Erik Hanberg Presentation

The presentation done by guest speaker Erik Hanberg was very entertaining to attend.  The most important thing I think that he wanted us to take away from his presentation was to work on actually delivering something if you are going to be attempting to be an entrepreneur, meaning that to start a business you better be working on delivering a product or service soon or you aren't going to be in business long.  He told us about how his wife and him run a design business and how he is also an author with books branching into three different genres.  So in his case, being both an author and helping the design business, he has to constantly be sure he's trying to provide the consumer with the product of his books and with the design business giving good advice to the customers as part of the service.  He also suggested some books to read, such as "the $100 startup", "outliers", "the 4 hour work week", "the E-Myth revisted", and "turning pro", as well as his mystery novel "the marinara murders".  He also suggested checking out "Smartpassiveincome", a podcast where Pat Flynn talks with entrepreneurs.  In summary, from listening about how he makes his money it's clear that to make your own business you need to have a product or service that people want, as well as being sure that it is a sustainable business plan or it won't succeed, like his theater.

Business Ideas

My first business idea is to create a gaming company, with its first project being
to create a retro role playing game in the style of the 16 bit era classics such as Final
Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy 6, and Chrono Trigger.  In recent years companies have shy'd away
from creating rpg's in this style in favor of attempting to draw people in with games that
current generation gamers think look nice, but spend so much time doing so the overall
story and characters are bland and boring.  I think there is a large market for this retro
style of rpg because of the success of Square Enix's "Bravely Default", which was their
first new retro final fantasy style rpg since the original final fantasy 6 on SNES.
I watch quite a bit of anime in my spare time, and what I've noticed over the
years is that a good amount of it is never translated into English for American audiences
in either Japanese audio English subbed or English audio formats.  There are a lot of
sites that currently stream anime, but many of them do so without the consent of the
copyright owners, and can end up in some legal trouble with take down notices on the
copyrighted content.  I propose to create a company that works with the Japanese publishers
on making official English subbed versions of their anime to either host on a site we
create or on their own site.  The audience for Japanese audio English subbed is very large
here in America, with many fans (myself included) refusing to watch the English audio
translations of anything besides ones from their childhood that possibly sparked their
interest in anime.  Besides English subs, the market for European languages is large as
well.
My last idea is to create a gaming news website.  Currently there are a few large
gaming news sites, and most of them have a similar content, with the differenciating
factor being the quality of writing.  Many of the large sites (Kotaku for example) rush to
put out a story, and often do so without simple grammar and spell checks being done before
publishing a story to their site, while others (the Escapist) take the time to ensure the
quality of the writing before publishing stories, but aren't worried about doing immediate
up to date news, instead prefering to write detailed articles that are (in my opinion)
actually worth reading.  I enjoy informative writing, and would like to make a website
about getting detailed informative stories out to the public in a quick manor, so in a
sense attempting to blend the two styles together.  I feel there is a large enough market
to support this style of journalism, since both the quick bare bones style of Kotaku and
the slower informative style of the Escapist are hugely successful.

Startup.com

First off, I thought the movie was a good watch, as seeing the rise and fall of a real company is something I never thought I would get to experience.  I thought that Kaleil was a rather arrogant and headstrong person, but after seeing the entire film I realize that sometimes you need people like that to keep the company on track and focused on its goal of making money and continuing to exist.  I also thought that Kaleil was being rude and shouldn't fire Tom, but after the discussion we had in class it was clear to me that he should have been gone long before then.  His attitude towards running the company was not a very productive one, with little worry about how quickly the company could suddenly go under if they weren't careful.  After our discussions Tom seems like the kind of person that would be good to start a business with, but not keep in a high level of power like he had in GovWorks.com.  The third founder, George, I initially thought to be kinda selfish, suddenly backing out and demanding compensation for what he currently owned of GovWorks Inc., but after discussing it more during class, I realize there are two ways to think of the reason for his actions now.  The first is that he thought that GovWorks.com could fail, and wanted to be sure he got money out of it before it collapsed, and the other is he had no intention of sticking with GovWorks Inc. in the first place, and once it had made a reasonable amount of money he wanted to get out with it secured.  Either way he ended up being the only person to walk away from the company with any money, so he made the correct decision in this case to walk away, but the argument could be made that he was making a bad business move backing out of a growing company.

Startup.com is a movie I'd recommend to anyone considering starting up a company, as there are many lessons to be learned that could help keep a business afloat.

What I want out of this class

I would like to get a few things out of this class.  First, I would like to learn more about how the field of computer science relates to starting up a business and what parts of it can be influenced by technology.  I'm interested in how technology has changed how a business is run and started.  Second, I would like to understand what it actually means to run a business, since I have never had a job and have never tried to start up a business.  I don't understand how high ranking employee's, like managers and owners, are able to run the business without directly working like lower level employee's.
I personally have never had the drive to start my own business, and other than what we have gone over in the first 2 class meetings and from what I learned from watching startup.com I have no idea how to.  Since I haven't ever considered starting a business I don't have any ideas on what kind of business I would want to run, so I'm hoping that we will go over a few basic ideas as examples for starting ideas other businesses have used.