musings & critique about hi-tech, academia, building startups, and a journal to building eKita
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Yes my doggies I know you've been waiting for it - the report of the final day @ LSM D.C.
The final day was indeed the most intense of them all. The air was buzzing all morning as teams wrapped together last chances at (in)validating assumptions by going out onto the streets, then mapping out the results and pivoting one last time based on what was learned.
Quickly after lunch the teams were all required to upload final presentations that they'd put together based on all things learned over the weekend. It was damn incredible how drastically every single project changed from the first day pitches. Some projects did not even remotely resemble their original counterparts!
With exactly 5:00 minutes each to present their projects, and an additional 3:00 minutes for Q&A (and I mean exactly!) - teams were anxiously practicing their pitches and putting together their presentations.
At roughly 15:00 everyone cornered into the presentation room - with quite a few more guests, investors, and interested attendees - making thefort.vc venue pretty packed and focused on that little pull-down presentation canvas.
Check here for all the photos in instagram fashion
From start to finish:
Sporting their DIY company T-Shirts pre-pitch time, LOLDreams...
Pat Sheridan, CEO of Modus Create, a very interesting development team of industry experts pushing agile development to its limits.
A shot from behind of Jonathan Perrelli, one of the damn coolest incubator directors and investors I've met.
So - what you've all been waiting for: Final Pitch Day!
Starting off with team Factsheets.io, who started the presentations with a bang! (Sorry but I love seeing women founders up on stage kicking ass)
Factsheets solve a huge pain button for the US government (and entire public) by providing straight-forward-simple factsheets on how government policies affect YOU! One of my favorites!
Team EventKick pivoted quite alot during the weekend, starting from something resembling a wedding planner and invitation/RSVP tool to an app that helps remind you and your connections of the meetings you promised to show up at. Lots of features and integrations planned forward, and lots of things (in)validated!
Team IAGOZ pivoted wide circles around their target customer/user (yes - same target for both) of the "professional male" demographic. Ultimately resulting in a service which will clone your favorite shirt that fits you the best, into an exact copy (without trademark tags of course) or any other fashion you want...
Up next - Crowdfinder, which aims to help you find the crowds that you might want to avoid - or join.
With location based tracking and a few other features planned, the pressure point for them was to solve people's wasted time waiting in lines by helping people find the stores less crowded...
This next one won a cool factor - LeapList.
Ever get a gift you thought was crap? What does one do? Ever not know what kind of gift to give someone?
LeapList makes it easy: make a profile with the things you really want to do before you kick-the-bucket, and have your friends, family, whoever - help fund it. One little bit at a time...
Ready to take a trip? A tour? Thats just the beginning of course - with the next team that I was actually the one to give them their name: Groovl. Group Travel For Less is their motto - find trips that others also want to take and consequently the group buying effect lowers all of your prices! Groovl will soon expand into other areas of group buying as well!
Ever need a Taxi and cant find one? How about the opposite that you need a taxi and can find 100's but they are all full? How about seeing those long lines of taxi's outside hotels waiting for clients?
Big problem, Simple solution, with Concierge: help taxis and taxi-seekers be in the right place at the right time.
The next team didnt actually come up with a final solution for anything - but what they did do was definitely win the prize of most invalidated assumptions - aptly named: Invalidator, had a long list and chunk of data on products that really wouldnt be useful, which they had a few new ideas on to use for something that would be...stay tuned I guess??? :)
Spicify.me was up next with a solution for everyone who ever wanted to find a specific spice, herb, or special cooking item and just couldnt manage to find it. Look it up, find it in your local area, and help others by tagging those rare ingredients where you do find them.
This next team definitely got the laughs. LOLDreams, an entertaining portal where people share their craziest dream stories and get to enjoy those of others - already launched and active by day 3 with users posting their dreams online and ranking other's. An energetic team with very friendly demeanour, check it out at www.loldreams.com
This group was after my own heart: Smart-ly.com started with an attempt to solve the US education decline (US now ~#22 in education) by figuring out the real problem.
It ends up, the real problem is that being smart just aint cool in the good-ol-US-of-A. So to fix that, students can now aim high, achieve their goals, and get rewarded for it - like, a personal channel and getting to know your favorite celebrity perhaps? Smartly won the top LSM prize by actually not only finding tons of young students and their parents who loved the concept - but actually getting a local celebrity (Jonathan Perrelli) to make a personalized video for a local who had only dreamed of meeting him.
Smartly is also going to integrate with eKita to provide them with the full academic workflow statistics and social graph data they need to systematically reward students for over-achievement. Many celebrities are already eager to help out.
Last but not least - another team after my heart with another education based solution: Quume, where your academic & professional accreditations, achievements, and merits are verified and organized. A great team motivated to solve the process of continuing education and knowledge seekers in providing a simple platform for everyone to prove they know what they know.
To boost their project up they also received a LOI from yours truly (thats me), as eKita will very much support them by hosting their application on our platform.
The final day was indeed the most intense of them all. The air was buzzing all morning as teams wrapped together last chances at (in)validating assumptions by going out onto the streets, then mapping out the results and pivoting one last time based on what was learned.
Quickly after lunch the teams were all required to upload final presentations that they'd put together based on all things learned over the weekend. It was damn incredible how drastically every single project changed from the first day pitches. Some projects did not even remotely resemble their original counterparts!
With exactly 5:00 minutes each to present their projects, and an additional 3:00 minutes for Q&A (and I mean exactly!) - teams were anxiously practicing their pitches and putting together their presentations.
At roughly 15:00 everyone cornered into the presentation room - with quite a few more guests, investors, and interested attendees - making thefort.vc venue pretty packed and focused on that little pull-down presentation canvas.
Check here for all the photos in instagram fashion
From start to finish:
A shot from behind of Jonathan Perrelli, one of the damn coolest incubator directors and investors I've met.
So - what you've all been waiting for: Final Pitch Day!
Starting off with team Factsheets.io, who started the presentations with a bang! (Sorry but I love seeing women founders up on stage kicking ass)
Factsheets solve a huge pain button for the US government (and entire public) by providing straight-forward-simple factsheets on how government policies affect YOU! One of my favorites!
With location based tracking and a few other features planned, the pressure point for them was to solve people's wasted time waiting in lines by helping people find the stores less crowded...
Ever get a gift you thought was crap? What does one do? Ever not know what kind of gift to give someone?
LeapList makes it easy: make a profile with the things you really want to do before you kick-the-bucket, and have your friends, family, whoever - help fund it. One little bit at a time...
Big problem, Simple solution, with Concierge: help taxis and taxi-seekers be in the right place at the right time.
It ends up, the real problem is that being smart just aint cool in the good-ol-US-of-A. So to fix that, students can now aim high, achieve their goals, and get rewarded for it - like, a personal channel and getting to know your favorite celebrity perhaps? Smartly won the top LSM prize by actually not only finding tons of young students and their parents who loved the concept - but actually getting a local celebrity (Jonathan Perrelli) to make a personalized video for a local who had only dreamed of meeting him.
Smartly is also going to integrate with eKita to provide them with the full academic workflow statistics and social graph data they need to systematically reward students for over-achievement. Many celebrities are already eager to help out.
To boost their project up they also received a LOI from yours truly (thats me), as eKita will very much support them by hosting their application on our platform.
Labels: 3DS, cowork, education, edutech, lean, leanstartup, startup, washington DC, workshop
Monday, August 6, 2012
Day 2 of LSM @ DC was intense!
A very, very long day full of action packed lean learning. Some good workshops, one by myself on ideation and techniques of how to use it in customer development; but otherwise a day full of participants getting out of the building and talking to customers, learning, and pivoting fast.
We've got everything from an educational project to help make education cool - a realization after attempting a learning platform that nobody would really use it because getting high grades and being smart in the US culture isnt considered cool. So the pivot is now working towards making high-grades and academic achievement highly rewarded by being able to have private channels of communication with student's favorite celebrities. Want to meet your favorite celebrity? Get straight A's and you will, on Smart-ly.com!
Obviously this is a very interesting project for us at eKita.
There's also group travel buying project Groovel (name change imminent: there's already a groovel.com) who help people looking to travel in groups get it that much cheaper - by group buying the travel and tour packages.
A similar concept to what Elan is doing over at MorePeoplePayLess.com.
Overall we've got about 8 projects here, with some very interesting ideas here that are evolving into solid solutions for painful problems - right in front of our eyes.
With its hyper-drive model of invalidating and validating assumptions about product->market fit and customer->product fit, LSM is definitely a success at making you learn lean!
The only cave-at I have so far about the intense 3-day approach of this is that there are lots of false negatives and false positives in the testing process. Something that I've seen happening here quite alot with teams, and have mentioned to them to keep this in mind: dont necessarily throw away an assumption simply because of a quick street-test that invalidates it!!!
All in all though - learning the techniques and methods is the goal of LSM - and at that, it is excelling incredibly well.
Participants are quickly becoming lean startup machines!
A very, very long day full of action packed lean learning. Some good workshops, one by myself on ideation and techniques of how to use it in customer development; but otherwise a day full of participants getting out of the building and talking to customers, learning, and pivoting fast.
We've got everything from an educational project to help make education cool - a realization after attempting a learning platform that nobody would really use it because getting high grades and being smart in the US culture isnt considered cool. So the pivot is now working towards making high-grades and academic achievement highly rewarded by being able to have private channels of communication with student's favorite celebrities. Want to meet your favorite celebrity? Get straight A's and you will, on Smart-ly.com!
Obviously this is a very interesting project for us at eKita.
There's also group travel buying project Groovel (name change imminent: there's already a groovel.com) who help people looking to travel in groups get it that much cheaper - by group buying the travel and tour packages.
A similar concept to what Elan is doing over at MorePeoplePayLess.com.
Overall we've got about 8 projects here, with some very interesting ideas here that are evolving into solid solutions for painful problems - right in front of our eyes.
With its hyper-drive model of invalidating and validating assumptions about product->market fit and customer->product fit, LSM is definitely a success at making you learn lean!
The only cave-at I have so far about the intense 3-day approach of this is that there are lots of false negatives and false positives in the testing process. Something that I've seen happening here quite alot with teams, and have mentioned to them to keep this in mind: dont necessarily throw away an assumption simply because of a quick street-test that invalidates it!!!
All in all though - learning the techniques and methods is the goal of LSM - and at that, it is excelling incredibly well.
Participants are quickly becoming lean startup machines!
Labels: 3DS, cowork, education, edutech, lean, leanstartup, startup, washington DC, workshop
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Trip to New York & DC: arrival just on time for Day 1 of Starting Bloc (www.startingbloc.com) conference, located in a very cool venue called AlleyNYC smack dab in the middle of Manhattan.
StartingBloc was definitely a cool thing to see - with a jam packed venue of roughly 100+ people coming in from all over the country (even a few from outside) to partake in their 5 day event focusing on the creation of social enterprises. AKA Social Entrepreneurialism. Something I'm quite a fan of myself as a model for sustainable business.
In the evening, LSM hosted a session of a new 4-week accelerator program in which they hold evening sessions of leanstartup practice, teaching, and hands-on work with a very low ratio of participants to mentors.
It is an interesting take on LSM being able to cater to people who want to learn the principles and put them to work but in a more casual and less intense compact manner that their 3-day intensive weekend workshops offer.
I will update with some photos when I'm back in NY, as I was so exhausted and at the same time excited to see all that stuff going on (and people to talk to) that I didnt actually take any shots.
But I did take these from the place I stayed the night, a cool French guy named Arthur who works at the U.N. and has an absolutely beautiful view from his really nice flat.
Enjoy!
StartingBloc was definitely a cool thing to see - with a jam packed venue of roughly 100+ people coming in from all over the country (even a few from outside) to partake in their 5 day event focusing on the creation of social enterprises. AKA Social Entrepreneurialism. Something I'm quite a fan of myself as a model for sustainable business.
In the evening, LSM hosted a session of a new 4-week accelerator program in which they hold evening sessions of leanstartup practice, teaching, and hands-on work with a very low ratio of participants to mentors.
It is an interesting take on LSM being able to cater to people who want to learn the principles and put them to work but in a more casual and less intense compact manner that their 3-day intensive weekend workshops offer.
I will update with some photos when I'm back in NY, as I was so exhausted and at the same time excited to see all that stuff going on (and people to talk to) that I didnt actually take any shots.
But I did take these from the place I stayed the night, a cool French guy named Arthur who works at the U.N. and has an absolutely beautiful view from his really nice flat.
Enjoy!
Labels: alleynyc, cowork, lean, leanstartup, new york, social entrepreneur, startup, workspace
