In what seems like the blink of an eye, we’re a quarter of the way through the year and over halfway done with the spring semester. I’m deep into preparation for the summer program at the Undergraduate Incubator, and I’ve started prepping for the fall semester since I’ve already been asked if I need to the student bookstore to order textbooks to sell to my students. I’ve received over 20 applications for the summer program, which means I’m going to have to do some interviewing to determine the cohort.
I think I’m building something pretty awesome and worthwhile, and within the next year I’m going to have a hard time finding somewhere to put everyone who wants to build something with us. This is a great problem to have, and I’m way further along in building this thing than I thought I’d be. My original goal was to have 50 students associated with the Undergraduate Incubator Program in the first three years, and we may actually hit this number within 18 months. I still can’t believe how quickly this thing has sprung to life over the last few months, and I couldn’t have done it without the support I’ve received from others in the department and elsewhere in the university.
It’s been an absolute rush. This semester hasn’t seemed as hectic as last semester, but things are really starting to pick up again now that we’re getting close to the end of the academic year. The summer program is going to be a completely different beast than the academic year program, and since there’s a decent amount of money involved, keeping the student accountable will be incredibly important. I think the format I’ve devised for the summer utilizing modified weekly sprints will prevent any major catastrophes toward the end of the summer. I’m also hoping to use what I learn from the summer program to continue to improve the academic year program.
This week is probably the busiest week of the semester, as a number of programs reach their conclusion in the next couple of days. Venture School wraps up its seven-week run tomorrow. This is my second time teaching this class, and this cohort is even stronger than the cohort last fall. I’ve had a couple of students from the fall cohort present at 1 Million Cups Iowa City over the last couple of months, and I’m hoping to have a number of students from the spring cohort join us in August and September, after the Incubator Summer Track students have all worked through that program. I’ve met with a number of the students in this cohort, and the business ideas are all pretty strong. We’ll see who ends up winning some money tomorrow evening!
Before we wrap up Venture School, I’ll be spending the day at the Grant Wood AEA headquarters in Cedar Rapids running our first Design Dash event outside of Iowa City. The past two events have taken place in downtown Iowa City and on campus, and we’ve heard feedback from our partners that they would like the program to travel across the state, so some schools don’t have to travel as far. We chose Cedar Rapids for the trial, since it’s not that far from home. We have around 50 people signed up – a bit smaller than last fall’s 120 participants, which should be a bit easier to manage. It should be a great day of building and creating – the other two events were awesome, and I don’t expect any less from tomorrow’s event.
The Innovation Challenge competition is going on today and tomorrow. My students, along with a handful of other undergrads, are competing tomorrow while I’m at Design Dash. There’s a pool of $50,000 up for grabs in this competition, so this is the biggest event of the semester for my students. I’m not sure who is judging the group this semester, but I’m sure they selected a high-quality group of panelists. Since I can’t be there all day, I’ve enlisted the help of my coaches to sit in on the proceedings and give the judges information on the students if necessary. The awards ceremony is Wednesday evening over at MERGE, and I will be attending that event to see how my students did.
Students have been taking advantage of my office hours leading up to the Innovation Challenge event. Since I have three times as many students this semester as last, I expected three times as many students to ask for help with their business plans and pitch practice. I’ve had to open up extra meeting slots to meet the demand over the last couple of weeks. I haven’t gotten a lot of things done beyond meeting with students, and that’s fine – there’s plenty of time this coming weekend to catch up, and I got a few things done in the home office this past weekend around the Easter holiday.
I received some great news a few weeks back – I’ve been selected to give a talk at EntreFEST in Iowa City this June! I’ll be giving a talk titled A Global Journey to Make Ideas Real, where I’ll talk about my journey through the entrepreneurial ecosystem, from my humble beginnings as a freelancer, to traveling across the country to learn about startups, to organizing and facilitating Startup Weekends across the country, and all the way to Uganda to teach lean startup basics to new and seasoned entrepreneurs looking for an edge. I’m considering writing a full-length book on this topic if this talk goes well, so this is going to be a bit of trial balloon. It also allows me to gather my thoughts and start to assemble an outline covering the important stuff. I tend to ramble in this blog, so it will be nice to go through nearly a decade of material and separate the wheat from the chaff. I’d love to see all of you there, so if you haven’t purchased a ticket to EntreFEST, you can find those on the conference Web site.
Startup Weekend Iowa City preparations are starting to gear up. I’ve decided to move the event dates forward to coincide with EntreFEST, in order to hopefully capture some of the attendees and bump up the numbers a bit. July is such a busy month, and we didn’t come close to meeting our attendance goals last year. We’ll see if running the event June 9-11 will bring in a bit more energy and excitement. I’ve already started to reach out to people across the state to drum up interest, and I’ve emailed the EntreFEST folks to partner with us for cross-promotion. In years past, there have been a number of EntreFEST attendees who are new to the statewide entrepreneurial ecosystem, and this might be a great way to get their creative juices flowing and allow for even more connections to be made.
With all of the things going on here at home, I haven’t even touched on all of the travel I’ve done in these first few months of the year. At the beginning of February, I took the train over to Chicago for this year’s CiderCon. This year’s event really felt like the pre-pandemic events – last year in Richmond, Virginia, still had the pandemic cloud hanging overhead with mask mandates and vax cards (not to mention the cold or whatever I had when I first arrived in town, which combined with the cider consumption turned the first couple of days into a giant messy blur.) I got to see several old friends and made a bunch of new friends over the four days. I attended way too many cider shares and got to pour for Original Sin Cider at the Cider Summit festival at Navy Pier. The weather was actually pretty decent for Chicago in February, so walking outside to different events was better than it was in previous years. The Chicago Cider Week kickoff was also a lot of fun, with food from Eris Brewery and a little bit too much ice cider from Eden Ciders.
I got a lot of inspiration from my time at CiderCon to make a big push to get the Cider Finder app out of private beta and into the hands of the public through the app stores. As I’m going to say to a bunch of my students going through the Incubator Summer Track – it’s time to crap or get off the pot. I haven’t made the time to get the thing finished and out the door over the last couple of years, but now is the time. I want this thing to flourish, and I want it done before cider season kicks off this fall. Next year’s CiderCon is all the way out in Portland, Oregon, so I want something demonstrable if I’m going to travel all the way to the Pacific Northwest next January. 2023 is the year I get this done, even if it’s not perfect and doesn’t have all of the features functional right now.
I logged a bunch of miles on planes last month with trips to Winnipeg and San Antonio. At the beginning of March, I traveled to Winnipeg with a student who was pitching at the Stu Clark New Venture Championships. We were treated to an amazing experience while we were there, including a chance to see polar bears up close and personal at the local zoo. Before the competition kickoff, my student and I got a chance to visit the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada and take a guided tour through the history of air travel in that part of the world. My favorite part of the museum was the Air Canada plane from the 1950s that you could walk through and explore. There were a bunch of exhibits designed for kids that my daughters would have enjoyed.
My student didn’t win any money, but he was up against some stiff competition – the eventual first-place winner came out of his group of four. Going to these external events is helping me understand where we need to focus our efforts going forward – pitching skills and finishing prototypes are both going to be focus areas this summer and beyond. The student who won the competition in Winnipeg presented incredibly well and had a product that was just weeks away from launch. The other student who I thought might win the group was also nearly to market and had a great presence in front of the judging panel. My student pitches well, but just wasn’t as close to market as the two who I thought would win the group.
To wrap up March and for the first couple of days in April, I traveled south to San Antonio to help launch the UTSA NSBE Startup Weekend program. We had started talking about doing this event over a year ago, and it was great to finally get down there and make it a reality. The group of participants was pretty small – only eight participants over the course of the weekend, which is the smallest group I’ve ever facilitated. We did manage to get three teams organized, so the pitches on Sunday afternoon were competitive. The food was great, and for the meals that weren’t provided, I ate my weight in barbecue chicken and biscuits and gravy. I had an amazing time, and I can’t wait to get back down there at the beginning of February 2024 for their next event.
As you can see, the activity has been pretty much non-stop since the beginning of the year. Between the Undergraduate Incubator, Cider Finder, and other miscellaneous entrepreneurial ecosystem programs, there’s not been much time for anything else. I’ve actually been pretty successful in saying “no” to any new projects in an effort to focus on my current work and a number of tasks that have been sitting in the to-do pile for months or years. I have a handful of creative projects to finish alongside coding Cider Finder and working through the summer program on campus.
The nice thing about the summer program is that even though I’ll be on campus most of the summer in order to answer questions and meet with students in the Incubator Summer Track, I won’t be micromanaging the group. I’ll be encouraging the students to work in the BELL during the eleven weeks of the program, but it’s not a specific demand – the only demand is that students attend required meetings on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and make a certain amount of progress in the development of their businesses. The rest of the time can be devoted to working ahead for the fall semester and on other projects. It will be nice not going into the coming fall semester nearly blind, as I did going into last fall. Most of the pieces are in place for the summer already, and the cohort will be selected in the coming days.
I really didn’t mean to go over three months between blog posts. Once the semester started, things just got away from me. Before I knew it, I was at CiderCon. Shortly after, I was on my way to Canada. A bit after that, off to San Antonio. I actually started crafting this blog post a month ago while I was in Winnipeg during a bit of down time between events. I’ve traveled just about as much this spring as I did last spring, before I had the responsibility of the Undergraduate Incubator Program. Just today, I had to turn down an opportunity to facilitate a Startup Weekend on May 5, as that’s the final pitch celebration for my class, and I want to do something special for the graduating seniors, as most of them are packing up and leaving Iowa City in the days following the end of the semester.
If you’re around Iowa City in the next couple of months, stop by the BELL for a visit! We’re not really set up for social events right now, and we can’t serve alcohol in the building, so we probably won’t host anything fun there during EntreFEST. However, I’d be happy to show off what we’re doing during the festivities, and my students are going to be around during the event. I’m going to see what I can do to clean up the facility during the week in between the class final and the beginning of the summer program – I have about ten days to dress up the building, and there’s going to be some tidying involved once the seniors check out of their offices.
Beyond the Incubator Summer Track, speaking at EntreFEST, and running Startup Weekend Iowa City, I don’t really know what’s going to happen the rest of the summer. No overseas trips are planned this year. I had no idea I was going to end up traveling to Canada last month the last time I posted – that all happened in a matter of weeks after the beginning of the semester. I’ve begun to expect the unexpected – I can plan all I’d like, but something will always come up. So, who knows what will happen before I have a chance to write again!