Don't Let Your Dreams Be Memes

Although Mission Statement and Vision Statement are vital components of any company that often together, they are by themselves distinctly different. From a little research, what I’ve found is that a mission statement focuses on today and what the company is trying to achieve and how to achieve it. Vision statement on the other hand, should focus on where the organization sees itself in the future; what is the goal and ambitions of the company that will attract people and how will those contribute to society. Although both are quite abstract, mission statement is often more specific in talking about the do’s and how’s whereas vision statement is about hopes, goals, and changes. As I look at these two from these perspectives, I came up with some ideas for mission and vision statement for my business idea company. These ideas really have to do with thinking about what I really wanted the company to do, what kind of scope am I envisioning it, and what values are important to this type o...

Being a service-based business, there aren’t that many things that are considered intellectual property that need to be protected. The only thing that I can come up as being closest to needing intellectual property is the copyrights to the business’s website code.   The code is used to create the business’s property and is part of the company’s property. Although not directly belonging to the intellectual property zone, securing a domain name that closely resembles the business name is also a must we are trying to run our service orders through online website. As far as the business model goes, it is a market full of similar service, hence similar business models. Getting a copyright to a business model that everyone knows about is not very beneficial. However, I think the business will have a good number of trade secrets including distribution methods, customer profiles, and advertising methods. As the business aims to gain reputation through advertising agreements with local st...

In class, we had a lecture and discussion about the history of the dot.com to dot.bomb era, where the market was full of a hype and rush of new tech companies that ended in a bust of   closures and bankruptcies. The lecture was a supplement to the ‘Startup.com’ documentary, which shows the story of two young entrepreneurs’ startup company during this era. Although funny yet interesting enough, Andrew the analogy of uh.. aging dinosaurs to represent the race between tech companies during the dot.com era, and their quest to be ahead of technology and the market. Dinosaurs CompuServe, Prodigy, Yahoo, and AOL, all of which were the big names during that time, who through how much do those names ring any bell (or at all) to us students, went through series of booms and bust in their developments. The era was full of insanity!! Investors were diving into throwing their money out there in hopes of making profits to companies full of (false/nonexistent) promises. As technology boom w...

Shadrach White is the CEO of CloudPWR, who we had the opportunity to hear from as our final guest speaker. Shadrach started his vision around the year of 2010-2011 when he saw cloud computing as the next generation emerging technology that will be used widely. Too much of his back then business partners’ disagreement, who did not see cloud computing the same way as he does, Shadrach  left his old company and started what is now CloudPWR. Not only did he prioritize something that not a lot of people see then, Shadrach also has a different targeted market than majority of tech companies—government sector. He believes that this market is approachable, despite the fact that the government sector did not buy into cloud computing due to security risks at the time, and that if he were able to make connections, then it’ll be easier in the future to continue expanding his business in this market. And it sure did, Shadrach’s company to this date is working with at least 100 clients aroun...

John Dimmer is a friend of Andrew, and also one of the original founders of Free Range Media. John started his talks with his background in finance (although he at first wanted to be a professional golfer), which was something he feels as being his best skill. He had experience working for a bank and finance person at businesses that he was part of.  Despite his strong background in finance, John also dealt with operations at Free Range Media. One of the two main advices that John gave for entrepreneurs was: learn basics of accounting and financing—work well when dealing with money especially in contracts and agreements. John mentioned the importance of hiring legal counsel so that you wouldn’t need to panic over legal matters. The other main advice that John gave was to choose investors wisely. He laid out the order of investors that a new startup business should go through: self-funding, family an friends, Angels, Venture Capital.  The most memorable thing that I could rem...