We’re currently in a strange, new reality. With the exception of a few Zoom meetings on the calendar, time and date don’t really have much meaning. Even though I haven’t physically interacted with other adults over the past few weeks, my social life is actually better than it was before this event began, with several online happy hours scattered throughout the week with people who I hadn’t even met before this event started, or in the case of one happy hour, people who I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years!
Having the last few weeks at home has been a productivity godsend for me. I don’t want to downplay the experiences of others who are struggling to do much at home or dealing with illness. I understand that some people’s productivity has almost completely dropped off – I’ve heard stories of people who haven’t made it out of bed many days in these last few weeks, or if they have, it’s been to a kind of “quarantine nest” on the couch, surrounded by crafting projects they wanted to do, junk food they’ve started to eat, and their laptops, smartphones, or televisions pointed at one streaming video service or another. It would be a huge change for someone who didn’t spend much time at home before the pandemic. For me, it’s essentially business as usual.
The benefit for me, as a veteran work-from-homer, is that I got about 12 hours per week of my life back, where I’m not shuttling the kids to and from school, dance class, and other appointments. I’ve also converted all of my shopping from in-store to online – something I’d played around with a bit last year, but the state of the stores over the last couple of months and the risk of infection have pushed me firmly into the online shopping camp, pretty much permanently. Other than the times where I only need a couple of things from the store, I’m going to be doing my routine shopping online or over the phone. Food delivery companies are also now serving Oasis, so I’ve given Chomp a try with great results.
This is truly the dream of a limited extrovert. I don’t have an unlimited tank of social energy like a true extrovert, but I need at least a bit of human interaction, so I’m not a true introvert either. When I attend an event like Denver Startup Week or the Young Entrepreneur Convention, I am energized by others during the event, but I eventually need time to decompress – I usually build a break into the middle of Denver Startup Week just to catch my breath and take a long time. In addition, I built this partial day off into the middle of my trip to CiderCon this past January as well. It makes these trips more enjoyable to have a break.
Even though it’s been a great benefit to my productivity not to go anywhere, I do miss the opportunities to interact with other human beings in the same room. Some things have translated well to the virtual world, like happy hours – I can catch up with people for a little while, enjoy a beverage or two, and not have to find my way home afterwards. Many of the in-person happy hours before all of this started were right at the time I had to pick up my older daughter from school, precluding me from ever attending. Now, since we’re all home and the happy hours are before dinner, I can tune in and have some great conversation before I have to start making dinner. Honestly, I hope some of the online happy hours continue after we get back out of our homes and reintegrate society.
Some things do not translate to the virtual world, however. Conferences, for the most part, don’t do well as a series of webinars. The whole point of going to startup events, for me at least, is to have the ability to interact with other attendees through social events. This is why Denver Startup Week is one of my favorite events each year – there are so many opportunities to socialize with new people and catch up with old friends who have moved to the area. There are always a couple of seminars I want to attend for the information, but I’m far enough into my entrepreneurial career that many conference presentations cover the same basic information – great for those just starting out, but increasingly tedious for me.
A couple of my contacts pointed me to the Interconnect Conference a couple of weekends ago. I wanted to see how the in-person experience of a conference could be translated online, since nobody seems to know how long we’re going to be stuck in our current predicament. Much of the information presented was designed for entrepreneurs at the beginning of their startup journeys – I think most of the attendees were college students or recent graduates. The best part of the entire experience was the social hour at the very end. Unfortunately, we only had five minutes to talk with each of the people in the social hour, and the software cut off conversation with no option to continue beyond the five minute limit.
Really, the reason I gave the Interconnect Conference a chance was that it was free to attend. I refuse to pay money to stare at a computer screen while someone talks at me. Conferences that charge for the online experience are going to be a hard pass this year. Unfortunately, with its $199 price tag, EntreFEST is out this year. I had been sitting on the fence about attending right before everything started closing and canceling – there weren’t going to be many networking and social opportunities, and many of the breakout topics weren’t terribly appealing to me. Most of the speakers seem to be either in the corporate or educational camps – not surprising, given the speaker selection committee is comprised mostly of corporate folks.
If EntreFEST is making the shift to focus more on corporate innovation, educational tech, and highlighting entrepreneurs from outside Iowa, Johnson County Entrepreneurship Week is going to fill a major gap here in eastern Iowa. We’ll show how startups can get things done right here where we live and showing off the best things about our local entrepreneurial ecosystem and the best people who live and work in it. I’ve decided to delay the event until 2021 – mostly, I want to see if Denver Startup Week shifts online this year and how that ends up playing out. Also, to make the event a success, I need another year to pull everything together and finish filling out the organizing committee. There just wasn’t the bandwidth available in my life before COVID-19 to pull everything together for an event this year, and we probably would have had to scale things back significantly due to the pandemic. I don’t believe that we’re going to get back to in-person events until August or September.
Because of this, we’re seriously considering moving Startup Weekend Iowa City online this year. I attended the online Startup Weekend USA event this past weekend, just to see how an online Startup Weekend could work. There were a few technical glitches along the way – not surprising given that there were nearly 1000 attendees across the country attempting to do everything on increasing strained home Internet connections. However, I feel like it was successful enough that it should be easy to convert our event to the online format. The one major difference is that the “idea storm” and team formation that we usually have Friday evening actually ended on Friday evening, having started earlier in the week. We probably won’t have such a large window for this, but it would be easier to run something similar. I will be reaching out to a handful of other Startup Weekend alumni to help moderate the event, if we do end up going online.
Aside from observing the logistics of an online Startup Weekend, I ended up on one of the top 10 teams among the 50+ teams that participated in the weekend. Our idea is called Lease It Forward, and it looks like a good chunk of the team is going to continue on with the idea. I’m planning to take more of an advisory and consulting role and not directly participate in too much of the project as it continues. I already have enough to do – 2020 is about finishing existing projects and moving my own businesses forward.
Lease It Forward didn’t place in the top 3, unfortunately. I was a bit confused by the judges’ choices, though.
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COVIDx, the third place team, sounded like they were building a combination of a daily health survey that would place an undue burden on end-users and a wearable technology that Google and Apple are already developing.
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MedFoyer, the second place team, proposed a virtual waiting room that requires the end user to have a smartphone. There were so many problems with their proposed solution – many patients don’t have smartphones, nobody wants to sit in their car in most of the country in the middle of winter any longer than is required, and it would be cheaper to hire an extra receptionist for people to page when they arrive at the clinic.
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Varna, the first place team, muddled through proposing some kind of temperature-sensing tech combined with AI that is supposed to warn nursing supervisors that their staff might be getting sick. None of the judges asked them about false positives due to overheating underneath a bunch of PPE – when I used to work as a CNA during college and grad school, I’d be sweating to death under PPE when I had to enter rooms with infection control because elderly patients had a habit of cranking the heat in the room as high as possible. It was a disappointing end to a really fun event, and I’m glad our idea is continuing beyond the weekend.
There were serious business model issues with many of the other teams as well.
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Breathe Clean proposed a mask with a disposable N95 filter – people are already making these for free.
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On The Go LA wanted to help move physical restaurants into food trucks – this would need a huge infusion of venture money to make this work, and the demand really isn’t there.
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Global Co-Power wanted to place a line of code in mobile apps that would allow mobile phones to run distributed computing programs – there’s no business model to this, and doing this would kill battery life and make phones grind to a crawl.
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Bdega wanted to bring bodegas in New York City into the e-commerce world – those who want to move this direction have already started building Web sites, and those who aren’t using modern POS systems certainly aren’t going to be convinced.
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Parasol wanted to help people stuck at home who might be suffering abuse but can’t leave, but the solution was unclear.
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PPE Connector wanted to create a certified PPE marketplace for clinics, hospitals, and non-profits – pretty sure store room managers already are doing this through their normal suppliers.
Obviously, Lease It Forward should have won.
So, I probably have another month or two of being confined to the home office. I’m not running out of things to do by any stretch of the imagination. This has been the pause I’ve needed for a while to finally finish so many projects that have been sitting in my office for years. When I finally can leave the house to work, I have hard drives full of finished videos that need to be uploaded to their proper online homes. Writing projects will be started and hopefully completed. I might actually get outside and get my yard looking halfway decent this year!
I hope that the next blog post brings better news on the state of things. Until then, I’ll just be plugging away, socially distancing myself until the worst is over. I hope that you all are still healthy and hanging in there, because we’ll eventually get through this.