Archive for the ‘Adventures in Ventures’ category

So it begins

January 13th, 2012

Every year about this time I tend to get delusions of grandeur for what my New Year’s resolutions/goals are and subsequently find myself sick as if my body is trying to slow me down and focus on the marathon instead of the sprint. This year has been no exception except I’m not as sick as I usually get and feel like the vision is attainable. I’m hoping to help build an entrepreneurial community in my current state of residence (and any subsequent places of residence). I plan to attempt a local organization with regular meetings and events, a coordination of various awesome people and build a website as a central aggregation of online resources for the state.

Some of the first awesome people I have had the privilege of meeting is Cory & Lindsey Miller. They launched and run a non-profit entrepreneurial foundation called the <div>. It is a tech community hub dedicated to innovation, creativity and training for a better Oklahoma though it offers free webinars that are great for non-tech entrepreneurs that just need help getting up a website and entering the world of social media. They were kind enough to let me come and infect the minds of anyone that happens to show up to a Business Models for Beginners class.  Here’s to a great year!

Foundry Utah

October 3rd, 2011

A quick shout out to a great organization that helped me find my path and start the journey of entrepreneurship. The Foundry is technically an incubator program sponsored by the University of Utah. In reality, it was and still is a community of like-minded people interested in figuring out how to start a company with nothing but a whiteboard and a few documents. A little MacGyverish sounding but having been part of its creation it definitely had that feel of finding a way to get something done with what you had and expecting it to work.

They’ve been running in semi-stealth mode for well over a year (here is the post I wrote in May 2010 when I joined the Foundry) but have finally put up a website to interact  with the outside world since the world kept asking how to find them. I guess in that way it was a little more A-Teamish. It is a unique program that focuses not on building a business but on building the entrepreneur and letting them build the businesses. The businesses themselves vary in industry and success but the end result is more lifetime entrepreneurs and game changers. Not a bad place to spend a few months. If you are interested in keeping an eye on their mayhem sign-up for their newsletter.

The downside of rose-colored glasses

June 20th, 2011

I’m trying a little experiment with the help of a friend of mine who claims he wants to run his own company but doesn’t have a great idea.  The experiment is to see if I can prompt him to develop a habit of  identifying business ideas or problem/opportunity scenarios. Now he is a great problem solver-that is what he loves to do but he claims he’s just not good at seeing problems. So my first attempt will be to send him emails at random times during the day either requesting that he reply with a new business idea from random sources, a problem that needs solving, or a request to identify a number of problems he observes within the next x number of minutes. Any other ideas on how to turn him into a opportunity recognition machine?

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