startup

Anything and everything related to startups.

Leaping is the best part of Startups

I’m at odds with the norms of business.  Thinking and Doing are the two halves to executing in business, you need both of them.  You need to think and strategize and you need to act.  On the startup slice of things I find myself more and more excited about acting than thinking.  Its not that thinking is not important, it is, is huge, you need to know, but what you can’t do is know and not act.  Knowing without acting is really really really bad.  So acting is more important.  Do more thats it.  Just do.

In the valley and in the world of startups, the phrase is “less talking, more doing”.  You can get that tattoo’d on your body, I’ve seen it as a tshirt, a tie, a jacket, a bumper sticker, you name it.

When I meet with inventors, and students, and folks trying to take on the big idea, build something, take it to market, they tend to get entrenched or stuck in theory craft of what could be.  Note that this is an essential skill to have.  The ability o envision an abstract into a manifested thing, walking, talking, etc, is really really awesome.  BUT getting stuck in that vs acting is bad.  Its like designing the experience before experiencing it.  You can’t do that.  I can’t imagine what it would like to taste something i’ve never tasted before.  I kinda need to bite into it.

At TCO we’re of many minds, we house many strategists, and many doers.  I’m sort of in both seats.  But I love the doing part.  I love leaping out of the plane and inventing wings on the way down.  That is the thrill of things like Startup Weekend which hosted in our office at TCO last month.  We packed 75+ people, students, some faculty folks, alot of staff into our space for 2.5 days and jammed on the impossible, let’s build a company in a weekend.  It was great to see people from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton there as well. Over half of the audience were students from Ohio State and we lucky to have a lot of developers.  This means we made stuff, alot of wings were created on the way down, just in time for pitch day on Sunday.

I got in the act as well and put my noggin around a passive gaming engine idea i’ve been thinking about for past few years.  I love willing stuff into existence and thats what you do at Startup Weekend, on friday you have bat crazy idea, its lame, really lame, you get 1 minute to pitch it, then you fight to get votes from folks and then you get a team and lock yourself in a room to realize it.  People feed you breakfast lunch and dinner, you get some advisers, you get folks who have jumped out of the plane before and did manage to build wings before they hit the pavement to give you some thoughts, they tear your idea apart, expose problems, force you to see them.  You also get advised by the folks that jumped out of the plane, tried to make some wings and flattened themselves on the pavement, failure is often a better engine for learning than winning.  I see a mentors role often as the person to make you think, thats it.  Think about what you’re making, but get back to doing.  Nothing impresses a venture peep more than the story of traction, and traction comes from doing.

If you haven’t done a Startup Weekend, I recommend you try it out.  I often tell folks, I’m a product of Startup Weekend, I wouldn’t be on the path that I am without that crazy 2.5 day event, where for a moment in time, I willed some idea to life.  In my case, in 2008, my team won 5ok for it.  Which was the fodder for doing ton of stupid things that eventually led to us trying and failing to start a company.  That failure shaped me for everything to come.  I wouldn’t trade those memories, those mistakes for anything.  But that high you get on Sunday night, after the final pitches where you willing something into existence and people got it and then recognized you, and you felt like you’re on the biggest idea ever, that feeling is awesome, and it comes from doing side of the heart, the thinking matters yes, but the audacity to leap out of that plane and invent on the way down, that is the game I live for.

What Do Ya Wanna Buy?

Kickstarter is the bane of Suzy Orman.  

Yes its true.  Kickstarter isn’t just a cool crowd-sourcing platform to find cool neat little one off products, its an addiction.  Its an addiction that few if anyone will talk about.  Its a brilliant human distraction. Everyone wants to be part of something, the world of entrepreneurship is unfolding all around us, anyone who wants to make can, there are no barriers any more.  Not only can anyone make, but now anyone can fund, we all can collectively toss a buck into a jar and steam roll past snooty capital backers and say, we the humans of this planet, will this product into existence, take that!

I love Kickstarter, its a fun, cheap way, (well sorta cheap) to be apart of something that could be bigger than yourself.  What part of the human soul doesn’t want to be a part of that?  Its the key to our humanity to be a part of something.  Kickstarter enables these dreams, makes them a reality, its pretty damn groovy.

The downside is the human condition, the fact that we don’t understand portion control without education.  We’re bingeing on crowd-sourcing right now.  We’re taking our gas bill money and plowing it into yet another comic, strange lamp, talking sensor thing,bands album, indie movie, you name it.

Students, students with disposable cash and an aptitude to enable, ie, they are more powerful than the average mortal on campus because they are young, talented, skilled and well funded are plowing cash into Kickstarter because its cool.  And that to me makes me think of Suzy Orman.  I love her show when I catch it.  She lectures the planet on how to save money for the future, and todays $$$ we should be saving is going into Kickstarter for that feeling of belonging to something greater.  I know, i have many one off things from Kickstarter campaigns, none of them actually are as useful than the feeling that I was apart of it.  That feeling is getting expensive and Suzy would strangle me in a parking lot if she knew how many projects I’ve backed.

Suzy’s special segment What Do Ya Wanna Buy?!? is a fun segment where she cross examines folks as the dish out their current financial situation and then ask whether or not they should buy X.  In turn Suzy analyzes all of that and hits them over the head with DENIED! or you are approved.  I always like the DENIED ones better though because in the end Suzy is thinking how you can living well many many years away.  Sadly Kickstarter is erasing that future for many unless we can get a hold of it.. love the service, humans suck!  LOL

Analog World Returning

They say vinyl never died it just went on holiday during the CD time and came raging back as the world began listening to MP3’s.  Now records are more popular than ever.  Its hip, fashionable, heck even cultured to talk of old times, records, heck 8 track is probably going to be seriously in before we know it.  The other day I read a piece on brick and mortar businesses going “analog” and about fell outa my chair.  As a music person, or person who makes music every now and then, analog to me typically refers to brands like MOOG who make boomingly dark loud and evil basses and synths, in todays music, musicians crave that old analog, retro beefy real in your face noisy unclean, sound.  Analog is hugely hip in music these days.  Now apparently its a “in” descriptor to where retail is going.  I mean isn’t brick and mortar already analog?  Does the physical in store shopping experience actually need yet another identifier to describe itself??

Apparently now in the future, living in 2013, yes.  Analog is returning.  

 

Here’s an idea thats come across my radar more then once in Columbus.  Thank You Letter Startups.  Yep, I’ve seen two attempts in the past 3 years, one is currently in motion via some students at Ohio State and the premise is really simple, people miss writing real letters, not SMS, texts, or email, or tweets… no, that stuff is blah now, the next frontier, physical real world, thank you letters.  To many of us again, we’ll fall out of our chair thinking about that.  But to a younger, millennial generation coming to be, the notion of anything physical, or non-digital is like frickin far out man.

And what’s more interesting I think is that there IS a big market for it.  Now the real trick in making this work however is how they infuse authenticity into the mix.  How do we make these letters “real” without the real work.  Ahhh yes, there’s a frontier worth checking out eh?  Actually my mother would slap me here and insist on a real hand written letter, which I’d sheepishly nod as something i’d prefer better as well but you know when tech is play, they must address momentum and scale to really make a buck, how they do that here, well something has to step aside and handwritten, well that may be a part of that.  Or its an add on fee!  Heh.

We live in interesting times.  Soon meeting people face to face will be a startup idea.

Heap – Capture Everything

Startups I’d like to do.  Long ago before coming to Ohio State I theorized on a concept like this.  Heap – Capture Everything.  Thinking about the progression and adoption of mobile technology, there are so many experiences developers don’t know, we don’t see, and its not because technology is lacking its because we’re not inventing layers to collect and capture the data.  More so we don’t start with the questions we need and want to get answered.

Thats a potential problem with Heap.  It makes sense, but it doesn’t if you don’t know what you want to know.  Working in research taught me that the questions matter more than the answers.  Questions frame the approach, you build an experiment to get the data to support the questions.  Now there is pure exploratory you can do but you can end up with a massive dataset that is subjective to whatever you’re asking.

In a world gone fast, gone optimized, gone learning and story telling, focusing on the questions is even more important.  Hopefully HEAP will engage and involve some themes or data collection base strategies for folks- course it may not since its just the capture tool and not the questions.

Taking the buckeye slice, i think about the learning analytics of carmen, or leveraging this kind of tech around Ohio State mobile.  This takes us into what i see is one of the univerisities greatest assets, our ecosystem.  Lotta people hate that word, i used to dislike it as well but it really helps you see the power of a university in this context.  Our whole process, system, people, context, all of that creates momentum, it holds a ton of user interaction, those interactions analyzed (provided theres a question), yields data, that data can be turned into insight, that insight can be turned into another product, process, theory, etc.  We swim in a world at Ohio State that is full of this potential yet we often do not recognize it.  Leveraging our own momentum, thats a key for Ohio State going forward.  How to do it?  Keeping an open eye and open mind on the assets, contexts, and scenarios in play, and building systems, and questions we’d and others would want to see answered.

TCO’s role is to think beyond the construct of the university, we have to look to the market, find that potential revenue, bring in those extra dollars, to do that, we need to think more broadly.  But good discussions to have!  Wish HEAP the best and I envy their runway, they are likely to be acquired into the millions in 2-4 years, so it will be a quick exit and a great example of building a solution play on a massive ecosystem unfolding.