Surviving Computer Science at UW

I wasn't able to attend the class on the day we had John Dimmer as a guest speaker, however I had my friend record the lecture and send it to me after the class so I caught up on it later that day. From the recording, I learned that John Dimmer is an entrepreneur who also worked at Free Range Media with Andrew Fry and helped create multiple businesses around the country. John Dimmer wasn't there initially when Free Range Media was founded but he joined later after FRR was a going concern. It was nice hearing the about John's journey from high school till here because we have already heard Mr. Fry's side of the story on the first day of class, and now hearing it from John's perspective helped put it all together. He want to high school with Mr. Fry back in the day and his dad helped pave the Entrepreneurship way for both of them. He graduated with a degree in finance and worked in the industry for a few years. During the John's talk it was obvious that these ...

Pricing your product is one tough decision, and it's something that I have had to put a lot of thought into. Initially, I was just throwing numbers out but after Tuesdays lecture on "My Uncle's Alders" it really helped me put a set ruleset together so I can come up with a price for my product. Below are the guidelines I followed to come up with the price: Time and effort spent When you are selling the product Shipping and handling Consider the value of the product from clients perspective Following these guidelines I decided to the price for my Video Game Cafe would be $9.99 per person for each hour and offer discounts for groups. I decided to go with this pricing scheme for many reasons, one of them being the age group that my business is targeted towards is early teenager to young adults, which means I cannot have a high price entry point. $9.99 is low enough for someone who just wants to go play some games with their friends in a LAN environment and have fu...

Our third guest speaker was Brian Forth, who is the CEO of SiteCrafting.com which is a Tacoma based website development company. Brian has been in the web designing business for almost 20 years with his company. I enjoyed this guest lecture very much because he seemed really comfortable in the class and he gave a lot of time for questions in the end. There are 36 employees in Brian's company and it was interesting to know how he handles various management level issues such as having bad team managers or bad employees in general. Brian seems to be very stern in terms of his company policy and I find that very amendable because he didn't write company goals just for the heck of it, he decided to follow those goals and incorporate them into the company's roots. This is very essential so the employees don't lose track and promote company goals at all time. Brian also talked about how it is working with different clients, since he has experience working with different compa...

Our second guest speaker was Robert Coons who is the co-founder and CEO of Scout Military Discounts, a company that lets the users look for places that have military discounts available. They can also check whether a user is eligible for the discounts and what kind of discounts depending on the rank and years of service. Robert seemed like a very passionate and hardworking individual who has been enduring the entrepreneur lifestyle as he plans on moving to Tacoma to proceed with his company SCOUT Military Discounts. Robert talked about his past, how he started as well as ultimately where he would like to take the company. In the beginning he had to call hundreds of businesses with his friends to find out what kind of military discounts they provide, if any. In the process they built a large database that helps the users of the App, as well as provide more value to their company if they were to sell it. However, in the future he would obviously look to automate the process by having pe...

It was wonderful listening to Eric talk about his entrepreneur lifestyle and everything along the path to where he is now. I particularly appreciated the fact that he shared some personal information like his expenses and income distribution between various companies, so we can get a good idea of different type of income each business generate. He started off by writing a chapter for his book and posting it online to see how other people react to it and if he would have an audience if he were to finish that book. I thought that was a great idea because that way he tested the market, to check if there's scope for what he wants to do, without spending too much time writing the whole book only to find out that nobody wants to buy it. Based on his income distribution between the companies book revenues were particularly interesting because that is the work that is already done and he doesn't have to do anything more with it. He also wrote those books in his spare times, a few hour...

When thinking of the scope and domain of a business idea, the first issue that one would run into is deciding how big the project domain could be or how specific you want it to be. For me, I would prefer to focus on a specific niche and do an above average job in that instead of focusing on something that is already very big and doing an average or below average job at that. Here are the 3 business ideas that I currently have: Video game café -  Borrowing the idea from Korean culture of PC cafés a.k.a. PC bang, I think starting something similar here would be a good idea because coffee and food is something that goes well while doing other activities as well, which in this case is playing video games. Although it wouldn't be restricted to just PC games, there would be Xbox/Playstation setup as well, along with serving food/coffee. VR play room - I don’t know if something similar already exists but with virtual reality blowing up, all the possibilities of what we can accomplish ...

Finishing up my senior year, the one thing I am looking forward to most is going out into the field and getting a job, which happens to be a little contradictory to this course since it's about starting your own business and all the things you need to know. However, I still want to learn a lot of new things from this class because I don't see myself working 9-5 jobs for the rest of my life. At some point, maybe few years down the line, when I have little more financial freedom I would like to start my own company. The idea for my company is something I haven't thought of yet and the domain of it will probably be vastly different by the time I am ready to take the initiative, so for now I want to learn the management/economic aspect of running a business. One of the biggest questions that come to my mind when I think of running a company is how do you handle growth? I don't think it's possible to predict the growth and scale of your company when you are still in t...