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.