The Dream of Entrepreneur’s

                The American dream is alive and well.  If you don’t believe it just look to all the successful entrepreneurs that are making their dreams come true.  These people are creating ways to be their own boss.  Working when and how they wish, providing for their families and some becoming rather wealthy along the way.

                Sure there is a lot of risk involved.  Many people fail trying to live an entrepreneurial type of life style.  It can be very stressful when what you have been building is on the brink of collapse, but it is the true entrepreneurial that keeps pushing until the last minute to see it through.  Looking failure in the face and denying it another victim.  That is just part of the dream, to struggle to make it happen while holding onto the faith you have in yourself to succeed, to keep fighting through all adversities to come out on top without losing your integrity along the way.

                It would not be a dream if people succeeded every time they attempted to take a chance and put a little of themselves on the line.  It is the opportunity that is available to build a successful business in America that brings people to the reality that they can do whatever they desire.  Not a company built out of need, but from the existence of the possibilities that exist in America and the ability to take advantage of what is available.  All it takes is an idea and the strength of character to see it through while learning all you can along the way.

Lew McMurran technology lobbyist

                Lew McMurran is the vice president of government internal affairs.  He is a registered lobbyist and advocates for businesses that is a fortune 500 company.  He manages loans including giving and collecting them.  He has worked for King County Council as a lobbyist for the county as a go between to the state legislator.  He has also worked as a public utilities district company at the county level until Sept 2000.  At this time he stated working for working for the Washington software alliance which is now called Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA).  The WTIA has approximately 600 companies as members today.

                Lew works as 501c6 nonprofits with members paying annual dues.  He works for a trade association with unions for companies.  He provides services and products people want to buy.  The WTIA provides business services providing cash flow and other resource outlets, events and programs such as professional development, IT certification and networking programs, and advocacy and lobbying.  As an advocacy and lobbying he acts as a go between for businesses and politicians.  There is no real carrier path to what he does; he simply was in the right place at the right time with the right skill set to fall into the job.

                He works with legislation between two sides as bipartisan.  He represents the technology industry in Olympia helping to shape how this industry should be handled since software development is such a different industry being so unregulated.  He helps to define how taxes should apply since Washington does not have an Income tax like California does.  He has helped connect producers with the IRS to help decide how taxable digital goods such as downloadable software games should be taxed.

Jeff Goodwin with Taking Chances

Jeff Goodwin was a business major who also took CES classes as electives for fun at the U of Washington.  He lives on Fox Island with his wife.  He has worked for Boeing while taking night classes when he learned the language FORTRAN.  He contracted work with IBM doing image processing and image recognition using 8086 Assembly language.  At this time he decided to make his own software.  He had a great idea but when he submitted it to IBM he got no backing and someone else ended up producing his idea.  Jeff created a service provider business that turned into a product business after getting the proper revenue and resources.  He started by building device drivers with IBM now as his customer.  He bootstrapped the company in this way.

                Jeff next went to Austin to the OEM Company creating software to bridge new hardware with real time operating systems.  He needed to raise money through angel investors and he had heavy competitors in this market.  At this time he partnered with another company who became their client.  He had to make a choice to either become a bigger company or branch out by making a move towards open source so he chose a third path which was to sell the company as his exit plan.

                Through SWAT analysis helped him make his decision and so he really sold his Intellectual Property.  He sold to cisco not because they were the highest bidder but because he thought it was the right thing to do for the people who worked for him.  He wouldn’t leave their building until a deal was struck.  The hardest lesson he said was to “know when to sell you company.”

Networking with Lynnette Claire

                Lynnette Claire went to the University of Oregon where she received her PhD and works at the University of Puget Sound.  Lynette started her career with a Gardening Magazine in Boston.  When this fell through she started a job in Seattle called Seafood trade.  At this time she felt she was not much more than a glorified secretary.  She then had an opportunity to start a magazine called Simply Seafood.  After starting this business, which is still running she accidently fell into starting a business of tree care with an arborist.  She then moved on to event planning with “Freelance” where she helped start the 6^th avenue public market. 

                Lynette started Entrepreneurial Network and believes that she needs to keep college graduates in the local area of Tacoma.  She believes she can achieve this act by developing a strong local network.  Building a local network will help raise the awareness of the politicians.  This will also give entrepreneurs more access to resources, will help companies grow faster, allow knowledge to be more available and help develop more innovative products.  She pointed out that there are 2 types of networks which are cohesive ties and structural holes.  Cohesive ties have the strengths that everyone knows everyone, the quality of information is good and there is a self-correcting mechanism.  Structural holes allows for more branching out to different pools of people which in turn allows for a lot of new types of knowledge to be brought into the network.  She believes that people should decide what kind of network they typically reside in and make attempts to branch out into the opposite to allow for greater networking abilities.

The Higher They Rise The Farther They Fall (Startup.com)

                GovWORKS.com is the name of the company started up by Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman on the movie “Startup.com” which is a documentary following the successes and failures of the company.  Kaleil is the CEO of the company and does most of the raising of the funds needed to get the company off the grounds.  Tom handles the Development side of creating the website to handle online transactions from individuals to the government.

                These two have known each other since high school and decide to create a startup business together.  The company starts out with only about 10 employees and expands to at one point having 233 employees.  Their largest competitor is ezGov.com which is another startup attempting to do the same thing as govWork.com is.  EzGov.com is able to launch their site first, but with the amount of funding Kaleil is able to acquisition allows them to have a superior product upon their release.

                Many relationships are damages or even ended along the way.  Kaleil goes through a few relationships along the way and even Tom and Kaleil end up finding themselves at opposite ends on how the company should be ran.  This leads Tom to say that he lost his trust in Kaleil which prompts Kaleil to fire Tom.  This is when the company reaches its lowest point because at this same time the .com bubble bursts and the company infrastructure becomes bloated and mass downsizing is required.  In the end they are left with only 50 out of the 233 employees they had at their highest point.  I thought this was a great example of how startups are started, maintained and brought down.

John Dimmer – The finance Guy

                John Dimmer focused most of his discussion on financing a business.  He is an entrepreneur that has been involved in many tens of companies.  He explained how even though money is not the primary goal of starting a company as an entrepreneur it is one of the primary concerned when trying to get a startup off the ground.  He is currently involved with Angel Network and this company helps as an angle investment company for startup companies looking for that extra financial push.

                One of the first ways he suggested getting funding is through friends and family or by personal credit cards.  Another way and probably the second step you want to take if you need more money is to talk with angel investors.  This is probably the best option for startup companies since they look to invest smaller amounts compared to the $10s of millions that VC’s would like to invest.  Last is Ventures Capitalists because IPO’s are unobtainable by most.  VC’s although have tons of money they will want to have much more control over the workings of the business and will look for reasons not to invest in your idea.

                He did focus on Angel investments since these are the more friendly types of investors and what he does currently.  He pointed out that there are a few options when obtaining a loan from an angel investor.  One is a loan option another is a stock option and finally there is a combination which is the smallest gamble on the side of the angel investor.

Ron Kornfeld – The Business Plan Professional

                Ron Kornfeld worked for MCI while they were developing the internet.  He got a degree in classic music playing the piano and composing music, but quickly decided there were not a lot of opportunities within that field.  This company could not figure out how to make this product profitable so he moved on to an internet startup to make money.  He used low end band width of dial up as his startups focus.  He used business plans to help test the idea itself along the way. 

                Ron described the way eyeballs are worth something to websites that use a lot of advertisement by investors through the metadata that can be gathered from the user’s preferences and navigation.  He had a tech business with hard problems solving, but in 2008 he went from almost going bankrupt to liquidated and ended up 100k in the good.  He made this push for his company’s shareholders.  He developed a website for kid learning with an adaptive learning algorithm.  This idea came to him when his son was struggling to learn through other types of learning software.  This was the Dreambox and he brought teachers in to help in the development process along with experts to give opinions and he gave his research out for free to not have to compete with other big companies.

                Ron learned a lot from each of his ventures.  While creating Dreambox he learned when you bring in experts in a field that you don’t want to generalize them.  In analyzing them you want to first see how extensible they are and how flexible.   Then you give higher correction and then you make sure you are not stepping on others within your team by bringing someone new in that specializes in the field you are trying to solve a problem within.