Category: Blog

General Magic Movie Thrills Crowd

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On December 11th, TechRaising held a screening of the inspiring documentary, General Magic. Members of the Santa Cruz tech community gathered at the Landmark Nickelodeon Theater to watch and learn about one of the most innovative, yet unheard of, companies in Silicon Valley.

The documentary told the story about a team, consisting of the top talent, trying to revolutionize the way humans interacted with technology. General Magic released a closed network communication device called the Magic Link, that did not sell. This product launch failure led to the bankruptcy of General Magic.

The story captivated the audience. Two 12 year old kids expressed how the film gave them insight into the start of the now ubiquitous, mobile phone. Brayden Estby, owner of 11th Hour Coffee, drew parallels from the mobile phone industry as he thought about current trends in coffee. Everyone in attendance gave the documentary glowing reviews.

Following the movie, Andrew Mueller, our moderator, asked special guests David Hoffman, Michael Stern, and Dee Gardetti to provide us with firsthand accounts of what it was like inside General Magic. David Hoffman shot all of the original footage used in the documentary, who happens to be best friends with former CEO of General Magic, Marc Porat. Michael Stern, a corporate lawyer at Cooley, was the former CFO of General Magic. And, Dee Gardetti was the first hire of General Magic and head of HR.

David Hoffman expressed how General Magic failed in part, due to lack of advertising. The only Magic Link devices sold were to family and friends. No one else understood how to use the device or what it could do.

Michael Stern taught us that the lack of structure in the company caused serious problems. The engineers wanted to build and work on their passion projects, which was not conducive to meeting deadlines and shipping products. When a product manager was hired, the engineers would find a way to make them leave by “choice”. Michael Stern thought that effective product managers could have saved the company, but we will never know.

On a more positive note, Dee Gardetti discussed the importance of perseverance in the job market. In the documentary, Tony Fadell — a recent college graduate and known now as one of the fathers of the iPod, iPad, and founder of Nest — wanted to work at General Magic so badly, he called Dee daily to get an update on his application. Dee found Tony so relentless that she felt like if she didn’t hire him, he would still be calling today.

Events like these are important for the Santa Cruz community. They bring people together, motivate them to grow, and continue to inspire people to reach their goals and build amazing things. For more events with TechRaising, please subscribe to our mailing list, join our meetup group, and like us on Facebook.

If you are interested in learning more about General Magic, it is expected to hit select theaters in San Francisco and New York in Spring 2019.

 

Cosmic Announces TechRaising Social Purpose Challenge

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Santa Cruz design and branding agency Cosmic just announced an incredible opportunity for  innovators, problem solvers, and entrepreneurs who want to do good. Any and every TechRaising team that demos a product on Sunday aiming to serve a social purpose will get a free one-hour strategic consulting session with Cosmic’s brand traction experts.

How cool is that? Here’s what Cosmic has to say:

We’re excited to announce The Social Purpose Challenge — a partnership with TechRaising for their 48-hour startup blitz on June 1 – 3.

We believe the future of business resides at the intersection of profit and purpose, and we are challenging this year’s TechRaising participants to develop products, services, or companies that serve a social purpose, mission, or cause. 

Our mission at Cosmic is to help brands with a social purpose play at the same level as their profit-driven competitors. To support this mission and the TechRaising community, we’re offering any TechRaising team that demos a product that aims to serve a social purpose by the end of TechRaising a free 1-hour strategic consulting session. In this session we will cover brand strategy, positioning, and messaging. 

Additionally, any TechRaising team that goes on to form a company or nonprofit by August 31, 2018 will be eligible for a startup branding package — custom-designed, pro bono, by our team.

We are excited to support the TechRaising community and to give back to people and companies in our community working towards a more just world.

To learn more about Cosmic’s new mission and direction, read their article on Defining Social Purpose Brands and view their Case Studies. 

Ready to make an impact and get expert guidance on the way to global change? Register for TechRaising 2018 right now—which, by the way, starts in 48 hours! Polish your pitch, rally your team, and get ready to make the world a better place.

Challenge Details

To qualify for our pro bono offerings, the following conditions must be met:

1-hour Strategic Consulting Session

  • Your TechRaising team’s product or service model must exist at its core to serve a greater social purpose beyond generating profit or employing your team. Your company or organization must fit within the Cosmic Definition of a Social Purpose Brand.
  • Your team must demo your idea at the end of Techraising during the demo timeslot
  • Your team must schedule the 1-hour Strategic Consulting Session within 2 weeks of techraising.
  • Additional Consulting available upon request in the form of a Strategic Workshop for a fixed fee

Startup Branding Package

  • Your TechRaising team’s product or service model must exist at its core to serve a greater social purpose beyond generating profit or employing your team. Your company or organization must fit within the Cosmic Definition of a Social Purpose Brand.
  • Your team must demo your idea at the end of Techraising during the demo timeslot
  • Your team must schedule the 1-hour Strategic Consulting Session within 2 weeks of techraising.
  • Your team must form a legal business entity, ex: LLC, S-Corp, C-Corp, B-Corp, or NPO and connect with Cosmic to schedule the Startup Branding Package by August 31st, 2018
  • You will receive Visual Identity Concepts (logo, colors, fonts) and basic Messaging and Positioning Guidance. You will have the opportunity to provide 1 round of feedback to Cosmic for each deliverable. Any additional rounds of feedback requested to be negotiated separately.

Santa Cruz Project Lights Up Kickstarter

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With a Kickstarter campaign that fully funded in 15 minutes Zohar Wouk is not on a typical teenager’s path. He veered from that path toward the end of 11th grade when he left school to attend an entrepreneurship boot camp at Draper University.  It was there that he first came up with the idea for Futuristic Lights — and the passion to advance technology for the art of Gloving.

I had the chance to talk with Zohar and this is what. I learned.

When Zohar and his then 9th grader  coder AbeAbe Karplus attended the 2014 TechRaising weekend they had been working on the prototype for their first product for almost a year. Zohar’s mother participated at TechRaising the previous year and built Snappost. From what Zohar heard and observed, he thought to bring his idea to TechRaising to see how far they could push themselves and how much they could accomplish in the two days. They ended up getting much more out of the weekend than a bunch of code written.

This was the first time they had shared the project publicly and they gained many valuable insights from experts — from UI designers to VC’s. This helped them clarify where they were going with the project. But most of all, the most lasting outcome of the weekend was connecting with the Santa Cruz tech community that has continued to offer support, insights, feedback, and connections.

Since TechRaising 2014, Zohar and Abe added Abe Jellinek, Pawel Faryna and Michael Chubbs Marchetteto to their team and they honed their focus to a single product — The Kinetic under the company Futuristic Lights. They have plans for additional product after they launch and learn from The Kinetic.

Being young, fresh, broke entrepreneurs, they didn’t have the funds to finance the first round of manufacturing. They decided that Kickstarter would be an ideal vehicle for raising funds for The Kinetic. Kickstarter is a great way to reach groups of people that are passionate about niche products. Products that they feel they have a role in making possible and products they want to use themselves. This gives the group a reason to rally around the project. If the project doesn’t meet it’s funding goal it doesn’t happen.

The gloving community, is active and vibrant — and certainly rallied around the Kinetic. One of the reason’s for the success of the Futuristic Lights Kickstarter campaign is the active curation of, and communication with, that community.

Much of this happens on Facebook. Zohar’s team made the launch of the Kickstarter campaign an anticipated event – much like the opportunity to buy tickets to a concert that is surely going to sell out. They created videos highlighting each of the 6 modes of the gloves and two more teasers about the project. Each of these videos was rolled out over the course of a month. Soon the gloving community was waiting in anticipation for the next video revealing another feature.

When they announced the launch date and time they combined it with a give away of the product. Sharing the post was the ticket to enter the give away. The post was shared 1000 times and had a reach of almost 70,000 people.

The gloving community was so primed and excited for the launch that they were waiting with rockstar fan anticipation for the launch. Like standing on line for concert tickets to go on sale they were waiting online for the Kickstarter to begin. They were there to click as fast as they could to get one of the early bird specials. And boy did they go fast.

Still, the team wasn’t sure what would happen.  They thought the community was excited but had no idea how much. Despite the whole team’s hard work, the five were very nervous that the project wouldn’t get funded. They guessed they would raise about $5000 the first day and would consider that a win. For them, it was surreal watching the numbers climb and climb. Their initial $20k goal was the absolute minimum required to produce the basic product. With every dollar as the campaign grows they gain confidence in the quality of their ability to deliver a great product.

The Kickstarter campaign runs until Jan 11, 2015.  Click here to light up your world.

photo: FuturisticLights.com

Essential Tips For Pitching Your Startup

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As we approach the 2014 TechRaising Weekend April 25-27  let’s look at some of the insights that we learned from Adeo Ressi’s Pitch Practice session during last July’s TechRaising Meetup.

All of these tips are essential when you are pitching to investors. And most will help you create a great pitch to attract team member to help work on your idea at TechRaising. Take a look and ask questions I the comments or tell us what you think.

Adeo’s Pitching Tips

Don’t ever use adjectives and especially superlatives.  You may think your idea is the best, the greatest, the first. Chances are the VC you are talking to has heard that same idea 100 times in the last two weeks. Ideas come in waves, if you thought of it chances are at least 975 other people did too. In Adeo ‘s case, when he hears superlatives you lose so much credibility he has to fight himself to “re-listen to what is coming out of your mouth.”

His advice: Don’t squander your precious time in front a VC — get straight to what they need to hear: tell them what you product is, who buys it and what problem it solves.

All businesses have one customer. Tell me whom you are helping – and it can’t be half of humanity. Yes you want to have a broad customer base, and it needs to be a specific segment of humanity. “Men” is not a specific segment. That is half of humanity.

The customer is who’s paying.  Always focus on the people with the money – especially when you are creating a market place.

Use the phrase, “My helps specific segment of humanity to [do what]” Not “I’m helping them by….”

Never, Never, Never, Ever – Start your pitch with Questions. 1) Unless you are actually gathering market data you are wasting time that you could be using to tell your story about your business.  2) Big risk: If no one engages your pitch has just crashed & burned.

Appear fresh and new – Saying that you have been working on your product/idea for the last 5 years is often not a good thing. You want to give the appearance of magic — that your idea just came from the ether and hey “look at this prototype we created over night!”  If you tell them that you have been at this for years – they’re going to want to see all the customers you’ve garnered in that time.

You spend all day thinking about your business model and need to make it comprehensible in a short pitch. Don’t give partial information. If there are 10 parts to you model don’t give only parts 4, 6 & 9 in your pitch. It confuses the audience. Find a way to distill your whole model into your pitch. (By the way, if your model requires 10 parts you may need to reexamine your model.)

Don’t lead with your “oh so clever phrase” or your data – Always start with what you are creating. People need the context first for you stats or clever phrase to make sense. Otherwise they are confused on where you are going with this. You don’t want to start them off questioning the data. Use the data to justify their gut feeling after you already sold the idea. Not the state you want the people with the purse strings to be in! Seriously, resist the temptation to be what you think is a great showman. Trust Adeo on this, your stats or catchy phrase will be even more powerful when people know what the heck you’re talking about!

Start with this phrase  “My company (insert name) is developing (insert a concrete item – website, mobile app, software etc) to solve (name the problem) with (insert your secret sauce)”.

When you’re the winner, Shut Up!  When you’re pitch has landed stop talking. Maybe the hardest thing to do and also the most important. Any top sales pro knows this and it is still hard for them.

Ok, now that you are ready you can get your TechRaising Tickets here.

Image: Flickr – Adam

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Plantronics Developer Connection Opens Possibilities With Spokes SDK

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And now a word from our sponsor…

Hi all you TechRaisers!

Just thought we would drop a quick blog post and tell you a bit about our group, the Plantronics Developer Connection, and ask for your consideration when you think about your pitch for TechRaising.

The Plantronics Developer Connection is based out of Plantronics HQ, here in Santa Cruz.  As you are probably aware, Plantronics makes headsets.  We make all kinds of headsets, including Bluetooth ones, and ones you plug into your computer via USB, and even the little stereo ear bud ones to plug into your flip-phone.  So yeah, you probably know us for our headsets.

What you might not know, is that we also have a software side that goes along with our headsets.  This software is called Spokes.

Spokes software has been available Plantronics devices for quite some time now and even has a mature SDK associated with it.

What’s new is that we are now publicly exposing the Spokes SDK and inviting developers to download it, check it out, and build cool things with it.  We are presenting the Spokes SDK through the Plantronics Developer Connection (developer.plantronics.com) which also houses all the technical documentation and sample code associated with Spokes.

We launched the Plantronics Developer Connection in May and we are trying to get our story out to the developer community and promote awareness of what the Spokes SDK and all it has to offer.

What’s our story and what does the Spokes SDK have to offer?

Our story is that our headsets do more than just audio.

What else can they do?

Our headsets can detect when they are on your head or off your head. They can detect if you are near your PC or away from your PC.  Our headsets know the incoming Caller ID from the mobile phone they are paired with.  Also, our headsets all have unique serial ids that can be used within secure environments to provide an extra layer of security ID.

The best part is, developers have access to all these headset events through the Spokes SDK.

That is our story… Plantronics headsets can do some cool things beyond just providing audio, and now developers can tap into these headset abilities and create killer apps based on these actions via the Spokes SDK.  You can find the Spokes SDK and everything you need to get started (technical docs, sample code and monitored forums) at the Plantronics Developer Connection. (developer.plantronics.com)

Of course, nothing beats a good example, so here are a few examples of what our Application Partners have already built using the Spokes SDK.

Threewill:  “Popcorn for Jive” uses the Spokes Mobile Caller ID API to get the incoming Caller ID off the mobile phone and uses it to look up in Jive who is calling.  Check the YouTube video to see the demo.   Popcorn is also able to do this for Salesforce.com and you can see that demo here.

Datahug: Datahug is an enterprise connection service.  Datahug knows “who is talking to who” within your enterprise, and allows you to find connections within other companies you did not even know existed. Datahug uses the Spokes Mobile Caller ID API to monitor incoming calls on the mobile phone and pair them to your contact list. This gives a much more accurate picture of “who is talking to who” within your enterprise.  Check out the YouTube demo to see it in action.

Sococo:  Sococo Team Space integration with Plantronics.  Sococo provides a virtual office space so teams that are spread out remotely can easily meet and coordinate online in a virtual office space.  Sococo uses the Spokes “Don/Doff” API to know when the user is physically wearing the Plantronics Voyager Pro.  As soon as the user takes the headset off, their status within Team Space is immediately updated to unavailable.  Check out the video demo from Sococo to see it all in action.

Now that you have seen some examples of our SDK in action, hopefully it has inspired you to think of ways to us the Spokes SDK within your own app or service.

We really hope you do consider our SDK when you decide on what to build for TechRaising.  Also, as an added little bonus, if you and your team do decide to build something using our SDK, we will get you and the rest of your team members FREE Voyager Pro UC headsets to test your app with and then to keep and take home with you.   Don’t tell anyone, but we might even bring some unreleased hardware and firmware bundles for you to experiment with, so you can be the first developers ever to have access to these specially bundled firmware packs.  This is all very exciting to us and we hope this will inspire you to check out the Spokes SDK and build something awesome with it.

We are really looking forward to this event, and can’t wait for it to start!

See you Friday for the pitches!

Four Steps to Success – Alex Cowan’s practical guide to building a startup

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Alex Cowan, founder of the enterprise communications software company Leonid Systems and author of the recently published Starting a Tech Business, says his book does not bring any particularly new ideas to the table. Instead, he says, it takes the best thinking from the contemporary tech world and translates it for non-engineers and other mortals.

Cowan will lead a four-hour, full-immersion workshop called “New Product Development in Four Steps” for TechRaising members and friends on Tuesday, Oct. 9, drawing from ideas in his book. Most of the strategies being explained and workshopped will be familiar to anyone who has spent any time considering the tech business scene: Cowan will cover design thinking, lean business principles, the “customer development” (versus “product development”) model, and the application of “agile” software-development ideas to a startup environment.

Cowan promises that the workshop will be as valuable to people familiar with these buzzwords as it will to those for whom they are new ideas.

“Watching ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ isn’t the same as learning how to tango,” he says. And this workshop, which will involve a series of hands-on exercises, will be more like dancing lessons than a speech.

Cowan learned these cutting-edge best practices in part by building a successful startup. In 2007, Leonid Systems was called Leonid Consulting, and Cowan was the lone employee. Today it employs 35-plus, with offices in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Bucharest, Romania. Along the way, Leonid became a software company, as Cowan decided to turn the practices and utilities he was selling into products.

Running a self-funded enterprise-level company was challenging, Cowan recalls. “I mean, it was brutal,” he says. While growing Leonid, he read all of the current literature, from Steve Blank’s “Four Steps to the Epiphany” to Eric Reis’s “The Lean Startup,” and he was able to apply best practices to his company while the sales graph turned into a hockey stick. (“Still,” he says, “a little bit of financing would have been nice.”)

While using the stuff he was learning from the new-tech business gurus, Cowan was somewhat surprised to find that most of the companies he was tracking, and some that he was doing business with, were not heeding this good advice.

“The big ideas in high-tech, and how they apply beyond high tech, are pretty much universally accepted,” he says. “I mean, nobody says ‘lean’ thinking is bad. But there’s a big gap between the number of people who’ve read these books and the number of companies that apply them. It’s a paradox. Why aren’t these things more widely practiced?”

Cowan concluded that the problem was that there weren’t enough practical guidelines about how to implement these big ideas. Hence, Starting a Tech Business.

Simply put, his book bridges the gap between theory and practice, offering exercises that show how design thinking, etc., can be put in play in real-world situations.

Cowan is not at all ashamed that his book re-frames a variety of ideas that have been around for a while. On the contrary, he proudly points out that one of his favorite ideas in Starting a Tech Business—the “AIDA” marketing framework, is 100 years old.

“A lot of business books claim to deliver ‘the secret,’ some Rosetta Stone, how to work an hour a week and become a millionaire. This is simply a practical application of the best ideas coming out of product development in high-tech.”

Alex Cowan will present New Product Development In Four Steps on Tuesday, Oct. 9, from 5:30-9:30. Cruzio Internet, 877 Cedar St., Santa Cruz.

Twitter’s Bart Teeuwisse Will Showcase Bootstrap at Sept 20 TechRaising Meetup

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Over the past 12 months, Twitter’s Bootstrap—a free, open-source web-development toolkit released last August with the slogan “By Nerds, For Nerds”—has become a phenomenon that is already changing the look of the web.

While Bootstrap is designed to be accessible to non-coders, it has become popular with hardcore nerds (as promised). It has been the number one project on GitHub, a web-hosting repository and hangout for developers and engineers, all year.

According to Bart Teeuwisse, an engineer/evangelist at Twitter (and TechRaising mentor), Bootstrap’s popularity can be explained simply: “It reduces the time and effort required to create a good-looking site that works across a variety of browsers.”

“With Bootstrap you don’t need a whole lot of technical know-how to start creating website mockups. It isn’t the end-all be-all, but it can be an important piece of the puzzle.”

At the next TechRaising Meetup on September 20, Teeuwisse will explain how Bootstrap works, and suggest some ways developers, designers and others might find it useful. He’ll also do some “live-coding” to demonstrate how easy it is to create a feature-rich functional mockup with the design consistency that is Bootstrap’s hallmark.

Teeuwisse explains that Bootstrap grew out of an internal Twitter tools group that was tasked with creating dashboards for internal analytics and all kinds of other uses. Each project required a user interface, and the group decided that, rather than “reinvent the wheel over and over,” they’d standardize their style.

In October 2010, Twitter staged its first “Hack Week,” inviting its employees to work on new projects outside their normal job duties. By the end of the week the Bootstrap team had built a stable platform incorporating some essential design standards. What they came up with is essentially a collection of CSS and HTML conventions, a library of JavaScript code for creating elements such as navigation, typography, buttons, tables, icons, etc., as well as a flexible grid system for creating page layouts.

Importantly, Teeuwisse says, Bootstrap allows users to customize their layout: “It doesn’t force you into using any default styles.” Perhaps even more importantly, it creates a “responsive” design that queries whatever device is calling for a page, and delivers an appropriate design to any screen on any device on any browser.

Last August, Twitter released Bootstrap—and its code—to the public and open-sourced the project. Teeuwisse says this has turned into a big win-win for Twitter and the development community.

Bart Teeuwisse will discuss Bootstrap on Thursday, September 20, at Cruzioworks, 877 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Gather at 6:30, presentation begins at 7pm. RSVP here.

What Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Funding

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One of the most difficult things for an entrepreneur is figuring out how to finance the business. While entrepreneurs may be experts in their industries and/or in the technical requirements of their businesses, many have little or no knowledge of how to get the investment necessary to allow their expertise and companies to shine. Last month we were fortunate to have Craig Vachon, an extremely savvy and experienced investor, share his knowledge of the investment landscape with us. This was a provocative presentation that laid out all the options progressing from the most desirable form of investment (no investment) to the least desirable. The presentation was framed in the context that…

Investment equals selling your company. The goal is to sell as little as possible.

Check out the slide deck below to learn more about how to navigate these waters. Happy sailing!

What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know about Funding

View more PowerPoint from TechRaising

If you liked this, check out the June 28 TechRaising Meetup, where serial entrepreneur Sol Lipman will talk about what it takes to get your product launched.

Finding My Inner Dork at TechRaising

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As I started to take Jose Caballer’s awesome F.E.D.O. personality test at TechRasing here Saturday, I was hoping to find out I was an Evil. Being an Evil would be cool, and I believed I had a chance: For most of my career in media, beginning with the co-founding of the Missoula Independent 21 years ago, I have been the boss, and everyone knows bosses are Evil. But as I circled the F.E.D.O. test’s “this-or-that” choices, I could tell it wasn’t going that way.

I was a little surprised to find out at the end of the test that I’m not a Flakey either. Nor am I an Obnoxious. Turns out I’m a Dorky. Hmmmph.

If I doubted the test’s accuracy, my status as a dork was confirmed Sunday afternoon when I presented my project to the gathered throng, most of whom had also experienced the intense and immensely rewarding TechRaising weekend. Faced with near-total technical breakdown, my brain froze. I stood before the crowd squawking nervously and sweating bullets. A total dork. (Note: Here I’m not using the generous definition Caballer developed for his workshop: “Dorky people enjoy the technical aspects and the details…figuring things out and having deep knowledge.” I’m using the characterization found on the brilliant Nerd Venn Diagram: “Obsession; Social Ineptitude.”)

I learned an important lesson about preparation in those four excruciating minutes, and, in retrospect, something more important about collaboration. If I had asked our TechRaising teammate, Todd Schafer of Schafer Design, to help with the presentation, I’m pretty sure it would have been rock solid. The whole weekend was about collaboration, and in this instance I guess I forgot that. Ouch.

Thankfully, the feelings of panic and shame subsided 15 minutes after we got to the Red Room to celebrate what had been a hugely productive and powerfully inspiring event.

Fast Company
Miracles happened at the second-annual TechRaising. At 6pm on Friday, 31 participants delivered 90-second elevator pitches in the hopes of attracting a team. Some needed design or biz-dev help, some needed marketing help, and almost all needed coders. Some ideas were complex and some straightforward, and almost all were rather ambitious. Amazingly, at 4pm on Sunday, 18 teams presented complete or well-started products.

The members of one of those teams, Amy Sibiga and Bruno Rocca, had met Friday night, when they happened to pitch similar ideas related to health and wellness. They immediately decided to merge their efforts, and were joined by a designer—Ted Holladay of Studio Holladay —and a developer—Chuck Keller of productOps. They formed a company—Intelligent Wellness Solutions—and by 4pm Sunday they were able to demo a fairly complete design for an IOS application: Their H4Me app will deliver customized information to people with chronic illnesses, and provide feedback to providers. Rocca says they’ll have a version of the app far enough along to show to clients by Friday.

Another product, I Want a Ride, was demoed Sunday and is in Beta testing as I write this. On Friday night, it was nothing but an idea. In fact, Eric Conlon, who designed the online ride-sharing / hitchhiking service, hadn’t even signed up to pitch. But when TechRaising co-founder Andrew Mueller invited anyone with an idea to pitch it (“Last chance!”) Conlon jumped up.

The weekend was a rush of creativity, a mix of focus and chaos. Saturday morning, Caballer ran a three-hour workshop geared to apply principles of agile software development to real-world design problems, and give participants a taste of the struggles and joys of collaboration under pressure. It was a perfect preparation and metaphor for the rest of the weekend, in which 60-plus creative people worked long hours to bring new things into the world.

While he was building a custom WordPress theme and homepage for my project (Hilltromper—an outdoor rec / nature guide with social media functionality), master coder James Lafferty also built a prototype of a website, called SupplyShift, designed to score supply-chain sustainability for large companies. Todd Schaeffer, who offered crucial WordPress assistance to me all day Saturday, designed a logo for SupplyShift, and another one for Iota, a very cool micro-gifting service. He also built a working WordPress prototype of Robert Singleton’s CoNuz, where the article you are reading will be published about 45 minutes from now. Daniel Chamberlin of 12:AM Design, who designed the CoNuz logo, did the same for at least four other projects.

Mueller and his TechRaising cofounders, Margaret Rosas and Matthew Swinnerton, designed the event to allow for exactly that kind of massive collaboration and spontaneity. Rosas used the word “magic” maybe a dozen times over the weekend, and I have to say, even as a certified Dork, I felt it.

A lot of the magic took place outside the machines that we were all hunched over. Saturday morning, my Cruzioworks co-worker Tyler Young, of Plastic Trophy, whipped up a design for some site features that will no doubt be incorporated into Hilltromper. Another Cruzioworks co-worker, the self-described “serial startup guy” Lloyd Tabb (Mozilla, Luminate, Everyschool, Blekko, Llooker, etc.), turned me on to the Adventure Rider Motorcycle Forum, one of the coolest examples of high-quality crowd-sourced outdoor content I’ve seen. Bart Teeuwisse, former principle software engineer at Yahoo! now working as an engineer and evangelist at Twitter, researched social media solutions for me and helped me develop, in 10 or 15 minutes, a rollout strategy.

Speaking before the presentations Sunday night, Chris Neklason, who brought the internet to Santa Cruz when he and his wife, Peggy Dolgenos , founded Cruzio in 1989, spoke about “Biz 2.0” and the spirit of collaboration that characterizes this new world we live in. Just as new tech tools reduce the “friction” that can inhibit growth and innovation, he said, this new open-source attitude can multiply all of our efforts “to make the world a better place.”

A couple days after living the TechRaising weekend, I definitely feel empowered and inspired to do that. I saw so much else there that I’d like to share…but I have to get back to work. Thanks to TechRaising, I have a website to build.

This post originally appeared in CoNuz – an ambitious project started at TechRaising April 2012

Founder Institute gives TechRaiser a Scholarship

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The dinner bell at TechRaising Spring 2012 brought an extra-special announcement from Andrew Mueller and Gary Herman: The Founder Institute is offering each TechRaising team a free application to their May 2012 program. They will award a full tuition scholarship to one team of their choosing ($1,500 value).

Thanks to Gary, who approached Founder Institute creator Adeo Ressi about the possibility to sponsor a TechRaising team. Everyone hacking, designing, and building at Cruzio this weekend has been recongnized as embodying the kind of raw, passionate talent that the Founder Institute’s program supports.

Gary is the president of Santa Cruz’s own Jabico Enterprises and a 2010 alumni of the Founder Institute’s four month incubator and workshop for emerging entrepreneurs. He’s a self-proclaimed evangelist of the Founder Institute and Santa Cruz’s burgeoning community of tech talent. His experience with Adeo Ressi and the Founder Institute program was an eye-opening experience that resulted in an epiphany about what it takes to turn start-up dreams into lasting real-world success. The Founder Institute is a different kind of entrepreneurial incubator, It is an early-stage community-based (and very intense) laboratory. All that participants need to begin is a seedling of inspiration, a huge amount of drive.

If the Founder Institute is the incubator, TechRaising is the greenhouse, combining the soil, the sun, and the seeds. TechRaisers are planting their ideas in the fertile environment of the re-invigorated Santa Cruz tech community. Gary’s path through the Founder Institute back to Santa Cruz, the home of his successful business, validates TechRaising’s vision that new tech companies can emerge and thrive in Santa Cruz.

On kick-off night, Margaret Rosas delivered an inspired vision that continues to echo throughout the event. Her perception that Santa Cruz has a spirit that you don’t get anywhere else coupled with the belief that each of us have a magic wand that’s ready to make amazing things happen if we just start waving it embodies the magic that we are seeing come to life.

Today at 4:00pm the TechRaising teams will gather for demo presentations! If the palpable energy of the weekend is any indicator, it’s going to be a pretty mind-blowing afternoon.

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Read more about the Founder Institute at their website, http://fi.co. TechRaisers will receive a private coupon code for application. Meet Gary’s company, Jabico Enterprises, at www.jabico.com.