Ms. Allen.

Nicole Allen is consultant at Brooklyn-based Wireless Generation, an education technology innovator. She's worked in the private and public sectors and she is also a co-founder of Tiffany Allen Reed Scholarship Foundation, a North Carolina foundation focused on helping young women overcome financial barriers to college.

By the time I entered high school in Greensboro, North Carolina in the late nineties, I was already being encouraged to do more with the math and science potential I’d shown in middle school. I was directed into a specialized public school focused on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, a far less common option for girls not that many years before.

Yet, even while I was being steered toward a “tech” future, and ostensibly breaking boundaries, I still had no idea what that future could look like, or where to turn to find out. This could be true for any young student with math and science talent, but for a young woman of color there were few mentors and even fewer role models. And this has not significantly changed.

When first pursuing engineering I chose “electrical” simply because I’d heard it was the highest paying engineering discipline. It didn’t occur to me what I would actually do all day, or that I had so many choices to make about how to use my background. I thought I might end up developing software for a big corporation, or building airplane communications systems. I assumed my choice of major meant I would be glued to my computer screen, forever. I didn’t understand that technology jobs entailed working and collaborating with people, shaping ideas and engaging in creative problem solving, often outside traditional office walls. I didn’t understand this because I was surrounded by classmates, mostly first generation engineers, who had never been exposed to accomplished women in the field.

Today, with my degree in Electrical Engineering for North Carolina A & T State University and a MPA from NYU, I am determined to create a different experience for young women who are following a similar path and want to know where their studies can lead. I work in a consulting group within a Brooklyn-based education tech company, Wireless Generation, where my primary job is to bring education innovation, such as new digital tools and new ways to use data, to scale for thousands of teachers and millions of students.

Last month, I led a group of women from Wireless Generation on a field trip of sorts to share our career experiences with high school girls at New York City’s UA Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. It's part of a larger desire to support schools and communities who are investing in inspiring young women to pursue careers in STEM. Companies, schools, and universities must work together to create a strategy that not only leads to hiring women in technical fields, but contributes to their success.

UAI is great example of this model. More than 80 percent of their students are African American and the remaining population is Hispanic, white, and Asian. Many of the students will become the “few” women known among their family or friends to receive a college degree and even fewer to receive an engineering or technical degree.

One major impression the women of Wireless Generation made during our visit was frankly not about the details of our careers: “I have never seen an engineer like you, who is so smart and so well dressed,” one girl happily declared. None of us looked or acted like the waning stereotype of a dowdy female engineer. The students were amazed that our roles required us to look professional, and even stylish, when meeting clients, and that it’s possible to be look good and develop software. They didn’t simply want to hear app development; they were curious about our organic style of brainstorming ideas at a scrum board, or about building stick models in less than 30 seconds that will become the basis of a new education app.

Yes, it was supposed to be a learning experience for the girls, but for me the best part was what I learned from their questions. They wanted to know about balance, what’s it like working in a mostly male world and about being a minority in a technology workplace. “Have you ever experienced feeling different or not 'fitting in' because of your gender or race?” they asked me. “How did you get to education from engineering?” Their questions pushed me to reflect more thoughtfully on my own professional journey.

My approach had been “just do it” or “take on the experience” and learn from it. The questions they asked were the same ones I pondered before starting my career. But I lacked mentors or role models to answer my questions. With the help of my talented women colleagues from Wireless Generation, these girls don’t have to experience what I felt. And, through people like Mara Tucker, Director of Development at UAI, who knows how vital this type of exposure and discussion can be, many of these young women will pursue technology careers and embrace their difference as an asset. Mara has taken the lead in making UA girls increasingly aware of what’s out there. Becoming more inclusive for women and minorities in STEM is not about erasing our differences, but benefitting from what makes us different. No one is saying to these girls, "you can’t do this." In fact we’re saying, you can–and here’s how.

We’ve invited the girls back to Wireless Generation to see a creative, technology workplace. Building relationships takes time and investment, I want these young girls not only to see our support, but feel the excitement that we have in knowing they will become the next generation of women in STEM. We’re cheering for them and believe they can break the digital ceiling just as many of us already have.

(freenetworkfoundation.org)

This is a guest post from Cole Stryker, a writer and publicist working in New York. It is an excerpt from his book, "Identity Wars: Online Anonymity, Privacy and Control," which is slated for a September release from Overlook Press.

On March 27, 2012 I had the opportunity to attend a private screening of a mini-documentary called "Free the Network," produced by Vice's tech site, Motherboard.tv. The documentary opens at Occupy Wall Street, first depicted as a wacky, disparate band of activists which developed a curious techno-centric bent with the arrival of Anonymous, along with a more or less disorganized faction of hackers who wished to bring about social revolution through technology. The film centers on one of them, a 21-year old college dropout named Isaac Wilder, the executive director of the Free Network Foundation.

Mr. Wilder builds communications systems based around Freedom Towers, DIY kits that fit in a suitcase containing everything one would need to set up an ad hoc peer to peer network. The instructions are simple: "Plug it in. Press the big green button." It creates a local network that stays up no matter what happens to the wider global Internet. All of this is mostly funded through private donations from family, friends, and fellow revolutionaries. Mr. Wilder estimates that the equipment required to assemble a Freedom Tower would have cost over $10,000 as recent as five years ago. Today: $2,000. And it's completely grid-independent. That means solar powered batteries, a DC power system, a server, a router and a suite of powerful software, all contained in a suitcase.

The idea is to build a mesh network, where all computers are nodes that act as transmitters to other computers, in order to decentralize the Internet and remove it from the control of governments and corporations. Mr. Wilder argues that if we are ever going to achieve global revolution, we must wrest control of the pipes from multinational telecom companies who would censor or monitor the communication of social revolutionaries.

(freenetworkfoundation.org)

The documentary depicts the aftermath of a police raid at Zucotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, specifically rows of laptops that had been smashed in by cops, presumably. Several contributors to the documentary speculate that the destruction indicates the establishment is trying to keep the message down. Maybe the cops are just sick of putting up with a bunch of grungy hippies and this was a method of discouragement rather than an outright conspiracy to destroy information. Either way, it's a dark, dark image, one that makes me immediately sympathize with the need to create information networks that can't be smashed in, let alone censored.

I caught up with Mr. Wilder a few days after the screening and asked him where his passion for free networks comes from.

I went to Cuba. In the summer after my freshman year of college with three of my best friends. I really didn't like it at all. The police state. That people didn't have access to information. It just really got to me. I wrote a science fiction novel about building a free network. I love writing, but realized this would actually be better as science fact than science fiction.

He went back to school and connected with an  adviser who pointed him in the direction of the FreedomBox Project, which lit a fire in him.

I mean, I'd already deleted my Facebook. I was already a Computer Science/Philosophy double major. But I spent one more year in school and then I left to start the foundation.

The FreedomBox is a small device that fits in the palm of your hands. It is a small, Linux-powered computer that plugs directly into a wall with built-in privacy-protected email and chat, and a publishing platform for activists living under tyranny. It's a work in progress, and the team is currently soliciting software packages that will make an ideal FreedomBox. The project is ambitious, aiming to bring about the collapse of nothing less than China's "Great Firewall. "

Mr. Wilder says that he'd like to see a burgeoning microwave network in Kansas city, his base of operations, and hopefully, some action in New York and California by the end of 2012. He's quick to reiterate that the technology he wants to see in place is already here.

[This technology] exists already, all over the world. Athens, Berlin, Spain, Kabul, Nairobi. There are huge microwave networks that do what we're talking about doing. It's not just for the developing world. It's not just cheaper. That it's cheaper means we can do it together. These are hacker collectives providing internet access to people who can't get it any other way because the infrastructure isn't there.

He rattles off a laundry list of hacker projects, citing "unbelievable pioneering work" happening across the globe at the hands of hacker collectives.

Mr. Wilder hopes that within five years, a dozen metropolitan areas in the U.S. will have cooperative networks and the beginnings of distributed Wide Area Networks. He says that satellites are a possibility, but he thinks that they're not the most attractive option due to visibility and tracking problems, as well as high latency. He's more interested in near-space platforms at 100,000 feet. These consist of dirigibles, fancy balloons that would float somewhere between Kansas City and Chicago, for instance, connecting the two citywide networks. He says the Air Force and oil companies have been using these for years.

This can be a commons. We did it at a small scale at Liberty Park. Next we'll do it for a thousand people. Then for a few hundred thousand people. And ultimately humanity. We'll have a network that we share and operate together for our mutual benefit. I think it'll happen peacefully because the desire for it will be so overwhelming that there will be no way to stop it. This seems like the best way to counter late capitalist hegemony.

The Free Network Foundation isn't interested in pushing for increased government regulation of the Internet. They don't seem to trust the White House any more than they trust AT&T. And so, they rage against the machine by building a new one.

Mr. Teten

This guest post was written by David Teten, Koen Bremer, Gyorgy Buslig, and Adham Hussein. David is a Partner with ff Venture Capital and Founder and Chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York.  Koen, Gyorgy, and Adham are all Columbia Business School MBA 2012 students and former consultants with McKinsey and BCG.

Even the best VCs and entrepreneurs have a painfully high failure rate.  Lowering that failure rate would be highly impactful on venture capitalist returns, if we could figure out how to do it.  In addition, in light of increasing competition in the startup funding space, a methodology  for helping portfolio companies consistently is a strong competitive advantage.

In an effort to address this, we launched last year a formal study of best practices of VCs in improving portfolio company value. The objective of the research is to define a blueprint for how investors can help portfolio companies succeed through operational (non-financial) support, including  but not limited to facilitating shared services, recruiting, knowledge sharing, and enhancing management skills. To do so, we are working to understand what the best practices in the industry are, as well as what the correlation is between providing this kind of support and start-up success.

We’re now in the midst of surveying VCs and entrepreneurs for this research.  We’ll feature in our published work the most effective firms and practices we identify, subject to the interviewees giving us permission to use their names and data.  We’d greatly appreciate you taking a few minutes to fill out our survey:

VCs please click here.

Entrepreneurs please click here.

The value creation study draws on a wide range of research:  in-depth interviews with over 50 venture capital investors, entrepreneurs, startup incubators and advisory service providers; a proprietary database and survey of VCs’ portfolio value creation practices; a wide scan of academic and practitioner publications focused on the topics of entrepreneurship and venture investing; and the authors’ experience working in venture capital, early-stage technology companies, and strategy consulting.

This study is effectively a sequel to the study David Teten led with Chris Farmer of General Catalyst on best practices of venture capital and private equity funds in originating new deals, published in Journal of Private Equity, Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor, etc.  Similarly, we plan to publish this value-creation study in a few different major journals.

If you have any questions, you can contact the team at vcbeyondthemoney(@)gmail.com

We’ve summarized below some of our preliminary results. This is the first in a series of articles as our research findings unfold.

Are VCs a different breed of “investors”?

The conventional school of thought argues that investors –generally- should be creating value by selecting the “right” companies, business plans, and teams into which to invest. We argue that on top of that selection function, venture investors have a wider role to play beyond funneling financial resources with a high-risk appetite.

Venture capitalists are financiers of a special nature. They fund highly uncertain projects that usually operate within a very fast moving environment and within consistently shifting technological paradigms. The company teams they work with are usually highly motivated entrepreneurs trying to engage in extensive product and customer development efforts for a product they don’t typically have a full vision of, for a customer whose needs are opaque, and for a use case which is ambiguous. This is a very different world than traditional corporate lending.

Almost every VC will say, “I respond to the CEO’s requests, I put him in touch with someone in my network when he asks me to”.  We view that as the bare minimum.  We think that VCs can add tremendous value by systematically actively supporting their portfolio companies.

So how can VCs help their startups?

We have interviewed over 50 entrepreneurs and some leading VCs around the US about their experiences and pain points while building their companies. Our in-depth interviews have led us to define a framework (TOSCAN) for early-stage investors to systematically support their entrepreneurs, which we believe will in turn increase success and valuations.

-      Team Building: accelerating hiring to help startups build their most important asset; people

-      Operations: minimizing entrepreneurs’ burden in admin, accounting and legal

-      Skill Building: building the right skills, especially for top management, and ensuring they develop inline with the early-stage company’s life cycle

-      Customer Development: identifying the right customers and gaining access to them

-      Analysis: how entrepreneurs measure, understand and report the performance of their early-stage companies

-      Network: helping entrepreneurs building relationships with networks key to their company success

What is important, useful, new, or counterintuitive about your idea?

So far, there are two particularly innovative techniques we found VCs to be using:

• Dedicated teams: Some of the investors we interviewed have started building dedicated business support teams, led by Partner-level experts. We are particularly interested in learning how these teams are organized, their interaction patterns with portfolio companies, and the company’s perception of their value-added.  Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and ff Venture Capital are all examples.

• Portfolio companies’ networks: Many VCs said that the people who know the most about building a company are the portfolio CEOs.  In order to enable information-sharing, VCs must build very strong online and offline networks between portfolio companies, which organically provide a wealth of knowledge and support to each other.  All of the firms above have online networks for their portfolio executives.

Mr. Phoenix.

Jordan Phoenix is a personal development coach and social entrepreneur in New York City. He is the director and founder of Project Free World. 

What’s the most unreasonable thing you’ve ever tried to do?

According to best-selling author Tim Ferriss, shooting for unrealistic goals is the best way to go. He believes the competition is much less fierce that way, as only a small handful of souls will actually be brave enough to believe that they are capable of achieving such feats.

For the past 72 hours, I have been racing the clock to complete an “Unreasonable Challenge” of my own.

You see, this very article that you are reading right now is part of my application process for a chance to join the Unreasonable Institute team in Boulder, Colorado. They are an international startup accelerator that essentially provides high-impact entrepreneurs with everything they need to turn good ideas into highly successful, socially conscious enterprises.

Twenty-five lucky entrepreneurs are chosen each year to live together in a mansion for six weeks and go through an intense training program with access to world-class mentors, legal advisors, and big-time investment funds. When I found out about them and their opening on Twitter a few days ago, I thought: “Holy shit, this sounds like an organization that’s just as crazy as I am! I’m finding a way to get this job.”

If you think I may have a reasonable bone in my body, know this: I’m currently working on something called Project Free World, which is going to provide the proper (F) Food, (R) Rights, (E) Education, and (E) Environment to every human on the planet. This seems like a match made in heaven! Unreasonable Institute, where have you been all my life?

“Slow down, Jordan. You don’t even have an interview yet, schmuck. Why don’t you try getting this thing published first before you start googling powder forecasts in the Rockies? And this article isn’t even about you, it’s supposed to be about a successful fellow from the Institute, remember?”

Good thing my rational self-talk comes around to put me back in line once every blue moon. Part of the application requires me to get an article about one of the Institute's fellows published in a major publication within a one-week timeframe. Time to hit the phones.

No luck from the Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Mashable or The Next Web. Wait! A journalist from the New York Observer covered my Meetup group a few months back. I think I still have her email...

I'm in luck; she answers me right away. I can write a post for the Observer's tech blog Betabeat, she said, with three conditions: the interview must be with someone involved in New York tech or a VC in the Valley who invests here; the narrative has to include an explanation of why I'm writing it and what the Unreasonable Institute is; and it has to be "light, funny and readable."

With my assignment squared away, I dialed up Unreasonable Institute fellow Matthew Kochman, a Brooklynite who created a company that uses innovative technology and systems to prevent drunk driving. Pretty awesome stuff.

“Sure, I have a few minutes to chat.” The CEO answers his phone right away. That’s five-star customer service if I’ve ever seen it.

In his junior year at Cornell University, Mr. Kochman founded the Moving Every Student Safely Express, which provides students with pre-paid taxi plans to prevent people from driving drunk after a night of partying. It works in the same manner as a college meal plan; paid for in full before the semester even begins.

The brilliance of this plan lies in its reverse engineering of the psychology of a drunken college student. It’s common knowledge that most college students are on a rigorous work schedule and tight budget, so any spare funds typically go directly towards food and alcohol.

“A student with a few dollars left to his or her name, who is under the influence of alcohol, is highly unlikely to spend that money on a safe ride home,” Mr. Kochman says. “This program completely eliminates that dilemma by having the safe ride paid for well in advance.”

When M.E.S.S. Express piloted the program, people loved it. Parents were more than willing to pay for the service for the peace of mind of knowing that their children were not endangering their lives and careers with shortsighted financial decisions.

To Mr. Kochman’s surprise, the service became extremely popular during the week in addition to the weekends. The reason?

“Students felt safer taking a taxi home from late night study sessions at the library rather than walking home alone,” he remarked.

Through his fellowship at the Unreasonable Institute, Mr. Kochman was able to develop a scalable model for his business, receive angel funding, and create a system that allowed students to order pre-paid taxis through a simple text message. The program was essential in taking M.E.S.S. Express to the next level.

Mr. Kochman concluded, “The six-week training was an all-around amazing experience. The Unreasonable network is like a big family; every single person there has their heart in the right place. It’s great to go back every year to reconnect with all of the alumni and see the positive impact they are creating all over the world.”

Currently, M.E.S.S. Express provides more than 25,000 safe rides per year and generates more than $250,000 in annual revenue.

The interview only strengthened my resolve. I’m going. I can visualize it now. Someplace sunny. A place where the air is clean and the beer flows like water. That's a reasonable request, isn't it?

I sent my first draft in to my editor. She immediately asked for a rewrite. Crushed, I asked for suggestions.

"Make it kind of meta," she suggested.

So I did.

Mr. Yehia.

Mo Yehia is co-founder of Sqoot, a daily deal API that helps publishers monetize. He’s lesser known for stints at Sparkle Buggy Car Wash, Cracker Barrel, and Lehman Brothers. He’s kind of a big deal.

It finally hit me: “I drive a Beemer but make less than a McDonald's manager (hourly), my hair is thinning, sunlight hurts my eyes, and my Mom says I’ve become an asshole.” It was time to leave. I grew a pair and left my job on Wall Street, scared shitless of what was to come. I moved as far from New York City as possible and spent the next year unlearning everything it taught me. I was so brainwashed by my Vineyard Vines-wearing peers (when is a sperm whale on your belt ever OK?), that I didn't know what I wanted anymore or where to start. From the outside looking in, entrepreneurship was as foreign as Japanese.

Through a series of random, cosmic events (and mind-boggling hustle), I met Andrew Warner in Buenos Aires, Avand Amiri in Boulder, Chris Stanchak in Philly, and Aniq Rahman in New York City. I wanted to be like them. So, for the next six months, I drank the proverbial Kool-Aid and marinated in just about everything startup. I moved back to New York, finagled my way into the tech scene, shook hands, kissed babies, and promptly began a strict three-pronged regiment to combat my hair loss.

It took six years for the novelty of Wall Street to wear off, and six weeks for the uncertainty of startup life to wear on. Without further adieu: a rant on the transition into and observations of NYC tech. Warning, this is my first post, anywhere, ever.

Help Me, I'm Poor.

Two years ago, I left a six-figure job. I thought, "WTF can $400/mo get me?"

1. A non-reserved seat at a communal table at GA, so I can act as if I'm not distracted by wide-eyed visitors who cluster together to learn "Digital M&A Secrets: How to Position Your Startup For Acquisition."

2. Everything I need in Argentina. While vetting ideas w/ potential customers stateside, I lived next to the zoo (BIG mistake), ate $1 empanadas, took $0.25 subways, & learned polo (bonus: no one in Buenos Aires is fat).

Where my Arabs at?

As one of four Arabs in the NYC tech scene, I'm more likely to sell you shawarma than software. Women are just as scarce. Introducing... “Layla,” the first all-Arab, all-women accelerator. Would you like hummus with that?

Entreprewhat?

I hate the "e" word. It's hard to spell and can refer to Divya at Dunkin' or Drew at DropBox. I just don't trust words w/ that many vowels. Starter isn't much better. It's a defunct brand that went from hero to zero.

Money Ain't a Thang.

No business model, no problem (read: real fucking problem). For a year, we weren't making money. So, we raised prices (not money). Novel right? PS, we gained customers. "You have customers, they pay you money… you get profit!” - DHH

Banker Turned Human.

I traded in lunches at Del Frisco's & late nights in Meatpacking for lunches at Russ & Daughters and late nights in Lower East Side. I have a legit beard, well-formed gut, & exclusively wear tees. Jesus, I might as well ride my fixie to work (read: my apartment), move to Brooklyn, and get Pabst & American Apparel as proud sponsors.

Sick Hat Trick.

I accomplished the TechStars hat-trick: three rejections from three cities. When they finally succumbed to our incessant bombardment and accepted us, we turned them down. Touche. "In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength, but through persistence." - Buddha

Listen to Your Heart.

It takes 7 jobs to truly find something you're passionate about. In the meantime, most of us shlog through life. Happiness is elusive (like hypercolor shirts & Norwegian gnomes). If at first you don't find it, don't settle. "The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary." - Nassim N Taleb

Mr. Owens in action.

This is a guest post by Trevor Owens, founder and CEO of  the Lean Startup Machine, a three-day workshop on Lean Startup methodologies. Mr. Owens has also been a guest speaker at Princeton, Columbia, Fordham, and New York University.

The implications of the Lean Startup movement have been significant for entrepreneurs all over the world. At long last, founders are spending less time building products in isolation, and more time embracing their customers. Validating assumptions early and methodically has allowed entrepreneurs to fail fast, turning startup failure into a scientific process that ultimately leads to success. This movement, however, may have even bigger implications in store for established companies. Lean Startup isn't about being cheap, but about being less wasteful and still doing things that are big.”

Can Corporations Be Startups Too?

Applying Lean Startup to corporations remains contentious. But of the 1,000+ LSM workshop attendees trained to date, a significant portion consistently includes corporate intrapreneurs. These are the people that drive innovation from inside the enterprise, whether through an explicit product development and R&D role, or through their personal influence within the organization regardless of their title.

Intrapreneurs are a precious commodity to companies that know how to turn innovation into profits. Keeping them from going out “on their own” does not simply imply better compensation, but requires a corporate culture of innovation, with the leadership setting the example. Given the right culture, intrapreneurs gladly share much of the returns (and risks) of their innovation work with their employer. With thousands more attendees to go through LSM internationally before this year ends, the message is clear: corporations want to try Lean Startup on for size.

Lean Startup Machine Goes Corporate

Two weeks ago, LSM hosted its first on-site corporate workshop in partnership with The Library Corporation (TLC), which provides software that runs more than 2,500 libraries around the world, including the public libraries of Los Angeles and Chicago, the National Library of Singapore, and school districts in Dallas, Atlanta, and Nashville.
TLC had sent several employees to the LSM weekend in New York. "Based on the feedback, we realized that this was something we wanted our whole product team eventually to experience,”  said Simon Marcus, TLC’s COO.

Mr. Marcus and his counterpart, CTO Jabe Bloom, spent the last five years optimizing the company’s software development and customer support operations. But beyond operations, they invested their energy heavily into creating a culture that rewards talent, initiative, and cooperation. They now see disruptive innovation as the 38-year-old company’s natural next step in its evolution.

TLC then reached out to LSM to ask for an on-site workshop for its 40-person product group.

So, How Did It Go?

To maximize the use of LSM team’s time, Mr. Marcus and Mr. Bloom conducted the initial idea pitches and team selection prior to the workshop.

The evening before the workshop, Lean Startup Machine’s four-person leadership team headed down to West Virginia with a quick stop in D.C. In keeping with the Lean Startup methodology, it was critical for the four of us to get first-hand experience with our first corporate customer. It was as much about ensuring top quality of what we delivered to them as it was about getting as much learning out of the experience as possible for ourselves to iterate on our own “corporate workshop” product.

This corporate on-site was planned to take place not entirely on TLC’s Inwood, WV, site. The LSM team rolled out of their beds at Inwood’s best Hampton Inn at 6 a.m., put on our signature yellow “GET OUT OF THE BUILDING” tees under otherwise business-casual blazers, and took a short drive through town to TLC’s wooded campus, where a charter bus was waiting.

The first day of the workshop started with a two-hour ride from TLC’s offices to Washington, DC, during which TLC employees immediately started working on their initial minimum viable product ideas. The LSM team wobbled up and down the middle isle, meeting and mentoring the TLC team throughout the bus ride.

The rest of the workshop was similar to the usual LSM’s experience. The difficulty of getting out of the building and talking to customers, the disappointment of learning that the idea you thought was great likely had no market potential, and the tension within teams as they had to align on their next pivot, were as exhausting and rewarding within corporate walls as they were at the public workshops.

Interestingly, the open organizational culture that TLC had created held the teams back when they ran into a highly structured and constrained mode of a startup. While the TLC team was certainly disciplined, being forced into almost impossible deadlines and an imposed learning curve was clearly somewhat of a shock. This highlighted the potential difficulties with creating a culture of innovation in corporate environments that are otherwise employee-driven.

What helped was the clear process and methodology that LSM delivered to TLC. Down to the type of sticky notes, using all caps and black markers, and staying strictly inside the lines (literally) on the Validated Learning Canvas, the learning process that had been validated in LSM’s public workshops got the corporate teams through the two days.

“No one would argue that the U.S. Marines don’t take extreme risk and innovate on the fly, but they do that within a highly rigorous, disciplined framework that protects them from obvious mistakes and supports them in complex evolving environments," Mr. Bloom said.

Startups demand a high emotional cost from their co-founders, and corporations tend, rightfully, to focus on their employees' well-being. Perhaps more than for the typical entrepreneur, the LSM experience was a true bootcamp for the corporate innovator.

LSM workshops are consistently populated by corporate executives, senior software developers, and project managers, who see learning Lean Startup as an investment into their own careers and their companies’ futures. To avoid the risks illustrated in The Innovator’s Dilemma, companies desire to diversify by investing in new product creation.

The Apptopia office. (Apptopia.com)

This is a guest post by Brady Donnelly, an editor at Fueled, a New York-based mobile design and development agency. Follow him on Twitter at @bradydonnelly and email him at brady@fueled.com.

Jonathan Kay and Eli Sapir, cofounders of the soon-to-be-launched app market Apptopia, have a problem with App Store over-saturation. “It’s quite inefficient for us to see 216 flashlight apps when it’s one of the single most simple functions on the entire App Store,” Mr. Kay said. “You also have big Fortune 500 companies spending upwards of $100,000 to build apps that mostly already exist. Why not acquire an app for $20,000, build off of that technology, and save yourself nearly 30 to 40 percent of the cost?”

The solution they’ve created is a marketplace, set to open shortly after SXSW, that allows developers to sell what Mr. Kay described as “exclusive rights” - not just code, but App Store-listed apps in their entirety, including existing revenue, users, and App Store statistics.

Mr. Kay was previously at Grasshopper, a phone service for startups, where he held the lofty title Ambassador of Buzz. His strategy for Apptopia is to spread the word as directly as possible about the brand. “We hustled as hard as we could for the four to six weeks pre-launch. We got involved in forum conversations, threw events, got press articles, had more than 500 conversations, and talked to every mobile app developer we could,” he explained. “We didn’t make the common mistake of waiting and expecting something ‘magical’ or, even worse, ‘viral’ to happen when we pushed the on button on launch day.”

With Mr. Sapir, who is the former Entrepreneur in Residence at GreatPoint Ventures and the founder of GPush, a once-popular Gmail-notification iPhone app that he struggled to sell (hence the need to create a market like Apptopia). Mr. Kay set up a password-protected version of the marketplace, gave each app a price tag, and walked buyers through. The numbers so far are promising, albeit a far cry from the founders’ long-term intentions: with more than 175 apps in the store and 65 interested buyers browsing, two apps sold for a total of $17,000. Apptopia is also adding two to three apps to the market per day.

Their pricing formula is really a “secret sauce,” Mr. Kay said, but it includes a number of broad considerations: App Store SEO rank for specific keywords, financial considerations per App Store category, and estimated future revenue per user based on a number of monetization strategies. Apps, with that in mind, must already be available for download. “It allows us to screen-scrape relevant sales data and assure that the financial data we are showing buyers is 100 percent accurate,” Mr. Kay explained. “This is really important, as buyers spending $10-, $15-, or $30,000 will need to know for certain the numbers they are using to make an educated decision are real.”

Apptopia is based in Massachussetts but raised more than $100,000 in seed funding from New York City-based ExpansionVC. Apptopia will guide sales from beginning to end and taking 10 percent in the process. And they’re committed to avoiding the saturation that justifies their existence in the first place, charging a listing fee after the first month and focusing on apps in the $1,000 to $100,000 range.

Mr. Kay said they want to focus on “real revenue generating opportunities” not common among Apptopia's competitors like source code-salesmen Appsplit and SmartAppsters. Instead, Apptopia will take full-fledged, existing products from developers, who often lack exit strategies, and into the hands of those who can monetize them - enlightening the public in the process. “The general public will finally be able to see the financials and general sentiment behind certain apps,” Mr. Kay said. “This should be good for the mobile industry on a whole.”

Mr. Furmansky.

This is a guest post from Alex Furmansky, founder of Sparkology, a luxury dating site for young professionals. A Penn grad, Alex traded in his finance and tech career to follow his passion for innovation and belief in chivalry.

Last week was riddled with reports about a new study being published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. With each day, editors managed to create more provocative, click-inspiring titles like:

• Does Online Dating Make It Harder to Find ‘the One’? – Time
• The Dubious Science of Online Dating – New York Times
• Online dating's promise—and pitfalls – Los Angeles Times
• Researchers Say Online Dating Algorithms Are About as Accurate as Picking Up Strangers in Bars — Betabeat
  

Friends, investors, and even my own mother forwarded me the articles—each hoping to elicit a shock-filled response. However, there is one tiny problem: I LOVE the study.

Behind the Headlines

At the heart of the study is the authors’ determination that mathematical formulas cannot correctly identify pairs of singles who are likely to have successful, long-lasting romantic relationships.

Such claims have been the crux of ad campaigns by eHarmony.com, Chemistry.com, PerfectMatch.com, and GenePartner.com. These sites require users to take extensive “personality tests” that are supposedly crunched by a supercomputer harboring secret formulas for everlasting love. With results in hand, the user is paired with their ideal match.

The study has simply confirmed my claims that this premise is completely bogus.

Every marketing professor should tip their hat to eHarmony. The company that managed to brainwash an entire nation into believing in magic. Singles, however, should listen to science rather than ad men.

Just for fun, I’d like to share an excerpt from Sparkology’s business plan, which we used to secure our round of seed funding last April:

Many current online dating sites have found an ingenious way of defending their price points or differentiating themselves from competitors: The Hidden Algorithm, The Secret Matchmaking Analytics, or the Dr. [Insert Foreign-sounding Name]'s Guaranteed Personality Test. From a marketing perspective, the concept is brilliant – a claim that can neither be proven nor disproven. Yet in reality, these algorithms do not add any measurable probability of success. Does the fact that Person A likes fishing and Person B likes sushi mean they are meant to be? Or is this just a matter of statistically insignificant correlation rather than causality?

Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT currently researching such dating algorithms concludes “the sites are claiming a lot, but show no evidence of doing anything useful in terms of matches”, further mentioning that “their algorithms are placebos”. In other words, algorithms seem effective because the participants believe the marketing hype. This is ideal for online dating sites defending their pricing, but a complete hoax for honest members hoping to find someone special.

So: Do Dating Sites Work?

Too many dating sites have either engaged in false marketing, unethical practices, outright fraud, or a combination of all three. I’m happy to see more journalists take a stand and educate the public. I see this as an opportunity for a new crop of moral, forward-thinking, and quality-driven dating sites to disrupt the current ecosystem of disingenuous giants.

Dating sites offer an incredibly efficient and effective way to meet wonderful people outside of your social circles. The key to success lies in taking the time to look beyond the fancy TV commercials filled with embracing couples, and instead understand each site’s principles.

• How does the site moderate its pool of singles? The candidate pool is the most important, objective criteria you should consider. All formulas aside, you want to be in good company.
• Does the site’s business model encourage hookups, dating, or marriage?
• How easy is it to get from registration to meeting someone in person?
• Are you proud to join the site? Or do you feel “icky” about it? Trust your gut.
• Does the site have any policies about how it handles your data? Sharing/selling/buying profiles? Fake profiles? Fake interactions?

I urge you: Do not hold an entire industry accountable for the missteps of the bad actors.

Are algorithms good for anything?

Yes. Sparkology has a behavioral algorithm that recommends results based on users’ actions, including clicks, messages, likes/dislikes, and others. Here’s the difference: instead of claiming to identify a user’s soul mate based on a personality test, the goal of our algorithm is to identify people who the user would be most attracted to based on the user's past behavior. It can also help illuminate people who would be more responsive, by analyzing whether the person has been responsive to persons like you in the past.

The algorithm allows us to showcase candidates worth your time without requiring extensive profiles. No algorithm can pinpoint exactly what makes two people spark... but when a spark occurs, our algorithm can use that information to predict future sparks.

In other words, we don't survey everyone in the bar and match you by astrological symbol claiming that you and your match are meant to be, or put all the self-described Type A people together in one corner and Type B in the other. But we point out that the cute blonde stirring her Manhattan has a lot in common with the adorable brunette you clicked on, and clicked with, last week.

It's similar to how Google or Facebook show results or wall posts that are more relevant to you. And it's better than just showing you everybody at once with no order all, which is what you get when you walk into Max Fish on the Lower East Side.

We're also not getting into the other issues of walking into a bar... it's hard to tell who's really single, hard to talk over the loud music, etc. :)

This is a guest post by Aaron Harris, CEO and co-founder of Tutorspree.

After finding myself explaining SOPA and PIPA to my parents and to my girlfriend over the weekend, I realized that, while the tech community has done a good job firing itself up - we have not done enough to educate people outside of our sphere. When it comes down to it, that constituency is the one you really need to sway Congress. If we stay within our own echo chamber we'll lose to the force of the MPAA/RIAA and their associated lobbies.

The problem, at heart, is similar to the one we tackle every day at Tutorspree. While we're normally focused on math tutors and the like, our fundamental mission is to spread knowledge through one-on-one interactions. If we could use that ability to educate even a single person who currently has no idea what's going on, then that's a win. Every person we convince after that is another victory.

So we launched www.explainsopa.com. We're collecting emails of people who have questions and of people who have answers, and we'll match them up to hash out the issues. As we get more knowledgeable, it will become easier and easier to convince others how critical stopping these bills actually is. And on a day like today, where Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit are blacking themselves out to create awareness on SOPA/PIPA, we think it's time to do more than just observe. It's a time to go out and teach others the dangers embedded in these bills, and how we can stop them.

Mr. Schildkrout. (Photo: Kathryn Tucker)

Aaron Schildkrout is the co-founder and co-CEO of HowAboutWe.com—a dating site that's all about actually getting offline on real dates. Yesterday he got word of the first HowAboutWe wedding.

Adrianne Jeffries of Betabeat pinged me yesterday with a link to a post from Philip Greenspun titled, "Is this continued existence of involuntarily single people proof that online dating is a failure?"

STC (Save the Click): Here's a summary of Greenspun's piece: He argues that, given the falling rates of marriage over the past few decades and the continued plethora of single people who want to be married, online dating is a de facto failure. He believes that self-description in online dating should be abandoned for more of a peer-testimony system. His evidence is some census data about marriage rates and the success of a lengthy testimony he wrote on behalf of a now-married friend. The whole thing is framed in opposition to the claims of a pro-online-dating "26-year-old" guy who Greenspun met at a Hanukkah Party ("suspiciously held on Christmas Eve").

To reframe his questionable argument as a question: Given 1) people's desire to find true love and a wonderful life partner; 2) the near-ubiquity of internet access in the U.S.; and 3) the existence of dozens (actually thousands) of online dating sites—why are so many Susans (and Jims) still desperately seeking?

Simply put: It’s terribly challenging to find the love of your life.

Check out the ecstatic German poet Rilke on the topic:

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

And I believe this is becoming increasingly difficult.

Imagine two curves.

The first: Time versus marriage rates. This curve arcs downwards over time—at least over the last few decades (according to Greenspun’s research).

The second: Time versus the Ease of Finding and Sustaining True Love (or even good-enough-love). This curve, I think, would be curving downward even more steeply than the marriage rate.

If you buy this math—then what accounts for the difference in steepness? I’d venture that at least one cause is online dating.

More broadly, I’d say that contrary to the tremendous historical forces driving marriage and love-finding rates down (transformations in employment patterns, gender dynamics, mass entitlement, the decline of men, post-industrial depletion, etc.—that’s for another post) is millennialism—the internet-driven, global, connected, do-it-yourself, change-oriented, active, healthy, actualist movement that is also upon us.

Internet dating was born of this 21st century spirit. Accordingly, the best sites are fairly effective at helping the most highly motivated ring-seekers find a match—and therefore account for some of the differential between the two curves we drew a minute ago.

Sadly though, most internet dating sites have failed to stay true to millenialism. They embody much of the stagnant, non-doership that millennialism opposes. Endless online chatting. Fake hope couched in “scientific” matchmaking. Browsing and browsing and browsing people like so many boxes of cereal.

But that’s not all internet dating can be —or will be. So, in a sense, Greenspun is intuitively right that internet dating isn’t there yet. It isn’t millennial enough yet.

Chemistry—the recognition that occurs between two people that they could each imagine a wonderful life in the other’s arms—this kind of chemistry happens offline.

My hope is that as more and more people embrace the internet’s power to create magic in the real world, the curve that maps the ease of finding and sustaining true love will lift upwards.