Curious Office invests in Bonanzle!

I’m really happy to be writing about today’s news. Bonanzle is a 2-year-old company founded by Bill Harding which has created a fast-growing (and profitable) marketplace where small merchants can sell everything from purses and antiques to jewelry and collectibles. “Rather than building around the largest so-called ‘power sellers,’ we’ve created a marketplace that caters to smaller merchants who are passionate about a few, carefully selected items.”

Think of this as Etsy except the focus isn’t so much on handmade goods but rather one of a kind, specialty items. Think flea market where the focus isn’t on who sells more items. No, this isn’t about “Power Sellers”. In fact, its for everyone else. It is a community that is much more like a “marketplace” in the traditional sense. That is, a lot of small sellers with interesting wares, thoughtful antiques and rare collectibles.

Why we like Bonanzle:

1) Smart cash management
They bootstrapped the startup, growing it into an up-and-coming force in e-commerce with 250,000 registered users and nearly two million unique visitors a month before raising this larger round of financing.

2) Bill Harding
I had met Bill well before this funding. Bill Harding is a rare individual who is both business savvy AND technical. He has been the hands on developer, CTO and CEO for two years. He doesn’t pontificate a lot. He just gets on with it.

3) Traffic
The site has a rabid support base. Traffic is high and stays high because the vendors feel connected to the marketplace. Sellers and buyers represent a demographic that values communication and relationships.

4) Large, known market
We all grew up understanding the concept of a garage sale and a flea market and an estate sale. Grandmother’s china and silver flatware? That stuff if valuable and in every home. Selling it on Etsy makes no sense. Selling it on eBay next to the automotive parts and electronics section somehow devalues the transaction and the interestingness of these kinds of items. Simply put, there is a place in the market for a site like this.

5) Clear roadmap
The site has tons of traffic but a lot of very obvious ways to improve. Now that they have cash, its just a matter of doing many of the things that have been on Bill’s list for a long time.

6) Great supporters
I know nearly all the investors in this round. And, I truly believe that these individuals will add far more value to this company than one might ordinarily experience in any other funding event. Geoff Entress, Andy Liu, Ben Elowitz, Andy Sack and others. These guys all GET IT. They have a long history of success. They have been in the trenches. They keep coming up winners. Bill is going to get incredibly valuable feedback from his investors and the company will be all the better for it.

We’re proud of Bill and the Bonanzle team and appreciate Geoff Entress for driving this funding to its successful conclusion.

I’m pleased to join an impressive team of mentors for the launch of TechStar’s newest city! Seattle joins Boston and Boulder with Andy Sack at the helm. Get your startup funded and off the ground while learning from the best! This kind of launch pad is totally in synch with what we’ve long believed here at Curious Office. Great ideas being pursued by smart people who get help from other experienced entrepreneurs is the simple key to getting a new start-up off the ground.

Get seed funding for your new company, plus the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.

At the end of the three month program, it’s your company. TechStars is the best way to get your new company off and running and on a path to success.

1) Tell us about Chris Rodde. How did you come to start AllSeniorHomes?

I grew up in the Bay Area in a family of entrepreneurs—my grandfather was a builder and my dad, a real estate developer—so my passion has always been to start something on my own. I started a dot-com in 1999 but quickly realized that I knew nothing about starting a tech company. So I decided to get some experience and joined Microsoft. Microsoft moved my wife and me to Seattle about 8 years ago. I expected to stay at Microsoft only 3 years but kept learning and finding new, interesting projects. In 2006, I knew it was time to get back to the startup world or I might never get off the corporate sofa.

So I went to All Star Directories, a late stage Seattle startup which does lead generation in the Education market. This is where I met my business partner, Jay Goldstein. We saw how well the online lead generation model worked and talked about starting something together. Our first idea was to create an analyst firm in the lead generation space because there is a total lack of data about lead generation (market sizing, pricing, market shares, etc–somebody should do this!). We didn’t get far with this idea, but instead started looking at different industries where we could do lead generation. We settled on senior care because we saw a growing opportunity and similarities to the education market.

2) In a nutshell, how do you describe AllSeniorHomes?

AllSeniorHomes is a site to help people that are looking for senior housing or senior care (assisted living, nursing homes, retirement communities, etc). People caring for their parents (let’s call them “caregivers”) are often thrown into the role suddenly when there is a health problem or when they go home for Thanksgiving and realize that mom or dad can really no longer take care of themselves. These caregivers are faced with a lot of big decisions. We offer a great resource to help people through these decisions by providing informative, well-written content and a directory of assisted living facilities, nursing homes, alzheimer’s care communities, and retirement. communities We connect families with senior care communities. Communities pay us for qualified leads.

3) Who are your big competitors and what value proposition sets you apart?

Incidentally, there are a few competitors right here in Seattle such as A Place For Mom. A Place For Mom’s model is quite different from ours, however. They operate a network of elder care advisors to find a community and get paid a referral fee when the senior moves into a community (a “move-in”). We believe that we can deliver much better value to communities by charging for leads (rather than move-ins) and allowing the communities to take responsibility for doing the 1-on-1 sales with the end consumer. So for communities, our value proposition is about providing a more economical source of customers.

For consumers, it’s impossible to find great resources. Despite Google’s best efforts, there are so many bad websites out there that get in the way of finding the few good ones. We don’t see many sites out there that are making the same kind of investment in great content and user experience—we think these things will really matter in the long run and set us apart. A good example of this is our Seattle Assisted Living

4) What do you like most about your job?

All of it… The wearing of many hats… The highs and lows… Creating something from scratch… The great thing about starting a company is that you are completely responsible for success or failure. It’s an emotional roller coaster—last Friday, Jay and I were feeling dejected because of a few meetings we’d had—earlier this week, we were flying high as we discovered some great results in our business. The successes are completely because of your efforts and so the feeling of accomplishment is complete. I also have a great sense of satisfaction when we hear positive things from consumers and our senior care customers—it feels like we are making a difference for people.

5) What bit of trivia would someone not know about Chris Rodde?

I grew up in the same house that my father did and graduated from the same high school 30 years later.

I’m excited to share this interview with Aaron LaBerge of Coolspotters fame. We here at Curious Office invested in Coolspotters alongside Second Avenue Partners, Rich Barton of Zillow & Expedia fame and others. Aaron is a forward thinking technologist that knows what kind of experiences entice consumers. The quality of their execution is second to none and they are a great prototype for any start-up entrepreneurs wanting to learn how to go from concept to world class product.

1) Tell us about Aaron LaBerge. How did you come to start Fanzter?

I am originally from Charleston, SC and graduated from the University of South Carolina (Go Gamecocks!) with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering. After school, I worked at a small Internet startup in Columbia, SC that was building database driven websites (before there were database driven websites). From there I moved to Seattle to work for an upstart software company named Starwave, where I was part of the team that helped launch ESPN.com. Disney eventually bought Starwave, through a series of mid-90’s acquisition acrobatics, and I ended up spending the next ten years working for ESPN, where I was lucky enough to work on some of the most visited and loved web properties in the world.

When I met my co-founder, Eric Kirsten, we were both thinking about what was next in our professional lives. We started brainstorming ideas and quickly realized that we wanted to start a company together. Fanzter was started as consumer-focused technology company. Our first product, Coolspotters (http://coolspotters.com), was born of the simple idea that product, style, and fashion trends are driven largely by celebrities and other public figures. At the time, there was no easy or reliable way to discover what products these celebs were wearing, eating, driving, and using, so we saw an exciting opportunity.

2) In a nutshell, how do you describe Coolspotters?

Coolspotters.com is quickly becoming the #1 destination for the latest celebrity fashions, trends, and click-to-buy shopping. We make it easy for people to discover, share, and buy the products and brands used by their favorite celebrities – in their real lives, and in movies and television. Think of it as an association engine that is centered around pop-culture and products/brands.

Coolspotters provides tools for users to share everything they know about their favorite celebrities, products, brands, and entertainment. Community members can “spot” celebrities with the fashions they wear in their real lives, or with the movies in which they’ve appeared, for example. They can also spot products or brands with the TV shows and movies in which they’ve been featured. The result is a universe of inter-connected profiles, allowing users to discover what’s hot now…or emerging as the next big thing. Rachel Zoe, celebrity stylist, called Coolspotters the “Google of People and Products”. We like that.

3) You just raised some new money. What did your investors love about the story?

We have some great investors that we view as true partners. Second Avenue Partners has supported us since day one. And most recently, Steamboat Ventures invested.

They also love our next product – SimpleSports (http://simplesports). It’s a completely new way to consume sports information that will be launching soon.

4) What do you like most about your job? What do you dislike most?

I’ve always loved building products. I’ve been lucky enough in my career to help create a few really amazing products. Everything at Fanzter centers around providing an environment that allows our people to build great things, and “building” is my favorite part of my job. As far as what I dislike, there’s not much, but I’ll admit it’s more than a challenge maintaining a work/life balance. When you start a company, it’s not unlike having a child, it takes a ton of attention, focus, and care.

5) What bit of trivia would someone not know about Aaron LaBerge?

I have the same watch as Bill Clinton, Bob Iger, The Rock, and Pierce Brosnan. http://coolspotters.com/watches/panerai-luminor

Had a nice visit here in the Office of Curiousity with the founder of Moo.com Richard Moross. If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out their products, you really should. They are the coolest Custom Business Cards, MiniCards and Postcards with personality.

We are pleased to announce our latest project! Rouxbe is a company targeting a big market – home cooks of all ages who are motivated to become better cooks. We all know there are lots of hit-and-miss recipe sites. Unlike other online cooking sites that focus on recipes, celebrity chefs and short technique videos, the, Rouxbe School mirrors an actual culinary curriculum, complete with instructional cooking video lessons, practice video recipes, culinary chef exercises, progress reporting, cooking quizzes, and personal chef support.

Rouxbe is for those who want to learn actual technique. The company is also backed, in part, by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

Just found these today – Helveticons are extremely cool. Should you need icons for wire-framing, presentations, Web applications, buttons, promotional material, or something to put above your desk – Helveticons got you covered. Seven file formats of which six are in scalable vector format. The set contains a lot of different file format, such as .gs for Omnigraffle icons, and .chs for Photoshop shapes. All in all, this is a nice set of graphic design resources. Even if you dont actually use the icons, sometimes its great to have inspiration for common icons.

We are flattered that Marcelo Calbucci has invited us here at Curious Office to speak at the Seattle StartupDay 2009 hosted by Seattle 2.0. StartupDay is the conference for pre-entrepreneurs interested in founding or joining a tech startup. Meet one-on-one with advisors. Learn how to pick the right idea, build your team, fund the business, build your product, bring it to market and make a profit. Learn what’s important for creating a tech business from scratch.

Here at Curious Office we are all about startups and that’s why we think this event is going to be great for any aspiring entrepreneur. StartupDay is a conference for people who are interested in learning about startups so they can better prepare themselves when they decide to found or join one.

Sometimes, timing is everything. Back in 2000 there was no YouTube. We tried to do a video aggregation play for “special interest” and instructional videos just as 5min is doing today. But, the problem was that broadband and video consumption in general just wasn’t pervasive on the internet. We were too early. There was no existing content on the web to just link to so we had to dredge it up from video reels and encode it all! So, we merged Rocketvox with another company to become thePlatform and focused on video technology instead.

There are two key lessons I took away from that experience. First, was that timing is as important as your idea itself. If your timing is wrong you have two choices. One, is to buckle down and slog it out for years. Or, you can change your strategy. You know your timing is too early when you talk to big companies who obviously should care about what you are doing but who don’t yet have a developed strategy and team dedicated to working that particular initiative. In such cases you have to make the tough call. Do you put your head down and ride it out in hopes that you are right? Or, do you shift your model to try and demonstrate shorter term successes. It’s a personal question only you can answer. In retrospect, I think we made the right decision. However, it wouldn’t have been a dumb idea to resurrect RocketVox as a content play several years later. I never did and probably should have.

Sometimes old ideas done better and with fresh perspective are the best ideas going.

1) Tell us about Eric Peters. How did you come to start FrugalMechanic?

I’m a Seattle native, born and bred here for 28 years. I graduated from the UW with a degree in Business – but I also paid for school programming database driven websites. Programming+Business = Win. After school, I split my time between corporate jobs at Amazon and Microsoft (MSN Search). At Amazon, I was the only business user in Retail Hardlines to have a Linux Developer box (which I had to get an SVP approval for) and also my own SQL login account to the data warehouse. At Microsoft, I was one of a handful of search data experts & got to run & analyze monetization and usability AB Tests for MSN Search.

I left Microsoft a few years ago to go to an Ignition Partners startup SecondSpace (now called DataSphere) where in June of ‘08 my best friend Tim Underwood (who I had recruited to SS) and I were laid off – that’s how Frugal Mechanic really got started. At the PI, John Cook wrote a blurb about us in August 2008 @ http://www.seattlepi.com/venture/374001_vc08.html. At the time our initial goal was to spend the summer and “build that startup idea” we never could scrape the time together for. That summer turned into much, much longer.

2) In a nutshell, how do you describe FrugalMechanic?

We’re a shopping website for auto parts.

OK, that’s a little short but that’s what the website does for consumers. On the backend we scrape & normalize content from across dozens of websites, handle price refreshes, and power a front-end that has over 50M pieces of fitment information for auto parts. Oh did I also mention we power over 40 different websites all from the same code base? A couple of our more high profile partnerships include http://autoparts.cardomain.com, http://auto-parts.myride.com, and http://autoparts.thecarconnection.com

3) Who are your big competitors and what value proposition sets you apart?

It would be easy for me to say Price Grabber/Nexttag/Shopzilla/MSN Shopping/eBay/etc. The reality, though, is they rank terribly for auto-part related searches, so our biggest competitors are other individual auto part retailers.

The whitelabel solution I mentioned is one of our competitive advantages for driving distribution – there are a lot of automotive enthusiast websites that would like to have an turn-key auto part store without the headache of customer service. We can do that for them, and at no cost (in-fact we pay them a revshare of our affiliate revenue)

4) What do you like most about your job? What do you dislike most?

I love wearing multiple hats. By far, that’s one of the biggest joys a business-techie guy like myself can have. I can be having a biz dev call in the morning, writing code during lunch, and de-duping auto part categories in a spreadsheet all in the same day.

On the flipside, starting my own startup has been one of the most stressful situations – especially when we were consulting to bootstrap in the earlier months – it was very distracting and sucks a lot of energy out of you. My boss can also be a bit of an a$$h0le sometimes, but I find it hard to talk behind his back.

5) What bit of trivia would someone not know about FrugalMechanic?

My Co-Founder & Best Friend Tim Underwood is also a Seattleite (I have visual proof – http://twitpic.com/9xaxj – Socks w/Sandles!)

Reach Eric via Twitter: @ericpeters

What’s Lunch 2.0 you ask?

* Leave work for your lunch hour or happy hour
* Come to Seattle Lunch 2.0
* Get free food and drinks
* Experience lunchtime or happy hour at a cool local company
* Learn about something new
* Meet new contacts in the industry
* Go back to work and be productive

We had a great time hosting the event along with our office mates Wishpot and Zooppa – showcasing the combined experience and insight of the folks heading up companies incubated by H-Farm and Curious Office.

Some of you may know that Curious Office is a co-investor alongside Fanzter’s original lead investor Second Avenue Partners and others. Today it was announced that Fanzter acquired Mustache, Inc, purveyor of popular iPhone applications, Streaks, Summizer, and Brackets. Jon Maddox of Mustache, will be joining Fanzter, Inc. as VP of Technology and Product Development to continue developing things people love with them.

This announcement follows Fanzter’s announcement in March that they had raised $2 million in a Series B financing round led by Steamboat Ventures.

Congrats everyone at Fanzter!

As you can see, lean and green is no longer a trend but part of the entrepreneurial fabric of the Pacific Northwest. The future of start-ups is in sustainable products, whether that’s wood flooring or water dispensers or electronics that conserve energy. We would like to thank the judges, sponsors, volunteers, faculty, and our colleagues at Seattle University, Washington State University, Seattle Pacific, Evergreen, Pacific Lutheran, Seattle Central, UW Bothell, Western Washington, and Whitworth. It takes a community raise an entrepreneur!

$25,000 Herbert B. Jones Foundation Grand Prize
Nanocel, UW, Seattle U
Provides high performance liquid cooling solutions to the electronics market.
Dustin Miller, PhD Mechanical Engineering; Daniel Rossi, Evening MBA; Todd Fishman, Seattle U MBA; Mehar Pratap Singh, Evening MBA; and Noah Stockton, Evening MBA

$10,000 Bristlecone-Selamat Challenge Second Prize
Energizing Solutions, UW
Washington corporation with patent pending technology to help industrial facilities switch from predictive to preventative maintenance on their electric motors, cutting maintenance costs by more than 70%.
Brian Pepin, BS Electrical Engineering; Marc Ramme, MBA; and Anthony Simon, BS Electrical Engineering

$5,000 Fenwick & West Finalist Prize
Shockmetrics, UW
Technology that is able to detect shock in patients before it becomes terminal.
Ryan Bergsman, Evening MBA; Anthony Rodriguez, PhD Bioengineering; Erik Roby, BS 2008

$5,000 WRF Capital Finalist Prize
HydroSense, UW
A revolutionary water sensor that detects fixture-level usage from a single point in a home or business.
Jon Froehlich, PhD Computer Science; Conor Haggerty, BS Community, Environment and Planning; Tim Campbell, BS Mechanical Engineering; Jenna Lee, PhD Psychology; Zach Okun, MBA; Vandan Parikh, MBA; and Debbie Tran, MBA

BEST IDEA PRIZES
The BEST IDEA prizes were created to reward teams in the Business Plan Competition for their exceptional work in several different categories. The teams receiving these prizes were selected by a special group of judges during the Investment Round. This year we gave away SIX $2,500 Best Idea Prizes.

OVP Best Technology Idea
Nanocel, UW, Seattle U
Provides high performance liquid cooling solutions to the electronics market.
Dustin Miller, PhD Mechanical Engineering; Daniel Rossi, Evening MBA; Todd Fishman, Seattle U MBA; Mehar Pratap Singh, Evening MBA; and Noah Stockton, Evening MBA

SEBA Best Innovation Idea
Shockmetrics, UW
Technology that is able to detect shock in patients before it becomes terminal.
Ryan Bergsman, Evening MBA; Anthony Rodriguez, PhD Bioengineering; Erik Roby, BS 2008

Summit Law Group Best Consumer Product Idea
Big Canvas, UW
We take mobile/always-connected communication to the next level, beyond texting and Twitter, by offering richer media expressed through photos and creative arts to our users.
Adam Goldblatt, EMBA, and Satoshi Nakajima, EMBA

DLA Piper Best Service/Retail Idea
ecowell, WSU
Will design, deploy and manage a network of litter-free, beverage dispensing kiosks that allow users to customize their drink, and pay 50% less than bottled beverages while doing so. Kiosks will offer automatic customer identification, environmental messaging, and targeted advertisements.
Brian Boler, BS Electrical Engineering; Reid Schilperoort, BA Finance and Entrepreneurship; Andy Whitaker, BS Electrical Engineering and Chinese, and Don Tilton

Keeler Investments Best Clean-Tech Idea
HydroSense, UW
A revolutionary water sensor that detects fixture-level usage from a single point in a home or business.
Jon Froehlich, PhD Computer Science; Conor Haggerty, BS Community, Environment and Planning; Tim Campbell, BS Mechanical Engineering; Jenna Lee, PhD Psychology; Zach Okun, MBA; Vandan Parikh, MBA; and Debbie Tran, MBA

Sensors in Motion Best Sustainable Advantage Idea
Sisalwood, UW
A sustainable alternative to hardwood for interior design and furniture.
Jason Hahn, MBA; Lindsey Sheets, MBA; and Payan ole-MoiYoi

One of the web’s larger graphic design portals did a nice expose one usability and design. Inkd was included as an example of good design. Smashing Magazine wrote the following:

When it comes to building customer’s trust in your company, a professional, trustworthy design becomes crucial. In the Web, people are very likely to mistrust online-business, so you better make sure that you appear credible and serious. Inkd.com does just that with a professional look, a solid grid-based layout and following classic usability conventions.

Over at our print design marketplace, Inkd, we’ve compiled a blog post containing the top 15 graphic design magazines. Most also have free trials and discounts for designers belonging to organizations or for students, and all of these magazines have resource rich companion websites.Some magazines are highly focused on graphic design, some are great for general inspiration. Many have at least annual calls for design and competition. This is a really great list. Particularly for those of you who design brochures, newsletters and other print material.

I am actually a Seattle native. Born at Virginia Mason as my father did a medical internship and my mother was a hippie watercolor artist in the Pike Place Market. In college I took Computer Science (on a Burroughs card reader) but wasn’t smart enough to write device drivers so I decided to focus on business applications and languages. I used to like to reprogram the TRS-80s in Radio Shack to loop profanity on the screen. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair, then TRS-80 with a cassette player as “mass storage”, then Compaq luggable running CPM, then a Zenith lunchbox running DOS, then I started selling Leading Edge PCs running the Microsoft stack. I came back to Seattle after college in ’87 to work for Andersen Consulting (Accenture) as an RPG (for the IBM S/38 and AS/400) programmer for $19,500/year and I thought I was the bomb. Deep in by bones I am a computer nerd and gadget freak. But I have this need to use technology to actually solve real life problems rather than just be technology for technology sake. I guess I am in Technology because I really believe things like the PC, the Internet, wireless, et al have changed the world and can continue to improve my life.

You’ve raised more money than anyone I’m likely to interview. You took one company public. Now you’re latest company is called Kashless. What’s the elevator pitch?

Yea I have raised over $500M for different companies, invested a couple million of my own in over 40 companies and helped VC’s invest about $30M more. I like being both an investor and inventor. I am in inventor mode with Kashless.org now.

Kashless.org is the first online marketplace where everything is free. The company calls it ReCommerce. Kashless.org helps consumers find reusable and recyclable items in their local communities that they need in their daily lives. Currently available only in the Puget Sound, the site lists thousands of items free for the taking today. The Company hopes to provide the service nationally in the coming months.

Why is it the best place to search for and publish free items?

We provide a single place that aggregates all free items locally across other listing services. Kashless.org has scheduling tools, offer tools, user reputation, feedback, saved searches and lots of other advanced e-commerce features that are missing in existing free listing services. As a giver of stuff, you can get a tax receipt for giving through Kashless.org and have tools to manage your response cue (other than your email inbox) and track your positive impact on the planet, all new features to the free transaction marketplace.

Mind if I ask how the idea came to you?

Like every idea I have had (and acted on) and every idea I have ever invested in, personal need. Last summer, I was cleaning out my garage, had a bunch of failed Craigslist sales and failed pick-ups when offered for free (blog post). I was frustrated by the lack of good ecommerce tools and the poor experience trying to give something away. It was easier to throw it in the trash. That is why so much good stuff goes in the trash, it is too hard to give away. I thought I could do better.

What other start-up(s) in Seattle do you think are cool?

One of my favorite things about Seattle is the vibrant start-up community. Especially in the last couple of years with the addition of mixers and lots of local networking sites, there has really been an explosion. Unfortunately I can’t use them all and I haven’t considered the business models of many of them, so I wouldn’t presume to judge the “coolest” startups. I also do a lot with alternative energy start-ups as founder of NW Energy Angels, so they are different. As far as ones I use and personally hope succeed, I would include 43Things, Divvy, Dibspace, Greenwood Technologies, Brammo (Ashland Oregon), RYNO Motors, Blue Marble Energy, and EnerG2.

You could give tons of advice to a new entrepreneur. We’ll save that for a book. If you could share just one sentence of guidance or warning for the first time CEO what would you say?

Find a problem that personally pisses you off and fix it.

1. You aren’t out there trying to get your start-up idea funded like so many others in Seattle. Tell us about Dan and what you do.

I am the Program Director for the Computer Science, Information Systems, and Information Security programs at City University of Seattle. We see many of the technology issues that companies have, from startups trying to find the right programming experience to people being ready to go to work from day one. My job is to make sure that all of the computer science education that we provide is what companies need for their work force. We work with over 35 major and minor companies in the Seattle area to help write and deliver great educational programs and help people get real skills that they can go right to work with. We even work with startups to understand what they are looking for, along with some of the bigger companies in the Seattle area. Education has a unique perspective when it comes to companies, people love to talk to us because we do not try to sell them anything, we see many different skills that companies want, we then try to design programs around those skills, measure the success of imparting those skills, and work with groups that provide key insights into what is happening next, so we can train to future skills. The hardest part is working with future based skills, and often we find ourselves working with Alpha version systems, that by the time students have graduated from school, are in full use late stage beta or just hitting production. It is one of the most fun things I do, work with advanced technological ideas and then design training programs for them.

One of my biggest favorite phrases is that the “students we teach today will be solving problems tomorrow that we do not even know are problems yet.” CityU of Seattle has taken that idea to heart, and works very hard to make sure that we are preparing students for the future. We are fortunate in that we can respond very quickly to new technology, it takes us a year to put together a complete training program, while other colleges might take as long as five years to do the same thing. Like many companies, we find that we have to be very agile in what we teach, to make sure we are providing skills that employers need.

2. What made you decide to move to the educational side versus staying in the “private” sector?

I spent 22 years in the private sector and had a blast, but something was missing, and that was paying it forward. This was a personal issue for me, where could I do the most good? I worked in Information Security and would help small select groups of people within companies, but after my experience with blogging, and seeing how fast the information security business and landscapes change, I thought that being in education would be the next big logical step. We need more people researching computer systems, making great hard to break software, thinking about how to break and fix computer systems, and generally making the computing environments we work with from the Critical Infrastructure grid (power, water, sewer) to the software on our mobile phones. The chance to raise the bar on what we teach, how we teach it, and get people thinking about the problems we have in computing was too much of an opportunity to pass up. If you had the chance to effect good change on a global population, that is a hard thing to turn down, I don’t know many who would turn that down.

3. Tell us a bit about how you’re using new technologies (cloud computing etc) at CityU?

One of the problems with learning is that everyone learns just a little bit differently from the way that everyone else learns. By working with Cloud Computing on the backend infrastructure, video teleconferencing, video lectures, podcasts, along with traditional text/document/PowerPoint, we can provide a richer experience for students. We can easily appeal and work with the various ways that people learn by providing a rich mix of traditional materials and support for new learning methods and tools. I have had students stream lectures on their cell phone, or watch lectures on video on their lunch breaks prepping for the class. The more we move away from traditional PowerPoint huge lecture hall style teaching and more towards what students expect with digital technologies today, the more successful the students are in retaining knowledge. The more successful students are, the higher likelihood of them being hired, and the higher likelihood that they will get great jobs, and eventually pay back the communities that supported them.

We are in many ways trying to create a 1 to 1 relationship between the student and the content using our backend teaching systems to appeal to the way that the individual student learns. Cloud computing, open source software like Wordpress, Loudblog, Open Source VTC, and Moodle as a learning management system, free seminars, and other technology all adds to the classroom experience, and supports the many different ways that people learn. When you can have a one to one relationship between the content and the student, everyone wins. Technology provides a way to remove barriers to learning, the technology we use is all about breaking down barriers and providing a rich experience for the classroom online or in person.

4. You do a bit of blogging too. Favorite topics to write about?

People, technology, society, and education are my favorite things to write about. If you look at the ability of communication to break down access and remove barriers to access to world-class information. Today we live behind pay walls for information, but individual or corporate blogging, sites like Toolbox, FriendFeed, Social Median and even RSS readers can all be inputs to the information that you need now. People are complex, we are often messy in how we relate to each other, Web 2.0 and other technological systems help us all understand where things are coming from. We learn not to take things to personally, we develop better social skills, and we allow ourselves to find people inside and outside our comfort zones. Do I agree with everything I read, no, but when I read something brilliant by Louis Gray, Steve Hodson, Mike Fruchter, Andy Sack, Marcello Calbucci, and other brilliant thinkers and leaders for this generation, we all expand ourselves. Usually I end up commenting and putting my own spin on what they say, but through them, I have met some of the most fantastic people that I would never have met otherwise. Those are the fun things to write about, and mostly what I focus on when I do write. There are also the cool things that are happening in the Seattle 2.0 community, startups fascinate me because we are working with a strong charismatic leader at times, other times we are dealing with people who are focused on a dream. What makes them tick, what makes them successful, how do they handle failure? These are the heroes we should be looking at and talking about, Seattle has one of the most vibrant startup communities I have been involved with; we need to talk about them more.

5. If you could snap your fingers and solve any technology problem right now, what would it be?

The one problem I would love to solve in terms of technology would be to have a true one to one learning system, where people could go and learn what they need to learn or want to learn without knowing the difference; it would all be interesting and applicable to what the student wants to do with their lives. The first person that can put something like this together, I will see how well it does in our environment.

Read this: http://tamccann.blogspot.com/2008/11/nwen-presentation-0-25mph-for-startups.html

Pitch your business using Powerpoint, but focus on running it with Excel. Get the key milestones on a timeline and understand the dependencies. Everything will take 50% more time to close than you think, so plan accordingly. Trade your personal equity to attract great people. Focus on customers long before you focusing on product. The CEO must do all the initial selling. Did you say one?

Many people know Envato websites but they don’t know Collis Ta’eed. How did you get into this business?

Although my background is in design, I think entrepreneurship must have been in my blood. I’ve always loved starting things, even as a kid I had various dubious schemes and plans. Sometime after becoming a designer and then freelancer, my wife and I found ourselves discussing how much better life would be if we didn’t have any clients to please. After a whole lot of working weekends and nights, together with a super talented rails developer, we managed to launch our first site, and we’ve never looked back!

What is the Envato network?

Our company Envato has spread out a lot since those early days and we’ve launched a whole series of websites in different areas. They mostly cater to creatives, developers and freelancers and collectively we refer to them as the Envato network. Broadly speaking we have a set of digital goods marketplaces like FlashDen where people can buy and sell Adobe Flash components, and a set of educational blogs that teach technical and creative skills like Psdtuts+ where you can master Photoshop!

Along with these we like to support creatives in whatever way we can find, so we operate a popular freelancing community where there’s advice, tools and jobs for freelancers, and Creattica which offers daily design news and inspiration, and actually there are a whole lot of sites in our network. Sometimes even I have a hard time keeping up with them all.

If you were to add another site to the network what would feel natural to you?

We have a few sites up our sleeve, the one we’re working on currently is a new tutorial site called Cgtuts+ which is going to be all about 3d. We’re very excited to be growing the Tuts+ line of sites because we’re so passionate about education. I think the internet is a great equalizer for the spread of information and I’m hopeful that the Tuts+ sites will help that movement. The bulk of our content is completely free and we offer some really top grade tutorials by industry professionals. Cgtuts+ will be the sixth site in the line, and following that we’re planning a higher level education site to complement the current batch of tech skills sites.

Teaching online poses some interesting challenges but also some wonderful advantages. For instance it’s difficult to replicate one on one contact, but on the other hand the potential to make one piece of educational content and then use it an infinite number of times is hugely efficient. So I’m very excited about growing Tuts+ in the future, as well as all our other sites.

Do you consider yourself a design guy, a marketing guy or a technical guy?

These days I think of myself as an entrepreneur, but beyond that I have a very definite specialty in design. I design all our sites myself, though these days I’m not sure I can keep that up. So this year I’m faced with the challenge of replacing myself in my favourite job … oh well, all good things come to an end!

Your success is evident. Why do you think you’ve done well growing Envato? What suited you well to this task?

I think you could attribute a lot of our success to the fact that we’ve been meticulously honest and open with our business. We have a large community of users who we care about very deeply. It’s our goal to help them succeed in whatever way we can, and I think people instinctively understand and react to that.

Favorite hobby when not working?

Drinking tea! I love tea, though to be fair I do a lot of thinking about work while drinking tea. I also love playing the piano and play them whenever I find one, even when it’s at inappropriate times like in a restaurant full of people.