Jim Kastana

Jim Kastana

One of last guest speaker was Jim Kastana, he focused on innovation and invention in entrepreneurship.

He first talked about his concept of IPZ, Innovation Partnership Zone. In this he mentioned emphasizing on people first and then structures and then on gathering the data.

His main focus was on innovation and how it is important to be a successful entrepreneur. He said Innovation is essentially creative and applications of technology in ways that are marketable and useful to consumers. Invention is creating something that in entirely new to the world. But invention can lead to innovation.

He gave us good examples to explain innovation. One of the examples was of the wine growing in the Pacific Northwest. He mentioned how Pacific Northwest had no vineyards and then they found out the weather conditions in Walla Walla was very close to that of Napa valley in France. So they decided to grow grapes for wine. It was an innovation because they discovered something that was in need in that particular area. It was something new for the region. So now what they got in Napa Vally can be produced and sold there too.  Now Walla Walla is one of the largest wine producers in the Unites States of America.

The next topic Jim discussed about was economic clusters. In economic clusters professionals group themselves and collaborate on the basis of their industry.  This was very interesting to know that how such professional make a relationship on the basis of their similar ideas and may be creating something new.

I really like the topics Jim Kastana discussed i.e. innovation and clusters. It liked his ideology; it definitely left a positive mark on my thoughts.

Brain Forth

Brain Forth

Brain forth talked and discussed about his entrepreneurial experience and also about his initial life journey before being an entrepreneur.

Before being an entrepreneur he was a teacher is a school where he uses to build WebPages and worked as a web designer for little kids. He then went into how left his teacher job and then into the real industry.

First he talked about his past jobs, his experience of working at Disney and software Development at Knowledge Universe Company. He talked about his past working experience helped him learn about good customer service. How important to prioritize their customers and treat them with respect.

Brain talked about how he was treated an employee in Knowledge Universe. He discusses that it wasn’t him but that company just didn’t treat their employee’s in a right way. He explains how the company sends him a letter where he got fired before the project was launched. It was sent to him too soon.

From his past experience he said that you can’t be always nice to your employees. Sometimes you need to make a line and get what you want from the employees. Just for the betterment for the company.

He also talked about some good insight about his business ideas. One of them was his exit strategy. He said his exit strategy was to sell his company to his employees because they are the one who helped build the company. Second he talked about ‘reality distortion field’. In this he explained how it is important to present things that you want to people just to get them to do what you want.

At the end he mentioned about the wine app that he developed. He talked about sometimes how taking risks can get you something that you never expected. So one should not be afraid to take chances.

Mission and Vision

Mission:

The goal of café Mid-O is to exceed the expectations of our customers by providing exquisite study lounge experience. The café Mid-O is designed and scheduled by taking in consideration of what a student and a working professional’s requirement of that extra time of the day, other than normal school/working hours to complete their goal. Our late closing hours, affordable food/drinks and free Wi-Fi is aimed to identify and deliver what our customers in lack their daily life.

Vision:

Our vision is to provide the community near University of Washington Tacoma a study lounge. Here students and working professionals can experience a perfect ambiance for their day’s extra work. 

Graham Evans

The discussion with our guest speaker Graham Evan; had a very fact based and practical approach to it. He started of talking about business marketing. Three points he mentioned in regards to marketing a product were:

-          Great product + Lousy Marketing = No money

-          Lousy Product + Great Marketing = Short Term money

-          Great Product + Great Marketing = Long Term money

With this he tried to explain the role of marketing in terms of a product. He supported this is some examples one of them were of a British Company.  He elaborates how British companies tried to set them up in USA but failed due to lack of market research. He highlighted the importance of marketing in a way of what your audience wants, and how it can lead to a big failure if not done right.

For an entrepreneur he suggested four ways to follow:

Know what you don’t know – Learning a process of life. I keep learning new things. Don’t think that you know everything.

Recognize Challenges to your Paradigm – One should recognize the challenges that might come in their endeavor and try to work through its way.

Five wrong ways of thinking.

Open Communication – Good communication with others always ends in good results. So communicating yourself well is an important aspect.

He then advised the students that how it’s beneficial to pitch for the investors who are not that interested. This way we can get good critic’s comments on your plan which might help present it better to the ones who are actually interested in it.

Last but not the least Graham talked about six ways to think, namely:

-          Brain storming/ reverse Brainstorming

-          2x2 Strategic matrices.

-          SWOT(Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat)

-          Morning Pages

-          Six Hat Thinking

-          Business Plan.

Graham Evans discussion was one of the most unique discussions we had so far. He helped me think not only in a better entrepreneurial way but also in a non-traditional unique manner.

The Kick Starter Post

My business plan is not based on a phone application. My plan is to open a café for students. So if I had a kick starter campaign it would be based on the service we will provide on the interest level of the customer.

Tier 1:

Cost : $0.00

If you open up a customer account get the first item purchased free.

Tier 2:

Cost: $10

If you buy item worth $10 in one day total, get a 100 points added to your customer account.

Tier 3:

Cost: $50

Add/spend $ 50 in a week and get one food/drink item free the nest time.

Tier 4:

Cost: $100

Spend in 20 days. Get 400 points added to the customer account. Get one food/drink item free.

Tier 5:

Cost: $150

Spend $150/month minimum and get special offers available to you at the end of every month. An add up of 500 points to the fresh start of month.

John Dimmer

John Dimmer was one of your guest speakers in our entrepreneurship class. He talked about his journey as an entrepreneur since he graduated from the University of Oregon. He talked about how he was confused about opening his own company or not, when he freshly graduated from college.  But then he decided to work for Puget Sound bank. He talked about how this work experience helped him gain knowledge for being an entrepreneur.

John dimmer talked about the Three C’s he learned while working in Reliance Company. The three C’s were “Character”, “Capacity” and “Capitol”. He talked about how the company and he had mutual benefit from each other.  John also talked about how networking in important when you want to start up your own company. He talks about how we should talk and discuss about our idea of the company to other people and may ask their opinions too. This way you never know we might end up with a great start up company idea. I guess this was a very simple yet informatory advice for us students.  Networking does help in lot of areas of business so why not start before we make our start-up idea.

John talked about how he worked for these companies in order to gain enough knowledge and skills to start up his own company. Now John owns an Airstream and Honda dealership in the area of Seattle. He talked about his Airstream dealership is one of the biggest in the Washington region.  With this the main idea john talks about was the exit strategy for the entrepreneurs. How important it is for every entrepreneur to have an exit strategy for this business plan.

At the end john brings everything together and talks about being an Angel of Tacoma Angel Network. He talks about investors in the organization, and how important is the role of angel in an entrepreneur’s life. After getting help from self saving, friends and family; an angel investor helps an Ent. give the real level in your businesses endeavor.

John gives us good insight over how one should be interested and compelling towards our business idea in order to convince an angel. How one should understand our audience before putting forward any idea.

 Mr. John Dimmer’s presentation helped me understand and look into the life path of an entrepreneur. He gave us good tips for all the inspiring entrepreneurs. 

Erik Hanberg!

Our first guest speaker of the class named Erik Hanberg talked about his entrepreneurial journey till now. He talked about how an idea needs to be put out in the market. May be that’s not the best idea at that time but all you need to is to put it out there. Eric talks about his experiences about the entrepreneurial world. He talks that everyone has ideas but what it takes to give a big step. He also talked about how an entrepreneur life should be. He should either sell self or sell something to be successful in ones ambition.  He also shoes us a graph where he talked about all the other things t was going on at the same time. He helps us understand that if one plan doesn’t work out, the world doesn’t ends and you can start something else using the skills of your previous experience. For example he talked about how he used his marketing skills from his fundraising in Side X Side which he worked with his wife full time. Erik Hanberg talked about his multiple businesses which was an encouragement for a start up entrepreneur that if you have to keep testing your potential until you hit the right one.  At the end he advised on what an entrepreneurial lifestyle should be. His lecture was all in all very helpful.

The Business Plan

The Business Plan

My First plan:

I have been studying in UWT from past one year and one of the things that I have realized lacks here is a good student lounge. I am talking a student lounge where you get food, beverages, books, Wi-Fi and also have late closing hours. There are a couple of café’s around the area, like star bucks, anthem, metro etc but I haven’t seen any café that has long opening hours. They either close at 6 or 8pm. Being a student sometimes I need to work on my assignments for long hours. And café’s provide a nice ambiance to work on them. I think if there exist a café’ lounge that has the facility of long opening hours will attract a lot of students. A lounge that has a nice ambiance to sit with some affordable food items and beverages can turn out to be a success in the area of our university.  So my business plan would be to open a lounge/café’s for student around the university area.

My Second plan:

My second plan would be to make a mobile application that will help call people to a different country on more affordable prices. The reason I picked up this idea is because a lot of my family members live in a different country and sometimes it becomes very hard to talk to them for long hours because either of the prices or the service. One of the mobile applications that help calling internationally is Viber. It definitely does support calling to a different country for free but then the service provided by the app is very low; most of the times the call ends due to low connection. Another famous application is Skype  Skype does provide great service but again even after buying the monthly subscription for calling a different country, the service provided is not up to the mark. So my business plan would be to have an application that provides good service for calling to a different country at affordable rates.

My Third plan:

My third plan isn’t that strong of an idea but that’s what I could think is a current problem that can be solved with a new business plan. As I mentioned before I have many family members that live in a different country. So there are times when I have to send them things from here. Let it be electronics, cloths, etc.  In order to ship them back there it costs a lot of money. Therefore I want to come with a plan that if a customer gets yearly subscription of the offer then the cost of sending parcels to a different country can be reduced. This plan is may be hard to implement but if a diverse background of entrepreneurs come together I think it can pulled off to be a success. 

StartUp.com

Mid 90’s saw the dot com boom. This boom left a handful of millionaires and hundreds to go-for-broke paupers in the wake.

GovWorks.com is another startup company that tried to sow its roots in the market during the boom. The film was shot in two years while the CEO’s (Kaliel Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman) were struggling to make a name of their company.

As shown in the movie, Kaliel Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman are childhood friends who had the main idea behind opening a company called the GovWorks.com. This Company offered a secure way for funds to be exchanged between the government and the citizens. For example fines, taxes, permits and so forth.

So the movie started off by how these business partners are trying to get their company started. As the movie started, Kaliel from the very beginning is shown as the main entrepreneur who was trying to get investors for their company to run. Through the movie it seemed that It started of pretty well.  The company got some good investors such as Vignette Corporation and sapient corporation.

Slowly the company grew. It got some good projects in their hand. I guess one of the main reasons their company grew was, at that point of time no one offered such a facility. So for the people and investors it was something new and they can trust on.

In the middle of the movie we see a theft scene. Kaliel was shown stressed out about it as all the computers were stolen. That means all the main data was gone too. But for some reason I was not able to anticipate its effect on their company. Did that theft really affected Kaliel and GovWorks? Were the thieves were caught? Or was that scene just for added to add some thrill in the movie.

                After like a year or so tom and Kaliel discomfort started to increase. I guess the reason behind it was the difference of their personality when it comes to business. Kaliel was a fighter, he would be out there trying to grow there company better. On the other hand tom seems like a person who gives up on things very easily. To me it seems like he was not serious about sustaining the company for future. He was definitely excited at the time of formation of the company but after the company saw its initial success. Tom kind of got a little laid back. He was the tech guy, and when the website was facing competition being the CEO of the company he should be take control and work things out. I think Kaliel noticed his laid back attitude may be that was the reason he didn’t want tom to work for the company.

The other thing that made me question in the movie was the downfall of the company. As seen in the movie it started happening when Tom left the company. Did it happen because Tom was not there? May be Kaliel couldn’t take care of the tech side as well as of the business side of the company. The main is reason behind the shutting down of the company was not really clear to me. But what I think is that may be Kaliel made a good decision of firing tom out but again on the other hand he should have appointed someone who was better than tom and who could take care of the tech side. Because if you look at the work GovWorks did, it was all about customer satisfaction. If the customers were not happy with the website then there is not point working on the business side trying to get the investors.

I think Startup.com is great movie for the future entrepreneurs. It shows you both the good and bad side of starting up a company. This movie definitely does a great job in showing how a great idea is turned into reality. Then it covers up the rise and fall of yet another start up Dot-com Company.