Calling all Boston-area college career counselors
Alex and I are heading up to Boston on Friday to meet up with some angel/VC types and want to spend the morning meeting with some college career planning offices. If anyone has good contacts, particularly with schools like Boston College and Boston University, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could drop me a line--especially if you know them well because you've worked directly with them, spoke at one of their events, etc.
links for 2007-09-10
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“It’s actually served us pretty well,” says Haro. “If you think about 3D games from seven years ago they look pretty terrible. And the kids who play this game don’t even know what the word ‘retro’ means. It’s just another look to them.”
My Helio Ocean breaks and I just ordered a Sprint Mogul... thus endeth the Helio experiment
Recently, I've been pretty frustrated because the Helio Ocean Exchange wouldn't sync my calendar and that the contacts wouldn't actually sync the phone's firmware contacts. Therefore, I could look you up in my Exchange contact list, click to call you, but then if you call back, the phone would have no idea who you are. The calendar issue was a bug on their part that caused the phone to just completely crash when I tried to sync my calendar. The guess from Helio was that it was due to old calendar entries... seems like that's a hell of a bug just to be caused my some old entries.
Well, today, we had a new bug:
Did you spot it? Look closely. Yeah, um, the magic triangle spring is supposed to prevent the keyboard and the numeric keypad from opening at the same time. I opened the keyboard today and something went ping on the inside. The top slider came loose and not only was I able to open both sides of it, but this is as closed as I can get it now. So, I basically have an open Swiss Army Knife for a phone.
I went over to the Helio store expecting to get a replacement, because I'm paying the insurance. Nope. First, the guy tells me that he doesn't know if this is a warranty item or a claim because, he'd "never seen that happen on any of the phones before", implying that I broke it. I told him I didn't much care if he had seen this before or not... fact of the matter is that it broke and I was insured. All he could do was to direct me to a phone and gave me the customer service number. They implied it was a claim (not a defect) and so they gave me the insurance company's number. They were going to take 24 hours to process the claim and then get me a phone in 3 business says standard shipping... i.e. 4 days without a useable phone (It doesn't dial out anymore and the menu buttons are all screwed up b/c it doesn't know which way it's oriented). Of course, I could pay another $15 in addition to my $50 deductible to get it next day. Knowing that there was a good chance I was bailing on Helio anyway because of the Exchange issues, I passed on the $65.
Here's the interesting financial outcome of this whole thing, though. Dave Evans pointed me out to the Sprint SERO plan (Google it), which was a hidden discount program for employee referrals. The problem was, I couldn't take advantage of it when my prior Sprint phone got stolen because it was only for new customers. Now, since I left, I'm a new customer again.
So, in the end, even if I eat my way out of my Helio contract, here's the final financial impact assessment:
PPC-6700 stolen... No immediate financial impact because that phone was purchased as part of USV due diligence on a mobile app company... moved back to old Palm Treo... hated it.
6/13 - Bought new Treo and accessories... ($274)
3 months of Helio service (@$85) vs. 3 months of old Sprint service (@$116) = +$93
Early termination fee.... ($175)
Cost of Sprint Mogal... ($300)
So, basically, the new phone overall cost me $656...
...BUT...
Monthly savings on Sprint SERO plan vs comparable full cost Sprint service +$40/month.
So, before the end of my 2 year contract is up, the phone will have paid for itself.
Not too shabby... Can't wait for my Mogul!
I also can't wait for Ken Berger to tell me he told me so.... however, leaving Sprint and coming back did allow me to take advantage of this lower cost plan, so, in the end, it was totally worth it.
links for 2007-09-08
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Create a public Internet identity. I strongly recommend blogging, but even a homepage will do. Have a genuine all-accessible identity online that you're cool with grandma and your boss reading. Don't make it uber drab, but do provide context for who you a
Majoring in Entrepreneurship? Can Entrepreneurship even be taught?
Fordham is starting an entrepreneurship program for its undergrad students and I'll be teaching a course entitled "Innovation and the Entrepreneurial Mindset". Yesterday, those of us who teach in the program were talking with the dean about whether or not the program should be a major or concentration, a specialization, a minor, etc.
The difference is whether or not it should be something focused on by itself or in conjunction with other majors, like finance or marketing.
I've always leaned towards identifying yourself with some fundamental business skills set, like finance, accounting, marketing, info systems, etc., and then layering on specializations, like entrepreneurship or international study. To me, international marketing, marketing in mainstream media or advertising, or marketing for a startup are three pretty different types of marketing--all of whom require the fundamental principals of marketing, but differ in their application. Now, whether those are specializations, double majors, etc. I don't think it matters.
Also, you have to think about fallback, too. What if someone does the entrepreneurship program, but can't nail that business idea or decides that getting some industry experience and connection in the area of their startup idea would be valuable--working for DKNY before you decide to start your own fashion label, perhaps. Would anyone want to hire you if you were only an entrepreneurship major and didn't at least have marketing, finance, or accounting?
There are business programs that have full majors in entrepreneurship, like Babson. In fact, I met a Babson entreprenuership major last night at the CooBric opening and he thought it was a valuable experience.
Of course, this question of where it fits in a program presupposes that you can even teach entrepreneurship in the first place... and to be honest, while I might not have thought so a few years ago, the more I get involved in this program, the more I think you can. It's not so much teaching as it is introduction. When I grew up, starting your own business was seen as kind of a flakey thing to do. My mom worked in a school and my dad was a fireman before he went into accounting (yeah, I never understood that transition either). I never knew about the startup world, and when I learned about it, I thought it was just all about having the big idea one day--like a lightning strike.
In my own experience, I think what is more likely to happen is that the big idea is slow cooked after being involved in a space or a line of thinking over time. I got the idea for Path 101 after seven years of various mentoring and intership programs. I wasn't trying to be an entrepreneur and the best ideas probably come when you're not trying to be one.
So, what am I going to teach? I'm going to teach immersion and opportunity identification. I'm going to teach these kids what it means to actually get waist deep in something like I am... that it's not just getting a job... it's about real active participation in the industry, in the community, whatever it is. And, once you're in the thick of it, learning how to identify power structures, pain points, etc.
These are lessons that are useful whether or not they'll ever become entrepreneurs, because it's not enough to just clock in and clock out anymore. There are so many more opportunities to really get active in a space and the people that take advantage of those opportunities are often the ones that wind up innovating and changing those spaces.
What do you think? What does an entrepreneurial education look like to you? How does it fit with other skills and courses? Did anyone take any entrepreneurship courses in school?
links for 2007-09-05
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This is pretty friggin cool... and its an idea that I threw around with an entrepreneur at USV like two years ago.
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Lindsay Lohan reads my blog, too!
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Toby and Brooke are my fav couple friends... Perhaps Mere and I should do something like this.
5 Things I'd like to see in Dopplr
So Dopplr got funded and so I feel inclined to spend a little more time thinking about what I'd really like it to do, because it's a great concept.
- Events: Show me, in a structured way, why people are going where they're going. If everyone I know is planning on going to SXSW, tell me, and tell me where everyone who plans to attend SXSW is coming from. People have been trying to nail the relevant events thing for a while and if Dopplr could tell me what out of town conferences people were planning on attending, that would be a great dataset to show everyone--particularly the conference providers themselves. Who's coming for Day One, Day Two, or who's just in the area for other stuff
- Let the people drive the dates. I'm thinking about trips to Boston, Providence, and Toronto in the next month or so, but I'm kind of up in the air about it. Dopplr forces a date on me. Why can't I just say, "Sometime in the next month" and see if other people are planning on going at any time within that. Seeing that kind of data might help me narrow down my trip.
- Show me strangers... like, on every page. When you first join Dopplr, the user interface just doesn't show a heck of a lot of people. It feels like an empty place. I should be able to see who is coming to NYC in the next week, even if I don't know them.
- Combine with other profiles. I'm glad to see Reid Hoffman investing in this, and hopefully, when the LinkedIn API comes out, Dopplr will be one of its first developers. I'd like to see the LinkedIn profiles of people who are coming to NY and at the same time, the Dopplr intentions of everyone in my LinkedIn network.
- Dopplr Autopost: Before you build a widget that most of my RSS hungry audience is never going to see or use, allow autoposting of Dopplr updates to my blog (and yes, my Facebook). When I add a possible trip to Boston, even if I know the dates, I want a post on my blog to automatically appear that says, "I'm thinking about going to Boston soon... find out what dates and subscribe to my updates via my Dopplr feed."
Dopplr to me: Add to me! Add to me! Sigh.
I'll prob be doing a fair bit of traveling for the rest of the year. Toby suggested I join Dopplr, which I did.
And then I sat there and stared at it.
Here's an app desperately in need of a "Find your Gmail friends on Dopplr" tool. It wanted me to add trips, so I added one. Nothing happened. I thought I might find some people going up to Boston on weekend of the 15th. Nope... nothing.
So, um... what's the point?
Don't apps need, um... like, magic or sex or something? Shouldn't you show something to the user to hook them? Keep them engaged?
Perhaps I don't know enough Web2Heads that go to all the same confereces as everyone else.
Yay Path 101 Competition! 5 Ways Yahoo! will mess up Kickstart
I was excited to see that Yahoo! thinks there's an opportunity in the college career space. They're supposedly creating a new social network called Kickstart. From the Path 101 perspective, I say, "Bring it."
Man, I can't wait to see this.
So, when's the last time a big media giant created a really successful social platform from scratch?
[crickets]
It seems like we're not even sure if this is just vaporware, but even if it isn't, I'd say there are at least five things that Yahoo! is inevitably going to trip up on.
- Hell hath no fury like a media company scorned by a social network. They couldn't buy Facebook, so they decided to make their own. But, they needed an angle. What do college students what? A social network about beer? Nope... they're underage. Sex? No, can't do that, not that it wouldn't be successful. Ah! Jobs! Yes, jobs! It seems like Yahoo! is starting out with the idea that what they're building must be a social network, without really considering whether or not the social network approach makes the most sense. This is just bad product development. You don't walk into a problem and say, "Whatever the opportunity is in this space, we're going to solve it with a social network... and a hammer." I actually tend to think that social connecting/friending isn't what students really need... it's content, direction, guidance, tools... Just connecting is like handing students a business card. They don't have any clue what to do with that connection and how to get the most of it, let alone even know who to connect with in the first place.
- Play well with others? Ha! Let's see... 34 million Facebook users. 14 million LinkedIn users. Let's build our own thing and not plug in to the vast networks of existing students and professionals already out there and start completely from scratch because we want to own this category. If you can't bridge the gap to your customers by meeting them in the places they already are, then don't expect them to come to you.
- It's going to be all about jobs and companies. Yahoo! knows how to sell stuff, like jobs and ads. So, they're going to build something that is going to be immediately monetizable, meaning its going to be all about companies, jobs, etc. There are two problems with that. What about companies that aren't on there? What if I don't want to work for some big corporation that can afford to pay Yahoo! to have a presence on Kickstart? Is this going to be a place where art students are going to find jobs? What about drama majors and people looking to work in the non-profit fields? Doctors? What about grad school? Or, most importantly, what if I don't have a clue what I want to be? What then? Am I likely to join a social network based around job recruiting if I'm "undecided"? I highly doubt you'll see any freshmen or sophomores on this site because they haven't chosen a field of interest yet and probably aren't sure where to go. That's the real problem that needs solving... helping them figure out where they want to direct themselves, not connecting kids who already know what company they want to work for (which is how many of them anyway?) Here's the other thing. Because of their HotJobs affiliation, is Yahoo! ever going to tell a student that the best way to get a job is through networking? What they're doing isn't real networking. It's putting a social network around a job posting. There's no way Yahoo! will eat its own lunch and totally disrupt the jobs space. They'll find a way to perpetuate the old business model of charging for posted jobs at a few hundred bucks a pop. In a pure socially networked world, there wouldn't be that kind of opportunity to extract so much value, because the right opportunities would fall into the right laps all the time in a seemless, barrierless way.
- Professionals: Sign up and get spammed by students desperate for jobs. If I'm a professional working at a company, exactly what is my motivation to sign up for a social network based around getting college kids jobs? If I put a profile up and people can contact me, aren't I opening myself up to just getting spammed with resumes? The service has to work for everyone involved and if all these college kids can only find their way to a company by connecting to someone who works there, the last thing I'd want to be is the first Google employee who puts a profile up--especially since the atmosphere here is all about jobs. Professionals love giving advice and helping students away from the recruiting process and such relationships are best built over time. If the whole thing is just focused on jobs, its going to have the feel of one of those really bad "networking mixers".
- Their customer is the company. One of the advantage that startups have over bigger companies is that they can spend a little time purely focused on value to the end user first before figuring out who their customers are. Take Indeed. Indeed could never have gone to job boards day one and said, "We'll crawl all of you, and then you pay us to sponsor your listings and get them to appear in the sidebar results." However, after they proved to be a very compelling consumer service with growing traction, job boards realized the value, especially the smaller ones, and got on board with what they were doing. When you are a big media company, you don't exactly take risks with your clients, but where that leaves you is lacking in the end user value. I mean, would YouTube have become so big if they didn't start out with all sorts of illegal clips? Students want real insider content... and real discussion. Do you think any of these students are going to get into a discussion on the Nike page of whether or not they'd actually like to work for Nike given their history of human rights violations? Have they cleaned up their act? Is this a place I want to work? I wouldn't ask with the recruiter sitting right there in my network, that's for sure.
Look, Alex and I haven't built anything yet and the proof is in the pudding, but seeing these kinds of attempts just gives me that much more confidence that we have the right approach with Path 101 and will succeed. I've been in the classroom with students talking with them not as a corporate focus group, but as a teacher, mentor, recruiter, etc... not asking them, "Hey, if we built this, would you sign up for it" but discussing their real struggles. They don't know where to start and this isn't it. Not only do they not have a network, but they don't know what to do with a network once they have it. They don't know how to e-mail a professional. The services that are out there don't attempt to tackle the hardest but most compelling problem in the career development space... how to get students figuring out for themselves where they belong and pursuing those paths. Just throwing a bunch of jobs and companies at them is window dressing and not going to really help them figure much out. If anything, it just perpetuates the problem that most students think their only options are to become bankers and lawyers or work for big companies, because that's who they see recruiting. Path 101 will get them talking, exploring, using tools, very much the same way TheKnot.com not only helps you find flowers for your wedding, but helps you actually think about what kind of a wedding it is you want to have in the first place. After that, flowers are the easy part.
Running out the quarter: Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl
Bo Jackson: Greatest video game athlete ever