Will Tweet or Facebook post for school supplies.
That’s the idea behind a social charity program spearheaded by Austin tech startup Sparefoot, which puts consumers in touch with storage facilities.
Sparefoot will donate $3 worth of basic school supplies for every Facebook share and Tweet about what memento they’ve stored since grade school. The donations will go to a school supply drive for Communities In Schools of Central Texas, a nonprofit focused on dropout-prevention.
“We launched this company while I was still in school myself,” Chuck Gordon, Sparefoot Founder and CEO, said in a news release. “Our goal with Supply Memories is to give other students a similar opportunity to succeed, no matter their circumstances.
To participate, visit Sparefoot on Facebook or visit Supply Memories to learn more about the Twitter program.
Tag: startups (Page 6 of 10)
Nicole DeLeon, founder of Embarkly, based at Geekdom in San Antonio
DeLeon’s idea got picked.
That weekend she developed the project with a team of eight people and by the end, they had a demo of the site ready to go. They also changed the name from BoardMe to Embarkly.
Embarkly helps people find and book pet boarding facilities. It’s a consolidated marketplace online with listings, prices, reviews, availability and the ability to book online. The site seeks to make pet boarding simple.
DeLeon rapidly got a prototype launched and she performed well at 3 Day Startup, said Pat Condon, one of the investors in the Geekdom Fund and a cofounder of Rackspace.
“One of the biggest benefits of programs like 3 Day Startup from an investor’s perspective is that you really get an inside look at how startup founders perform in the pressure cooker and it really showcases how much they can get done with extremely limited resources (money and time),” Condon said. “In today’s world, this extra insight for an investor can be the difference between success and failure.”
The Geekdom Fund made a seed stage equity investment in Embarkly.
The pet boarding market and pet services industry in general is quite large and Embarkly’s business model is quite scalable, Condon said.
“Plus, probably even more importantly, is the fact that so many pet owners really treat pets as family members and are willing to spend money on them accordingly” he said.
Embarkly seeks to become the “Expedia” of the $2 billion pet boarding industry. Right now, the service is available in all the major metropolitan markets in Texas. DeLeon plans to expand nationwide in coming months.
Embarkly pitched at Texas Ventures Labs Investment Competition Finals last February seeking $400,000 in financing.At that time, the company estimated that it could achieve potential annual revenue of $72.5 million with a 10 percent market stake. It faces competition from Findpetcare.com, Petbookings.com, Dogboarding.com and others. The company makes money by generating leads for pet boarding facilities.
While Embarkly didn’t win, it did get traction at the event. DeLeon went on to raise money from some angel investors including an executive at Home Away. Travis Skelly, one of the founders, left the company to take a job on the east coast. Today, DeLeon runs the company in San Antonio and her cofounder Orion Jensen works out of Austin.
DeLeon recently moved her company to Geekdom, a collaborative and coworking space on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
This past weekend DeLeon spent volunteering as a mentor for Startup Weekend San Antonio. She knows it’s possible to go from idea to a company in a weekend.
But it’s not easy.
“Startup weekends really work, but you must work them,” said Allen Torng, one of the organizers of Startup Weekend San Antonio. “You have to take the energy from the weekend and propel that forward. Everyone’s going to be asking what you’ve done since. Building a startup is hard. A lot harder than a Startup Weekend. It’s important to create achievable goals and be willing to do whatever it takes to meet them.”
DeLeon started Embarkly because she had trouble finding quality pet care for her dog, Carson, and cats, Bonito and Bob.She was born and raised in San Antonio but she’s lived in Los Angeles and upstate New York. She has always had pets so she knows first hand how tough it can be to find quality care for them while she’s travelling.
Before founding Embarkly, DeLeon worked as a mergers and acquisition lawyer for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP and as a prosecutor for two years. She has a law degree from the University of Texas Law School in Austin and she passed the Texas Bar Exam.
“And although it didn’t make a difference for Geekdom fund to invest, I love the fact that Nicole left her law career behind to pursue her passion…that is just a great story,” Condon said. “She’s obviously willing to take the risk necessary to make a startup successful.”
At her heart, DeLeon’s always been an entrepreneur.
During her college years, she ran her own business online through eBay and she became one of its first PowerSellers. She ran a wholesale electronics import business into Argentina from China.
“Technology had enabled all of these things to happen,” she said.
She sold about $1.2 million worth of retail goods, she said. While she liked being a mergers and acquisition lawyer, she didn’t like being a prosecutor. So now she’s revisiting her entrepreneurial roots.
“What we are trying to build is a site extremely tailored to pet care services,” DeLeon said. “We see a huge need in the marketplace.”
The final pitch session on Sunday at Startup Weekend San Antonio
Trakk-EM had one of the largest teams with seven people. Martinez’ idea was to create a watch with built-in GPS that connected to a mobile phone app. If a child went missing, the parent could simply alert everyone in the network immediately with the app and track the child on the phone.
“I’ve been at Sea World when my daughter was lost,” Martinez said. It’s one of the scariest experiences for a parent, she said. She found her four-year-old daughter but that experience prompted her to come up with the idea for the watch and mobile phone app.
Martinez, a senior majoring in business management at the University of Texas at San Antonio, may enroll in a technology program at the university. She wants to go on to compete in its technology competition.
Kyle Jennings, software engineer and former combat medic, participated in Startup Weekend San Antonio
Jennings, a former combat medic and now a software engineer, spent weeks in the Audie L. Murphy Veterans Memorial Hospital in San Antonio following an operation on his back because he also contracted double pneumonia.
His wife had to care for him and their newborn son and toddler daughter at home. He said he could have used a site like OurPart.US to connect him with resources for his house to provide him with more independence.
He would also contribute to projects for other veterans.
“I think there are a lot of people who want to take care of wounded veterans,” Jennings said. “I think it’s a great idea. I’d like to see it out there.”
Jennings’ idea for a family budget site actually got picked on Friday night at the beginning of Startup Weekend San Antonio. But his team for Remainder.com dissolved when they tried to join forces with BudgetAllies.com. The entrepreneurs had different visions for the site. He went on to help other teams instead.
Jennings still enjoyed the experience.
“I basically love my job,” Jennings said. “I love it so much I do it on weekends. For me, it’s not about coming here and winning. I like honing my craft and helping others. That’s what I’m passionate about.”
He’s also a member of Geekdom, a new co-working and collaboration space on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown. Geekdom hosted the event. It provided office space, conference rooms, couches, a fully-stocked break room with refrigerators loaded with Red Bull and Alamo Beer and presentation space.
“The venue is key in the support of this event,” said Michele Stewart, one of the organizers of Startup Weekend San Antonio.
“I think people really enjoyed sleeping here all night long,” Stewart said. “With the support of Rackspace we were able to make it a fantastic weekend.”
Rackspace sponsored the event and provided all the meals and snacks and other support.
Startup Weekend San Antonio is in its infancy, said Royce Haynes, a coordinator and entrepreneur who flew in from Boulder, Colo.
“This is only the beginning,” he said. “I think we’re going to see a really robust startup community in San Antonio.”
Team photo of TrueAbility, which took home the top prize at San Antonio Startup Weekend. Photo courtesy of San Antonio Startup Weekend.
True Ability, a service that lets companies test the technical aptitude of job candidates, won the panel of judges over.
“TrueAbility helps companies hire great techs,” Frederick Mendler, CEO, said during his pitch.
One of the things lacking in the startup community is domain expertise, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom.
“The biggest missing element is someone who knows the business they’re getting into,” he said.
TrueAbility knows the marketplace, Longo said. The need exists for startup companies to tackle bigger problems and TrueAbility is doing that, he said.
The company has 30 years of experience hiring technical talent and has hired more than 1,000 people at Rackspace, Mendler said. The TrueAbility platform will allow companies to know in advance how competent its job candidates are in different technical skills like Unix, Php and Java Script among other skills.
The team is made up of Mendler, Marcus Robertson, Luke Owen and Dusty Jones.
Following the big win, the team retired to their office at Geekdom to drink champagne and celebrate.
“We’re going to take tomorrow off and let the Red Bull wear off and get out of our systems,” Mendler said. “Then we’ll come back and focus on building the site out. We think there’s an opportunity to have $1 million in revenue in the next eight months.”
The judges thought TrueAbility had a solid business model and a well-formed and experienced team.
Frederick Mendler pitching TrueAbility at San Antonio Startup Weekend photo courtesy of San Antonio Startup Weekend
The judges also liked BikeIdentity, which garnered second place. BikeIdentity reported that 1.5 million bikes are stolen every year and 48 percent are recovered but less than 5 percent go back to their owners. BikeIdentity wants to solve that problem with NFC tags on bike frames that the police could scan to find the owners. The tags would retail for around $10. BikeIdentity estimates it will reach $12 million in revenue in 3 years. The team was seeking a $150,000 investment to bring its product to market.
SoundFly, a seven second broadcasting service on Twitter, took the third place prize.
“What would you say to the world in 7 seconds?” asked Ramesh Danala, during his presentation. SoundFly gives people the ability to accurately convey tone, emotion and personality with friends and family.
“People can Tweet and text, but the power of talking is amazing,” Danala said.
Dan Pernik first pitched the idea for SoundFly on Friday night. The idea didn’t get enough votes to become one of the selected projects. But when a team broke up over night, SoundFly got a new life. Inaddition to Pernik and Danala, Sundip Lal and Elliot Adams from New Orleans, joined the team.
“SoundFly was one of the ideas that has big potential,” said Pat Matthews, a senior vice president at Rackspace and one of the judges. “It definitely is an exciting idea.”
At the end of the day, most of the ideas that come out of San Antonio Startup Weekend won’t work, Longo said.
“That’s not why they’re here,” he said. “They leave here constantly learning. They now have a network.”
People can have ideas all day long, but they’ve got to execute on them, he said.
“This program forces them to execute,” he said. But people can’t fall in love with their ideas, he said.
“Never get married to your ideas” Longo said. As San Antonio Startup Weekend proved, they change and teams must adapt or die.
Danny Willford, a developer, has been up since San Antonio Startup Weekend started on Friday. He’s working for two teams.
By Sunday morning, about a dozen people had dropped out. They either left because their idea wasn’t picked as a project on Friday night or they didn’t like the team they joined or they just wanted to go home. No one really knows why they left because they are gone. Ideas pivoted. Personalities conflicted. Teams disintegrated. Others formed.
Only the hardy remain, and these men and women are a dedicated bunch who have toiled all night long, in many cases, to bring their companies to life.
Tonight they will pitch their ideas in front of a panel of judges.
Danny Willford, a developer from Kyle, hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep since the event began. He left briefly on Friday night to meet some friends in San Marcos to celebrate his 26th birthday. But instead of driving the short distance to Kyle from the party, he turned around and came back to Geekdom, a collaborative workspace on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown, which is hosting the event.
When he returned at 3 a.m., he met up with Brian Curliss, one of the guys behind Massage by Students. They talked for two hours about Curliss’s idea and the project. By the end, Willford agreed to work on Massage by Students’ project even though he had already joined the OurPart.US team, which is developing a crowdfunding site for veterans.
Willford doesn’t mind the extra work. He loves Startup Weekend. A few months ago, he moved from Chicago to take a job as a PhP Java Script developer for MicroAssist in Austin. He has participated in two Startup Weekends in Chicago, the last one was last Fall.“This is a great way to meet new people,” Willford said.
Like a few others participating in San Antonio Startup Weekend, Willford has not slept. A comfy white couch sits just a few feet from his chair in an office room. He removed the fluffy blankets to resist the temptation to lie down. He stays awake thanks to Red Bull, snacks and adrenaline.
A few hours ago, Chris Spence, one of the founders of Apartment Assurance, who vowed to stay up the entire weekend, crashed at 7 a.m. on Sunday. He’s now sleeping in a office on three red bean bag chairs with the lights off. Curliss with Massage by Students fell asleep around 5 a.m. on a red couch in a really dark interior conference room. He asked his team to wake him up at noon.
But Willford has no intention of sleeping. He’s got too much work to do. He’s creating the back end of the Massage by Students website and also working on creating the website for OurPart.us.
Why does he do all this work for free? In fact, he paid $100 to participate in this madness.
“This is really fun,” he said. “The organizers at this one are the most fun I’ve ever seen. They stay up with us. They give us free beer. I really like the Alamo Beer.”
But his real motivation for participating in San Antonio Startup Weekend is to create new products and eventually found his own company.
“I can’t wait to be my own boss and launch something successful,” he said. “Having the ability to say that I made something that people use and like. I would find that to be really gratifying.”
Members of Trakk-EM hash out the details of their idea
Cans of Red Bull are littered about along with empty water bottles, discarded coffee cups and Alamo Beer bottles. Bags of peanut M&Ms, Skittles, Mini-Hershey Bars, Pop-Tarts, Oreos, Rice Krispies Treats and more line the breakroom shelves.
Two of the members of Massage by Students working past midnight
“That’s a great pitch,” said Brian Curliss, head of the Massage by Students startup, a web platform that connects massage school students to local clients.
Thielbar is packing up to head home to his wife and three kids. He is a team of one. On Friday night, he had three people working on the project, but the team dispersed and the members either left the program or went to other ventures. Still, he plans to carry on and pitch to judges on Sunday night.
“I’m going to get first or second,” he said. “I didn’t come here to not win.”
He says his stiffest competition is TrueAbility, a team formed by four former Rackspace employees.
At that, Curliss objected. His team spent the day talking to people who run massage schools in San Antonio. He’s in it to win it too. They set up a consumer survey to get more feedback on the service. Curliss drove down from Dallas and has spent the entire weekend sleeping on a couch at Geekdom. Greg Stein, another team member, drove in from Austin and Yosef Javed travelled from Lake Charles, La. They say one guy drove 20 hours from California to participate in Startup Weekend San Antonio. Five people make up the Massage by Students team.
Initially, Massage by Students focused on marketing massage schools. San Antonio has seven of them. But after visiting a few Saturday afternoon, they decided to “pivot” or shift the focus of their startup away from schools to students who need a Customer Relationship Marketing or CRM platform. They plan to sell listings on their site to only 18 students in addition to the massage schools and they predict they can earn recurring monthly revenue of $2,000 to $6,000 in San Antonio and up to $100,000 nationally.
On Sunday, they’ve invited local massage students to visit Geekdom to give hour-long massages for $20.
The two member team working on Apartment Assurance
He’s working with his co-founder, Jonathan Khan, on Apartment Assurance, a legal service for apartment dwellers. They’ve done market surveys and lots of research. They’re trying to hash out how much to charge for the service.
“We’re trying to decide whether to charge $14.99 a month or $19.99 a month, we’ve got to make the numbers work,” Spence said.
“I think it should be $9.99,” Khan said.
And so it goes in the life of a startup. By the time they’ve got to pitch later on Sunday, they’ll have all those details nailed down.
The crowd starts to thin out around 1 a.m., but a few people are letting off steam playing games of ping pong. The Trakk-Em team is still working in the commons area.
Geekdom is taking a gamble on new technology startups.
The collaborative coworking site today launched the Geekdom Fund, seed stage capital for technology startups in San Antonio.
The fund will provide startup teams with $25,000 equity investments and free office space at the Weston Centre downtown where the Geekdom is based, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom and one of the fund’s administrators.
The fund provides a big missing piece of the puzzle in San Antonio’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, Longo said.
“Funding is always the point people want to get to,” Longo said.
The money comes from Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, and other executives at Rackspace and other angel investors, Longo said. The fund seeks to give San Antonio technology entrepreneurs a head start in launching their products into the marketplace.
“You apply with a great idea and a great team,” Longo said. “You have to be a member of Geekdom to apply. If you want to relocate here, we want you.”
Geekdom is a collaborative workspace, which launched late last year and has grown quickly. The site occupies the 11th floor of the Weston Centre and has expanded to the 10th floor and plans to expand to two additional floors in coming months.
Nick Longo, director of Geekdom is also one of the administrators of the Geekdom Fund, a $25,000 per startup seed stage fund.
The money allows people to build a website, build an app and quit their job and pursue their startup dream, Longo said. The Geekdom fund has already invested in some startups based at the center including ZippyKid and Embarkly.
“Part of our criteria is you haven’t received funding from somewhere else,” Longo said. “This is seed money.”
To apply, visit the Geekdom site and fill out the application. It also asks startup teams to fill out a lean canvas form and list the people on their team.
Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Joshua Baer has a set of those millionaire-on-a-skateboard dotcom Gold Rush stories that give the Austin startup scene its own sexy tech history.
Baer graduated Carnegie Mellon with a less-than-stellar academic record, and a couple hundred grand in revenues from being an early dabbler in web hosting and email services. He secured two houses: one for his business and one for his home and skateboarded to work every morning. He was one of the dozens of entrepreneurs spun out during of the Golden Years of Trilogy. And, as a young man, he sold his first company and made enough money that he could afford to sit back and contemplate what he’d like to do with the rest of his life, now that he could do whatever he wanted.
He decided what he wanted was to help other entrepreneurs take their own version of the wild ride that brought him there. So Baer founded Capital Factory, which provides work space and mentoring to entrepreneurs. He’s also the founder and CEO of OtherInbox—which he sold in January to Return Path. He’s also a specialist at the University of Texas and an investor and advisor at more than 25 other companies.
The man who once-upon-a-time was scared to have his own company is equipping all the entrepreneurs he can with the knowledge and contacts to create theirs.
Baer grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, a third-generation descendant of Eastern European immigrants. His father was portrait photographer and most of his ancestors were entrepreneurs.
“So when I first started a company, I thought of it as something achievable,” he said. “It wasn’t as intimidating to me as it is to some people.”
As a computer science major at Carnegie Mellon, he was an early internet adopter. At the time, if you wanted a web site you had to run your own web server. He couldn’t afford a web server and he didn’t get chosen for the StarNine WebSTAR beta program. So instead, he applied for the beta program for ListSTAR, an email server that fewer people were applying for. Being a student with time on his hands, he could afford to play with the email software and read the manual, which led him to start answering questions on the ListSTAR forum. He became the resident expert and eventually drew the attention of the StarNine CEO, who decided to make him an intern, an official spokesman of sorts, to answer questions on behalf of the company.
Soon people were hiring him to consult about issues on their servers, paying him a pizza or $10-$15 bucks an hour. He started farming out work he didn’t have time for to fraternity buddies who were computer science majors. Then one day, one of his customers proposed that, instead of fixing problems as they arose, he would pay Baer $50 a month just to keep his server up and running to avoid chronic breakdowns and angry customers. It looked like money for nothing and Baer launched into the server industry. That was the real beginning of his first company in 1996, SKYLIST. And as it grew, rapidly, Baer got nervous.
“I was afraid to have my own business,” he said. “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” The CEO of StarNine had sold that company and started another. He offered to help Baer out by making Baer’s company a division of his own.
“By the time I graduated in 1999 I had a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue,” he said. “I employed a couple people doing tech support and people doing programming. I was the king of my world. I could buy more beer than anybody I knew.”
He got inundated with job offers. But then Jonathan Berkowitz, a friend who graduated six months before him, got hired by Trilogy Inc. and told him about it.
“I met with the CEO and he said ‘Keep your company. Come down here, work for me, learn a ton on my dime and when you’re done you can go back up there.” How could he refuse?
He brought his CMU gang who were working for him down to Austin. They housed servers in his house until they ran out of room, then rented a place up the street. His next company, UnsubCentral, spun out of SKYLIST. Compliance rules were emerging around email and he created a leading compliance solution for email list operators. Part of that company required him to meet with the Federal Trade Commission to provide industry comment on CAN-SPAM. He was 24.
“I don’t really enjoy wearing a suit,” he recalls. “But if I had to do it again now I am so much more confident and better prepared, I would totally show up in jeans and a t-shirt. Back then I was a 24-year-old trying to be an adult.”
When he was 30, he sold both SKYLIST and UnsubCentral to Datran Media (now PulsePoint) for an undisclosed amount estimated at $10 million in 2006. And that changed his life.
“Selling my first company was an inflection point,” he said. “Right as I turned 30 I sold my first company. It was a life changing event. I wasn’t doing poorly before I sold the company but I never had any financial security. ..your perspective on life changes when you have financial security.”
He pondered what he wanted to do. Go sit on a beach? A career as an EMT seemed exciting. “I romanticized the idea….” he said. “It must be incredible to walk home every day and say I saved two people’s lives today. But I pass out when they take blood from me.”
“Then I realized: I get a ton of personal satisfaction from helping people become entrepreneurs. … If I help somebody actually get their company started I feel successful. I get a ton of positive energy back from them…. The best way I can help the world is to help one person achieve financial independence. They’re going to make their own lives better and it’s going to have a trickle-down effect. If they start a company, that makes Austin better. That makes the world better. That’s I thing I can do and I’m good at it.”
So that’s what he does. He has always been a good networker, by his own admission. And he teaches what he’s learned along the way.
“He was one of the instructors for our class, we got to get advice from him on a weekly basis,” said Dwayne Smurdon, CEO of Predictable Data, a company that was created in one of Baer’s classes. “He’s very pragmatic. He gets down to issues you really need to worry about rather than the big scale issues like human resources. He focuses on what is the minimum you have to do to be viable, to get your company started up. “
That might include teaching students how to deal with mentors: Make sure you’re prepared to ask them very specific, targeted questions. Don’t waste your time or their time. Make sure you’re asking until they’ve said no; you never know how much a mentor is going to give.
It includes pitching advice: Start with a story people can relate to. Start with a small picture and build towards the big picture.
“He helps you network, get involved in the entrepreneurial community,” said Smurdon. “He’ll introduce you and what you do with that is up to you. It’s such a big advantage that other people who didn’t’ get to know someone like Josh don’t have.”
Both Smurdon and Baer say he emphasizes focus. There are so many potential issues to tackle, entrepreneurs don’t know where to look first. During pitch competitions, he said, entrepreneurs need to be able to drill down to the point.
“My goal is that I should be able to help everyone in some way: Introduce them to somebody, help them figure out a key tactic–something to do differently,” Baer said. And he’s carved a unique spot for himself in the world of Austin startups
“Josh is such a great catalyst for the city of Austin,” said Bryan Jones, 2012 chair of the Greater Austin Technology Partnership through the Austin Chamber of Commerce and CEO of Collider Media. “There aren’t many people that are both a successful entrepreneur, prolific investor and community activist. His ability to evangelize the city, while still making the community feel smaller by making constant introductions, is amazing.”
Baer is a fierce advocate for Austin as a tech growth center and weighs in often on the Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Hills controversy. While California benefits from a greater supply of early stage capital, for example, he points out that fewer companies need that much capital. He, for example, bootstrapped his first two companies.
“We want to learn what we can from the Silicon Valley, take their investors and their money and never become them. They’re at the pinnacle, they are the Mecca of consumer internet technology but they’re kind of like an established old boy club. It’s not impossible to break into that, but it’s hard. It’s hard to carve out a niche. Austin is a big pond that’s growing. That’s the exciting place to be for me, not in the busiest, most crowded room, but a growing one that creates opportunity…. You can affect what it’s becoming. You can change it. You’re not going to change Silicon Valley….I was a nobody in Austin but I’ve been able to get involved, get to be part of the community, stepping up and filling the void. There are places to jump in and play your part in what is going to be.”
So that’s what he’s bringing to Austin. The message and the knowledge to invite entrepreneurs: There’s opportunity here…come and play.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Nancy Giordano and Jeff Sharpe
The seminar covered topics from social media to strategy to designing the space you work in to include cooperative-brainstorming areas, play areas and areas for quiet reflection—similar to the space Capital Factory recently unveiled.
Nancy Giordano, CEO of Brand Futurist and Play Big Inc., started the day with a rapid fire summary of trends, saying we’re currently in a kind of trough between the way work used to be done, and the way it will be done in the future which includes massive cooperation, involving everyone in the process whether that’s collaborating on a project or social media—the epitome of inclusivity.
Also touched on:
• Collaborative work stations are replacing work in offices or cubicles.
• Entrepreneurialism and intrapreneurialism–empowering employees at all levels to bring independent thought and perspective into the process–is growing.
• The millennials are introducing a culture of relevance, purpose, passion and positivity—a combining of philanthropy and capitalism with a focus on fostering possibility.
• The millennial perspective on collaboration is “Yes…and” as in “Yes, that’s a good idea and we could also do this” rather than “Yeah…but” which kills creativity.
The focus sounds positive: Inviting everyone to join the conversation, embracing the idea of failing faster and failing forward, opening organizations up to ideas from all stakeholders: employees at every level, customers and vendors. But that requires an ongoing conversation that puts new demands on businesses.
“I’ll stay up until midnight doing emails and I fricking get responses back!” Giordano said. “I have clients who email me back in the middle of the night. And that’s the U.S., not global clients.”
Research shows that the constant disruptions from this ongoing dialogue leaves workers with 12 percent of the day for thought, “even though knowledge workers paid to think for a living.” Use of antidepressants is up 400 percent—though she didn’t say from when. And sleep deprivation is a huge contributor to fatal disease.
Between the explosive growth of technology, new ways to communicate and collaborate and rapid pace of change, humans are struggling to keep up. “We’re in an area of exponential growth,” Giordano said. “As humans, we’re able to adjust to linear growth. We’re not at all prepared for exponential growth.”
Giordano said the business world is demanding more quality, innovation, transparency, personalization and speed, for less time, money, complexity and energy. “That puts anybody who is a provider in a quandary.” Some brands aren’t making it across. And Baby Boomers, entrenched in old ways of doing business, are considered the biggest obstacle to moving forward. They are reluctant to embrace collaborative work, social media and failing forward.
During one session, a participant asked how failing forward could be implemented in highly regulated arenas such as the medical field or in banking. In those situations, said Jeff Sharpe, Director and Designer at JS WorkShop, the focus of experimentation could be on areas such as customer experience.
During an afternoon session, Aaron Strout, Group Director of communications company WCG, Ray Wolf, CEO of PeopleBrite and Lekan Bashua, Manager of Turnstone, talked about issues from strategy to keeping up with social media and news, to the proliferation of tools for everything from collaboration and communication to scheduling. The bottom line seemed to be that everything must line up with business’s core objectives.
Strategy, Strout said, must be flexible and adaptable over time. It must rest on frameworks and processes rather than tools and technologies. It must be informed by key stakeholders, especially those with daily customer contact. He makes sure he’s staying on top of industry change by regularly shifting what he reads to ensure he’s not getting stuck in one perspective.
Wolf, who has had a vast and varied career and a number of tech startups, said he visualizes what he wants: In his case, a business where he can work from a beach and drink good wine. But it’s important to recognize that you don’t reach your goal in a bound but in strategic stages. If you have a new app, don’t aim to be Facebook, aim for a reasonable goal such as gaining 1,000 users.
Each participant had some way of evaluating tools. Bashua suggested using a “maven.” His is his wife. If he mentions a tool 10 times, she points it out to him and he knows it’s probably a good one that’s serving a purpose.
The last session of the day was Peter Kim, Chief Strategy Officer of the Dachis Group and author of Social Business by Design speaking on social media.
Kim listed several key elements to a strong social campaign including:
• Everyone can participate
• It’s responsive: He told the story of the You Tube video showing how Mentos candy can make a geyser in Diet Coke spawning zillions more videos of Mentos geysers. The Mentos company embraced the craze and Coke responded coldly. By the time Coke figured out the benefit of the attention, it was too late.
• There are three “buckets” of messages that work: Making people laugh, entertaining; making people famous; tugging at their heartstrings.
A mature social media campaign, he said, will be enterprise-wide; will be scalable and will be able to identify ROI from social business solutions.
Bashua of Turnstone gave one takeaway most participants will remember and which summarized the future of business: So.lo.mo.big.fat which translated to:
Social, local, mobile, big data, fat pipes (large communication network). The future of business in a nutshell.