Extra Credit - South Sound Technology Conference

    I attended the South Side Technology Conference as apart of my internship presentation. I was able to show off what I learned/did during my internship this quarter. For the research/poster session portion, I got to see what my fellow students worked on. One other thing poster I was interested was my friend Arshdeep Singh's. Arshdeep had an interesting story to his internship. He started off testing software updates on virtual machines but wanted to do something else. He talked with his manager and he got moved on to a networking team. On the networking team, Arsh got to write Ruby scripts to automate switches.

    Another presentation that I found interesting, not mine or a friends was Caleb's presentation on his TMobile TechX internship. During his internship, Caleb got to work on an operations security support team and development integration test team. I liked that his internship was a rotation one where you could see what it's like on different engineering teams. This is the a kind of internship that I prefer to have so I can see what technologies/teams fit my interests.

    I did catch a peak at what topics were actually being discussed during the conference. The two that I caught during my breaks were drones and women in technology. I don't actually personally own any drones but they do interest me it lets end users see the view from above whenever/whenever they want(of course there's regulations) and am hearing about how Amazon is trying to deliver packages via drones.

     Women in technology is something I hear about all the time on LinkedIn. My view on this  is that it's good to bring in/interest people who aren't represented as well in technology - women and minorities but at the same time I don't believe they should be given unfair advantages like if a man presents himself as more technically adept than a woman applying for the same position, the woman shouldn't be hired simply because shes a woman.

Dot.com to Dot bomb

     Andrew gave a lecture on the Dot Com bubble. In the mid to late 1990s, there was an unprecedented amount of an excitement in the Internet companies that rose. People thought it was a boom without end.

    Andrew used dinosaurs as an analogy to describe the dominant Internet companies in the era - Compserv,  Pets.com, Yahoo. He used dinosaurs because they were these strong creatures that roamed the Earth and no one dared to challenge them. Unfortunately, like dinosaurs, these companies failed to adapt to the significant changes(for Dinosaurs, asteroid ahead of them and perished.

The asteroid in this case was an incoming bubble. Because of all the excitement, so much money than what these Internet companies were actually worth(if you do DCF  of future revenues) was being put in and later when the bubble burst, people were in a panic to sell. This actually reminded of my purchase of the new Star Wars battlefront game. Due to all the hype around the Force Awakens, many people(including me) bought the entire game($60) without playing it first. We put so much hype into the game. The game itself lacked a single player campaign mode, droids, and had few maps compared to the previous Battlefront games.

     There were some dinosaurs that adapted to survive. Andrew talked about Yahoo as the exception. Yahoo would be the crocodile in the dinosaurs analogy. One of the things I took away was that to survive in the economy, you need to willing to adapt. As software engineers, were taught that you need to constantly learn new frameworks and technologies or your skills will be obsolete.  er

Guest Speaker - John Dimmer

    John Dimmer came to our class to speak last Thursday. Andrew mentioned that John's talk was his favorite. I think this is because John and Andrew started up Free Range Media together :)

    John played golf at the University of Oregon. He graduated from University of Oregon with a degree in finance and started his career at Puget Sound Bank. After working at Puget Sound Bank, John went on to work at Alliance Surety Bonds which he learned a great deal about accounting. John  then became an entrepreneur. He is a managing member at Firs Management, an investment firm that invests in startups, owns a Honda Dealership, and Airstream, trailer dealerships in different states.

    John also talked about the differences between legal structures your company can form. The three types of legal structures he mentioned were LLC, C corporation, and S corporation. LLC reminded me of Quizlet LLC. C corporation is the most common legal structure. C corporations pay federal income taxes from its income. S corporations are not subject to a federal income tax as the shareholders will bear the burden of paying the federal income tax.

Mission, Vision, and Values Statement

Mission/Vision Statement
Our mission, at Vitalize Technologies, is to provide simple to use community based application to notify what is going around on around them.  We alert our users of work opportunities, retail promotions, sports activities, and other social gatherings. Our platform will let users, at anytime, anywhere pinpoint areas of interest and and join in conversation with other users who are interested/join in the common event.

Value Statement

Our core values are

Customer Obsession - Like Amazon.com, we want do what's right for the customer. We want to listen to our customers - see what features they like and suggestions they have for our application. We want to start from the customer and work backwards to earn their trust.

Transparency  - We want our employees to know what our plans for the company and have them contribute ideas and suggestions

Passion - We want developers, program managers, and designers that live and breath our product(in other words, actively use our product in their everyday life and want to improve it). We feel that if our employees use our product, they will have more energy to code and kill bugs!

Safe & Respectful  - We will not tolerate any discriminatory or threatening language on our platform. Users that use discriminatory or threatening language will be banned.  

Amy Sallin Visit

    Amy Sallin, assistant director at Buerke Center for Entrepreneurship came to speak with us last week. She spoke to us about competitions in entrepreneurship and gave us advice about how to get advice in entrepreneurship. One such competition she mentioned was Buerke Center for Entrepreneurship's Business Plan Competition in which $70,000 is awarded in prizes. The money won can set your business and pay off expenses/new employees.

   Andrew added on to what Amy mentioned and said that this would be a great opportunity for us to enter our business plans that we will turn in at the end of the class. Amy also told us that there are more benefits than just the funding involved. By entering the competition, we will be able to build our network of contacts, receive coaching/mentoring, feedback on our idea, and be able to market our idea to other participants/potential investors.  The network of contacts could especially be helpful for us in case we want to start a business later or looking for a new job. Because the process lasts six months, it is experience that demonstrates your commitment to go from start to finish

    The Buerke Center of Entrepreneurship Business Plan Competition does have outright cash prizes for 1st/2nd place and other finalists. However there are other rewards as well. Amy listed two of them, $5000 AARP prize for addressing challenges faced by low income seniors, and $5000 Wells Fargo Clean Tech prize that harnesses renewable materials and energy sources.

Logo, Company Name, and Product

My company's name is Tamaritz.

Our logo is

    

     Our product is a carpooling client that gives flexibility to people to find and schedule their carpool groups on their own. This product will also have an add feature for people to add events/happenings around them as well to make it more interactive. The add on feature will emphasize live time communication and interaction among people in a community. At the same time, that feature will involve a mix of private and public communication. The main focus of the add will be private and localized communication that entices people to use the main carpooling application.

      The mission of the carpooling product is to make communities more connected, save money on gas, reduce traffic on roads, and stay connected with members of their carpool group. Eventually the carpool client will have a discovery feature that allows a user to discover where other users in their same community are going. Of course there will be privacy concerns. Users that belong to a group have full power to either make that group discoverable or not. 

      My carpool app will also leverage Facebook and attempt to match riders/drivers that share mutual friends, schools, and other preferences(music, tv shows). I believe that if we do this sucessfully, people will have something to talk about during the ride and be able to develop new connections.

     Our company culture will consist of small teams that move quickly and rapidly iterator on features they care deeply about. In the future, we may involve data visaulization/graphing that informs the user how much money/ the positive environmental effects of them carpooling.

Guest Speaker - Brian Forth

     Last Thursday, we had a guest speaker named Brian Forth. Brian is the founder of SiteCrafting Inc, which from the company website is "a digital agency in Tacoma that builds and designs websites to amplify your web presence, and support your business goals". SiteCrafting's clients include Tacoma Public Utilities, and Lemay Car Museum. This reminded me of the company I am interning at right now, Pivotal Labs. Pivotal Labs is a consulting software company that works hand in hand with their clients via pair programming and preaches the tenets of extreme programming - test driven development.

     Brian brought up responsive web design in his presentation. He mentioned that because so many people use their phones to access web apps/sites, it's important to make your web app responsive to such phones/tablets. This is something that has often been reinforced to me in courses I've taken and heard in industry as well. In my mind, if you don't support mobile, you're isolating yourself from a significant portion of the market.

     Brian also brought up business insights. When asked how he picks his clients Brian mentioned that he prefers that his clients don't lie in the same industry. Going along with this, SiteCrafting sometimes does a exclusive contract with a client. The nice part about the contract is that it is a guaranteed contract. This reminds me of Netflix. It is a constant membership fee no matter how many shows/movies you watch.

    This is more of personal advice but Brian also mentioned that he doesn't get too high during the good times or too low in the tough times. I hear this a lot in sports.

Guest Speaker - Erik Hanberg

     Erik Hanberg came and spoke to us in class last Thursday. Like from Derek's presentation, I learned a great deal about the life of an entrepreneurship. Erik has experience in nonprofits, business, and government. He was elected on the Metro Parks of Tacoma. Erik's diverse background reminds me of how diverse I want to be in my career. I have interests in law, finance, and technology. I have to find a job/business that helps me experience all of these interests.

    One of the things that Erik said was something that I've heard many times in life was that it's better to finish something than to start that. He also said that when running a business, if you lose passion or have no excitement about it, that would be the time to leave. I forgot to ask him but I wanted to hear his perspective on how you balance these two ideas. What if you're about to launch/ship but you lose interest or you're in the middle of process of developing the idea. What my compromise was when pursuing an idea/having thoughts about do so, jot down why you want to pursue the idea - mini business plan - is there a market. is your product unique. And if that convinces you, take a shot at it and see what happens. You can always learn from failure.

    Another thing that Erik said was to know your audience. What I took away was that when I start a business, I will pay a lot of attention of attention to product forums. I would want my future business to be customer centric.

 

Extra Credit - Startup.Com

     Startup.com is about three men, Kaleil Tuzman, Tom Herman, and Chieh Cheung who come together and start a dot com company, Govworks.com. Govworks.com was a site where people can visit to pay city fines, taxes, and user fees. Like many other companies during the dotcom era, the company's pitch and aspirations were too over hyped. When Kaleil pitched the product to investors Kaleil often emphasized that this was a 600 million dollar market. Govworks.com reminded me of the 2011 NFL Eagles team whose own backup quarterback, Vince Young, declared a Dream Team

     Startup.com did have success. Govworks.com grew to 200 employees and 50 million in cash. Kaleil started becoming famous, appearing in magazines, and even meeting up with/ handing President Clinton a business card. However not everything was uphill. Kaleil had a battle with his co founder Tom about Tom wanting to be a CO-CEO. Tom was eventually forced out of the company. This really opened my eyes to the risks of starting a business with a friend. When I talk ideas with friends, my friends typically get excited about the idea and want to quickly implement. We never think about the possible damage getting a business can do to our personal relationship.

     The third partner walked away from the company after selling his shares. Andrew in class pointed how this was similar to the Winkelevoss twins and how they were able to get Facebook equity after a legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg. From the Winkelevoss story, if I were to get involved in a business idea with others, I should try to ensure good relations with the founders so if there's mutual agreement to leave, there won't be major disputes over equity.

Guest Speaker Post - Derek Young

       Derek Young was our guest speaker on Thursday. He talked a great deal about his entrepreneurial and work experience. After college Derek Young found a job, like a great deal of the rest of us, but still found a way to keep side projects going. This is definitely something that I thought over in the past few months - balancing a financially stable but time consuming 40 hour job with time to pursue ideas.

        Derek talked about having knowledge in IT, marketing, and finance. In my mind, I believe diversifying in general is a strength - whether its in the stock market, or basketball/football. Coaches value player's versatility in that they can play more than one position. Working in information technology, if you develop yourself in finance, you may find solutions that people in finance wouldn't(they don't have your perspective)

       I was the most interested when Derek spoke of the apps/businesses he created. One that accord struck with me is the website he was involved that helped organize workplace sports. I love watching/playing sports. This was definitely something that I want to do in the future - combining my passion for software development and sports(wish I was professional at this). Derek even mentioned a time when the site was down and their got paid $15,000 for fixing the issue. This helped resonate the opinion that if I combine my passions, I could a product that would have financial success.

      Derek also gave valuable advice on being an entrepreneur in general. One was that even if an idea wets the bed or isn't a hit, you can still learn from that experience and apply those lessons toward future ideas. Another one was coming up with a name for a business. Derek talked about he would create a mind map on a whiteboard of things that have to do with the business and start connecting words until he found something he liked.

     Derek also mentioned that some of the companies/ideas he pursued started off as problems he solved in everyday life. He didn't have the a goal of a business in the end.  He thought that people would find these tools helpful and would use them. This reminded me of Andrew Sutherland, Quizlet founder. Andrew created Quizlet initially as a way of studying for a French test. He later realized that Quizlet would be a tool/service that many people would use.

      Thanks Derek for coming and sharing your wisdom/experiences.

Three Business ideas

Three Business Ideas

1. Adoption app for cats/dogs that are about to be put down. (Tinder like app maybe) I was reading this one day - https://www.aspca.org/animal-homelessness/shelter-intake-and-surrender/pet-statistics and felt like 1.2 million was too many. If people knew that these animals were about to put down, perhaps more of them could be saved.  To implement this idea, I was thinking in the lines of having a Tinder like style where you could swipe through these pets. Or even perhaps, having all the pets in a grid that you can navigate through.


2. American Idol but for local artists. I did watch the show for a but thought that there must have been a lot of undiscovered talent in this nation - DJs, singers, etc. Only a handful of them make it big on Youtube/ win the American Idol. This would be a way to discover and see who your local artists are, support them etc, help them achieve their dreams. For monetization, I thought of Spotify's monthly membership subscription model but that should only be considered once we reach a certain user base.


3. When reading news, it's hard to get a sense of where something it happened. People are more invested in news that happen closer to them. This would be a news platform that aggregate stores/maybe get them users and displays them on a map with the user(Waze like). In terms of monetization, I was thinking maybe also have ads on the platform from different retailers when you get close to the store. For ads, you only receive ads from retailers you follow.