Lew McMurran: Lobbyist!?! One of THOSE people!

Lew McMurran starts out by identifying himself as a registered lobbyist.  Which this day and age carries a stigma about as appealing as being an ex-con.  People just assume you're some kind of sleazy, lying, manipulating, scheming, corporate pawn.  Which, as it turns out, a student even asked McMurran how he feels about calling himself a lobbyist, to my amusement.  He, however, took it very seriously and claimed to be an honest, straight shooting, regular Joe, who isn't involved with any of the lobbying that generally garners such disrespect from society.   McMurran explained how he worked for the banking industry for a while, then the King County Council, and public utilities district.  Eventually he started the WA Software Alliance which changed its name to the WA Technology Industry Association.  The company is a nonprofit organization 501.C-6 and currently has about 11 employees.  They offer a number of Business Services, events and programs as well as advocacy and lobbying.  Currently there are 600 member companies associated with WTIA and membership is as simple as paying a sum of money relative to the number of employees your company has.  McMurran offered some advice for students, apparently the same advice he tells his high school & college age children, “JOB stands for Just Over Broke – try to create your own business and employee yourself.”  From my perspective however, the job I have has helped me far exceed “just over broke” and the corporation I work for has all the pay, benefits and growth I need.

Jeff Goodwin: Business Life Cycle

Jeff Goodwin has always been an entrepreneur - starting when he was a teenager trying to start his own business washing roofs for people.  Goodwin actually rented a washer and began recruiting clients.  As with all businesses things were slow getting started, but eventually Goodwin was making enough money to buy his own washer, and increase his profit margins within his company.  (I don’t know much about roofing, but I was under the impression you’re not supposed to hit shingles with a pressure washer?  Perhaps I’m wrong…)  Goowdin went to Washington State University and earned a degree in business although he took several technology related electives.  Goodwin decided to continue taking night courses learning various programming languages such as 4tran and cobal and put those skills to use while working for Boeing.   Goodwin spent some time as an assembly programmer and eventually landed a position at IBM.  By this point Goodwin was spawning his own business ideas but a company as large as IBM apparently wasn’t interested in what Goodwin had to offer.  The long and short of it is, Goodwin left, started his own business and became relatively successful.  Unfortunately he became stuck between a rock and a hard place and decided to sell his company to Cisco.  Part of the sale contract included Goodwin running the business for a few more years, which he did, then finally moved back to WA.    Goodwin currently is the president of Goodwin Attorney Services in Tacoma and seems quite content.  Goodwin is an example of how an entrepreneur can start young with ideas and motivation, then get the required skills through education and on the job experience, then start and run a successful company to eventually sell and exit.  He kind of represents the entrepreneur life cycle in a nutshell.

Dr. Lynnette Claire

Dr. Lynnette Claire came to class and spoke to students about entrepreneurship and her experiences during her career.  Dr. Claire was awarded a B.A. in English from the University of California and her first job was writing articles for a magazine centered on Horticulture.   Dr. Claire passed on an opportunity to move to Boston MA to continue work with the horticulture magazine company and instead decided to peruse her options in the greater Puget Sound area.  Dr. Claire started her own company called Simply Seafood magazine using her learning’s while working for the Horticulture magazine.  Claire began working with small businesses as a part time coordinator and helped those companies develop and expand their networks.  Dr. Claire also helped expand several other ventures and realized her passion for business.  At this point she decided to pursue higher education and returned to school at the University of Puget Sound – attaining masters and eventually a doctorate of philosophy from this school.  (Personal note, my wife received her undergraduate degree from UPS – but her PhD from University of Missouri – completely unrelated field though; plant insect and microbial biology)  After finishing school Dr. Claire became interested in teaching and took a position at UPS where she continues to teach.  On the side she is also working in Tacoma to establish an entrepreneurs network in the hopes of helping future entrepreneurs in the area get their careers started.  This type of network could be critical for many new entrepreneurs because many new comers have plenty of good ideas  but lack the experience and connections to bring their ideas to fruition. 

Mickey Mouse Protection Act

STOP: Read the United States Constitution, if you haven't ever - I highly recommend it. 

You might find Article I Section 8 Clause 8 interesting, allow me to quote it here:
    "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

It is critical to note that the idea of a copyright or patent is to secure only a limited period of protection.  The keyword here is ‘limited’.  I'd like to share my opinion on why current trends in copyright law are anti-competitive, unconstitutional, and sniffling artistic and economic progress.

First, consider that a limit for a copyright was originally established when the first copyright laws were drafted.  Henceforth modifying that duration with a "Copyright Extension" act will set LEGAL precedence to extend the duration.  Thus, future extensions are now legal via precedence of previous extensions.  As such extending indefinitely is legal and constitutional.  This is a direct contradiction with the United States constitution and also a logical fallacy.  We should not be extending the copyright duration simply because it has been legally extended in the past, those past decisions were as unconstitutional as future ones.

Second, consider patents.  The limit applies to patents and copyrights, yet copyright extensions wildly outpace patent extensions.  Why is that?  It seems to me that certain individuals (Disney, Sonny Bonno) are spending huge quantities of money to lobby for extensions that serve their purpose.  This is interesting because the US Constitution is supposed to provide laws that serve the public, not Disney.  There is no real positive benefit to the US Public by extending copyright protection further.

Third, proponents believe extending copyrights will encourage progress in the arts because artists will have to create original work instead of modifying existing work; this belief is actually quite wrong.  Take technology for example, it is obvious that innovation is faster and vastly more effective than invention.  In fact, imagine a world where innovation was illegal, only invention.  If only the inventor of a technology could innovate on it, you wouldn’t be reading this blog on the internet, let alone on a PC Computer, unless Bell Laboratories were innovative enough to develop every piece of technology in the US that uses a transistor.  That’s right; the very first bipolar point-contact transistor was invented by a couple nerds working for AT&T.  If innovation was illegal, there would be no Intel, no IBM, no AMD, no Microsoft, and no progress.  Sure, there would be some new inventions we don’t have today… but at what cost?

Indefinite copyrights clobber innovation, stifle advancement, and undermine the constitution.   It’s not about “Fairness” or “Sticking it to the man” it’s about (something that may seem equally as arbitrary, yet profoundly more important) the spirit of the United States Constitution and enforcing the philosophies of the founding fathers.

I could discuss this for days… but fellow students probably didn’t read this far anyways…

AOL: Ahead of their time, and Failing

We're all familiar with America On Line (AOL) and if you're like me, you enjoyed the free coasters they sent in the mail (AOL trial CDROMs) back in the 90's. AOL is an interesting story for me, because I grew up hearing about it, and also hating it. AOL started in the 80's with an online video game service where you could pay a subscription and download video games directly to your Atari console. That business however wasn't working, for a number of reasons, and AOL moved to an Online Internet Service provide, a rather bloated, bug ridden, sluggish, and annoying ISP to boot. That said, at one time AOL had over 30 million subscribers (in 2001) with stock valued over $226 Billion (with a B) and is noted as one of the founding innovators of the internet, bringing it to the mainstream masses relatively effectively. That success was short lived as AOL's software and services became less desirable, and in 2006 the company dwindled to 10% of its former glory with stock valued at only $20 Billion and a subscriber base of less than 4.4 million. Today AOL has delt with acquisitions and mergers, and is struggling to find adequate management to lead the company along a successful path to cash.

I'm writing about AOL because they were very much ahead of their time, but have been unable to really find sustainable market to keep themselves afloat. In the 1980's their company was providing down-loadable game content directly to your console, years ahead of similar services such as Steam. Yet Steam is a high successful company and business is booming for them. Namely because they came around the time broadband and PC games were really gaining momentum and the service they provided is sustainable, and very useful especially as internet speeds increase. AOL's founder also wanted to provide a server where users could buy music on demand, but the idea was rejected by Warner Brothers. Which is interesting because iTunes today, is an incredibly successful company. Again, AOL was a little premature with the idea, but once MP3 players hit it big, and broadband made music online viable, that market was ripe.

Sometimes being ahead of your time can lead to incredible success, but not always, it is possible to be too far ahead of the times, and alienate your customers, or worse, your investors.  (Look at the idiot to the left for a perfect example of what being too far ahead of your time can look like to potential customers)  If the people who will fund your venture and the people who will pay for your product cannot see how your product fits in to the world you will fail. It could be the most profound and innovative idea, yet you will find no success in that endeavor simply because the market isn't ready for your product. There is a special moment when a market is very ripe with potential customers, yet free of stiff competition, and spotting when that market is at its critical mass and having the epiphany required to harvest that fruit is very rare yet extremely rewarding. It kills me when I see a business who sells a product that's so obvious I can't imagine how I didn't think of it, and at the same time I can't imagine how the world existed without it. When you see those companies, you know they'll be successful, and when you see companies like AOL, you know they will eventually fail.

Startup.com (and Shutdown.com apparently)

Startup.com is a documentary of the extraordinary rise and fall of a company during the mid-late 1990's while the newly developing internet was flooding the market with new industry and investors were pouring out money hand over fist without necessarily fully understanding the internet and these new dot com businesses. The documentary follows the major business developments of GovWorks.com through the eyes of its three original founders (although primarily through Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman's perspective as the third founder is largely absent from the film and eventually bought out of the organization). Long story short, the three founders invested relatively small amounts of personal assets (maybe $20k each) and with the company kicking off around 8 employees their growth to over 233 employees and investments skyrocketing over $70 million they found themselves outclass and outgunned in a market with competitors producing superior products, and experienced management and leadership causing significant internal destabilization leading to an eventual demise of the company.

Tom Herman & Kaleil Isaza Tuzman

The two remaining founders declared bankruptcy in 2001 noting assets of $8 million and liabilities of around $40 million, the CEO's basically getting nothing. It seemed Tuzman was capable of securing the finances for the company but Herman was clearly not qualified to run the technical aspects of the company which may have ultimately led to the demise of GovWorks.com. In the end, the friendship between high school friends Tom and Kaleil was clearly scarred, possibly festering a resentment between the two for the rest of their lives, the business was a failure and collapsed, and hundreds of people lost their jobs.

On the bright side, Dora got a dog.

John Dimmer: Want Money? Ask This Guy.



John Dimmer (holding Bowl) recieving the Pete Lyons Award.

John Dimmer provided students with an interesting lecture about how students from humble college educated backgrounds can go into the world, excel, innovate, and decimate the competition and end up in a position where our biggest problem in life is being retired in our 30's. But hey, with all that time, why not take the exuberant amounts of money we have, and start investing in others, as an Angel Investor, since it takes money to make money, why not make some more! Dimmer's story is fascinating, and his success from what I can tell, is largely due to his intelligent presence, and diligent work ethic. Dimmer provided students with a map that illustrates the phases of a new company's development adjacent to the phases of a new companies finances and funding. As one might expect the initial sources of income are from the founders, followed by friends and family, then angel investors, VC's, etc, until finally an IPO is made. Although the majority of new companies never reach an IPO, they are still quite successful without it. Dimmer's lecture focused primarily on securing funding for your company, and the different avenue's you'll have to take to do so. His experiences with his own ventures gave students some insight on identifying their audience when considering approaching VC's or Angel investors. After meeting him, if I were to seriously consider starting my own business, I would almost certainly seek him out for counsel, and perhaps depending on where my business was heading, and if I were lucky, he could be an investor in my company.

Ron Kornfield: Creating a Business Plan



Ron Kornfeld: Serial Entrepreneur

Ron Kornfeld is the founder or co founder of a number of companies: NibmelSource, Personal Grid, Dream box, Normandy Partners, Harmonetrix, Cognisoft, xl.io and XactLab. This means he has a great deal of experience starting a new business, and makes him your best friend if you're trying to start your own. Ron uses a five step process for creating a business plan, which can be a daunting task if you've never done one before. Ron's process involves: First identify your audience, think about who will be reading your plan, and cater its design to that person(s). Second, outline the plan, with an outline in place you can begin to fill in the details as needed or discovered. Third, write the plan, this is where you gather all those nitty gritty details and fill in every section of your outline thoroughly, lots of critical learning will happen at this phase, and you may even discover your idea is

 not viable, or already implemented by someone else. Fourth, review your plan, make sure that you, and someone else (preferably more experienced than you) reads the plan and provides key feedback that inside eyes might not catch. Fifth and finally, update your plan, make sure all that good feedback is incorporated into your plan as what good is reviewing it if you don't make any positive changes. Once the business plan is written, you will have a pretty solidy understanding of your company and your plan – with that you can begin to raise funds, seek out investors, acquire resources etc... or you can throw the whole thing in the garbage because your idea sucks, or has been done by someone who can do it way better than you. Either way, the Business Plan is the first place to start for any entrepreneur, experienced or otherwise.

Bruce Kendall: Economic Development

The Chief Executive Officer of Economic Development Board of Tacoma-Pierce County, Bruce Kendall, visited our class and spoke about his company and plans for the Tacoma-Pierce region. Bruce leads a 'not for profit' company (501-(C)(6)) that garners its funding through voluntary 'pledges' from both private and public institutions. The focus of his business is to stimulate economic growth and development in this region by helping companies bring their business here. Bruce wants to focus on companies that will bring in 'external' money – cash flows from sources outside our region streaming into our region. Bruce is also focused on larger, more establish and stable companies. A large part of what Bruce's company does is road block clearing. Talking with companies, encouraging them to bring their business to our region, and then helping them clear any road blocks, financial, legal or otherwise, preventing them from coming. Bruce's focus is in five core areas: clean water, cyber security, logistics, medical services, and aerospace. Attracting companies in these areas will help accelerate economic growth in the region because the infrastructure for those businesses is in place, and mature. The part I found most interesting about Bruce's talk is that he doesn't provide any direct service or product to the region, yet private companies will give him money. Not as investments, or as donations, but as “Pledges” that help his company continue to provide the indirect service to the region that Bruce claims we need.

Technology: Lead to Win

Technology plays a key role in today's businesses. Not just developing products that are technological advancements, but using the latest technologies and technological advancements to create that business and product. For example, Intel corporation produces processors and chipsets, that by themselves are advancements in technology. However, Intel also advances the technology used in the creation of those chips. Furthermore, Intel is leading in both Product technology and Process technology vs. it's competitors. This means, even if the competitors can design a product comparable to Intel's latest processors they must also design the technology to produce it. In my business the technologies to provide my product are already well establish and well defined. It will be up to me to ensure that the latest web streaming technologies, search engines, and web design are incorporated into my business to make sure my product is as 'fancy' as possible for my customers. Opportunity to develop these technologies that I would be using is a little outside the scope of my business. However, my business involves a lot of analyzing video, and data input of attributes about various videos into a database. It would be extremely useful to my company if the technology to autonomously generate these data attributes from a video existed. This technology would not be something the customers see in the product, however it would mean a larger number of videos could be analyzed in a shorter amount of time, providing more content to the user at a faster rate. Such a technology would differentiate my service from my competitors and surely lead to more success. Though doubtful my company would ever enjoy a 2+ year technology lead over my competitors such as Intel.

Brian Forth: A Business Leader

Brian Forth visited our class and talked a little about his qualifications, endeavors and successes. Brian was no stranger to corporate life given that the majority of his family was employed by a major corporation such as Lockheed Martin. Brian didn't exactly go to college for business, nor was his initial career anything to do with business. However, after getting a degree in Theology and Philosophy Brian decided to teach elementary school. Brian changed jobs again, and eventually decided to create his own job. Brian's creation was a company focusing on web site creation called SiteCrafting Inc. This company has grown in size to 30 employees in 3 locations, Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane. In 2009 Brian was honored at the 8^th Annual Business Leadership Awards winning the small business leader of the year award. Different from what most people think of business leaders, Brian puts a lot of emphasis on his employees during his day to day activities. He focuses on strategies and principals that will retain employees and encourage growth, knowing that this focus will lead to higher quality products and a more successful business. Management that recognizes that employees are a critical region of a successful business are surely more likely to succeed, even when economic conditions make business an uphill struggle. Brian seems to understand that, and during his acceptance speech said “We have to approach each day, confident that we can handle whatever changes come our way because we adhere to timeless, changeless principals.” I wish Brian continued success with his business.

Entrepreneur: A state of being.

The idea of an entrepreneur is quite simple; innovate/invent, market, sell, profit. Sounds easy, but reality is considerably harsher. The vast majority of entrepreneurs never get off the ground, for various reasons, and those that do have to face the soberingly dismal odds of success. According to the reading, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you're statistically most apt to fail miserably. Yet, despite those statistics, a few people still give it a shot, and yet a few of those even succeed. Some may call those who try stupid, or brave, given the odds, but I just call them motivated. Of all the entrepreneurs I’ve seen, both successful and utter failures (and both) they all share the same attribute.


Motivation. 


Being an entrepreneur means you have to take on the colossal task of starting and running (at least initially) your own business. There are a number of avenues you can take on what kind of product, and business you start, but the idea is that whichever route you choose, success means generating a sustainable revenue stream for yourself and business. Whether you're filthy rich and invest your own money, or you put your strapping charisma to the test and pull in loads of cash from investors, friends or family, you'll be garnering a degree of risk. More often than not that risk will spill into your personal life and any failures can be catastrophic for your life or family. A good entrepreneur should mitigate risk whenever possible and focus on adapting and surviving all the problems that come their way. This is where motivation keeps them going, without motivation and good leadership no 'would be' entrepreneur will ever succeed.

Guest Speaker: Erik Hanberg

Having a guest speaker visit a classroom is always a pleasure.  It provides students with several good opportunities; for starters it adds an additional voice to the mix besides just the professor's rambling.  But more importantly it adds additional perspective about the subjects at hand.  Erik Hanberg is an entrepreneur that has had both success and failure with his businesses during his career, not entirely different from our professor, but his path, like the path of almost every entrepreneur, was distinctly different.  Erik and his wife started their "Entrepreneurial Adventure" with a semi-solid foundation built from the salaries they received working for well established companies.  After leaving those companies, their income has streamed from a number of sources; a graphical design company, a theater, a startup, and even selling a number of books Erik wrote.  The variety of sources and variety of work created some new possibilities, as well as some new risks.

Erik detailed for our class, a numberless chart of his income over the last several years, broken down in terms of what source the money came from to help illustrate how his ventures have ramped and faded over time.  This of course, started with his salaried career.  The first thing I noticed was that the salaried career made a very flat, predictable, and fairly large amount of money for him and his wife (at least compared to the income from the other sources).  Once the "entrepreneurial" activities started, the income immediately took a dive and the rate began to jump up and down sporadically.  Some of this jumping was due to vacations, and travel, that in a regular company would have been impossible.  But some of it was simply the instability of business in a recessed economy.  Personally, that kind of unstable income, by choice or not, gives me heartburn, and I’d much rather work my salaried job with 4 weeks of vacation per year, 10 holidays, and an 11 week sabbatical every 7 years.  But everybody is different, and Erik seems quite pleased with how his ventures are fairing.

My key take away from his presentation was that creating your own job can enable you to structure your life in a way more suitable to your taste at the potential cost of stability.  Like all things in life it seems to be a trade off, more dynamic hours with less income predictability vs. more income predictability with less dynamic hours.  Whatever floats your boat… If you do it right, you can get a rock solid income foundation layered with pits and planes, if you do it wrong you can hit a pretty epic iceburg.

*Pictures & Art property of their respective owners...

TINST 475 [Insert Witty Blog Title]

       
I've never composed a blog before, and likely never will again.  I generally stick to highly technical writing, so please bear with me if my blog is dry, I'll try not to bore my readers too much.  For this initial entry I have decided to write about two potential business opportunities that have occurred to me in the past.  At this point, I have not done any research on these ideas, and I'm almost certain that someone has beaten me to market.  Nonetheless here are my proposals.

 

 

 

 

First, some background; a friend of mine has a projector in his living room, and very often, he'll host parties at his house.  During the parties, the keyboard/mouse (wireless) will be passed around, or picked up randomly by people who will use youtube to play a music video.  In this manner, everyone gets to listen to songs they like, and there's always an interesting video playing in the background.  The annoying part about using Youtube for this is that Youtube is not designed to be a "Music Player".  Sure it has playlist features, but I'm not aware of any simple means to start playing, and queuing up videos, while searching for others, w/o using multiple tabs.   Thus, my first idea, is a Youtube Music Video Player website, that will use embedded music players in tandem with a search pane.  The website will give users the ability to queue up songs, create playlists, and potentially even search and embed videos from multiple video sources.

Second, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a pretty big Starcraft fan.  As such, I enjoy watching e-sports online, primarily replays and casts of professional Starcraft 2 players.  Just like more common sports some players in e-sports are more interesting to watch than others, and some matches between players can be even more exciting.  However, searching videos for these players can be problematic, because not all casters use a standardized naming scheme for their videos, and a lot of the details about the match aren't necessarily contained in the video title.  My second idea is a front end website created for searching and playing SC2 casts with a database backend that will use a comprehensive schema to track all videos.  In this way, users can search for not just the players, but additional details such as the maps, the casters, the events/tournaments, the winner/loser, the length, the races, etc.  This way a user could conceivably perform a search as complex as "Find videos casted by Husky, on Sakuras Plateau, where Idra loses"

Product Ideas:

1) Web Based Youtube Music Video Player

•   Plays embedded youtube/vevo music videos (possibly other sites as well)
•   Allows searching youtube for other videos while still playing (on same tab)
•   Possible to search multiple video DB's from single search ?
•   Allows user to queue up videos, using links
•   Allows user to create playlists, including normal features like repeat, shuffle, etc.

2) SC2 Replay Website / Game Database

•   Store all casted replays from various casters (Husky, HD, Force, etc...)
•   DB schema uses dozens of attributes, allowing users to search by variety of means
•   Rank/Rating system for Casters & Replays