Last summer, we hired 9 interns for Entrustet.  It was one of the best decisions we’ve made as a company.  Most companies struggle with intern programs and many interns leave their summer programs without much more than a new line on their resume.  Jesse and I figured out how to make the program work so that the interns added value to the company and we added value to the interns.

Some highlights from the intern program:

• The digital executor toolbox
• 25+ blog posts
• 700+ attorneys added to our CRM
• 5 blog posts on other websites
• Huge amounts of research
• Replaced our copywriting consultant

Besides the direct benefits, our interns injected some fun into the office, which was great after working solo with Jesse for over a year.  It was also a low risk way for us to learn how to manage people.  Here’s a short list of things we did to make it work as well as it did.  Again, make sure to read Jesse’s post on how to run an intern program.

Before You Hire

• Think about what you need and write specific job descriptions
• Start early.  Put your ads up in February for the summer.
• Create a plan for when your interns arrive

When you hire

• Create a set of 3-5 tasks that the interns can do at any time
• Teach for the first 2 or 3 days.  It will be worth your investment.
• Have one never ending project.  For us it was adding lawyers to our CRM.
• Ask your interns what they want to do.  They will be motivated to work on what they like to do better than what you make them do.
• Work in the same room as your interns and invite them to come to your meetings

Read the rest of Jesse’s post for the full details on how to run an intern program.  It could make the difference between a waste of time and a huge help for your company.

                          

So how has working in the “digital death” industry changed me and my worldview?

I no longer take anything for granted.  I’ve read so many stories of people dying unexpectedly that I’ve realized how special life truly is.  Jesse will say from time to time “Isn’t it ridiculous that we’re alive?  Think about all of the things that had to go right for us to be here today. It’s amazing.”  It really is true.

If the average life expectancy is 80 these days, it means we only have 29,200 days on this Earth.  Before Entrustet, sometimes I thought days were boring, or were simply impediments in time before I got to do something I really wanted to do.  Now that I’ve been working on Entrustet for almost two years, I never take a single day for granted.  It’s one of my 29,200, and only if I’m lucky.

Dealing with death has caused me to care even less about what other people think.  You only live once, so do what makes you happy.  In the whole scheme of things, rejection isn’t that big of a deal.  Seize your opportunities and take your chances with alacrity.  You never know when you won’t have the ability to take them in the future.

I’ve become even less materialistic.  You can’t take your possessions or your money with you when you die, so I’ve come to realize that I don’t need things or to make $1b (unless we get hyper inflation!).  When I read about people on their deathbeds, they all say they regret not spending more time with friends and family or taking a trip to a foreign country or taking the opportunity to work on the things they loved.  They never say they wished they had bought a bigger TV or a nicer car.  I’ve realized that it truly doesn’t take much (money) for me to be happy.  I know I can live well on a small amount of money.

It’s strange that I’m dealing with these issues as a 25 year old, but I think I’m lucky.  Most people push the idea of death down the road and many people don’t end up following their dreams.  I’m glad I’m realizing these truths now, not when I’m 50, 90 or not at all.  Sometimes it takes a near death experience, but for me, all it’s taken is being near death.

Please watch Steve Jobs’ speech to Stanford’s graduation class.  Jobs was diagnosed with an extremely deadly type of cancer and miraculously survived.  He’s an authority on how to live before you die and his speech is where I got the title for my post.  Do yourself a favor and take the time to watch.  You only live once, make the most of it!

                          

About six weeks ago, I saw an article in Forbes by Maureen Farrell that talked about a program launched by the Chilean government to attract startups to Chile.  As I read, I found out that the Chilean Government was offering US startups $40,000 to move operations to Santiago for up to six months.  Startup Chile’s goal is to attract 25 high tech startups to Santiago for 6 months, put them in free office space and connect them with Chilean entrepreneurs, VCs and potential employees.

Members of the Startup Chile program, along with the Chilean Minister of the Economy, fanned out across the US to try to recruit startups.  They went to Stanford and Berkeley and met with Vivek Wadhwa and Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch.  They met Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook and countless valley VCs.  Next, they crossed the country to talk with entrepreneurs in Boston and NYC.

As soon as I saw the program, I knew I wanted to apply. I love to travel and my biggest regret of college was not studying abroad in a Spanish speaking country because I had to pass up a semester abroad to run exchangehut.  Convincing Jesse was easy.  We both love to travel and do new things and we’ve both worked on Entrustet all over the country for the past year and a half.

On September 20^th, we submitted online applications and hoped for the best.  Two days later, Startup Chile told us to be ready for Skype interviews.  Our Skype session went really well and we were told we had to create a 3 minute video that showed why we wanted to be selected.

We wanted to do something to stand out and Jesse and I love to cook, so we did 1 minute on Entrustet and then shot a Chilean cooking show.  I had seen Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations that featured el lomito, a slow braised pork sandwich with crushed avocado, lime mayo and a huge slice of tomato.  We also picked cold avocado soup as our starter and cooked a Chilean dinner at 10pm after I got back from reffing soccer.  Evidently, Startup Chile liked our video, because four days later, we got an email saying we’d been selected.

Now we had to decide if we really could go.  We wrote out all of the pros and cons and then drafted emails to all of our investors, mentors and advisers.  Next, we talked to everyone individually to hear their concerns.  We got tons of support and most people were very excited.

For us, the decision was easy.  We spend most of our time each day online or on the phone.  We rarely have in person meetings and we travel to the east or west coast every six weeks or so.  Entrepreneurship is an adventure every single day.  You never know what kind of challenge you’ll deal with or what kind of surprise each day will have when you flip open your laptop.  We feel like going to Santiago for Startup Chile is just another adventure that will help us concentrate on creating an awesome product that people want to use.

I’m really excited to move to Santaigo to run Entrustet.  I can’t wait to see the city and meet the founders of the 24 other companies that were selected.  We’ve been location independent many times before, and we don’t think this will be any different.  For us, the pros outweigh the cons by a longshot.  We also know that if anything happens or for whatever reason it’s not working, we are only an $750 plane ride home.

Jesse and I both keep active personal blogs, so if you want to keep up with what we’re doing in Santiago, make sure to check back here often.  I also update my Tumblr mini blog pretty much everyday and it’ll be the place where I’ll share short observations and pictures.  If you want to learn more about what we’re up to in the Startup Chile program, make sure to check out the Entrustet Blog.

I’m really excited to go and can’t wait to write my first post from Chile!

                          

Introducing the Entrustet music video “What My Assets Will Become” a cover of All the Things I’ve Done by The Killers.  Daniel Thompson plays the piano and with Rob Howard on the camera.  I hope you enjoy…I know we all had a ton of fun with it.

                          

For those who do not know, SXSW stands for South By Southwest, which is a combination Technology, Film and Music festival held each year in Austin, Texas.  It is one of the biggest in the US, if not the world and brings some of the smartest and most interesting people together to listen to panels, network and go to parties.

I was lucky enough that my first time going to SXSW also included the added experience of launching Entrustet into beta, with Jesse giving a talk called “People Die, Profiles Don’t.” I met some great people and attended some really interesting sessions and will share my best of SXSW.  Check out our Entrustet blog for more info on what we did at SXSW.

Entrustet

We launched our beta version early in the morning on Friday March 12th, a day before our panel.  Everything’s been going really well and we’ve started to get some good traffic and user sign ups.  Our panel got some traction, especially online on Twitter.  Our stat that over 285k US Facebook users will die this year caused a stir and was used by our friends over at The Digital Beyond at their panel on the 16th.

More and more people are asking the question “what happens to my digital assets when I die?” and this attention is starting to reach a critical mass.  Everyone from Guy Kawasaki to the American Bar Association is starting to think about it.  Hugh Forrest, the founder of SXSW raised this question in an interview with NPR:

Yeah, we did one session on that last year and we create this virtual presence more and more with our new technologies. What happens to that presence when you pass away? Do you will that on to someone else to essentially keep on your virtual existence or how does that work? And there are lots or there are some services that help you with that process now.

Now, the other session you mentioned was My Right to Delete, which is, again, in this brave new world we live in, the things we say or do often get onto the Internet and it’s impossible to get rid of them. How do we move on, if and when we want to move on?

Gizmodo is dedicating an entire week to looking at what happens to your digital assets as people pass away, including an article called What Happens Online When We Die? and many other publications have been writing about this issue.  The Digital Beyond’s panel was well attended and Adele McAlear’s blog Death and Digital Legacy has been gaining strength.

I believe that 2010-2011 will be the year that consumers really start to think about what happens to their digital assets when they pass away.  What do you want done with your Facebook?  Your email?  How will you protect your family photos or all of your blog posts?

Panels

I went to some great panels this year.  My favorite one was about Seed Combinators and featured a who’s who of entrepreneurship forces.  The panel included Paul Graham, Naval Ravikant, Marc Nathan, David Cohen and Joshua Baer and they spoke about their efforts to create successful seed combinators across the country.  I think that Madison, WI has to potential to have a very successful seed combinator and am going to post about it in the next week or so.

Another great panel talked about Social Media in China.  In China, websites are not able to sustain themselves on “advertising” as a business model, so they have had to create innovative business models in order to survive.  I hadn’t realized how big TenCent is (1.5B in revenue, 40% profit margins) and all of it is based on virtual currency and virtual goods.  The Chinese version of Match.com charges $450 for 6 months, equivalent to 1 months salary for the average Chinese citizen.  Like match.com, the service matches you up with potential matches and you go on dates.  After the date, you call into their call center and rate how you thought the date went, what you liked and didn’t like about the other person and if you want to date them again.  The next day, the service calls you back and tells you what the other person thought of you.  It gives you the chance to improve your dating skills and cut through some of the awkwardness.

Another dating site allows you to create an avatar of yourself and go to a virtual “dance club” where you dance with potential partners.  You talk, exchange personal info and get to know each other.  The site makes money when the people buy drinks, gifts and other virtual goods for each other.  After awhile, if you like the other person, you can meet up in person.

Advertising has been a crutch in the American Internet space that is being removed as we speak.  I think you will start to see more innovative business models, like Mint.com and others come to the US in the near future.

I also attended Student Startups to hear about others experiences starting a business in college (nice job by the panel, including Ellen Chisa), The Third Coast, by the founders of Crowdspring and many others.  If I had to do it again, I would attend more core conversations, rather than panels, as there is more give and take and you have a better opportunity to interact with the speakers.

Food, Parties, Fun

I could write an entire post about each of these topics, but a short recap will have to do.  I had some amazing food in Austin, but the best came from a food cart called Texas Picnic.  I had one of the best pulled pork sandwiches I’ve ever had and their white BBQ sauce on their chicken was unlike anything I’ve ever tried.  I’m somewhat of a BBQ connoisseur, so that is high praise.  The Whole Foods we went to was the biggest I have ever seen, with a crazy amount of selection.  If I had unlimited money I’d shop and eat there all the time.

The parties were really fun, with the highlight being the Mashable party.  We had to wait in line for at least an hour, but we made the best of it, creating a new check in location on Gowalla that served as the unofficial Entrustet Launch party (8 people checked in).  We grabbed some beers from the liquor store across the way and made friends with the people around us and had a great time.  The Thrillist party on our last night had some great live music, although we missed the DJ.

I also met some great people who I hope to stay in contact with in the future.  One of the interesting people was Geoff Hamrick, a 19 year old entrepreneur from North Carolina.  Geoff and his partner George have a cool site called Group Story that lets you share photos and collaborate to create photo books.  They’ve got a really cool idea going.

Overall SXSW was a great experience.  I will definitely be back next year and hope to see many of the cool people I met this year again and hear about their successes in the year apart.  I learned a ton, including some lessons that will lead to direct improvements in Entrustet.  It was a week well spent.

                          

With Account Guardian, we’ve created a free way for you to create a secure list of all of your digital assets (any online account or file on your computer) and decide what you’d like done with each asset when you pass away.  You can either decide to delete individual digital assets or decide to pass specific assets to heirs of your choosing.

Jesse gave his presentation People Die, Profiles Don’t at South By Southwest yesterday and we got a great reaction.  The most tweeted about portion was our stat that over 285,000 American Facebook users will pass away this year.  We calculated this number using Facebook’s own stats and US Government data provided by the US Census and the Centers for Disease Control.

We believe that this number shows that companies already face a large problem about what to do with digital assets when their users die.  I’ll have a longer post about where I think the industry is going once I get back to Madison on Wednesday, so stayed tuned!

                          

I think his latest piece titled More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs has the potential to impact the lives of even more people.  Friedman says:

The most striking feature of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency was the amazing, young, Internet-enabled, grass-roots movement he mobilized to get elected. The most striking feature of Obama’s presidency a year later is how thoroughly that movement has disappeared.

I remember getting inundated by posts from my friends on Facebook in the weeks leading up to the election urging me to support Obama, attend rallies or make sure to go out and vote.  The movement continued for the next few weeks, but has completely lost steam.  Even the most ardent Obama supporters among my friends aren’t engaged via social media anymore.  This in itself is pretty amazing, but not Friedman’s main point. He wants President Obama to re-engage America’s youth and doesn’t believe that going after Wall Street or other negative methods will work.  He continues:

Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

I am 100% behind this idea.  It makes perfect sense and would appeal to both sides of the aisle at at time when partisanship is at a seemingly all time high because of the fight over health care.  It would harken back to the Obama that many young people voted for, rather than the less than inspirational version of the President who we have gotten to know since his election.

I believe that entrepreneurship is our best hope for saving the US from its mammoth debt obligations.  We need to find ways to “grow the pie” rather than trying to raise taxes on a stagnant (or shrinking) pie.  I believe that all kinds of entrepreneurship are going to be necessary to solve our problems.  We are going to need traditional entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but we will also need social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus and the social entrepreneurs featured in Business Week.

I think that if President Obama were to make entrepreneurship a central portion of his presidency, he will find a huge groundswell of willing entrepreneurs who will be willing to help.  Friedman mentions National Lab Day and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship as examples of organization that are helping young people get interested in innovation.  Both programs would not be able to survive without older, successful mentors.  I think that entrepreneurs are willing to help out as mentors and young people are waiting to be entrepreneurs, but some are just waiting to be pushed.  Inc. Magazine contributor and author of Upstarts!, Donna Fenn says:

Over 75% of the entrepreneurs I interviewed for my book, Upstarts! said that they were very or highly likely to start another company; most had already founded two or more.”  She continues, “70% said their companies had a social mission. But make no mistake: they’re laser-focused on the bottom line as well and they understand why growing a profitable, sustainable company that creates jobs is a social good in and of itself. It’s pretty clear to me: this is a generation worth investing in.

Fenn‘s point is important because many startups are not only creating jobs and coming up with new solutions to problems, but they are also trying to make the world a better place.  If we can get more people to think with this mindset, the US and the world will be a better place.  So President Obama, please follow Friedman’s advice.  This is a no lose issue for you and the country.  You should be able to get support from both sides of the aisle.  You should be able to reconnect with an electorate that wants to support you, but has not because you have abandoned what got you into office.  Go back to the politics of hope, propose real solutions that everyone can get behind and see what happens.  I bet it will change lives.

                          

The Entrustet informational site is live and ready for the world. I’ve been working on Entrustet.com for the past 14 months with my friend and co-founder Jesse Davis and have loved every minute.  Entrustet is a secure, organizational tool that brings together people like you, estate planning lawyers and the companies that provide online accounts and memberships. Entrustet allows users to maintain a secure portfolio of online assets, nominate heirs and manage asset distribution and deletion after their passing. Entrustet’s wide range of services allow you to organize and decide what happens to your digital assets, before your loved ones or your executor are faced with the unknowns and complexities of protecting your online legacy.

For example, you could use Entrustet to create a list of all of your important digital assets like your domain names, digital photos and online accounts and tell your heirs what you would like done with them when you die.  I know I want my digital photos to be preserved so that my heirs can have access to them once I’m gone.

My partner Jesse Davis came up with the idea while he was reading Thomas Friedman’s book The World Is Flat and we partnered up a few months later.  You can read more about how Jesse came up with the idea on our company blog, here. We have been working full time ever since and are excited to share what we have been doing with the world.  It’s been an amazing experience so far and we are excited to continue working to make Entrustet a success.  I’ve learned so much, met some great people and throughly enjoyed myself over the past 14 months.  I’m confident that it will continue!  Jesse and I would like to thank our Merlin Mentor team, our lawyers at Neider and Boucher, family and friends and everyone else who has helped us to get where we are today.

I invite you to check out our informational site and give us your feedback!  You can also find us on Twitter @Entrustet