Vandelay Industries Is An Unstoppable Force

Dave, Roberta, and I are working on a manufacturing simulation for our Operations class.  Basically, we buy machines, adjust order quantities, quote lead times, etc. for an imaginary company that we've called Vandelay Industries.  (Yes, we're in latex.)

We were a little late getting started, so we're in the bottom quartile of the class rankings.  However, Dave and I just put our heads together and have moved up 2 places in the past 10 minutes.  Boom!

Are we a little too excited for such a minuscule uptick?  Perhaps.

Does our uber-spreadsheet-model project absolute domination over the coming days?  You bet.

Serenity now.

I Can't Believe I'm Not Watching The Game

The Heels open their season tonight against Davidson and I'm too busy to watch.

It's really a strange feeling because I usually go to great lengths to rearrange my life to watch Carolina basketball - either at home on TV or (preferably) at the Dean Dome.

We're tied with 4.49 remaining. I hope we win, but if we lose I'll find solace in the fact that every time Roy Williams has lost his season opener, he's taken his team to the Final Four.

Go Davidson!

Prime Time Week

This is a seriously prime time week for me.

On Friday, I'll participate in the Finals Match Day for the Carolina Venture Fellows program. Essentially, I'm competing for the opportunity to interview and possibly land a summer internship at a local venture capital firm.

Match Day is a bit of a cattle call. VCs from several local firms will be on campus and herded into a room. The finalists - there are 10 of us - will each get 5 minutes to give a pitch to the room. No notes, no slides, no handouts. While some are worried about the rules of the pitch, I think that they actually play in my favor...

After the song and dance, the VCs rank whom they wish to interview and we rank the firms with which we wish to interview. Once the matchmaking magic happens, there are 4 15-minute interview slots lined up back-to-back. Kinda like speed dating for an internship, right? (Obviously, one would arrange for subsequent interviews if all goes well on Match Day. )

I feel like I have a pretty good shot. I've already met VCs at my 3 targeted firms and feel like I'm differentiated enough from the other (very qualified and very smart) finalists such that I'll be able to make a pretty compelling case to the firms that focus on early-stage technology investments.

Immediately after I'm done with the Venture Fellows process, I'll hit the road for Day 2 of the Darden Innovation Challenge in Charlottesville, VA. My team has prepared marketing concepts that we'll pitch to executives from American Express and Hilton. I like what we've got and think that we stand a reasonable chance at taking down the $20K prize.

(I broke my snare drum this weekend, so I need the money...)

Word on the street is that Google is sponsoring the event after party. Should be cool to hang out with some real, live Googlers.

To top it off, I have a Macroeconomics mid-term and Marketing case brief due this week as well...a handful of lunch meetings...and an IM basketball game...and the Heels' season opener.

As much as I tend to whine to Kelly about being busy, I hope that I can continue to make forthcoming weeks just as action-packed.

3 Game Changers

Three game-changers hit the street over the past week or so. I can't sleep, so I figured I'd drop a few thoughts on each.

OpenSocial doesn't pose any threat to Facebook, but it does pose a threat to users, such as myself, that have a low tolerance for stupid, pointless online apps. (Does this mean that I'll be able to play Pirates vs. Ninjas in LinkedIn?)

It might pose a threat if someone develops a seriously innovative app outside of the Facebook ecosystem...but I simply don't see that happening.

Also - it's interesting to see SalesForce.com - the original SAAS platform player - on the list and funny to see MySpace adopt the idea shortly after they announced plans to launch their own platform initiative. Those guys (MyS) were really lucky to be first to the party...

Google's Android is positively genius...and a cool product name. Assuming the platform gets traction with phone providers - which it seems to already be happening - Google will have simultaneously opened and optimized a new market for their ads and, more importantly, found LOTS more eyes to see them.

I suspect that Durham-darling Motricity is less-than-thrilled by the announcement.

Facebook Ads officially launched. Per a previous post, I've already given this a look - I guess during a beta launch period when it was "Flyers Pro". As far as I can tell, Facebook Ads looks like Flyers Pro with a new UI, contextual placements with user photos, and WAY better analytics and campaign mgmt. Which I guess is to say that it really isn't anything like Flyers Pro at all.

It's funny that the whole concept is simply an inversion of Yahoo's old school directory. Instead of users browsing a content directory, marketers can target content to a directory of users.

The next big opportunity here will be an application that pulls ad campaign data out of Facebook and into Google Analytics or other online marketing automation tools.

It's Officially Ridiculous

When people ask me about my schoolwork, I usually play it cool and describe it as reasonably interesting, somewhat challenging, very time-consuming, but quite manageable.

Now I'm ready to come clean:

The amount of work I have to do between now and Thanksgiving is completely ridiculous.

Granted, much of the work is related to extra-curriculars such as the Darden Innovation Challenge and the Carolina Venture Fellows process.  Still - the classwork itself is more than enough to keep me miserable for the next 2.5 weeks.

I'm not whining. This is a matter of fact.

Bob Young at UNC

Bert and I are at ibilio's Bob Young lecture at the Stone Center at UNC.  I've never blogged a live event and only have about 20 minutes of battery left - so this should be an enjoyable experiment. All quotes are paraphrased.

Here goes...

Oh yeah, just in case you don't know - Bob Young is the co-founder of Red Hat, founder and CEO of LuLu, and owner of the Canadian Football League's Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

I knew we were in the right place when I saw the guy with long hair wearing an ill-fitting suit and white socks. Most of the people here are engineers or computer science students. It's great to be in a room full of nerds again...

"If you work in technology, you have to spend 8 hours working and then another 8 hours working at home just so that you'll remain relevant when you go back to work tomorrow. If that 2nd 8 hours is a burden - then you should look into selling life insurance."

Bob and Mark Ewing started the Center for Public Domain because all of the money thrown at open source projects in the early '90s. In their opinion, it didn't make sense to "thank" the open source community with more money. Instead, they founded a non-profit to help influence intellectual property laws, which they saw as the most likely demise of the open source movement.

"Google wants to own the world just as badly as Microsoft does. They are the fastest company on the planet to go from a company that says "Do no evil." to a company that implies just the opposite. I love Google, they just have no idea about the evil things that do or might have to do."

The hardest part about turning his first ideas into real businesses:

- "Lulu has been the hardest."
- "Raising funds as a young entrepreneur. 'He's 26. He has no idea what the hell he's doing.'"
- "It takes time, vision, commitment to build a technology before you actually have the customers. It takes 6 months before you realized that you just wasted the last 6 months."
- "The be a successful entrepreneur - to be a successful anything - you have to be a good learner."

Bob's good-humored cracks at professors and university administration have been hilarious:

- "If these teachers knew so much about their field, then they'd be Bill Gates! Who are they to tell you what you need to know?"

- "If I wasn't such a terrible student and therefore constantly motivated to work hard to prove my teachers and classmates wrong, who knows, I might be the director of ibiblio."

"Love relates to other people; not to what you do. I love Linux and open source because of what it enables me to do."

"Patents should be limited to inventions, not ideas. One-click shopping is the worst patent ever. It's stupid no matter how you look at it - there are an infinite number of ways to code one-click shopping."

"Had there been Ritalin when I was a kid, I too could have gone to UNC Chapel-Hill."

Best line of the talk - very facetiously - "My failures? I haven't had any. Next question."

Great talk.

Kelly's Birthday

Today is Kelly's birthday - which is always a great time. It's close to Halloween and just a couple days before my birthday. Plus, this year we get to celebrate at a Robert Randolph and the Family Band concert at Memorial Hall. (Even though she'll be working/watching and I'll be standing in the back by the sound booth...)

There have been a couple minor irritants this time around, though. Even though she loved it, the gift I bought for her - a new Wusthof knife and an cookbook of Florentine recipes - turned out to be eerily similar to what I bought her last year. Doh!

Also - Kelly's Facebook profile has been flooded with "Happy Birthday" wishes, which is somewhat humiliating because there's no way I'll get as many as her...

Happy birthday, Kelly Cat!

Please Don't Call On Me...

I just sat through my Operations class REALLY hoping that the professor didn't call on me. I read the case for the day and had a general opinion on the problem, but I definitely was not prepared to bring my "A" game. (Or probably my "C+" game either.)

My excuses:

- This was the first time I haven't been mostly prepared for class. Honest.
- I spent 11 hours at school yesterday working on extra-curricular jive.
- Game 4 of the World Series > Executive Shirt Company, Inc.

As I fired a barrage of mind bullets at my professor - which appears to have effectively jammed his cold call radar - I realized that I was enduring (what I suspect to be) a quintessential MBA experience...and that there were probably numerous others in my section doing the same thing.

Had he called on me, I guess I would have done what the other less fortunate and less-than-prepared victims did:

- Confidently state an opinion.
- State that my calculations were different than his.
- Mumble unintelligibly and fumble around with pieces of paper at my seat until he realizes I'm about to say something stupid and moves on to someone else.
- Do my homework for the next class.

Good News from the Darden Innovation Challenge

My team made the international top 10 for the Darden Innovation Challenge case competition. We get to compete in the final round in Charlottesville, VA in a few weeks. Woot!

The competition is fairly straightforward - the sponsoring companies provide a "problem", typically a marketing/product problem, and charge the participating teams to come up with a concept that addresses the problem with an innovative product, marketing strategy, etc.  The "innovating" is the hard/fun part...

Our first round problem came from Whirlpool. In a nutshell, we needed to figure out a way to help the company drive demand in the 18-27 age demographic. Luckily, the company provided us with a number of product concepts to get the ball rolling.

Our concept turned out to be a new line of funky, pseudo-upscale dorm appliances marketed by Whirlpool under a hip vanity brand. We weren't completely thrilled with the final idea - (I actually fought pretty hard early on to kill it - shows what I know!) - but the concept brief was strong and (I think/guess) had the right mix of creative positioning and "innovative" ideas balanced by meat and potatoes operational concepts, reasonably defensible financial/market justification, and digestible sales projections.

The final round will require that we prep new concepts for American Express and Hilton Hotels. We'll put forth our best effort in hopes of impressing the corporate sponsors/recruiters and, more importantly, winning the cash money pay day that goes to the first place team.

Our team, "Kenan-Flagler 16:47":


From left - Kami, Jen, Yan, Nicole, Eric

Asking Better Questions

I just got (moderately) punked by my macroeconomics professor and learned an important lesson in the process.

We were looking at quarterly GDP data over the past 6 years and noting that consumer spending remained strong during the 2000/2001 recession. I asked the following question:
What does the strong spending imply about savings?

...and got the following (paraphrased) response:
Well, by definition, savings is the income that you don't spend - so there really isn't any saving.

Doh! I set myself up for that one with an overly ambiguous question that didn't really ask anything. Luckily, the professor kept going and addressed the broader context of my question by talking about the implications of low savings in the US economy.

For what it's worth - I thought his answer to my question was fantastically sarcastic!

Haunted House Photos

Kelly and I volunteered at the Durham Jaycees Haunted House last week. We were both "roamers" - which essentially meant we roamed about the house finding ways to spook the patrons.

I took the "hide in the dark, jump out, and roar in their face" approach, which worked pretty well.  Kelly just ran around screaming bloody murder during the climactic ending, which - according to the guides - really freaked out the guests.

Why? Because she was dressed as an un-dead cheerleader:


Putting on our make-up.



In full costume.


I definitely dropped out of character and started laughing when I heard someone shout "Oh my God! Its a crazy cheerleader!" as they went through the house.


Thanks to DJ Waldow for the photos.

Cirque Eloize

Memorial Hall hosted Cirque Eloize' tonight.

It was absolutely amazing, funny, beautiful, harrowing, shocking, breathtaking, inspiring, etc. I couldn't believe the acrobats' strength, their ability to artfully contort their bodies will hanging 15 feet above the stage, nor their capacity for landing safely on their feet after being hurled into the air.

A DTH reporter asked me a few questions during intermission. I'll link to the article tomorrow if I make his final edit. I offered some memorably stupid DTH quotes as an undergrad - hopefully I won't come off as an idiot this time around.

NetFlix Gets it

I loved reading about NetFlix's drive to improve customer service. I think that their efforts will turn out to be yet another illustration of how it's always right to do the right thing for the customer...and another nail in BlockBuster's coffin.

The quick access code seems particularly friendly:
To lessen any wait time, Netflix has developed a system where customers can get a unique identification number off the Web site. Customers punch in the code after reaching the call center so an employee can access a subscriber's billing information and rental activity.

The company announces Q3 earnings this afternoon. I invested a portion of my student loan in NFLX shares at $18, so I look forward to the call. :-)

FriendFeed, Madden, Etc.

So Fall Break is almost over and here's what I have to show for it:

- I've gotten extremely/pathetically good at Madden '08 on PlayStation 2.

I like to reward myself for doing something well, in this case finishing finals, by un-boxing my PS2 and regressing back to the "13 year-old Eric playing Tecmo Bowl for 6 straight hours" days. It usually goes like this:

  1. I buy a video game at Target, usually a basketball or football game.

  2. I play it every spare minute of the day for ~2/3 days.

  3. I become an absolutely unstoppable force in the game.

  4. I realize that it is pathetic that I've played so much that I've gotten so good.

  5. I never play the game again.


I've realized my supremacy (Step 3) and the incredible amounts of time I've wasted to achieve it (Step 4), I'm just not quite ready for Step 5. Perhaps after a few more games...

- I finally got my invitation to beta test FriendFeed. The service is quite handy and more or less exactly what I thought/hoped it would be. Essentially, its a "here's what I'm doing" app that aggregates my activity across numerous web applications (Flickr, LastFM, NetFlix, etc.) and spits it out as a webpage and RSS feed. (Think Facebook news feed for activites beyond Facebook...)

The company was started by a handful of ex-Googlers and will probably pick up some (more) buzz fairly soon.

If you're interested, here's my feed.

- I rediscovered my love for making music with friends. My family was in town this past weekend, so my brother and I rocked out like we usually do. We played "Foxy Lady" so loud that everyone else in the house went outside.

Charlie came over yesterday and we sang a number of tunes together. It's such fun to sing along with a good singer and to unexpectedly discover that you have so much in common with someone you've only recently met.

- I watched the Heels nearly eek out a big win over the Lamecocks with Kelly, my dad, my brother, Andrew, Dave and my numerous other tailgating dudes. The Heels are so close to becoming a relevant football team again...

- I watched "Thank You For Smoking".  Easily the funniest movie I've seen in months...

- I made inroads on the summer internship search. (No details that I can publicly divulge.)

- I realized that having nothing to do gets boring fast.

Eric = (1/8)*MBA

I just turned in my last final for Mod I, which means I'm 1/8 of the way through the MBA party. Right now, I'm too tired to discern whether I find the milestone exciting or depressing or terrifying or what.

Finals week got off to a bad start. I ate a bad chicken wrap for lunch last Friday, so I spent the entirety of my reading day sick as a dog. I managed to catch up on my studies on Saturday and Sunday, but didn't really prepare as well as I would have liked.

Fortunately, 2 exams (Accounting and Leading & Managing) were pretty easy and 2 others (Finance and Statistics) were more challenging, but pretty straightforward. The Microeconomics exam I finished today was a near-disaster, just as I - and everyone else - figured that it would be. (I'll spare you the long story to say instead that Micro hasn't gone well for anyone at KFBS this year - students or faculty.)

More to come...my ride/wife is here. :-)