Well that cowboy is me, thanks to a crazy fundraising dare we ran on my new online fundraising startup, MyDunkTank. This dare raised $2,095 for an amazing non-profit called Startup Corps.

I’ll be sharing all my cowboy adventures on the MyDunkTank Cowboy Blog so be sure to follow me there.

And don’t miss this funny video of my transformation produced by my friends at Revzilla:
 

MyDunkTank is a humorous twist on non-profit fundraising. It allows you to do a fundraising dare in support of whatever cause you choose.

A fundraising dare is a simple game that takes place entirely online. You list a few dares that you’re willing to do and your friends and family vote for their favorite dare (they can also add their own creative dares). You agree to do whatever dare raises the most money.

Here’s a picture from my fundraising page and a link to Blake’s dare and Chap’s dare:

Chap and I are the first guinea pigs for this new fundraising format. We announced our fundraisers yesterday, each for different causes, and together our fundraisers have already raised over $400.

My cause is Startup Corps, an amazing entrepreneurship program for high school students. Chap’s cause is the Austin Center for Design, where they teach designers that they can change the world and help address profound social problems.

The quick story behind MyDunkTank

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard me talk about the philosophy of Missioneurs – the idea of running your causes like companies and your companies like causes.

A core tenet of missioneurism is that purpose and profit are not in tension with each another. Instead, we believe that purpose makes you more profitable and that profit allows you to better achieve your purpose. After all, when you’re profitable you have the money you need to expand and are not dependent on investors or philanthropists.

(By the way, this is exactly the philosophy of Good Company Ventures, where I’m an entrepreneur in residence. In fact, I learned the purpose vs. profit language from their CEO Garrett Melby.)

I believe in my bones that purpose and profit serve one another, and I wanted to launch a startup that was a true example of missioneurism.

I also wanted to do a startup that had a chance to grow like a powder keg instead of a movement, with users sharing and evangelizing the product to their friends so that the site could grow virally.

Five months and dozens of ideas later, Chap, Gabriel Weinberg (a key advisor) and I came up with the idea for MyDunkTank. Our mission is to democratize non-profit fundraising by turning regular supporters into fundraisers and philanthropists. It’s built like a business with a natural revenue model (we charge a transaction fee for each donation).

We think MyDunkTank could grow like a powder keg in at least two ways. The first is because donors may want to share funny dares with their friends. The second is because donors in one fundraiser might be inspired to hold fundraisers of their own.

How we built this website in just one weekend

Chap and I built and launched MyDunkTank entirely in one weekend, something that has drawn both admiration and questions from our startup peers. Many people have been asking me how we did it.

The short answer is that we put into practice the Lean Startup methodology pioneered by Eric Ries and Steve Blank. In particular, we decided to start with a Minimum Viable Product, which is a fancy phrase for the smallest useful version of our product that would solve a core problem for our users.

Before we built that, we spent two months doing hardcore customer development, where I was talking to dozens and dozens of potential users as well as entrepreneurs who had started businesses in the fundraising space.

This helped us know what a Minimum Viable Product actually looked like for a business like ours.

Four keys to our lean launch

Let me get a little more specific. I’d say there were four big things that allowed us to get this alpha coded and launched in one weekend.

For starters, our idea is new but not complex. Essentially, we needed to setup a voting system where people vote with dollars instead of with clicks.

Using Ruby on Rails, we were able to piggyback on open source code written by others for the transaction processing and for much of the plumbing that comes with any web application.

The second thing we did was to cut absolutely every feature that we didn’t need immediately. For example, most people would have launched this site with the ability to create your own fundraising page in an automated way. Chap and I didn’t do this. All we needed was the ability for he and I to run our first dares. So we hard-coded our fundraising pages with the plan to make these dynamic later.

The third thing we did was to abandon the dream of a big dramatic launch. Originally, we had planned to recruit celebrities to do the first dares. We figured that celebrities would raise large amounts of money and attract a lot of attention to our site (which is probably true).

The problem with starting with celebrities was that it would have raised the stakes of our initial launch, forced us to have significantly more polish on the site and would have exposed us to the possibility of a flop that would be harder to recover from. After all, no one has ever run a fundraising dare before and we could only guess as to how it would play out.

The last key to launching lean was spending two solid months talking to potential fundraisers, donors, and entrepreneurs who had started businesses in the non-profit fundraising space. This is what customer development looked like for our product.

We immersed ourselves in our customers before writing any code.

Your help with feedback and donations

The whole point of launching a Minimum Viable Product is to get feedback from real users (that’s you) as quickly as possible.

In just 24 hours of real usage, we’ve already learned a tremendous amount and I have had a few of my assumptions challenged, which is a good thing.

Now we need your help. Please use the site, donate to our causes and create dares – and then tell us what you think.

Also, in case you’re wondering: I really will do whatever dare wins!

Noisy with things I need to do and things I don’t want to forget. With emails I wish I had worded differently. With new ideas I want to follow to maturity. With interruptions I invite by leaving email and Facebook open. With phone and text message interruptions I don’t invite at all.

My guess is that it’s noisy inside your head too. Especially if you’re successful. A lot of people depend on you, and you probably have the bloated inbox to prove it.

The problem with all this noise is that it makes it hard to hear anything.

Not just the signal within the noise but also the signal inside your own head. The signal that only you can produce. The stuff that bubbles up when you are free to listen to yourself and think for yourself – when you’re not feeling anxious about something you just did or something you have to do.

If you’re like most people, signal happens somewhere quiet: in the shower, in bed at night or even on the toilet.

Maybe there are people around when it happens and maybe you’re even interacting with them – at a coffee shop, on the golf course or on your carpool to work – but the effect is the same. They are helping you quiet the noise inside.

The trouble is that these days, quiet is on the run. Noise follows us everywhere we can bring a smartphone, even on the toilet and in bed.

Because we can respond to messages anywhere, people expect that we will. We can try to opt-out, but that brings it’s own noisy anxiety. People feel dissed when we don’t respond.

The question today is not how to find quiet, because quiet isn’t out there waiting for us. The question is how to invite quiet into our lives as aggressively as noise invited itself in.

If you’re waiting for me to give you the answer, I’ll save you the suspense. I haven’t figured it out. But I have started to experiment, and I’ll share my thinking so far.

Step 1 – Quieting the noise outside

Quiet is impossible when it’s noisy all around you. So the first step is to quiet the noise outside.

For me, the loudest outside noise is email.

I used to get around 200 emails each day from people who expected a response. The fastest response time I could achieve was around one minute per email. Most required 30 seconds or less but some required 5 or 10 minutes.

When I responded to all of these 200 emails, that meant over 3 hours of noise each day just from email. Add Twitter, Facebook and text messages and that gets me to about 4 hours per day – half of a typical person’s workday and about a third of mine.

The only thing I spent more time doing than email was sleeping.

Quieting this noise wasn’t a productivity problem, it was a math problem:

200 emails x 1 minute per email = 200 minutes (or 3+ hours)

The only way to reduce email noise was to get fewer emails, respond to fewer of them or spend less time on each response. Since I couldn’t reduce my response time any further, I had to look for ways to reduce my email volume and respond to fewer of the emails I received.

My solution was an autoresponder. Everyone who emails me gets an automated response that tells them that I’m only responding to emails about my core projects and then lays out what those projects are. They only get this automated response once every 14 days thanks to AwayFind. I tried to make the email as authentic and human as possible, because I know how much I hate when people don’t respond to my emails.

This has already cut my inbound email by more than 50%, probably because people think twice before pressing the send button on unnecessary emails. It has also made me feel less pressure to respond to most emails.

While I was at it, I thought I’d also reduce the second source of noise: networking meetings. I was spending about 2-3 hours each day with people who had asked to meet with me, which I usually combined with a meal to kill two birds.

Now my autoresponder and my email footer encourage people to find me at events rather than requesting meetings.

My third major source of noise was the news, blogs and other content I was reading. This was also a math problem:

Content noise = Content consumed x Time spent consuming it

Since I can’t read any faster, I had to consume less.

Now I only read content recommended by 20 Twitter accounts on my private “must-read” list and from content emailed directly to me. I’m the same way with blogs and books. I don’t read many people, but I tend to read almost everything these people write. I’d rather be a foot wide and a mile deep than the other way around.

The fourth source of noise was people I cared about. Most of these people add immensely to my life, but a few of them were responsible for most of my drama and anxiety.

As hard as it is to fire clients, leave a job and end relationships, these hard choices can change everything. Whenever it comes time for me to pull the trigger, I ask myself: Have you ever regretted doing something like this after a few months had passed?

I can’t think of a single example where I have.

Step 2 – Quieting the noise inside

The second enemy of quiet is the noise inside your own head.

Quieting this noise requires something different for everyone, and it takes trial and error to find what works for you.

For me, most of the noise in my head is habit, pure and simple. When I landed in Philly two days ago after a vacation in Europe, my head was quiet. But as soon as I started working and doing errands, I felt the noise creep in.

Part of the noise was a checklist of to-dos I started assembling in my head. But the reason I was assembling the checklist was not that everything had to be done right away. It was because I was in the habit of assembling checklists and then worrying about them.

Breaking that habit isn’t easy, but there a few things that help me.

First is noticing the noise and telling myself the real reason behind it. The noise isn’t the result of important things that must be done now. It’s the result of my being in the habit of thinking and feeling this way.

Second is choosing to leave things undone, even when my mind protests. Scratching the itch today only makes it worse tomorrow.

Third is distracting myself from the noise. Sometimes this means shutting everything off and diving into work that matters. Sometimes it means distracting myself for the sake of distracting myself.

Physical things are the best distraction for me: taking a walk, playing sports or making something with my hands (see the book Shopclass as Soulcraft). I also get good mileage from going out with friends, visiting family and meeting people for drinks.

Fourth is taking long vacations from the noise – long enough to reset my noise baseline and get some perspective. It’s always hard to keep this baseline after I get back, but I consider it a win if I notice a few important things I can do to make lasting change to my habits.

After this trip recent trip to Europe, I came back determined to give leadership of a few key projects to others, to smile even when I don’t feel like it (as much for its effect on me as for its effect on others), to work at a slower and more sustainable pace, and to occupy more weekday evenings with friends who serve as a personal oasis.

I also set a goal of getting away for a least one week every 2-3 months, totally unplugged.

Step 3 – Inviting quiet to fill the void

Quiet needs a void, but a void can also produce noisy anxiety of its own. A void can feel a lot like boredom and loneliness, scary things to an overactive extrovert.

The best time to get used to quiet is when the rest of the world is asleep. For whatever reason, it’s harder to feel bored and lonely when you’re the only one awake.

I wrote most of this article between 12:30-2:30 AM. I seem to produce most of my signal at times like that, when I don’t have to struggle for quiet.

Living with quiet late at night or early in the morning helps build up your overall tolerance for quiet. It settles the panic reflex that can be triggered when you don’t know what to do, and it soothes the part of all of us that can relate to the quote, which I once read on a fortune cookie: “The heavy chains of worry are forged in idle hours.”

The real magic, though, is finding quiet in other parts of the day – when your peers are drowning in noise and are producing plenty of it themselves.

I haven’t figured this out myself, but here are a few things that work sometimes.

First, I try to make a few places into a personal oasis. An oasis doesn’t need to be beautiful or silent. It just needs to be somewhere that’s unfamiliar and free of any habits. It’s critical to keep that place clean of noise from day one.

Places trigger habits for me, and an oasis is a place where I can build new habits of quiet. A few slip ups and I usually have to start over somewhere else. Once I give myself permission to seek noise there, it’s hard to resist that temptation in weak moments.

Second, I spend time with people who can be an oasis. These are people with very different lives than me. People who don’t want to talk about professional things and tend to be active and talkative. Time with them can lead to internal quiet for hours after we part company.

By the way, these people can be dead or even fictional. Abraham Lincoln is one of the most calming personalities I’ve gotten to know through reading. When I need perspective and quiet, I will sometimes read a chapter from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s great biography of Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals.

Third, I start writing stream of consciousness. This means I type without pausing for 10 minutes, even if I have to repeat “I am typing this sentence over and over” when I don’t know what else to say.

It doesn’t really matter what comes out. What matters is the state of flow it produces. Flow is a state without noise and anxiety, where time passes unnoticed and your internal signal has a monopoly on your attention.

Stream of consciousness writing also helps me purge some of my internal noise.

What works for you?

In my opinion, the pursuit of quiet is one of the most important challenges of our time. I’ve only just started this pursuit myself and have a long, long way to go.

If you’re on your own pursuit, I’d love to share notes on what works for you and what doesn’t. Leave a comment and we’ll continue the discussion there.

Your product will change lives. Your company will make investors rich. Your idea has to spread.

But no one cares.

You can tell because every sale is a struggle, investors won’t return your calls and your customers aren’t telling their friends about it.

So you have two options.

The first option is to think like Sisyphus and keep pushing the boulder uphill. The second is to think like gravity and use the hill to make the boulder roll faster.

Are you Sisyphus?

Sisyphus (pronounced “Sis-ih-fuss,” like this) is the mythological king who was condemned to push a boulder uphill for all eternity, only to have it roll back down.

Almost every startup starts out like Sisyphus. The problem is that most startups also end like Sisyphus, stuck in an infinite loop of toil and frustration.

How can you tell if you’re Sisyphus?

Because when you’re Sisyphus, it’s you versus the market. To win you have to do desperate things like buying advertising, tricking users into spamming their friends and making thousands of cold calls.

If you spend enough money and fight hard enough, you may be able to bully the market into submission. Bing advertised its way to a modest share of the search market. Plaxo spammed me until I tried it. A major nonprofit called me at dinner until they caught me at a weak moment.

The big guys can afford to bully the market. You probably can’t.

I know because I’ve tried this approach with startups like Anthillz and TicketLeap and projects like the Gigabit Genius Grant. I’ve seen the story repeated dozens of times in Philly Startup Leaders companies.

There’s no glory in winning this way and it’s a miserable way to lose. Fortunately there’s another way.

Starting a business shouldn’t be so hard

It’s a lie to tell entrepreneurs that starting a business should be hard. The lie goes something like this:

• Sales is hard, so when your prospects waiver, you should keep calling.
• Raising money is hard, so when investors blow you off, you should do whatever it takes to track them down and deliver your pitch.
• Generating traffic is hard, so when users sign up, you should ask for access to their email contacts so you can spam their friends.

The truth is that startups are only hard when you’re wrong about the market.

Here’s what I mean:

• Sales isn’t hard when your prospects love what you’re selling.
• Raising money isn’t hard when investors meet prospects that love what you’re selling.
• Generating traffic isn’t hard when your prospects can’t wait to tell their friends about you, blog about you and rave about you to the press.

In short, running a startup isn’t hard when people love what you’re selling.

Gravity makes things easy

Love works like gravity, it pulls the boulder towards you. Gravity turns the hill into an advantage.

People immediately knew they loved Hot or Not, Chatroulette and Mint and spread them like wildfire. People came to love PayPal and Flickr once those startups pivoted from their original business plans.

Paypal began as a way to transfer money between handheld devices before those devices were mainstream. Flickr began as a multiplayer online game that was much less compelling than the ability to share photos with others in the game.

PayPal and Flickr were wrong about their markets at first. When they got it right, their users loved them and gravity started working in their favor.

Gravity works the same way with causes. Philly Startup Leaders snowballed because startup entrepreneurs love being around each other and couldn’t help but talk about. I think the same will be true of the missioneurs movement once we find our voice.

Startups with gravity have the potential to grow like a powder keg where startups without it are condemned to grow like a movement–and that’s if they grow at all.

How to find your gravity – Secret #1

The first secret to finding your gravity is knowing what gravity feels like.

When you feel yourself pushing a boulder uphill, you’re feeling gravity working against you. It’s not the inevitable struggle of a startup entrepreneur. It’s a fundamental problem with your startup.

Chances are you are solving the wrong problem for the wrong people. You may be presenting your product in the wrong way, but usually early adopters can get through presentation problems and find what there is to love about your product.

When gravity is working with you, you can tell. Early users rave about your product and send you new users who then send you more new users. Investors seek you out because you’re getting traction and people are talking about you. Bloggers profile you because they want to capitalize on your buzz.

Maybe you think your startup is different and can’t work like this. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s almost impossible to make a startup work any other way.

How to find your gravity – Secret #2

The second secret to finding your gravity is pivoting as soon as gravity is not on your side.

If gravity is not working for you, your first pivot should be to expose your product to new markets. Someone out there might love your product–you just picked the wrong audience.

You can run quick trials in new markets using hand-to-hand sales and marketing. Gravity will tell you when you get it right.

If gravity still isn’t helping and you aren’t finding passionate customers in any of your markets, it’s time to make your second pivot—a product pivot. A product pivot is when you fundamentally change your product to solve a different problem.

Product pivots are really hard to get right and require trial and error. The best systematic approach I’ve found to choosing your product pivots is the Lean Startup Methodology, pioneered by Eric Ries and Steve Blank.

You’re only going to have time and money for a few product pivots before you die. So the goal here is to choose wisely and pivot quickly.

The bottom line

It’s hard to make the right choices with product pivots. Even the best startup entrepreneurs are wrong more often than they are right, and sometimes they sink their startups in the process.

It’s just part of the game.

What’s tragic is when startups die because they don’t know when to pivot. It’s tragic because it’s more common and totally avoidable.

If you’re struggling to sell, it’s time to pivot. If your users aren’t telling their friends about you, it’s time to pivot. If the press doesn’t want to write about you, it’s time to pivot.

The bottom line is this: Your life as a startup entrepreneur shouldn’t suck. If it does, that should tell you something.

Gravity speaks loudly. Listen to it.

In the meantime, here’s an update on the Missioneurs Movement, one of the many things I’ve been working on. Building movements is hard, and one of the hardest parts of this movement has been agreeing on answers to tough existential questions about what we believe and what we hope to accomplish together.

I’m just one voice in this conversation. Here’s my most recent take on missioneurship from a presentation I gave at the Philadelphia kickoff event for Good Company Ventures.

You’ll notice that I try to be funny with my slides. This is new for me, as I’m sure you can tell. They say that comedians have to try out a new joke at least a dozen times in front of audiences before they nail it. We can only guess where that leaves me!

Presentation Video

Presentation Slides

The 600+ communities who rallied for Google gigabit have fallen silent, including here in Philadelphia. This silence speaks volumes. If gigabit really matters, shouldn’t we still be talking about it on our own?

Do we really want gigabit, or do we just want to win Google’s favor?

I think we really want gigabit, and this is a golden opportunity – not only to bring gigabit to Philly, but also to show communities around the world how they can do the same.

The world needs someone to fill the gigabit vacuum left by Google. That someone should be Philly.

Gigabit is not about Google

Gigabit was never about Google. Google is only installing gigabit in one portion of one community. That leaves the rest of the 600+ communities who applied for Google’s gigabit experiment to fend for themselves.

Google drew worldwide attention to gigabit. Now the rest is up to us.

In Philadelphia, we know exactly what to do when people with money and power don’t step up to help us. Hell, that’s what’s been happening here for decades.

We do things ourselves.

I’m not saying that a bunch of entrepreneurs and hackers can wire our entire city with gigabit fiber ourselves. What I am saying is that we can create so much demand for gigabit that the people with money and power would be crazy not to invest in gigabit.

That’s the vision for Gigabit City.

Local gigabit deployments require global collaboration

Gigabit City is about moving beyond regional competition so that we can bring gigabit to all of our communities. Only one of our communities is going to get a Google fiber network. The rest of us need to do it ourselves.

The problem is, it’s damn near impossible to make the case for local gigabit deployments alone.

We need to generate so much demand for gigabit that our neighbors, elected officials and broadband companies can’t afford to ignore it. We need to show our communities why they can’t live without gigabit — how gigabit will revolutionize the way they live, work, play and communicate.

That’s going to take a whole lot of brainpower and creativity. More than any one community can muster alone.

That’s why we need to come together as a global creative community. And that’s why Philadelphia, a place known for organizing grassroots, do-it-yourself communities, can help.

Introducing Gigabit City: A global community of gigabit leaders

Gigabit City is our answer to the need for global collaboration. It’s a simple online community where leaders from around the world can make the case for local gigabit together.

Our shared case for gigabit starts with ideas for must-have gigabit applications.

These ideas will have our neighbors clamoring for gigabit. They will become the ammunition we use to lobby for gigabit locally.

We’re using Google Moderator to collect these ideas and our $10,000+ Gigabit Genius Grant to help drive submissions.

The $10,000+ Gigabit Genius Grant will be given to the best gigabit project as decided by community votes on our Google Moderator site and a panel of expert judges (learn more). You can submit your ideas here.

This cash prize should not dilute the collaborative spirit. Only one of us will win it, so it’s silly to participate for that reason alone.

The real prize is local gigabit. And that’s something we can all win together.

Spread the word and join the community

Gigabit City will only succeed if communities likes yours and ours come together. Here’s how we can all spread the word and grow the community:

1. Join the discussion group. This is where the real conversation will happen.
2. Share your ideas on Gigabit City. This is how we make the case for gigabit together.
3. Send emails to your local community encouraging them to share their ideas
4. Personally invite the people you respect most from your communities
5. Follow Gigabit City on Twitter
6. Become a fan on Facebook

Please, please, please: Make this community your own.

It’s not ours, it’s yours. The best we can do in Philadelphia is to set this community in motion. Only you can give it the momentum it needs to make gigabit an urgent priority in communities around the world.

I’m surrounded by young social entrepreneurs from places like Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, England, Ireland, Thailand and, yes, the good old United States — although I’m one of only two Americans here.

The social entrepreneurs here get missioneurship, they really do. It’s intuitive to them to put mission at the center of their universe and to treat entrepreneurship as a means to that end. They get the importance of driving revenue from their core services, even though they don’t know how to do it. They understand that by building mission enterprises, they can revolutionize their communities, even when governments and established institutions aren’t willing to help (or actively oppose them).

What don’t they understand? Above all, me! Sometimes they ask me to repeat myself because they can’t understand my English or I talk too fast. I adjusted my presentation slides to make up for this, with lots of text slides so that they can follow along when they have trouble understanding me.

Here are the complete slides from the presentation I’m about to give. I was asked to address the challenge of balancing mission, entrepreneurship and community. I answer that you shouldn’t balance these at all, and I pivot from this topic to a discussion of how to build community (including the story of Philly Startup Leaders) and how profit can be used to set mission enterprises free.

I have a not-so-secret mission that someone from this conference will go back to their country and create a missioneurs chapter. In terms of spreading the community, this would be the ultimate first follower.

Updated 3/25: New videos of the conference released

For me, the best part of the conference was meeting so many remarkable missioneurs from all over the world. Seeing them on video is nothing like spending three days with them. Nevertheless, these videos should give you a sense for how these incredible people talk and think. I also make a few appearances.

> Visit missioneurs.com to see a full event recap with videos

Here’s a summary of the announcement with a link to the full version:

Philly Startup Leaders needs your help to do something big for Philly. Really big.

We’re pledging $5,000 toward a prize for the best gigabit idea submitted on Gigabit Philly. This is all the money we have available as an organization — it’s our savings for the last two and half years. We need you and the city to match it.

The Google gigabit competition is a golden opportunity to prove that we have the best grassroots tech and creative community in the world. Our grassroots communities have already started the campaign with Gigabit Philly, a website that collects your big ideas for how to harness gigabit connectivity to change the world.

Yet we will fail in this campaign unless we do something dramatic. We have to show Google what’s special about Philly. And we haven’t done that so far.

So Philly Startup Leaders is taking a gamble on Gigabit Philly, and we need your help. Our $5,000 pledge is just the beginning. We need our donation to spark a wave of pledges large and small that will draw worldwide attention to Philly. This prize will help us generate hundreds if not thousands of big ideas on Gigabit Philly from all over the world.

Make a pledge now and send the full announcement to everyone you know. We need help from every one of you!

Here’s the link to share: http://phillystartupleaders.org/news/philly-startup-leaders-goes-all-in-for-gigabit-philly/

We literally went from idea to launch in about 12 hours. At 9pm last night, a group of us were sitting at the Philly Startup Leaders fishbowl event with an idea, and by 9am this morning our announcement was live.

The idea started when the City of Philadelphia’s Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank and City Councilman Bill Green presented their vision for Gigabit Philly at the Philly Startup Leaders fishbowl. These guys are working hard to bring gigabit here, but they aren’t getting much support from the city.

We asked, why would Google invest in a city that’s not going to lend a tremendous amount of support? And the answer is simple: They wouldn’t.

We had lots of ideas for what the City of Philadelphia could do to show its support in a big way. In the dream scenario, the city would commit to doing a gigabit broadband experiment regardless of whether Google participates. Fat chance, right? Then we had ideas for more modest support, such as pledging financing to venture capital firms who would setup a gigabit investment fund.

Then there was this simple, no brainer idea. The city could sponsor a big prize, say $50,000, for the best idea submitted to Gigabit Philly. This would send a strong (and relatively inexpensive) message to Google and to Philadelphians that gigabit is a priority for the city, and that the grassroots community has the city’s full support.

Bill and Allan said that the city can’t write a check for anything in 8 days, but we didn’t buy that. We thought that if it was important enough, the city could move mountains.

Someone just had to push them. So we decided to take matters into our own hands.

Please support this campaign in any way you can. Make a donation, however small, and spread the word.

Here’s the link: http://phillystartupleaders.org/news/philly-startup-leaders-goes-all-in-for-gigabit-philly/

Sure, they can push themselves harder and longer than the rest of us. Lance Armstrong’s heart is about twice as strong as mine. At rest, his beats 32 times per minute while mine is in the high 50s.

This means that during a sprint in the Tour de France, when his heart is exploding at 200 beats per minute, he’s pushing blood and oxygen through his legs with twice the force of my heart when I’m maxed out on a soccer field.

He could make a fool out of me in any test of physical endurance. And he’s 38 years old.

But here’s what he can’t do. He can’t train his body not to scream in pain when it gets tired. He can’t train his mind not to consider quitting when his body is broken and hurting like hell weeks into a race.

His body obeys the same rules mine does. It breaks and hurts and gets so tired that it tells him to stop. So does his mind. It tries to rationalize the easy way out. It tells him that it’s okay to slow down. Everything will be fine.

Changing the world is an Olympic sport. Building a movement, disrupting a market, fighting injustice, reforming politics, redefining art – these are as grueling as winning the Tour de France, physically and emotionally.

They make you feel tired, hurt and broken again and again. They make your heart scream and your mind protest that it’s okay to stop.

Every time you say no, I’m going to keep going, your heart gets a little stronger.

It learns to carry you a little farther before that pain and panic roars back. It learns to recover faster, requiring less time nursing your wounds.

The difference between Olympians and everyone else is not that they don’t feel pain and panic, because they do. It’s that they want something so badly that they are willing to feel pain and panic as the price of admission. Sometimes everyday.

Being an Olympian is a choice, and it’s not for everyone. It’s a choice to endure intensely human pain to achieve super human things.

That’s why Olympians are worthy heroes. That’s also why the world desperately needs more of them.