Baveo allows users to post photos, videos, and text updates to a blog devoted entirely to the newest members of the family. The site is well designed for parents and family on the go. Parents can post directly to their Baveo blog via their site or their phones, and friends and family can stay updated via email or text messages.

I recently had the chance to chat with Ari Greenberg, Baveo’s CEO and founder. Ari helped break down where the idea for Baveo came from, how the team came to be, what they’re up to, and a few other thoughts about being an early entrepreneur.

After witnessing a childhood friend and his wife blog about the birth of their first child, Ari’s idea for Baveo was born. Ari saw the chance to make a wonderful and important experience even better. Expecting parents deserved a better and more integrated blogging experience.

Previously at Magnify.net, Ari spent his free time exploring the project further. He had always known he wanted to start his company, but he lacked an idea worth pursuing.

Baveo quickly became that idea, and when he realized it, Ari wasted no time building a team of three. Everyone works for equity, and Ari wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s how he knew the team believed in the idea and wanted to see it succeed. It also ensured the team would be honest with him and tell him when things weren’t going right. Both are equally important.

The site is currently invite-only so the team is working towards building out new features and publicizing the site. There’s a large community of mom and dad bloggers out there for them to tap into, and they’re exploring ways for users to better capture and share baby memories.

No matter what they think now, though, the team is focused on letting their users decide where Baveo goes next. “Everything needs to be about the user,” Ari says, “Users will tell you what they want if you listen.”

For all of you expecting parents out there, sign up for a Baveo invite now. Let your friends know what’s going on with your little cherub and let Baveo know what you think of their service. They’re listening.

The Columbia Venture Community looks poised to be the group that finally brings entrepreneurship to the forefront of the Columbia community (and if not, it at least looks like it could save a senior or two from unwittingly going into banking or consulting).

I’ve written about the Columbia entrepreneur community, or lack thereof, before. In fact, it was my first post. Over the past several months, however, I’ve noticed a marked change in the buzz over Columbia’s commitment to entrepreneurship. It’s come from several places. The focus group I mentioned in my first post was organized by the Columbia Center for Career Education. In April, I attended a Business School-run event, the Columbia Entrepreneur Organization’s Pitchfest. In May, I attended my first Columbia Venture Community event run by Mark Peter Davis, a Business School alumn.

It was at the CVC event that it really felt like things were starting to come together. It was the first time I had really seen a group for all of Columbia — alumni, engineers, business, law, etc. It was the first time I saw an event and a group that looked like they had staying power. Not since CORE somehow got Mark Cuban to speak on campus have I felt that. (I’m not sure if CORE still operates since they’re still sporting the several years old Cuban photo so maybe this is a bad comparison?)

On Tuesday of this week, I attended my third Columbia Venture Community event (one of them slipped through my blogging fingers). On a lazy August day at 6pm on the upper west side, I was shocked to find 50+ people in the basement of Lerner Hall. School’s not even in session!

There were 50+ real, living and breathing people with some affiliation to Columbia who weren’t off ‘summering’ elsewhere for August (which probably means there weren’t too many VCs in the crowd), and who couldn’t think of anything they’d rather be doing than talking about startups. Brilliant!

I spent the networking portion of the night speaking with a variety of interesting people that helped reaffirm my gut feeling about CVC. GoodGame TV developer, Oliver, and I talked about getting started in PHP. GoodGame TV features an entertaining series of videos covering everything gaming related. Great content, not so great UI. (Oliver, expect an email from me. I think a few simple changes would take care of some of the UI issues). I also chatted a bit with Vikram Venkatraman and Sol Kahn, both classmates, colleagues, and friends from our mutual obessions with entrepreneurship.

Tejpaul Bhatia, founder of MediaMerx, promised a Guide to Raising Venture Capital post for Enter Venture in the future — and yes, I will hold you to that Tej. “Everything you’ve ever heard about raising money on blogs is wrong” Tej told a few us. We look forward to hearing what’s right, Tej. I also enjoyed conversations with Frances Ning and Jonathan Wegner. Jonathan’s business card he gave me at my first CVC event still ranks as one of the best I’ve ever picked up (Update 9/21/08: They’re called Moo Cards, and I just ordered a few for Enter Venture). Frances was notable as one of the few women at the event and aspired to to build feeder organizations that would bring Chinese nurses to America.

Everywhere I stepped I was tripping over interesting people, and again, remember, this is August.

Unfortunately, I was not able to stay for most of the presentations, but I was able to see Bartek Ringwelski and Sasha Davidov present InterviewPoint. InterviewPoint is a database of real interview questions from real interviews as recorded by real students. Users can share questions and strategies, as well as benchmark their resumes against other students in similar interviews. I haven’t been in the banking / consulting interview mindset for awhile now, but something tells me that a Vault guide + InterviewPoint combo would be the perfect recipe for your banking or consulting interview.

Of course, this is the Columbia Venture Community. After realizing you could start your own InterviewPoint, there’s no reason for you to go on that consulting or banking interview after all. With all of this excitement around the Columbia entrepreneurial community, there’s no better time to shun the all too familiar Columbia paths. Come out, meet other entrepreneurs, and see what else is out there beyond the banking / consulting world. Bring friends. Join a startup. Start a startup.

It figures that this group has only now come along just as I’m about to move to San Francisco. Two years since I’ve graduated from engineering school, it’s great to finally see entrepreneurship gaining some traction at Columbia.

Farewell CVC and good luck. I expect a Zuckerberg or two by the time I get back to NYC.

When it comes to experience, though, early entrepreneurs should broaden themselves. When you’re starting out, participate in a wide swath of activities to better understand each part of a business. Write a business plan. Code part of your site. Try testing the site. Present your pitch. Whereas a scientist knows how to do research, an entrepreneur must know how to do the research, the grant writing, the accounting, and the floor mopping.

Widening your experiences also teaches you what you’re not good at. When it comes time to build your perfect team, experience will tell you that maybe you’re not the best guy for accounting, even though you know how to do it. Find a rock star accountant as soon as you can.

In the spirit of this idea, here are the 5 ways I try to broaden my experiences:

1. Read.

I’m an RSS (and book) junkie. I read anything from typography and web standards to financing and marketing (and biographies, fiction novels, and an occasional book of the Core Curriculum variety).

2. Get out there.

I practice my message and get new material by going to NYC tech events. Try to find events that are targeted to your market but emphasize different parts of your market. I can’t say enough for Meetup to help with your search. NYC has several Meetup web groups, some specific to video, marketing, web standards, programming languages, etc. There are also sites that announce weekly events. For NYC, try Garysguide, NextNY‘s calendar, and Silicon Alley Insider‘s weekly posts.

3. Try it.

Enter Venture is just one way that I try out my ideas. I practice teasing out ideas on my whiteboard and rough site specs for feedback from friends. You can build a local version of your site to practice your coding skills. Open Photoshop, or Gimp and play with some color scheme ideas using tutorials on the web. Sign up to be a software tester at uTest.

4. Analyze.

I’ve been using Google Analytics, Feedburner, and WP Stats to track visitor usage and identify visitor trends. I’m in the midst of using Crazy Egg to better understand usage patterns on the site, which will help drive my next round of Enter Venture updates.

5. Improve.

If you follow #1-4, you should always be improving. Be aware of what you’ve improved on and celebrate it. Be, also, aware of what you need work on and work on it.

Start from #1 again.

(If there are any rock star accountants out there, let me know what you’re up to.)

1. It’s great to know how to teach one’s self
2. It’s great that there’s this thing called the “internets” to help

Point #2 is something I want to revisit later. Using the internet as a learning tool has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are obvious. You can search for anything and often, thanks to today’s search technology, find exactly what you’re looking for at the end of that long tail. The minuses, though, I think are less obvious and something I’d like to dedicate a longer post to. The internet has a time problem. We’ll just leave it at that.

Point #1 is the real reason for this post. Continuous education and self teaching are vital to the success of any early entrepreneur. It’s impossible for you to know at the outset everything you’ll need to know to be successful. Your success will be defined by your ability to continuously learn (and adapt, and get lucky once or twice).

Now, I have struggled for the past two years to better understand the value of my engineering degree. I have yet to really use the subject matter knowledge acquired from four years of biomedical imaging engineering. My single summer internship studying brain waves was fascinating, but a lifetime of working in hospital basements is not exactly what I’ve planned for myself.

What I’ve come to believe, and this past weekend substantiates this, is that an engineering degree teaches you the fundamentals to be a better self educator and problem solver. No matter what you go on to do after college, these fundamentals will help guide the way you improve, break down problems, and work with a team towards a solution.

Here are the 5 reasons I think my engineering education was crucial to my early entrepreneurship path. There’s certainly more, and I’d love to hear what other people think:

1. Self Education

I’m not sure if it’s by design or due to the general ineptitude of most engineering professors, but engineering tends to be really poorly taught. I certainly don’t blame the professors. Most of them were hired to do research. They simply aren’t there to engage you in the content, and the textbooks certainly don’t help.

You have to engage yourself in engineering. You have to find the right combination of study groups, office hours, and practice problems that work for you. You learn to focus and compile. You learn by doing.

The way we refer to ‘studying’ before an engineering exam is probably a misnomer. More often, this time is spent practicing. Take that problem from Week 10 that you’re sure will be on the exam. Write out the solution step-by-step. Then, write it out again, but this time, change the numbers. Last, give yourself a final practice test by doing the problem without the book in front of you.

Even when you work out the answer to the equation, your job still isn’t done. Your next class will ask you to implement that solution with a program in Matlab. You’ll never know everything about Matlab and all of it’s functions so you better get used to digging around it’s help files and teaching yourself what you need to know along the way.

2. A Problem Solving Framework

I think the problem solving framework is best represented in an engineer’s final thesis or project.

My senior BME project team took on the following project: How could we create a portable set of underarm crutches to be used by sports trainers? We spent the first few months simply breaking down the problem. How small is portable? (Trainers typically carry duffle bags). How much weight must they support? (Accounting for the football team’s linemen, a lot). How much money do we have to build this prototype? (A little).

Once we knew the answers to these questions, we could think about solutions. Using our newly acquired Self Education skills we figured out the details for implementing.

(In case you’re wondering, we ended up building a crutch made of hinged aluminum segments with a wire running through the center that could be tightened and released to extend and fold the crutch. Cool stuff.)

3. Finishing spirit

It’s incredibly hard to get partial credit in engineering. Say you have a Java assignment that’s due at 9am on Friday morning. You could spend every waking hour from the Sunday night prior working on that assignment. You’ll make all kinds of mistakes, get sidetracked by random problems, but still find incremental improvements. What every engineering student knows, though, is if their program doesn’t run at 9am on Friday morning, it’s all for naught. Everything has to work when you hit ‘Enter’. I think it’s this feeling that keeps us up the night before. Success is relatively binary.

4. Side-by-side work

I can’t speak for every major, but one of the best things about BME was working side-by-side with professors and TAs during projects and labs. You can learn so much more than answers to problem sets this way. You see their passion and technique. How do they hold their instruments? How do they comment their code? It’s typically worth emulating.

I don’t think this extends outside of engineering all that often. Your poetry professors can’t write an example poem with you looking over their shoulder. Your ChemE professor can run that experiment though. Your CS professor can dazzle you with that on-the-spot ‘Hello world’ program in CS1007.

5. Teamwork

This was a bit of a late edition to the post. It’s also different than reason #4. Side-by-side work has more to do with emulating the best than working with a team of your peers.

I’m not entirely convinced that my engineering degree helped instill an appreciation for teamwork that I didn’t already have. Twenty years of team sports had already taught me most of what engineering school reinforced. If you haven’t had a similar experience, count this as an important reason #5.

I can remember a conversation my lab team once had with a graduate teaching assistant during some downtime in senior lab. He was a BME PhD student with a BS in MechE. He told us that if he had to do it all over again, he would have been a BME student from undergrad onwards. Obviously he just wished he could have spent another 4 years of his life talking about BME, I thought, but that wasn’t it. Instead, he told us that a BME degree would allow us to do anything. If you didn’t like medicine and biology, you could leverage your EE and CS classes. If you didn’t like those, you could leverage all of those math classes. If you didn’t like those, well, you could just fake it.

As I’m writing this now, I think his words ring true for practically any engineering major. Engineering isn’t about finding the right path over the course of a short, immature 4 year period of your life. Engineering is about learning how to learn, learning how to problem solve, and learning how to improve.

Thanks Columbia. (I never thought I’d say that before I finished paying the bill).

Several months ago I asked my friend Laks to recommend a good book that would really help me better understand how software should be done. For the past two years, I’ve worked in two completely different environments and seen two completely different ways of creating a web application. Unfortunately, I’ve never really felt like I’d learned to do things the right way.

I first tried reading the book online, but I didn’t appreciate the book in the same way when I had to follow a link somewhere, get up from my computer, sit down and find my place if I hadn’t left the page open from the night before. I knew I enjoyed what I was reading, but it was hard to keep coming back so I broke down and bought the book version for $25.

Aside from The Elements of Style, I don’t think there’s a smaller, more valuable book out there. I read the book on my way back from this year’s New Orleans Jazz Fest. On what should have been a let down flight, I found myself riveted by all 187 pages of this thing. A day after Jazz Fest and 2 hours into my flight I had the chills.

Getting real isn’t the type of book that’s going to tell you what to do with every little detail. It tells you how to focus on a tightly focused framework that will guide you to how you should handle every little detail. Just check out the chapter titles:

• Introduction
• The Starting Line
• Stay Lean
• Priorities
• Feature Selection
• Process
• The Organization
• Staffing
• Interface Design
• Code
• Words
• Pricing and Signup
• Promotion
• Support
• Post-Launch
• Conclusion

Talk about brevity. This book hits you over the head with its succinctness. Try digging through another book about software and see if you can find as much covered in as few words as 37signals has done with Getting Real.

One of the tell tale ways I know I’ve found a good book is by checking to see how many pages I’ve dog ear’d. I’d say about 15% of this book meets this description. There’s all kinds of gems in here, everything from hiring:

“Find someone who’s enthusiastic… Someone who’s excited to build what you’re building. Someone who hates the same things you hate. Someone who’s thrilled to climb aboard your train.”

To making opinionated software:

“Some people argue software should be agnostic… We think that’s bullshit. The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides.”

To how to approach any type of problem:

“Are you facing an issue that’s too big to wrap your mind around? Break it down. Keep dividing problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to digest them.”

And on and on. Or not so “on and on”? The book’s only 187 pages!

Finally, if you’re not ready to plunk down $25 for your own copy, check out this David Heinemeir Hansson speech. Let one of the authors push you over the hill:

(Isn’t Omnisio’s video / powerpoint slick? I have to think this will become more popular.)

I don’t think I’ll ever stumble upon the best way to create software, but I think this book is certainly close.

Now, I’ve never lived or worked in Silicon Valley, but I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard that students are encouraged to pursue entrepreneurship. I know that they have startup career fairs. What I knew about the NY startup scene during college was this: nothing.

So, here are my two ideas for how Silicon Alley can change that:

1. Silicon Alley needs to go to school

At the CVC event tonight, I heard and participated in several conversations that went like this:

• “I had no idea there were startups in NYC when I was in school.”
• “Are there companies that come to campus that aren’t investment banks or consulting firms?”
• “Why doesn’t anyone just go recruit from SEAS (Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)?”

Great question. I graduated from SEAS in 2006. While there, I had no idea that NYC had even a single startup. I knew exactly who McKinsey, BCG, Booz Allen, Deloitte, UBS, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs were, or rather, after going to Columbia I knew who these firms were. I couldn’t agree more with Ari Greenberg of Baveo when he says that, “before I came to Columbia. I didn’t even know what the hell an investment bank or consulting firm was.”

I get the impression that Silicon Valley really cultivates the relationship with the young talent coming out of its area’s schools. I remember reading an article from Hacker News that said that many of UC Berkeley’s CS majors had multiple job offers.

Just before today’s CVC event, I ran into a recently graduated CS major who lived on my floor when I was a freshman RA (don’t ask). What’s he up to these days? He’s looking for a job. Looking for a job??!! Are you crazy?

Do you know how many times I’ve been at tech events lately where someone announces they’re hiring? This always strikes me as amazing. You’re looking to hire someone at an event full of people already working for startups or people planning to start their own? Really? Is there no better place to ask that question?

Silicon Alley should be hammering on Columbia and NYU’s doors. What more could a startup ask for than a recent graduate with lots of energy, the willingness to learn, and tons of time on their hands? Sure, it takes a leap of faith to recruit entry level developers from college, but it sure beats standing in a conference room while holding a “Looking for Developers” sign over your head.

The message to Silicon Alley is simple. Students have no idea that you exist because, well, you’re not hiring them!

2. Silicon Alley needs to be the most popular kid in school

I think this would be pretty easily attained by Silicon Alley once they start reaching into the area’s universities. How many college students really dream about donning that suit and tie when they graduate, anyways?

The area needs more buzz. It needs to create this buzz by looking outside its IAC walls. It needs success stories that people know about and hear about. Students shouldn’t find out about the Silicon Alley startup scene two years after graduation. They should be dreaming about being a part of it from the moment they step on campus. They’ll see startups, join startups, and think, “Hey, I can start one of these on my own.”

All of a sudden, that CS major becomes more attractive. You don’t need to move across the country. You don’t need to squeeze in that economics minor to make yourself more attractive to the McKinseys and Booz Allens (not that I’m advocating being one dimensional). Awareness will build on campus. Students will start telling stories about those firms that are dishing out free lunch and that let you wear jeans to work.

I can just imagine the career fair now. Imagine a table for Meetup right next to the table for JP Morgan Chase. How many engineers would choose writing back end financial software over working on a hot web product?

As Mark Davis said at today’s CVC event, “Columbia has a lot of people interested in entrepreneurship, but there’s not a lot of community.” The community has to come both from the universities and industry.

Columbia is starting to get it’s act together. Your move, Silicon Alley.

Sometimes the right choice is no team at all — but this is not the sustainable or scalable option for most operations.

How does an entrepreneur, and a starving one at that, build a team of like-minded, competent, individuals who will work with and not against the entrepreneur or each other?

I don’t know the right answer, but have a running theory:

The optimal team is build both with trusted associates, as well as with experimental new talent.  Unfortunately, payroll takes capital. If you’re starving, that capital comes out of the marketing budget or the R&D budget, or food/rent.

So how do you compensate a resource without funding?

Stay tuned for an upcoming post on incentives…

I have launched a social experiment of my own for new talent that includes both experiential incentives and targeted good faith.

My current team includes a few trusted associates, all part-time, and freelanced admin and skilled labor resources. If the experiment above goes well, it will include a few more feet on the ground.

I can’t seem to post word documents to the blog, but am happy to let people see it. It exemplifies much of what I believe in partnering with your talent and structuring fair incentives.

I would be glad to share it with anyone who is interested, and don’t even mind if you use it as long as you ask.

My initial impression is that Mark Davis has addressed many of my concerns about the Columbia entrepreneurial community in one fell swoop. This event brought together alumni and students, all of the schools, entrepreneurs at a variety of levels, and had a very NY Tech vibe to it. Not a bad first meeting.

After the event I was speaking with the creators of MyOffice about how to improve the event, and the one thing we kept coming back to was the need for feedback. (Isn’t that the great thing about entrepreneurs? They’re always looking for someone to tell them they’re wrong. They’re always looking to improve.) I have a few ideas to make the CVC events better, and in the spirit of one of those ideas, feedback, here’s my assessment of the companies that presented:

ThisTechnology

ThisTechnology has created a system that will bring internet style banner ads to television. I think most people harp over the fact that their platform will add advertisements to their television screens, but I don’t really worry about that. I’ve seen this style of advertising overseas so I think it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the norm here. I don’t claim to fully understand how this platform works, but I can see the end product.

Jeff’s presentation was professional but shaky because he rifled through his speech and his slides. Ultimately, he showed his product and you got it. The existing partnerships, staff composition (12 people full-time, 3 people part-time, and 1 person over-time — great line), and experience were encouraging. What’s less encouraging is that I can’t seem to find their website in a search.

SocialDough

Social Dough is an engagement advertising platform. It guarantees engagement for advertisers, publishers, and content consumers, everyone makes money and saves money.

SocialDough seemed to have a bit too much figured out, but not too much figured out — if that makes any sense? They had a 6 year revenue projection, but no developer. I wasn’t sure how it worked, but I still remember a PowerPoint slide with a 2000% increase.

I think SocialDough is doing the right thing by getting out there and presenting their idea, but I can’t tell if this is anymore than an idea at this point. Derek and his partner should really focus on rounding out their team and building their product, less on excel noise and buzzwords.

MediaMerx

MediaMerx has created a platform that distributes premium video to emerging markets. The point of the pitch was simple: there is a growing affluent segment in emerging markets that has money to spend on what we’re selling them. Brilliant. They could be selling designer handbags to this segment and it’d be a good idea. Trade your designer handbag shipping issues for broadband issues and you have MediaMerx.

Tejpaul Bhatia could have given this presentation in his sleep. He clearly laid out his company and transitioned well into several demos of his product. As one of the creators of ESPN 360, I’m confident he knows the industry well and shows it during Q&A.

Who Tours

Dave Smith is a product guy, and I loved it. He barely stood up to acknowledge the crowd before sitting to his product demo and living the “Show don’t tell” mantra. He walked us through WhoTours, a smart concert search engine. WhoTours can use your iTunes library to search the internet for concerts you’d enjoy. Sort of. The demo had a bit of hitch, but given Dave’s passion for the product I have no doubt it’s something he’ll fix.

This is the most enjoyable review to write because I have something to play with at home and there’s an actual product to talk about. I think the UI could use a bit of a reworking, but they have a great homepage graphic to work from.

Dave wasn’t prepared to and didn’t know how to answer some of the financial questions in the crowd. Great. That’s why he was there. It was great to see him use the Q&A to survey the crowd for revenue ideas.

Snooth

Snooth has created the worlds largest wine community social networking website. Their recommendation system is comprehensive with forums, ratings, connection to stores and distributors, and a variety of search filters. It’s a fun website that even a non-vino can appreciate with a pleasant, interactive experience that is both well branded and easy to navigate.

Philip James presentation was hampered a bit by IE6. He handled it well and stayed away from problem spots on the site, but his next purchase should probably be an adapter for his Mac so he doesn’t have to demo with IE6 again. Snooth sounds like a company that has targeted a niche, is iterating their site, and is growing.

All in all, this was a great step in the right direction for the Columbia Venture Community. I was impressed with the presenters. The group has the potential to grow and the opportunity to do so. To be successful, it will need to be prepared to support the needs of undergraduate early entrepreneurs to VCs, but I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

In my warmup post, I talked about the the issues facing the Columbia entrepreneurial community and how it struggled to gain traction. I’m happy to report, just a week later, that I feel the tide may truly be turning. I’m began writing this post from Room 140, Uris Hall at Columbia University where the first ever Columbia Entrepreneur Organization’s (CEO) PitchFest was going on.

The event was a first in more ways than one though. While CEO is a graduate business school organization, the event was open to students from all of the schools as well as alumni. Flyers covered the campus. I received three separate emails for the event, and I’m an alumni. I can only imagine how many times current students were emailed. While the numbers weren’t extraordinary, the 100+ people who attended the PitchFest witnessed one of the more successful Columbia entrepreneur events I’ve seen in years.

The idea behind the event was to bring together the skills and talents of the various schools at Columbia. Each person who chose to do so was given 1 minute to present who they were, what idea or existing business they had, and what they were looking for.

I loved this framework. I believe it successfully addressed two of the most frustrating pieces to networking events.

One, everyone had a chance to participate. There were all kinds of businesses and presenters. Very few people stood to start the event, but after awhile the sheer number of presentations made it easier to take your own turn in front of the room. After all, everyone was doing it.

Two, the event was efficient. What better way to force people to hone their message than giving them only one minute? Better yet, for those in the audience, how else would you have been able to hear so many different ideas and opportunities?

Some of my favorite presentations were about:

• A medical device company specializing in handicapped devices. Better yet, the presentation was made by a woman that used walking crutches. If I had money, that’s someone I would invest in — someone who uses their handicap to a competitive advantage.
• A freshman from the biomedical engineering program (BME, what what!) who has grown his pancake making hobby into a business that will challenge the vendors on campus. He was the youngest person in the room and one of the best dressed. I could go on, but let’s just say I was impressed.
• Finally, those people who simply offered their services were also among my favorites. These experience-offerers truly understood the spirit of the event.

I also presented and met some interesting people, but I don’t want to talk about that just yet. Right now I have an idea and a prayer but nothing more. I’m a firm believer in the fact that ideas are worth nothing and execution is worth everything. However recently, I’ve changed that belief slightly with my most recent idea. Ideas still aren’t worth anything and execution is still worth everything, BUT, timing is golden.

Overall, well done CEO. It’s good to see these types of events at Columbia, and I was impressed with all of my peers. Next task for CEO and other entrepreneurial groups on campus: How do you capture the attention of the rest of the 99.5% of the student body that missed this event (to say nothing of the alumni network in the area)?