Reslutions & Fashions Collective

Jeremy Pease is the co-founder of reslutions.com, a residential solutions website for on-campus housing for college students. He already owns about 2 to 3 companies and he is yet to complete his under-graduate degree. When he showed us some statistics that he pulled up about his work hours, he explained that he almost single-handedly coded the entire website. His achievements at his age are very much impressive.

Jeremy's strategy for starting up a company is simple; identify a problem, research for the solutions, analyze the market and competitors and then go ahead and build your solution. I found their ideas for companies very much practical and useful, which is very important when you are starting your own company. Most of the funding they received for reslutions was from a fellow student. He discussed about the problems they had with their third co-founder and explained how they handled a difficult situation successfully.

Jeremy too had similar advice for our class as most of the entrepreneurs we have met this semester, to keep working on projects that you have a passion for.

Our next speaker for that day was Elizabeth Schofield, the founder and editor of fashionscollective.com. Elizabeth spoke to us about how she came about to start her own popular fashion blog. She has only recently left her full time job and is now earning her income completely by herself through her consultant work.

Elizabeth talked about how she came to a decision about her career; and I personally found this very reassuring because I can relate to it. She has a mixed set of skills and interests which could never really fit into any one job profile but today, being the editor of fashionscollective, she has that opportunity to utilize all of her skills and knowledge to work on something she is truly passionate about.

Although her website does not earn her any money, she explained to us that it is extremely vital to gain the exposure that she needs for her consultation jobs. Knowledge is the main product rather than anything else that they offer to the public. She also spoke about the fashion industry lagging in the digital world in terms of marketing and advertising, especially the luxury brands.

Meeting a successful entrepreneur like Elizabeth, who never really intended to be one when she started off, was a very informative experience. It is reassuring in the sense that even if you don't start off with the idea of being an entrepreneur right out of school, there is still a chance to be a successful one even with a late start.

Playmatics

Nicholas Fortugno, the CEO of Playmatics, is a well known game designer. Although he instinctively started building games at an early age, his most successful game was DinerDash.

He talked to us about the gaming industry as well as how he came about to begin his own company. His business partner, Margaret Wallace and him had started a company named Rebelmonkey which unfortunately was short lived. But after that came Playmatics.

Playmatics is still a small company, comprising of about 15 people. Nicholas talked about the composition of his team and each member's importance in the team. The programmers, the artists, the game designers and the producer each having special skills.

Nicholas had several interesting opinions about gaming in general and the industry. According to him, games came up as an art form but are a combination of creativity and programming. To get a job in the gaming industry, one just needs to build a game and make it popular. He had a very strong opinion that programmers and game designers must be prepared to face the fact that their first prototype will have to be chucked. Hence, one must work on rapid iterations of the prototype to build a good game.

He also spoke about technology in general, the classification of whether a technology is good or bad depending on whether one can imagine everyday life without it.

This trip gave a very interesting peek into the gaming industry and I would certainly like to explore it more even though at the moment I might not have the best qualifications for it.

LookBooks

LookBooks is a company offering digital marketing solutions to the fashion, fine arts, architecture and design industry. Their software provides a portfolio service acting as an intermediary between models, fashion brands, and other clients who require their data to be represented in the form of portfolios.
Fashionindie.com, a website for fashion enthusiasts, is also owned by LookBooks.

Ryan, the CEO of LookBooks, spoke about how he came to start up the company after at several different job profiles. One particular strategy that Ryan spoke about caught my attention since it was something unique and I had not heard it before; when they built their software, their primary target was the best and biggest brands. His strategy was that only after the software succeeds with these high profile brands, they would work to target the rest. The fact that this worked for them impressed me to a great extent because as a startup one would rarely go for the riskiest client.

Samantha, the editor of fashionindie.com, spoke about the content that is put up on the popular fashion blog and also that its important to build great content related to the industry in order to attract the audience.  Arun, the recent NYU Poly graduate, talked about the production and development of the core product. He mentioned that in any industry, it is important to first understand the already existing processes before building your own product.

Adam, the CTO, and Matthew, the Creative Director of LookBooks both gave us a brief idea about their backgrounds and how the came about to working with Ryan. Adam is of the opinion that setting a brand is important. He talked about the technologies that their software is based upon, namely mySql, PHP and javascript. Matthew had an interesting background, one of the things was being a part of the first ever off-planet art show.

Each of these people we met, specialize in their areas of interest and that is one extremely important factor you need to keep in mind when you are out to start your own company; to work with partners who each have something valuable to contribute to your company. A business person, a technical person and a creative person, I believe these people form the building blocks of a concrete new venture.

Vision Education & Media

Vision Education & Media is a New York based company which caters to the after-school educational needs of kids up to the age of 13. Their main focus is on using technology & multimedia to create an early awareness amongst the younger generation through hands-on knowledge. They conduct classes, camps and clubs where the students can learn about robotics, video game making, digital videos, etc.

Laura, the Founder of Vision Education & Media, believes that the most effective learning method is to start off with a child's circle of interest and then introduce new concepts once the child is engaged. I strongly support that opinion because in order to engage a child in a learning activity after school seems like a tough challenge; hence it is important that the child enjoys while he/she is learning.

RoboFun workshops are the classes where the students are introduced to Lego robotics. My first reaction to that was, how can kids that young understand the complex concepts of robotics? and why robotics of all the topics? But as Laura and her team talked more about it, I realized that the basic concepts of robotics were introduced to the children in a fun way and it led them through a constructive learning process. EJ, who was in charge of creating these interesting robo models showed us a couple of them that she was creating blueprints for.

The company's revenue model is partially fee-based and the rest is grant-based (90% for profit and 10% for non-profit). According to Laura's experience, gaining funds for a for-profit organization is much easier and hence the division of their revenue model. About 85% of their revenue is earned through the creative computer clubs. While their team is fairly sized, comprising mainly of part-timers and a few full time employees, they have a very basic marketing strategy.

The visit to Vision Education & Media gave a helpful insight into a small company which is not out only to earn revenue, but also to help kids have a well rounded learning experience.

Union Square Ventures - Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a company which provides an opportunity to budding artists and creators to experiment and build projects of their interest. It operates as a crowdfunding platform for all kinds of creative projects. Union Square Ventures is one of the main investors for Kickstarter.
great initiative.

Cindy Au, the Community Director at Kickstarter, started off with a great presentation about the company. Anyone above 18 can submit their projects to kickstarter and quote the amount that they wish to raise via crowdfunding. If they manage to raise the quoted amount within the specified time period, they are successfully funded, and Kickstarter charges 5% of the entire amount, whereas if they fail to raise the funds, no one is charged.

The 'Backers' can browse through the various projects on Kickstarter, and choose to pledge any amount starting from 1$ and they get to be a part of the project they support by being awarded some non-financial reward. The reward can be something like t-shirts, DVDs, tickets, or any such thing related to the project.Cindy showed us some statistics which displayed that most people pledged amounts in the range of $11-$25 and 84% were one-time backers. In this way, even after the project has been funded and implemented, the backers can follow up with the progress of the project they supported. This is what appealed the most to me about the concept of a company like Kickstarter; it provides a platform to build new connections with the people in your area of interest.

The second speaker of the day was Gary Chou from Union Square Ventures. With his multifaceted experiences in the industry, he talked about how he ended up working at Union Square Ventures. He gave us some good advice explaining that you may not necessarily end up working in the field of your study. He explains that one needs to continue optimizing for learning throughout their career, keep creating new projects which display your creativity and to start with smaller projects before you jump to create the next Facebook.

Visiting a company like Kickstarter put me slightly at ease; its nice to know that any time in the future, having a crazy idea for a creative project won't be completely futile; there is a high probability that it will be supported and funded as long as it appeals to people and has some purpose. It was a valuable session in terms of learning about the stories of 2 successful people and gaining by their experiences.

McGraw Hill Companies

On the morning of the visit to McGraw Hill Companies I was very much impressed to find myself in the midst of a busy corporate street in New York and slightly intimidated by it all, it was my first trip to this part of the city. McGraw Hill is probably the largest company that we have visited yet and the contrast was quite distinct with respect to the other organizations.

Patrick Durando, head of the Global New Media team at McGraw Hill companies, briefed us about the different domains that are handled by McGraw Hill companies and also the locations of their offices all over the world. Until then, like most people, I had known McGraw Hill only as an educational publishing company and didn't realize that McGraw Hill companies had quite a firm standing in the financial services sector.

We were then introduced to Edward Ford, a passionate employee, in charge of handling the internal social  networking website, Buzz, for McGraw Hill companies. Although Buzz was introduced to the McGraw Hill employees only a few months back, it gained popularity very quickly. Edward talked about the expected impact of creating such a vivid and socially focused intranet; it is meant to increase the operational efficiency, create a flatter organization, provide a base for knowledge sharing and crow-sourcing and eventually help in the product development.

The last speaker, Ruth Neighbors, is in charge of usability analysis, which basically involves research, evaluation and designing the interface according to the test results. She spoke about all the research that goes into creating a user-friendly application and also about the differences between focus group testing and usability testing; the former is not too helpful to make your product better. Patrick, later on took us to the studio which was brought about mainly due to his efforts and is now being used for all the McGraw Hill video recordings.

What I most appreciated was that the new media team, although a part of a huge organization, manages to introduce some level of entrepreneurship into their individual work. It reminded me completely of my last job, being part of a huge multinational corporation where individuality is somewhat lesser significant as compared to the company at large. It also reminded me about the barriers that come up in such widespread organizations, where you cannot just walk over to talk to every other person and so the level of personal communication is minimal. Hence, I really liked the sense of community that can build up through such an informal intranet system that is Buzz and think that it is very much required in any organization which has employees across the globe.

CourseHorse Reaction

The visit to the Stern school of Business was refreshingly different from the previous media organizations we visited; mainly because Course Horse is still an upcoming company. Nihal Parthasarathi, the co-founder of Course Horse, gave us an insight into the challenges faced by entrepreneurs right at the early stages before the business is well established.

Being a finance and marketing graduate from NYU, Nihal has a solid Business background and a keen interest in the education industry. He described how he and his business partner, Katie, came up with the concept of Course Horse and how they share responsibilities. Market research, financial modeling, creating a prototype, compiling the functional documentation, approaching various schools to post their courses on Course Horse, product development and testing, these were some of the activities he has been handling. He mentioned that the development work is done by a small team from Philippines. Despite the language barrier, he maintains a great relation with the team, which in my opinion will take him a long way; personally, having experienced the other side of a similar situation, I can say that a good relation with the employer makes a huge difference in an employee's attitude towards work.

His advice for building your own start-up from an idea is simple: firstly, can it make money? and secondly, will it make the customers keep coming back to you for more? When asked as to how Course horse plans to keep its customers coming back to them, he responded saying that satisfied customers would spread the word via reviews. Course Horse offers & plans to offer some incentives such as loyalty points, certifications from Course Horse and graduation gifts, for taking up the courses via their website instead of going to the vendors directly. As compared to their competitors, Course Horse is very much particular about Quality Assurance; providing a high quality of courses and offering refunds for courses makes their system more user-friendly. One thing that struck me then was Nihal's readiness to accept ideas from a bunch of students like us and I realized how important any sort of feedback is, to a budding business.

Another thing I picked up from this session was the emphasis on presentation skills. According to Nihal, Course horse managed to win the Stern Venture Competition mainly on the basis of their presentation skills, and the ability to respond to questions confidently. Passion for your work is definitely at the top of the list of things for starting your own company, but the ability to express your ideas is very much important too. His thoughts on networking too were very helpful; when you are meeting new people, having a product already out in the market improves your standing and every time you make a new business contact, it helps to share your own contacts with them.

It was great to see a fresh and enthusiastic business in action. It is not merely enough to have a great idea for a new venture but also to have a large set of business and communication skills as well. It reaffirmed the challenging yet compelling nature of entrepreneurship for me.