Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

Everyday I am reminded not enough people have a strongly defensible and emotionally charged response to this most simple of questions. Randy Komisar pleads with us to do something we would do for the rest of our lives, not because we should do it or will do it for the rest of our lives, but because deferring life now to find happiness later in most cases doesn’t work.

It is a fundamentally important question because there have been people I’ve worked with, at Blank Label and other places, who work for not necessarily the wrong reasons, but for reasons they did not know, or did not feel strongly about. This becomes problematic, because once you get over the honeymoon period, a startup is a really tough grind. And unless you have a good answer to ‘why am I here, what am I doing this for, why am I doing what I’m doing’, you will hit one of the root causes of startup failure, quitting during a dip.

Meeting people and engaging with them is something I enjoy doing on a fairly regular basis. For the most part, I love talking to people who are passionate, about anything. I’m not a networking fiend who has to find someone directly relevant, although I’d lie to say I wouldn’t brown-nose a little if there were, but I just enjoy seeing the energy of someone who knows why they do what they do. This week is about meeting a lot of people as I watch a new class of Freshmen roll into Babson College, and especially interesting, six new Freshmen joining E-Tower.

As I meet each and individual one of them, I’m going to try and pass on what the good classes are, how to do well with minimal work, which events to go to, what organizations to join, but most importantly I’m going to challenge them to be able to regularly ask themselves why they are doing what it is they are doing. These students are far too talented and have way too many opportunites not be treating that question with all the seriousness of why did they choose to come to Babson College.

Meant to be a week of part work, part leisure, in New York, my one week off for the summer, before getting into a very busy Fall semester leading Blank Label into a new frontier, kicking off Open Gate Intiative, trying to get the most out of four interesting and well-recommended classes, empowering a new batch of Freshmen at E-Tower, it’s actually been chaotically busy and hasn’t yet been the mental break that I was hoping for and perhaps needed. I guess it was unrealistic to expect that I might go part-time on Blank Label, but Blank Label wasn’t going part-time on me. What I’ve been doing for ‘leisure’ which has kept me running up and down Manhatten has been meeting young upstart entrepreneurs, the people I get super passionate about meeting at the litany of startup events in Boston.

There were a couple of events that were of particular interest that I’ll drop a line for. Entrepreneurs Roundtable was a small audience of mostly first time entrepreneurs either just having started their venture or looking for opportunities. The framework was a networking event of around 30 people, with the meat being five pitches of five minutes in front of a VC, in this instance, Mark Mackenzie from Alliance Bernstein, who has a small 200 million fund (relative to their 500 billion assets under management) that invests mostly around later stage, i.e. Round C and D and later. It was interesting that only one of the five companies pitching was a scaleable, high-potential startup. That’s not to say they weren’t all pitched by great, passionate entrepreneurs. But the business model just wasn’t a venture investment, e.g. service/ consulting company, small market size, nonprofit.

The next evening I went to Sprout Up NYC, where I probably spoke to a dozen passionate startup entrepreneurs, heard Gary Vaynerchuk, give a really passionate and energetic talk on Social Media and Entrepreneurship, but throughout the whole three hours I was at the event, the notion of raising venture money never came up a single time.  Mostly people were passionate about new media, the possibilities that came with it. They wanted to create sticky unique content. They loved the ability to attack a super niche vertical, with no interest of going into a broader platform down the track, or at least pitching it as such. Is it perhaps that NYC is so corporate in so many large areas, Advertising, Fashion, Old Media, Financial Services, that for startup entrepreneurs who are trying to stick it to ‘the Man’, the idea of raising money, growing a company, and natural bureaucracy, just goes straight back to the dilemmas of ‘the Man’, and instead the preference is to stay small and love what they do with no compromise for growth.

A couple of observations, don’t know what they mean, but definitely interested in exploring more of the startup scene in New York, and will keep you posted accordingly.

Was in super-chilled mood when writing this post, listening to Andrea Bocelli duets including Josh Groban, Sarah Brightman and Christina Augilera. I’m not usually that guy, but I am tonight.

Being active in the student entrepreneurship space as well as actually being a student entrepreneur at Babson; being the co-President of Babson’s E(ntrepreneurship) Tower and co-Founder of Babson-Olin Open Gate Initiative, I’ve been invited to sit in on some planning meetings for what (non-curriculum) entrepreneurship looks like at Babson ’09-’10. I’m always amused by my deep involvement with affecting entrepreneurship at Babson, especially given I’m not actually a full-time student. In fact my Babson Card says “Special Student”, and a friend reminded me yesterday, “you’re the worst ambassador of your home university, I don’t even know where it is!” This is a bad thing given the University of New South Wales gave me a far amount of scholarship money to attend Babson for a year.

One of the big sticking points during the discussion was what a hub of student entrepreneurship on campus would look like. There is a drive to have a center piece, an Innovation Central, where students would be meeting, working, hanging out, collaborating, etc. Now Babson already has an entrepreneurship center in the Blank Center, unfortunately no relation to Blank Label, and this summer for the inaugural incubation program they did open up the ground floor as student office space. A lesson to Aaron Gerry who is trying to build a hub of entrepreneurship at Northeastern, don’t use an open floor plan that has no discretion to the main door, and sits directly under two floors of faculty. In theory it’s a nice space, open floor plan allows open collaboration, faculty are close by for meetings. Lessons learned, most people didn’t use the space because it was distracting to have people in and out of the building, collaboration lead to distracting conversations, and faculty being right over the top gave this inevitable sense of Big Brother.

Olin actually has a really nice space at The Foundry, where a couple of Babson teams, including Blank Label, started spending most of their time. Now what about The Foundry can you put your finger on that makes it work. The fact that it’s an actual house rather than an office building helps. The upstairs is a suite of six offices, all dedicated to individual teams. The ground floor is split between kitchen, living room/ lounge and two conference rooms. It’s a comfortable, unpretensious space where people can play Rock Band during breaks, cook bootstrapped dinners to share with their teams, even sit on the porch and gaze at the stars on a nice evening to think about where next to take their startup. The fact that it’s detached and on the edge of Olin’s campus also is important.

Babson isn’t looking to build a house. And there’s no doubt you can foster a great entrepreneurial environment in an office building. During the week, I visited Boston TechStars, and I was amazed at how not sexy their office space was. I had seen photos of Y-Combinator and read many stories of the incredibly environment at TechStars, and yet when I turned up, there wasn’t cool lighting, interesting wall paint, large systems hooked up.  So going back to the meeting at Babson, I exclaimed “people come for the people”. Of course this is a useless chicken-and-egg, but you put enough cool s*** in there, make it a safe, comfortable space, it’ll be up to the students to populate. You can only take the horse to the water.

One day soon, I will go and check out all these co-working offices in Boston to see what they’re doing right. But in the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions on what should be in a vibrant, highly collaborative entrepreneurial environment for students, please comment away.

As a student entrepreneur focused on self-development and personal growth, the question of “What am I bringing to the table” is always motivating. A strong advocater of the breadth and depth sprecturm of development, I like to be aware of, educated in, have applicable skills for, a broad range of applications. Especially as a young entrepreneur I know the value of having a wide range of skills, or at least problem solving techniques to address the multitude of issues that come up. At the same time, through this experiencial learning process, I also appreciate that I have to be really good at something. If I want to climb the entrepreneur value chain, I really have to bring something world-class to the table, that I can personally do better than anyone else. Currently that world-class, niche skill doesn’t exist for me. But it doesn’t have to, I’m young, I’m still expected to be well before the tipping point of my entrepreneurial education.

At the same time, it is something that is at the forefront of my mind. What do I want to be really good at? Not what kind of companies do I want to be creating, but what do I personally want to really excel in? That’s one of the problems of going to a business school for entrepreneurship. So many of the skills they teach you are intangible. I feel so weak saying I’m a consumer behavior or branding guy. I don’t know how valuable knowing my debits and credits apart are in a startup. There’s very little I can call on to say this is a qualified skill that is my competitive advantage. Many would argue that the really important skills to have are the intangible ones because they’re much harder to learn. However that still doesn’t help address my insecurities of having no qualified skills. For the most part, I’m a fairly objectively minded person when it comes to personal development. As a result, I’ve decided I’m going on the exploration of developing some skills. So I can finally say to someone, “I’m Fan Bi, and I’m really good at …”

Given the space I’m generally interested in, where Blank Label currently is, and what is most feasible (it’s not like I can just ‘pick-up’ an understanding of life sciences), I’m going to finally dig deeper into web tech. It’s starts pretty basic with the much acclaimed 37 Signals: Getting Real. There’s also going to be a real effort to go beyond just the Tech Crunch and Venture Beat and dive into the likes of Hacker News and Digital Inspiration.  Now for those paying attention, you’ll notice the inconsistency at calling on to be the best in the world, which simply cannot happen for me in web tech. The competition is rife. However the intersection of web tech, consumer marketing and entrepreneurship, is a far more narrow vertical, and something I may actually have a shot at being really good at.

Skimming even just the titles of my posts, beside the fact I write a fortnightly column for College Mogul, and the fact I’m both a student at Babson College as well as a co-founder and CEO of Blank Label, it’s fairly evident that I strongly believe the reasons why students should consider venture creation as a very real possibility whilst in college, and that why the auxiliary parties need to do everything possible to support those pursuits. So outside of my life at Blank Label, my one big passionate pursuit is directly in this field. But I probably should have found something that didn’t try and overcome two of the most proven difficult to overcome hurdles.

Open Gate Initative is the project that I’ve co-founded with Evan Morikawa, co-founder and CEO of Alight Learning, whose mission is to provide a highly interactive, collaborative platform for Babson and Olin students who share the interest in venture creation. There are a couple of key words in this that I’d like to highlight. First, the focus on ‘interactive’ and ‘collaborative’ is incredibly important. We’re a generation of people who are entitled enough to care very little for the incredible speakers we have access to, instead finding it non-specific if we’re being spoken to with any audience size greater than a dozen. We don’t turn up to lectures, why would we turn up to hear someone else talk when we’re not getting credit for it. Sure there is some inspiration value in hearing talks, but the truly inspirational ones are really rare. The focus on OGI will really be to get people thinking creatively together. It’s the intellectual stimulation of problem solving, the shared opportunity identification, and outrageous fun that will get students really thinking  about venture creation. The other key word is ‘interest’. This is not the gateway for student entrepreneurs to be given more exclusive resources to make then high potential. Merely, for those with an interest which can be supported, catalyzed and encouraged.

Naturally the two biggest hurdles that OGI looks to overcome is i) creating a sustainable student organization and ii) bringing together the cultural differences of specialized business and engineering students. The first one is fairly obvious for those with any exposure to student organizations that go through roller-coaster cycles of good Presidents and bad ones, even more tumultuous than on the national level, that start with the best intentions and then just flop post the honeymoon period. The second is far more subtle, yet at the same time interesting to analyze. What we initially thought were fundamentally different approaches to venture creation between Babson students and Oliners we actually found to be show common traits of how traditional business people approached entrepreneurship as compared with creation-focused engineers.  I’ll go into the observations in depth another time, suffice it to say there is polarity on a few different spectrums.

As OGI is rolled out in the coming weeks, I’ll keep everyone posted on how we execute and plan on overcoming said challenges, what the response and effectiveness is, and what lessons can be shared with other schools looking to cross-pollinate or that are multi-disciplinary.

Music whilst writing this post: Macy Gray Radio Station on Pandora

Before starting Blank Label, I was the co-Founder and Executive Director at Meeting of the Minds (‘MOTM’). If you clicked onto the hyperlink, you’ll notice that the website is terribly outdated, and that’s because it was my first startup, and I’d be the first to admit it failed. MOTM was a youth-based think tank that looked to bring together Sydney’s brightest young minds accross disciplines from Engineering to Science, Government to Business, to collaborate around topical issues such as Australia and Aid, Social Impact of a Rising China, Economic Conditioning. It was the opportunity for like-minded students to bridge the disconnect between Sydney’s large universities and share their passion, excitement, and mostly ambition for change. We started small, grew organically, started to make an impact, got some press, scored some sponsorship money, then flittered out in reverse order.

So when I came to Boston in February this year, I was excited to engage with the incredible intellectual capital of students the city is so famous for. Many from back home actually asked if I’d ever thought of migrating MOTM to Boston, but I responded being sure that there would be far better platforms for like-minded students to be collaborating independent of the silos of  schools. Naturally being passionate about startups and venture creation, I went searching for student-centric communities and vehicles that brought together these (aspiring) entrepreneurs. My exploration led me to the Kairos Society which held an event at Tufts earlier in the year, bringing together student entrepreneurs from Tufts, Babson, Harvard and MIT. It was an enjoyable event, great opportunity to meet peers outside Babson, and hear an entertaining talk from Mike Michalowicz. There was a far more ambitious event in April, that went national, brought together student entrepreneurs from 17 schools around the country, meeting, sharing, collaborating and celebrating in NYC. That was four months ago, I haven’t heard from them since. And trust me, I’ve been listening.

Since then, I’ve explored the numerous Boston tech, startup and VC networking events. From Web Inno to Mass Innovation Night, Future Forward to Dart Boston. I look forward to exploring far more including Tech Tuesday and finally making it to a TiE event, but from the list, there isn’t really anything student-orientated. Now of course the logical quesiton is what’s the value of having something just for students, especially just undergraduate students. Well I’d like to think Scott Kirsner‘s on the ball with Innovation Open House, offering an opportunity to students to visit some of Boston’s coolest companies, and even the people who created them. The point is that it really helps nurture the Grey Entrepreneur, the one sitting on the fence, who with influence and environment will have their risk adversity eroded from better understanding what it’s all about, and at the same time develop their self-confidnce by seeing it in action, and seeing their same-aged peers going out and doing it. To have it focused on students is also important. We’re a terribly entitled bunch of people, who want something that speaks to us directly as consumers. Otherwise it’s going to be hard for us to hear you – probably because we’ll have your headphones plugged in.

Music whilst writting this post: Matchbox 20, Mad Season.

Having just spent the last two days in workshop titled Entrepreneurial Thought and Action (ET&A), I realized that I perhaps had a different interpretation of the word than most. At the start of the summer, I stipulated that entrepreneurship was actually a fairly narrow subset of broader population of creation. It was in response to philosophical (nice word for argumentative) conversations with my father on why traditional corner store or small business with little innovative principles should not be labeled entrepreneurial. It was not a solution looking for a problem, or just a middle-man opportunity, it was an Executing Innovative Solution. Now linguists would break down each word in that phrase, and I completely appreciate it’s all very subjective.

If I understood it correctly, much of the course of the purpose was to encourage entrepreneurial mindsets, and notions of affordable lose and taking the plunge. However starting with the Muhammed Yunus claim that ‘we are all entrepreneurs …’ lost me fairly early. Whether it be an academic institution or independent programs such as the one I attended, it’s incredibly important to find your purpose and then position. When you stretch out the definition of entrepreneurship too far, it loses its meaning, the purpose is too broad, and the audience finds itself confused.

This was slightly less of a problem in ET&A as it was far more of an intellectual exercise and fairly abstract in its practical applications. For the most part this is a safe play as arguments against the content become highly philosophical and incredibly subjective. My views of encouraging entrepreneurship revolve around the notion of The Grey Entrepreneur. It’s a fairly simple hypothesis that stipulates entrepreneurial educators need to create highly active, sustained environments that creates the ‘nurture’ element to an entrepreneur’s development in complimentary to the ‘nature’ elements.

It is difficult to do this on any short-term basis, e.g. two days at a workshop, or an incomplete environment, e.g. business school with a venture creation major, because entrepreneurs are ultimately still outliers in their way of thinking and in that development stage, if they are not in a sustained environment, the outliers will move back to the norm.

Presenting to a public audience rule 101, know who they are. That doesn’t change with the internet. I know who my community is in the physical plane, those in Boston who share common interests, are like-minded in philosophy, intersect in areas of expertise. The web, and this blog, allows my community to not be limited to my physical geography. And it helps articulate my thoughts perhaps more thoroughly than 140 characters.

Most of my musings will be related to my core areas of interest; i) understanding Gen Y dynamics, ii) venture creation, and iii) networking with unreasonable people. It will be a candid perspective of what I see going on with the consumers of Blank Label, the startup I dedicate my life to, my exploration of what it means to be an entrepreneur especially at the early stages, and my interactions with various interesting people in my journeying, mostly in the active Boston tech, startup, VC arena.

It’s my firm belief that all three are undeniably linked, and mostly in relation to the increasing supply of student entrepreneurs entering the marketplace and looking for substantial meaning as a value system in life. As Gen Y starts to become more prominent in corporate America, we’re going to feel displaced and dissatisfied at what we do after the initial honeymoon period. We find the corporate world stuffy, uninspiring, and a far cry for the action-driven activities we were involved with at school. Although I’ve only experienced limited amounts of corporate industry, a quick read of my resume will highlight that I probably stayed there long enough to hate it. And turning to venture creation as an outlet for something more meaningful is becoming a popular choice.

The economy isn’t THE reason for it, rather acting more like a catalyst. Now I’m naive and irrational enough to think that a team of undergraduate students can build a high-potential company, but I’m not stupid enough to think I can do it without the help of others. This is where networking comes in. Something I’ve noticed, although slowly changing, is that not many undergraduate students are being confident and proactive on the Boston networking scene. This is unfortunate because Blank Label’s been able to benefit a lot, including Board Advisors and press.

I really want to use this as a medium to share my experiences and lessons learnt from all three areas of focus. Making unoriginal mistakes is a terrible shame, and I’m a big believer in this school of thought that knowledge is never wasted. I don’t know how many people will find this useful, but in any case what I do know is that this will be an honest, sometimes brutally so, perspective of one young Chinese Australian’s journey as an entrepreneur in Boston.

Viewing Entourage s5 ep5 Fore! whilst writing this blog.

Inevitably the question of why you start a blog comes up under the title of ‘The First Post’. For me it’s a little different. I started my first blog on blogspot on New Year’s Eve last year, and I wrote semi-regularly, on a wide range of things. It was mostly for personal interest. I mean I enjoyed writing, I thought it was useful to articulate my thought process on paper, or in this case in code. I was then referred by a mutual friend to the gold folk at College Mogul with whom I’ve been writing a column every fortnight.

But one of my primary values in life is independence. Once there’s anything ruling over me, or a mandate I have to adjust to, I just get incredibly uncomfortable. And not the type of uncomfortable that I enjoy. That’s the uncertainty in everyday that I enjoy, the risk, the sense of the unknown. This is the uncomfortable that is genuine discomfort. Don’t get me wrong, I love the folk at CM and for the 3.5 people who probably read my posts on CM, minus the two friends I always make read it, leaving that 1.5 person reading it, I’ll still continue posting there. And to the credit of the CM team, with no thanks to me, they actually manage to drive around 10,000 uniques to my B.S. every month.

This blog is really for my ramblings, just the way I like them. It’s not supposed to be highly searchable and optimized, I don’t care too much if I piss off people or institutions I’m not supposed to, this is me giving it to you straight.

Music whilst writting this post: Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say That I Am, That’s What I’m Not.