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.