Entrepreneur Game?

I was working on my portfolio and searching for pictures on google and found this imageSo I went to the blog and read the article. I'm going to post the suggestions in the article and provide the link to the blog. However, the link goes to all of March of 2007 so you'll have to look a little bit to find the post with this info in it.

1. You’re not an “adult” yet. “There are a lot of adults who still react childishly to challenges, of course. What you don’t often find are kids who react to challenges like adults. When you do, you’ve found an adult, whatever their age.”
2. You’re too inexperienced. “What really convinced me of this was the Kikos. They started a startup right out of college. Their inexperience caused them to make a lot of mistakes. But by the time we funded their second startup, a year later, they had become extremely formidable. They were certainly not tame animals. And there is no way they’d have grown so much if they’d spent that year working at Microsoft, or even Google. They’d still have been diffident junior programmers.”
3. You’re not determined enough. “You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It’s probably the single best predictor of success.”
4. You’re not smart enough. “You may need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder. But if you’re worried about this, you’re probably mistaken. If you’re smart enough to worry that you might not be smart enough to start a startup, you probably are…If you don’t think you’re smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren’t technology companies, they’re sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.”
5. You know nothing about business. Not actually a sign that you shouldn’t start a startup, but advice for someone starting one. “This is another variable whose coefficient should be zero. You don’t need to know anything about business to start a startup. The initial focus should be the product. All you need to know in this phase is how to build things people want. If you succeed, you’ll have to think about how to make money from it. But this is so easy you can pick it up on the fly.”
6. You don’t have a cofounder. “Not having a cofounder is a real problem. A startup is too much for one person to bear. And though we differ from other investors on a lot of questions, we all agree on this. All investors, without exception, are more likely to fund you with a cofounder than without.”
7. You don’t have an idea. This might not be an obstacle if you’re looking for funding from Y Combinator: “In a sense, it’s not a problem if you don’t have a good idea, because most startups change their idea anyway…In fact, we’re so sure the founders are more important than the initial idea that we’re going to try something new this funding cycle. We’re going to let people apply with no idea at all.”
8. There’s no more room for more startups. This is also not a sign that you shouldn’t start a startup; this is Paul’s dismissal of the statement that there isn’t room for more startups. “A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think ‘this can’t continue.’ Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false. No one claims there’s any limit on the number of people who can work for salary at 1000-person companies. Why should there be any limit on the number who can work for equity at 5-person companies?”
9. You have a fmaily to support. “This one is real. I wouldn’t advise anyone with a family to start a startup. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that I don’t want to take responsibility for advising it…What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business…Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees of a startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways and the bad.”
10. You’re independently wealthy. “Startups are stressful. Why do it if you don’t need the money? For every ’serial entrepreneur,’ there are probably twenty sane ones who think ‘Start another company? Are you crazy?’”
11. You’re not ready for commitment. “If you start a startup that succeeds, it’s going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you’ll be done a lot quicker.) So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready for commitments on that scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you’ll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you’ll find you have much less spare time than you might expect. So if you’re ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientation session, you may also be ready to start that startup.”
12. You need structure. “I’m told there are people who need structure in their lives. This seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them what to do. I believe such people exist. There’s plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the majority…If you’re one of these people, you probably shouldn’t start a startup. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even go to work for one.”
13. You’re uncomfortable with uncertainty. “Perhaps some people are deterred from starting startups because they don’t like the uncertainty. If you go to work for Microsoft, you can predict fairly accurately what the next few years will be like—all too accurately, in fact. If you start a startup, anything might happen.”
14. You don’t realize what you’re avoiding. “One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.”
15. Your parents want you to be a doctor. “When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctor was the thing to be. There was a sort of golden triangle involving doctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. All three vertices now seem pretty dated. The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents’ opinions about what you should do is to treat them like feature requests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think about why they’re asking for something, and see if there’s a better way to give them what they need.”
16. You believe that having a job is the default. “This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice…To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It’s a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that’s something that’s changing pretty rapidly.

Blog can be found here.

I think a lot of this applies to what we did in 407 this year and it also addresses a lot of the issues that people deal with when deciding to be an entrepreneur.

Mycoted

When I was a freshmen I took ED&G 100, now they call it EDSGN or something like that. I got along really well with my professor especially when he asked us open ended questions like, "design a new road." And we were given five or ten minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible. I love brainstorming and trying to come up with creative solutions and wacky ideas to try to solve a problem. That same professor gave us a resource to help us in situations where creativity is required but a group is struggling to generate ideas or the concept generation process has become stagnant. This resources was mycoted, which is luckily still around, and can be found here.

Mycoted is a site that lists, among other things, ways to brainstorm or help a group get started with idea generation. The ideas range from simple things like using a flow chart to map potential processes to using SCAMMPERR which stands for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, Rearrange, and Reverse.

These techinques are very helpful in a class like ours and might also help break the ice during initial group meetings where people tend to feel awkward at the thought of talking about an off the wall idea.

Check out the website!

Kite Energy

There is a site called TED, linked here, where there are hundreds of videos on a wide range of topics. I found the site through a LeaderShape email and I haven't been able to stop watching.

The video I want to talk about is about producing wind energy from kites, the video can be found here. Apparently, the windmills that I love are really quite ineffective when you consider what they could do if they were taller. This guy and his team are working on actually tapping the energy of the wind about 2000 feet, where it is much stronger than the wind at the 300 foot level, which is where the tallest windmills are located.

The wind from a fleet of kites which can be produced in ten years would be enough to meet the goals that have been talked about being necessary to reach in order to halt global warming.

Thoughts?

Odyssey of the Mind

When I was in 2nd grade I took part in a program called Odyssey of the Mind and I was involved from then until I graduated (except for the one year I missed because I couldn't find a team). Odyssey of the Mind is a creative competition for groups of 5-8 students from kindergarten through college. Each Odyssey team (run through the school district) is put into a division which is decided by the age of the oldest person on the team. Each team must then choose one of the problems listed on the Odyssey of the Mind website, found here, to work on.

The teams I was on usually worked on the "classics" problem which usually involved some kind of classical work in art, writing, or history. The other types of problems include a vehicle problem where teams must create a vehicle that can complete a certain kind of task, a balsa wood problem where each team builds a balsa structure that must support the most weight while also meeting certain specific requirements about weight and the number of legs, a humorous problem, and a technical problem. The problems for 2010 are located here.

On the day of competition teams must not only compete in their chosen problem, called the long term problem, because teams spend weeks and months working on the solution, but teams must also compete in a spontaneous problem. The spontaneous problem is a much shorter problem that can be one of three types either verbal, hands on, or a combination of the two. A verbal problem would give the teams a chance to exercise their mental skills and quick thinking, one example of a spontaneous problem is use words to make a first and last name that relate to an occupation ex Dan Druff for a hairdresser. A hands on problem focuses on completing a problem as a team, one example is building a pasta tower as high as possible with limited supplies and time. A hands on verbal problem is a combination of a verbal problem and a hands on problem and could be something like use the two objects on the table to create something from another planet and describe what it is used for. The spontaneous problems usually take less than ten minutes to complete and cannot be planned for ahead of time.

Each Odyssey team starts out at the regional competition where they compete with other teams from nearby school districts. The top several teams then move onto the state competition, which for PA, is held in Altoona. The top two teams of each problem in each division then get to go onto the world finals. At each level there are a few awards that teams can win, the Omer, is presented to teams who embody the spirit of Odyssey of the Mind, and the Ranatra Fusca, is the highest award given for creativity. At the regional or state levels if a team receives the Ranatra Fusca they automatically move on to the next competition level.

Odyssey was a great experience for me and really helped me learn about creativity and work on those skills. I would love to continue working on Odyssey but it was difficult to get a committed team in high school and thus far it has been impossible to get together a college team.

Here are some of the pictures from my later years spent on Odyssey teams.

This is my team right after our long term presentation at the state competition in 2004.

This is the "pin board" that my 2004 team made just after our World Final long term presentation at the University of Maryland.

A close up of the back of the pin board with a tree shape in the pins.

This is the front of the pin board with part of a person imprinted on it.

Improv Everywhere 2

In an earlier post I talked about Improv Everywhere and the fun activities they do and the random scenes they create. On April 1st (April Fool's Day) they posted a new mission called Best Funeral Ever. In reading the comments it seems like there were a few different groups of people: those who were totally sucked in and furious but then realized it was April Fool's Day (I fell into this category), people who were totally sucked in and believed it the whole time and posted very angry comments, those who got sucked in then realized what day it was and were still angry, and the people that caught on right away.

Personally I think it was a great way for Improv Everywhere to prank its followers rather than just posting a "new web design" that is horrible or other past April Fool's Day pranks. A news station even did a piece on the event although they did not know it was just a joke. A lot of people felt that this wasn't funny even as a joke and while I certainly don't feel that way, I do believe that it is a sensitive topic for many people.

The next day they posted another post about how it was all fake and everything was totally fake and involved no real funeral or death. The comments on that portion of the website were much more friendly and positive about the whole mission.

What do you guys think? Great prank on Improv Everywhere's fans or disrespectful stunt to gain publicity?

Coraline Boxes

So I know I just posted, but I came across this cool idea and wanted to share it! I am sure most of you have seen a preview or hear about the movie Coraline. Well, while I was looking at this website I read a post about how the blog author got a Coraline Box. This box has something to do with the Coraline movie and the folks who made the movie sent out 50 of these boxes to well known bloggers. There is a site, here, that has been gathering information about these 50 boxes and which bloggers they were given to.

I think this is an excellent way to get some publicity. It reaches a whole new audience than tv ads do and can plant some curiosity in the minds of the blog readers. I know I want to know what a Coraline Box is and why there would be three headless dogs in a box and why those heads would be in someone elses box.

Check it out!

Improv Everywhere!

There is a group called Improv Everywhere. This group does things that are incredibly random and hilarious. I first found them online when I was a freshman, and still had a little time to actually surf the web. The first "mission" I read about was when a group of 80 people dressed up in blue polo shirts and khaki pants, just like the employees of Best Buy. The group then slowly entered a Best Buy and watched what happened. The mission report can be found here. One of my favorite missions took place during a baseball game at Yankee Stadium where a guy named Rob "got lost" and couldn't find his seat. A lot of people in the stands got really into trying to help Rob get back to his seat, which he eventually found. Pictures and a full account can be found here.

Improv Everywhere's most recent mission involved giving high fives to people going from one subway to another up a huge escalator. This is a great way to change a routine part of thousands of peoples lives and give them something fun to do.

I think groups like this and activities like the high fives are things that are fairly rare in our world and can really make a difference in someones day. Ideas like this have not only made the Improv Everywhere group well known but also have a positive impact on the world around them, just like the products we make for our last project could.

Save the Planet

I use facebook and with over 175 million users I am sure many of the people in the class have an account. Recently I found an application, through a friend, called Save the Planet. This application allows people to log in and earn "lunch money" which can then be used to "save the planet" in whatever way you choose. There are several options where you can spend your lunch money which includes removing ounces of CO2 from the atmosphere through carbonfund.org, buying rice for the hungry through the World Food Programme with the United Nations, and saving a square foot of rainforest through Conservation International. To earn this lunch money you can just log in every day and earn up to one million lunch money dollars or you can play games on the site. These games are easy and fun and are good for when you need a break from studying.

I think this is an easy way for students, and now everyone on facebook, to help solve some of the problems that are important to them. In five to ten minutes a day I can make another million dollars in lunch money and with the million from logging in I can remove 107 ounces of CO2 from the atmosphere. Check it out!

Colored Bubbles

So I was poking around some old websites that I had in my favorites from my high school days when I actually had time to surf the internet. I came across this website, which was always awesome because this guy did things that appealed to my engineering brain and also were just plain cool. He covers topics from chocolate and writing to gardening and home made kites with wingspans of 44 feet. I was poking around through his "insane projects" page, found here, when I came across his awesome idea of adding smoke and helium to bubbles. This is a really cool idea and I wonder why it hasn't really caught on, maybe because Wayne just does this stuff for fun and hasn't caught the entrepreneurship bug.



So while thinking about bubbles I remembered vaguely an article I had read a long time about about colored bubbles. After some googling I found the site that sells them, here, and then I found the article I read, here. This article really talks about how this guy spent a lot of time, 11 years, and money, $500k, to finally realize his dream. It also talks a little bit about how he approached companies and had to sometimes put his dream of creating colored bubbles on the back burner to focus on keeping his life together.

I really enjoyed this article the first time I read it and the second time was just as good, if not better, now that I'm in 407. If you have a few minutes you should check it out. I know that I'm wondering how he made that bouncing bubble.

One Red Paperclip

This is the tale of how one red paperclip became a house...

It sounds strange right, trading a red paperclip to get to a house, but it can be done, and it was done by Kyle MacDonald. Kyle decided that he wanted to trade and the trades always had to be for something bigger or better than what he currently had. The full story can be found on his blog here.

This shows how a simple idea can really catch on and become a phenomenon. Catching the public interest is something that is key to being successful for our project and for entrepreneurs in general.

In other news, does anyone actually know who these guys are?

Crazy T-Shirts

So while looking at a site with a lot of cool, but expensive, products that make good gifts I came across a shirt that detects wi-fi. This is a very cool idea because you wouldn't need to drag your laptop out of its case and start it up and wait around for it to load only to find out that the McDonald's you are in doesn't have wi-fi, you could just look at your shirt! It would be ideal for travelers and kids on campus who don't know which buildings have wi-fi.

Realistically, if a company could come up with a small sticker that could go on the back of your watch or a keychain you could clip to your keys that would be easier for me to buy. I would be willing to spend $10 on a keychain that would tell me when wi-fi is around, that would be great! It could even be part of a jump drive, which would make it convenient since you would probably always have your jump drive around when you are looking for wi-fi.

Disney

So I went to Disney over spring break and it was great! I worked at Disney for 8 months on the college program, which I would highly recommend. I was there for just two days. Since I worked at Disney and I love the company and their way of running the parks and more importantly the way they treat their guests I was surprised to notice that they have missed one small but easy and obvious way to improve the experience of their guests. I stayed at the Pop Century Resort and because I was a resort guest I was given a free parking pass which I was supposed to put on the dashboard of the rental car. This is a great option that Disney gives, parking for 1 car for 1 day is $12! So by staying at a resort, one of the cheap ones, for approx. $80 you're really only paying $68 because you save $12 for parking at the parks.

This is all well and good except for the fact that there is no "quick line" at the parking lot entrance where cars line up to pay to enter the park. This means that resort guests must wait in line with everyone even though their parking is already paid for since they are resort guests. An easy way to fix this is for Disney to change one of the already existing entrances into a "resort guest only" entrance which would just need a scanner, to scan the already existing bar code on every resort parking pass, and a gate which lowers and opens for each car.

This option grants resort guests and even quicker entrance into the park because they won't be waiting behind minivans which are trying to find the exact change needed. The buses have their own lane, resort guests should as well.

Edit: I finally downloaded my pictures from my trip and here is a picture of waiting in line to enter the park, it'll probably help clarify what I was talking about.

Long walk or short walk?

When I saw this comic on xkcd.com I immediately thought, that is so true! As an IE I spend a lot of my time (aka all of my classes, except for 407) in the Leonhard building. For those of you that don't know, the Leonhard building or Leo (since I'm lazy and hate spelling Leonhard with an H) is the farthest building from main campus. It's across the IST bridge and beyond EES. This makes it a long walk from wherever you're coming from and when heading over there I always try to take the shortest way possible.

For me, since I live in West Halls, is to cut across Atherton and then through the parking lot. Clearly this is the shortest path. The problem that occurs is just where the applied science building starts and the sidewalk continues straight on towards the EES building. There is no diagonal path towards Leo (I have included a rather sad illistration of this below, thanks paint)! Now, being IE's makes all of us obsessed with officiency and the students have made their own path, literally worn away a dirt path across the lawn. I have been an IE for 3 semesters and the path was there when I started and will be there when I leave, unless somehow, someone knows the sidewalk people of Penn State.

Ruckus Gone, Who Will Step Up?

So Ruckus has finally died. Apparently no one really knows why they are gone, they went down for an update and a while later it shut down, seemingly for good. This article gives the most information I was able to find about the subject.

Personally I was never a fan of Ruckus. Switching from Napster to Ruckus was like being kicked out of your suite at the Plaza and being moved into the Motel 6 in a bad neighborhood. Napster was streamlined and allowed you to access new music and the ability to listen to that music in the same program without being required to go through your browser. Ruckus was stepping down in technology and ease of use. The search function of Ruckus was particularly horrible and would not even provide options for incorrect spellings. Also, the selection Ruckus offered was minimal and spotty.

Napster might have cost the university money but at least people were satisfied. Ruckus was free, after a while, and ran on annoying pop up adds that routinely interrupted my homework. These ads clearly did not work and were a distraction to the user and lowered the quality of the Ruckus program.

My question is what will Penn State do next? Will they return to Napster? Or will they try to find a new provider?

Personally I hope they return to Napster, it is a no brainer for me. Their selection is better, their program is sleeker and more user friendly, and they don't bombard you with pop up ads. As far as I have seen Penn State is not even aware this has happened. There is nothing on PSU Live and nothing that I have been able to find through google. Step up Penn State, don't leave your students without music. Don't leave your students the excuse to start pirating music, again.

Speaking Out Loud

I was reading an article about the cost of people not feeling comfortable speaking up with their ideas. The article said that companies risk losing ideas by not making their employees feel comfortable about giving their ideas, no matter how crazy the ideas might seem. In my experience this happens a lot and the eventual, "Oh I thought of that two months ago, but didn't want to say anything," comment just makes it worse. While I participated in Odyssey of the Mind members of my group, myself included, would often see things at the final competition that they had thought about but not said out loud. By keeping those ideas to themselves they deprived our team the possibility to "piggy back" ideas off of that idea.

Knowing that people might not always feel comfortable giving ideas seemed like a strange thing to me when I worked with Odyssey of the Mind. However, after my internship this summer I have seen that often times the people with the best ideas are the people who are out on the floor working on the product or working in the area that is being changed. The people I worked with this summer felt comfortable talking to me, rather than management, about ideas they had for improving their work area.

Providing people with a comfortable way to present ideas would be helpful to companies with a large amount of employees. The article suggests setting up a service where employees can give their ideas without leaving their name. I think that idea could be useful for companies with many employees, however for small groups a different approach would be needed.