First year is done and what a doozy it was! But now I have 2nd year to look forward to and courses that I actually get to choose!!
One course that I am really looking forward to is Entrepreneurship. Its not just that its a recommended course to take if you are interested in the Entrepreneurship career track. Its also a pre-requisite for other fun courses at Haas (like the Venture Capital and Private Equity course).
Almost everyone who has taken Entrepreneurship says that it is an extremely useful course to take if you already have an idea and want to really see where it can go. Or what I like to call the this-is-an-app-not-a-company decision.
So to cut a long post short, this is what I want to do this summer before I actually take Entrepreneurship in the Fall. I want to brainstorm up some ideas and hopefully, hopefully should have maybe one good idea to run with before school starts. An exciting summer it promises to be!!
More exciting Entrepreneurship things that happened at Haas recently? Well, for starters, a brand new Founder School. And of course if you have been following other Lester Center events, now all 2010-2011 videos of various events are available for the BEF(Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum) and the EBP(Entrepreneurial Best Practices) series.
A couple of the ideas I have been thinking about -
- Automatic transcripts for webex sessions and conference calls. We have a lot of tutorial sessions over webex and because I read much faster than I can listen, I always thought that it would be faster to have a transcript of the tutorial session instead of having to watch the entire video. And transcripts for conference calls can be useful in multiple situations. Only problem being the whole multiple speaker speech recognition thing. Not such a problem for tutorial sessions as its usually a GSI speaking.
- Let your friends vote for your Top-5-FaceBook-posts. This one is pure vanity I know, but it would be cool to have an app which lets friends vote on what were your top 5 FB posts (status updates or pics or links). I did use an app at the beginning of 2010 which did a summary of your year in status updates. But you were the only one allowed to pick and choose what went in.
- Help-I-lost-my-Google-Wallet! Smart phones are doing more and more these days (sometimes I think Skynet will actually be a smart phone). And now that Google Wallet is here, we need to worry about people like me who are super prone to losing their phones. What we need is a one stop shop which will cancel all your credit cards (linked to your Google Wallet) or even in the real world. As the security explanation for Google Wallet states, if you lose your phone, you still have to call all your card companies to cancel your cards.
Wini,
Take a look at the whole ‘Lean Startup’ concept, in case you haven’t already. Folks to read are Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Hiten Shah and Sean Ellis (amongst others) which invariably will lead you to Steve Blank and “customer development”. Yes, the concept itself is sometimes a little over-hyped, but there’s enough substance/logic and proven successes that it’s made me a believer. Eric recently had the SLL conference (#sllconf), videos for which are available on Justin.tv (2 conferences worth).
In a nutshell, its enough to [a] keep you busy during the summer months
[b] will allow you to validate multiple ideas (not just one) if you choose. You can set up landing pages (use Unbounce), do A/B testing, collect leads and all that good stuff. The ‘catch’ of course is that its not easy.
Thanks Chando, will do!