After watching Startup.com in class, I thought the documentary was crazy. The movie followed two young entrepreneurs, Kaleil and Tom who were very young and new to the "get rich" lifestyle. I thought the show did a great job of presenting the lifestyle very realistically, whether it be choosing their company name or visiting many different venture capitalists. Kaleil and Tom decided to launch a new website called govWorks.com. The success is all good for a while but then a failed trip to Silicon Valley sets them up for doom. This show really focused on the Internet revolution and how inflated ideals and dreams of instant wealth were affected by reality and tons and tons and tons of broken promises. The crisis in this documentary is showed from many different peoples perspective and that kind of enhances how big of an issue and how serious the crisis really was.
I really liked seeing how two young friends from high school had an idea of creating a website and how they pursued that. This movie basically tracked the rise and fall of govWorks.com and the trials the business brought to the relationship of these two best friends. In this company they created, Kaleil was the one who raised the money and Tom was the technical chief. Throughout the movie, a third party wanted to buy out their company but they decided they didn't want to do that. The movie has some very stressful moments, especially with always needing cash and for the competitiveness from other companies in improving their website. It was cool to see all the success and the failures in this movie and overall, I liked to see what it was like back then.
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Thursday, March 2, 2017
.COM to .BOMB
The .COM to .BOMB lecture was very interesting and hard to grasp how big of a deal it really was because I wasn't alive back then. I learned the five big stages that took place: an innocent beginning, boom, insanity, and the crawl back to sanity. The innocent beginning, around 1993, wasn't big news to me as the internet was fairly new and HTTP was just two years old. Around 1995, I learned how Netscape became one of the most valuable companies in the world starting the boom stage. I learned about the tons of companies that had great success from the world wide web and this only became more insane from 1997-2000. Big companies were buying littler companies resulting in few but huge companies controlling everything. It all went down hill from 2000-2003 where the bust occurred. Thousands of companies declared bankruptcy as their revenue was completely shattered. The crawl back to sanity was a very rough and slow process for the companies that barely held on. Out of all the companies that I learned about, I find it crazy how everyone doubted Amazon because of their financial model and now look at them. They survived the bust and proved nearly everyone wrong and have done an incredible job with their company. Overall, I had no idea about the .COM bust before learning about it in class. I'm happy to learn about this to know how far we have came and how incredible and important the internet is for companies to survive.
Monday, February 27, 2017
Shadrach White
I personally thought Shadrach Whites presentation had the most information out of all of the visitors so far that I could use going forward in my career. Shadrach's mottos of "be a revenue hawk" and "make friends early but known when to run" were the two main things that I took out of his presentation. He preached often about how business can always be solved with money and how being able to understand what buying/selling actually means is very crucial. I liked hearing his tips of advice starting with smile, make quiet time, and read. I thought it was very impressive how he's created and started up four businesses already but he started with landscaping businesses, laid bricks, dug ditches, and even worked at a retail outlet. I found all of this so impressive because he didn't go to college and got a certificate for network engineering at some small college later on. I was intrigued hearing about his businesses, Financial Systems, Sportsware, Axiom Systems, and now CloudPWR. His biggest product in CloudPWR, Respond, was very interesting in how basic yet efficient it really is. The last thing I really liked hearing was his response for financial planning. He said that an entrepreneur should always have cash reserves and a budget that they follow. He said he always has a plan 2-3 months in advance which I found as very good advice.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Mission Statement
Trackahol, an application firmly committed to pinpointing, protecting, and preventing lives from being taken from drunk driving.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
John Dimmer Visit
John Dimmer, a Cloverville Park High School student just like Andrew Fry, visited our class to talk about his experiences with the entrepreneurship lifestyle and the many businesses he's associated with and has been associated with. Even though Oregon is a big rival to UW, I still respect him for attending that school.
John really broke his presentation into two big things: the big idea and funding. He made is very clear how big of a deal funding really is and all the tons of ways people can make money to start up their businesses. He talked a lot about the main funding source, Equity, specifically on "what is your company worth" and "how much money do I need." He also talked about Debt and briefly mentioned others, such as Grants, Business Plan Contests, etc. He preached how expensive Equity is and how young entrepreneurs are very uneducated about how important Equity is in the long run. He sees these young people giving up way too much equity, sometimes even more than 50%, giving up the control of the company, causing many concerns going forward.
He also talked about establishing the raise, company control, angels, and vc. Overall, I was really fascinated with the companies he currently has ownership in. He talked about owning half of a Honda dealership in Oregon, Round Table Pizza, and even AirStream Trailers which I am very familiar with. I found John Dimmer to be very inspirational and his presentation definitely taught me some business related terms that I didn't know about before the presentation.
John really broke his presentation into two big things: the big idea and funding. He made is very clear how big of a deal funding really is and all the tons of ways people can make money to start up their businesses. He talked a lot about the main funding source, Equity, specifically on "what is your company worth" and "how much money do I need." He also talked about Debt and briefly mentioned others, such as Grants, Business Plan Contests, etc. He preached how expensive Equity is and how young entrepreneurs are very uneducated about how important Equity is in the long run. He sees these young people giving up way too much equity, sometimes even more than 50%, giving up the control of the company, causing many concerns going forward.
He also talked about establishing the raise, company control, angels, and vc. Overall, I was really fascinated with the companies he currently has ownership in. He talked about owning half of a Honda dealership in Oregon, Round Table Pizza, and even AirStream Trailers which I am very familiar with. I found John Dimmer to be very inspirational and his presentation definitely taught me some business related terms that I didn't know about before the presentation.
How To Protect My Idea
My first thing I'd want to do to secure my idea would be to patent my "tracking of alcoholic beverages." I've looked online and this idea isn't patented yet so that's good to hear. I think that this patent will allow me to use this technology with nearly all alcohol beverage companies in the future. The market for alcohol in the world is massive and I think this patent can change the way I approach expanding to the bigger companies in the alcohol market. My initial plan was to go for smaller beer manufacturing companies at the start.
Other than a Patent, I feel that having tight trade secrets would be very important for this business to succeed. I feel this business is tied very closely in with the government and the standards with DUI's and drunk driving. I feel that alcoholic beverage companies would absolutely support what I'm trying to accomplish and would love to be apart of the change I'm trying to create. The main big secret would be not telling the public domain about these chips built into alcoholic beverages. I think that this secret is very important because once one person outside of the government and law enforcement hears about, the whole world will find out and it will make people find sneaky ways to hide from this.
A big thing is I don't want a trade secret to kill this business if leaked because theres always that chance. In this case, I don't think this will kill my company if leaked. In fact, I think it will make people more cautious the next time they decide to drink and drive.
Other than a Patent, I feel that having tight trade secrets would be very important for this business to succeed. I feel this business is tied very closely in with the government and the standards with DUI's and drunk driving. I feel that alcoholic beverage companies would absolutely support what I'm trying to accomplish and would love to be apart of the change I'm trying to create. The main big secret would be not telling the public domain about these chips built into alcoholic beverages. I think that this secret is very important because once one person outside of the government and law enforcement hears about, the whole world will find out and it will make people find sneaky ways to hide from this.
A big thing is I don't want a trade secret to kill this business if leaked because theres always that chance. In this case, I don't think this will kill my company if leaked. In fact, I think it will make people more cautious the next time they decide to drink and drive.
Monday, February 6, 2017
Business Idea Cost
I have not fully liked all of my ideas that I have came up with but I came up with a new one that I will do for this project.
This new idea is an identification system that would help out the police primarily, but also other security departments possibly as well. My idea is involved with the internet of things (IOT) and my idea is putting a chip in alcoholic beverages, either inside the can/bottle, or epoxy the chip underneath and this will be used to store a simple code. With this chip, I'd create an app for the police departments to use which will use bluetooth to track these chips. If a car goes driving by and a cop scans and see's these chips, he can follow and pull them over. The data on these chips might consist of, temperature change to see if the alcohol beverage is open / a string programmed in to give a code on what the beverage is, just from the app.
As far as cost goes, I would patent this idea of tracking alcoholic beverages. I would then go to beer companies (Budweiser, Budlight, Coors, etc.) and offer my technology to their manufacturing headquarters. I would want a royalty for every beer that has my chip in them. I think a 1 cent royalty would add up very quickly because the alcohol market is a big market. I would then offer my application to the government, but more specifically police departments. I would offer the mobile application at around 40$ per police officer. This app would constantly be updated by my software team and would be instant in finding chips because it would go straight from the app to the chip, no internet needed, only bluetooth.
I would be open to putting my chips in every alcoholic beverage company if they were interested, offering royalties as my main way of making money.
This new idea is an identification system that would help out the police primarily, but also other security departments possibly as well. My idea is involved with the internet of things (IOT) and my idea is putting a chip in alcoholic beverages, either inside the can/bottle, or epoxy the chip underneath and this will be used to store a simple code. With this chip, I'd create an app for the police departments to use which will use bluetooth to track these chips. If a car goes driving by and a cop scans and see's these chips, he can follow and pull them over. The data on these chips might consist of, temperature change to see if the alcohol beverage is open / a string programmed in to give a code on what the beverage is, just from the app.
As far as cost goes, I would patent this idea of tracking alcoholic beverages. I would then go to beer companies (Budweiser, Budlight, Coors, etc.) and offer my technology to their manufacturing headquarters. I would want a royalty for every beer that has my chip in them. I think a 1 cent royalty would add up very quickly because the alcohol market is a big market. I would then offer my application to the government, but more specifically police departments. I would offer the mobile application at around 40$ per police officer. This app would constantly be updated by my software team and would be instant in finding chips because it would go straight from the app to the chip, no internet needed, only bluetooth.
I would be open to putting my chips in every alcoholic beverage company if they were interested, offering royalties as my main way of making money.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)