What I learned during 2011

I learned a heck of a lot in 2011. I began the year in my investor relations role and gained valuable experience about how large companies manage coms. A few months into the year I was forced to make a decision on my next job. I could either follow the suggested path in audit, or take a path less traveled and work for someone I really liked. From the beginning, I never felt particularly interested in doing audit. I had a little bit of experience from college, and it had left a sour taste. My gut said take the other job, and I did. Today I can say I know I made the right choice. Lesson: Follow your gut

In my new job I learned a heck of a lot about financial services. From end of lease, to credit ratings, to subsidy. It’s a very interesting business, and I feel like I’m asking the right questions and putting together interesting data for my boss.

I continued to grow in my trading of naked options. Closing 2 positions with 1000% gains, but also had my fair share of losers. I need to continue to be patient, take calculated risks, and always have bullets ready when I see the right opportunity. Thinking the best strategy might just be companies with lots of cash flow, and high dividends, and simply just reinvesting.

I gained confidence by contacting a VC and traveling to San Diego to meet with him and pitch some ideas. Things went well, and we still trade emails today. The cost of the trip has already been recovered from making the contact.

I learned about trademarks, starting an LLC, and how it feels to get a cease and desist from your alamarter. I learned how to respond to such letters, and am excited to see what the outcome is.

I learned I can make $20 a month from youtube for a video a made, but no idea why it’s got 100k plus hits now. Still trying other videos, but no such luck… 20 videos like this would be awesome.

I learned I can still drink like I did in college, run almost as fast (still improving from this summer), and experimented cooking new dishes.

I learned about real estate, and made offers on several houses, none of yet to be accepted, but still looking for the perfect one. I like this one.

I learned that grad school is expensive, and it doesn’t make sense for me to go unless I stay in state at UT.

I watched several episodes of pickers and storage wars and added to my knowledge of antiques and such.

In 2012 I am looking forward to continuing to learn. I have some fun new ideas for DFS I need to start working on. I’ve got a feeling Dwindeals will be the side project i’ve been looking for to succeed (trust your gut). Finally, I want to learn something about beer.

Discussion in adding a 4th partner

A lot of really good stuff here, and I agree with a lot of it.

As per core competencies of the company this is how I vision it:
Unique, simple to use website (Jon to build this)
Customer engagement via multiple platforms such as email, social (void, but not essential today)
Sales model with merchants that provides quality products (I dont care how good 1 & 2 are, sales is very important)

Not core competencies:
Finance, Accounting, Law

We could model out every bit of how much it would cost to outsource the entire project, none of us are needed, and each of the core skills can be replaced at the expense of money. However, we can't outsource a team that is completely connected, and driven towards one goal.  Totally agree that there needs to be a pool set aside for investments, future employee awards ect. But the pool doesnt need to be all that large. And we can think about voting rights on the board as 100%.  Think about this, say in 3-4 months we're on track to hit $100k in revenue in a year, I would say it's not unlikely to be able to raise cash that would give us a $2M valuation (20x revenue), and if we could show we're still growing even more. Then giving away options becomes very interesting. You offer someone options worth $50k pending the company reaches a $4M valuation and you're giving a pretty nice reward for only 1.25% of the company's equity, if the company doesnt double it costs us nothing.

Let's make sure we view the forest and not the trees here. We don't have a product, just an idea. Let's not let some possible future value of the company blind us to executing something we think has potential. I want to make sure we're as initially successful as possible, but I want to make sure everything is fair. I need some help understanding how labor demanding email marketing is other than designing a pretty email and then changing the products every day. I would assume John also has skills in taking that database of emails and slicing it different ways, find anomalies and arbitrages in the data that will help us with converting sales .

Startup Party Austin

Last night my buddy Rafael and I went to a holiday party that 5 different start ups put on. It was pretty good. Free booze, and plenty of interesting people trying to start their own projects. We brought our latest kickstarter project battleshots to try to get some buzz around it. Everyone seemed to have a good time. Also we need to check out bootstrap austin. 2nd time it's been suggested to us

Follow Your Gut

The other night I sent a list of ideas I’ve been having to the head of a tech accelerator that I hoped could help make one or more a reality. My original goal was to get the portfolio of ideas complete, and email sent the day after thanksgiving hoping to catch him when he had less email traffic, but for some reason I delayed.

I delayed until Saturday, and then until Sunday, and finally decided to put my finishing touches on the document Sunday night and send it then. This would allow for my email to be first in his inbox to see in the morning. After getting it done, I didn’t get my normal sense of accomplishment, and didn’t sleep very well that night. In the morning I had a response like I wanted, but wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

Last night I spend 7 hours with my good friend and lawyer discussing my trademark, and putting together additional documentation. My lawyer is a bright guy. He explained to me how law is like a chess match and we strategized and played out several different scenarios. This was fun, stimulating, and I know I am learning a lot.

Briefly we talked about some of my ideas, that I had emailed the night before and he thought they were great. We got off track a bit as we discussed how to capitalize, and what the team would look like. After getting such a poor response from the email the prior night, it felt good to have some reassurance my ideas were good ones.

After reflecting on the whole situation I think I’ve figured out a  lesson. I need to trust my gut  more often. Generally, I feel like I can trust my gut and I think my gut was telling me to delay sending my ideas in an email to someone I didn’t even know. At the time I thought the feeling in my gut was myself being lazy and just pushing off work. I think this is a fine line I will need to learn to walk, but will be an important thought to keep in mind going forward.

Now someone I don’t know, who doesn’t want my help, has my ideas and the ability to make them happen. I hope they don’t get “stolen.” It’s hard to get ideas turned into a reality without sharing them, and I’ve tried to not share my ideas, but the response is never good. You could try sending non competes, but people will rarely sign them, so I decided to just give it a shot.

My buddy Rafael and I did this a few weeks ago on KickStarter.com with our iVault. I’ll say we had moderate success, several positive reviews, over 100+ facebook likes, but we were unable to raise the capital to complete the project. The funny thing is now there are 2 other projects (first, second) just like ours on the site. I guess copying is the best form of flattery, but i still want some credit.

Thoughts on Kickstarter project

It seems like to get funded on kickstarters you need a professional video or a prototype, and we don’t have either. We thought about the video but decided it would cost money to get done, and take longer to produce so we made it on our own. As far as the prototype it would really cost around 5-6k to get to that point. Seems like many of these companies are actual design firms that already have produced the product and are using kickstarter as a marketing forum. With that said, I think the right idea could still be pretty successful.

You should find some cool entrepreneur clubs on campus and meet people. Looking back I wish I had networked with more people on campus that could help with these sort of things (designers, programs, graphics people) now I just try to find them online.

I have a couple more website ideas I am trying to develop and I’ll see if the concepts workout. I just see lots of opportunity out there, and people developing simple apps, and sites that end up getting several million dollars to continue to develop the product. I think about Siri and where that is taking technology and what a good app or website that could utilize voice. To some extent I feel like I’ve missed the iPhone revolution, but there will be another one, just have to be patient .