I’m always interested in people’s stories (how they grew up, where they came from, what makes them who they are today) and Tony’s story was no exception. The narrative describing his childhood was funny and easy to read. I appreciated how he admitted to finding creative ways around actually doing any hard work. He didn’t seem to get in as much trouble for it as I did in middle school and high school. One thing was made clear in the beginning of the book – Tony was a serial entrepreneur. If there was a buck to be made, he was going to figure out how.

I truly empathized with how Tony (and his friends) felt about their first job out of college. They went from Harvard to Oracle in the Silicon Valley. Great jobs, great pay, no worries, enjoying life. That is- life outside of 9-5. This line was golden to me:

“This wasn’t about the money, it was about not being bored.”

Tony and his friend quit their jobs at Oracle to design websites for local businesses. At this point, Tony’s story of breezing through college, getting a good job, not liking it, quitting to design websites, and then going on to start LinkExchange was almost verbatim of what I have been considering doing for the past month or two. Glad to know that there is a possibility of building something and selling it for $250 million to a big company like Microsoft. It wasn’t an overnight success. I found the journey of LinkExchange just as exciting as Zappos’ story.

Fun fact: Tony Hsieh did not found Zappos. He was an original investor. Another fun fact: it was originally named “Shoesite” but that seemed too generic so Nick Swinmurn, the founder, settled on Zapos, which was short for the spanish word zapatos meaning shoes. Tony told him to add another ‘p’ so it wasn’t accidentally pronounced ZAY-pos. That was super interesting to me after wrestling with names for a few side projects recently.

Something that struck me as odd about the book was that Nick just disappears from the story. Apparently he left the company in 2006. Throughout the book “Tony, Alfred, and Fred” are mentioned time and again but Nick isn’t ever really part of the picture. I don’t know if that’s bad. It was just kind of odd since he was the founder.

Another quirk about the book was its transition from the story of Zappos to explaining their culture. One page they’re moving to Las Vegas and the very next page they’re explaining the Culture book. It was an abrupt switching of gears. The journey of Zappos’ growth was enjoyable, laid-back reading, but the insights on developing core values to shape a corporate culture is what you’ll want to re-read and go back to for reference.

Since I’ve been working for a big company for the past six months, I could relate to a lot of the corporate cliches Zappos tries to avoid or improve upon. Creating their core values was a very interesting process. I especially liked what he had to say about integrity:

“Integrity was a value that had been suggested by some employees, but I made a conscious choice to leave it out. I felt that integrity would come from us actually committing to and living up to our core values in everything we did, not just referring to them when it was convenient.”

Ironically, Accenture lists Integrity as one of their core values. We memorized Accenture’s core values during our initial training, but I have to admit that it’s easier to relate to Zappos’ Core Values. Both companies stress living their core values. Would you think it’s easier to live out “Client Value Creation” or “Build Open And Honest Relationships With Communication”?

Towards the end of the book there are excerpts from employees and even customers. One was from a recruiting manager on the core value “Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded” and how her freedom to be creative at her job made it more fulfilling. This was another golden passage for me:

“The problem when someone feels burned out, bored, unchallenged, or stifled by their work is not the job itself but rather the environment and playground rules given to them to do the job at hand.”

I’ve been there. Just today actually. I’ve heard it from coworkers, too. So many points in this book hit home for me, which is probably why I couldn’t put it down. I read this article on Inc.com about Zappos’ marriage with Amazon before finishing the book. The book’s version is much more upbeat. The great lesson he offers is very Jason Friend/37Signals-esque and something I’ve definitely heard before but can’t help but repeat.

“You don’t need to put a lot of effort into reaching out to the press if your company naturally creates interesting stories as a by-product of delivering a great product or experience.”

The last chapter of the book barely scratched the surface of positive psychology. Tony definitely whet my appetite to read more books on the subject. I can easily identify pleasures and passions in my life, but as for a higher purpose, I feel I’m still searching for mine or haven’t realized what it is yet.

I’m really glad I read this book. I highly recommend it. Let me know if you’d like to borrow one of my copies.

The two points I took away from the opening keynote by Laura Hollis were that entrepreneurs were not satisfied with the status quo and that they needed to be rewarded for being the most creative and innovative.

Next, there were two panels to pick from (somewhat blindly). We chose Panel A consisting of Jonathan Naber, Michael Bell from Fronterion, Phil Tadros from Doejo, and Zach Kaplan from Inventables. I think the panel had the potential to share a lot more knowledge than they were able to because of the poor questions. For example, after the panel got done with introductions saying they were part of companies no larger than 30 people this girl rambled off a prepared question along the lines of, “How do you scale your company to be 50 or 100 employees while sticking to your company values?” No one works for or has built a company of 50 people so how are any of them going to answer that? Other questions were very specific to only one member of the panel which defeated the purpose of the panel.

After the panel, we went to our first breakout session and chose “Bootstrap Marketing” with Michael Bell and Phil Tadros. Tadros was by far my favorite speaker of the day. I had my laptop with me so I was able to quickly stalk him and the Doejo operation. You could tell he had a lot of real world experience and knew how to get things done. A lot of his marketing advice revolved around word of mouth, referrals, and parties. By the end of the breakout session I had come to the conclusion that marketing isn’t important until you have a solid product or service. When you have that, avenues for exposure open very quickly.

One of the most entertaining parts of the day was Tadros taking questions and immediately presenting solutions and striking up business deals with other entrepreneurs. “Oh you have a music site? We have X and Y musicians as clients who could help promote. Let me get your info after this.” It was great because instead of “this is how I would accomplish your goal”, he approached it as “let me help you accomplish your goal”.

The second breakout session we attended was “Finding Good Problems and Solutions” which was more presentational and less Q&A. Ken Taylor from Yahoo started off presenting about where and how to find good problems to solve. It was geared towards those who “just know” they need to start a business but have no clue where to start, but this was fitting since a majority of the workshop attendees looked like college undergrads. Michael Callahan followed with how he approaches finding solutions. It was funny because he presented like his approach was totally his own and then Taylor’s first question after he was done, “so like the scrum?”

Carl Nordgren, a visiting associate professor at Duke and co-founder of Minogi, gave his closing remarks in true college profession fashion.

This will only take 15 minutes, but when I tell my students at Duke that they know it’ll be 35 minutes.

It was a rather long closing, but he presented some valid points and gave an insightful historical look into the Millennial Generation. I jotted down that “creative capacity increases when you declare you are creative”. I love that line. I enjoyed Carl’s remarks and wanted to take his class in order to hear more.

What I Took Away

I need to go produce something and stop observing all of this entrepreneurial stuff from the sidelines. There were a few nuggets and insights that made it worthwhile, but I had heard most of it before (more than once and practically memorized in some cases). I have no track record and my portfolio is getting stale. I’m going to spend the next 3-6 months putting out a lot of projects that have spent way too long on the back burner. This is the first of many.

At first glance, BidFire is a very cleanly designed site that’s well put together and simple to get around. Kudos to their web designers. There is a short video that explains how the site works. Surprisingly, it has very little in common with eBay for being an auction site.

Instead of being able to bid as much as you want like on eBay, on BidFire you pay each time you bid. It costs $1 and you have to buy bids in packs of 10, 25, 50, 75, or 100 before you can use them.

On eBay when the auction is over, it’s over. On BidFire, the countdown to the auction’s end is reset every time someone bids within the last minute of the auction. This means that an auction could go on as long as bidders have bids they’re willing to use.

Auctions increase at a fixed amount, usually a nickel, on BidFire. This is what keeps their auctions so appealingly cheap. It’s also where they make their money.

I was observing an auction for 25 bids that was valued at $25. With a little over 2 minutes left in the auction the price was $0.10. All of a sudden, the action picked up just like you would expect an eBay auction to. Instead of someone with the fastest internet connection putting in the last bid with two seconds left in the auction, a group of six or so bidders went calmly back and forth sometimes bidding with 50 seconds left and other times with 2 seconds left. Either way, the clock reset to one minute and the price went up a nickel. Here’s where the auction turned into a game of sorts.

The point of the game, as I see it, is to bid as few times as possible to win the auction. The final price is not important because it never comes close to half the retail price of the actual item. Every time the clock nears zero, you have to predict whether or not someone else is going to bid to reset it for everyone else. If no one does, the auction is over. If someone does, a nickel is added to the auction price and the clock is reset to one minute. If two people bid, both are charged with using a bid, the price goes up twice, and the clock is reset just once.

This auction for the 25 additional bids ended with a final bid of $2.15. As long as the winning bidder didn’t bid more than 22 times, he came out ahead and beat the system (22 x $1 + $2.15 < $25). For everyone else who bid, they played into BidFire’s revenue model. It took 43 bids to get the price up to $2.15 so BidFire made $20 on the auction! (43 x $1 + $2.15 = $45.15)

Another auction that just ended was for a Playstation 3 Slim 120GB that retails on Amazon for $299.99. What did it go for? $15.40! Someone got a real steal right? Sure, but BidFire didn’t lose any money. If you divide $15.40 by $0.05 you get 308. BidFire could take the $308 they just made, go right to Amazon and spend $299.99, ship the Playstation for free to the winner, and still have enough left for a delicious meal at Taco Bell.

You might be thinking that $20 here and $8 here isn’t much especially when BidFire doesn’t even have 10 auctions a day, but what if they did? What if they had the right backing where they could have 100 or 100,000 auctions every day? If they did, would economists rule the site and play the odds to their favor? Is it technically gambling since you’re betting your dollar that you’ll be the top bidder each time? How else do you explain not winning an “auction” when it cost you to bid?

It should also be noted that they don’t always profit. If you look at their FAQ, they’ve listed some sample auctions like one for a $50 Walmart Gift Card that was won for $0.05 (technically $1.05 since the bid cost a dollar).

Kudos to BidFire’s clever profit model. Is this actually an old model I’ve never come across (e.g. pyramid scheme)? Please leave a comment if you’re better at math than me and can give me some pointers to gaming the system (legally).

Pandora had a huge win in an Internet radio royalty ruling but this also meant that they would have  “to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the free version of Pandora”. If you go over the free 40 hours in a month it’s just $0.99 for unlimited listening for that month. I think that’s a great deal, especially since I sit at a desk most of the day and can’t stand listening to my coworker’s idiotic side comments.

My new favorite web service of the summer has been Dropbox which allows you to store files online and sync them across multiple computers. They sent me this email last night about changes they’re making:

The Dropbox team has been hard at work these past few months and we’d like to tell you about some upcoming changes and enhancements to the Dropbox service.

We’re Changing Undo History
Did you know that Dropbox automatically:

• Safeguards any files you delete in case you need to undelete them
• Saves old file versions in case you need to go back to them later

It’s like having “undo” for all your files and folders.

Today, Dropbox keeps these deleted files and old file versions (“undo history”) forever. For many people this creates clutter, and it also wastes space.

Because of this, beginning August 1st, our new policy will be to keep 30 days of undo history.
…

I actually had no idea about that feature since I’m new to the service, but once again you can see they are scaling back the free service and pushing the premium subscriptions (freemium model).

The last email I received about “new policies” was from Vimeo who starting August 1st will only keep your original video source file for one week after upload unless you become a Vimeo Plus member. I wasn’t as bummed about this one since I have only uploaded one video there to date. I may do more if I ever start editing stuff I film with my Flip HD.

I’m not mad at any of these companies for cutting back free services. I understand it costs money to offer them to people for no charge. SMS messages are expensive and so is streaming music and paying royalties. Hard disk space has become cheaper and cheaper but it still costs money. I don’t think any of these companies are trying to force people into becoming paying customers, they just can’t simple take on the costs and subsequent losses like Facebook and YouTube do.

Mashable‘s had a great article today that was very Mark Cuban-esqe talking about how “free will not last forever“. It was less about how companies can’t survive giving everything away for free, but more about how the end users are willing to pay for services if it’s better and easier than the free alternative.

If users are persuaded to sign up for a premium account for Tatango, Pandora, Dropbox, or Vimeo, they’ll expect more whether it be more features or a more polished experience. And if those users are willing to spend the money, they’re probably going to shop around for some alternatives where their money could go further. If they lose the functions they love the most about these services and don’t have the money, then they’ll find the next best free alternative or maybe get inspired to start their own service.

I’m lucky enough to have more disposable income to subscribe to more premium services and buy more apps and software, and I think a lot of people are with me at least in their willingness if they don’t have the extra cash. (I mean who wouldn’t pay for TweetDeck?) All of this breeds competition which is great for me- the end user. I want the best of the best for as cheap as possible and while that might not be free as often as it used to be, I should still be the one getting more out of it.

Dear Scott Weber and the rest of Volatus Advisors, LLC,

GET A NEW WEBSITE! Yours is embarrassing in every sense of web site evaluation.

Thanks,

Web Designers Everywhere

P.S. Here’s something to get you started:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var currentTime = new Date()
var year = currentTime.getFullYear()
document.write(year)
//-->
</script>

Before I get on to regurgitating what you talked about last week, I wanted to recap how these blog posts are evaluated. We receive one point for being within 50 words of our 750 word requirement. We receive another point if what we talk about in our post is related to the assigned questions. We receive out last point for posting before midnight the following Sunday. I’m going to come right out and admit to Travis, who grades these, that I’m not even attempting to get close to the word count this week. Just not feeling it, sorry.

Here are the points I wrote down:

• compelling concept
• well thought out business plan
• emulate most successful company
• gotta be realistic
• outgrowing management
• be nimble, define processes
• think about what you want
• corporate culture
• acquiring funding
• change in business

As you can see they’re pretty self explanatory. What would save everyone some time is if your talk was captured and uploaded to Canteloupe.tv or some other website so anyone who is interested in hearing your formula for success can watch your talk instead of relying on my crappy recap. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk has a whole section to his website for his keynote speeches. It’s awesome.

Here is Max Beatty’s formula for getting people care about what you have to say:

1. Get a new website
2. Post your talks there
3. Follow your own advice

Thanks and have a great day!

Open Source just isn’t profitable. I don’t like it. You’re not going to find a lot of companies out there that are profitable after maybe Red Hat.

I don’t think Mark could have been more misinformed or incorrect in his statements. Try googling “open source isn’t profitable” and then “open source is profitable” and see what kind of results you get. My results were all pro open source profitability and one article stating that “Microsoft SharePoint-based Solutions: More Profitable than Open Source” (typical) Here are some of the other headlines that came up:

• Open-source companies see profit aplenty
• Open source software: building profitable solutions for people
• HP: Open source can be more profitable than proprietary
• Running a Profitable Open Source Company (pdf)

If you haven’t already, go see Revolution OS and learn why open source is not only important but better. When I tweeted about what Mark said on Monday, it was very fitting that my first reply was from an entrepreneur who has moved from Bloomington to the Silicon Valley.

My Tweet: Mark Hill doesn’t like Open Source and thinks no one profits from it. I know what I’m blogging about this week for his class!

First Response: @maxbeatty example #471 of why we left the Midwest

The real problem I have is that a class focusing on entrepreneurship in informatics (read: Indiana) comes out and says,”Open Source isn’t profitable so don’t start a business based on it”, but at the same university where the class is taught, only Open Source languages are taught to undergrads. During my time at IU, I’ve had classes in C, Perl, Scheme, XML, MySQL, HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript – all open source and open standard languages. I know other informatics undergrads have had classes in Python, Java, and recently Processing. Even the capstone projects of the school of informatics focus on open source technologies!

If proprietary languages like C#, .NET, and SAP are such coveted skills, why am I along with the rest of my classmates not being properly prepared for the real world? My roommate is currently in the MSIS program of the Kelley School of Business and he is learning C#, .NET, and SAP. Does that mean you have to grad school before you really know anything?

If Mark is right, the university and school of informatics are wrong. If Mark is wrong, what happens to his creditability with the class? There’s always the fallback argument that a mix of proprietary and open source solutions is probably best, but either way such blanket statements as “open source isn’t profitable” should stop unless you can back it up. The floor, which happens to be WordPressMU that’s coded in PHP that runs on an Apache web server that’s installed on a server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is open (source) for you, Mark.

On to this week’s questions:

1.  As a company grows, why might someone that was successful and engaged in the business become less successful and disenfranchised? With that in mind, what would be an important trait of someone going to work in a small company?

People change, lose interest, or are replaced by someone else better fit for the job. Greg Oden was great in high school, pretty good in college, and now hasn’t played any sort of substantial roll in the NBA. This could very well directly correlate with his engagement with basketball. At each new level, basketball became less important to Oden as other responsibilities like celebrity status and business deals took over. If a coder comes into a company loving to code and puts out great code, he’s probably going to earn a promotion that may or may not take him away from what he loves- coding. If he’s in the corner office budgeting expense reports he has no idea about, he’s not going to be successful or engaged.

An important trait of someone going into a small company is knowing their roll. Do they code, design, or manage? If they can code and manage, they should manage coders. If they can only design, they should stick to designing until their skill set expands to manage or code. Until then, they should know their roll and keep to designing. If they can’t expand their skill set, they probably aren’t going to be very successful because they can’t adapt to change.

2.  When hiring early members and/or partners to the team, what are two important things to think about?  How would you ensure that those are thought about?

Early members and/or partners to a team should have a shared vision of the project and have complimentary skills. If everyone isn’t on the same page, they can’t progress at the pace they need to. There are surely going to be differences along the way, but everyone’s description of the “big picture” should be in the same ballpark.

Having everyone on the same page doesn’t require everyone to be clones. In fact, it is best if the team’s skills compliment each other in order to maximize potential. For example, if you have two people who do great backend development but neither does frontend development, you aren’t maximizing potential. Instead, having one backend developer and one frontend developer would allow you to put out a complete product unlike the last combination. Ideally, the smaller the team, the less overlapping of skill sets.

3.  When a manager hires into a specific role, what is a common mistake and how might one avoid it?

A manager in too specific of a role may want to branch out and thus ignore his initial responsibilities. Being new to an organization and their definition of roles may also be hard to adjust to. Instead of busting in on a new scene and trying to be a hero, it’s often better to lay low and take notice of your surroundings. Once you understand your setting, take action.

Cross-posted from my I400 class

Kim Lee presented last week about her experiences with start-ups even though she has never started a business. For the most part, her employee perspective was refreshing especially since we’ve talked so much about finding talented employees and keeping them happy. Her history exposed some flaws and strengths of pasts companies that are applicable to all new businesses. I was a little worried when she requested our name, email, and cell phone number without giving us any explanation about how it was going to be used. I noticed a lot more of my classmates put down “N/A” for their cell phone number than was believable, but I don’t blame them for not trusting her.

I’m personally not sold on Vontoo, but then again this weekend my little sister immediately gained interest in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am when she learned that Justin Timberlake was a participant. Maybe more people are sold on hearing a celebrity’s voice recording than I care to admit.

On to the questions that Mark specifically formed based on the post-break attendance.

1. Explain the profit chain.

The profit chain consists of three links- employees, customers, and investors. If you have happy employees, they are more likely to produce a better product and serve customers better. Serving customers better makes them happy, and investors like happy customers. Investors like happy customers so much that it makes them happy. If the investors aren’t happy, it’s probably because they’re hearing from the customers. When the customers seek out the investors, it usually means they are unhappy because of an inferior product or poor service. The inferior product or poor service comes from the employees who don’t care because they hate their job. Keeping one end (un)happy usually results in a chain reaction for the other links.

2. What would an entrepreneur like me think is the most important part of communication?

Communication is an exchange of information. Someone is giving, another is receiving. It’s how the world works. Mark is a man of action, though, so if he’s going to get his message across he’s not going to waste his time with words. Actions speak louder than words. Instead of telling someone how to do their job, show them. Instead of vaguely describing how you want something done, show them. It’s a much more effective way of communicating.

When someone asks me how to do something on their computer, it’s easier for me to show them the actions they need to take by either sharing their screen or making a screencast than it would be to write out explicit instructions in a blog post for them to follow. When you’re learning to flip a burger, they could waste your time with an instructional video or take 5 minutes to hold your hand as your grill up your first patty.

If this isn’t what Mark wanted for his most important part of communication, I’m going to go with listening as my second answer. When you listen, you’re taking in information that you can later act upon whether it be user feedback, investor instructions, or general market trends.

3. Compare and contrast the difference between “good is good enough” and “good is the enemy of great.”

When I hear “good is good enough”, I think of high school. Nothing really matters in high school besides getting a diploma and meeting the state university’s minimum SAT score. Some people relish in the fact they had straight A’s all through high school, but the kid who passed with C-’s is still going to sit next them in finite class freshman year at StateU. There are developers that won’t let their code graduate unless it’s absolutely perfect, but often times it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect or not. As long as it’s good enough to pass, it’s probably ok to let go so they can move on to another task. Spending too much time on one task and forgetting about others is when you need to remember that “good is good enough”.

Going back to the high school example, the student that is hellbent on getting all A’s may end up with their mediocre peer in freshman finite, but could at the same time be in a greater position to succeed at the same time. Those A’s probably landed the student a few grants and scholarships, and their hard work probably prepared them better to excel in college. This is where “good is the enemy of great” comes into play. The average student didn’t need to be “great” to get to the same place “good” would have gotten them. Their ambitious peer, however, isn’t ready to settle for good so they are continuing to improve. When a developer or company admits that things are as good as they can be, they won’t get better.

There are times when “good is good enough” probably more on a day-to-day basis, but in the long run for a company to be innovative and deliver the best product “good is the enemy of great”.

• Article from BizVoice/Indiana Chamber (pdf)
• Forbes Profile (including salary information)
• Mini-Bio on Interactive Intelligence

Describe the characteristics of an entrepreneur that you would look at in thinking about

working for a start up company. If you have any direct experiences, please share how you

thought about those.

After reading those it’s apparent what the first characteristic is that I’m looking for in an entrepreneur- experience. If you’ve been successful in the past, chances are you’ll be successful in the future (see Mark Cuban and Scott Jones). I interned at ChaCha a few summers ago and was always impressed when I heard Scott speak. When times seemed tough, the future uncertain, or employees got on edge, he was there to calm everyone and tell them he had been there before. It also didn’t hurt that his rolodex was filled with all the right connections. Whether it was hosting parties for the governor, striking deals with the state university, or finding funding at the most opportune time, it was usually because of Scott’s experience.

If it’s the first time around the block for an entrepreneur, I’m looking for a hustler. Not just someone who can get things done, but someone who spends his every waking moment dedicated to learning more about their project. An entrepreneur who is the master of their domain and is also passionate about it, stands to be very successful.

What was the value that the venture capital firm provided which helped Software Artistry

become successful?

This question could have been worded differently to be clearer, but I think the answer they are looking for is R&D or research and development to the layman. Don Brown said he continues to work directly with developers. Given his educational background of physics and medicine, two fields heavily researched, it’s no surprise he adopted this value for his start-ups.

Describe the concept of runway and how it impacts the risk profile of starting a company.

How long of a runway would you want to see if you were going to work for a startup or start

your own business?

I found a great simple explanation of runway by Steve Spalding over on How to Split an Atom that I thought I’d share here:

For businesses “runway” represents how long you can stay in operation based on your revenue, burn rate and savings. If you have $10k in the bank and $5k worth of expenses a month, your “runway” is two months. At that point, you either get a loan, start flipping burgers on the side, or find a benefactor (VC/Angel/Family) to hold your head above water.

The goal of any business is to make its “runway” infinite, which simply means bringing in more revenue than it pushes out in expenses.

The risk is in the revenue. If you don’t produce any revenue, you run out of runway and crash. The longer runway you have, the longer period of time you have to make your revenue greater than your expenses. It’s very risky to start a company on a short runway just like it’s very risky to try to take off in a plane on a short runway. You might even be able to extend the metaphor to say that bigger planes need longer runways much like bigger startups need longer runways.

Mark has mentioned both weeks that you’ll always need more time and money than you think for your startup to take off. Continuing with the metaphor, you would want to leave some grassy bailout room after the runway instead of a brick wall incase everything doesn’t go to plan.

If I were going to work for a startup, my first question about their runway is if they planned accordingly for scalability. For example, would the product work the same for 10 people as it does 100 people? What about 100,000 people? 100 million people? What does an increased user base do to your expenses and have you planned accordingly? Some companies will have the same expenses if they sell one widget or a million of them, but you see a lot of startups that can’t handle a sudden influx in demand which sometimes drives potential customers away leaving their revenues less than what they could have been if they planned to scale accordingly. Mark Cuban often write on his blog about how internet video isn’t ready to challenge cable and satellite providers because no one can provide the enough bandwidth to handle the millions of viewers cable/satellites do.

If I were starting my own business, I’d keep my day job to extend my runway. When I have to start tapping into my sick days because nights and weekends aren’t enough to develop the project AND I’m making money from the project, then I’d consider quitting my day job to pursue my passion project full time. Hopefully by the time the project is that demanding, it is profitable enough to cover expenses and my increased attention could take it to the next level. That’s a very vague runway, but the moral of the story is to create the longest runway possible. When you break that threshold of profitability, you have an infinite runway!

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford

Before I get into this week’s questions, I thought I’d offer a little feedback on the course and the blog system thus far this semester. Simply put- it’s in beta, which is why feedback is important so the teachers and capstone team can make improvements. Thankfully, I’ve already tried to give some feedback to Travis Brown, the AI, a few times and he’s been very receptive. It’s great! I wish more classes would take continuous feedback on the course instead of waiting until the end of the semester to be reviewed by burnt out students on vague scantrons.

For example, this week I told Travis that I thought he could save himself and the students some effort by simplifying the process in making announcements. He had sent out a few messages via Oncourse about the schedule of speakers and this week’s blog assignment being available under the Resources on Oncourse in PDF to download. Since the PDFs were nothing more than plain text I wondered why he didn’t just send that in the messages instead of going through the trouble of creating a PDF, uploading it, and then sending out a message about it. He thanked me for the feedback, but said not all students check their messages diligently enough and I respected that. For those less diligent, make it easy on yourself and just have your messages from Oncourse forwarded to your email. If I were Travis and the capstone team trying to drive more traffic to this blog and show its potential, I’d post all announcements here. Force students to subscribe to the RSS feed (or at least Travis’ posts).

The technical hiccups in the classroom are another sign of beta status. The real classroom wasn’t ready the first week and we all crammed into a much smaller classroom. No sweat. This week the sound quality was terrible, but I got the jest of what was going on. I’m sure the production will gradually smooth out. What I’m really waiting on are the video archives of talks to go back and review when making these blog posts.

I’ve seen a lot of progress with the blog in the past few weeks with the layout changing, sidebars filling up, and kinks such as the IE login problems being resolved. That’s beta for you. I’ll throw my two cents in about the blog because I really like the idea of it being used to organize a class.

First, the permalink structure should be changed to something more human readable and thus better for SEO (i.e. /?page_id=48 < /lectureres).

Second, it takes 2 seconds to create a contact form using something like cforms II that makes it much easier to give feedback and ask questions instead of emailing informatics.i400@gmail.com.

Third, there are duplicate links in the Pages widget (“Home” == “Welcome…”), not to mention the Pages widget has the exact same links as the main horizontal navigation bar that is directly above it. What is the purpose of the blogroll and calendar widgets? The blogroll isn’t made up of blogs and has two links that could go in the footer. The calendar just links to posts from that day which doesn’t serve any immediate purpose that I can think of.

Back to the “Bios of Lecturers” page, it needs some sort of sub-navigation to make it easier to find each speaker. A list of names at the top that links to their section of the page or to a new page altogether would be nice. In fact, the entire site could use a more elaborate layout to accommodate all of the content that it is and will be handling. When Travis asked in class if anyone had read the other entries, no one even knew they could let alone how to. Look to sites like Ars Technica, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and the New York Times for inspiration on how to display and navigate lots of content.

I thought adding the RSS feed to my Google Reader might be a solution to managing all of the content, but it looks like it’s only feeding the last 10 posts. Is this the setting in the backend or was it only setup 10 posts ago? With 40ish authors posting weekly, this makes the RSS feed useless as of now.

I hope Travis, the capstone team, and even Mark Hill take some of this feedback to heart to improve the course this semester instead of waiting to retool it next year. If the capstone team is looking for another method of collecting feedback, I would suggest UserVoice that is used by a lot of beta/start-up sites.

I’ll start another post so Travis doesn’t think I’m filling my word count for this week’s assignment

1. For my Digital Art class (FINA D210), I’ll be posting here but crossposting with the category “digital art”
2. For my Entrepreneurship in Informatics class (INFO I400), I’ll be posting here (may be private to non-IU viewers) but crossposting with the category “entreprenership”

Supposedly, the I400 class is some sort of capstone project where I guess they are setting up and managing a WordPressMU install :: yawn (please let me know if it’s something more). There is really no excuse for my digital art class to have me post elsewhere (thought about submitting this URL and seeing if she knew the difference). The only reasonable explanation I could think of was that my teacher is originally from Taiwan and I know Blogger offers easy-to-use  translation tools. 

Bottom line, I’ll be blogging a lot this semester and I’m excited for that. I have quite a queue of other things I’d like to post, but haven’t found the time. Note to professors requiring their students to blog, let your students have some freedom (sure offer them a default like Blogger and WordPress) and just use Google Reader or some other RSS reader to manage the class. It’s not that hard.

As part of this semester’s I400 Entrepreneurship in Informatics course, each student is required to keep a blog and this week’s topic is telling about a time you failed. Failure is an apparent inevitability for every entrepreneur and while I’ve had my share of failures along the way, I’ve chosen to share my story about a group of undergrads led by myself who tried to save their fraternity only to have all their hard work squashed by near-sighted alumni. The egg was on their face when they had to close down the house the following semester.

This is a longer story that I could probably go on for thousands of words, so I’ll try to highlight the bullet points and go into detail where need be.

Before I even joined, my fraternity was on the decline. They tried to rejuvenate the chapter by adding on to the house to make it a more appealing place to live. The project was poorly managed and faced several unforeseen setbacks. Alumni were desperate for new members to pay dues that would go towards the project. Fast and loose recruitment lead to poor new members that weren’t interested in helping improve their chapter and, even worse, were delinquent bill payers. Drastic times called for drastic measures and a mashup of Wayne’s World and Animal House ensued.

I had the opportunity to book a Grammy-nominated artist to perform at the house for Little 500. A major event of this kind would have improved our image on campus and made us a more attractive house to rush. I personally paid the deposit and began organizing the event. Red tape was cut, approvals all around even from the dean of students, and only the alumni board needed to approve the concert before all was a go. Alumni scoffed at the artist solely based on lyrical content (Afroman – Because I Got High…). These out of touch alumni shot down the concert in front of parents and undergrads, crushing everyone’s spirit. A younger member of the alumni board walked off after the vote and resigned because of their lack of vision for the fraternity and wouldn’t be a part of a group dedicated to ruining the chapter.

Little 5 sucked. The construction still wasn’t finished. Summer came and I began on another crusade to organize an event to save the house, only this time with the backing of a new board member. I worked 40 hrs/wk for an internship and at night I was busy planning every logistical detail for a fall concert:

• choosing an agreeable artist
• reviewing their riders and planning accomodations
• stage and sound
• ticketing
• promotion
• security
• finances

I also made sure to do everything by the book so that the university would approve our large event. It was a great learning experience dealing with professionals in various fields. If you approach someone like a broke college kid, they treat you like one. When you start having some swagger like you have the proposed $50,000 – $75,000 for the production on hand, people treat you differently. I talked to talent agents, fire marshalls, security agencies, ticketing companies, rental companies, and a host of others like I had planned a major event tons of times when in actuality it was my first try.

After weeks of conversations with my new alumnus partner, we had a solid business plan in place to not only make this concert a success this year, but for years to come. We planned to give close to $10,000 to the Boys and Girls Club (the fraternity’s national philanthropy) while keeping enough to get the next show planned and organized (i.e. Zeta’s Big Man On Campus). To give an idea of the type of show we were looking to put on, our last decision was whether to choose Jason Mraz or Wyclef Jean to perform.

Then, the momentum slowed as bigger financial problems faced the chapter. My alumnus partner, who I highly respect to this day, finally made the call to back out on the concert. After weeks of working late night hours on top of my internship, making phone calls across the country, exchanging emails with who I imagined to be real life Ari Gold’s, meeting with Bloomington and university officials, and putting together a bulletproof proposal, it was all for naught. 

Sure, we didn’t go in front of the board again to get a big thumbs down or go through with it to have no one show up, but in the end we failed in our mission to save the chapter. After the fall semester that we were proposing to have a show, the house was unofficially on the market to be rented out and the chapter was slowing disbanding. By Little 5, a year after my original proposal, the house was in shambles and closed a month later. No action, no result.

To this day, I am thankful my alumnus partner had the foresight to see his money and my effort weren’t enough to save the failing chapter. I have no regrets for the time I invested in planning the show and gained valuable experience in event planning and real world business practices. 

Between listening to Scott Jones and his guest entrepreneurs every week for my internship and working on that project, I was and still am very excited about the entrepreneurial path (doesn’t hurt my dad is an entrepreneur too). As if it was fate, Standout Blogger put out 10 entrepreneurial blogs you need to be following this year this week, so I wanted to include that. I also was followed on Twitter by @startupstudentthis week (probably because I mentioned the word ‘entrepreneur’ in a tweet) and thought I’d give them a shout out as well.

Before I close, I’m giving myself a shameless plug to my own blog.