JMU Talk

The first few days were spent in Harrisonburg, Virginia at James Madison University where I gave my “Entrepreneurship as a Career Choice” talk. Previously I had just spoken to individual classes of say 15 – 30 people. This time Prof. Wales and the business school at JMU decided to have me do one large presentation instead of several smaller ones. They opened it up to the entire school and promoted it through the business school’s Facebook account and around campus with flyers. In addition to his three classes, there was another professor who had his students attend, and there were also some walk-ins who must have seen the flyers or the Facebook account.

When I walked in, I was taken back by how full the large lecture hall was…especially considering it was a Friday afternoon at 2:30 PM. It was jam packed – there were kids standing in the back and sitting on the stairs. Prof. Wales actually had to go check that the room hadn’t accidentally been double-booked. As usual, I try to tell my story as fast as possible and then open the session back up to the students for questions. I make it my goal to try to show them that I’m willing to talk about anything related to my business experiences. Once I answer a few tough questions, the flood gates open up and they asked me anything and everything about my personal life and our business…and I answer every single question as best I can. My “Discussion Topics” slide that I have on screen during the Q&A also worked well again, helping spark some of those questions:

Afterward probably ten students came up and asked me questions, which again I thought was awesome for a Friday afternoon. I always encourage them to email me if they have any questions, and many of them often do. Even if I don’t know the answer to their questions, I can often point them in the right direction of someone or some resource that does. There is definitely no shortage of college students out there who want to try their hand at starting a business. I love that Prof. Wales puts together such a fantastic entrepreneurship program for these kids. At the end of my presentation he also announced a “web ventures” class that he will be teaching starting next semester as a follow-up to the entrepreneurship course. For students who take both, they’ll have started multiple real businesses while in college. They have weeks, not months or years, to try to generate profits. While theory certainly has it’s place, you don’t know if something is for you until you actually do it. These classes give students the chance to try their hand at a viable career option. I wish more colleges and more programs built these types of courses into their curriculum. His class is the #1 most popular elective in the entire school. To me that shows how intrigued kids are by entrepreneurship.

The Rest of the Trip

I spent the rest of the trip in Virginia and North Carolina visiting friends and family. I attended my first Virginia Tech football game in Blacksburg. I had my first southern BBQ in North Carolina. I met a ton of interesting people. Everyone was so nice and so accommodating. It’s so much more fun traveling somewhere when you know people who live there and can show you around. In a lot of ways I wish I stretched the trip out a little longer.

Culturally, the only real oddity (besides the Southern accents) was that restaurants just automatically split up your checks when you eat out in groups. So if four people go out to eat, you get four separate checks. In the Northeast they bring you one check and you divvy it up yourself. You can ask for separate checks, but if you have a large group at a busy restaurant it’s definitely seen as an annoyance for the wait staff. I don’t really prefer one way to another, just found it interesting.

In total, I drove about 25 hours. For the most part I don’t mind taking a road trip solo. In a lot of ways I prefer being able to listen to what I want, stop for food when I want to, and hit the road in the morning as early or late as I want to. Still, by the last few hours of the last day I was sick of being in the car.

Work

While I was gone I didn’t do much work – just checked email 1-2 times/day and Skype’d in for our Monday meeting (the group video call feature worked great). I did however have a very interesting series of email and phone chats regarding a big opportunity for LockerPulse. I signed a NDA so I can’t say anything yet, but it’s the type of thing that could end up being huge for LP and our business if it works out. I’ll likely be working a ton of extra hours the rest of the year when you combine this LP stuff with the crazy DI holiday season, but to be honest it really doesn’t bother me. These times are why I love being a web developer and a business owner. Should be fun!

One of the best ways to create jobs is to encourage small business growth.  According to the Small Business Association (SBA), small businesses:

• Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
• Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
• Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
• Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.
• Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
• Hire 40 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer programmers).
• Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.
• Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms; these patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.

And of course to get more small business growth you need more people starting small businesses.

So why don’t more people start businesses? Here’s a theory – our school system totally and utterly fails us. It’s not that people aren’t capable. It’s not that they aren’t interested. It’s that they never learn how.

Consider a Junior Achievement poll of 1,000 teens age 12-17:

• 92 percent of those surveyed believe that entrepreneurial skills should be taught in college or earlier.
• 51 percent of teens would like to start their own businesses someday
• 88 percent felt it would be “difficult but possible” or “somewhat challenging” to do so

Wtf people. We’re totally failing our kids. They want to learn when they’re young.  They know that they should learn when they’re young.  They know how challenging it will be.  But no one is teaching them. No one is guiding them.  They need to be taught so that they can practice.    They need a mentor to guide them.  They need to be around other students with the same interests.

All of the great resources on the web are great supplemental pieces to the puzzle, but for there to be true change I think that the seed needs to be planted in an educational environment.   That’s how you reach everyone who is interested in starting a business at an age where they have enough time to develop the skills necessary to take a legit stab at making entrepreneurship their career choice.

We’ve built great support systems for future superstar athletes, but we’ve failed at building any system for the future superstar entrepreneurs.

I love this quote from an article about Jason Fried of 37signals:

Fried talks about how “making money is like playing the piano: The earlier you start, the more practice you’re going to have, the better off you’re going to be.” On the day he turned 13, Fried’s father, a Chicago Mercantile Exchange trader, took him to get a work permit. He worked typical jobs—grocery store, gas station, shoe store—but he always had a side business of his own. At 15, Fried got a resale license and began buying stereo equipment at wholesale cost, marking it up and selling it to friends. “I suck at playing the piano,” Fried says, “but I’m good at making money because I’ve had more practice.”

It makes total sense. It sounds obvious, but many times when you start a business you’re focused on everything but making money. You’re worried about funding, the technology, the people, the office space. Other skills are nurtured from a young age. Why should we expect running a profitable business would be any different?

Teaching entrepreneurship will encourage more entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship will create more successful small businesses, which will provide more jobs (and also do many more great things).

I give credit to Junior Achievement. They have a high school entrepreneurship program that schools can participate in. I give credit to teachers like Professor Wales who has his students start a business as a part of his college entrepreneurship class.

But it’s not enough. I hope that people of influence are taking note. This is important stuff. It could drastically increase the quality of life that we as a people experience in the future. We teach lots of stuff in school. Much of which is trivial and unimportant to the lives of the majority of students learning it. Make just a little bit of time to teach this.

Side note: My partners and I are all passionate about helping to reform and improve education. In 2010 we’re going to start a scholarship fund at our former high school. We haven’t hashed out all of the details yet, but you can bet that it will encourage technology and entrepreneurship at the high school level. Hopefully it’s the start of us playing our little part.

After a couple of awesome presentations at Skidmore College, I was a bit bummed to hear that Professor Wales, my good friend and teacher of the class, had accepted a position at James Madison University in Virginia.  I had enjoyed going in to speak both semesters and thought that the two of us had a ton of future potential working together to grow young entrepreneurship in upstate New York.  Of course, I also understood that it was a great career move for him and that it didn’t signify the end of our potential collaboration.  JMU is a great school and he has a ton of great resources at his disposal. He originally asked if he could video Skype me in to guest lecture, but after some thought I decided that if I was going to do it I’d rather do it in person.  My girlfriend and I decided to turn the trip into a long weekend in Washington, DC.

This past Friday morning I gave guest lectures to both of Professor Wales’ Entrepreneurship classes.  Each talk lasted for 50 minutes and had about 25 students in attendance. He’s done a great job of improving the class each iteration.  This semester student groups are required to start a business that turns a profit of $200 by the end of the semester.  Extra points are awarded for eco-friendly projects.  You can read about all of the projects over on Prof. Wales’ blog.

As has been the case in the past, the Q&A portion of the lecture has been the best part.  I tried to tighten up my actual presentation, but next time I think I’ll shorten it a bit more.  20 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of Q&A would probably work best.  This time it was closer to 30/20 the other way.  My goal for the presentation itself is to tell enough of my story to get them interested enough in asking me questions.  Rather than guess what they want to know, I’d rather answer it directly.

I like to do a sort of “guided” Q&A – my last slide has about 20 topics related to young entrepreneurship that they can ask me about.  It works well because it lets them know that I’m willing to answer just about anything.  The slide is below.  I’ve revised it each time based upon questions from the previous group.

Once we get rolling on the Q&A I generally tend to get questions about anything and everything, which is when I think both sides really are enjoying it the most.  I think it’s a great presentation strategy.  I sort of stumbled upon it because originally there were too many topics and I couldn’t decide what to cover and what not to.  Now that I’ve used it a few times I’m going to work it in to every presentation I do from here on out.

I was just so impressed with everything at JMU.  They were nice enough to pay for my hotel and dinner, although it was completely unnecessary.  The faculty that I met were just genuinely nice people.  I can see why Bill took the job. The town was a great college town.  And of course, the students were fantastic.  For being early on Friday morning, I was surprised how attentive they were and genuinely interested in what I had to say.  It’s hard to get up in front of a room of people you’ve never met before.  Seeing people really listening to what I was saying eased my nerves a ton. A handful of students even came up after class to discuss various things with me, which makes me feel like I didn’t totally bore them.  Everyone at JMU made me feel right at home.

Every time I get back from doing these types of things I’m all fired up. There are so many young passionate students out there that can start great businesses and change the world.  Not just in Silicon Valley, but at all the great institutions around the country (and the world for that matter).  In a lot of cases, I feel like they just need someone like Prof. Wales to come along and show them how to get started.  By taking a class like this they’re able to get a real taste of entrepreneurship and decide if it’s for them.  I wish every talented student had the same chance.   Hopefully as time goes on, that’s something I can help facilitate.

Thanks to everyone at JMU for the awesome experience.  I look forward to coming back soon!

Like last time, it started off with a 20 minute debate between the students about whether or not you should start a business right out of college.  And like last time, they brought up all of the exact pros and cons that one should consider before starting their own company.  A very sharp group of students.

My talk consisted of 30 minutes of telling my story, a few minutes of telling the stories of a few other young entrepreneurs I know, and then about 25 minutes of Q&A/discussion about starting your own business.  Again, much like last time, the questions were absolutely great questions.  It’s really cool being able to have an intelligent conversation with a group of students who are seriously considering starting their own business.  As part of the class, the professor is giving them each $100 with the goal of starting a revenue-generating company by the end of the semester.  How about that for a cool college class!

Unfortunately it appears as if Professor Wales will be moving on to bigger and better things next year, so this talk probably won’t be happening at Skidmore in future semesters.   It’s truly been an honor to go there and be able to speak.  The students are some of the most impressive college kids I’ve ever met. I’ve had two awesome experiences and hopefully been able to have some impact on the decisions these students make coming out of college.  Much like this blog, my goal is definitely not to get every student to become an entrepreneur, but to get every student to consider entrepreneurship.  Hopefully through my talk and by taking this class, these students will be able to truly evaluate whether or not this is something that they want to do.

“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth”.
-Roberto Clemente

I mentioned back in August that I was invited to speak to an Entrepreneurship and Small Business class at Skidmore College in Saratoga, NY (about a 45 minute drive north for me).  Well, the day finally came yesterday, and it was an awesome experience.  The class is comprised of about 20 seniors who are interested in entrepreneurship.  For a senior class, it’s relatively intense – they actually develop an idea and pitch to local venture capitalists at the end of the semester.  That’s certainly not something I had the opportunity to do as an undergraduate!

I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  I mostly visualized one of my engineering classes at RPI where half of the students played video games on their laptops during class and the other half slept.  We could have had Bill Gates come in and speak and they wouldn’t have paid attention.  Not the case at all with the Skidmore students.  The class was an hour and twenty minutes long.  The first twenty minutes the students broke up into two teams and debated whether or not your should become an entrepreneur out of college.  Pretty quickly it became apparent that they were really truly interested in the class.  Their responses were right on point – they nailed all of the important pros (you have nothing to lose, you have a stronger desire to prove yourself, etc) and cons (risk of falling behind your peers financially, ruining your social life, etc).

For the next hour I got the stage and was able to talk about entrepreneurship as a career choice.   I spent the first half telling my story.  I certainly have some work to do on this part for the next time I present, but the goal wasn’t necessarily to do a perfect job talking about myself.  The goal was to give them enough of an idea about who I am and what I do so that we could actively engage in a discussion period at the end.  I posted a list of roughly 10 discussion topics on the last slide and I spent the second half hour bouncing between Q&A and talking to some of the discussion points I had listed (an example would be “businesses you can start for $100 while still in college”).

Again, I feared that I would hear crickets after my initial part of the presentation and I would be stuck talking to the last slide for a half hour not really knowing what they were interested in hearing about.  Instead, almost every student had a question for me.  It really was an awesome experience. You couldn’t ask for a better group of college seniors.  Regardless of whether they start companies or go into the corporate world, they’ll all have a huge positive impact on the world.  I know that’s a bold statement, but you could just tell when you were around them.  Anyone who doesn’t have faith in putting our future in the hands of the kids graduating today hasn’t met any of the students in this class (side note:  I couldn’t find the professor’s office once I got in the building, and a group of about 10 random kids all helped me get there.  They went above and beyond just pointing me in the right direction.  Don’t see that very often).

First and foremost, I want to thank the entire class for (especially Prof. Wales) having me in to speak and actively engaging in the presentation.  I also want to thank them for giving me a more optimistic outlook of the next generation of workers.  We will undoubtedbly be hiring quite a few employees from their generation, so I feel a lot better about our prospects of finding someone great after meeting them yesterday.

Somewhat selfishly,  I also want to thank you for opening up a new door for me.  I was really hoping this presentation would go well, because I wanted to have the opportunity to give it again.  It’s rare that you’re put in a position where people actually want to hear what you have to say, so much so that they will actively engage you in a Q&A session.  I’m lucky enough to be in that position when it comes to entrepreneurship, particularly the decision making process a young entrepreneur goes through when deciding a career path.  How cool is that?

Everyone has opportunities to give back and make the world a better place, but some are less obvious than others.  I’m not very handy, so volunteering for Habitat for Humanity might not work so well for me.  I like to do everything really fast and I hate wasting time, so helping out at a seniors home might drive me insane.  But I can talk all day long about the ups and downs of running a business in your twenties.  I can talk about all of the tough decisions I’ve had to make.  I can talk not only about the really smart things we’ve done, but also the really stupid decisions we’ve made.  When I started this blog I had a feeling that people would be interested in hearing about my experiences.  I thought being as candid as possible would help them decide whether or not they wanted to run a business, especially because most business owners are either too busy to share their story or unwilling to share it.   I feel like that’s been validated from all of the wonderful comments and emails I’ve received over the past few years.  Now I have another medium to get the same message out.

Oh, and for now I’ve decided not to put the presentation online.   This first time I wanted to focus on creating a positive experience for the audience.  I didn’t want to have to worry about setting up a camera or mic.  I don’t want to put the slides online as-is because they have some financial numbers that I’d like to keep off the web.  Ultimately if this continues to go well I will have an online version.  I’m going to make it a goal to give the presentation to one new school per semester.  So in the spring I’ll try to hit up RPI or SUNY Albany in addition to Skidmore.  Once I feel like I’ve got it down and it’s really resonating consistently with every audience, I’ll record it once and create a section on this site.  I’ll try to include other relevant content to supplement the presentation (other videos, articles I’ve written, recommended reading, etc)

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.  For now I’m thankful that it went well and hoping that it goes even better next semester.  In the meantime, I’ve got to get back on that SportsLizard revamp that I’ve managed to drag on for the past few months…

Our sports writer for the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog runs a great blog called The Blog of Champions.  He also happens to be in high school.  As part of a social studies project he and his classmates were asked to create a blog about social injustice in America.  Let me repeat that:  as part of a social studies project he was asked to create a blog.  How freaking cool is that?  Blogging has hit high school classrooms!  Pretty soon every kid will at least know how to set up a blogger blog or a wordpress.com blog.

If you get a chance, swing over to his blog about fixing health care and leave a comment on the first post.  It’s always nice to help a student out when you get a chance.  But helping a student out with a blog comment – man, times are changing.