entrepreneurism that is the hallmark of American capitalism and Silicon Valley.

I’m in India this weekend with fellow TechCrunch/BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy. After we’re done with the elephant rides in Jaipur, we’re going to be meeting local tech startups. Then we head back to New Delhi to meet more aspiring entrepreneurs. Sarah is writing a book on how startup culture has gone global and I’m researching how R&D has globalized. It never ceases to amaze me how you can find brilliant entrepreneurs everywhere—whether in the middle of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan or Santiago Chile (where local entrepreneurs showed me life-sized holographic images projected through some hardware connected to their laptops, and software which can help monitor the operational efficiencies of department stores in California). The promise of these early ventures is always amazing and their enthusiasm infectious. Which brings me to Global Entrepreneurship Week. And Snoop Dogg.

You are probably asking yourself, what the heck does the controversial and highly successful rapper have to do with entrepreneurship?

No one disputes that Silicon Valley is the global capital of the tech world. But this wasn’t always so. It is the Valley’s dynamism and networks which have given it an unassailable advantage. Silicon Valley has simply left rivals like Boston’s Route 128 in the dust.

I mentioned a little bit about my first Columbus Day in California in a previous column. But I didn’t tell you the whole story. I was invited to three amazing events on the night of October 12. Venture capital firm Alsop-Louie—known as one of the wackier and unconventional VC firms—invited me to their legendary Columbus Day party. On that same evening I had an invite from Henry Chesbrough, Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California-Berkeley to attend a dinner party for his forum. Down in Silicon Valley I also had an invite to speak at an event with India’s former Minister of Disinvestment, Arun Shorie—the guy who was once in charge of privatizing the country’s moribund nationalized firms and who is as close as you can get to financial royalty in India.

It was a really hard decision which one to pick. And I found myself wondering, where else in the world would I have to face such a decision? The answer is nowhere. Silicon Valley, which has expanded to embrace the entire Bay Area as an engine of entrepreneurship and innovation, is a unique place of powerful and concurrent overlapping networks. As a new arrival to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, I had read about this and did believe it. But it was hard to understand to what degree these types of concentric circles of connections were pervasive in the Valley. I am now studying how some of these networks develop and their influence on success rates in entrepreneurship.

An Ivy League degree may get you a job as an investment banker or VC, but it won’t increase your odds of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

So you couldn’t get into Stanford, Berkeley or Harvard, huh? Don’t sweat it. You can still make it big. Some people might believe that an Ivy League education provides a huge advantage in entrepreneurship. But after researching this over and over again, I’ve found no such correlation. To the contrary, it seems that those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed. And those who aren’t members of elite alum societies develop the skills needed to hustle in the rough and tough business world. The Ivy-Leaguers may be able to get their buddies from Sequoia and Kleiner to return emails, but they aren’t going to be any more successful at building companies.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

I spent Columbus Day in Sunnyvale, fittingly, meeting with a roomful of new arrivals. Well, relatively new. They were Indians living in Silicon Valley. The event was organized by the Think India Foundation, a think-tank that seeks to solve problems which Indians face. When introducing the topic of skilled immigration, the discussion moderator, Sand Hill Group founder M.R. Rangaswami asked the obvious question. How many planned to return to India? I was shocked to see more than three-quarters of the audience raise their hands.

Are you an immigrant who is fed up with waiting for years for a green card which you may never get? Or a tech entrepreneur looking to dramatically cut costs? I’ve got a suggestion for you. Move South. No, I don’t mean to Los Angeles or San Diego, I’m taking about way down South in Chile. They’ll welcome you with open arms and offer you incentives which will cut your burn rate more than half. And you’ll get to live in a land which makes even California look drab.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

In my last post, I explained the motherlode of innovation hidden in the huge stacks of patents and discoveries backlogged at our universities and research labs. While entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley trip over each other to create the next iPhone app, they ignore the early-stage discoveries which could lead to the next Internet, a revolutionary memory device, or a cure for infectious diseases. Researchers in university labs find vast numbers of breakthroughs which can better the world. Most of their work never sees the light of day. Hardly 0.1% of all funded basic science research results in a commercial venture.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Everyone seems to be waiting for the next great discovery which will change the world. But, believe it or not, the next Internet, semiconductor, or breakthrough in MRI technology may already have been discovered. It’s just languishing on the shelves of the university research labs you drive by on your way to work every day. University researchers don’t know how to commercialize their discoveries and smart, hungry entrepreneurs looking to meet the next Larry or Sergey don’t know how to find them. These parallel universes rarely meet (well, except sometimes at Stanford).

In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those revenues include ongoing royalties from all of the research licensed over the past 40 years. The implication is clear. An astonishing amount of promising research is left in the lab.

When I say this to university administrators, they get incredibly defensive (almost like the VC’s I pissed off with my last post.) They rightfully argue that the role of the university is to teach and to add to the world’s knowledge base. The real benefit comes from the students who universities educate, who go and start the Apples and Microsoft’s. No argument there. But we have a goldmine of knowledge and potential innovation locked in our research universities. This goldmine could fuel the next two decades of economic growth. It is time to mine this goldmine.

This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Back in 1986, when Bill Gates was still making sales calls, he pitched my group at First Boston on why we should bet the farm on Windows. Despite the risk involved, we gave his fledgling startup the deal. This wasn’t because of his financial backers (he didn’t even drop any names), but because we believed in his vision and nerdiness. In the same way, Google became a huge success long before the deep pocketed VC’s arrived to ride Larry and Sergey’s coattails. They simply had a great technology and winning strategy.

So I’m miffed by the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) claim that companies like Microsoft and Google “…would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists.”

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Last week, he wrote about the need to lift restrictions on H1-B visas. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

I’ve got a message for all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists who think a CEO is over the hill after age 40. Old guys rule. And they are far more likely to be the founder of a successful technology company than most of you understand. How do I know this? Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. We also learned that these founders are likely to be married and have two or more kids. They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas. They simply got tired of working for others and wanted to rise above their middle-class heritage.

These clearly aren’t the talented 20-somethings who have “great passion” minus the “distractions like families and children…that get in the way of business” which Sequoia Venture’s Michael Moritz raves about (also in this Building 43 video). Or the ”very low paid” young entrepreneurs who, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt, make “all the right things happen” by “working themselves to death”. But these are the companies which Silicon Valley VC’s seem to flock to. And maybe that’s one reason why the failure rates of VC investments are so high.

This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University.

I have a suggestion for our President on how to boost economic growth without spending a penny: Free the H-1B’s.

More than a million doctors, engineers, scientists, researchers, and other skilled workers in the U.S. are stuck in “immigration limbo.” They entered the country legally and have contributed disproportionately to our nation’s competitiveness. They paid our high taxes and have been model citizens. All they want to do is to share the American dream and help us grow our economy.

They could be starting companies, buying houses, building community centers, and splurging like Americans. But because we don’t have enough permanent-resident visas (green cards) for them, they’re stuck in the same old jobs they had maybe a decade ago when they entered this country. They are getting really frustrated and many are returning to their home countries to become unwilling competitors. And they are taking our economic recovery with them.