Memorial Union Terrace, Madison, WI (Photo credit: Mike Procario)

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

It may seem as if entrepreneurship and venture capital are exclusively tied to the east and west coasts. In many cases this is true. A recent report derived by SSTI from PricewaterhouseCoopers Moneytree Survey Data shows that California attracted 53% of all venture capital dollars in 2012 in the United States followed by Massachusetts and New York City with a combined 19% of  VC investment dollars.

For recent graduates pursuing a career associated with the world of startup life, it may seem as if the coasts are the only places to go to start or join a new business.

There are, however, accelerator programs that are trying to change that. One program that I’m intimately familiar with, given my ties to UW-Madison, is called gener8tor and it is launching its third class of startup companies. The program is based in Madison, Wisconsin and is drawing companies from Austin, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, and the Twin cities.

Jon Eckhardt, co-founder of the program sees a big opportunity to create a more meaningful environment for aspiring entrepreneurs in the Midwest.

“gener8tor’s is tightly integrated into the entrepreneurship communities in the mid-west and the coasts, especially as a result of our work with nearby academic institutions” Eckhardt said. “This, combined with our innovative training platform, lets us link the capabilities of the mid-west with resources nationally.”

And it’s starting to work. According to Troy Vosseller, a co-founder of the program, its 13 companies have raised more than $5 million in capital and created 70 jobs. “The growth is only accelerating and this summer the program saw over 250 applications from around the country and from around the world,” said Vosseller. Other VC firms are starting to notice. One of which is Great Oaks Capital, a VC firm who’s founding team spent time studying at UW-Madison.

John Philosophos, Partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital put it this way. “We see big opportunities brewing in the Wisconsin ecosystem.  The entrepreneurial community is growing and producing high quality start-ups. Critical resources, including top flight developers from the UW Computer Science program and College of Engineering, mentorship from the State’s broad based economy and forward thinking corporations are all being mobilized to support innovation in the State.  Accordingly, we have made Wisconsin one of our national areas of focus.”

Local corporations are also joining the movement. American Family Insurance, based in Madison, has begun investing in and becoming customers of the region’s emerging companies. Dan Reed, Director of Business Development at American Family, says the company “sees an opportunity to engage the community in creating wealth and value in a way that also fosters a culture of innovation across the region.”

Consider that just a few years ago, the University of Wisconsin was said to have “stood out among its state school peers” in terms of producing chief executive officers of major corporations, according to a study from U.S. News & World Report. If a program like gener8tor could help guide some of that raw Midwestern talent, maybe we’ll see an uptick of investment dollars and economic growth in the Midwest which would be a huge win for the region and national economy.

Innovation And Investment Dollars Turn To A New Region: The Midwest is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
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The woman looked at me like I was a nut job.

“In my country, I ride wild bull. My teacher help.”

Her eyes were still glued to my face. She didn’t know what the hell was going on. After all, stood before her was a 16-year-old who was..Russian? American? She had no idea and neither did I.

I was trying to pretend like I was from some foreign, made up, Eastern European country. Two years later I would see Borat on television and wonder to myself if I ever encountered him on the street.

I was speaking like Borat. Some made up, nonsensical european dialect. This was before Ali G came out.

I was traveling the country on a teen tour with some friends from high school. We started off in Montana, made our way up to Seattle, down the west coast to Southern California, then to Ensenada Mexico on a cruise, and ended up in Las Vegas. As if the trip didn’t provide enough excitement on its own, I needed to spice things up by invoking some strange persona that only belongs on a stage before a crowd of tomato-throwing hooligans. I’d realize later that this wasn’t so far from the truth. At least the part about standing on a stage before a large audience.

Everywhere we went I’d engage with random strangers and introduce myself.

“Chhheloo, my name is Borris” (I had never seen Ali G or Borat until this point in my life).

“Hi Borris,” said almost everyone.

Then the real fun started.

Once their shields were down and they were open to conversation, I just jumped to it.

“Do you like to ride wild bull?” or, “Why are you wearing those funny shoes?” or [insert something ridiculous here].

The things that came out of my mouth made absolutely no sense but the people remained engaged. They were intrigued and wanted to know what this wild bull thing was all about. I think they really wanted to know what was going on, who I was, and where the hidden cameras were.

The charade continued. From cowboys in Montana to strippers standing on Las Vegas Boulevard, many people had the opportunity to meet, and react to, Borris.

Including Steve.

Steve was a person I met on the top deck of our Carnival cruise ship.

The Carnival Cruise ship docked at the Ensenada marina.

He was a short, skinny guy with blonde hair just mingling about with the other boat guests. I figured he was a good a target to stir up some nonsensical conversation with. I was dead certain his reactions would be different from the cowboy and stripper but that’s what made it fun.

“Chhello,” I said as I did 50 times before, in that strange accent. “My name is Borris, whut iz your name?”

“Chhello Borris! My name is Vladimir.”

My brain started, “What the..”

He responded with the same accent. For all I knew he was actually from the real country I was mocking, wherever that is. I started to get nervous. It was all fun and games but now I was blatantly insulting some guy’s culture and language. As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I don’t take that kind of thing lightly either.

“uhh…hi Vladimir.”

Now I was committed.

Before long we were talking about wild bulls, Russia, and some other arbitrary topics. The conversation got very uncomfortable, very fast, until I just broke my cover.

“Hey man, I’ve been kidding the whole time. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.” I felt better but still equally as guilty.

“My name is Dan and I’m really from New Jersey.”

He started to laugh. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was funny or was about to throw me off of the boat.

“Dude, it’s all good. My name is Steve and I’m a comedian from L.A.”

The next thing I knew he was telling me about his life, his career as an aspiring comedian, and the comedy show he was scheduled to perform later that night in front of the entire cruise ship. He was part of the ship’s entertainment and was supposed to do stand up in front of the 2,500 passengers.

“Dan, why don’t you do the show with me later?”

I thought about it for a moment.

Am I funny? Nope. Am I a good public speaker? Nope. Am I ever going to see these people again? Nope.

“Alright I’m in.”

Later that night my friends were showering up, changing, and getting ready to attend the ship’s 8pm evening activity in the main theater. A theater that seated all 2,500 passengers.

I was also getting ready to attend the show but also getting ready for the biggest public appearance of my life.

Behind the stage Steve conducted a pre-game ceremony with me. It was like we were about to head on to the soccer field and play for the state championship only we were two people, not eleven. He even said some prayers like many sports teams do when they huddle up.

Then the theater speakers came on and started to speak to the crowd.

“And now I’d like to welcome…”

The host for the night called our names and on we went.

The lights were extremely bright as I looked out into the crowd. And there they were. All 2,500 people from the boat. Staring at us, just waiting for us to be funny as comedians should be. I was in an anything-but funny mood once I saw all of those people.

The show went on…

He did some act that had to do with the Titanic and Leonardo Dicaprio. I did something related to Borris.

The audience applauded, we walked off and I remembered thinking about how horrible and awesome the experience was. It was both terrifying and exhilarating, but most of all it was uncomfortable.

At that moment I realized that the most interesting and opportunistic experiences come from situations that are both unexpected and uncomfortable. We find our best moments when we take the path less traveled and when we live life without conforming to the status quo. I could have sat in one of those 2,500 chairs and watched Steve with my friends. Instead, I joined Steve on stage for 20 minutes. A brutal but very exciting 20 minutes.

Steve gave me his card and told me to call him so we could develop a standup routine together. He wanted me to join him in Los Angeles full time. I put it in my pocket but had no intention of calling him. I didn’t think I was funny but at that moment I realized that life was.

The boat arrived back in California. We got off and I continued on with the strange Borris character.

Strange indeed. Just like this post.

Publish.

Why Borat Is My Hero. A Strange And Uncomfortable Hero. is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
Follow me on Twitter: @DanReich Facebook: Facebook.com/danreich

English: Homeless person in Tallinn, Estonia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was sitting on the subway listing to my music and watching three people. The first person pulled out their wallet. The second got up and walked as far away as possible. And the third, standing in between the two, was just hovering there pleading for help.

He had a red moustache and semi long hair. A very shaggy looking dude.

He must have been in his mid twenties, maybe a year or two younger than me. He was wearing a black backpack strapped on tight with a brown sleeping bag interwoven between his arms and shoulder straps. Part of the bag was sticking out like a cape and the other part was dragging beneath his feet. The rain-water on the floor didn’t help either because now part of his sleeping bag was soaking wet.

I looked back at the guy with the wallet. He slowly cracked it open and reached for one of the few bills he had left. I wondered how much money he had in there. As far as I could tell, he didn’t have much either.

He stood up and approached the homeless guy with an outstretched hand.

“Here ya go man.” He handed the homeless person a dollar.

“Thanks bro. Really. Thank you.” It was one of the most sincere thank you’s I’ve seen in some time.

The second person, now on the other end of the subway car, was eagerly waiting to get off. She looked guilty, disgusted and couldn’t wait to leave the train. It was as if she was terrified of spiders and before her stood a giant eight legged creature. I wondered why she was so afraid? Why couldn’t she stand to be in the same company as this homeless person? Or be in the company of the person who was parting with his dollar?

Meanwhile, the guy with the wallet sat back down and chatted it up with his friend.

“The guy just wanted some food. I think it was the right thing to do.”

His friend didn’t even hesitate, “dude, for sure!”

I started to look at the other subway passengers who were nearby. Many of them were now reaching for their wallets and pockets. Some looked happy to help and to join the cause. Others looked hesitant as if almost obligated to match the good deed and righteous donation of the single dollar.

I could hear their inner thoughts. Their body language was speaking loudly.

“If that guy could part with a dollar then I could too.”

The donations continued. Others poured out some singles and coins to this young man who was pleading for some spare change so he could get a meal.

“This stop, 14th street Union Square.” It was the same robotic voice as usual. The train came to a complete halt.  The doors opened and I watched the red-headed homeless person walk off the train. He looked hungry and eager to grab a meal with his newfound income.

I’ve seen this situation many times before especially in the NYC subway system. A person needs help. He asks for it. At first, it seems like no one is willing to help and then there is one. One person that sparks a chain reaction and compels many others to lend a hand. There is of course also the one or two that can’t stand to be around the situation and so they get up and walk away.

This situation reminded me of the countless choices we are faced with every day. We can choose to act or choose to ignore. We can choose to lead or we can choose to follow. The important thing is that we have that choice and that we don’t become desensitized to our ability to act for causes both big and small. We can pursue that big job or promotion or we can remain content with the status quo. We can donate a dollar to someone who is hungry or we can walk away.

Memorial day is over but I’m reminded about how fortunate I am to live in a world and a time where we can make those choices. I’m fortunate for the good people that help make this world a better and safer place.

At that moment my iPod switched songs. Damian Marley and Nas came on…

That I’m safe when I’m resting

Furniture in my nesting

Not by force I’m suggesting

You count your blessings

I think I’ll take a cue from Damian and Nas today and count my blessings.

No Money, No Food, No Choice But To Ride The Subway and Ask For Spare Change is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
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Samer Hamadeh, Founder & CEO of Zeel.com

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Samer Hamadeh started hustling the good ole’ fashion way by finding a problem and fixing it. A few years later he would apply those same principles to his other ventures, most notable of which is Vault.com. Now Samer is on to an entirely new business but this time it’s in a new industry: healthcare.

I caught up with Samer so he could share some of his insights into his life as an entrepreneur, a candy salesman, and his new startup called Zeel.

Many people aspire to start their own companies. How did you get started as an entrepreneur?

My first big entrepreneurial success was selling candy at recess during 7th grade. I was eventually caught, but I convinced the school that I was just meeting unfilled demand, so they let me continue. (Twix bars were my best sellers – I’d buy them for 25 cents each at Costco and resell them for 50 cents.)

After I graduated from Stanford, my friend Mark Oldman and I saw another opportunity. We realized that internships were becoming an essential part of the career path –and that there was no good information available about where to find a great internship. This was pre-Internet industry, of course, so we published a book, America’s Top 100 Internships, which was a huge success, and started a consulting practice to help companies with their internship programs

I’ve always focused on getting people the services they want to make their lives better, delivering via the latest technology. I’ve gone from passing notes at school, to books, to CD-ROMs, to the web, to mobile apps. I sometimes joke that telepathy is next.

You’ve spent your career building businesses in the career and education space. What made you decide to switch industries?

The thing is that I’ve always been focused on delivery and customer service. At Vault, we were pioneers in on-demand content – our customers purchased and downloaded interview guides and company dossiers in PDF format right before interviews. After selling Vault and before founding Zeel, I was an investor and advisor at Campusfood.com, which we recently sold to GrubHub, the food delivery service, also based on satisfying last-minute needs.

In addition, I’d say that I’ve spent my career figuring out the best way to solve the problems I was facing at the time, from a lack of candy, to getting a job, to, today, easing aches and pains.

When my co-founders and I started Vault, we were right out of school, and we naturally created a company to assist recent college grads. Zeel, on the other hand, was inspired by the aches and pains of our 30s and 40s. I’m married with kids now, along with most of the rest of our founding team. We need the relaxation and pain relief that massage therapy provides. We don’t have time in our busy schedules to book massages a week in advance and spend hours going to and from a spa – plus, getting massage in-home means that we don’t need to hire a babysitter. We like flat fees so we don’t need to worry about tax and tip. We want to use our phones like a remote control for our lives, so we launched an iPhone app for booking. We’ve basically created the most convenient way possible to reliably get a great massage, from a vetted and licensed massage therapist, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking to get into the healthcare space?

The healthcare space is complicated. You need to take time to understand the industry – just being a healthcare consumer won’t give you anything close to a complete picture. For one, it’s much more regulated than other spaces. Health insurers have intricate rules. And there are laws about advertising, payments and provider referrals that you just don’t have in other industries.

That’s why it took me and my team nearly two years of immersion in the healthcare space to devise Zeel Massage On Demand℠. Massage, for example, might seem straightforward, but there are different licensing requirements in every state, local regulations about when and where massage can take place, and restrictions on how you pay therapists.

So I’d advise entrepreneurs to educate themselves as thoroughly as possible. Go to conferences and healthcare meetups. When you’re ready, apply to some of the superior accelerators and fellowships that have sprung up in this space, like Blueprint Health and StartUp Health.

Founder of Vault.com Discusses Startup Life and His New Healthcare Company Zeel is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
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littleBits is an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with magnets for prototyping, learning and fun.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

I spent years of my life sitting alone on the basement floor. No TV. No friends. Sometimes my brother would join me but for the most part it was just me and a lot, I mean a lot, of legos. Who knew that tiny pieces of plastic bricks could have such an impact?

For me, legos was a game changing toy. In fact, writing the word “toy” makes me cringe because legos is so much more than that. These little bricks put me on a course that would later lead to robotics in high school, electrical engineering in college, and entrepreneurship somewhere in between. And anyone that’s ever played with legos can understand where I’m coming from. Like me, you probably bought some lego truck or train, built the thing based off of the instructions, and then completely destroyed your newfound creation so you could build your own piece of art.

Invention. Creation. Destruction. Innovation.

This cycle happens over time in every business and in every industry.  Take AOL as an example. They created the first web portal and then it got destroyed by new companies building off of their building blocks. AOL away messages became Twitter. AOL profile pages became Facebook. AOL search became Google. The same thing is happening to Craigslist and to many other companies and sectors.

And this is where innovation comes from. It’s all about understanding how to use building blocks and for me that happened with legos. That’s why I got pretty excited when I saw littlebits for the first time a year or so ago over on Fred Wilson’s blog. I recently met Ayah, the founder of littlebits, and I’m more excited about what this company can and hopefully will become. As Ayah believes, and as I do to, the new building blocks of the 21st century are based on electrical circuits. Some may argue that we are beyond hardware and that the real building blocks are knowing how to code and how to program, but I believe that the next wave of true innovation will come from the intersection of new hardware and new software. Not software alone.

And that’s why littlebits is so exciting. Kids all over the world will be able to play with and learn from the new building blocks of the 21st century. Had I been sitting on that basement floor with these building blocks instead of legos, who knows what I would have built. A TV perhaps.

Littlebits Is The New Legos is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
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The Intern Group offers amazing opportunities to gain vital work experience, develop extensive, global networks and see the best of what some of the greatest cities in the world have to offer

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

It’s easy to get stuck in an unfulfilling corporate career path. Before you know it, you turn around wonder where all that time went. In some industries, like banking or consulting, it’s very hard to jump ship from the lucrative safety net of the corporate world to the treacherous waters of entrepreneurship.

David Lloyd decided to forgo a potentially lucrative career in banking to start his own company in South America and in less than two years, his company is doing a few million in revenue. The business? He places talented individuals with international internship programs in London, Madrid & Latin America where they go to work for leading companies, NGOs & National Governments and live a cultural immersion in a new, fascinating country.

I recently caught up with David to talk about what it’s like to rip off the golden handcuffs of the corporate world and to discuss his business called The Intern Group.

You had a great career path as a banker. What made you decide to quit in order to pursue The Intern Group?

I realized early on in banking that the rigid, hierarchical corporate path in a mature, saturated industry was not where I wanted to spend the next decades of my life.

Before banking I had done something more unusual. I moved to Latin America after university with the goal of becoming fluent in a second language. I moved to Buenos Aires, where I knew no-one, and enrolled in intensive Spanish classes. Outside language classes I searched for an internship as I wished to use and improve my fledgling Spanish in a work-place environment. However, with no particular contacts in a highly contact based environment, I was in trouble. Finally, after months of trying, I was offered a marketing internship at Rolex. The value to my resume of an international blue-chip name, in the context of a different culture and language was enormous.

I developed a great deal through my internship experience abroad. I set up The Intern Group so that individuals have the opportunity to do the same as I did – but in a structured, systematic and educational way – and develop themselves professionally and personally.

How did you go about funding the business? After all, you just quit your job.

I had enough saved up to bootstrap with a very basic WordPress website et al. I started to apply to Start-Up Incubators and 8 months after starting the business we were accepted into Start-Up Chile, a Chilean government program for international entrepreneurs, and awarded 40,000 USD in equity-free seed capital. Shortly afterwards, during Start-Up Chile, we turned cash-flow positive and have not looked back.

What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs especially those stuck in the corporate world?

Don´t talk yourself out of it. It is easy to say “You need to be rich to start a business”. You don´t. Technology has made the amount of money needed to launch a start-up astonishingly low. “But what if it doesn´t work. The risk!?”. Do you want to live your life thinking “what-if?”. Yes, your planned project might not work out. But failure, in this context, is seen as a good thing by the people that count – if you learn from it. Many of the most successful businessmen and women started with out-right failures. You learn more from failing than succeeding. The far bigger risk is talking yourself out of it and staying in a job you are unhappy with.

Where do you go from here?

The Intern Group is now on the way to becoming a mainstream option within global higher education.

Just like study-abroad programs became established in recent decades, I see the same now happening with structured intern-abroad programs. Crucially, interning abroad brings even more benefits than traditional study abroad. Not only do you learn all about a country´s history and culture by being immersed there, and develop language skills essential in a globalized world, but you also develop the critical professional skills necessary to advance your career.

I see The Intern Group leading this movement, with more, exciting destinations in our portfolio and further governmental/university partnerships as the next step.

As a young company, operating various international offices presents an extra layer of challenge. How have you overcome these challenges and are there any other pieces of advice you’d give to aspiring business operators?

Firstly, great co-founders/partners in the business. In every program destination we operate, a local partner is leading the business locally, and they are always from the destination. They grew up there. They have the local professional network, and the local know-how vital for success. If your international team is talented, and invested emotionally and financially, you are on the right track.

Secondly, and as a function of the first point, this brings up the importance of spending a lot of time on hiring. I read the other day of a company who spends 98% of their time on hiring, and 2% on resolving hiring mistakes whereas most companies do the opposite. I am a big advocate of this philosophy. In large companies a bad hire is costly. In smaller, younger companies, especially those with different teams spread out around the world, it can break you.

Thirdly, lots of communication. When you are far away from each other, it is easy for individuals and even entire local offices to feel somewhat dislocated and isolated. We prevent this with technology and lots of good-old fashioned talking.

Startup CEO: How To Quit The Trading Floor and Do A Startup Placing Interns All Around The World is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
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Scout raised almost $180,000 with their own crowdfunding campaign in order to improve home security systems.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.

No one thinks home security is cool or interesting, but when you’ve raised almost $180,000 with a custom made kickstarter-esque website, home security becomes pretty interesting. Lindsay Cohen and the team at Scout realized that home security is a commodity and most of the 17% of the country that has security is dissatisfied with their provider. They thought they could bring security up to date, and to do so they went about building their own organic fundraising campaign to get them off the ground. Lindsay was able to share some insights on how they pulled this off.

Dan Reich: Scout seems like a great product. Why did you decide to raise money without a platform like kickstarter or indiegogo?

Lindsay Cohen: Kickstarter rolled out new rules this year that have disqualified a lot of companies from using their site, including Scout. Too many companies were raising millions of dollars without a solid plan to deliver on their promises. At about the same time those rules hit, Lockitron launched their project and showed that you could be successful with an independent crowdfunding site. We felt well prepared for the campaign and were able to save 5% (about $9000) in fees by not going through a third-party website. That money goes a long way for a startup.

DR: You mentioned that you raised money without a first generation product. What assets did you have when you decided to start this fundraising campaign?

LC: Scout came out of the Sandbox Industries startup foundry in Chicago, IL. We had some initial seed money from Sandbox to do the research and development on the project. We used that money to complete the market research, create our initial prototypes, create our website and pay a small team to execute our rollout plan.

DR: As of this writing, you raised close to $162,000. How did you pull this off?

LC: A huge part of our success has been attributable to our ability to get press coverage. In order to do that, we spent the month prior to our campaign planning who we would contact in the press and how we would pitch the story. Since then, we’ve had a small team here at Scout that has been hustling and executing the Scout plan for the majority of their waking hours over the past three weeks. We do have a small budget for pay-per-click ads and an ad retargeting campaign, but press coverage is far and away the biggest reason we have been able to raise $160,000 to date.

DR: What advice would you give to people that are thinking about doing their own crowd funding project?

LC: Know what you’re getting yourself into, put the time into creating an aggressive rollout plan and then execute your plan every minute that you aren’t sleeping. There is a massive amount of preparation that goes into making something like this happen. We’ve written two blog posts on the topic to help others learn from our experiences. There are pros and cons to our approach. Don’t dismiss Kickstarter, if you qualify, just for the sake of doing it yourself. You can gain a lot of leverage from an existing crowdfunding site with a built-in base of users.

DR: What do you wish you would have done differently?

LC: We wish we would have talked to our early backers of Scout more often and given them more chances to share news about the project. We planned to contact them mid-campaign and during the last week, but we should have started in the first week and touched base every week thereafter. Backers are your best evangelists, their sharing efforts on Facebook and Twitter allows you to reach a whole new group of people that you otherwise would not have reached. Also, we would have incentivized sharing more often. Running referral competitions and motivating people to share can be highly effective.

Home Security Startup Raises $180,000 With Its Own Crowd Funding Platform is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
Follow me on Twitter: @DanReich Facebook: Facebook.com/danreich

Wisconsin vs. Standford 2013 Rose Bowl.

Like all new years, I try to take some time to reflect on the past year. I think it’s a healthy and worthwhile thing to do (Here is last year’s review). It also helps to put things in perspective when thinking about the year ahead. So let’s see how this year went.

I mentioned it earlier but this January started off like last January. Wisconsin lost in the Rose Bowl. Shocking. Last year however I wasn’t in Los Angeles for the game. I think it was because I was looking forward to a much bigger game that would take place the next month.

(Indianapolis – Left to Right: My sister, brother, me.)

February. They did it! The Giants won the 2012 superbowl and it only took me 11 hours to drive across the country to Indianapolis with my father, brother and sister. The game and experience were both incredible. The icing on the cake was the fact that I took the Giant’s to win with 25 to 1 odds. That will probably be the luckiest bet I ever make, but I’ll take it. I also had the chance to meet a lot of great people, performers and athletes but perhaps the most interesting encounter was when I bumped into Flavor Flav at the McDonald’s airport for my 4am flight to California. Yes, he was wearing his giant clock even at 4am. He was also on my flight.

Life is a series of ups and downs and March was one of the tougher months of the year. A family member of mine passed away from congestive heart failure. I’m not sure what else to say about that month other than it sucked.

April was better. In just one month I would be getting married. Even typing the word “married” is still a bit strange but I wouldn’t change it. Aside from the wedding plans, I got to head back to Madison, Wisconsin with Andrew and Corey to talk to some students about our Spinback experience. As one friend put it, “the student becomes the teacher.” I don’t think I would go that far but it was great to share some stories with students.

May is when I married my best friend, Amy. The wedding was incredible and I still need to watch the wedding video. I’ll be sure to do that in 2013. After the wedding we did the honeymoon thing and traveled across the country and to the Pacific: Hawaii. It was my first time there and I’m sure I’ll go back at some point. It was also a major milestone in my life as I finally got to cross sky diving off the bucket list. I expected to be terrified jumping out of the plane but it was one of the more peaceful and exhilarating experiences of my life. It’s something I highly recommend that you try. I also got to play golf at some spectacular courses which only reconfirmed how much work my golf game needs.

(Amy is already out of the plane)

In June, Buddy Media got acquired by Salesforce.com. It was such an incredible experience to work with Mike and Kass Lazerow as well as the rest of the Buddy Media team. It’s amazing how much you can learn in such a short period of time. The deal was finalized in August and then I took some time off to do some traveling. Amy and I went to Greece, Turkey and Israel, ate some amazing food and did some extraordinary site seeing. If there is one thing I took away from that trip it’s this: Travel more. Life is short and the world is small. I’m pretty sure Australia is next on my list but who knows when I’ll make it there. And now I’m thinking about this quote I recently read.

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.  ~St. Augustine

Truth.

(Istanbul, Turkey)

Overall, 2012 was a phenomenal year. I learned to be more fearless, more independent and more appreciative of the important things and people in my life. In 2013 I’ll write some new chapters and blog posts. I’ll start a new business venture and keep moving on in this little thing called life.

Here are some random and meaningless predictions for 2013:

• - Green Bay Packers will win the super bowl
• - Zero Dark Thirty will win an award for best picture
• - Iran will get a serious wake up call to stop development of nuclear weapons
• - The internet will be less about people communicating and more about things communicating
• - There will be another major stock market crash
• - The health care industry will finally undergo disruptive transformation
• - All of my predictions will be wrong
• - I’m going to remind myself to never make any predictions ever again

From 2012 to 2013 – No Badgers! is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
Follow me on Twitter: @DanReich Facebook: Facebook.com/danreich

“I’m terrified. I have no clue what I’m doing.” When you’re trying to build an exciting business you would think the description would be a little different but my friend continued. “I have a great idea for a business and I know it will work. I just need $300,000 to make it happen. I want to ask my family and friends for money but I don’t know how. How does it work? Is it a good idea? What if I let them down?”

Starting a business is extremely difficult and like any business, it requires capital. We often read stories about people raising millions of dollars from venture capitalists but most people don’t have access or the means to raise money from a VC. For the vast majority of people, money is raised from banks, from personal savings, and from family and friends. So it’s no wonder my friend was terrified. There’s an emotional tax associated with a capital raise from close relatives. It’s the feeling of losing dollars and trust from your strongest supporters.

Nonetheless, the thought of losing family money shouldn’t prevent you from doing so. So what do you need to know if you want to raise money from family and friends? What are the important things to think about? Here are a few points to consider:

They know all about risk and reward, right? My friend heard about my new business and asked me if he could invest. I said no to him three different times and on three separate occasions. On the fourth time he said something that stuck with me and I ultimately changed my mind. He said, “I’ve invested before and I’m not afraid to lose this money.” Good point, friend. If you’re talking to friends and family that can afford to invest, it’s likely they understand the concept of risk and reward. After all, that’s probably why they can afford to invest some of their money in the first place.

Give fair and favorable terms. Taking money from close friends and family may typically happen in the very early stages of a company. The earlier a venture the riskier it is. If you have a friend or family member that wants to help you get off the ground you should consider giving them favorable terms on their investment. You can make them a larger equity holder. Or perhaps you give them favorable interest rates on a loan they give you. As long as you’re having an honest conversation with them, you can figure out a fair deal structure. Which brings me to my next point.

Be honest. If you’re involved in financial transactions with close friends, it’s extremely important that you are brutally honest and transparent. Sure, you’ll discuss things like terms of the investment and how the business will grow and make money. It’s also important however to talk about expectations. The last thing you want to do is build your business at the expense of a trusted relationship.

Diversify your investment base. When you’re making fundraising rounds with friends and family you may have the opportunity to take money from more then one person. If you do this, you’ll diversify your investment base. You’ll be able to provide some risk protection for your investors even though you’ll be limiting their upside potential. Less money in means less money out. On the other hand, having more investors means managing expectations and communications among more stakeholders. This can get very time-consuming especially when you are trying to run a business. But hey, there is a reason you often hear the word “diversification” when it comes to money management.

Social Proof. Would you invest in a company or entrepreneur that couldn’t raise a single dollar? Probably not. Raising money from your friends and family is a decent indicator that you can successfully convince someone to believe and invest in you. Even if it’s from your parents or your best friend. It sets a baseline precedent that you are capable and trustworthy of managing capital and this is very important for more meaningful capital raises and conversations later on.

Today, there are new technologies that make it easier than ever to raise money. These are crowd-funding platforms that facilitate investments among large networks of individuals. However, it’s often easiest and perhaps most problematic to mix funding with family. If you go down that path, make sure you are thinking about some of the implications. You might all become rich but you also might shake up a relationship or two and that might make for an awkward family dinner.

Have you ever taken an investment from a close friend or family member? Have you ever invested in one? What advice would you give?

Dan Reich is a tech entrepreneur and engineer. He has founded and sold multiple companies, the most recent of which was acquired by Buddy Media, which in turn was acquired by Salesforce. Follow him on Twitter at @DanReich.

Raising Money From Friends and Family is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
Follow me on Twitter: @DanReich Facebook: Facebook.com/danreich

Ian Monroe is a lecturer at Stanford University, as well as the founding CEO of Oroeco, a company that’s gamifying personal sustainability (and seeking to incentivize the global economy in the process). It’s a big mission and I was intrigued by what his company is working on so I caught up with Ian to hear more about Oroeco’s trials and tribulations, as well as his relocation to Santiago for Start-Up Chile.

Dan Reich: When and why did you decide to become a social entrepreneur?

Ian Monroe: Well, I suppose my path to social entrepreneurship was part inspiration, part imitation, and part process of elimination.

I’ve spent most of the last decade bouncing around the world while working on projects related to energy, sustainability, and international development. I enjoyed working with non-profits and corporate clients, but I didn’t see many lasting impacts come out of my field research and report writing. I also enjoyed collaborating with academics and government, but the lack of information transfer from research to policy-making and public awareness got similarly frustrating.

As these frustrations were building up, I saw many of my friends start companies I’m convinced are going to change the world, like Lukas Biewald (CrowdFlower), the late Corwin Hardham (Makani Power), and Brent Schulkin (Carrotmob). Being surrounded by entrepreneurship mentors – where I live in San Francisco’s Mission district there are literally dozens in every direction – made the process of founding a startup seem less daunting and more doable. All I needed at that point was an idea worth dedicating a substantial chunk of my life to build into a business.

DR: How did Oroeco become the idea you decided to build into a business?

IM: Oroeco was born out of seeing both need and opportunity. Fundamentally, Oroeco is something I’ve wanted for my own life for a long time. Despite being a supposed “expert” in sustainability – to the point that I’m invited to teach courses at Stanford on the topic, speak at conferences, and contribute to industry certification efforts – I still can’t walk into Walmart or a grocery store and easily quantify which options are best for other people and the planet. And the choices I know make a difference – like driving less and eating less red meat – are often offset by my international flights.

What I’ve been missing is a tool that easily tracks all my choices, shows me how they compare based on the metrics I care about, and suggests and encourages improvements. Ideally this tool would be fun and social too, since it’s easy to get overwhelmed by data, while comparisons to friends are a lot more engaging.

I also found myself increasingly thinking an Oroeco-like service was needed to realign our economy for sustainability. Most large-scale social and environmental issues – like climate change – trace back to companies producing goods and services that ultimately get paid for by consumers. So informed consumption can drive supply chains to become more sustainable, but first we all need the information and incentives to make better choices.

The idea for Oroeco didn’t refine into a social business concept until I saw that technologies already existed to make it happen. First my environmental life cycle assessment research with Stanford and NRDC exposed me to a bunch of great data sets, which quantify sustainability impacts for most products and services. Then I saw technologies like Mint.com make it easy to automatically track all my spending and investment in one place. And the last piece was seeing the opportunity to connect both of these data feeds to the growing ubiquity of Facebook and social gaming.

DR: What are the biggest challenges Oroeco has faced so far?

IM: The biggest initial challenge was building a great tech team. It’s funny, because I considered myself to be more of a “techie” than most with my science and engineering background, but unless you’ve got “computer” or “software” in front of your degree you don’t count as “technical” in the Silicon Valley.

Finding a team of solid technical co-founders took nearly a year. The process was made more difficult by the fact that Oroeco was entirely bootstrapping, so I was essentially only offering equity and enthusiasm for how Oroeco could change the world. On the positive side, we’ve now got a fantastic team that’s both highly qualified – most are startup vets from Stanford, MIT and UC Berkeley – and as passionate about personal sustainability and Oroeco as I am. I’m particularly excited that our primary engineering leads are two awesome women (Yang Ruan and Kirstin Cummings), which is a rarity in the startup world, and something that’s helping us incorporate gender-balanced perspective into design decisions.

DR: Chile is a long way to go for a startup accelerator, what convinced you to leave San Francisco for Santiago?

IM: We considered a few American startup accelerators, but by offering about $43,000 in equity-free investment, Start-Up Chile was by far the best deal we could find, as well as a great opportunity to connect with a network of international entrepreneurs who can eventually help Oroeco go global.

I’m the only Oroeco team member who’s spending a full six months in Santiago, while the rest of our team will keep circulating between the San Francisco area, Boston, and New York. While I’ve had the opportunity to work in much of the rest of Latin America on various sustainability projects, this is my first time in Chile.

On the more personal side, I’m fascinated by Start-Up Chile’s model, and getting a firsthand look at its successes and failures. The program is already being emulated by other countries, like Brazil. Start-Up Chile clones could catalyze entrepreneurship throughout the developing world, and the program is already sparking a tremendous amount of international networking and knowledge exchange.

DR: How has the Start-Up Chile experience compared to building a business in Silicon Valley? Has Chile succeeded in creating a startup-friendly environment?

IM: Overall, Start-Up Chile has been fantastic. The support staff and working environment are great. Santiago is an easy city to navigate, with public transportation on par with San Francisco and many European cities.

Navigating the Chilean bureaucracy has been a bit more challenging. Start-Up Chile has tried to streamline the process as much as possible, but there are still a lot of paperwork hoops to jump through. It took me nearly a month and more than a dozen signatures to open a bank account through a local Citi branch, then another half dozen documents to sign off on just to put cash into my account. In contrast, setting up a Citi account in San Francisco took about 15 minutes, and I’ve opened an account in Beijing in about as much time, despite my Mandarin being much worse than my Spanish!

DR: Oroeco’s mission is to fundamentally shift the global economy towards sustainability. But that task seems quite daunting, particularly for a little startup. What are your biggest challenges ahead?

IM: Our current challenge is to spread the word that we exist. Our big push now is to recruit our first beta users through our Indiegogo campaign – indiegogo.com/oroeco – which wraps up January 1st. So if people hear about us, like what we’re doing, and want to try us out, that’s the place to go. We’ve got a next to nil marketing budget, so we’re relying heavily on social marketing and word of mouth.

Over the longer term, the challenge is to simultaneously grow our user base while keeping our existing users engaged. There’s plenty of market research that shows most people want to live more sustainable lifestyles, and Oroeco can be a disruptive technology that changes how people and companies incorporate sustainability into decision-making. But for that to happen we need to scale to millions of users, ideally hundreds of millions, and these users need to be engaged enough by Oroeco’s user experience that our information and incentives factor into their everyday choices.

Our success will ultimately hinge on our user experience, since a compelling product will market itself. We think we’ll appeal to more users as we add societal, health and environmental impacts indicators beyond climate change, and we should appeal to even more users as we refine our social gaming and rewards. The challenge is to add functionality without compromising on design elegance, and to provide a flexible interface that can accommodate a wide range of user preferences.

A final challenge is protecting user privacy, particularly since we’re working with financial transaction data that can be sensitive. It’s important users trust us with their information, and have faith that we won’t create a great service that changes the rules of the privacy game once it hits critical mass. Users understandably get quite upset when this happens, which we’ve seen most recently with Instagram.

DR: Any parting advice for aspiring social entrepreneurs?

IM: It’s cliché to say, but the most important thing is to be thoroughly passionate about what you’re working on. And don’t be afraid to share that passion with everyone you know. Your honest enthusiasm is what will attract like-minded team members, as well as investors and users. It’s also ultimately what will make the bouncy startup journey fun and rewarding, even if you end up in a ditch.

I’m naturally a pretty laidback guy, with a tendency to engage in long-winded academic discourse, so infectiously exuding my excitement for Oroeco is a challenge. But I’m still happily working long nights and waking up excited, which is only the case because I still thoroughly believe we’re building something that will help craft a sustainable future. Sharing this passion with a great team and crew of awesome advisors has only magnified this feeling. Now we just need to demonstrate there are a lot of users out there who feel the same way.

Dan Reich is a tech entrepreneur and engineer. He has founded and sold multiple companies, the most recent of which was acquired by Buddy Media, which in turn was acquired by Salesforce. Follow him on Twitter at @DanReich.

Startup CEO: Ian Monroe on Social Entrepreneurship, Startup Chile, and Building a Tech Team is a post from... Dan Reich - A Student - Learning, Living at the Intersection of Business + Technolog + Innovation + Culture.
Follow me on Twitter: @DanReich Facebook: Facebook.com/danreich