aaron360 blogs

Startup Book Club - The Linchpin

aaron — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:32:21 +0000

Just for fun, I headed out to the San Francisco Startup Book Club meeting on Saturday. I found the club, which recently merged with the San Francisco Business Book Club, on meetup.com. It’s just an eclectic group of people from around the Bay Area that meet once a month outside the Book Passage in the ferry building to informally discuss a different book.

This month’s book was The Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? by Scott Godin.

My two cents? The book is far from earth shattering, but a quick and easy read nonetheless. It is very much a behavioral book rather than practical guide for a certain business problem. Godin has a very interesting framework based on using (what he describes as) “art” in your work to make you indispensible.

Unfortunately this will be my only opportunity to check out the club while I’m in town. Thanks to Scott for putting it together and everyone that dropped by.

StartupWeekend Party

aaron — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:54:15 +0000

Last night I got out to then StartupWeekend Preparty hosted at Younoodle HQ.

It wasn’t an earth-shattering party by any means, but the combination of the StartupWeekend Crowd and the Younoodle office/employees made it exciting none the less.

StartupWeekend, if you’re not familiar, is an event that is held around the country where participants have one weekend to pitch business concepts, divide themselves into teams to work on the best ideas, and try to hammer out as much as they can in a few short days. Many companies have gotten a solid start (i.e. a working proof-of-concept) coming out of a StartupWeekend and proceeded to grow into legitimate startups.

Younoodle, who hosted the party, is a networking site for entrepreneurs and people involved with startups—it has a pretty cool “Startup Predictor” which uses an algorithm to value businesses based on information entered by site members. On the back end, Younoodle aggregates and analyzes this data for sale to investors and other entities. (If you decide to join, hit me up!)

The Younoodle HQ is in South Park (in the SOMA neighborhood). It was a cool little converted-warehouse space that has the requisite ping-pong table, couches, huge flat-screen TV and other startup amenities. Perfect for a party. (NOTE: Didn’t get any pictures myself but I found a good pic here from another event).

I’ve got a few more exciting things on the horizon including a funding party at Heyzap and the TechCrunch Social Currency CrunchUp.

San Francisco Apartment

aaron — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 20:20:52 +0000

Just arrived in San Francisco last night to start my internship on Monday morning. Check out my apartment and view of the city from the financial district.

Rendering

aaron — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:01:45 +0000

So I’m stuck in the Digital Union rendering out the “final” cut of the What If? video and I thought I’d pass the time by blogging about it. Two weeks ago I had never heard about this place—and over that time I’ve spent a few days here working on the video.

The Digital Union is a center in the OSU Science and Engineering Library that has a bunch of MAC/PCs loaded with audio, video and photo editing software. I’ve been using Final Cut Pro to edit the video from the What If? Innovation Summit because the video was captured with an HD codec not compatible with my Adobe Premiere setup. Fun, right?

The “proctors” here are pretty knowledgeable and there are some other cool services (like loaner Flips and decks) that I don’t need now, but sure are good to know about.

What If? 2010 Video:

2010 Emerald City Music Games

aaron — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:33:19 +0000

Wednesday night I got out to the Emerald City Music Games at Dublin Coffman High School—this will probably be the only DCI (Drum Corps International) show that I get to this summer).

For the uninitiated: Drum Corps—short for Drum & Bugle Corps—is a youth marching music activity, that is like an amped up marching band. Participants, who must be 21 years or younger, make a full time (24/7) commitment to the corps, perfecting a show that they perform 30+ times in 3 months on a national tour.

The corps in attendance on Wednesday were:

For videos and pics, check out the links below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/apfriedman/sets/72157624454161556/show/

Long Overdue Update

aaron — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:12:56 +0000

If social media is a bandwagon…I regrettably fell off there for a while. Blogging is a lot of work and so is business school. But no excuses. I’ve been watching a few of Gary Vaynerchuk’s talks lately which have reminded me why I started the hitting the blogs/twitter hard in the first place. So I’m back.

Additionally, it doesn’t hurt that I have something interesting to blog about again. As part of a similar program to last year’s Ireland program, I’ll be interning for a San Francisco Technology company called Pie Digital beginning in mid-July. I’m still working out the details of what I’ll be doing, but I’ll look forward to posting some content from the left coast in a few weeks.

I also am going to start playing with format. Looking at the blog over the past year+, it could use a little facelift. For your sake and mine, you’ll see a few video blogs, some photo-only stuff (time to start you using that Flickr Pro Account some more) and shorter, easier-to-read posts.

Looking forward to it. Encouragement (in fact feedback of all kinds) is welcome.

Silicon Valley Trip - Day 2

aaron — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:23:03 +0000

The second day of the San Francisco trip began with a sort of déjà-vu: Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) Ventures invited us back for a meeting with associate Joshua Raffaelli to get a different perspective on the firm’s operations. After arriving at Menlo Park a half-hour early, we took a detour back to The Sundeck for a cup of coffee before starting our day. Sitting in The Sundeck dining room with a 270°-view of the surrounding mountains I thought, “This would be a pretty nice way to start every morning.”

After breakfast, we returned to the Millenium Falcon Conference Room at DFJ to meet with Joshua. He was kind enough to bring us some swag (DFJ pens, notebooks, hats and bags) while he talked about the day-to-day deal-making and due diligence processes of the firm. The day before we had met with the Don Wood, a Managing Partner at DFJ, who focused more on DFJ investing strategy including its global network of affiliates.

Our next stop was at Garage Tech Ventures—home of startup-guru Guy Kawasaki—in the heart of Palo Alto. Here we piled into a small conference where a picture hung of the eponymous garage (located just a few blocks away from the Garage Tech Office) where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard got their start. Managing Director, Bill Reichert, discussed the firm’s history: how it began as an accelerator and became one of the most important Silicon Valley early stage VC firms of the past decade.

After lunch at Il Fornaio, the group made its way to the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. Incidentally, the research center (which is a retired Navy base) is adjacent to the Googleplex property in Mountain View. Here we met with Tim Collins, CEO of KleenSpeed: a resident research company at the center which is developing electric racecar technology. After touring the KleenSpeed facility we met with Lisa Lockyer and several of her colleagues at the NASA Technology Partnerships Office.

Finally, we made our way back to the place where our two-days-in-Silicon-Valley started: the law offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) for an attorney panel. Professor Oglevee, an organizer of the trip, had suggested that we use this opportunity to do a venture capital “term-sheet” workshop. A term-sheet is the non-binding document signed by an entrepreneur and venture capital firm when entering an investment deal. Daphne, Alison and Phuong (the attorneys on the panel) gave us each three different term sheet templates and we discussed the differences between them and what to look for when signing one. As it turns out, the keys are: READ YOUR TERM SHEET and ASK QUESTIONS.

After the panel we had one last chance to thank Jim Terranova, Fisher alumnus and Director of WS investments at WSGR, for organizing the trip and supporting the next generation of buckeye entrepreneurs. Thanks again Jim!

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life blog and Fisher Entrepreneurship Association blog.

See more pictures at flickr.

Silicon Valley Trip - Day 1

aaron — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:51:00 +0000

I’ve spent the past 24 hours in San Francisco and Silicon Valley on an educational trip with the Fisher Entrepreneurship Association visiting venture capitalists. The trip was hosted by Jim Terranova who runs WS Investments, the VC arm of the Silicon Valley law firm WSGR.

Yesterday’s itinerary included

Breakfast with Jim and Mario Rosati (the “R” in WSGR)
Don Wood, Managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) Ventures
Lunch at the Sundeck
Sven Strohband, at Mohr Davidow Ventures
Several Representatives of The Sand Hill Angels

We’ve got another packed day today, with events including a visit to NASA’s Technology Partnerships Office at the Ames Research Center.

Pictures coming soon…

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life blog.

TechColumbus Innovation Awards

aaron — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:40:23 +0000

Last night TechColumbus held its annual Innovation Awards at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. I got the opportunity to attend as a representative of The Fisher College of Business Center for Entrepreneurship.

The event, attend by more than one-thousand prominent figures in Columbus business, has seen 40% grown since last year. The primary purpose of the event was to announce and celebrate the finalists and winners of awards in the following categories:

Green Innovation
Minority Owned Enterprise
Outstanding Service
Outstanding Product
Innovation in Non-Profit Service Delivery
Executive of the Year
Outstanding Woman in Technology
Inventor of the Year
Outstanding Start-up Business
Outstanding Technology Team
Student Innovation Awards

However, the event emceed by 10TV’s Andrea Cambern and Jeff Hogan also included several special guest appearances including one by Resource Interactive Founder and CEO Nancy Kramer.

TechColumbus’ web marketing team made creative use of social networking technology to engage the audience at the Convention Center as well as those that did not attend. A “tweetpit” was setup next to the stage with three web marketers who live blogged, tweeted, updated facebook and posted live video of backstage interviews with the winners. A giant display showed a live twitter stream of the Innovation Awards twitter hashtag (#IA09) which the “1100 geeks in a room” drove to a regional trending topic.

It is interesting to see what happens when you encourage the twittersphere to embrace your event. All the conversation certainly attracted attention from people outside the physical event, but it also gave a voice to people with negative opinions of it.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees and thanks to the Center for Entrepreneurship and Dave Shaw for the invite.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

Internal Case Competition

aaron — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:34:22 +0000

This weekend, Fisher hosted its annual first-year internal case competition. A case competition is essentially a mini-consulting project. An actual business situation, as summarized and published by prominent business school publications (e.g. The Harvard Business Review), is presented to a group of students who have a relatively short amount of time to analyze the case, synthesize a recommendation and present and defend it to a panel of judges (representing executives of the company from the case).

Many case competitions are held as intercollegiate competitions (e.g., the Big 10 Case Competitions) or are sponsored by outside interests and organizations (e.g., the Proctor & Gamble Case Competition and The National Black MBA Association's Case Competition). However, Fisher is relatively unique in that it holds its own internal case competition for MBA’s only. By holding our own competition, we can cost effectively (without travel costs and registration fees) allow everyone that wants to to participate. Additionally, our internal case competition is used as a sort of audition for the aforementioned intercollegiate competitions.

The case revolved around Microsoft’s place in the internet search industry (from the perspective of September 2008). We were fortunate that this was a company, industry and product that we were relatively familiar with. We were given the case on Friday morning at 8:00 AM and were required to submit a finished PowerPoint deck by 8:00 AM on Saturday. The first teams began their presentations at 8:45.

My first experience with a case competition was a bit unusual. Due to illness and other unforeseen circumstances our four-person team was reduced to only two. Despite our best efforts to manage our time, sleep was definitely sacrificed in order to put forth the best product possible. We did not win, however our efforts were rewarded with a “Best Q&A” award.

I want to thank my teammate, Angela, here for convincing me to compete despite our disadvantage and pushing to put together the best solution possible.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.