May 31, 2009

Year End Performances

I’ve heard that the fear of public speaking is one of the top fears in the world.  According to Speech Topics Help, Advice & Ideas the top fears are:

1. Fear of public speaking (Glossophobia)
2. Fear of death (Necrophobia)
3. Fear of spiders (Arachnophobia)
4. Fear of darkness (Achluophobia, Scotophobia or Myctophobia)
5. Fear of heights (Acrophobia)
6. Fear of people or social situations (Sociophobia)
7. Fear of flying (Aerophobia)
8. Fear of open spaces(Agoraphobia)
9. Fear of thunder and lightning(Brontophobia)
10. Fear of confined spaces(Claustrophobia)

So it’s amazing to me how little kids pull of their year end school performances.  I was so proud of my two kids this weekend.  They had their year end performances this past Saturday.  They go to the same international school so they both got up in front of a crowd of tons of parents and kids at the University of Texas at Austin JJ Pickle Center and sang songs, acted out skits, and read poems in French, Spanish, and English!

Both of our kids in the early days seemed to always have a meltdown when they performed.  Our son went to Montessori school and invariably he would freak out, not say a word, or get pissed off.  Of course it was quite embarrassing for us parents plus we felt bad for him.  Our daughter did the same thing.  She would be totally fine before the performance but then all of a sudden when she saw the crowd of people she would shut down and get shy and embarrassed.  She would then cry afterward because she felt she had let us down.  Of course we would hug them and tell them they did a great job and it’s OK to get nervous sometimes.

But this time was different.  They both preformed and sang with gusto!  I was so proud of them.

It’s funny how these performances bring back the memories of when I performed as a kid.  I’ve probably blocked out some occasions, but I do remember totally blanking on what came next in one of my piano recitals.  I think I even forgot words during a voice recital.  I felt horrible and completely embarrassed for days.  I can’t remember what my mother said to me but I probably didn’t hear anything over my internal dialogue of ‘you are such a loser.’  But for some insane reason, I kept on trying different things.  I guess it’s sort of like getting back on that horse after they buck you off (which happened to me quite a few times – once I even broke my arm in a horse riding incident).  The fear is still there but each time you get a little bit more used to it.

The same is true for trying new things in business and life.  Sure you get hurt and bucked off from time to time, but you have to get back on and try different things.  No sense in beating your head against the same wall and getting the same undesired result.  You should try beating it at a slightly different angle or just get off the horse and try a different one. 

Anyway, I’m thrilled they did so well and had a good time.  Our daughter rewarded us by getting sick today.  Hopefully she’s better by tomorrow.  Maybe if she watches enough Dora the Explorer she’ll be peachy keen by tomorrow…one can only hope!

I hope all of you other parents out there survived your school’s year end performances!

May 25, 2009

Have You Discovered Your Passion?

Everyone has heard the word passion.  It’s written about in business books, in fiction books, in poems, in romance novels, etc..  It’s shown on TV and in the movies when people find their true loves or their calling in life.  But what is it?  In the world of entrepreneurship, people tell you in order to be successful you must be passionate about what you are doing.  I’ve run into a lot of people who appear passionate about what they are doing but they don’t always succeed in the way they expected.  Passion ebbs and flows in most everything in life.  Sometimes you are in love with your business and sometimes you aren’t, but in order to survive like Microsoft, Dell, Apple, etc. the passion must be there, the underlying love for your products, people, and company must be there and the gaps between must not be long.

They say true passion can be traced back to childhood, when everything seemed possible.  My son is passionate about soccer and hanging out with his good buddies.  If it was up to him, he’d be kicking around a soccer ball all day long.  I often have to tell him not to kick the soccer ball in the main part of the house.   If we’d let him, he’d probably sleep with his soccer ball.  If you mention one of his friend’s names, he will incessantly ask us when we are going to see him next.  He’s a bit of a socialite like his mom.

I can’t tell what my daughter is passionate about yet, but I think she has an affinity for music and lip gloss.  We have a keyboard in our house that my father gave us and she tends to gravitate to it and punch the keys from time to time.  And she likes to play the bowling game on the Wii.

My husband is passionate about starting the multi-lingual, international Magellan School here in Austin.  He is passionate about his kids learning Spanish since he is fluent in Spanish and wants them to have the gift of multiple languages that was given to him.  He is also passionate about biking and exercising.  He set a goal to do the Shiner Bash – 100 mile ride and he did it.  He exercises every day and he says he’s in the best shape he’s ever been in his life.

What a blessing it must be to discover your passion and find yourself being able to realize your goals.  It’s even better when you can make a living at it.  It seems like most people can’t turn their passion into making a living for whatever reasons whether it be timing, market acceptance, encouragement, money, health, ability, skills, etc.  Many people try to keep their passion alive on the side or after some time, we forget what it was we were passionate about.

Right now in my life, I’m most passionate about my kids.  I am passionate about helping people achieve more than they thought they could.   When I look back upon my childhood, I remember the passion I had for music.  I think my father actually started taking us to piano lessons when I was about 9 years old when we lived in Albuquerque, NM.  When we moved to Lubbock, TX , I sought out my own piano teacher who lived nearby and I would walk to her house for lessons.  It was hard to find time to practice and hard to find time to continue since it was just me, my mom, and my sister.  My grandmother studied piano in Oxford University in England so I must get some of my passion for music from her.  Sadly, I can’t play the piano today, but I can sing.

I sang in church and actually did a solo in front of the entire church in my early teens.  I sang in high school choir.  I sought out my own voice teacher and when I went to college at UT Austin, I took voice courses for two semesters.  I knew I was reasonably good, but not great.   I never envisioned myself singing in a musical or singing opera so I guess I thought what’s the point and continued on with my business degree.  In grad school I sang a few songs in a couple of bands.

I also remembered that I liked to write.  In my early teens, a few girlfriends and I would start this notebook with a story and each of us would have to write the next part until we ended up with a full story.  I hate to admit this, but I think Michael Jackson and his glove showed up a time or two in those stories.   I wonder what happened to those notebooks.  I would also invariably get high grades in creativity in my English classes but very low grades in grammar.  The concept of grammar didn’t click for me until my freshman English class in college for some reason.

I also didn’t have anyone around me encouraging me, connecting me with people, giving me feedback, or showing me the way to nurture those creative right brain activities I was drawn to.  So I did what any respectable child of two doctors would do….I got an Accounting degree and then an MBA, which has served me well and odds are has resulted in a much more lucrative career than if I had pursued writing, singing or horse back riding (another younger days hobby of mine) as a career.

So now here I am in mid-life.  Too old to start up regular horse back riding again for fear of breaking my bones…well not really, but not enough time to go to a barn and take care of a horse.  It’s highly unlikely that I can make singing a financially rewarding career at this point in my life, but I am enjoying my voice lessons and relish any time I can make it to a jam session.  I do enjoy writing in my blog.

So that leaves me to figure out how best to blend my passion for working with people, with a product I’m passionate about, with a path to millions of dollars….

Any suggestions?  How did you discover your passion?

May 22, 2009

Board Management

On May 20, 2009, we held a board management Lunch & Learn at the Austin Technology Incubator.   We hold these monthly or bi-monthly.  Our next one is going to be on Building A Great Corporate Culture.  It was a very productive meeting and our companies learned a lot.   I served as moderator and the people on the panel (with the exception of Janice because she got struck by swine flu sick) were:

Richard C. Benkendorf, Co-founder/Managing Principal, Technology Impact Partners (TIP)

Dick, through his role at TIP, serves on the Board of Directors or Advisory Board of both private and public firms as well as investment partnerships including Wave Max, Open Scan, Care Data Systems, Revelation, Concentric Equity Partners, AllianceTech, Adtron, State Street, Murphree Ventures, Facilities Technology Group and CMIT Solutions as well as not for profit entities such hospital charitable or civic organizations.  Other current or very recent investees of TIP include @security, Globalscape (now public), Voxpath Networks, Pointserve, Tobin, Dwight’s Energy Data, Advent Networks, Liberty Fitness, Facilities Technology Group, American Telesource (now public), Reunion Ventures, and Affinegy.

Previously, Dick was a Senior VP of Ameritech and prior to that spent 16 years at IBM.  He founded The American Software Company (TASC) and was President of Telemed and Chairman of Execucom.  He founded T/D Technology, a private equity firm that acquired and operated software and information technology firms.  He also founded ISSS Ventures, a $155M venture capital fund.

Bob Bridge, Entrepreneur In Residence, Office of Technology Commercialization

Bob has been in management, marketing, and engineering roles at semiconductor and system companies for 33 years, including serving as founding CEO at three technology companies. One of those companies, Zilker Labs was sold to Intersil in December 2008. Bob has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Austin Ventures, vice president of marketing at Agere (a network processor IC startup), and vice president and general manager for communications ICs at Crystal Semiconductor/Cirrus Logic. Additionally, Bob has held engineering and management positions at Motorola, AT&T corporate headquarters and AT&T Bell Labs. Bob holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematical Sciences from Rice University.

Janice Ryan, CEO and Chairman of Social Dynamix

Janice Ryan has a 27 year track record of growing profitable sales organizations and venture-backed startups.  She is currently CEO and Chairman of Social Dynamix, an early stage venture focused on tools for social media performance measurement.  Prior to this, she was CEO of Sigma Dynamics, a predictive analytics software company in San Mateo, which under her leadership was sold to Oracle (ORCL) in August of ‘06.  Prior to Sigma Dynamics, Ryan was the founding President/COO, of ROME Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Texas.  She was also a member of the founding executive team that launched Vignette Corporation (VIGN), an early internet enterprise software company which experienced one of the most successful IPOs of 1999.  As Vice President of Sales at Vignette, Ryan established the company’s sales infrastructure and management team, and was responsible for driving Vignette’s revenue through all channels worldwide, including direct sales, telesales and a network of systems integrators and resellers.

Ryan has served on several high tech Boards and Advisory Boards, and as an Interim Executive for multiple venture-backed companies in Texas and California.  Early in her career she held a variety of senior sales and leadership positions at IBM, Lotus Development, Filenet Corporation and ViewStar.  Active in philanthropic causes, Ryan has also served on various non-profit Boards, currently serving with the Center for Child Protection.  She earned her BBA degree from Baylor University with distinction in the fall of 1977.

Brian P. Wong, Director, Intersil Corp.

Brian was the President and CEO of D2Audio Corporation, a leading audio semiconductor and software company, which he recently sold to Intersil, a public company in August 2008.  He is currently running the D2Audio-Intersil business as part of Intersil Corp. Mr. Wong has more than 26 years experience as an executive and general manager in the sales, marketing and the development of semiconductors, firmware and software.  Market sector experience includes digital media, consumer, IT and computing, telecom, and storage.  His technology experience includes power management; digital audio, optical and wired datacom; data converters; semiconductors; optical, firmware/software.

Brian has closed over $130M from Venture Capital funds and corporate strategic partners.  He has formed Strategic Partnerships involving investment and/or licensing with AMD, Intel, Intersil, Delta Electronics, MediaTek, and Form Factor. Previously, Mr. Wong was CEO at Primarion Inc, a company focused on I/O and Power Management ICs, which was acquired by Infineon.  Prior to that, he was a senior manager at TRW and ran the Mixed Signal IC business, which included data converter, Clock/Data Recovery, PLL, and high speed digital ICs. Mr. Wong holds a BSEE from University of California, Los Angeles, a MSEE from University of Southern California, has taken graduate management classes at UCLA Anderson School of Management. He is the Chairman of The Austin Technology Council, sits on the Advisory Board for the UC Davis ECE Department, and served on the board of Integral Wave Technologies, a power management company.

The key takeaways were:

• Pick and interview your board members carefully.  Pick people with skills that complement yours.
• Make sure there are no surprises on the day of the board meeting, unless of course they are good surprises!
• Equity compensation for board members ranges from .25% to 1.00% and is granted up front or vests over time depending on the board and the company
• Sizes of the board ranges from 3 to 5 people at the very early stage.  Any more it becomes unweildy and unproductive.
• Boards in small, start-up companies usually meet at least once per month.
• After a successful board meeting, everyone should know the financial state of the company, people/equity grants, milestones achieved, and milestones to be achieved.

It was great to hear the war stories and I contributed some of my own.   They are truly battle scars.

May 21, 2009

Connecting The Dots

Sometimes the dots connect and sometimes they don’t.   Sometimes you connect them and a nice picture emerges.  Sometimes you connect them and a mess shows up.  Some seemingly random dots are showing up in my life right now and I’m not sure if and how I should connect them or if there is any connection at all.  Here they are:

I recently received the new & improved purple peacock hat I mentioned that I wanted in my New Year’s Resolutions post that my good friend Julie Fergerson, VP of Emerging Technology at Debix, got me for my birthday.  The one she got me was too big for my small head so I sent it back and the designer, Sharmon Hardin, created me a new one that fits great and even has peacock feathers!  She was so friendly and easy to communicate with. Every hat someone buys from her she makes another for St. Jude’s.  I think I’m going to submit Sharmon and her hat business for inclusion in Seth Godin’s new book.  Now I have to wear it to lunch with my friend one day!

My daughter made me a beautiful bracelet for Mother’s Day that I wore to work yesterday and got many compliments on.  Of course, I was shoving it in people’s face to look at it so they were forced to say how pretty it was whether they liked it or not.   But it is quite lovely.  I’ve been noticing her personality starting to show more.  Sometimes when she says something, I’m taken aback at her sophistication and the signs that she’s growing up.  I smile at her confidence and beauty.  She’s starting to drop her baby words but I still tell her she needs to get her ’swim soup’ when she’s going swimming.  She had so many cute words that will probably hang around in our family’s vocabulary forever.  I used to come up with words when I couldn’t say something properly and my mother still reminds me of those or says them in sentences when she’s talking to me.  I had words for elephant (my favorite animal), apple, sweet things, etc.

My son made me a wonderful card with a picture that he drew of himself on the front and he wrote “I love you mommy” in French inside the card.  I have it on my desk at work and several people have remarked how cute they thought it was.  The only word I remember that he used to say was ‘mimi’ for milk otherwise he seemed to pretty much learn a word and say it right.

Our roof was damaged in a recent hail storm and even with insurance coverage it will cost us $3 to $4K out of pocket.

My husband’s car was practically totaled by the hail storm with windows blown out and body damage that will also put us out of pocket some money.  The windows are fixed so he can drive it but he still has dents all over his car.  His car is jinxed because so many things have happened to it.

Interesting opportunities are presenting themselves for me and Babble Soft making me wonder how I should deal with them.

I’ve had a surge of creativity recently around writing song lyrics, singing, and writing in general but no consistent time and space to get it out.  It’s all bottled up and I feel sometimes like I’m literally going to explode.  I’ve never experienced this before, but it’s a form of torture (not water boarding).  I also don’t generally hang around people who get that or who I can share what I’ve been able to write, which makes me a little sad sometimes.  It helps that I work in weekly voice lessons over lunch.  We are working towards recording a few songs for demo purposes.  I tell my voice instructor that I consider our lessons therapy sessions!

I am tired from burning the candle at both ends as they say.  The whole Building A Web Business After Hours is taking it’s toll.  I’m home sick today just feeling worn out with a scratchy throat.  The upset tummy has disappeared for now.  I will hopefully be fine tomorrow.

The new school, The Magellan School, that my husband is founding is going really well and set to open this August 2009.  Many families have already signed up and donations are coming in.  The first years are always challenging so it’s going to be tight around here for a while.

There’s a bunch of other dots that I either can’t write about or I’ve forgotten but needless to say I am living in interesting times and it’s seems like it’s exactly where I’m meant to be to deal with what lies ahead…

How about your dots?

May 17, 2009

4 Steps to a Server Non-Migration

And now for a guest post by my business partner, Nicole Johnson, who is the VP of Product Development for Babble Soft on the topic of moving servers.  She shares the ups and downs and great learning experiences of our recent attempt to move servers from a dedicated to shared environment.

****

Recently, we decided to attempt to migrate our Babble Soft site from our own dedicated server at Rackspace to a shared server hosted by Mosso, which was spun out of Rackspace. It turned out to be a time-intensive process and in the end, didn’t work out. We thought it would be a good idea to chronicle what we went through just in case you are thinking about doing something like this, too, just to keep a few things in mind.  Although it didn’t work for us, it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for others.

1. Server Assessment
The first step in our migration was to make sure the new environment would work for us. We had to make sure that our applications would work which are written using Microsoft’s .NET programming model and our main site and blog would work, written in php on the same server. After reviewing the “Is it a good fit?” guidelines, we deemed it should work. It would be a transition to go from having your own server to sharing: No more remote connections and no more SQL Server Profiler (among other things, but it would be for the benefit of the company to reduce costs.

2. Test, test, test
The second step of server migration is to test your application and website on the new server. We set up a new account and installed everything on the new server WITHOUT updating our domain host to the new location, yet. Mosso makes things VERY easy to test your website. In addition to that, the live chat tech support is invaluable!  All of the techs were very knowledgeable (some more than others, but all good) and very helpful. They were very eager to help me and did a great job.

One trouble spot was that when I tested the blog, it did not work. It’s a WordPress blog and moving Aruni’s blog, entrepreMusings, over was a breeze, but not our Babble Soft corporate blog. I couldn’t easily go to wp-admin because it kept trying to go to the domain, which was on our old server. After talking things over with the Mosso techs, we determined it might just be because we were “testing” and it would be fine when it came over. Wrong, but that’s just how technology goes sometimes. I’d later spend a good part of a whole day on a Redirect Loop Error that would only be solved by installing the Disable Canonical URL Redirection Plugin that both one of the Mosso techs and @clecompte gave me at almost the same time. I still have no idea why it worked on our server and not on the Mosso server, but c’est la vie, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. The blog still didn’t work after that due to our server having a default IIS configuration and blog posts don’t end in .php to “tell” the server that it should handle them as such, but I’m probably getting into too much tech talk now, so we’ll end that there. I would have gotten it to work, eventually…had we really finished the transfer.

3. Plan the downtime for the move
The third step to our migration was to take our applications down in an organized way. In our quarterly newsletter, we warned our users the site would be down for maintenance the week of May 11th, Mother’s Day. Aruni and I are both mothers, but, it would be a good day for the site to be down since most of our customers are moms, too, and they would likely be doing Mother’s Day “things”, so we “took one for the team” and planned to work that day. I had everything ready to go, so Aruni put our application and purchase page in maintenance mode and submitted for the DNS change at the domain host. They proved to move the site quickly and I was able to bring our application back online within a few hours (would have been faster if I hadn’t been a mom that day, but that’s what happens when a company is run by two moms). Unfortunately, it was not that simple to bring the purchase page back up as there was a database connectivity issue, but being the work-a-holic that I am, I worked on that until 2am and then part of the next day and fixed it. We were on our way. So, what went wrong?

4. Know when to cut your losses
In the grand scheme of things, had this been what I do full time all day, I probably didn’t spend THAT much time on this whole project, however, in a working-part-time-on-three-jobs kind of way (five if you count being a wife and mom), it proved to be almost “3 weeks” of work. So, when I was putting the finishing touches on everything, trying to make it 100% functional and the Mosso techs (by now we’ve become fast friends and all) let me know that Mosso was going to medium trust security level on all servers, it became a deal breaker. It’s not because medium trust is a bad thing. In fact, I think it might be a scary thing they weren’t in the first place, being a shared server and all, and it’s a good thing they are changing that. But, now I just spent “3 weeks” testing and moving an application on a server that is not configured like the final environment and our application doesn’t work in medium trust “as is.”

This is not to say that we couldn’t make it run in medium trust and who’s to say that it wouldn’t be just a day’s work, but the way technology is, it could be a day or another “3 weeks.”  At this point, we have now lost too much productive time on this project to make this worth it. Taking Seth Godin’s advice, we decided to ignore sunk costs and determined that my time moving forward would be better spent on one of my primary job functions, product development. So, we went back to our dedicated server and decided, instead, that we’ll just have to become wildly successful to offset the savings and see that it was a blessing in disguise because our needs would far surpass what a shared server could give us in a year anyway.

In the end, this was a really good learning experience and Mosso definitely seems to offer a great service, but it just ended up not being the right fit for us.  Had we known about the medium trust issue earlier on, we might have either saved time or been able to work on it, but one of the main “issues” of a shared environment is we have to adapt to their changes and we just learned it way faster than I thought we’d have to. We’re staying with Rackspace as our hosting provider, who offered us fabulous customer service throughout this whole process.  Many businesses would do well modeling their service levels after theirs.

May 14, 2009

ATI Bioscience Open House

Last night I attended the first ever Austin Technology Incubator Bioscience Open House!  I’ve been extra busy this week since the previous night I also served as a panelist at the TiE Austin Funding Forum.

The open house was a HUGE success with close to 150 people in attendance at the AT&T Conference center located on The University of Texas at Austin campus.  The event was held in an outside area and despite the wind, everyone seemed to have a great time.

The event brought together entrepreneurs, VCs, healthcare professionals, and hospital representatives.  It was was partly sponsored by Seton Family of Hospitals in Austin.

The open house was the brainchild of our fabulous Bioscience Director, Jessica Hanover, and was pulled off flawlessly by our Marketing Communications/Events guru, Melissa Rabeaux (who I mentioned in a post I did about her work pulling together the Clean Energy Venture Summit late last year) and her intern team:  Stephany Puno (@StephanyPuno) and Laura Benold (@lbita).

I was feeling a little anti-social last night for a variety of reasons including information and emotional overload, so I was more than happy to hang with Stephany and Laura eating tortilla chips, 7 layer dip, and mini-hamburgers…oh and drink a couple of glasses of vinto tinto.    They kept me entertained, and I helped with registering people and even validating parking from time to time.   Being near the check in process, I got to meet most everyone who came and went anyway.

I ventured out into the crowd to say ‘hello’ to a few people I hadn’t seen in a while, make some key connections, and to see Jessica speak.

ATI Bioscience is a fairly new program (about a year old) and is definitely building a great foundation to help grow Austin’s Bio community!

May 13, 2009

TiE Austin Funding Forum

Last night I participated in annual event put on by TiE Austin called The Funding Forum.  I participated last year as a reviewer to help teams prepare for their pitches and as a last minute panelist to review pitches.  This year I was a panelist listening to pitches but was kind of a moderator too.

The companies rotate tables and pitch their ideas via their PC or hardcopy PowerPoint slides to a few potential investors.  Many angel investors, VCs, entrepreneurs, and members from the technology startup community are present.

At my table, we had 4 different companies.  One of them had already come in to the Austin Technology Incubator to present so I was familiar with them.  Two of them had very nice, well thought out presentations and a did a good job presenting their ideas.  One of the presenters was not very well prepared.

It’s a great place for new entrepreneurial teams to practice their pitch and get advice from experienced individuals.  Some take feedback gracefully and some don’t.

One of the investors at my table had funded a company he met at a prior Funding Forum so it seems to work, on occasion, as it’s designed to!

I left just after the company pitches ended for a variety of reasons, with one of them being that I started to wonder if I was truly in the right space-time continuum.

May 5, 2009

TheFunded Now Has A Founder’s Institute

I just heard about this and it sounds pretty interesting.  You don’t have to relocate to take advantage of this program.

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TheFunded Founder Institute is a new founder-centric incubator that trains new and seasoned entrepreneurs the best practices for building next generation companies. The unique 4-month program offers remote participation, the industry’s most founder-friendly terms, focused mentorship and training from renowned CEOs, resources from leading service partners, fundraising opportunities at fair market value, and shared equity upside among all participants in the companies formed. Passionate Founders can apply today at www.FounderInstitute.com – registration for the Summer 2009 Semester ends on May 10^th, 2009.

Why was the Founder Institute Created?

The National Venture Capital Association recently reported that VC fundraising dropped nearly 40% in Q1 of 2009. In these dire economic times, only the highest quality, most disciplined new businesses will proliferate – and The Founder Institute was created from the ground up to create such businesses. Our focus on quality is evident in our process;

-        Institute Founders receive guidance from renowned, experienced start-up CEO Mentors.

-        The Institute’s unique equity-sharing model aligns incentives and ensures maximum effort from all parties involved. When one of the Institute’s companies does well, all of the participating companies benefit – and when the Institute’s Mentors help the participating companies, they share in the upside as well.

-        The Institute focuses Founders on non-abstract, critical company-building assignments that build successful businesses in a weekly, step-by-step fashion.

-         The Institute helps Founders secure investment at market rates and under the best possible terms – instead of forcing a valuation or equity purchase at a premature stage.

-        The Institute does not require Founders to relocate or live on reduced incomes.

-        The Institute sets up regular meetings with investors and the public throughout the company-building process to increase quality and focus.

-         Institute Partners provide discounted or free services, so Founders can focus more time and resources on building the business.

Great Founders are often overlooked by the current entrepreneurial ecosystem, and innovative startups have a dramatic positive effect on the global economy. TheFunded Founder Institute aims to help the global economy by helping smart people start new, high-quality businesses.

For more information, visit www.FounderInstitute.com, or contact jonathan@thefunded.com.

May 3, 2009

A New International Multi Language School in Austin

Some of you may know that my husband, Erin Defosse, has been spearheading the formation of a new amazing private international multi-language (Spanish and Mandarin) school for the Austin community – The Magellan School.

Since we both fancy ourselves entrepreneurs, we understand each others need to try new things and hopefully make a difference.

The location was just announced (see a copy of the latest newsletter below) on Far West/Mopac and it will be the first of its kind here in Austin!

The Head of School, Marisa Leon, is fabulous!  I interviewed her and have met with her on several occasions since then.  She is remarkable with kids, brilliant, and extremely observant.  As a parent, I am so thrilled that she will be leading a school that my kids will be going to!

I will be the only one in the family who probably won’t be fluent in Spanish so I’m foreseeing a future where the kids will be saying things about me behind my back.   But it’s a risk I’m willing to take for my kids to be global citizens and be able to communicate with so many more people in the world.

They are still accepting applications for the Fall.  Even if you don’t have pre-K to 2nd grade school age kids please consider donating (tax deductible) and be part of the founding financial supporters of the school to help ensure its continued success.

The early years of any start-up/entrepreneurial endeavor are so critical and any financial or volunteer support you can give will go a long way to making Austin one of the key global centers in the world!  I firmly believe that schools like this will attract companies and families to our fine city.  Giving even just a little goes a long way.  Check out the Magellan Giving page for more information.

When a child discovers that he or she can change the world for the better…the world usually changes!

Please help spread the word!

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May 2, 2009

You Are So Smart Mommy

I try to mix my parenting and business posts here on entrepreMusings.  Of late I feel like I’ve been doing more parenting related posts, but I just couldn’t pass this one up.  This morning as I was getting the kids ready for swim classes and soccer, my 6 year old son said the most brilliant thing!  We have a busy day today as I’ll be taking them both to my daughter’s swim class, then to my son’s soccer game, and then later back for his swim class.  Then we are heading out so they can see their dad finish the Shiner 100 mile bike race later this afternoon.  It’s two hours from Austin so I’m sure they will both take naps in the car.  [UPDATE: It ended up being a 5 hour roundtrip because I didn't have the right directions.]

Anyway, my son was getting dressed for soccer, and he wasn’t sure what shirt to bring.  Sometimes they wear a black one and sometimes they wear a white one.  I told him why don’t you bring both just in case and then all of a sudden out of the blue he said “You are so smart mommy!“  I said “Really?“  He said, “Yes you are so smart to think of bringing both of them.“  I was like “Wow, thank you sweetie.  I’m so glad you think I’m smart.“  I gave him a huge hug and kiss and told him “I hope you still think that when you are 12 or 13 years old.“  He looked at me and said something like, “If I’m still playing soccer and you tell me to bring both shirts, you will be smart.“  We both laughed and my daughter laughed along with us.

He then couldn’t find his shirts and was looking in the wrong drawer and I told him to look in the other one and there they were.  He looked at me in disbelief and happiness that I found his shirts and again said “You are so smart!“  I was smiling from ear to ear and gave him another squeeze and tickle.  He was truly being genuine and he learned that I responded positively the first time so I thought he was quite brilliant to say it again so soon.  He’s picking up quick that when mom is happy, life is easier and he’s more likely to get to play the Wii. 

I didn’t understand why people said boys have their moms wrapped around their fingers until I had a son.  My daughter has me wrapped too.  The wrapping loosens a bit when they whine but when they say and do brilliant things and when they flash their adorable smiles or are peacefully sleeping, it gets wrapped so tight it squeezes my heart and takes my breath away…