NEWSSTARTUP LIFE

I just saw The Social Network and was struck by one moment in the movie that everyone in the theater loved: Mark Zuckerberg gets an idea so great that he runs outside in sandals through the snow. He hesitates for a second in the cold and then keeps going. I think it was so well received not just because it was funny but because people identified with it.

Everyone knows that moment where you say: “Oh crap, I shouldn’t have done that. Forget it, I’m doing it anyway.” Aaron Sorkin did a brilliant job of making sure every audience member identified with Zuckerberg and it happened the moment he became human; the moment they saw his passion, his risk-taking in a silly way that made them think of what would motivate them to do the same thing (unconsciously), and the story unfolded with everyone invested. Mark Zuckerberg’s level of entrepreneurial risk-taking and genius may be unattainable for most of us but we can resonate with passion so great that we do something that seems a little stupid.

I asked some of the social entrepreneurs in my social network: What makes you run through the snow in sandals? Here’s what they said:

• "The many people with autism desperately needing to be respected in society makes me run as I think I can provide hope and meaningful jobs." - Thorkil Sonne, Founder of Speciliasterne and Specialist People Foundation
  
• "The possibility of empowering and making a difference to other people." - Ashni Mohnot, Founder and CEO of Enzi

• "The prospect of a world-changing venture and everything that comes with it – the risk, the excitement, the potential… in many ways startups parallel love." - Cody Simmons, Founder and President of CO-Fund
  
• "The idea that a smart, hard-working young woman in Peru or Vietnam or somewhere else had to drop out of nursing school because she couldn't get $700.  In the grand scheme of things, it's not that much money.  It's just that, in most developing countries, no one believes students are worth a loan." - Kushal Chakrabarti. CO-Founder and CEO of Vittana
  
• "The awe of a great vision and the happiness of coming one step closer overshadow every physical restriction." - Bjorn Herrmann, Principal of Supercool School (and promoter of literally running through the snow in sandals)

• "I was ironing when I decided we were using the wrong bottle design to buy household products. Fear + excitement filled me. 4 years later, Replenish is a reality." - Jason Foster, Founder/CEO of Replenish

The journey may take years, and the idea might come to you while you're doing a mundane task but I think everyone can agree that it all starts with a step in the "right" direction, whatever that is for you. As for Zuckerberg, we may think we know what motivates him to follow his passion. But a young billionaire who drives an Acura, rents a modest house, and makes a $100M gift to a school to which he has no personal connection  is hard to predict. He is not a stereotype and neither are you.

Howard Thurman, spiritual adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., phrases this blog’s title another way: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” What makes you run through the snow in sandals? What makes you come alive? Go do it.

Entrepreneurs are best at finding innovative solutions to serious problems. Environmental problems are arguably the root of all social ills and it's exciting to see social entrepreneurs take on the challenge. The 2nd annual OG25 Green Business Startup Competition included 25 finalists ranging from a company redefining the off-shore energy market (wind farms!), to smart sprinkler systems, and a social network for the eco-mom.

The winner of the competition was Zimride, a "rideshare service [that] helps organizations establish easy to use, private, social networks for ridesharing." One of the company's unique angles is to use networks like college campuses and companies to arrange rideshares in "trusted communities," allowing members to search and post ride options including personal cars, shuttles, vanpool, and zipcar. It's also marketed for events (so perhaps the line to get in to Burning Man next year will be 7 hours and not 8 if enough people try it?) Already in use at UCLA, Stanford, University of Michigan, and USC, Zimride has proven to engage 10-20% of student populations and integrates with facebook and Twitter. Since I don't have a car and I'm not part of a campus or corporate network, I'm planning to test out their free public rideshare option, which is (probably) safer than hitchhiking and faster than the bus.

These finalists also caught my eye:

• Airbnb is an upgraded version of couch surfing that matches private residences with travelers. A friend of mine recently used the service to stay in a mountain-top vineyard cottage with an ocean view. I intend to advertise my less exotic, but just as friendly, couch and air mattress in my living room if you ever need a place to stay in LA.
• ecoATM is an "automated eCycling station." In my experience, most ewaste recycling centers do not currently have the capacity to provide convenient drop offs. This solves the problem: how should I dispose of my broken phone charger after 5 p.m. (that was intentionally built to last no longer than 5 years so I'll buy another one) and get money for it?
• GoodGuide, Inc. rates over 65,000 non-toxic and environmentally-friendly products and helped me determine that there is a better toothpaste than the one I'm currently using (but mine is second best). Also, the company is a B Corporation.
• Soleo Organics makes the highest rated sunscreen by the Environmental Working Group. I tried it this weekend for several hours in the intense LA sun and I was well-protected.
• ThinkEco makes a product they've coined the "modlet" for "modern electrical outlet". Plug your electronics into the modlet and "then use your web browser to wirelessly monitor and manage your power consumption." It should save you 10-20% on your electricity bill.

The conference also hosted a Green Product Design Competition. All 50 companies/products are worth a review for inspiration to all you social entrepreneurs out there. I'll say it again: You are the best at finding solutions where others see problems. You thrive on it. So go, create, and introduce yourself to me at next year's OG25.

Photo Credit: opportunitygreen

(Ed. Note: This is a guest post from SoCap10 by San Franista author Emily Goligoski)

There are two things to be expected from startups, if you follow IDEO’s Jocelyn Wyatt’s thinking: they’ll change their names and business models.

And, if that second or third name sticks long enough for people to know the organization, it’s likely that the founders have learned a bit about early non-success and making the wrong choices. Enter FailFaire, an open forum for attendees of this week’s Social Capital Markets conference (SOCAP) to share stories about their failed projects and social business undertakings.

Thirty entrepreneur participants were greeted to the first West Coast FailFaire with the words “it is a mistake to suppose that people succeed through success; they often succeed through failures” by host and humanitarian design firm Catapult Design. The format for stories about mistakes and going belly up allowed presenters ten minutes each to introduce themselves, explain what they tried to do and where it went wrong, and ponder what they’d do differently next time.

Catchafire founder Rachael Chong described her struggle to find the right developer to build Catchafire Beta. It took her almost one year, two developers and spending most of her seed funding before she found and recruited former Hulu VP of Technology to build a site that was aligned with her vision for Catchafire. Chong’s takeaways: be selective in picking technical partners (even if it means taking part in founder match events) and ensure that there’s a trial period before a new teammate can become vested.

Rules for the open-source Failfaire, which operates under a Creative Commons license, include no livestreaming. After events in New York and DC hosted by Mobile Active and the World Bank Institute, respectively, the SOCAP event was the first to feature talks that weren’t prepared in advance. Instead, a third of the participants spoke off the cuff about their experiences—and presented on their own behalves, not their organizations, per FailFaire guidelines.

Other recommendations from those who have been there? Don’t expect the first launch effort to be a commercial success. Make sure your goals are in line with your partners’. And ask yourself “is this something I’d want to work on for the next five years?” before jumping in--a good question from Skillshare that might have prevent future fails.

Photo credit: hans.gerwitz

Chicago. For people who love it, there's no place like it in the world. For people who've just visited...well, they've still usually had at least one encounter with a great slice of deep dish. Chicago is unquestionably the Midwest's great city. Yet, for all the devotion Chicago commands, its technology and startup scene are less developed than would seem to befit a city of its stature.

All that may be changing, however. This year, the city got its own TechStars/Y Combinator-style incubator in Excelerate, which was started by the founders of sites like OKCupid.com. In about a week, Chicago will also play host to a major conference for startups and investors in the Midwest called midVentures Launch.

To build excitement and knowledge around the conference, midVentures is also hosting a blog discussion about what it would take for Chicago to become a technology hub. As someone who spent 7 years there going to school and building social enterprises, only to leave to come to San Francisco to start my web business, this is something I've thought about:

1. Sell Aspiration: While Chicago may not be Silicon Valley just yet, it's recent crop of startups have some pretty big names. Groupon, which is arguably the hottest startup in the world, is based an Chicago and was started by a Northwestern alum. 37Signals are undisputed thought leaders in the modern startup era. Every high school and college student in Chicagoland should know them.

2. Internship Programs for Local University CS kids: One of the biggest deficits in the Chicago startup scene is just a lack of knowledge about what the field actually looks like. There are lots of promising computer science folks at universities like Northwestern and UChicago, but the internships they get in the summers between classes are rarely with local startup companies. This is a missed learning opportunity.

3. Aggressive career recruiting for those same students when they graduate: Perhaps even more important than the above, the biggest loss for the Chicago startup scene is the braindrain that happens every time a class of CS majors graduates and gets safe jobs as analysts and programmers at Wells Fargo. In my opinion, the best thing that anyone who cares about the Chicago scene could do would be to fundamentally disrupt this talent syphon and show students a different path.

4. Solving different problems than the Valley: Chicago startups are potentially better positioned to address certain types of problems than are startups in Silicon Valley. Whereas, in the Valley, technology and innovation are the real world, in Chicago, the local reality is much more driven by the cares and concerns of average people. There is a big opportunity to learn from customers who better match the profile of most of the world. Chicago also has a unique history when it comes to addressing issues of civic participation, education, health, poverty, urban violence, and more. I wouldn't be surprised to see tech startups that attack some of these types of problems.

5. Increasing the two-way flow with the Valley: Ultimately, the reason to build innovation hubs outside Silicon Valley is not to portent it's decline, but to help others rise. The trajectory is more startups from more places needing less capital. In my mind, that means the potential for more job creation, more startups focused on problems that really matter to people. But new hubs benefit from the accumulated wisdom (not to mention capital) of places that have been doing startups for longer, and creating a pathway that can send Chicago talent to the Valley and then bring it home would be invaluable.

Will Chicago become an innovation hub over night? Of course not. But then again, with things moving as fast as they are, it might not take too long.

Photo credit: terren in Virginia

Supercool School Principal (as in a founder of the company and school administrator) Bjorn Lasse Herrmann believes: “If people learn enough they can solve any problem.” So he created a way for people to learn very easily and in a socially connected network. Supercool School makes it easy for anyone to start a school; in fact, you can “start a free school in 60 seconds.” The founders of Supercool School realized that people aren’t just looking for good content, but they want a community of people to connect with who are interested in the same topic. Bjorn says, “The social experience of Supercool School creates chemistry and leads to a lot of informal ways of learning."

The platform actually started as a facebook application and now stands on its own, retaining the social networking feel. As one of their first schools, Startup School reached more than 2100 entrepreneurs in 130 countries and attracted over 1400 people to “like” them on facebook. Joseph Nganga, a social entrepreneur from Kenya says “I have learnt a great deal from other entrepreneurs – both experienced and in the start up phase. Startup School has enabled me to network with a variety of professionals who have helped me think through my own business, plan for its needs and better pitch to investors and partners.”

LocaleMotive, another emerging informal education platform with a social component, aims to help students “Study Socially. Check-In Locally.” While it hasn’t launched yet, students can expect a free study tool that will have features of project management software and feel like social gaming. Parents, schools, and teachers can view the progress of one student or an entire classroom.

As someone who resonates with Henry David Thoreau’s statement: “I was not born to be forced; I will breathe after my own fashion,” I appreciate the innovation and informal nature of these startups. They bring more practicality to academia, which appeals to me. Some of us (all, I would argue) were not made to sit in a chair attached to a desk or the grown up version of that with our ankles shackled to cubicles. Socially networked, innovative—maybe even fun, dare I say—education makes sense.

To remain relevant, education has to embrace and integrate social networking and I think its best that those innovations come from the private sector. (As a side note, how in the world did “Government on facebook” get 19,000 people to like it?) I’m curious to see how the formal education sector and accreditation bureaucracy will challenge, embrace, and change these informal education resources. Maybe we can, like Bjorn believes, solve some bureaucratic problems with education—entrepreneur style.

Photo credit: Shaylor

Here's a little idea and its big implication. The idea is that in a world of increasingly robust information about social networks, simply being able to connect people is more of a "commodity" than at any time in history. The implication is that to be seen as a real "connector" --- a designation incredibly valuable in just about any type of business -- you have to think more expansively about what it means to help people.

Connectors are a business archetype that most people are familiar with. They are the people who always seem to know the right people. They're the folks you talk to when you know you have a problem, but you're not sure who is the right person to help -- or even who is the right type of person to help.

Connectors are intensely valuable, particularly in industries that rely on networks. An example is venture capital, in which networks are deployed to find great investment deals as well as to help portfolio companies find the particular resources and relationships they need to succeed. Another example is nonprofits, which rely on social capital in the place of financial capital, and in which networks are called upon every day to help the organization move forward.

Super connectors tend to be really good at three things. The first is that they keep track of lots of details about lots of their friends and professional contacts. This is the area in which the average person is catching up to the super connector. While it still takes diligence, its never been easier to keep track of who you know, the sorts of things they like and dislike, etc.

This is the social glue that is making the ability to generally connect people across your network more of a commodity. Better information about who you know means a better ability to connect people who should know each other. This is a good thing; connecting people shouldn't be the provence of a special class of people, it should just be the way we think to help each other day in and day out.

The summer after my sophomore year, I hiked across northern Spain along a 1,200 year old pilgrim route known as the Camino de Santiago. For 30 consecutive days, my friend Christina and I walked about 20 miles a day, first through the Pyrenees, through the Medieval towns of Burgos and Leon, and ultimately into the ancient-feeling Galician town of Santiago de Compostela.

The pilgrimage leads to the cathedral where the remains of St. James supposedly came to rest after he fled the Holy Land. The trail began in the Middle Ages, as pilgrims from across Europe made the trek to atone for their sins and find grace. Its first peak was in the 12th century, when the cult of relics was highest, and literally tens of thousands made the journey.

Over time, the trail became not just a religious undertaking, but a right of passage for Spanish youth. In the 20th century, however, it fell into disrepair, the numbers slowly dwindling to the point that by the 1980s, only a few hundred people a year were walking it. In 1985, however, UNESCO declared Santiago de Compostela a World Heritage Site, and the government began reinvesting in the trail as a tourist attraction. By 2004 when Christina and I walked the trail, hundreds of thousands of people a year were coming.

Hiking the Way of St. James is like no experience I've had. Each morning, you wake up with the sun, walk an hour or so, stop in the first small village you come to for a cappuccino, hike for most of the morning following small yellow arrows that occur every half-mile or so, make a quick stop for lunch, hike a few more hours, and then end the day before it gets too hot. A shower, a nap, some dinner, reading, and conversation with people from around the world, and then bed.

Each night, you stay at Albergues, or Pilgrim's hostels that are only for those with official credentials that they are walking the trail. The Albergues are never more than 7 Euro a night, and most are more like 3 or 4. The economics of the journey are fundamentally disimilar from anything else I've experienced. There are plenty of ways to spend money if you'd like, but the trail is so powerful and overwhelmingly cerebral, emotional and experiential that there is little that purchased items could possibly add.

Today I'm headed to Burning Man, another community of seekers who create a truly alternative, albeit temporary, environment. For a week each August/September, tens of thousands of people come together to form "Black Rock City" in the desert of Nevada. Going means bringing literally everything that you need to survive -- food, water, shelter, lights, etc.

There has been an explosive conversation in the blogosphere this weekend about the under representation of women in tech entrepreneurship and web entrepreneurship more broadly. Is the situation better in social entrepreneurship?

This iteration of the conversation started off with a piece in the Wall Street Journal that rehashed many of the back-and-forths on this issue from the last few months, including the debate around whether the forthcoming TEDWomen conference was actually a step back for gender equality because of a sort of "seperate-but-(un)equal" thing. It also included a pretty lazy potshot at Techcrunch, the leading web 2.0 media publication.

Michael Arrington, the founder of Techcrunch, didn't like that one much at all and wrote a post titled: "Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men." In it, he effectively argues that venture investors, tech conferences and the media clamor for female entrepreneurs because they're eager to redress the imbalance and highlight more female innovators in order to inspire a younger generation of women to build companies.

The "debate" around this issue isn't about whether or not there is a gender imbalance in entrepreneurship. It's about why that is, and more specifically, which pieces of that why are structurally determined and could be shifted. It is also tinged by the supposed dichotomy between meritocracy and opportunity that colors debates about affirmative action, as well.

There is no shortage of theories about all of this. Right now, these particular set of posts are being debated on TechCrunch, VC Fred Wilson's blog, and Hacker News, among other spaces.

What's interesting to me is that in the world of social entrepreneurship, it seems like the balance is much better. I have no doubt that women in our field still deal with structural barriers, explicit or implicit assumptions about their capacity to lead, and other real hurdles to success. But it does feel to me that there are far more highly visible women social entrepreneurs and thought leaders in this field than in pure technology. Just as a proxy, in the last thee years, 24 or 49 of Echoing Green's prestigious seed fellowships have been awarded to teams led by women.

So here are my questions:

1. Is it true that social entrepreneurship has more women leaders than tech entrepreneurship?

2. If it is, how come?

3.  Are any of the reasons things that other entrepreneurial fields can learn from?

4. What does this field still need to do better?

Photo credit: TheGiantVermin

Last week, we told you the story of Feelgoodz, an ethical flip flop startup whose major summer order had gotten stuck in BP oil spill-related madness in the Gulf of Mexico. The sales drop caused by the disaster had left them unable to repay a venture loan, the money from which was meant to go directly into another social venture. The story became our most shared ever, and I'm thrilled to report that less than a week later, with the help of the Change.org community and an assist from Groupon, FeelGoodz has sold almost its entire summer line, and will be able to repay the loan.

To quickly recap the story, Kyle Berner founded Feelgoodz a few years ago as a way to bring the joy he had experienced as a teacher and traveler in Thailand to the rest of the world. The company had generated an agreement with Whole Foods that would help them sell on the order of 10,000 pairs.

Participating in First Light Ventures' New Orleans "Village Capital" program, Feelgoodz had been given a $50,000 loan to help cover the cost of shipping the summer order. Unfortunately, as the BP oil rig started gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, the shipment got stuck in the Bahamas, eventually being delayed for two full prime flip flop-buying months. Whole Foods wasn't able to sell nearly the number of pairs that they had planned on, and Kyle was left unable to repay the loan, jeopardizing not only his company, but Drop the Chalk, the education software nonprofit who was supposed to get the next loan.

The story came to me through one of Feelgoodz investors, and my gut was that it would appeal to this community of social entrepreneurs and supporters. What I didn't anticipate is that the story "BP Oil Spill Claims Another Victim, An Aspiring Entrepreneur" would become our most shared ever, being posted to Facebook almost 700 times. Something about it hit a nerve, and the injustice of a promising young social venture shuttered by exactly the type of environmentally unsound old world company that requires our movement in the first place grabbed people's attention.

The community was not only sharing the story, but actually buying flip flops, as well. On the first day the story was up, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of flip flops were ordered. At the same time, I forwarded the story to the leaders of Groupon, a company that in the past two years has reinvented group buying and built an epic national distribution channel. Their roots are in social activism and I had a suspicion they'd be into the story.

They were, and almost immediately got on the phone with Kyle to craft a deal. On Friday, they started sending out a nationwide deal that was $12 for a pair of flops that normally cost $30. In the first few hours they sold 1,000. After a day it was closer to 3,000. By Sunday, they had reached 6,500 and shut the deal down to ensure that they could get everyone the sizes and colors they wanted.

This all means that Feelgoodz will be able to pay back their loan, and Drop the Chalk will have access to the resources they were promised. It's certainly a testament to the incredible distribution power of Groupon. Moreover, it is an amazing testament to the power of the internet to help people form rapid and spontaneous communities of support. Finally, it's a powerful demonstration that this community cares not just about rallying against companies doing bad, but about supporting companies out there trying to do good.

Photo credit: Kyle Berner

[Ed. Note. We're thrilled to brass MEDIA founder Bryan Sims share the story of his very own "Giving Pledge."]

When I was a kid I used to read stories about people like Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Jobs. People who were first time entrepreneurs and started off like everyday people just like you and I. One of my particularly favorite things to learn about them was what they did for their first job.

My first job started at 15 while in high school at the local athletic club. I did maintenance and janitorial work, cleaning work-out equipment and scrubbing toilets in the locker room.

I first began investing as a teenager, taking my janitor’s paychecks and putting them in the stock market. Later in school I decided to create a teen investment club as part of a business class project so my friends and I could all invest together.

It was here that I learned two very important lessons:

1. The power of time and compound interest when it comes to money.
2. The power of a having many people involved in a project.

As 16 year olds investing in the stock market, we had one major advantage going for us, and that was time. Upon graduation and the disbanding of the investment club, many of participants took their money out and immediately reinvested into retirement accounts. In all likelihood, if they stick with it, they’ll be millionaires by the time they retire because they began so early.

The second piece I learned was the value of multiple perspectives. Statistically speaking, investment clubs with both men and women perform better than those with just men or just women. By getting a group of people together who shared a similar interest, we were able to benefit the group as a whole.

It’s because of these two philosophies that I’ve become a big believer in the Giving Pledge recently administered by over 40 billionaires and led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It takes these two concepts of people who have built wealth over time, and combines it with a critical mass of people to have a compounded effect for a greater good.