Surviving Computer Science at UW

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...