1. Record Every Idea

Don’t just think about it and keep it in your head.
No matter what idea you have, WRITE or TYPE it down immediately.
Get it recorded before you lose it in your chemical thunderstorm of a brain. Focus on the main concept. Once it’s down, feel free to continue adding to it with related ideas, more details, possibilities, questions, and next steps. Run with the energy.

Make sure you can record ideas anywhere you are and synchronize your notes on them. Personally I use Evernote which synchronizes notes across my cell phone, laptop, and desktop computer.
The objective is to turn this process into a useful habit that will effectively and efficiently manage ALL of your ideas.

2. Revisit Ideas Later

There are two good reasons to revisit ideas later.
Firstly, if you spend too much time on a single idea without giving it a rest, you’ll notice a diminishing return on your time. You’ll be brainstorming ideas that would otherwise be ruled out if you had just waited and approached the concept with a fresh mind.
Let your subconscious work its magic.

Secondly, there’s always something more important to be doing right now than exploring your latest idea. Your immediate time is best spent on what is already providing direct benefit. Ideas don’t provide short term benefit; only through long term execution do ideas pay off.
When you revisit your idea, add to it. Do a little research and answer some of the questions you’ve had in the back of your mind.

3. Remove Terrible Ideas

After revisiting ideas you’ll notice yourself become more objective. You’ll see all the times you were just caught up in the moment. You’ll start appreciating the process of idea management as you become more effective.
This step is intended to remove the embarrassingly stupid ideas that ALL of us come up with every once in awhile. Okay, more than once in awhile.
Always keep an open mind though, just because your original idea was stupid doesn’t mean a related or subsequent idea is bad. This is why we revisit ideas, to be more objective and to look at things in different perspectives.

If you’re truly following this process, recording ALL your ideas, this step will result in removing dozens of stupid ideas. It’s okay! Why? Because for every dozen you delete, there’ll be one or two decent ones that might make it through the next steps.

4. Research The Remaining Ideas

You can’t think through your entire idea from start to finish without researching it more. You need feedback, you need context.
Here’s some questions to answer in your research:

• What resources would you need to accomplish this?
• Is there already something like this available?
• Is it necessary/useful?
• Who cares about this?
• Could it be adapted? Can you think of some related ideas?
• How could you make money from this? Can it be profitable?

5. Remove Bad Ideas

After researching further you may find there’s already something that will accomplish what you were thinking. Maybe you find out no one wants your thing. Maybe you realize the technical challenges for accomplishing your idea are far beyond your expectations and capacity.

Through research you’ll obtain information, a type of feedback, that helps you determine if your idea makes it to the next level of time investment or not.
Keep track of which step/level your individual ideas are at. This should be self-evident from your notes/feelings. However, some ideas could get mushed together with everything else that is going on and you may lose track of your best ideas and their research status.

6. Talk to people

People have a lot of stupid ideas and this is why we are afraid to share them immediately. We wait and think them through so as to save embarrassment. This isn’t very productive, because talking to people is the fastest way to make progress. However, it’s not nice to constantly bug your friends about your new idea every week.

Now that you’ve determined your idea isn’t bad, talk to your target market, perfect customer/user, or whoever will listen to you. You need feedback from other people to gain a more objective perspective on the idea. This is a very crucial part of the process of idea management.

People will also direct you to where the value lies. Markets win every time, not the ideas.
After gaining experience constantly conducting market research you’ll learn to determine the source of feedback as relevant or not. If the person isn’t in your target market, their feedback is usually useless. The point is to start understanding who your market really is. This could require talking to dozens, or sometimes more than a hundred people about it extensively.

7. Remove or Archive So-So Ideas

Now that you’ve done some research/planning and gathered your initial feedback it’s time to remove the ideas that just aren’t as great as they first seemed. There is always another opportunity around the corner. If you think there may be an improvement or opportunity down the road, archive the idea for later.

As you obtain more experience in idea management you’ll get better at judging the completeness of your initial feedback. If you talked to a couple dozen people and no one was interested, many people would stop there. As an experienced entrepreneur you’ll be able to gauge when it’s right to keep on going or to stop wasting your time.

8. Do Something

If all you do is think, plan, and talk to people you’ll never actually make anything. The next step is to start doing something. Talk to vendors, recruit a team, make a prototype, try making a sale, etc.
Entrepreneurship is all about speed and implementation. Fail fast & often. Remember that.

You’ll never have a perfect plan, and writing a business plan is just pretending to be in control of things you can’t actually control.

9. Gather Real Feedback

Before you “complete” your ENTIRE business you need real life feedback. This needs to be based on something you have actually done besides thinking, planning, and talking to people. This could be a mockup, prototype, or actual product/service. This obtaining “real” feedback on something you have done will show you misconceptions, new applications, and might even land you a sale.

Invest as much effort, time, and money into the idea as you’re willing to in order to gather feedback so as to judge its potential. These last two steps: doing something and getting real feedback, encompasses everything you need to help you decide whether or not to commit 100%. So risk what time you’re willing.

10. Be Critical

Now that you’ve completed all of the above, it’s time to be super critical.
Decide which ideas are not worth your time RIGHT NOW. Play devil’s advocate, or have someone else play the role.

You may think it’s still a good idea, but the question in this stage is whether or not it’s worth your time, based on everything else you could be doing.
What is your opportunity cost? Is this really the best use of your skills, resources, and connections?
Is this something better undertaken after building skills, resources, or connections in your industry?
Congratulate yourself on the effort you’ve taken up to this point. When you sum all of your efforts you’ll realize how much progress you’ve actually made.

11. Commit 100%

If you’re 100% certain you’re willing to take a risk on this idea based on the massive amount of planning, research, work, and real world feedback obtained… then it’s time to commit.
If you’re still a tiny bit unsure if the idea will work and succeed, better leave it be for awhile longer. There’s always another opportunity around the corner.

Lastly, but far from least important: consider your internal drive for this idea. Is it a passion of yours or are you just taking an opportunity in the marketplace to generate revenue? This is probably one of the most important factors for success.

It’s most optimal when you can find an opportunity in the marketplace that happens to fit with one of your passions; however, this is rare. Hopefully, it at least holds some interest in you.
Imagine yourself going through the process making this idea into a realty. It could consume a few years of your life; ask yourself if you’ll enjoy it, or just the $$$?

When the outcome is uncertain, you should probably be certain you’ll enjoy or benefit from the process. Ask yourself: would you work on this project for 5 years without pay? (even if just part time)

Also remember: Passion is NOT something you’re ‘interested in’. It’s something that excites you like nothing else.

By following this idea management process, you’ll start seeing the bigger picture and eventually make sense of the beautiful chaos that is your mind.

Last winter’s program centered on Charter Cities, essentially designing a city from scratch. This year’s winter program focused on redesigning education & pedagogy.

As a mostly self-taught entrepreneur, I have strong passion about the education process and was excited to participate in this winter’s program. Although I had prepared a variety of ideas and notes beforehand, the limitations of the two weeks still challenged myself and others.

Most of the time was spent getting to know the other eleven students across the different schools. This was very valuable in determining what worked best in education for people in general, as well as what would work best in terms of implementing ideas in the local Tri-College environment.

Overall, we concluded we all had one common goal: Adaptive Expertise

From Babson’s entrepreneurial perspective, this means educating students to handle any kind of business environment, to act more as business consultants than employees for a specific company or industry. This would include learning critical skills such as communication, leadership, team work, etc.

Our group also discussed experiential learning, finding that both Babson and Olin College (heavier on constructionism) leveraged this educational strategy much more so than Wellesley. However we still saw opportunity for better or more experiential learning both at Babson and Olin College.

This leads me to my central point, which is: to value self-directed education leveraging intrinsic motivation in students, which could be associated with critical pedagogy.

Educators should see themselves more as facilitators of education, than the delivery points. Higher education professors should take the role of a mentor rather than a ‘traditional teacher’. Students like to learn in their own ways.

Learning communities also take advantage of the autonomy (and thus intrinsic motivation) that I’m advocating. E-Tower, a living-learning community for entrepreneurship at Babson College, has been an incredible environment for myself and other students.

My Suggestions:

Assessment

• Knowledge Vs. Understanding
  • The Google Factor – If you can find the answer in 90 seconds using Google, then redesign your exam question to assess the student’s understanding instead of knowledge.
• Anonymous Grading- This would prevent both conscious and unconscious psychological biases towards students, which many students believe can affect their assessment by up to an entire letter grade.
  • Blackboard already has functionality for anonymous grading, but many do not know it even exists.

Classroom Technology

• Google Doc Chatroom- Increase communication bandwidth in the classroom by allowing students to have side conversations without disrupting the main conversation.
  • It would be advantageous to couple this with speech-to-text software that is logging the classroom lecture/discussion so that students in side-conversations can ‘catch up’ with the main discussion if they can’t multi-task.
• Video Record ALL Lectures – This gives students the ability to choose when and where they want to consume class content and literally creates a more discussion & work based class time.

• Student Videos: Presentations, Reflections, and more. Video is a powerful medium that people should know how to leverage by the time they enter the ‘the real world’.
  • Video Production Center – This would be shared by the three colleges to help students make high quality videos. This would help market not only the institutions but also the individuals. Videos are simply exponentially more likely to be shared on the Internet, leading to an slew of new opportunities for the creators and viewers.
  • Multimedia Literacy – In the new world we live in, students should be able to leverage the various media our society uses.

Ideas For New Classes

• World Awareness – An entire course dedicated towards broadening the student’s awareness of what is out there in the world by discussing a TED Talk (or similar video) in each class.
• Motivation & Self-Exploration - Too many students graduate college without knowing what they should do or want to do. This course would help students find purpose in life by understanding their unique motivations and passions, and so they can create long term goals and determine career paths.
• Pursue a Startup – Until Babson offers pro-rated tuition for entrepreneurs (something that is seriously needed), it makes a lot of sense to have an independent study style course on pursuing a startup, which would allow collaboration between students in the three colleges.
• TriCollege Rhetoric – By integrating students across the schools in their freshmen year for a Tri-College writing class that would satisfy course requirements, we can foster integration between the schools early on with students. Of course, we advocate for students to choose their own topics while looking for similar interests so they can collaborate.

Conclusion

Overall our group had a very limited amount of time to tackle a very large subject. Additionally, the group was completely student-run, which caused a variety of communication, management, and leadership issues. Most agreed that we likely learned more from the process of the program than from the actual research and work conducting on pedagogy and Tri-College collaboration.

There were also many local-specific improvements that were outlined, but not relevant for me to share in this blog post. Due to the time constraint, the group mostly reverted to Tri-College collaboration over higher education in general. I, however, maintained my passion and energy on education in general and focused on the suggestions listed above.

I used this two week program to broaden my experience in something not specifically entrepreneurial, but nevertheless still constructive. I had a few personal take-aways, such one reminder from a Wellesley student that: continuously trying without sufficient understanding (entrepreneurship) in your general field (business) may be no more effective than waiting to get the ‘official stamp of approval’, in the form of bachelor, masters, or doctorate degree and then giving it your all.

Entrepreneurship, which I’ve recognized for quite some time, is all about enjoying the process; understanding you’re most likely going to fail, but holding hope in the slightest possibility you’ll succeed. This is all the more reason to do something you love and which you are passionate; to not get caught up in something you dread solely for the chance to ‘win big’.

After I shutdown ShuffleChat, I felt I needed to find my next big thing and FAST. However, in the cloud of dust from spinning my wheels, desperately seeking the one idea that will give me enough traction to take off, I saw an opportunity out of no where.

One day I visited GoDaddy.com to check if a domain name was available and I noticed a small banner at the bottom of their website talking about a video contest. Apparently, GoDaddy crowdsourced TV commercials in the spring by running a contest with huge cash prizes.

Now GoDaddy was running another contest with 3x as much cash ($600K total) and a small twist. You had to make a 25 second TV commercial that would compel a viewer to visit their website to watch another minute or so of the video. It’s a great marketing strategy that has been deployed by other major companies.

GoDaddy announced the contest at the end of July and set the deadline as September 30th. Unfortunately, I was a little late to the game and only found out about it mid-August, and got serious about it near the end of August.

Two months to brainstorm, arrange, shoot, edit, and perfect, is barely enough time- and I had to do it in less than one.

A great way to start off the semester

I got serious with the contest when I had a brilliant idea for a parody on the recently successful Old Spice commercials. I thought the spin would work perfectly for GoDaddy. However, when I emailed them about it they clarified that no parodies on existing commercials could be submitted.

Determined to produce something, I brainstormed my ass off. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to visualize the concept of domain names & websites in a TV commercial. I want to give a big thanks to my friends at E-Tower for listening to all my crazy ideas.

However, as time ticked away, I realized if I don’t pick an idea in the next few days I won’t have enough time to complete the project.

Then I got lucky. TWICE.

With barely enough time remaining in the contest to actually produce the commercial, I came up with a very simple and straightforward concept that I knew had a good chance of winning and could be filmed at my college.

The second time I got lucky was finding the perfect model. It required a sexy and dominant female who could take control of things. I must have looked through hundreds of models before I found the wonderful Crissy Lynn. She went well beyond my expectations and played a critical role in making whole commercial work out better.

Overall, I went from selecting my final concept (classroom setting) to finishing EVERYTHING in two weeks. Considering all of the factors, I am very happy with the final product:

Note: The video above is the most extreme version. Overall, I submitted six versions, which replaced ‘over the edge’ parts with something more appropriate. GoDaddy only approved the most conservative version. The Web-only part did not change in the other versions except for the first few seconds.

Why I didn’t win (anything)

The simplest and easiest thing for me, or anyone to say, is that GoDaddy is just stupid. But here’s really why I lost and should have won:

GoDaddy didn’t follow what they asked for, which was brand fit and comedy (giggles as they said). Ask anyone to describe GoDaddy’s brand and they will talk about attractive women 9/10 times.

Secondly, but most importantly, GoDaddy didn’t commit to the purpose of their marketing format. If the ENTIRE point of the TV commercial is to get people to the website, then I don’t understand why they picked the ones they did. Most of the commercials they picked had very little reason for a viewer to watch more.

Perhaps my commercial was too sexy for GoDaddy. Perhaps GoDaddy secretly wanted to get away from their sex’d up brand image. However, they should have made this clear in the contest description video (which is no longer available on their website).

What I learned

Good is Good enough – I figured that since I won’t have enough time to respond to GoDaddy’s request for changes, I had to record as many variations of my video as possible. This led me to plan 4x as much stuff to film as was necessary. After we started to shoot I quickly adapted and cut out all the variations except for one. In one way I did follow the ‘good is good enough’ rule by not hiring a professional camera man. The final product did have some camera mistakes, especially the lighting, but overall the quality was decent and something better would not have made it win.

80:20 Rule – Focus on what offers the most value – I spent way too much time on perfecting the web-only video when I should have realized the TV spot was MUCH more important. This became apparent when the videos starting going online and the voting started; GoDaddy did not release the web-only content for each submission.

If you need more time, plan accordingly - I initially scheduled the first shoot with Crissy ASAP, because I figured we’d need time to reshoot if necessary. I underestimated how long everything would take and I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been on the first shoot. This meant we had to reshoot most of the commercial again. Although it went faster the second time around, I could have saved a lot of frustration and costs if I just gave myself a few more days preparation for the first shoot.

Bonus Info:

• My Dell desktop crashed over 100 times while trying to edit the 1080p HD footage. I learned to save after every 2-3 changes. Serves me right for selling my custom built desktop that had a GTX 260 because I need to be ‘productive’ in college.
• We got kicked out of building we filmed in by the campus police because we ran past midnight on one of the shoots.
• We were originally going to use this porn song for the soundtrack, but they didn’t want to license it to me. Never got an official reason.

Special Thanks – Gerry, Jon, Dave – thanks for all your help & support! Also thanks to Jason and all of the other extras.

How GoDaddy Could Have Done Better

The contest needed to be a few weeks longer – Sure a time crunch is necessary to encourage competition, but it was more a negative than a positive in GoDaddy’s case. Besides a handful of submissions, EVERYONE submitted theirs on the last day of the contest. Now, this wasn’t because of some strategy to increase the chances of winning, because no matter what happened ratings wise, the CEO made the final decisions.

Better communication – GoDaddy offered a video that explained the contest, a pretty simple legal document that outlined the rules/expectations, and an email address where you could submit questions. GoDaddy should have realized they needed a phone number people could call in to discuss the contest. I think the main reason why they got poor submissions in both contests (spring and summer) was because they didn’t work with the filmmakers. They simply put out a call to action and hoped for the best.

Better Upload System – The form by which to upload your submission didn’t even state your upload progress, and there was no confirmation number to verify it was received correctly. When you’re uploading hundreds of megabytes this is kind of important. Additionally, no one really knew how to submit variations of their video. On this point, GoDaddy should have changed the rules to allow variations upon request after the deadline so people didn’t have to rush to record every possible variation before the deadline.

In conclusion – I’m bummed they didn’t select my video, but I had a blast producing it and would totally do it all over again. The contest did kind of remind me about the pros and cons of video production. So I don’t know if I’ll ever get into it full time, but who knows- maybe you’ll see a viral video of mine in the future. I do have some pretty crazy ideas.

I didn’t write a post summarizing everything that happened to my last startup, LinkLarry, but after reading YouCastr’s post-mortem I thought it made a lot of sense to review my experience with ShuffleChat. After all, I did start this blog to share my experiences and lessons learned through entrepreneurship. This Fall I intend on sticking to a routine and posting useful content weekly. But who knows, maybe my next venture will render me completely captivated.

Anyways, to make up for my lack of posting lately, here comes a long one… be warned.

Summary Of What Happened

I started ShuffleChat with my college roommate six months ago. It was our first night of spring semester when he showed me a new website he discovered over the winter break. He was ecstatic about things people were doing on the site; people were being very creative. It was called Chatroulette.com, and after spending a couple hours on the website we both realized we were in a position to make something better.

I’m an Internet & tech guy and my roommate is a marketing & sales guy; we had a lot of complementary skills. We foresaw the site and the social medium it created taking off. As we predicted, a couple months later the trend we spotted reached its tipping point and received major press such as NYTimes, CNN, WashingtonPost, just to name a few. This was the peak of the random video chat meme.

One of our main objectives with ShuffleChat was to clean up the experience. Chatroulette had (and still has) major issues with user nudity and other obscenities. I just checked the site while writing this and saw a guy masturbating the first time I clicked next. People can’t stay on the site for more than a few minutes without witnessing this first hand. We figured by just offering a cleaner alternative we could get enough users and innovate from there.

ShuffleChat took longer than we expected to launch for a few reasons. We started out building our own chat application from scratch, but this turned out to be a disaster. Things weren’t going well and time was of the essence so I quickly implemented an alternative in a matter of a week, pulling all-nighters like it was my business.

Unfortunately, this was an out-of-the-box piece of software and those who made our launch night in April can attest to the software just barely working. People could chat, but disconnections were frequent among other issues. In retrospect we rushed might have rushed it, but then again we pushed our launch date several times and no one knew how long the window of opportunity would stay open. We did succeed on our primary objective though, we had zero reports of inappropriate behavior; mainly because we were very selective in our marketing campaigns.

We shut the site down temporarily while I fixed the software issues and so we could focus on the marketing challenge, the larger elephant in the room in my opinion. We still needed thousands of more people to come to the site before it became it’s own traffic engine.

Shutting Down – The Reasons

Marketing/User logistics

Anyone that has tried chatroulette knows that it isn’t so much ‘random’ video chat as it is ‘speed’ video chat. People take one look at you and decide whether or not to move on. The average male will be “nexted” about a dozen times before having the chance to have a conversation. This environment creates a huge requirement for users.

For example, let’s say we wanted 100 people online at all times- 50 two-way conversations. Since it’s essentially speed dating people by what they look like, people will go through everyone else online within a matter of minutes. With an average time online per person of 7-10 minutes, it equates to ~600 people/hour, or over 10K people/day or over 300K/month. That’s an enormous amount of traffic, which usually takes months to build and it still wouldn’t even be enough.

In this case, chatroulette had the ultimate first-mover advantage; it started an entirely new social medium. Simply, the incredible amount of users required to jump start an alternative website is the number one issue every competitor had. Less than a handful of sites out of hundreds overcame this barrier to entry, and the ones that did mostly leveraged existing website assets (they already had traffic to refer).

Turned out to be a fad/meme

Chatroulette peaked with their press in March. It’s estimated that since then the site’s traffic has decreased by around half its peak. Having studied the market for so long it makes complete sense why this would turn out to be a fad. My co-founder and I understood this risk when we started, but we also felt we could innovate the service to decrease the fad effect. This is what Andrey Ternovskiy, the founder of chatroulette, is trying to do now.

For example, one of the ways I planned to innovate the medium was to focus on quality engagements between users. I wanted to eliminate the large amount of time people spent waiting to find a good connection. I planned to do this through increasing relevance between users.

I won’t get into all the features and algorithms I planned, because overall accomplishing this objective would lead to an exponentially higher user requirement. When there’s already an incredible challenge to get enough users, increasing the requirement exponentially would completely outweigh the benefit of better service.

Revenue Model?

Eliminating the inappropriate behavior would definitely have gotten us in the room with advertisers, but ultimately relying on ads is a very risky venture because if the concept (most of which are untested) doesn’t pan out you’ll never get the chance to work with ads. Making a product/service that someone is willing to pay for is so much better (less risky). For starters, it focuses you on solving a problem/need- which is absolutely critical in traditional entrepreneurship.

Throughout my research for alternative applications of ShuffleChat I found some better revenue models, but none of which created an all around good opportunity for a business. I kind of have set high standards for myself since I’ve done so many things. I see the value in taking a lot of initiatives, because eventually you’ll come across the right way to make a light bulb. Personally though, I’d rather jump the curve and make fiber optics, or a laser, something cooler than a light bulb.

404: Passion Not Found

I’ve accepted the fact that I’m an introvert. My co-founder is the exact opposite and that’s why our partnership worked; we complemented each other in many ways. However, in the end I’m NOT the type of person that would go on everyday to use our service like he would. While it may not be the most significant factor, it’s definitely better for the entrepreneur to be crazy about using their own product.

What I Learned

Focus on your exclusive role

I think we could have made more progress if my co-founder and I both focused on exclusive roles. If I didn’t help out so much on the marketing campaigns, such as the promotional videos, I would have had more time to ensure the tech wouldn’t glitch or fail. If he didn’t spend so much time on product development with me, we might have gotten enough users to the site to relaunch with a better version.

Be Pragmatic, Don’t over-complicate things

We wasted a lot of time focusing things that didn’t matter. For example we easily spent a couple weeks on promotional videos that ended up not even being used for a variety of reasons. We also wasted a lot of time planning every feature possibly imaginable. I myself spent way too much time preparing a Drupal site that could do things we wouldn’t need for another few months. This is a lesson I keep getting pounded into me: don’t fantasize about your product/service too much.

Don’t get feature crazy. Get it built -> Launch -> Listen to customers, then fantasize/brainstorm and iterate.

Keep the big picture in mind

In the beginning we both reminded each other we were in a race and that every single day mattered. We both worked our asses off, all while doing full course loads. However, in regards to effectiveness, I wish we implemented weekly meetings from the start to reflect on the bigger picture and avoid spinning our wheels. I definitely think the 80/20 rule applies here. 80% of what we worked on had an extremely small impact on the success of the startup.

Ask yourself right now, what things am I doing or plan to do that are not absolutely critical? In the big picture of things, are these things absolutely necessary? If not, stop them. Put it on hold. Focus on the most critical components in the early stage of your startup. The luxury of doing non-critical tasks can be afforded when you’re profitable.

Track EVERYTHING from the START

While I did setup Google Analytics and configured most of our marketing campaigns, I didn’t realized until later that there were some important factors that I wished I tracked from the start. For example, there were some interesting Facebook campaigns that I wished we tracked separately to understand the difference in their effectiveness.

Plan Plan Plan

I’m biased, because I love to plan, but from my experience with ShuffleChat, planning saved us many times, and would have saved us many more times if we valued it more. When done right, planning can help you be pragmatic. It’s a little different when you’re in an extremely time sensitive startup, but there’s always a balance to be had.

It really comes down to how you plan (the execution); planning can help you avoid mistakes or useless work, but it can also paralyze you and send you in the wrong direction sometimes. Achieve a balance.

Be an expert on your customer

Along with an emphasis on planning, I think it’s critical entrepreneurs master their customer. If you don’t know exactly what your customer wants, needs, likes, feels, dreams, hates you are shooting in the dark with assumptions. Market research is so important, and it’s best done by talking to people… LOTS of people.

You don’t need college, it just helps

So I finished my first year at the top entrepreneurship school in the country, completing their renowned FME program, only to find that I learned 3x as much working on my own startup than I did in all my classes combined. In entrepreneurship learning by doing is exponentially more effective. Disclaimer: I’m sure if I was the CEO of my FME company I would had a completely different experience. So I guess I should rephrase it to: learning by doing something you want is exponentially more effective. However, I’ll be posting more on my thoughts on education in the future.

It definitely depends upon the person, but I think if you have enough passion, determination, and Internet access, anything is possible. It’s all about becoming self-sufficient in my opinion.

Before I end though on the topic of college and my experience so far with Babson, I have to say that living in the E-Tower has completely made my college experience. Living entrepreneurship with 20 other hardcore entrepreneurs has been life changing. If you know you’re an entrepreneur, start networking with others like you, and find a way to live with them. Surround yourself with great people. 3am ideas by yourself is no where near as fun.

Moving Forward

Throughout the summer I worked on pivoting ShuffleChat in Babson’s Summer Venture Program. I went into the program with a plan that got torn to shreds by week 2 and went on to research and plan a ton of new applications, mostly centered around video and video chat. In my own terms I feel I made a lot of progress.

However, I truly feel this project has run its course and it’s time to officially shut it down so I can get my head and decision making away from it’s constraints. In closing, I’m glad I went after it, and if I could do the last 6+ months over again the same way I would (minus the stress, obsession, and mistakes).

The good news is that I have plenty of ideas that I’m looking into for my next startup. Some video related, some not. Also, in the past I turned down a few projects for Websites Unleashed, so I plan to take up new work on that front and sharpen my marketing skills before I commit to a new venture. I’m looking forward to applying more of what I’ve learned in Internet marketing, social media, and blogging over these last few years.

I also plan on going through my giant backlog of startup reading material. My Amazon Wishlist is currently over 60 books, and I still have half a dozen in a box waiting to be consumed. I love reading up on anything that might help me in business.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my lengthy post and got something out of it. I feel I have much more to say, but it’ll have to wait for future posts.

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I went to TechCrunch Disrupt pitching an idea that was tangent to a core aspect of my video chatting startup. One of the things I really want to accomplish through ShuffleChat is connecting RELEVANT people from all around the world to video chat based on very specific and advanced criteria. Essentially I want to create an automated social networking platform that is video-chat-centric.

However, there are major barriers to accomplishing this dream, such as the extremely technical matching system/algorithm. It will also require exponentially more users than random video chatting websites- all of which already have major difficulties obtaining enough users to make a useful service.

A new application: I’ve always felt that networking at large business/industry events has been very inefficient. You can only talk to so many people in a limited amount of time and theres very little indication of who is relevant. Yet we have these smart phones that can/should be able to communicate with each other wirelessly to alert people when there is someone relevant nearby.

So I want to introduce: Relevant2.Me – A concept for a new platform that will understand everything about you as a person and help you find and connect with other people you really need to meet.

For example, you could use the service to find friends, co-founders, business deals, mentors, artists, and other synergistic people/connections.

As you can guess, I’ve always been interested in the concept of context and relevance. My previous startup focused on crowd-sourcing relevant links for blog posts. Now I’m applying the concept to something I feel is more important: People.

I understand and appreciate how the web has enabled people to connect in more ways than ever before, but I still think we can provide tools such as Relevant2.Me to nudge people in establishing productive connections and relationships.

I know I can’t make this happen all by myself, so I’m looking for help. If you’re interested in Relevant2.Me, please contact me. Also feel free to post any comments, suggestions, and or critiques on the concept below.

Lastly, check back to my blog later for updates on my other side projects. I will also be posting interesting business ideas I’ve been accumulating but decided I don’t have the time, resources, or passion to execute. [tweetmeme]

Kate Ray

I’ve been interested in the semantic web for the last couple years. My previous startup, LinkLarry, tried to improve the amount of relationship data on the web by increasing the linking around content. However, the overall theme of the semantic web is that these relationships are described to add even more meaning between the content. Not an easy task.

Image via Wikipedia

Kate shows Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich) and David Karger (MIT) advocating for a more hybrid approach to the semantic web by providing some structure through ontologies while utilizing the unique intelligence of the human brain. This is important because the challenge for the semantic web is to find the best method to encoding all this meaning between content/entities.

I don’t think real meaning can be derived automatically through some super duper crazy analysis software using natural language processing and coming close to AI. At first I did think this way, but then I realized I was just a teenager dreaming. Instead I saw crowd-sourcing as a hybrid solution and so I tried this with LinkLarry. Unfortunately, I found out context is very important to consider when getting something to be used optimally.

Context is everything.

I think at the very fundamental level, the semantic web comes back down to the interaction with humans; of whom have the primary understanding of things. This is why I like the hybrid approach Bernstein and Karger were suggesting and would be interested in hearing and reading more from them on how this might work.

However, in an even bigger picture of things what’s more interesting is how the semantic web crosses over into physical reality. This is something the film does not touch on (and for good reason). Eventually all physical objects will be tagged with information about themselves and how they relate to others. Our mobile device of the future will understand the context of everything. More importantly, it will understand the context in relationship to you! I think this is an amazing future, exploding with opportunities of valuable applications.

What would you like to do in future if software/hardware could understand the relationships between everything?

Inspiring

TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 was pretty good timing for me. My startup has been changing directions over the past few weeks and it was time to take a step back and see what everyone else has been working on for a few days. The event definitely gave me some valuable perspective. After talking to a few dozen people I began to see where I personally fit into the ecosystem. There were dozens of exhibitors and I probably talked to more than half of them. The quality ranged from laughable to quite impressive.

The few startups that stood out to me:

6rounds is a really cool video chat platform that allows users to play games, watch youtube videos together, and more. Looking forward to speaking with Dany Fishel (Founder & CEO) about a potential partnership with my startup.

One i.tv’s new features include aggregating and attributing comments around the web to points in time in videos. They are also linking live (and non-live) TV with webpages. This among other things could seriously improve TV news.

There were a few other good looking startups, but the ones I listed above I think could really take off.

At first I wasn’t sure how good the event would be for me. I didn’t really know anyone else going and you could say my networking skills are below average. Fortunately, my good friend Alex Debelov from Babson came down last minute and we had a great time working the event to meet some of the top players.

Highlights from the event:

• I met another entrepreneur from my very small (1sq mile) hometown in Califon, NJ.
• I met Matt Coffin, a Babson alum who founded LowerMyBills.com and sold it for $330m. Now he’s very active angel investor.
• I received feedback from several VC and Angel investors, including Wesley Chan from Google Ventures. Although Wesley didn’t ‘get’ my pitch during the VC speed dating event, he was cool enough to grab a few drinks together at the after-party and talk about entrepreneurship among other things.
• I also met many of the staff from TechCrunch, including their CEO Heather Harde, who desperately needed my advice on which shoes to wear to the after party. The black ones were the obvious choice.
• And last but far from least, I welcomed Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter) to the event Wednesday morning. I even had the opportunity get his thoughts on my startup’s new direction.  The best part was that his feedback was the final thumbs up I needed to hit the ground running.

Overall it was a great event and in conclusion, now is the time to crush it!

Less than 9 weeks left until D-Day.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted into the Babson Summer Venture Program (SVP) to incubate ShuffleChat!

This is very exciting, because throughout this program I will receive free housing, working space, resources, and mentors. Additionally, at the end of the program there is a demo day for every business to present in front of angel investors and venture capitalists. This is an entrepreneur’s dream summer.

My grand vision for ShuffleChat is very ambitious, but with enough help and support from Babson and others I know it is possible.

Now the only thing left to do is not get too distracted and finish the end of my semester with good grades for finals. Wish me luck!

Due to this new responsibility and time consumption, the blog I’ve been planning and writing will be delayed until the summer.

I want to make sure I have high quality content for my readers, and this requires additional time and effort. I have over 50 quality blog posts planned from the lessons I’ve learned from my past ventures. I don’t want to be posting fluff content like other bloggers do.

So please be patient while I get everything ready. I plan on posting a minimum of twice a week for a full year once I fully launch the blog. That’s my commitment. Pre-writing everything is very important because managing school, business, and a blog won’t be an easy task.

I’ll be posting more details later. In the mean time, check out my story.