A Funny Story about an Acquisition that Didn’t Happen

Category : Entrepreneurship
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In startups, as in life, you cannot have regrets.  Here’s a story about an acquisition offer that I rejected in 2006 that would have been worth millions today.

It was winter 2005.  I was a 20 year old just starting my second semester of my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin. I’d just finished my first six months running ExchangeHut, a tickets and textbooks trading platform on campus.  In six months, we’d earned over $20,000 in revenue, much of it profit, and grown to over 7,000 users.  My cofounder and I had dreams of expanding.  If we could continue to grow Wisconsin and expand to other campuses while replicating our success, we’d make a pile of money!  We were having a ton of fun, learning new skills and meeting lots of interesting people.

One day, I got an email from a company called Cheggpost.  They said they wanted to chat because they had a similar service and we might be able to work together.  I checked it out and it looked like a college campus specific craigslist with users at Iowa State.  I was interested and so a few days later, we got on the phone. (more…)

Losing our Civil Liberties

Category : Personal Thoughts, Political Science & Economics
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Much of the world used to look at the US as a bastion of freedom, free speech, personal expression, the famed “city upon a hill” that the first colonists dreamed to create as they escaped across the Atlantic to try to freely practice their religion.  But over the past 10 years, things have changed.

For example, two young British citizens were not allowed into the US after tweeting “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America” and “3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA pissing people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!”  When they got off the plane, they were arrested and questioned for 5 hours.  They explained that “destroy America” means that they were going to party hard and that the digging up Ms. Monroe was from a Family Guy episode, but the police didn’t buy it.  Instead, they were thrown into a holding cell with drug dealers for 12 hours, then shipped back to the UK.

We’re patting down 6 year olds in the airport and forcing old people and young kids to take off their diapers because there’s a chance there’s a bomb in there.  When pressed, the TSA said that because a 6 year old in Iraq set off a bomb, we have to check our six year olds too.  That’s just asinine.

To get on an airplane, we require people to go through body scanners that show every detail of your body to some government employee and could potentially cause cancer.  An now the TSA and Homeland Security are debuting bodyscanners in random highway locations.  It used to be that the government needed probable cause to search you, but now, they’re just scanning away without any sort of justification.

We have the “if you see something say something” campaign to try to get citizens to inform on each other.  That’s straight out of Orwell.  The government could be monitoring your social media, your private email, your search traffic for signs of a “national security threat.”  When you enter the US, immigration has the right to look at the entire contents of your computer or any notebooks you might have on you, whether you are a citizen or not.  The last time I entered the US, the agent looked at my notebook that was filled with business ideas and personal writing for about 5 minutes before he let me pass.  The time before it, the agent opened my computer and looked around for a minute or two.

And if all that wasn’t enough, President Obama signed a law that allows US citizens to be held indefinently at Guantanamo Bay without charge or due process.  This law is so clearly against the Bill of Rights.  It’s incredible how far we’ve come in 10 years.  It’s official government policy to assassinate US citizens in foreign countries who are “associating with terrorists.”

It’s clear Bin Laden is winning even in death. If he were still alive, he’d be laughing at all the changes that have been made in the name of security.  In the name of fighting terrorism, we’ve adopted servaliance that are so Orwellian and Huxlian that the authors themselves would laugh at just how correct they’ve become.  Previously, when people did horrific things in the US, we shrugged it off as an isolated crazy person and basically said “fuck off, we’re gonna keep living the same way we have been,” but we reacted differently to 9/11.  We’ve succumed to fear from government and news media.

The ability to use  common sense and discretion was already on the decline in US society before 9/11, but since then, the decline has sped up incredibly.  The slope was a bit slippery before 9/11, but now its completly iced over and we’re quickly falling down the mountain.  I don’t like it one bit.

Why I Deleted Facebook and Twitter from my iPhone

Category : Personal Thoughts
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In early January I was in LA and my parents invited me to go a whale watching cruise for a few hours.  I’d never been whale watching and decided it sounded like a great way to spend an afternoon with my family.  About an hour into the voyage, the captain said that they’d spotted killer whales and that we’d try to go find them.  He was really excited.  He told us he’d been doing these tours for 10 years and only seen killer whales one other time.  I started to get excited too.

Thirty minutes later, someone spotted them.  It was a pod consisting of a large male, a mom, a baby and a few other smaller males.  I rushed to get my iPhone to snap some pictures, but they were so fast!  It was hard to catch them!  I got some decent shots but nothing turned out that great.  If you didn’t know what they were, you mighta thought they were something on one of those lake monster specials on the history channel*. I was a little disappointed.  After sharing the killer whales on Facebook and Twitter, my pocked buzzed a few times as friends liked, commented, tweeted, and retweeted.

Cruising back, I should have been really happy.  I’d gotten lucky enough to see something amazing that most people don’t get to see, but instead I felt a little disappointed my pictures didn’t come out well.  I realized that I spent the entire time trying to snap a picture of the killer whales so I could show my friends what I’d seen.  I ended up watching the whales through a little electronic screen, focusing on getting a picture, rather than simply enjoying their majestic beauty of what could be a once and a life time experience.  I really didn’t like those implications.

About the same time, I realized I’d been slowly increasing how many times per day I looked at and updated Facebook and Twitter compared to three months ago.  When I was in a car, a taxi, the subway, waiting for a meeting, riding the bus, or just sitting around, I was checking Twitter and Facebook.  Sometimes I found myself looking at my phone at meals or with friends, something I HATED when others did to me.  I was taking more pictures and sharing the daily minutiae of my life.  I found myself going through the day hoping to find interesting things not just because they are interesting, but because I wanted to share them.  As a reluctant convert to smartphones, I feared something like this would happen at some point.

On the plus side, I found out about important news really quickly.  I kept closer track of what my friends were up to.  I found funny stories and was up to date on sports, memes, technology and politics.  But, I spent way too much time with my head down, looking at my iPhone and getting carried away in the minutiae that is social media, seeing what people ate for breakfast, what celeb was in rehab and what random thought crossed their minds.  And some of my friends felt slighted when I didn’t like their status, retweet their tweets or tweet at them.

Facebook and Twitter have a value, but I didn’t like that I was almost obsesively checking Twitter and Facebook whenever I had downtime.  I was consuming unimportant content and over sharing meaningless parts of my life. I realized something had to change.  Social media wasn’t adding to my enjoyment of life, it was taking away from it.  So about three weeks ago I decided to experiment.  I deleted Facebook and Twitter from my iPhone and replaced them with the Kindle app.

I replaced my iPhone Twittering/Facebooking with reading books or keeping my phone in my pocket.  In the last three weeks, I’ve read two books and stopped checking social media as much and my life is so much happier.  I still get emails when people interact with me on Twitter and Facebook, but it’s much more passive.  And if I really NEED to use Facebook or Twitter, I can use the browser to get what I need done, but its slow and cumbersome so I don’t check as much.

Since I’ve deleted the apps, I can count the number of times I’ve been to the mobile sites on one hand.  It’s been a big change.  Freeing me up from oversharing and overconsuming has pushed me to read interesting books during my downtime.  Or just observe the world and interact with everyone around me.  And now that I’m mostly off Twitter and Facebook during most of the day, my friends can’t complain I’m not paying attention to their updates.  Because I’m not paying attention to anyone’s.  For me, life is so much better without the constant pull of social media!

Yes, I’ll miss out on knowing things really quickly, but a quick perusal of Twitter and Facebook after work so far has done the trick.  For example, I found out Prince Fielder signed for a $200m contract 10 hours after it happened.  But so what? I’m only sharing the most important things and cutting out the rest.  My Klout score is going down and I’m adding followers at a slower rate, but my life is more calm, free and easy.  I’ve been living more in the real world instead of living through a little 4.5 x 2.25 inch screen.

So think about it.  Are you walking through life with your head down, getting validation from social media instead of whats happening in front of you?  Are you tweeting and facebooking to show off and make your friends think “wow, what a cool life?”  Are you oversharing? Are you missing the killer whales live, so you can show your friends a picture of them later?  If you are, and I think lots of people are, think about taking a step back, deleting Facebook and Twitter and see if your life improves.  I know mine did.

In reality, nobody cares about the minutiae, its all about your impact on the world.  So stop oversharing, overconsuming and go out and live life!

*Thanks Polsky!

Capital Entrepreneurs 2011 Review

Category : Entrepreneurship
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In 2011, Capital Entrepreneurs companies created 121 full time jobs, 66 part time jobs, and raised $23.7 million in funding, all in a time when Wisconsin’s economy is struggling to grow.  CE now is made up of 150 entrepreneurs who now employ over 200 full time and 100 part time workers.  When I started CE in May 2009, I never thought our initial group of 10 entrepreneurs would ever grow to 150 members.

Since I first started traveling more in November 2010, Forrest Woolworth has taken over leadership of CE.  He’s done an outstanding job finding sponsors, adding entrepreneurs, standardizing the membership process and adding additional events like Build Madison and CE Pitch Days.  CE members have also been behind the Forward Technology Conference.  Besides for Forrest, credit should also go to Justin Beck, Chris Meyer, Scott Resnick and the rest of the original CE members for making our founders group what its turned into today.  I’m so proud to see Madison’s entrepreneurship ecosystem continue to grow and hope 2012 is even better than 2011!

From Forrest’s Capital Entrepreneurs 2011 Year End Review:

Capital Entrepreneurs companies are curing cancer, preventing suicides, and organizing community groups. They are making mobile apps and games used by millions, revolutionizing the digital music industry, making sense of social media, shaping some of the world’s largest brands, and much more. Capital Entrepreneurs companies participated in prestigious startup incubator programs including Y Combinator, TechStars, Startup Chile, and 94labs.

Over the last year, Capital Entrepreneurs companies were featured in news outlets around the globe. These included The New York Times, NPR, Mashable, TechCrunch, CNN, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, MTV, Sports Illustrated, AdAge, and more. Locally, Capital Entrepreneurs companies were the topic of two Isthmus cover stories, and were featured in the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison Magazine, and InBusiness.