T’was the night before SWTOR

and all through the house

hardware was updated.

Look! A new naga mouse!

Refrigerator well stocked with energy drinks

Everything just so, ready to own some Imps

Pre-order codes had been input with care

With the hopes that 7am email will promptly be there

Perhaps a last minute patch to watch for?

Just one more time, login to the launcher

On forums, On vent, On teamspeak and twitter

Discussions raged about which server was better

“Helm of Graush? WTF does that mean?”

“Relax  my friend, at least it’s not RP-PVE”

Podcasts, blogs, videos consumed

The fasted path to 50 illume’d

CE delayed? How will I activate my subscription?

Should’ve ordered the Digital Deluxe Edition

My company, SieEnt, had the tremendous honor of participating in Project Skyway’s Bootcamp Weekend June 10-12. The experience was incredible, validating, educational and eye opening. It was a 3-day initiation into the Twin Cities tech entrepreneur scene.  And that scene is full of energy, excitement and seriously awesome people.

I’ll break down thoughts by event:

Friday, June 10

“Geek Dance”

The Geek Dance was a great party.  A lot of networking and the questionnaire we had to fill out was a surprise.

Key learnings for me:

1. Cem’s suggestion: write down/type a few notes about the person outside of what they do as you walk away or as soon as you have a moment.
2. Resist the temptation to speak with all the people you already know all night.
3. Ask those people you know to introduce you to other people you don’t know yet.
4. While its super comfortable and fun speaking with other women, go out of your way to speak to more of the dudes .

Saturday, June 11

Executive Summary “Swap-and-Pitch”

This was really fun. You get the executive summary from another company and you pitch it as if were you’re own. Someone else, in turn, pitches your own company.

Key learnings for me:

1. This is an awesome activity. Is your plan clear enough for someone else to understand it to pitch?
2. Punt, punt, punt.
3. I realized there was some messaging that I could have done better.

Feedback:

1. I would have preferred being in a smaller group and having us pitch more than one business to the smaller group.

Mentor-Go-Round

In this part we attended in small groups 6 different “stations” with mentors, Marketing, Legal, Technology, Investment, Strategy and Hiring. Because our group was randomly thrown together, we ended up with 3 very different businesses in the group. It was interesting to hear and learn about the different problems my fellows were facing.

Key learnings:

1. Treat your job posts like any other marketing, pr and sales copy.
2. Talk to your network to discover strategic partnerships that you may not have considered.
3. If you’re fundraising a lot of money, look for a broker who will help in exchange for some equity on the back end of a success.
4. Your family investing your company looks good to VCs and angels.
5. “Preview is the new beta”.
6. I should probably retain a new attorney, or at least another one for other specialized issues.
7. Build something that just can’t be knocked off.
8. Define the next segment(s).

Feedback:

1. It might have made more sense to group campers up by similar verticals or B2C & B2B since we only had 20 minutes with each mentor table.

Dinner

Dinner was awesome. Our Project Skyway Ambassador didn’t make it but we enjoyed our time anyways.

Sunday, June 12

Go to the Gym & Pitch Prep

By Gym, they meant BizGym.

Key learnings:

1. We shouldn’t have spent so much time messing around with BizGym and just worked on our investor pitch.
2. Practice, practice, practice.  Spend more time practicing than writing.

One on Ones (really two on twos) with Cem and Casey

Key learnings:

1. Get your milestones defined and memorized.  The next level isn’t “launch” for us, it’s another series of prototypes for which seed funding would be just fine.
2. Our messaging around our business model isn’t clear. The focus always shifts to the game when the real plan is in the distribution and social platform that accompanies it.

Home Run Derby

Here we had to pitch and rate each other along with strangers in the audience.

Key learnings:

1. The community is kick ass.
2. Omg Practice! I really need a lot of practice speaking more extemporaneously.
3. I decided to start a meetup group called “90 Second Pitches, Bitches” so that people can practice like this in front of people.
4. Go with your gut. I changed my mind at the last minute on customer pitch and I should have just gone with my gut.

All in all, made some new friends. I learned A LOT. I had a great time and loved being pushed out of my comfort zone and receiving feedback. It was a really validating experience and I felt like I was around people that really “got it”, that really knows the passion and anxiety that comes with launching a startup. It makes me wish there were more boot camps. How awesome would our community be with more boot camps?

This blog has been an unfortunate victim of my new game company SieEnt. Livin’ the dream as it were.

As we move through our process of designing and building the game and the company a thought came to my mind. Designing a game is much like planning a party. Like a game, parties are also supposed to be fun.

Consider.

First what kind of party are we having? A kegger? Black Tie? A celebration around an event, like a birthday or wedding? A murder mystery dinner?
What’s our budget? Who is on the guestlist?

Then once all of that is established, its on to the finer details.

What kind of decor and space will we need? What about the music and lighting? Do we need room to dance? Do people need to sit down? What kind of food and drinks are we serving? Open bar or cash bar? How do we want our guests to interact with one another?

The point of party planning is to create a mood and atmosphere where something can be enjoyed. Details matter.

A large game might be a series of different kinds of parties, strung together.

Come to think about it, really why not approach everything like you’re planning a party? Maybe that will be my new business philosophy.

All Apologies

I had the great pleasure of attending the IGDA Leadership Forum in San Francisco a few weeks back. It was great. There was a lot of interesting and informative presentations about leadership in the game industry. Especially interesting to me were the presentations of Scott Crabtree, Marc Merrill and Laura Fryer.

Managing Your Team with Brain Science

Scott Crabtree is the only presenter ever that got me to put away my laptop AND iPhone for his entire presentation. He even scented his handouts with a nice orange smell so we’d remember that smell is important to learning. Unfortunately for me, I was asked before the presentation to smell the handout and as he apologized for the odd request, he explained that he was weird. So now I will associate that orange smell with “Scott Crabtree is weird” forever.

But that pre-presentation apology was just the beginning of what would be an hour of apologizing that his brain science ideas were basically not “manly” enough. While he never stated that exact phrase, anything that was “warm and fuzzy” in his presentation was prefaced as such. And yet, he had the scientific proof to back up the idea of wafting the smell of fresh baked cookies through the office when investors toured it to get more favorable results.

Creating a Culture of Awesome

Marc Merrill, President of Riot Games, spoke about his culture of awesome at Riot. It did indeed sound awesome, but he apologized several times for the idealism in his culture during his presentation. Awesome needs no apologies, my friend.

Fiat Lux

Bold, Smart Management

Laura Fryer, on the other hand, had no apologies for her straightforward, yet idealistic approach to management. She spoke of really personal struggles. Still, she made the case for leadership as a truly noble cause and she didn’t apologize for any of her values.

It’s People!!

Leadership means nothing without the people. A few days ago I was having a conversation about the Netflix Culture Deck with a mentor of mine. He also apologized for appreciating the idealism embodied in some of the values. He, whom I admire precisely because he cares so much about the people who work for him.

My frustrated response to his apology was, “It isn’t idealistic at all. It’s Human.”

Valuing things like social interaction, good judgement, honesty, commitment and even the smell of delicious baked goods are what makes us people. What is truly crazy is that by making the aforementioned values  ”ideals” imply a strange conception that people are interchangeable automatons and are stripped of all humanity in the work place. An organization is made of people, like soylent green.

So leaders, stop apologizing, embrace your humanity and lead as a human! It isn’t idealism.

We See ‘em Trollin’…

I’m sure HBR or Stanford or some school will someday do a study quantifying the amount of daily production lost to arguing on the Internet or simply reading pejorative comments left by trolls.

Until then I’m just going to postulate that reading unmoderated comments can be a total a day-killer. Since taking steps into the game industry over the last few months, I’ve been learning a lot about the culture of the industry. Most of my experience at GDC Online involved me explaining that I’m not making a “fashion game” or a game with pets. When I explained who my target market was, that was typically the response I received. What I’m sad to admit is that the response never surprised me.

Women, Innovation and Awesomeness

Women in IT and STEM fields is a subject I’m very passionate about (see: She’s Geeky et al). I was overjoyed to read that Gamasutra had an article today about the 2 Million dollar grant from the National Institute of Heath to fund a game that addresses the subtle biases women often face when considering a career in STEM. The vast majority of the comments on the article, on the other hand, were filled with ignorance and fear. I’m not sure what it is about articles like these that raise the hackles of so many men on these game industry websites. They realize women read these comments, right? Would they say those same things to their mothers, sisters and daughters?

Between the research I’ve been doing for She’s Geeky as well as SieEnt I came across a very startling fact: if current trends continue, by 2018 the US will have more high tech/IT jobs then they can possibly fill (source: ncwit.org Facts 2010). What this means is we will have to outsource more primary IT jobs. Innovation and awesomeness generally occur closest to where the work is being done – think more bottom-up innovation, rather than top-down innovation. While women make up over 50% of college graduates and the workforce, female IT graduates are only about 18%. Interestingly, this number used to be much higher, closer to 40%. Overall there was simply more interest in STEM and IT in the mid-80s. For some reason, interest in IT drops off in the 90s through the millennium. If we could draw more women into IT, it has the potential effect of making the whole industry appealing to more people in general. There have been plenty of studies about how diverse teams perform better in the workplace in addition to having better retention overall. But for whatever reason the IT industry in particular has a difficult time with diversity.

Another reason to have more women in IT: US women are growing in prominence as household “CFO”s. There’s a lot of money to be made if more products were geared to these women with higher disposable income.

I’m not sure why men (and women) want to keep IT a sausagefest there is no rational reason to do so.

w00t.

Wow. What can I say? I’m pleased as a peach about how She’s Geeky Twin Cities turned out. I’m so excited about organizing the next event! It’s going to be even more awesome!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

First, a HUGE THANK YOU to all our attendees. Ladies, you are awesome and I’m so humbled you chose to attend our unConference.  Second, thank you to all our sponsors: ClockWork, ipHouse, the Science Museum of Minnesota, Fabuliss, MinneWebCon, MinneStar, and SieEnt. Thirdly, thank you to Heidi Nobantu-Saul for facilitating both days and for all the pre-conference help. Thanks to our volunteers who tweeted, blogged, facebooked, hooked us up with contacts and checked women in at registration. Finally, last but not least, to Elizabeth Tupper for driving and seeing this to its fruition. She’s Geeky Twin Cities would not have been possible with out her!

Speaking of Liz, she said it best:

“Words can not explain how amazing it feels to bring 100 women the same life changing experience you had 8 months earlier.”

So instead of using my words (assuming I had them) – how about hearing, reading, seeing the event through others:

She’s Geeky Attendee Blogs/Podcasts:

From the ipHouse Blog
From the “Professional MacGyver”
From Social Nicole
From Kay Roseland
From Fabuliss
From the Most Popular Girls on the Internet
From Jenna Pederson

If you wrote something about She’s Geeky and its not here, let me know and I’ll get it up here!

She’s Geeky Press!

MPR press
Tech dot MN Story

Photos from She’s Geeky Twin Cities

I’ve always been a nerdy girl.

I’ve always been curious about the world around me. I was (and still am) especially fascinated with space. In third grade there was a partial solar eclipse. The night before the eclipse on the news they showed how to make a pinhole box with tin foil. I put one together that night. I had to fight my parents to stay up to finish it and I was very proud of it. I brought it to school and showed it to my teacher. I was the only kid to have one, but my teacher let me out on the playground at the appropriate time to use it. I was excited as the little dot of light began to shadow into a little crescent. I felt special to have the permission to be outside to witness it. But, I also felt very alone. There was no one to share the excitement with.

As I got older, I discovered that not only was it lonely to be a nerdy, geeky kid, but even more lonely to be a nerdy, geeky girl. Sure, the boys on my block would play with Transformers and the Atari with me, but I had to fly solo when my collection of My Little Ponies and stuffed animals saved the world along with Optimus Prime and Voltron. They just weren’t interested.

Talking Shop and Shopping

The Internet made it easier to connect with other fellow geeks and nerds but as a woman, I was a minority. I love talking about video games, music, science and technology. But sometimes I want also to talk about shoes, handbags, makeup, economics and my bizarre crushes on Werner Heisenberg and Mark Mothersbaugh; especially so with people who simultaneously want to talk about the former too.

So I said to Elizabeth Tupper, “Hey we need a women’s’ tech conference in the Twin Cities”. And not another group to join, but a conference that brought all kinds of disciplines together to cross-pollinate. After encountering several dead ends, Liz found out about She’s Geeky DC on twitter. It sounded perfect. We flew out there on our own dimes to check it out. We loved it.

Why She’s Geeky is Awesome

She’s Geeky DC was awesome because we could talk about tech and yoga together without an eye-roll. Moms brought daughters. We worked in corporations, for non-profits, for the government, for ourselves. We could talk about science and cocktails. We asked each other if management or consulting or programming was the right career path for us. We asked each other why we weren’t speaking at tech conferences. We asked each other why weren’t starting that business or following that dream. We encouraged and energized each other. And when the power went out on Saturday, we improvised!

We could talk about whatever we wanted – it was our conference.

And that’s the vision Liz and I wanted to bring back to the Twin Cities.

Just like my 3rd-grade nerdy girl self, we just want to share the excitement with other women seeking the same.

What’s more awesome is that the Science Museum of Minnesota sponsored our meeting space and all attendees will be able to stroll through the museum as well. How cool is that?

I hope you register for the event. I can’t wait to meet you and hear your stories!

We hope you’ll join us August 6 and 7 at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

I’m so excited. She’s Geeky is going to be at the Science Museum of Minnesota this August. The Science Museum has generously donated space and attendees will be able to wander the museum as well. How awesome is that?

Registration is now open for the event. Early birds can snag a discounted ticket rate of $40 for each individual day or $75 for both. What are you waiting for?!

Interested in sponsoring or volunteering? Contact Liz Tupper(@etupper) or myself (@moarinternets) on Twitter or email jacqueline.urick at gmail dot com.

So who is in for She’s Geeky Twin Cities this August? The tentative dates for the event are August 6-7, 2010. We’re in need of some volunteers for the host committee as well as the event itself. You know you want to help out!

What is She’s Geeky you ask?
From the She’s Geeky website:

The brainchild of Kaliya Hamlin, She’s Geeky gives women in technology an opportunity to get together and discuss the unique issues they face in their respective fields. Hosting unConferences across the United States, She’s Geeky aims to inspire women technologists in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields, provide a space for women geeks to create enduring communities, and foster collaboration and innovation among peers.

I attended the DC event last November and it was a wonderful experience. It was great to network and interact with techy women from so many different backgrounds. On Saturday, two women brought their daughters. I hope to see more young women at the event this August.
If you are a women in the Twin Cities who is interested in volunteering for the event, please reach out to me (@moarinternets) or Elizabeth Tupper (@etupper) on Twitter. We’re also looking for some sponsors, so if you or your company would like to support women in technology contact us!
She’s Geeky unConference topics – photo by jen_myronuk.

The first test of an entrepreneur is – can you spell “entrepreneur”?

So I think I passed that one. *whew*

I’ve decided to combine my passion for empowering women with my passion for video games. Its like the peanut butter cup of video games and its going to be awesome. As much as I’d love to spill the details, I know I can’t just yet — and its driving me nuts!

I have to say that I am amazed and in awe of the support I’ve been receiving for both my idea and what I’m going to accomplish. People really do want to help others.

So to that end, I encourage anyone with a great idea to start talking about what you want to do with that idea and see what happens. Perhaps you’ll be amazed too!