Dot Com to Dot Bomb

Andrew Fry talked to us about his experience in this moment in time. Andrew had a front row seat to the Internet explosion. His company Free Range Media was one of the first website design companies. During the Dot com explosion he wen from 2 employees to 30 and continued to grow. Andrew said it was insane. The only thing that seemed to matter was that you made money.

Andrew used Dinosaurs to illustrate the first internet providers: Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe, Delphi and Genie. The reason he used dinosaurs is that they are large slow moving and extinct. These companies where owned by larger ones except for AOL. Prodigy was owned by Sears and IBM.  Genie was owned by GE. CompuServe was owned by H&R Block. As the internet took off these companies slowly died because they failed to innovate and adapt. Much like the dinosaurs. The ones that did where taken out by the meteor or the dot com bust.

This moment was so crazy that these companies with .com on their names became instantly worth a lot of money. InfoSource was worth more than the Boeing Corporation. The wise man looked at this and thought there was something wrong. A company like Boeing that has been in business for 90 years and the largest exporter by value in the US would be worth less than Infosource. The insanity just kept going as AOL bought TimeWarner. But like all bubbles they finally burst and lots of people lost their jobs and money. One of the fascinating things is the companies that survived. Yahoo came out of no where and became a major portal for information. Amazon.com made money and is now the largest internet retailer in the world. Google came after the bust, has risen to lead the way into the future. 

South Sound Technology conference

Sharon Wong

Director of Business Incubation, Emerging Technologies Group

Cisco Systems

Sharon talked to us about the Emerging Technologies Group and the Internet of everything. It was fascinating to hear her place at the company and what she sees happening. The Internet is not just about information it is about connecting things. “Today more than 99 percent of physical objects in the world are unconnected. By 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected. As the number of connections between people, processes, data, and things continue to grow” Sharon discussed the opportunities that are available for businesses to be a part of connecting everything. One of the fascinating topics that she discussed was the power company in Canada that has brought its grid online. All of its meters are IP connected and can report constantly. Cisco has been working on software that will help the company predict the amount of energy needed and capacity that it has. Another point that Sharon made was that when we connect these devices they can give us feedback on how much energy we are using. They can gives us real time information on how much money we are saving. This can help us to conserve more. 

Michael Hamilton

Chief Information and Security Officer

City of  Seattle

Michael talked to us about security and the real threats. One of his points that stuck with me was when he asked us who gets hurt when credit cards are stolen? Well not the card holder, it is the Credit Card company. But the real valuable target is the power to turn on the flood gates at a Dam 2 states away. This is what needs protecting. He also stated that antivirus is not the solution it is not going to keep them out. They are already in. We need to work on finding them and getting them out of our systems. Too much of the expertise is spent on prevention. How do we combat this? Michael is leading the way with the Public Regional Information Security Event Management (PRISEM). What this can do for us is get everyone involved. Business does not have the means to fight it. Here in the South Sound we have a lot available to us. The Military is close by at JBLM. We have the FBI who is there to help us. These are things that PRISEM can help to orchestrate. It is like a central place where threats can be managed and the right people can be notified. 

Jim Kastama

Jim Kastama is a Washington State Senator and has been for the last 16 years. Jim talked to us about his work with the IPZ’s in Washington State. IPZ stands for Innovation Partnership Zone. Jim stated that 2/3’s of GDP is directly due to innovation. Innovation is different than invention. Invention seeks to create something where there is a perceived need. Innovation on the other hand seeks to improve upon what is already there. The Boeing Corporation has an assembly plant in Everett where they assemble 737’s. It took approximately 23 days to assemble a plane.  Boeing got the engineers and the guys on the floor together and had them discuss ways that they could improve the assembly process. One thing that stood out was the installation of seats. One worker suggested that they use a hay elevator to lift the seats into the plane rather than carry them one by one up the stairs. This and other innovations cut the assembly time down to 11 days and they are working on getting it down to 9.

 Jim has been working with IPZ’s in Washington and he gave us some insight. The IPZ’s bring the business sector, a research university, and local government together to see how they can help each other. Business has the labor, the university has the research and government has the capital. This model has been very successful in our state. In Walla Walla there is a huge wine industry and the local community college is leading the way in developing young talent to work in this industry.  One thing that stood out to me was the need to work on growing our own innovators and not look to steal them from somewhere else. If we can grow our own talent then they are more likely to stay here and have a much bigger impact.  Another program that he is working on is the Stars program. This program brings in known innovators and builds them a lab or surrounds them with what they need to get their ideas to work. This has been hugely successful with the IPZ’s. 

Brian Forth

Brian Forth

Entrepreneur and small business owner.

Brian came and talked to us about site crafting in 98. Site Crafting is a website and mobile application development company. Brian’s path to entrepreneur was different than others. He started out as a 5^th grade teacher. He ended up helping the students create websites for other teacher. Eventually his student’s parents started asking him to build websites for them.

Like other entrepreneurs his previous employment prepared him to run his own business. From those previous employments he learned how to treat customers and how not to treat employees. His company survived the dot com bust by being small enough to pick up the pieces that the larger firms could not afford to take. The key to his early success “We return phone calls”.

The key to his future success is to remove the cyclical model from the business. He is trying to move to more maintenance contracts instead of when they need it. They are going to buy it but anyway lets spread out the money. Another of his success is the mobile application side. His business is building websites that work. He used the mobile application that gets users information about vendors, where the vendors get in the application for free. The vendors see this and want a site that works as well as it does. This has given him a foot in the door to an industry that is very suspicious of outsiders. He has become the guy with the app.

Brian’s pointers for entrepreneurs

-          Setting precedent: The way you deal with things matters.

-          Everyone is a salesman good entrepreneurs see what needs to be sold to a person at that moment in time. Whether it is motivating someone to do a task that they might not have time for, or getting the bank to loan you money.

-          entrepreneurs do not have someone telling them what to work on.

-          It is a lonely group unless you meet with other entrepreneurs

-          Being a successful entrepreneur is about timing and a luck, being at the right place at the right time with the right solution.

Mission Statement and Vision

Mission Statement and Vision

Snowduty.com is Ski patrollers helping ski patrols. We are a provider of scheduling and geo-tracking of safety personnel.  Our mission is to help winter resorts be safer and more efficient. We do this through our mobile web application, which enables real-time location tracking and scheduling of ski patrollers.  Through better scheduling and coverage we can increase the safety of the clients and help lower the liability resorts face. Real-time coverage maps help resorts know areas that need to be covered rather than pencil and paper notes.  Our database provides an archive enabling resorts to look back on historical performance.  We are different than off the shelf scheduling software, in that we come to the resort and customize our solution to meet the site specific needs.   

Vision statement:

Ski patrollers helping ski patrols making resorts safer and clients happier.

Graham Evens: Entrepreneur and thinking skills

Graham Evens

Entrepreneur and thinking skills

Graham challenged us to think outside of the normal business strategy.  He talked about the success of good thinking skills, he talked of Ford hiring Alan Mulally and how when asked what he was going to do Alan responded with “I have to find out what I do not know”. He also told of another company that moved into the US grocery business and did market research but did not listen to the results. They went ahead and tried to give the consumers what they thought they were missing. This turned out to be a failure. Graham went on to get us thinking with the following points.

He gave us 3 things to think around:

- Know what you do not know

            Do not think that you know everything be able to learn

- Recognize challenges to your paradigm

Humans have a hard time including things that challenge what they believe to be true

- Five wrong ways of thinking – This one is by Edward de Bono you’ll have to look it up.

           

Graham gave us insight into how to present your business to potential investors:

He said there where 4 groups of investors

A.   Interested in my space

B.    Kind of in my space

C.    Might be in my space

D.   Not in my space at all

When looking for investors you want to start by pitching to the group that is not interested. If you fail the effect is minimal. This strategy also gives you opportunity to practice your presentation techniques and your business pitch.

Finally Graham talked about ways to think better:

- Brainstorming – reverse brainstorming

         How do you narrow down all of those ideas to ones that are useful?

- 2x2 Static matrices

         The idea is to break it up into four parts, these can help you to narrow your focus

- SWOT: strength, weakness opportunities, threats

Another matrix that lets you discuss these areas of your idea

- Morning pages

First thing in the morning get out everything that is in your head, then you can be

more focused (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

by Anne Lemott

- Six thinking hats by Edward de Bono. Descriptions taken from Wikipedia

Information: (White) - considering purely what information is available, what are   

    the facts?

Emotions (Red) - intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional

    feeling (but not any justification)

Discernment (Black) - logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and

    conservative

Optimistic response (Yellow) - logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking

     harmony

Creativity (Green) - statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a

    thought goes

Business Planning

            The important thing is how you think about it. Do not be too optimistic.