Tag: Startup Bus

The Startup Bus on failure

May 21, 2010 / elias

Hard to believe it’s been two months since the event. A lot’s happened since then which had me pause this blog series, but I’m now going to restart it and share the lessons during and after the experience.

Pollenizer is an agency that helps startup’s grow, run by my good friend Mick Liubinskas and his superstar business partner Phil Morle. They sponsored the bus, with the request an important lesson be shared, which was related to failure.

Below is a short video of Brandon Leonardo – a superstar that I think is going to go very far in his career. He however, had a very unfortunate incident that nearly threw off the entire operation of the bus. The incident revealed an important lesson for Brandon about how you deal with failure. Watch the video the find out what.

This blog post was done in honour of our proud sponsor Pollenizer. This post is part of a series on the Startup Bus, an event that occurred in March 2010 that was powered by Alassian, mentored by the eStrategy Group and supported by several other very generous sponsors.

Phil McKinney talks innovation to the Startup Bus

April 5, 2010 / elias

With all the hype now on the iPad (and the proposed HP slate), I thought it was timely to mention the personal session with HP’s head of innovation a few weeks ago. As part of the Startup Bus, Phil McKinney gave us a one-hour session on innovation, which we are fortunate enough to have recorded and have permission to share to the world.

Hewlett Packard was the company that started Silicon Valley, and Phil is one of the three divisional CTO’s at the company, focused on personal systems (meaning a lot of the innovative things that we will see come out are under his watch). So it was a no-brainer to start our experience there. He shared secrets of innovation, including some insight into yet-to-be released products by HP, like it’s electronic-ink paper that kills anything else in its class and the proposed Slate device itself (an iPad competitor soon to be released).

You can watch the entire presentation as part of this playlist. Or, click on the videos below which are in ten minute blocks.

Part one: Introduction
Part two: The Rules of the Bus
Part three: The Challenge of Innovation
Part four: The Secret Sauce – FIRE
Part five: The Secret Sauce – PO
Part six: Show and Tell
Part seven: Q & A
Part eight: Q & A (continued)
Part nine: (continued)

This blog post is a series on the Startup Bus, an event that occurred in March 2010 that was powered by Alassian, mentored by the eStrategy Group and supported by several other very generous sponsors.

The Startup Bus – looking into this crazy experiment in innovation

April 5, 2010 / elias

What happens when you put 25 entrepreneurs on a bus from San Francisco to Austin? Well duh – six new startups of course! Since TechCrunch announced to the world about my crazy experiment, I frantically organised what has one of the more memorable experiences in my life. It was hard work to get sponsors, get people, get the bus – and even down to the wire, have WIFI. But I pulled it off, and now I’m ready to share to the world what happened.

I’m going to write a blog series that will answer the following questions:
* What worked?
* What didn’t work?
* What were all the ideas?
* What ideas got rejected?
* Who was on all the teams and what were there roles?
* Did people flake out before/during/after (and if so how did that get addressed)?
* What are the state of the projects now?
* Are we planning to do something like this again?
* Did anything crazy happen during the trip?

Below you’ll find links to posts I will write on the event (as I write them). Above the links, you will find a video of me explaining to the “buspreneurs” why I think this experiment is valuable, regardless of the outcome.

Relate blog posts:
Phil McKinney talks innovation to the Startup Bus/

The Startup Bus on failure

Phil McKinney talks innovation to the Startup Bus

The Startup Bus – looking into this crazy experiment in innovation

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