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?