Elevator Pitch

My elevator pitch went well I think, since the ghosts of the elevator said yes.  Listening to all the other elevator pitches helped me to realize that i wasn't thinking big enough and that I hadn't thought about what my possible profits were or how much money I needed to start the business.  I decided on needing $400,000 to start the first restaurant.  After doing a few calculations based on a number of bowls that I can expect to sell per day, I came up with a total income of $680,000 per year.  I think that during my pitch I showed how much research on the market I had done, as Andrew Fry commented on it when I brought it up in response to his question of how much of a market there actually is for authentic ramen.  I realized after my presentation that I should have presented my business model as an aspiring franchise from the start instead of towards the end like I did.  The elevator pitches as a whole helped me to understand how much money I should be asking for from investors, as well as how much money I can expect to be making each year, and how I should be presenting my business in my business plan.  As a last word about the class as a whole, it turned out to be my favorite class that I've ever taken on campus, and was the only reason I wanted to come to classes this quarter.

Jim Kastama Presentation

The presentation by Jim Kastama was about stories from his life as both an ex-senator and an entrepreneur.  He said he doesn't miss being a senator at all because it was no fun.  He told us some interesting information that hadn't really been mentioned by the other guest speakers in their presentations.  He said that venture capitalists and angel investors want you to fail around 5 times before they really want to fund you because by that point you would have been able to build on the mistakes of the failed attempts to learn how to hopefully succeed in doing a start up.  He also said the biggest risk in entrepreneurship is the question of "can I/you make money" from whatever you are trying to do for a business.  He mentioned the d.i.s.c. personality analysis test and that you should consider diversifying your team with different personality types.  Another quote he gave us was "You're not like everybody else" in regards to personalities, which means to think about how not everyone will think the same as you about decisions.  By using personalities to assist in assembling a team it is more possible to create a successful business.

Andrew Fry Dot Boom to Dot Bomb

The presentation by Andrew Fry was about the dot.bomb collapse of 2000, using plastic dinosaurs to represent different large internet communities during different times between 1992 and 2005.  During the years leading up to the bust where companies started to go under left and right, many companies were being named with something ending in ".com" because it would lead to it being worth more by name alone.  Companies were being created with such names with the sole purpose of getting to the IPO stage, and because of the time it was happening at record pace.  The problem with this however was that the companies weren't being created out of a want to solve some sort of problem for a consumer, they were being created with the sole purpose of being sold for large sums of money.  Some people had taken notice that this abnormal growth rate was going to lead to a collapse in the near future, and just before the bust started the book "The Internet Bubble" was published, but the big companies at the time disregarded it.  The bust was so large that a website at the time called "fuckedcompany.com" was listing which companies were going under.  After the dust settled, in 2002 Amazon posted that they had a profit, and companies such as Ebay and Yahoo were growing at a healthy pace, signaling the end of the bust.  During the bust many people went from filthy rich to dirt poor overnight.  A large problem during the boom time was that the average person couldn't figure out what was fact and fiction from the way the internet was being portrayed in movies at the time.  With movies such as "The Matrix" portraying the internet as this magical domain, people didn't know what to believe.