Erik Hanberg Presentation

I wasn't present for Erik's presentation last week, so I read through everyone's blogposts to find out what he talked about. I also looked him up to learn more about him. Suffice to say, I regret missing his presentation as it seemed like he talked about a lot of interesting things. One of the more interesting things I read about in everyone's blogposts were the graphs that Erik showed to explain the contrast between being an entrepreneur and working for someone in a steady job. On the one hand, the employee will probably experience steady growth but he will probably reach a ceiling. On the other hand, the entrepreneur will have a hard time building up his or her company but if they do, the sky is the limit.

Another thing that I really found interesting was how Erik had different sources of income. For example, he had his company Side x Side and he was also a published author. It made me realize that I could have a main source of income while also doing other things on the side which was an important realization. One of the blog posts I read made the point that a career in CS was pretty well paying, so it would be difficult to give it up and pursue something else I didn't really have to put all my time an effort into one idea and abandon a steady source of income.

Somewhere down the line, I also want to become a published author like Erik, so I wish I could have asked him how it felt to juggle writing along with everything else he does.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadrach White

Our fifth and final guest speaker for this course was Shadrach White. I wasn't sure if he would speak during a class session after the confusion the first time. I figured he just wouldn't have the time. In any case, he showed up. Looking him up online, I saw Shadrach was the chief executive officer of a company called cloudPWR. Looking over the blogposts of other students, I read that he talked about his company's flagship product, Airlift. As I was looking up Mr. White and his business, I noticed something interesting. In his company's mission statement, Airlift was actually trademarked. However, when I entered Airlift into the google search bar, I got a lot of hits, none about Mr. White's company and/or product. I got some hits for airplane companies, movies, etc. I guess I learned more about the nature of trademarks through that. Moving on to what Mr. White actually talked about, I liked reading about the way Mr. White talked about development. The way he talke
Read more

Brian Forth

Our third guest speaker was Brian Forth, CEO of SiteCrafting. As the name suggests, SiteCrafting is a web design company that creates and designs websites for its clients. Mr. Forth's story is similar to the story about 'My Uncle's Alders' in that Mr. Forth kind of stumbled across his idea. He had someone ask him to create a website for him, and word got around. Eventually, Mr. Forth realized that he had a good thing going, and the result was SiteCrafting. There were a couple of things that stood out to me about Brian Forth and his company. First of all, his company does not have a sales department and has relied mostly on word-of-mouth. Second, the culture of Brian's company is unique. The office is just one big open area where all employees can easily access each other. Even Brian doesn't have his own office (in the conventional sense). I thought it was interesting when Brian talked about how some clients were let go. I wonder if sometimes a CEO or a company
Read more

Mission and Vision Statement

Once we brought up mission and vision statements, the first question I had was, what's the difference? I always thought the terms were used interchangeably. Unfortunately, I missed the class session in which we talked about these topics in detail, but after a bit of research and asking around, I learned that a vision statement was a statement that highlights where you see your company in the future, and a mission statement is what you will do day to day to get there. I had to do more thinking than I thought to figure out what my vision and mission statements were. Eventually though, I figured it out by thinking about what I wanted my product to do. I want my product to make parking easier for students, so my vision statement would be something like, "Looking to improve the university experience for students across University of Washington campuses." Of course, as my product gets bigger, it would be more general instead of only focusing on University of Washington campuses
Read more