omertà
o-'mer-tä; —n. italian. code chiefly among members of the criminal underworld that enjoins private retribution and the refusal to give information to outsiders.
http://about.me/rwuebker
o-'mer-tä; —n. italian. code chiefly among members of the criminal underworld that enjoins private retribution and the refusal to give information to outsiders.
http://about.me/rwuebker
Frequent DESB guest speakers and world-class mayhem-makers La Hacienda Beverages have been featured in the Daily Utah Chronicle - “Local Business Bottles Exotic Drinks”. Chase, Fidel, and Patrick are exemplars of how to use the business discovery process taught at the David Eccles School of Business (heavily influenced by the Lean Startup movement and our own local homeboys Paul Ahlstrom and Nathan Furr) to design cheap, iterative experiments that concurrently generate product-market fit and disclose and mitigate risk.
I admire these guys. They came to the Foundry, gritted their teeth, and showed our community that that you can, indeed, splice cutting-edge business development practices tuned for digital and knowledge goods into the DNA of a straight-up physical goods business. In so doing, they broke new ground, making it easier for other teams to follow in their wake (5th Street Games; Zeniick Watches; ArmorActive). For me, what they did was the equivalent of breaking through the four-minute mile barrier.
Today, La Hacienda drinks are bottled at a large-scale facility and sold at places like Anaya’s Market, Super Mercado and Cafe de Rico. RedFlower also has a commitment from Whole Foods. The national retailer has agreed to stock La Hacienda products in all of its Utah stores by this summer.
They are a great crew, and often show up to coach Foundry businesses and speak at my MGT 5770 (Business Discovery) class. If you have a dream for a business that everyone says is “too hard” and “you need lots of capital, experience, and a network to break into that market” you should reach out to La Hacienda beverages and find out how they did it. They will also introduce you to a host of companies at the Foundry who have managed to thrive while flouting conventional wisdom.
A quick note to let you know that applications are open for F4 - our fourth Foundry cohort. You can learn more about the program or the application process by checking out our informational videos hosted on Brainyacks (a Foundry startup, natch) or connecting with our growing Facebook community. Foundry alumni are probably the most useful sources of information about the program - our own descriptions of the program are murky and obscure. There are some videos and a web site produced by alumni floating around, and they are also worth checking out. If you are so inclined, you can search for Foundry postings in my Tumblr archive - I write about the program a fair amount, and I am told that I know something about how it works.
The bottom line is that if you are interested in launching a company, we want to help. It doesn’t matter what your dream is (a game publishing company; an iPhone application; a ski company; a web retailer), where you are located, whether you want to do good or chase a billion dollar market. Our interest is in connecting you to a community of other like-minded people and helping you develop your idea into a tractable business model and your capability to lead a team that can execute it. We can’t tell you whether the idea you have will work, or if it does work whether it’s a billion-dollar idea. You may find out that the business you’ve identified is one you personally aren’t entitled to execute - that happens sometimes. You also might find out that the business you’ve discovered is real, and is a fit for you, but you aren’t interested in pursuing it further. That happens too. No one here cares about that. We take the long view - we’re interested in training you with a set of entrepreneurial skills that will last a lifetime, and connect you to a cohort of people who will have your back in this venture, and the next one.
The program is a gift from the David Eccles School of Business to the entrepreneurial community. And it is free. Nobody takes equity in your nascent idea, has claim to your IP, or uses the program as lead-gen for legal services, “coaching” or book sales. The program is participant driven, from the ground up - Foundry alumni are, in large measure, the stewards of the program and help Ken Krull and Matt Hoffman keep everything from imploding. If the program provides value, you give back - time, or money. When the program stops providing value, we’ll stop providing it. So far, people like it. So we are keeping on.
Feel free to drop by our location at Artspace Commons. Foundry teams are posted up in there most of the time, day or night. Bring them a sandwich. They run pretty lean down there.
…Hence that a VC needs to own a sizable chunk (20 to 40) percent of a company depending on stage of investment in order to hope to generate strong returns, is indeed a sound rule of thumb and more of a necessity to survive than a sign of greediness.
Good luck finding great companies with that investment thesis. If your fund economics don’t work, it’s probably not a good idea to blame the system or the entrepreneur. You end up resisting structural change or selecting for poor-quality ventures. Or both.
A little more than two years ago, a small group of undergraduate students started meeting on Wednesday evenings at the University of Utah Lassonde Entrepreneur Center. The group mingled with the Gangplank Utah crew and they all wrestled together to answer a question of mutual interest - how to harness the pent-up entrepreneurial energy of undergraduate students and find ways to support it. From those discussions, the Foundry emerged.
Community contribution is at the heart of what we do here. We created the Foundry to accelerate regional economic growth by developing principled, lifelong entrepreneurial leaders. We think that one of the important ways that this happens is to focus on the company, not the entrepreneur; and to focus on abundance, not scarcity. Utah has an amazing culture of giving and a focus on community. This was not lost on the students as they thought through what kind of Foundry they wanted to create. After all, the group that designed the thing received hours of free advice from community leaders, did the work at a house set aside for student entrepreneurship by the David Eccles School of Business and Pierre Lassonde, and ate pizza from a budget provided by Troy D’Ambrosio. As the man says, to whomever much is given, of him will much be required.
More than a dozen Utah business leaders have helped envision and launch the Foundry, and scores of others currently participate as coaches, are subjects of our video curriculum, provide targeted training, invest in Foundry startups, provide internships, and hire Foundry participants.
I think one of the reasons the Foundry works is that it can absorb the significant contributions that everyone in a community can make. Asking for “contribution” is not code for “make a donation to the program”. It is not a request made from need. Rather, contribution to the Foundry is opportunity. And it doesn’t matter who you are - if you want to find a way to contribute to our community, you can.
Our community is growing. I am very curious to see where it goes and how it evolves. I am honored that I can participate in it, thankful for people like Pierre Lassonde for providing enabling infrastructure that allows things like the Foundry to evolve, and happy to see that in my community that it has become almost unremarkable that our undergraduate students take their holiday break to go do something extraordinary for someone else. For no good reason.
