Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

As I was arranging my schedule between driving Blank Label projects, starting up Open Gate Initiative, being a team leader at E-Tower, and classes, trying to squeeze startup networking events around my already compact schedule has been challenging. What that does mean is for a busy student entrepreneur, the following list has been whittled down as the essentials (and they’re all FREE!!!):

Mass Innovation Night – Wednesday, September 9

Mass Innovation Nights connect Massachusetts-based innovators with the marketplace using social media.  Held at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation, the monthly Launch Parties are FREE for everyone — companies and guests alike.  All we ask is that guests help spread the word about cool new products they see at our events.

TiE ENTER Launch – Tuesday, September 15 (Free for Students)

Fireside/ interactive chat with Jeff Taylor, Founder of Monster.com, Paul English, Founder of Kayak.com, Chris Hughes, co-Founder of Facebook.com and MyBarackObama.com. This event is primarily for aspiring and first-time entrepreneurs. If you are a student working on a BIG idea – or searching for one – come join a lively discussion on how these successful entrepreneurs stumbled upon theirs, and how they built businesses around them. The speakers will share what has changed in their respective industries since they began their entrepreneurial journeys as well as what they recognize to be the prevailing trends now shaping these industries. This will be an interactive chat where you can also share your BIG ideas and get constructive feedback from the speakers.

Tech Tuesday – Tuesday, September 15

Join your fellow geeks, tech savvy professionals, DIY-ers, press, and other industry luminaries for this informal gathering. Bring your laptops, robots, OLPC XO’s, Amazon Kindles, new cell phones, gadgets, and other new-fangled devices. Got a great demo or YouTube clip? Bring it! LCD projector and wi-fi will be available for ad hoc show and tell.

Ignite Boston 6 – Thursday, September 17

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.

WebInno23 – Tuesday, September 29

At 7pm in the Grand Ballroom we’ll hold our usual format of self-/angel-funded startups demo’ing to the audience in Main Dish showcases, and select an “Audience Choice” winner of the crowd’s favorite. After a brief intermission, at 8pm we’ll hold a strictly-optional special entrepreneur’s PR breakout session. During the entire evening’s event, Side Dish startup companies will provide informal demonstrations to the networking crowd from the Skyline Suites room.

MassTLC 2009 Innovation unConference – Thursday, October 01 (Stay in MA Scholarships Available)

Four generations of entrepreneurs will gather on October 1, 2009 with the focus on early stage entrepreneurship and driving innovation.  Unlike the planned sessions and passive audiences of typical conferences, MassTLC’s Innovation 2009 is an unConference where the agenda is formed organically by all attendees the day of the event. No podiums. No stages. Just small interactive sessions taking a deep dive into issues that drive innovation and the success of your company. A professional facilitator helps make it happen.

Eric Ries The Lean Start-up Talk – Thursday, November 19

2 hour talk by Eric Ries, the well known author of the blog Lessons Learned. He was the co-founder and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Artv of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Smule, 750i and KaChing. Eric will discuss the approach of the Lean Startup.

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.

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.

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.