As I’ve mentioned before, my hope has always been to start a company and do great things. Like many, I tried to get into Startup School at Y Combinator, and before that tried to get into MIT (unsuccessfully) for an MBA with a specialization in Entrepreneurship (I ended up with an MBA in Marketing at BU, and then went off to get an MS in Computer Science from another school).
And as mentioned in a previous entry I wanted to kind of bridge the lessons learned from those two experiences by doing a data science intensive at General Assembly. That last part is my most favorite of the three academic experiences. I’d say it was more experiential than academics.
Additionally, I have been trying, in fits and starts to get a company going. My idea is to in some way bring back peer-to-peer networks but use machine learning to filter out illegal or copyrighted content and just make it a haven for creators. Bring in a Harlem Renaissance of sorts.
The current model of people making creative content, a movie for instance looks like this (I know my slides say confidential, down below, but honestly, like Paul Graham says "ideas themselves are worthless, it's all in the execution.")…
My hope is to turn it into something like this…
Right now, due to the Corona-virus, virtual and distributed collaboration are becoming the next big thing.
LA and Georgia are probably still in a production hiatus due to the virus ravaging those communities, and NYC just climbed out of the hot zone list, I think. So if everybody can't be on set, you've got to do something to deal with all the content that has backed up in the pipeline needing to be produced.
You’ve now got people working on commercials for big name brands, many of them from the comfort of their home offices.
And you’re less reliant on having lost of people in the room where the filming takes place.
My first foray into the art of cinema is going to be through screenwriting and I’ve written a bit and am getting advice from a great screenwriting coach with experience reading for acquiring editors and agencies. I’m far from anything decent but I’m confident I’ll get there.
Anyway, with regards to software and a collaborative community, my idea has been refined through iterations. At the same time, Y Combinator opened up Startup School with a rolling admissions system.
I’ve been in it for a while, kicking often to the next cohort after I get distracted and to tend to other things. But hopefully I can finish things this time.
Many weeks there a feedback session, where teams from a diverse set of location and industries get together on what is like a Zoom call to chat about our ideas, answer questions, and address weaknesses.
The feedback I’ve been getting when presenting my ideas in our videoconferences has been quite helpful…
And the lesson content is really useful too…
So I’m drowning in resources right now.
And this isn't the only project I've got going on.
My next topic therefore will be managing one’s life…especially when one has a mental illness that makes it very difficult.
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