I had gigantic goals for myself in 2011 – many of which were seemingly impossible.  Through that decision to bite down hard, decide what I truly wanted out of my life and really pursue after my goals, its many sacrifices, and countless days, weeks, and months gone without rest, it feels good to be able to reflect on the last 364 days with some sense of accomplishment.  Just around this time last year, I started getting plugged into the startup scene in Boston and took my first dive into tech. I knew nothing about UI/UX, engineering, and certainly nothing about how to build a product.  Hell, last year, I was rejected in getting into Babson’s entrepreneurship society.

There are a couple of things I am very proud of myself for having done in the year of 2011 that I believe had the greatest impact on getting me to where I am now:

• From November ’10 to January/Feb ’11, having spent 8 hours a day on top of classes and 12 hours a day on weekends and during winter break teaching myself the fundamentals of web development through Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails guide. These three months didn’t make me into a proficient developer, but rather allowed me to understand the fundamentals and insight on back-end development which ended up playing a large part in allowing me to develop a great relationship and partner chemistry with my now tech co-founder, Murry, in February.
• Knowing what I wanted to do in life, who I wanted to become, and deciding to drop out of college once I realized my goals and current path (education in academia) were not complementary.  I want to be the greatest entrepreneur and innovator of my generation.  I believe starting out earlier than the rest gives me a head start in a setting where we all have only a finite amount of time.  Once my understanding of failure became greater than my fear of failure, it became a clear choice.  I would rather die knowing I pushed myself forward until failure than being ordinary and not knowing what it feels like.

However, there are several things I failed. Obviously, they are part of my 2012 New Years Resolutions:

• Managing and setting expectations.  This bit me on the ass quite a few times this year for the first time in my life from professional settings such as staying on the same page with my teammates, to personal ones with family and friendships.
• Bullshitting to myself that it’s impossible to fit in extra time into living a healthy and sustainable life schedule. 2pm-8am schedule is NOT healthy nor sustainable.  Also, after 2 years of football then 4 years of rugby from high school into college until leaving for the Valley this past May, I am in the worst physical shape of my life – at the age of 20! I will eat healthier, sleep sufficiently, and spend time in the gym frequently.
• Celebrating the most miniscule of achievements. Just as choices imply sacrifices, celebrations imply complacency. It’s a dangerous drug. I must to learn to keep my head down and keep moving forward.
• Being a less-than-satisfactory friend, son, and brother. This is in-line with me bullshitting to myself about my lack of time. I failed to keep in touch with some of my best friends from the previous years in 2011, and largely due to my fault, lost touch with great friends. I plan to repair these relationships as well as being a better family member to my parents and younger brother.

For me, 2012 is the Year of Discipline. My career and life goals are complementary with the root of discipline. Many of my faults and mistakes sprout from my lack of discipline in certain areas. I’m only getting older and need to live as a driven and disciplined adult, no longer does just being a driven young adult work for me. It shouldn’t.

Here’s to the New Years. Bring on 2012. Friends, I hope you achieve everything you want and more this upcoming year.

In regards to the type of activities that happened today, the office was buzzing with people’s phones going off and talking on the phone with investors.  Everyone seemed very focused on work when they weren’t on a call because many of us are getting ready to launch (including us).  When everyone around you is #ELaMF’ing (“Executing Like a Motherfucker”) [tweet], you can’t help but #ELaMF yourself from all that energy around you and in turn, add fuel to the fire.  It was great to have the team perform well today and Mike (aka Mags) absolutely killed it in sales today.

One Closing Thought: We spend roughly 2 hours a day driving going to the office and coming back home.  At 7 days a week in a 14 week program, that’s roughly 200 hours per person spent driving on the road not being able to do any productive work – 800 hours total for the team.  That’s like 10x more than what GroupMe spent to create the first version of their product…  I’m trying everything I can to try and get out of our 12 month rent that was signed back in May so that we can move down to MV and spend more of our time working and less money on gas.

Tuesday: To/day/ was pretty much a regular Tuesday at 500.  We got free lunch and the Forrst guys gave us exclusives to get on their brand new job board (LINK) so we could hire designers and developers from their super awesome community before anyone else.

Anyways, to/night/ was definitely not a regular night by any measure.  I wanted to grab dinner around 8pm and Rob from MelonCard told me he would only agree to go out to Pho Garden if I attempted the Pho Challenge.  My arrogant ass took the challenge and when we got there, Rob even agreed to do the challenge with me.

We started off strong and within the first 20 minutes, both Rob and I ate through about 70% of the challenge.  The next 10 minutes, we slowed down considerably as the noodle started to soak up all the juice and was only able to finish another 10% (total 80% in 30 minutes).  Rob took a break from eating at this point as he felt sick and I decided to power through the remaining noodles by putting noodles into my mouth and shooting it down with a shot of water.  The noodles were starting to trigger my gag reflexes a bit by this point, but I thought I figured out a way to beat it, until… I got a horrible feeling as I literally felt the noodles overflowing from my stomach.  Shortly after, I started the hashtag #noodlevomit and announced my defeat.

Pho Challenge

Side note: Rob never ended up resuming after the break he took at the 30 minute mark and held his noodles in, until he #noodlevomit his entire meal when he came back to his house that night.

I will never forget this day.

Wednesday: I felt like shit in the morning.  I literally got kicked in the ass by bunch of carbohydrates.  To add on top of it, I had a lunch meeting scheduled with someone from SVB at Pho Garden today at noon.  First thing I did when I woke up was to change the place of the meeting.

Back at the office, everyone and their grandmas had a great time making Pho and #noodlevomit references back at the office.  It was actually quite humorous getting made fun of about my experience, but I just felt sick to my stomach any time someone mentioned Pho…

Thursday: Today was an amazing day for us at Redeemr.  We closed our biggest deal when our now-clients came to visit us at 500Startups to put the finishing touches on the deal.

We will make an announcement about this soon.

Also, later in the office and after a few drinks out, DJ Pauly S was spotted spinning the turntables (read: MacBook) again [picture].

Friday: Today was Day 2 of Design Bootcamp lead by 500’s Enrique Allen.  Enrique brought in a bunch of super experienced UI/UX designers to talk about usability as well as lead some hands on exercises for us to really map out our product.

Unfortunately for my team and I, the timing couldn’t have been worse as we are really heads down gearing up for launch (We thought we’d launch last week L ) and ended up making the decision to forgo some parts of the bootcamp so that we won’t push back our launch date (again).

Pauly S, drunk again later Friday night, told everyone with pride that he will buy the “drunk.vc” domain name and start a blog there.  Shortly after, I became the owner of the St. Vincent based domain (.vc) called Drunk.  Early bird gets the worm, Paul.

I am now the owner of drunk.vc as well as drunkvc.com.  All interested parties, please inquire via email.

This first week was all over the map – as it should have been.  In the last 7 days, I got some free lunches, met the fellow founders and their companies (all 32 of them) only to make fun of them later, spent a night at the office, found the only hookah place nearby, and had some fun dancing like I was back in college (my rugby buddies know this well).  My week went something like this:

Monday: Our day started off pretty shitty-ly.  ”Orientation” was scheduled for noon for the official kick-off so the team and I wanted to get in the office around 10am.  But, this being our first weekday commute down to South Bay Area from SF, we naïvely naturally chose to drive down 101.  Almost 2 hours and a lot of cursing after, we arrived at 500.  Luckily, we weren’t late for the orientation because what ensued in the office living room was what I expected out of 500: a lot of swearing and threats from Dave McClure.

With all kidding aside though, Dave, Christine and Paul really pumped us up.  They really drove home what it means to be #500Strong.  It means a lot to be one of the youngest (just a little over a year, to be exact), yet one of the most connected family of mentors, advisors, and founders of companies in all types of stages not only here in SV, but all over the globe.

Monday’s Memorable Quote: “Normal startups die. Do not be the norm” – Dave McClure. [tweet]

Tuesday: Took 101 again, gambling that Monday was just an abnormality.  Wrong.  Need to find a new route.

Luckily again, we didn’t miss the first lunch session.  Eating my free lunch in the living room with everyone else, I listened to Adam and Mike at Spinnakr show how the founders can utilize their product for our fundraising.  Spinnakr is a really cool product and allows you to intelligently display different contents on your website based on where the visitor is coming from.  Imagine being able to show a certain homepage for a visitor coming from an article on TechCrunch and a completely different homepage for a visitor coming from our AngelList profile.  This is some really great tool and I’ll definitely be using it for Redeemr.

After the lunch session, we went back to work like everyone else until rather late and decided to join our desk neighbors, Rob and Geoff at MelonCard for a late dinner.  It was unique to hear their experience and the journeys they took to come up with the idea for MelonCard which automatically opts you out of any online information databases (like Spokeo) that store your private information and sell them.  After dinner, we went over to their apartment nearby the office and got to know each other better through this game called “Half-Baked” (rumor says Dave created the game) where people go around in a circle pitching “half-baked” ideas based on the two words shouted out by the two people right of you.  It was my first time playing and I got rocked, hard.

Anyways, it was great to check out their place because I was interested in finding a place closer to the office so we could spend more of our days working and not driving through traffic.

Tuesday’s Takeaway: If you don’t want to spend 3 hours a day going to MV and coming back up to SF, stop taking 101.

Wednesday: 40 minutes.  I guess that’s all it takes to get to MV from SF if you take 280.  Thanks to this, my day started off phenomenally.  In the morning, one of Redeemr’s advisors visited us at 500 and we gave him a quick tour of the office and talked about our action plans and strategy for our product distribution.  In the afternoon, Paul held his information session on AngelList in the living room and shared with founders the 500Startup tips and tricks (like the startup version of the secret recipe) on how to get funded on AngelList.  After editing and reviewing our page, we published our AngelList profile and immediately the weight the 500Startups name has on getting attention from other investors.  I didn’t realize 500 and Dave are two of the 5 most followed accounts on AL.

Even with this new AL thing, the team and I were actually able to get a lot of work done in preparation for our upcoming launch.  I learned how productive I could be personally in a shared office setting like 500, if I didn’t let all the different events and distractions take my focus away from actual work.

However, throughout the day, there was a lot of chatter and excitement about the upcoming event on Thursday titled “Night of Special Pitches”.

Thursday:  We got into the office around 10am and was later provided with a free lunch, again (Tuesdays and Thursdays have already become my favorite days of the week).  Fast forward all the non-important stuff (because, who wants to read about what I did during work?), Thursday night was a night to never forget.  On our shared 500Startups Google Calendar, there was a Q&A session with the alumni of batch #000 and #001 that started at 4:30pm and from 6-9pm, the event was called “The Night of Special Pitches”.  This has become a 500 tradition, where every first Thursday of the new accelerator batch, everyone just gets wasted from beer and try to pitch other team’s companies just from their name while inebriate.  As much as I think it would be amazing to share with everyone the pitches of every team, I think it’s just something you’ll have to earn to experience once you become part of the 500Family.  Anyways, you mix alcohol with startupers, apparently you get a lot of sex or drug related businesses because just about every single pitch was solving the needs of everybody’s sex or drug related frustrations and problems.

Afterwards, we all danced like maniacs and sung our hearts out to Pitbull, LMFAO, and Lady Gaga as DJ Pauly S (aka Paul Singh) worked the turntable that is his Macbook.  I had an amazing time dancing like I was back in college and every one of us really bonded with each other that night.  Many of us decided to continue our night and went bar hopping then to the club on Castro St (500 is in a great location).

I didn’t want to go back home when Mike and Murry were headed back up to SF, and I ended up making cozy on one of the many couches in the living room of the office for the night.

Thursday’s Memorable Quote: “Gizmo, sex toys in the cloud.” - Paul Singh. [tweet]

Friday: Waking up in the morning, I promised myself I will never sleep in the office again.  My back hurt like crazy and I got absolutely no sleep because the first group of people came into the office around 8am (I had gone to sleep around 5:30).

Even though I was tired, I ended up getting a lot of energy drinks and powering through the day.  Friday was a very laid back day as everyone started making their way back to the office around noon or so.  Later in the day, Robert Scoble and the RackSpace crew came by the office to offer every startup in the batch a year’s worth of free hosting.  Having been RackSpace customers already, we signed up in a heartbeat along with many others in the program.  They even brought free t-shirts and beers with them.  The former was warmly welcomed by everyone, but the latter wasn’t so as well accepted for a good reason.

Saturday and Sunday: Weekends are really low key at 500.  There aren’t any events going on and many choose to work out of their apartments and homes with their team instead of the office.  But my team and I prefer to work out of 500 on any given day, so we enjoyed being able to get A LOT of work in with minimal distractions.  The thing that sucked was that the building management shuts down the air conditioner during the weekend, so for the next few weeks until this weather starts acting more like the way it should, I’m going to be wearing as little clothing as possible.

13 weeks until Demo Day.

Well, it’s only been two days since the start of the 14 week program of the 3rd accelerator batch and all I can think is…  Thank god we did.

Outside of the mentor network which has already proven to be incredibly useful and helpful, it’s just been a thrill being able to work next to super incredibly talented and equally as driven founders of the 30 or so other startups in our batch (which even includes one of my favorite sites, Forrst).

On May 8th, my team and I packed up our entire lives’ worth of belongings into my small Mazda hatchback and headed out to San Francisco from Boston, where we had just finished the last gruesome finals of our sophomore years from Babson College just the Friday before that Sunday evening.  Our decision to move Redeemr out west was to place our startup in what I thought was the best environment.  This conclusion stirred a bit of commotion in the Boston startup scene (and yes, there is a “scene” out in beantown) as we had now become the epitome of the “Boston tech brain drain” where young, first time founders (like ourselves) were moving away to Silicon Valley or NYC.  We even got featured on the front page of the business section in Boston Globe about this along with fellow ex-Boston youngsters and 500Startups batch #2, Jeff Lu and Conan Jen of DailyAisle, a wedding planning site.

To convince my friends I wasn’t just “ditching” Boston (because that wasn’t my intention), I had told my friends that going west was because I wanted to be closer to my family in my hometown of El Dorado Hills, a small suburb of Sacramento, but the truth was, the decision was largely based on another reason.  There was not one other thing I wanted my team and I to achieve in moving to the Valley more than to become part of 500Startups.

46 hours, 3000 miles, and a lot of energy drinks later, we arrived in our new home in San Francisco (Fun fact: We tried to contact the Guinness Book of World Records before making the trip out, but they didn’t endorse these kind of attempts for obvious reasons).  Since then, we’ve been hustling, trying new things, failing fast, and staying flexible with a laser sharp focus on our goals.  Through our great friends and mentors who believed in us enough to push us into 500Startups, we achieved our first of many major goals when Paul accepted us into the program just ten days ago.

Now that the program has officially started, I aim to share a bit of the 500Startup experience each week as we get the shit kicked out of us by the mentors.  So join us as Redeemr tries to help SMBs, brands and celebrities convert their social media fans into direct sales, with our longer focus on becoming the customer loyalty program for the era of social media.  With 500Startups as our launchpad, we’re going to rock this shit.

I can’t stop thinking this is what college should have been.

13.5 weeks until Demo Day.  1 week ‘til launch.

- Tim

Back in September, out of spontaneity, I applied to the first Dart Dinner: Angels & Mentors (yes, you have to apply – it’s *that* popular).  Now, you have to understand, before this dinner, I hadn’t met a single person in the Boston tech scene, let alone had any close friends who were as passionate as I was about tech startups.  I was running a failing startup trying to radically change how college students found entry-level jobs and internships.  Even though I was perhaps the opposite of what I’m sure DartBoston would have liked to see in its applicants for the dinner, I got an invitation to come to the dinner a few days later from Victoria Song (who is an amazing girl, btw!).  When I received the email from her, I remember just laughing inside thinking, “How did I get an invitation?”.  I continued reading the rest of the email and I was blown away at the list of mentors and angels who were coming to the dinner.  People like David Cancel (CEO of Performable – recently acquired by another Cambridge-based company, HubSpot), Roy Rodenstein (Co-Founder of Going.com and now SocMetrics), Katie Rae (TechStar Boston Managing Director & Partner at Project 11), Bill Warner (Founder of Avid), and many more.

Entrepreneurs and mentors just hanging out (I'm not in this picture)

Holy sh*t, I was about to have dinner with Boston’s undisputed tech startup leaders.

September 28th, 2010, I leave Babson’s campus and get to NERD at 7:15pm.  I walk into the location and I am so excited about what I see: ~30 other young startup founders chatting it up with the angels and mentors.  As I try to contain my excitement in having realized, “So I’m not weird.  Plenty other young peeps love tech startups, too!”, it quickly hits me that I know absolutely *no* one here.  For the 30 minutes or so, I was that kid at the high school prom that sat in the corner of the dance hall sipping his apple juice too shy to talk to anyone.  If you know me, you know that this is just about the farthest thing from who I am.  I don’t know why I felt so shy the way I did.  I almost even left!  I sucked it up (I think I slapped myself), started making some conversations and within minutes, I felt right at home in a setting of strangers.  My friend Jason Baptiste (CEO of OnSwipe) showed up a bit after and we ended up getting a seat in the same table and enjoyed chatting with other young entrepreneurs.  Although I wasn’t able to meet with all the mentors, I was able to get to talk to Roy for a bit near the end of the dinner and I was just thrown back by his humbleness that was visible in the way he talked with the other young entrepreneurs and I.

Long story short, I met people at that dinner who I still talk to this day.  Even more importantly, I met mentors that night who still shoot back advice whenever I contact them regarding my new startup, Redeemr.

From a series of events that started from this dinner, I got plugged into the startup scene in Boston quick and it lead to the start of my tech startup career – largely, in part, due to the relationships that spurred from this dinner.  About a month after this dinner, I joined a micro-VC firm in Cambridge as an Associate who recruited me for my involvement within the young startup scene in Boston, met with friends of new friends which lead to me starting Redeemr, and with the help, support, and feedback from the people I met at the dinner as well as the people I couldn’t have met if Dart Dinner didn’t exist, I was able to develop Redeemr enough to not only raise a $90K seed round, but also in winning the Babson Business Plan Competition (which was something I had been wanting to accomplish since applying to Babson).  Of course, there was a lot of luck and other factors that didn’t spur from the Dart Dinner involved in experiencing a lot of this, but I’d be a fool to not give DartBoston’s Dart Dinner and Victoria huge credit for spending time to facilitate such an amazing event for us, young entrepreneurs.

So, what did Dart Dinner mean to me?  This is the place that started it all for me.  The next time they organize a dinner, make sure you do everything to get that invitation.  And for us young entrepreneurs braving out here in the West Coast, I can only wish you, too, have a chance one day to partake in such an experience.

So, is this “the” blog post where I state all of my qualifications and reasons why I should be picked to be Dave’s shadow?  No, quite the opposite, actually.  I am writing this post to announce my withdrawal from the competition.

WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU DROP OUT OF THIS COMPETITION? FIRST YOU DROP OUT OF COLLEGE AND NOW THIS?! WTF?

I can imagine many of my friends saying this to me tomorrow when they wake up.  I am quite shocked that I am dropping from this competition as well.  I mean, having the chance to shadow one of the people that I’ve looked up to for the last couple years, someone that I’ve only dreamed about meeting and having a conversation with one day (no homo, Dave), all seem like an amazing opportunity – almost like a life turning, history making, visionary happening kinda deal.

I’ve thought for a HUGEEELY long time about how I was going to stand out from the 14 other finalists to snag the internship spot.  Hell, I even had a couple Founders and CEO’s of Dave McClure’s own portfolio companies tweet and ping him to pick me for the job as well as Boston’s tech leaders and his own friends and colleagues including a 500startups mentor.  Damn, I had even made a video with some hugely recognized people who backed me by even giving up a piece of their dignity in ending their video with “I’m a Tim Chae Believer” (read: Justin Bieber).  I had even bought a Dr. Seuss hat…

But the thing is, I only applied to get to know Dave to get “into” the Valley tech scene – having just recently moved out here from Boston.  If I would have gotten the internship, it would have been during the most crucial and important stage for Redeemr.  We’re doing some really interesting things in changing how customer loyalty is set and achieved by businesses you shop at.  Sort of like Punchd – one of Dave’s portfolio companies.  Because of all this, I thought the time that I spent directly on Redeemr with my team would create a bigger value for Redeemr compared to the indirect benefit I would receive having a connection with Dave.  I’m ballsy enough to say that I’m enough of a cocky bastard to value Redeemr over the Dave McClure. I don’t think any other 14 DMC finalists can say that.

Best of luck to the other finalists, I hope that we will cross paths soon in the Valley.  I wish you best of luck in this process as well as in whatever it is that you do and/or going after (unless, of course, it is in the customer retention space in the SMB market).

Peace and serenity.  Hope you all enjoyed getting Rick Roll’d.

Redeemr is going to make SF its b*tch.  We’re taking over.

Let’s start with a quick intro.  Redeemr is creating a completely hassle free way for customers at all kinds of stores to be able to earn rewards from their purchases without requiring another club card, smartphone application or even your time!  And for many small-to-midsize businesses who can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on new hardware and software to implement an effective and data-driven loyalty and rewards program for its customers, we are giving them a way to get all the benefits of an expensive solution but at a price similar to printing out paper punch cards.

Recently, everything has been coming together and ultimately, culminating into my decision to leave school and become another college dropout entrepreneur.  Recently, due to a few angel investors who not only believe in what Redeemr is trying to accomplish, but more importantly, the people behind it (my team and I), we were able to raise a seed-round of around six-figures which will help us launch with a more powerful product for businesses and even launch quicker so our customer users can start earning better rewards sooner.  And last weekend, Redeemr took first unanimously in Babson’s $100K+ Business Plan Competition by taking all three of the possible votes by securing the two votes from the judges, David Hauser (Founder of Grasshopper Group) and Yumin Choi (VC at HLM Ventures) as well as the one vote from the collective audience.

The reasoning and mentality behind why I have decided to leave school can be read more in detail here that I wrote titled, “Why I Came to College”.  One of my two teammates who is the only other college student than myself, Mike Maghsoudi, a very highly achieving student and a fellow Babsonian has also decided – on his own – to pursue Redeemr with me by taking a leave of absence from Babson and becoming the Lead Business Development and Sales for Redeemr.

Now… Where will Redeemr be HQ’d?… San Francisco, California.

As exciting as this freshly decided direction for Redeemr is for me and my team, I can’t not somewhat feel rather guilty/sad/disappointed in my choosing to leave the quickly growing and fun tech startup scene and community of Boston and Cambridge, MA.

The truth is, I love the Boston startup scene.  I’ve always been an entrepreneur, but Boston was where I really found my passion for tech startups.  When I realized I wanted to be doing tech startups for the rest of my life, it was the people of the Boston startup scene who brought me in with open arms as if I was one of their own.  Ever since September of last year, I became a regular to the startup scene out here, made a lot of great friends, became one of the nation’s youngest VCs working as an Associate for a seed-stage micro-VC firm focused in internet and mobile startups, and hell, even got to write as a monthly contributor to Greenhorn Connect.  It’s all thanks to people like Jason Evanish, Fan Bi, Evan Morikawa, Samuel Johns, Mark Bao, Jason Baptiste, David Hauser, Roy Rodenstein, among many others – the ones who are making a difference here in Boston and brought me into the scene with open arms.

Boston was the place for many of my firsts, and you know what they say, “You never forget your first”.

So then, why did I decide to move out Redeemr to the West?

The decision wasn’t an easy one to make – to be completely honest.  Could I start and grow Redeemr to the vision that I have being in Boston?  I 100% believe that’s possible – and most likely much easier in the startup phases since my entire network of fellow startup peeps is out here.  Does being out in SF give me an advantage in building Redeemr?  I would say yes – to some extent much discussed in several posts such as this by Roy Rodenstein – but not to the point where it warrants a relocation on its own.  Could I – a first time founder and a 20 year old – have raised significant amount of money out here in Boston?  Well, of course.  I did (although it was from friends).  So that brings us back to square one, why did I decide to move to SF?  What it really came down to was, being a native of Sacramento and having spent my entire childhood there since my immigration to the States when I was 10, San Francisco provides me with an opportunity to be closer to home and family.  On top of that, no matter how any one looks at it, SF is still the “mecca” of all tech startups (even though NYC growing very quickly and Boston is getting there).  As a first time founder, I want to be where it’s sexy. Boston is just not there yet.  I want to be next to superstars and Boston doesn’t have that, yet.

It is common that everyone who leaves Boston for the West never end up coming back.  For me, I think it’ll be different.  One day, I want to startup a company in Boston – perhaps my next one.  I want to contribute back to the community as much as it contributed to me and my learning and growth as a tech entrepreneur.

For now, I am committed to experiencing the benefits of San Francisco and the startup scene out in Silicon Valley at least for the next year or so.  Hopefully by then, I will have a much more definite answer as to what Boston can do to retain more of its young founders – like myself.

Cheers Boston.  Signing off,

Tim

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So without further ado, here are my predictions in the tech world for 2011:

1. Augmented Reality - This would have been my prediction for 2010, but there still hasn’t been a startup to show how ground breaking technology AR could be.  QuestVisual’s WordLens app launched in December and showed the world what I believe is just a glimpse of the potential that AR has.  I believe Microsoft’s Kinect is going to be the front runner for becoming the platform for commercializing AR.
2. Mobile Wallets - With Google for sure pushing out NFC chips and Apple rumored to include them in the iPhone 5, people will be able to start using their phones just like credit cards by waving them over a wireless reader (I’m sure you’ve seen the wireless readers at the local McDonald’s or something…).
3. Gamification Takes Over – Every single new startup will somehow implement “gamification” into their business model to make its users addicted to its service, etc, etc.  Will it work?  Yeah, I believe so.
4. Microsoft Comes Back – While other big players in SV like Google and Facebook were the talk of the town acquiring startups left and right in 2010, surprisingly silent was Microsoft.  Why?  I believe they have some big plans to make some groundbreaking hardware technology that its rivals like Google and Facebook just don’t have the talent in-house to do so (see Kinect).  I’m very bullish on Kinect as I believe it is one of the most under-appreciated and underrated piece of hardware technology that can be made into such an amazing platform for creating ground breaking technology.  Rumor also has it that Microsoft is making a new technology that will allow users to actually feel how an object feels based on an image alone…  Do you see Google or Facebook doing that?  No way.  In 2011, Microsoft will come back to rule SV once again.  This time, not with software, but hardware.
5. Thiel Fellowship: 20 under 20 - The highly scrutinized and wrongly unappreciated program by Peter Thiel is going to train and polish today’s most creative, driven and potent young minds into creating several groundbreaking technology companies.  I don’t believe it will be in 2011, but I wouldn’t be surprised.  This program is going to prove successful come end of the program in 2013, and many more programs such as this will be enacted following what happened after Y Combinator’s success in mid-2000′s with the launch of several other accelerators following the YC model such as TechStars, DreamIt and Capital Factory.  However, they won’t come in $100K grants like the Fellowship.
6. IPO’s or Go Home - Companies that were the hottest in looking to offer to the public market in 2010 such as Facebook and Groupon just landed some incredible amounts of money from private investors (Groupon ~$900M and Facebook ~$450M from Goldman Sachs).  Some say they went Private IPO’s.  Now, I believe liquidity creates the cycle of free flowing money from investors to new startups.  If the biggest of today’s tech successes such as Groupon, Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga (ok, and Twitter…) can’t create successful liquidity for its shareholders, I can see the internet and mobile tech market becoming very stagnant and shall I say it… a bubble to *pop*.
7. Super Handhelds - It’s not a prediction that smartphones in 2011 will be equipped on a standard basis with dual-processors.  I won’t be surprised to see mobile devices with specs double that of what it is today.

He talked about how no one essentially believed that him and Rich (his co-founder) could pull off WePay successfully when he was starting out.  They spent months on end going to VC firms to pitch and needless to say, they never got funded (for a while at least).

Why I bring this up is because I think this single statement really exemplifies the entire failure and triumph process that entrepreneurs go through while founding their companies.  See, I view entrepreneurs as visionaries - someone who sees the world in a way that not many others have the ability to see, but more importantly, passionately wanting to change the world for the better.  Being a visionary means that what you see and want to solve  is not understood or even accepted and embraced to the extent that you see it as.  There are a very select few number of individuals in the world who will understand what you are trying to accomplish on the astronomical scale, but most importantly, those who understand you.  These people are (or should be) your c0-founders, mentors, advisors, and investors (the importance of bringing in an investor who understands everything that you are trying to do is something that I don’t currently have the personal experience/expertise and therefore qualifications to say about, but I hope one day I will be able to write about it).

As for everyone else?  Well, these are the people you should be marking to persuade in a very convincing fashion manner months and years down the road with what you are right now trying to create/solve.  It is most likely that none of these people have a personal vendetta against you, the reason why they don’t believe in what you are doing right now is because they just simply don’t have the capability to understand. If you let yourself depend on others’ support to believe in your abilities, you will never become a visionary.  Will you make your own history, or will you let others define you?

As an example, from my own perspective, I am under 20 years old, haven’t even received a bachelor’s degree, don’t attend an Ivy League school, don’t have a vast network nor do I even have a network of successful entrepreneurs in a relative-field that I can surround myself around, and I am not even technically a “first-time entrepreneur” but rather a pre-first-entrepreneur (haven’t made much traction or even a workable product of my first startup yet – getting there though!).  Yeah, I get (or at least used to until my current startup) good/great grades from my classes at Babson, I’m fortunate enough to have won a national scholarship for youth entrepreneurship to aid my college tuition and that I am now an Associate at a seed-stage venture capital fund at the age of 19.  So I guess I like to consider myself unique and at least a bit more advanced than colleagues and peers of my age group in having some kind of “proof” of my intelligence and abilities, but who would ever believe or even think that a no-name 19-year old could make a significant difference in this world through his startup? The only ones aside from myself who believe in me (and most likely similar in your case), are my close family members, my close friends and my co-founder.

If I depended on what the world thinks of my abilities to believe in what I am capable of, I would never get shit done.  The only thing I would be doing is going to classes, writing up papers and getting good grades so that I may graduate and get a job and be successful one day by proving to my managers and bosses of what I am capable of and thus, climbing up the corporate ladder.

However, I’m passionately pursuing my current startup, Redeemr, with my technical co-founder because I believe in myself and of my abilities to make a significant difference in this world.

Some (the non-believers) would call this ignorance, naivety, arrogance or even stupidity.

Many of the greatest cases of where an individual was so aware of his/her potential even when everyone else said no, are many of today’s founders and co-founders of the most successful and innovative companies.

Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”  While many people apply this to tough business decisions and some issues that come up in regarding customer development, I see Henry Ford’s quote this way: Only you are capable of changing the world in the way that you see it.

Most importantly, at the end of the day, believe in yourself, your abilities, and your team to change the world.