outta the cave

the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

2009-06-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

(social) startUP 17.june.2009 Lower Lights Ministries | columbus (social) entrepreneurs

2009-06-18T06:26:00.000-07:00

columbus (social) entrepreneurs goal with (social) startUP is to catalyze social change through meaningful entrepreneurship by harnessing the energy of the entrepreneurial startup community and the business acumen of venture capitalists. It's going to be the "Startup Weekend of Social Entrepreneurship" and it started here in Columbus, Ohio!

The goal of this first (social) startUP on 17.june.2009 was to help Lower Lights Ministries become more sustainable and break their dependencies on donor charity alone. The event was a success - we are collecting feedback to continually improve (social) startUP to be more effective and meaningful.

The 3 final innovations were:

Urban Garden
Recyclying/Sorting Facility
Maintenance/Repair Business

all based in the struggling Columbus neighborhood of Franklinton.

action! plans were formulated [see worksheet] + columbus (social) entrepreneurs will facilitate accountable involvement with Lower Lights Ministries for entrepreneurs, professionals, and creative minds who choose to move forward with these meaningful (social) entrepreneurial ventures.

(social) startUP 17.june.2009 Lower Lights Ministries

Photos (Flickr)
Worksheets
Thanks to NCT Ventures for the inspiration on the worksheets!
Original Event Details

Special thanks to our sponsors Sandbox Columbus (for providing the space) and Barrio Tapas (for providing the delicious food). Please support our supporters!

Thanks,
Luke Barbara
Joe DeLoss

columbus (social) entrepreneurs facilitates accountable community engagement + investment. in seth godin speak, we're mobilizing a tribe. our tribe is of passionate, ambitious, and accountable folks looking to tackle social issues through meaningful entrepreneurship.

get at us and connect for further information:
+ LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/cbusSE
+ Twitter: @JoeDeloss + @LukeBarbara
+ Email: CBusSocialEntrepreneurs@gmail.com

(social) startUP | "open sourcing social change" | 17.june.2009

2009-06-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

(social) startUP | "open sourcing social change"

presented by

columbus (social) entrepreneurs

17.june.2009 | 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Sandbox Columbus | 851 Pearl Street, 43215

(social) startUP brings together a community of socially-conscious entrepreneurs, professionals and creative minds to create social change. (social) startUP participants will be charged with a simple, yet crazy, goal - to create an entrepreneurial solution to make a community partner more sustainable in 2 hours time.

our community partner for this event is Lower Lights Ministries, a non-profit focused on community development in the Franklinton neighborhood of columbus, ohio (near west side). Lower Lights empowers those facing social, economic, relational and spiritual barriers to overcome dependencies and move from "get to give." to learn more about Lower Lights and to get your creative juices flowing on the challenge they are presenting to (social) startUP, please review (click on) this CHALLENGE PROPOSAL.

(social) startUP provides an outlet for professionals to create significant value in two hours of your time. have no doubts though, if you're interested, we will encourage and support you to engage community partners further as change agents. here's how your valuable time contribution plays out:

6:00 PM - networking + arrival
6:15 PM - welcome + introduction
6:25 PM - Lower Lights presentation
6:35 PM - small groups create solutions
6:55 PM - elevator pitches (1 min each)
7:05 PM - voting (top 3 ideas move-on)
7:10 PM - slightly larger groups create action! plans to solutions
7:35 PM - action! plan pitches (2 min)
7:45 PM - conclusion + next actions
8:00 PM - event ends, (social) change begins

please rsvp here
(and/or sign-up for updates on future events)

columbus (social) entrepreneurs facilitates accountable community engagement + investment. in seth godin speak, we're mobilizing a tribe. our tribe is of passionate, ambitious, and accountable folks looking to tackle social issues through meaningful entrepreneurship.

get at us and connect for further information:

    + LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/cbusSE
    + Twitter: @JoeDeloss + @LukeBarbara
    + Email: CBusSocialEntrepreneurs@gmail.com

George Carlin on the "importance" of stuff

2009-06-07T22:29:00.000-07:00

George Carlin, astute observer of human behavior and comedic genius, on the "importance" stuff. Well said!

wtf is a "garage sale"?

2009-06-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

What is a garage sale? Really think about it...

It's the consequence of having way too much stuff.

We've acquired so many physical possessions - that we no longer have enough space for - so we sell them. Surely some of these things were necessities at the time, that we're passing along to a new person who needs them. (Such as a baby crib once the children have grown up.) But I'd be willing to bet that a number of the items for sale are things we've simply become bored with and possibly never needed in the first place. Perhaps we're selling the "old" stuff so we can acquire more "new" stuff, which will later become "old" stuff which we'll sell to...well, you get the idea.

Is this a vicious cycle?
A sustainable practice?

We've been programmed our whole lives to buy stuff.
Does it make us feel good? Is that how we find meaning?

Think before you speak makes a lot of sense.
How about: Think before you buy.

What is this "garage sale" you speak of?

Inspired by a chat with Seth Godin and discussions at the Acumen Fund Student Leaders Workshop 2009. More on Acumen Fund and that experience in a future post.

reality check | the United States' "culture of consumption" = not sustainable

2009-05-10T03:25:00.000-07:00

As an entrepreneur, I believe there will be a major shift in our lifetime from "material want" to "meaning want" - in conjunction with a shift in entrepreneurial opportunities from "crap people want" to "things people need" and "experiences/products/services that are meaningful." (not necessarily my purely original ideas, but a synthesis based on different things I've read/heard/experienced.) Your thoughts?

NY Times: Shift to Saving May Be Downturn’s Lasting Impact
May 9, 2009

"Sustained increases in household saving would cause a difficult period of restructuring for the American economy, which has become increasingly driven by consumer spending. Such spending makes up about 70 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product."

Video: Did you know?

2009-03-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

A cool video presentation about how the world is changing and the evolution of technology.

Entrepreneurial Essays - www.PaulGraham.com

2008-12-24T23:34:00.000-08:00

Paul Graham is an programmer, essayist, and entrepreneur. He co-founded ViaWeb, which developed the first web-based application and was later acquired by Yahoo! for $49MM. Currently, he's a partner at an innovative early-stage venture capital firm Y Combinator.

Check out this collection of fascinating essays.
Here's a couple recommendations to get you started:

Cities and Ambition
Graham discusses different cities' "message" (e.g. Graham says New York's is "you should be richer" and Silicon Valley's is "you should be more powerful")
What is your city's message?
(per @NickSeguin who just launched his blog at www.NickSeguin.com)

How to Start a Startup
Here's some notes from reading this essay:
-Look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
-What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
-What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal?
Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.
-When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart.
-It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet.
-When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
-It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does.
-Your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.

QUOTE: daily habits + living well

2008-12-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

"If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.

There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.

Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t."

-- Christopher Alexander

(per Ben Casnocha - an entrepreneur and blogger)

TED Talks: Jonathan Haidt - The real difference between liberals and conservatives

2008-12-18T04:05:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Haidt studies how - and why - we evolved to be moral. In this TED Talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

The "first draft" of the moral mind:
"The initial organization of the brain does not rely that much on experience... Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises... 'Built-in' does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience."
Gary Marcus

5 foundations of morality:
1. Harm/care
-bond w/ others and care for others
-strong feelings about those who cause carm
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
(n.b. the Ohio State Buckeyes reference!)
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

"If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease."
- Sent-ts'an, c. 700 C.E.

"A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are; understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we are right. And then...step out of the moral matrix and try to see it as a struggle playing out in which everybody does think they're right and everybody at least has some reasons, even if you disagree with them, for what they're doing. And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility."
Jonathan Haidt

The Moral Mind
Jonathan Haidt's fascinating website where you can take anonymous moral studies and questionnaires.

TED Talks
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). www.TED.com makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free

VIDEO: Guy Kawasaki - Make Meaning in Your Company

2008-12-17T17:03:00.000-08:00

Guy Kawasaki encourages entrepreneurs to make meaning with their ventures.

Guy's 3 ways to make meaning:
- Increase the quality of life
- Right a wrong
- Prevent the end of something good

Guy Kawasaki:
Blog: How to Change the World
Website
Twitter

Stanford YouTube Channel

Powerful mobile search tools

2008-10-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

I recently had the addition of a Garmin nüvi 350 GPS to my life. It has been incredibly useful for everything from going somewhere new to finding the nearest coffee shop. Sometimes it doesn't have a particular business's address or the address is outdated. The following are some powerful mobile tools that I've found to be very helpful.

1-800-GOOG-411
Goog411 is a free 411 service from Google. Call to get the phone number or address of a business. (Which it can send you in a text message.) Watch the video for details.

Also useful...

GOOGLE SMS
Mobile/SMS search from Google. Local weather, business listings, game scores, stock quotes, and more. (Also free, but text messaging fees from your provider may apply.)

4INFO
Another mobile search service, similar to Google SMS. They should have a YouTube video too!

Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive

2008-10-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

Neil deGrasse Tyson is coming to speak at Ohio State on October 30th.

For ticket information:
OSU Distinguised Speaker Series

Selected essays:
- The Perimeter of Ignorance
- Holy Wars

Spider

2008-10-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

From Spider 10/10/08 2:44 PM

Picture taken with Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS.
(See Amazon product link to purchase. It makes me money if you use the Amazon link and doesn't cost you any extra money. Thanks!)