The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.  This was one of the most unique books I’ve read in a long time.  The book is set in post WWII London and later Guernsey, one of the channel islands between England and France.  It is historical fiction about what life was like on Guernsey during and after WWII. I had never heard about this aspect of WWII and it was really interesting to read about what life was like on the island.  For example, I didn’t realize that Germany took over Guernsey fairly early in the war, expecting to only be there for a brief stopover before attacking the UK and that there was a small concentration camp on the island.

Aside from the history, the book is interesting because it is written all as letters between the characters.  There are no chapters, making it easy to continue reading.  At first, I thought I would have trouble keeping all of the characters straight because of the format, but I quickly started to enjoy the new format.

Another unique aspect of the book is the authors themselves.  Shaffer had never written a book before this, but had stopped over on Guernsey and was stuck in the airport with nothing to eat except candy from the vending machine and nothing to read except travel books about the island.  Fast forward 30 years and she started to write this book after being harassed by her book club.  After completing the first draft, her health began to deteriorate and she realized she would not be able to do the necessary edits and rewrites.  She drafted her niece, Annie Barrows, who is also a writer, to complete the book.

The overall plot isn’t incredibly complex and fairly formulaic, but the book is a winner because of the interesting historical context, great descriptive writing and unique format.  I highly recommend reading it.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard – Chip and Dan Heath.   In their follow up from their must read book Made to Stick, the Heath brothers have done it again.  Switch details a simple strategy to help create change in all different scenarios, from eating behavior, politics, business and health care.

They believe that the human mind is broken down into two parts, which they call “the rider” and the “elephant.”  If you imagine that the rider is attempting to ride the elephant, The rider is the analytical part of our brain that likes to think things through, while the elephant is our emotions and motivation.  They show that in order to create change, you need to get both the rider and the elephant moving in the same direction along a well defined path. They offer some inspiring stories to go along with some great strategies that help make campaigns work better.

They show examples of people with small amounts of power who created huge changes in behavior using simple, innovative strategies.  They show how a tiny group highlighted the bright spots of villagers’ behavior in Vietnam to help end childhood malnutrition in the country and how providing a roadmap to child abusers can reduce abuse by 3x.  I can’t really do this book justice with a short blog post, but if you are interested in change and how it works, read this book.

The resulting surgery saved his life, but took his voice.  It also took his ability to eat and drink.  He cannot remember the last thing he said, the last thing he ate or the last thing he drank, although he assumes it was probably water in the hospital.  Since 2006, Ebert has had many reconstructive surgeries to try to allow him to regain his speech and the ability to eat and drink.  After short-lived successes and painful rehabilitation, each surgery failed.  His voice was gone for good.

Now, Ebert, who was famous for his weekly TV show, can only communicate through post it notes, typed communication, rudimentary gestures and basic sign language.  Many people would be extremely depressed and who could blame them?  Not Roger Ebert.  He writes on a scarp paper during in an interview for the feature in Esquire, “There is no need to pity me. Look how happy I am.”

After coming to grips with not being able to speak, Ebert turned to the written word.  He started writing a journal on his website, first to “apologize to his fans for not being able to come to Ebert-fest” and later as a way to express himself on just about any topic.  If you read his journal entries, you will see that Ebert is an amazing writer who philosophizes about all sorts of amazing topics.  Since 2008, Ebert has thrown himself into writing to continue to communicate with people around the world.  He has written over 500,000 words and responds to most of the thousands of comments that readers submit on his entries.  Ebert writes “It is saving me. When I am writing my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.”

Ebert inspires me because his positive attitude shines through, even though he has faced more adversity than a person should have to face in their life.  He still reviews movies and writes amazing reviews, but he has found a new outlet that lets him express himself in his own way, not how the world thinks he should.  He still goes out to dinner with his wife and his friends, even though he cannot eat.  For many, this would be the worst torture, but Ebert doesn’t think so.  When one of his friends apologizes for raving about the food in front of him, Ebert writes a note that says “No, no. You’re eating for me.” Ebert is amazing because he has adapted to the challenges in his life and embraced the good and tried to forget about the bad.  I love Ebert’s personal philosophy and wish more people thought this way:

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

If more people did, the world would be a better place.  There are so many amazing aspects of Ebert’s journey toward this realization.  He would not have been able make many of these discoveries without the help of technology.  The Internet has allowed him to interact with interesting people and reach the masses, from the comfort of his favorite chair in his home in Chicago.  A company in Scotland has helped him create a personalize text-speech tool that actually sounds like his voice, so he does not have to sound like a machine for the rest of his life.  Technology has given him the ability to reach me and inspire me.  I am glad I live in an era where people can have a positive influence on the world, regardless of the condition of their body.  If you have access to a computer and the Internet, you truly can change the world.

Introduction to the Course

Too many classes focus on theory and large, overarching issues instead of practical things that you will need to know to start a business.  Hopefully this class will prepare you to actually start your business by giving you the tools to do all of the nitty gritty work that is necessary to get started.  At the end of the semester, students will compete in a business plan competition in front of a panel of judges.

Week 1 – Introduction to Entrepreneurship

Class: There are many types of entrepreneurship, not just high tech.  It’s easier than you think and college is the best time to start. How to Live Before You Die.

Required reading: How to Start a Startup, What Startups are Really Like, The 3 Advantages of a Startup, Entrepreneurs Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Week 2 – Idea Generation and Business Plans

Class: How do you take an idea to a business plan?  How do you write a business plan? Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce

Required reading: The World is Flat, 9 Business Selection Criteria, 13 Sentences, College is the Best Time to Start a Business

Homework: Start thinking about a business to start for the business plan competition.

Week 3 – Types of Businesses Organization

Class: What type of entity should I use? LLC, Corporation, Non profit?  Learn how how to sign up for LLC.

Required Reading: 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups , The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

Homework: Sign up for an LLC, but don’t pay for it.  Start working on your business plan.

Week 4 – What are the Necessary Legal Docs Required?

Class: Operating agreements, partnership agreement and their  importance.  Guest speaker: A lawyer familiar with these issues.

Required Reading: Top 10 Geek Business Myths, The PayPal Wars

Week 5 – Taxes, Banking, Accounting

Class: How to setup a FEIN, get a free business bank account and start learning about Quickbooks.

Homework: Go to a bank and get a free business bank account set up (you don’t actually have to sign up), start exploring Quickbooks.

Week 6 – Quickbooks

Class: How to use Quickbooks in a small business or startup

Homework: Create a Quickbooks file for a hypothetical startup.

Required Reading: How to Get Taken Seriously Running A Startup Under 25

Week 7 – Credit Card Processing

Class: Teach how credit card processing system works, fill out forms

Homework: Call multiple resellers and see who can get the best rate.

Week 8 – Servers and SSL

Class: Overview of types of servers, server companies.   What is an ssl? Overview of ssl companies.  Test on first half of class.

Required Reading: Don’t Be Afraid of the Competition, My Rules for Startups

Homework: First draft of business plan due

Week 9 – Overview of Programming

Class: Types of programming languages, how programming works works, explanation of databases, what to look for when hiring a programmer.  How to register a domain name.

Required Reading: The Tipping Point

Homework: Register a domain for under $8.

Week 10 – Legal

Class: What to look for in a lawyer, what you need from them and the importance of a legal advisor.

Week 11 – Mentors

Class: Overview of why you need a mentor, who is willing to help, how you should look for a mentor.

Required Reading: Every Startup Needs a Mentor Team, The Entrepreneurial Push

Homework: Connect with a potential mentor on Linkedin, Twitter, email or phone.

Week 12 – Networking

Class: Why you need to network, strategies for successful networking, how to stay in contact with people.

Required Reading: The Business of Meeting People, Freakonomics

Homework: Get business cards for yourself, check out Brazen Careerist.

Week 13 – Blogging and Online Stores

Class: How to set up a blog, overview of Wordpress, Blogger etc.  Overview of online shops.  Intro to Shopify.

Homework: Set up free wordpress blog.

Week 14 – Online Advertising, Social Media, Analytics, Document Sharing

Class: Overview of online advertising, CPM, CPC, Twitter, Facebook.  Intro to Google Adwords, Analytics, Docs and Calendar.

Required Reading: Made to Stick

Homework: sign up for Google docs, share a document with me.

Week 15 – Guide to Raising Money, Office Space

Class: How to value your business? Overview of friends & family, angel investors, VCs.  When is the right time to get an office?  How do you get the best deals?  Where should you look?

Required Reading: The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists, To Office or Not to Office

Week 16 – Business Plan Competition

Final Exam – Business Plan Competition with panel of judges, based on Burrill Business Plan Competition.

—

I really think that this sort of course would be incredibly beneficial to a student who is thinking about starting a business or even thinking about working for a startup.  These types of skills will give students a nice foundation so that they can start their own business.  Check out my full list of resources on my Entrepreneur 101 page for links to all of the companies I would use for each of these lessons.

So help me out: What am I missing?  Would you take a class like this?  Do you think universities would be willing to offer a class like this?

My penmanship was pretty bad and the teacher realized that I was writing my letters backward.  Instead of writing some of my letters from bottom to top, I wrote from bottom to top.  I remember being annoyed and asking “what do we need to know this for?”  I could read my writing and so could the teacher, but I wasn’t following the rules.  In 3rd grade, I pretty much refused to learn cursive because I could print really fast and hated the new rules, again asking “what do we need to know this for?”  I continued this (probably incredibly annoying) refrain all the way through middle school: manually calculating slope instead of using a graphic calculator, diagramming sentences, specific types of bibliographies.  Even gym class wasn’t safe from my middle school ire.

Somewhere along the line, probably around freshman year of high school, I kept the questions to myself, but decided to tune out anything that I thought wasn’t going to help me later in life.  I loved reading about interesting things that had happened in real life and writing about current events, but hated theoretical or outdated lessons.  My favorite class in high school was consumer economics, an entire class devoted to balancing your checkbook, investing in stocks and personal economics.  It was real and I still use many of those skills I learned sophomore year.

I hated geometry because of the rigidity of proofs, hated calculus because I couldn’t understand why we had to do it by hand when we had graphing calculators to do it for us.  I hated memorizing the parts of a cell in freshman biology and reading about the Greek Gods.  It was boring and I couldn’t see the benefit later in life.  I haven’t used any of those “skills” since. This choice was the main reason why I got waitlisted at UW and almost didn’t get in, but I don’t regret it one bit.

When I got to college, I was expecting a change.  I thought we would learn how to succeed in the real world, but I quickly realized it was going to be more of the same inside the classroom.  I realized that if I was going to learn, I would have to do it myself.  After I bought ExchangeHut, I thought I’d try the business school.

After about half of a semester, I realized it wasn’t right for me.  Accounting 100 was rule driven and required you to do problems by hand.  After managing ExchangeHut’s accounting in Quickbooks for a few months, I couldn’t understand why we would figure out any of that stuff by hand.  Why not just use Quickbooks and save all of the trouble?  After the first four weeks, we started to learn about how Wal-Mart manages its inventory and how other large corporations prepare financial statements.  While I understand accountants need to know this stuff, I realized it was worthless to me.  I could use quickbooks for my accounting and if I ever got really successful, I’d hire an accountant.  Why bother?  I found the over reliance on theory to be extremely prevalent in business school classes.

I had a simple accounting question for ExchangeHut and asked four different friends who were Accounting majors with good GPAs.  None of them knew the answer, but they could sure solve the question on the exam about WalMart’s inventory system.  It happened again this year with an intern for Entrustet.  We have a finance major who earned a 4.0 from UW and is graduating in the spring.  He is clearly smart and learns quickly.  We have him doing some balance sheet work and other finance related tasks and he’s good at it.  He was working on our balance sheet and ran into a somewhat complex issue, so he went to his finance professor and asked for help.  The professor said “just use quickbooks, it’ll know where to put everything in the right place.”

At first I just laughed, but then I realized this was a microcosm of why students are having trouble adjusting the the real world.  I don’t think its our intern’s fault.  He just was never taught how to use quickbooks and as soon as he got to the real world, his professor says “use quickbooks.”  That’s what happens to graduates all over the country.  Rebecca Thorman’s post addresses how colleges are failing students, but I really think the over reliance on theory in the place of practice is what is hurting students.  Ellen Nordahl looks at the problem from the other side in her post about how students are unengaged.  Universities need to teach students more skills they will use in the workplace or they will not be prepared.  I bet if students weren’t asking themselves “what do we need to know this for” in their heads, they would be more engaged in their school work.

I am not saying that we should throw out all theory.  It is clear that you need to understand the basic theory in order to implement them in practice, but universities have swung way to far to toward the theory end of the continuum.

Schools are not the only place where the balance is out of whack. I ref a bunch of soccer each year and see the same basic problem.  I ref everything from U-11 to high school to semi-pro adults and I really enjoy it.  Each year, all refs have to take a recertification course that is supposed to refresh refs on the laws of the game and let us know about any rule changes.  It also gives instructors a chance to stress certain aspects of the game and teach better game management.  At the end of the class, everyone has to take a 100 question test and get at least a 75% in order to retain their badge. All USSF refs have to take this class each year, so attendees range from 12 year old first year refs to 70 year old guys who have been reffing for 35 years.  Sounds like a good system, right?

Wrong.  The test focuses on incredibly abstract game situations that would never happen, even to a World Cup level referee.  Here’s some actual questions from the test:

Q: An offensive player is dribbling toward goal, standing outside the penalty area.  A defender who is standing in the penalty area takes off his shoe and throws it at the ball, knocking it away.

Q: A player takes his shin guard off and slaps the ball with the shin guard in his hand.

There are a ton more, but you get the idea.  You have to know the rules to get these questions right, but they cause everyone’s eyes to glaze over.  It would be a test that would be great to do as trivia, but doesn’t really help a 12 year old new referee manage a game.

Because the test is so skewed toward situations that will never happen to you, the instructors have to teach to the test, just like teachers in middle and high schools do for state tests.  To make matter worse, the instructors use jargon heavy language instead of using concrete examples.  For example, at my most recent clinic, a kid of about 13 was confused about offside.  The instructor had said “as the assistant referee, make sure you stay with the second to last defender.”  The kid raised his hand and said “I thought it was the last defender.”  It was clear that the kid forgot that the goalkeeper counts as a defender, but instead of explaining it with an example, the instructor just repeated his sentence again, but more slowly and with more emphasis.  The kid didn’t understand until another ref at my table explained it to him with a diagram and an example.  There were so many other examples like this during the 8 hour course, my head started to hurt.

A huge percentage of kids quit refereeing each year because they get screamed at by coaches and parents.  The recertification classes should teach foul recognition (ie, when to blow the whistle and when not to), how to kick a coach out, how to deal with parents and the basic rules of the game, not what to do if someone throws a shoe at the ball or whether the correct restart after a chicken walks onto the field and knocks the ball over the end-line is a drop ball or a goal kick.  They should be showing videos of fouls from youth and adult games to keep people engaged.  A quick search of YouTube for “soccer violence” or “youth soccer red cards” brings up tons of teaching moments.  Additionally, FIFA makes rule changes each year, usually as a result of something that happened in an important game.  We could have watched videos of each situation to explain why FIFA decided to make the change, but instead we just read it from the book. Just like you learn how to succeed in the real world by doing things and learning practical things like Quickbooks, soccer referees learn from watching other successful referees work and learning from real life situations.

It is harder to come up with engaging, real life lesson plans than it is to teach theory.  Its also riskier.  I think educators are less likely to try to teach real life situations because it takes time to come up with more in depth lesson plans and it’s not the safe choice.  In The Wire (my favorite tv show ever), a teacher realizes that he can teach probability to his inner city students via dice.  The kids love it and learn because they can see how they will use this skill in real life.  I think everyone agrees that the US has to do a better job of preparing students for the future.  The first step is to stop teaching so much theory and start teaching things that students will use in real life.

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.

Jake Wood, who is about my age, is a former UW football player who graduated and enlisted in the Marines.  During his service, he completed two tours of duty, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and is now retired.  I first heard about Wood when I found his blog, Jake’s Life, shortly after he deployed for the first time.  I’ve been following his blog ever since.

Team Rubicon flew into the Dominican Republic and drove overland into Haiti with supplies donated from people in America.  They quickly got to work helping people survive.

Their blog posts are heart wrenching and amazing, all at the same time.  Many of the pictures are graphic.  One of their recent posts was called Bureaucracy is killing people, not bandits, and laments the fact that donations are sitting at the airport and not reaching the people who need it most.  Today, Team Rubicon has managed to treat over 200 people, in addition to the hundreds they have helped in the past few days and are quickly running out of supplies.  Their entire mission is completely privately funded, so they rely on private donations.  Please check out their blog and think about what you can do to help their effort.

The world needs more people like Team Rubicon.  Their entrepreneurial approach to helping people is saving lives, while supplies sits at the airport.  Mark Cuban recently said, “We need people who try to change the game. Who don’t just approach problems with gutless answers.”  He was referring to NBC and the Tonight Show, but I think it really applies to Team Rubicon.  They have changed the game for hundreds of Haitians by acting, not just sitting around.  I am inspired by their work and wish them the very best.  Good luck, stay safe and keep up the good work!

I can’t remember that last time I watched any American tv news program or read an American newspaper (for anything other than a sports story) on my own.  The only times I’ve read the American press is when someone sends me a link to a story.  Most of the time, the stories in the American press are simplistic, boring and cliche.  There is little analysis and the writer doesn’t seem to understand the story himself.  The only interesting stories are the investigative reports.

TV news is arguably worse.  Network news is ok, but generally focuses on celebrity or partisan bickering, rather than actual issues.  Cable “news” is an affront to the word news and most of the time, local news isn’t all that interesting.

It seems to me that the British press is better at covering just about everything than the American media.  From American politics to climate change, from sport to finance and international affairs, all of the mainstream British media seems to do a better job the their American counterparts.  BBC World News America recently featured a 10 minute segment on the US military strategy in Afghanistan, including a 5 minute segment with a journalist going out on patrol with an American unit.  I learned more in 10 minutes than in the previous three months listening to politicians and commentators yammer on or reading American news articles.

I read an article in the Telegraph today about the economy and the potential for a further deterioration in 2010.  I actually learned something from it.  I rarely get anything out of the NY Times or Wall St. Journal when I read it.  Both publications slant one way or the other and have a specific viewpoint they want to get across.  They rarely focus on stories that do not fit the narrative.  I’ve found the British press to be less beholden to their narrative than the American press.

This problem extends all the way to NPR programming, too.  Although NPR stories are more in depth, they do not present nearly as much information as a BBC radio story.  I think the British media believes that its readers actually are intelligent, whereas the American media believes that it has to tell a narrative and present to the lowest common denominator.

This phenomenon extends past the media and manifests itself for anyone to see in TV programming.  British soccer commentators talk 50% as much as their American counterparts in any sport.  British versions of Ramasy’s Kitchen Nightmares, Life on Mars, Dragon’s Den (Shark Tank in the US) and American Idol give the viewer the ability to think for themselves.  In the American version, there are always sounds an music playing in the background, trying to hit the viewers over the head with the point the producers want to get across.  If you get a chance, check out any show on BBC America and listen to how little background noise/music there is.

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is the best example.  The original British version shows Gordon Ramsay helping turn a struggling restaurant around.  He dines, talks with the chef, owner and waitstaff and then revamps the menu, teaches the chef some business skills and relaunches the restaurant.  It is interesting because he focuses on the business side of running a restaurant.  From buying cheap ingredients to when to be open to how to hire waitstaff, Ramasy teaches you how to run a successful restaurant.

In the American version, the kitchen is usually incredibly dirty, the restaurant owner does not want to listen to any advice and Ramsay’s team ends up completely redesigning the restaurant from scratch.  They probably spent 20k making it happen.  There is music in the background and always personality conflicts.  It’s nowhere as interesting as the British version.

It seems like producers have decided that Americans have no attention span and cannot figure anything out for themselves, whereas the British are allowed to think for themselves and can pay attention for a full 10 minutes.  I’m thankful for cable and the Internet so that I have a choice to watch foreign programming and read international news.  I’m not sure what I would do otherwise.

What do you think?  Do you pay attention to the American media?  Do you pay attention to British media or none at all?  Have you watched any British TV and noticed a similar phenomenon?

Justin Beck is the co-founder and CEO of PerBlue, a software startup in Madison.  PerBlue’s flagship product, Parallel Kingdom, is the first location based game built for the iPhone and Android and has over 80,000 players worldwide.  Founded in January 2008 while he was still in school, Beck and his team have worked to create a successful game and an interesting business model.  Beck graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

Nathan Lustig: Hi Justin, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.  Can you give me a brief overview of your company?

Justin Beck: Sure.  PerBlue was created when we started developing our flagship game, Parallel Kingdom, in January 2008. The first version was released in October 2008 and we’ve been steadily gaining players and improving the game ever since. The game is on its 3rd major version and we currently have over 80,000 players.

We have 7 more or less full-time people working for us and are growing nicely. We have also developed several other applications for the iPhone and Android platforms but our most successful app remains Parallel Kingdom.  As we’ve grown we have found our business to be building great multiplayer games for mobile platforms.

NL: What kind of background did you have to be able to start a mobile gaming company?

JB: I have been programming since I was 12 years old and love to do it.  I graduated from UW-Madison with a Computer Engineering and Computer Science Degree and I interned as a software engineer at Google and as a program manager at Microsoft on their ASP.NET team.

NL: Many founders of startups have some sort of an “ah-ha moment” when they first got the idea for their company.  Did you have one and what was it?

JB: I’m thinking that could be true for us.

I was working on a different startup with some friends from Google.  We were going to build a community bar and real-time chat for webpages as a script mashup, which was going great.  But when Andrew Hanson (my partner) and I were doing homework one night, we starting thinking about the next game we should make.  I was like, we should build something mobile, something people actually would play, simple, and we should throw GPS into it somehow to make it interesting.

From that conversation, we started with Parallel Kingdom.  It was about a month later when I realized the mobile space was really growing and I should invest myself into build a company around that space.  This was before the iPhone Appstore even existed.  I would say that was my “ah-ha” moment.  I just knew it.  It wasn’t a tough choice.

NL: What is the biggest reason you founded your startup?

JB: I love adventure.   I saw building a company as the next challenge in my life.  Two of my life goals were to work at Google and Microsoft.  I had been there and gotten offers from them, but this opportunity came up and the timing couldn’t get much better.  Many people assume lots of things about people who run their own business, many of these are explicitly not true with me.

I actually really like working for someone else and trying to make them as successful as possible.  I also really have no interest in the money.  I took a 2 year pay cut to do PerBlue.  So for me, it’s the adventure and challenge.

NL: What is the biggest unexpected challenge you had to overcome?

JB: I would say my biggest unexpected challenge was how hard it is to be a really good manager of a creative team. I am still working on it, but doing it well is very hard.

NL: What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about starting a startup?

JB:

1.       Play to win, commit yourself to playing the game and be willing to be very flexible in how you navigate the pathway.   Watch and model people who have built successful companies and learn from them.  (Watching failure doesn’t teach you how to succeed)

2.       Have a specific goal: we are going to do “this.” Drive yourself and your team to this goal.

3.       Have a schedule, (roadmap) that is a reasonable plan of getting to that goal.

4.       Commitment and talent are the 2 most important traits of your teammates.

5.       Stay focused.  You can only build one business at a time.  Choose your business and stick to it till its done.

6.       It’s a marathon not a sprint, pace yourself emotionally, mentally, physically

NL: What are three websites you check everyday?

JB: Not many. Pandora, Facebook, Google Analytics, PKStats, Bug Tracking is my honest list. But websites I check weekly bi-weekly when I am thinking about strategy or competitive research.

http://techcrunch.com
http://news.ycombinator.com/

I have my executives I try to watch.  Marc Pincus (Zynga), Eric Schmidt (Google), Jason Fried (37signals)

I like watching talks, Google Tech Talks are amazing.

NL: Do you have any funny stories or amusing anecdotes about starting or running the company?  Do people ask you “when are you going to get a real job?”

JB: There are lots of funny stories.  One of the easiest ones to explain is DB Death Day and yes it is a PerBlue holiday.  We had some problems with the database and issued a statement that:  “There was a massive forest fire in PK, resulting in every tree in the western hemisphere being burnt to the ground.”  Along with the loss of every GeoBuzz post.  It was a sad day, but somewhat comical looking back.

I have actually never heard that statement about getting a real job.  Most people are very encouraging.  Most people don’t understand what it takes to build a business. So that makes their empathy hard. I think the most negative person towards PerBlue was my recruiter at Microsoft when I turned down their offer and counter offer, but that was her job.

NL: What/who has been the biggest help to you and your company?

JB: My mentors have been amazing.  During PerBlue’s life I have now had about 7 mentors, as the life stage of the company changes the mentors I use and depend on also changes.  But I can’t imagine doing this without mentors.  My partner Andrew has also been an amazing asset, starting a company with a partner is an extremely wise idea.  Team is what makes the company, without the PerBlue team, we would have never gotten off the launch pad.

NL: What is the most fun part of running your company?  The least?

JB: I would say the most enjoyable parts of running PerBlue, are working with the team, building and solving big problems, having things work, and seeing players love the game and play it so much and actually see our business become successful.  I personally get a lot of gratification when I see my co-workers growing and become excellent at what they do.  I think the least enjoyable part of my job are the days when it seems like everything “breaks” or when things just don’t go like you need them to.

NL: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, you had some great advice.  Good luck in the future.

2009 was a fun year.  I graduated with a degree in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin, made great progress on Entrustet, made some good friends and traveled to Europe with one of my best friends to visit another.  I was in another great friend’s wedding, got my consulting company off the ground, saw some amazing sporting events and got more involved in Madison.  I even stuck with my blog.

My Best Posts (in no order)

The Business School Way of Life

Is the Dollar America’s Achilles Heel?

America Doesn’t Plan for the Future

The Entrepreneurial Push

Every Startup Needs a Mentor Team

My Decade in Review

My Favorite Books (read, not written in 2009)

Infidel

Three Cups of Tea

Outliers

Always Running

The White Tiger

I’m looking forward to going to South Africa for the World Cup this summer, attending South By Southwest and continuing to work on Entrustet.  I think 2010 will be another fun and interesting year for me.  I hope your 2010 is too!

Predictions for 2010s

I know it’s just about impossible to look forward a few months, much less a year or even a decade, but here’s some guesses as to where we are headed.

2010

1. Gold will continue its rise in response to more US government debt creation
2. Developing countries continue to grow more quickly than developed countries.
3. Unemployment will become the biggest political problem next year, but entrepreneurs will be somewhat sheltered

Longer Term

1. The Reserve Status of US dollar will be called into question.  Look for China and the rest of the world to continue to diversify away from US government debt.  I don’t know when this will happen, but I can’t see any other solution to the US’s massive debt and unfunded liabilities.
2. At some point, bubbles in China, US debt and others may pop.  This could lead to lower stock values and a resumption of the bear market.
3. China will move from manufacturer to the world toward one of the leading innovators.  China will continue to assert itself on the political and economic stages. Look for their dominance in rare earth metals.
4. Entrepreneurs around the world will be successful, as large companies do not want to invest in new technologies and talent is cheap.

The classic definition of gotcha journalism usually refers to an interview style where the interviewer tries to trap the interviewee into saying something that would be damaging to themselves or their cause.  It has been around since the early 80s and became firmly rooted into our political and popular culture since then.

With the rise of the Internet, journalists, bloggers and citizens have taken gotcha journalism to new levels.  The barrier to entry is much lower:  instead of having to secure an interview with someone in order to trap the interviewee, the new breed of gotcha journalism uses the Internet to sift through all of the statements that a person has made in their entire life to try to paint them in a bad light.

Now, bloggers go through politicians’ every public statement for any misspeak or inaccuracy and then try to crucify them.  It started with John Kerry being labeled a “flip-flopper,” moved to George Bush’s butchering of the English language and more recently, led President Obama’s Green Energy Czar to quit because of statements he made almost ten years ago.  When President Obama misspoke on the campaign trail, saying that he had visited all 57 states, right wing bloggers tried to make it seem like Obama was stupid.  When Sarah Palin burst onto the national scene, left wing bloggers and some in the media sifted through her previous public statements to search for any inaccuracy.

It seems like 75% of the news stories I read about each day have to do with some politician getting raked over the coals for some statement he just made that is different from a statement he made a long time ago.  Many times, the person leveling the charge is a fellow politician, along with the media and the blogosphere.

My generation is the first generation to be online from an early age.  We first interacted with email, then instant messaging, then social networks and now blogs.  We created (and are still creating) vast amounts of data about ourselves, much of which is stored online.  We have archived AIM conversations from when we were in 6th grade,  digital pictures from high school and college that are online and we all have our dumb Facebook wall posts that we made throughout our college years.

Many of us have blogs on wordpress or blogger and many more have microblogging accounts on services like Twitter where we make observations and pithy comments about our daily lives.  I know I’ve changed alot since I was in 6th grade and I assume I will change almost as much between now and the end of the 2010s.  During the next decade, as people in my generation get older and become leaders in business, politics and culture, will we still be subjected to gotcha journalism like our public figures are today?

One argument is that since everyone has all of this content online, we will become desensitized to people’s dumb or incorrect statements from when they were young.  Everyone has pictures of themselves on Facebook that they wished never made it online.  Everyone is going to have a poorly thought out wall post that could be taken out of context, or a pithy remark on Twitter that does not stand the test of time.  Anyone who blogs about anything interesting will be majorly wrong about something.  Will millennials become bored by the new gotcha journalism because everyone has something online that could make them look bad?

On the other hand, millennials may just make gotcha journalism even worse than it is today.  Since everyone has created gigabytes of online content, bloggers and the media will have an easier time digging up dirt on anyone who enters the public eye.  Imagine being able to see the new candidate for Governor at a boozy college party or getting a transcript of his AIM conversations with his best friend or girlfriend from high school.  The media, bloggers and most of all, the citizens will eat this stuff up.  Ratings will go up and everyone will be happy, execpt for the public feature.

I hope that my generation helps start the shift away from gotcha journalism.  I can’t imagine being shocked by the vast majority of the dirt that someone would dig up about a public figure online.  I hope that millennials are willing to allow people to change their opinion and not be called a flip-flopper.  I hope we will cut public figures some slack when their college photos get published to the major blogs and their old blog posts come back to haunt them.  I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful.  If not, we will have some really boring politicians, business leaders and public figures!

Do you think millenials will help stop gotcha journalism or do you think the problem will get worse?