Entrepreneur Archives - Scrollin' On Dubs

Nov 19

I’m the new EIR for Startup Lisboa

Entrepreneur No Comments »

I’m very excited to announce I’ve been named Entrepreneur in Residence for Startup Lisboa, the largest startup incubator in Portugal. I’ve been a mentor for their companies for the past two years and I spent October working with nine of their companies conducting a pilot program playing the EIR role. We had good feedback from the companies so this announcement is a formalization of the role I’ve been playing since October. Here is their official announcement if you’d like to read more.

I gave my Metrics for Startups talk a few days ago to the companies currently in their “Start to Table” bootcamp program. This talk covers how early stage startups can figure out their primary & secondary metrics, adapt those over time to reflect the current focus and how to create a dashboard to monitor them weekly to ensure proper course corrections to arrive at the desired outcome.

You can find slides and an in-depth write-up of that talk at the link above on my Grid7 business blog.

If you’re considering doing a startup of your own, why not start in Lisbon and apply to Startup Lisboa so we can have the opportunity to work together?

Feb 14

When it’s time to go all-in

Activism, Entrepreneur 10 Comments »

There comes a time when you take all the skills you’ve acquired over a lifetime, all the connections you’ve made, all the unique vantage points you’ve had the good fortune to have and you go all-in on your Ikigai. For me, that time is now.

I read two books over the holidays: “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi. Both were profound in their own ways and the net result was that they tipped me to make the decision to leave an amazing job that has allowed me to work with incredible people doing interesting work from all over the world. By every stretch I had achieved the grail of employment and I’ve just decided to let it all go.

Pagely has been the best job I’ve ever held. Culture-wise it is bar none the best organization I’ve had the pleasure to be involved with. It has allowed me to live in 38 countries in the last four years and has given me a virtual family, stable income and purpose (they’re hiring BTW). But I realized over the holidays that a) my heart is now elsewhere and b) I am likely no longer what the company truly needs. It was not an easy decision but I’m taking a leap of faith here and committing all my energy to a cause that I believe is the highest and best use of me for generating maximum positive benefit for the world.

Charity Makeover is a project I started as an experiment way back in 2013 to test the idea that we could tap into the unique talents of knowledge workers and assemble temporary teams to help local charities overcome the main challenges that hold them back. Think of it like a virtual Habitat for Humanity, a “digital barn raising for non-profits” if you will (hence the barn logo). We get the right set of smart people in the room and build game-changing digital assets for the local charities of their area which are poised to have incredible impact but lacking the in-house resources to overcome their hurdles on their own.

This effort was back-burnered for a number of years but always lingered as being the one thing I felt I was born to bring to the world.

I was a participant of a conference at sea called Nomad Cruise back in April of last year and on a lark decided to pitch this idea at their “Piraña Tank” mini replica of Shark Tank. You can find my pitch here:

That led to me reviving the effort and organizing an event in Lisbon which then led to a friend I made on that cruise gaining interest in being involved at a core level. On a visit Ben Lakoff made to Lisbon over a series of conversations we decided to partner up and work together to advance the idea. We executed the next event in Barcelona successfully and we felt the momentum.

Fast forward to today on my last day for Pagely… I stand on the precipice of leaving the safety of the company I’ve known for my entire remote existence and am diving head-long into the uncertainty a project with no proven revenue model nor investors but represents the single greatest lever I can think of to move the world.

If you want to follow our journey with this our Instagram will have updates or join my bi-annual personal email update. For now we’re busy preparing for our next event in Bali, Indonesia on March 14th and laying the foundational platform and playbook so that this becomes essentially “wikipedia-like” in the ability for anyone to extend it to his/her town. I’m taking all that I’ve acquired from my 25-year career in the way of knowledge, connections and passion and assembling the crew and tech to turn this into a global movement.

There’s a quote by Tim O’Reilly I put on the T-shirts for the Lisbon event. And it is our mantra:

“Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.”
-Tim O’Reilly

I’m confident we’ll zigzag our way to a sustainable revenue model with the runway we have. We have a hypothesis now would love an intro to people who work in HR and Corporate Social Responsibility for Enterprises to validate or refine this. In the event of some catastrophic scenario where we fail to make this effort sustainable, it will still have changed many lives for the better in the process and therefore cannot ultimately be a failure.

Thanks to my parents, my friends who have encouraged me to make this leap, Pagely for being supportive and Ben for being the first follower as we morph this into a movement. To the charity founders in the trenches who are fighting the hard fight without reinforcements, air support is on the way. Hang in there.

-Sean

Jul 18

Why I created Nomad Podcast, Nomad Prep and Nomad Bloggers

Entrepreneur, Remote Year, Travels 2 Comments »

TLDR;

Today I’m unveiling a project I’ve been working on for the past few months: a new podcast designed to demystify nomadic, location-independent work and make it more accessible. My goal is to help 100 people get “unstuck” by helping them make this transformative lifestyle change. You only get one chance with a podcast launch and I would love to break into the iTunes “New & Noteworthy” section for Places & Travel. Every single download & review helps towards this cause. If you support what I’m doing please take 30 sec now and download and subscribe to my podcast on iTunes. You can find video episodes and other goodies on NomadPodcast.com.

The Bigger Picture and Backstory

This effort began in December 2017 when I read an editorial piece on the New York times that talked about The Lost Einsteins. That article proposed that society today is deprived of an unknowable number of life-changing inventions by would-have-been Einsteins. They theorize that these young future potential contributors grow up without access to the environment and opportunities that would have been the catalyst for them to flourish due to living in poor socioeconomic status households.

This article resonated with me but for a different reason. While I agree with the author’s premise and suspect that indeed this is true and happening I hypothesize that the same phenomenon is at work within adults of all walks regardless of socioeconomic status. I believe there are a non-trivial number of privileged adults with all the trappings that came with a graduate education who went through a plinko board of choices in the education system and wound up winnowed into a career that doesn’t allow for the optimal expression of their talents. It’s debatable to what degree this is happening but unarguably this is true for some percentage of adults and it gets only more difficult over time to extract yourself from this rut. We find ourselves in veritable doldrums at points in our lives and while revamping the current education system to address the root cause and get more of the right people in the right roles out of the gate is a longer-arc massive undertaking, I believe there is a simple, immediate antidote for this issue and I want to try and make this more accessible to people in this situation.

Nomadic working travel has been instrumental in awakening me from this adult slumber. I won’t go into my personal story (if you want to read details Remote Year covered it well in this piece) but basically RY was a defibrillator that shocked me back to life, served as a gateway drug to nomadic working travel and ejected me from a personal and professional rut.

Why these three resources?

I spent three months living and working in Mexico, City last winter and had the opportunity to get to know a bunch of the admissions team for Remote Year. I was sitting within earshot and overheard numerous calls with aspiring digital nomads and while I only heard one side of the conversation, I got a high-concentration dose of Customer Discovery insights into the concerns and objections of aspirational nomads who wanted to do this type of working travel program.

I decided over Christmas break to develop a simple eCourse that would package up everything I had learned from my 1.5yrs of location-independent work at that point and give people a resource to help them more confidently make the leap. That project mushroomed into a significant undertaking. The deeper I got into developing the curriculum for that effort the more I wanted to apply what I knew of automation and software to turn it into a personalized coaching system that would not just be a static brochure but a living, interactive preparation tool. I spent most of my Christmas break developing content, gamification, an interactive checklist and automations to create the resource I wished I had going into Remote Year. I launched Nomad Prep a few weeks later with little fanfare and promptly realized I had committed the age-old entrepreneurial mistake of building a product before building an audience. That course continues to receive a trickle of students each week but I realized there needs to be a better way of reaching more aspiring nomads.

Nomad Bloggers (at the time RemoteYearBlogs.com but now changed due to trademark) was a project I had started in our first month of Remote Year originally intended to be a way of aggregating the blog posts from the bloggers in our group. I had modified it to support syndicating posts from other groups and it was growing in traffic. I rebranded it with the Nomad label, sold RemoteYearBlogs.com to Remote Year and used that cash to hire a developer from Upwork to add “Reddit-like” voting functionality and make the blog aggregator more sticky. While this seemed like a promising potential source of aspiring nomads it didn’t move the needle traffic-wise for Nomad Prep.

Shortly after I did a few interviews with prospective clients for Remote Year (they call them “Premotes”) and while the sessions were super-helpful, that approach unfortunately doesn’t scale. It led me to realize though that face-to-face video interaction captured and shared provide a rich way to ask and answer questions. I got the idea in my head that there’s room to do a podcast wherein I interview successful nomads, founders of travel programs and domain experts on subjects that could help educate folks on how to be better at working and living abroad. As with everything, it ended up taking 3x as long as expected working nights to cobble this together but I’m proud today to launch what I believe is the missing piece of the distribution puzzle here. I present to you NomadPodcast.com, the first platform of its kind for sharing stories that can help current and aspiring Nomads.

I’ll spare you the gory details of everything it does but it showcases interviews in HD video via YouTube, is mobile-friendly, has audio-only versions syndicated across all major podcast platforms and each episode includes a bunch of supporting elements like transcript, photos, links, show notes and the ability to ask the guest questions via text comments as well as recording a video via your webcam. I’m hopeful that this will become a resource that helps current nomads be more excellent and helps prospective nomads confidently take the leap to trying this lifestyle and in so doing will have the same transformative, awakening effect that nomadic travel has had on me. If it helps even one or two people have an adventure abroad they otherwise wouldn’t have had that revitalizes them or even awakens the next slumbering adult Einstein then I would find that hugely rewarding.

I have interviews at varying stages of the production cycle now with a number of stellar guests. If you’re onboard with this cause there’s nothing to buy here nor donations to make, just subscribe to the podcast via your favorite platform using the links below and tell a friend who could benefit from it. Thanks for your support.
Website
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
YouTube
Overcast
Anchor
Pocketcasts

Sep 21

Pics and vids from Startup Weekend Lisbon

Entrepreneur, Remote Year No Comments »

We held a mini Startup Weekend event in Lisbon this past weekend. For the uninitiated, Startup Weekend is a hackathon-type event in which strangers come together in a weekend and sprint to build and launch a product by Sunday night. It’s a global phenomenon (there were 18 different SW events running simultaneously in various cities around the world this past weekend). Ours was unique in that it was exclusive to our Remote Year group but it followed the same structure in terms of concept pitches and team formation Friday night, work all Sat/Sun and then demos of the product on Sunday night. This was my 8th SW event (you can read about some past ones I’ve been involved with here here here and here).

Here are a few interviews with participants following the conclusion of the event to give you an idea of what the experience was like in their words:

(video credit Chris Peloquin)

We had 24 participants from Remote Year who gelled into the following five teams:
Loo Review – Yelp for Restrooms
DiscoverPath – Self-guided walking tours
Carrot App – Intercept eCommerce impulse buys and encourage savings
Swipe Up – Disintermediate the airline industry
Volunteer Everywhere – eHarmony for volunteering (site not live yet)

Carrot App took first place and DiscoverPath and Volunteer Everywhere tied for 2nd. All of the teams did incredible work pulling this stuff together in a weekend. I had originally proposed doing a SW event with Remote Year folks back at our final Town Hall in Belgrade. With the help of many people working behind the scenes we pulled this together on a greatly-accelerated timeline than normal SW events.

My pitch and deck below for DiscoverPath:
(video credit Chris Peloquin)

Our team had awesome chemistry and was able to get an entire functioning MVP of the app built. This is us creating the next tech unicorn in the streets of Lisbon:
team-prosim-startupweekend

The current version of the app is a pure MVP and has 3 monuments in Lisbon tagged with audio narrations. It enables an example free-form walking tour whereby the listener gets the wikipedia description of each landmark as he/she comes within the specified geofence of each. It’s a phonegap app so cross-platform support. The backend is served on a free Heroku server utilizing Keystone (node.js-based CMS), opensource maps, Leaflet js and other free open source libraries. It’s a bit surreal to think the entire tech stack for this (including the hosting) was free (as in dollars and licensing) only the time of the developers working over the weekend to pull it all together. How far we’ve come since the days of $10k in Windows server and MSSQL stack licensing… I’m hopeful we’ll continue to hack together on it and refine the app to get it to a more useful state during the course our travels over the next eight months. This is something I want myself.

Lastly, I wanted to give quick shout-outs to the 25 Remotes who took a leap of faith on this event and gave up their weekend in Lisbon to build a product. To Wout Laban who flew all the way from Amsterdam to facilitate the event. Maria-Christina of TechStars for helping coordinate the intro to Wout and giving us approval to do this one a bit differently than the traditional SW. Aline, Jenna, Goncalo and Tomas from RY for supporting us with coordinating food, logistics, venue, etc for the weekend. To Pagely for buying us all lunch on Saturday. Thanks also to Andre Marquet, Miguel Arroja, Afonso Ramos and Toby Gutsche (local Lisbon entrepreneurs) for mobilizing on such short notice and donating time to be judges at the event. And an extra shout-out to Miguel for giving up a Saturday to help provide mentorship for the teams. Lastly, thanks to my friend Andrew Hyde for making the initial intro that set this whole thing in motion. If you’d like to get in touch with any of the teams please leave a comment here and I’ll be happy to coordinate an intro. Check StartupWeekend.org to find out when this event will be in your city next.

sw-dinner
(photo credit Chris Peloquin)

startup-weekend-lisbon-group
(photo credit Eddie Contento)

Next epic event we’re bringing to Remote Year = Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” program next month in Morocco. Stay tuned…

Sep 03

The rumors of my employment have been greatly exaggerated

Arizona, Entrepreneur 1 Comment »

Yes, it’s true that after 10+ years of various entrepreneurial endeavors and solo consulting I once again have a job. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like a job.

pagely-shoe

I’ve been unofficially working with Pagely since mid-July assisting with their sales and marketing efforts. Pagely pioneered the space of scalable managed WordPress hosting and developed a PaaS offering that allows any business ability to defer IT concerns and focus on using WordPress. It’s similar to how a service like Heroku enables developers to be free of IT worries and focus on the application. Anyways I’m happy to announce today that I’m officially on board with them as their new Director of Sales & Marketing.

At PressNomics 2013 I heard the founder of iThemes speak and give a simple bit of advice from the stage. It was so seemingly inert and obvious that I’m guessing it went right by many people. But it’s something that has stayed with me. The advice he gave was this:

Do something you enjoy
for people you like
with people you love.

That’s it. That was his grand wisdom for finding happiness in daily work. And while it sounds obvious to the point of being silly, it’s proved to be a profoundly-useful lens through which to evaluate decisions.

I have no less than one metric crapton of things I’m planning to write about over the coming months. I have knotted feelings and lessons from the rise & fall (and resurrection) of JumpBox and then slogging it out as a lone wolf consulting as Grid7. I’ll leave all that for later. For now I’ll try to relay wisdom I’ve come to in the past months.

Like that famous MC Escher painting where the hand is sketching the hand, that sketches itself, we are all in this recursive dance of authoring our own story while simultaneously becoming a character in that story who can become captive to the role and feel compelled to live up to the character. I didn’t know if I was employable after having worked for myself for so many years. I consider entrepreneurship to be core to my identity and as an entrepreneur admittedly had internal strife about the notion of going back to work and having a boss again. But like just about every fear, this has proven to be completely unfounded. We get knotted up by our fears and crises of identity but in the end growth comes from leaning in and unraveling the knot.

Anyways, I’m stoked to be working with Josh, Sally and the rest of the elite Pagely team. Going to battle for someone requires ultimate faith that he/she has your back. When your General & CEO thinks (and more importantly acts) this way I’m all in.

As Grammie would say, “more anon.”

Aug 07

5 Reasons Startup Weekend Flagstaff this weekend is a must attend

Arizona, Entrepreneur 1 Comment »

This weekend the Startup Weekend tradition continues in Northern Arizona at SWNAZ. Not that you should need any excuse to leave Hades, ahem, I mean Phoenix right now but here are five reasons you should make the trip.

Avoid spontaneous combustion.

‘Nuff said.
Meet cool people The people that attend Startup Weekends are the do’ers. Talkers stay home for these events. The participants here are the folks who make stuff happen and from experience, these people are the ones worth knowing. This will be my 5th Startup Weekend and each one has hands-down had some of the awesomest people I’ve met. Oh and the guy who invented Startup Weekend is flying all the way from Zurich coming out of retirement to facilitate this event. No big deal.
Learn while building There is simply no better way to learn than by doing. You will be exposed to folks from all disciplines including business folk, engineers, designers, SEO experts, social media gurus, investors. Startup Weekend is basically a cauldron that forges friendships and skills at an impossible pace. The first one I went to in San Francisco blew my mind, as did the subsequent one in Chandler and then once again in Los Angeles.
Put some wheels to your idea This is probably the single best chance to take that business idea you’ve had collecting dust and finally get it built. You’ll have the opportunity to convince a room full of people with the talents and drive to make your concept a reality. More than a handful of companies have launched at these events and gone on to raise funding as venture-backed startups. Not only is this an opportunity to get your idea developed but it’s a stage to get attention and get that initial PR to get it noticed.
Have fun on the cheap. Seriously, for the price of a modest dinner date in Old Town Scottsdale you’ll get transportation up on a bus with the fun folks from CO+Hoots, meals throughout the weekend, free stuff like a copy of Andrew Hyde’s Travel Book plus rumor has it we’re taking this bad biscuit out on the town Saturday night. I guarantee that nowhere in AZ this weekend will people be having as much fun as the attendees at Startup Weekend.

There’s still a handful of seats left and when they sell out attendance is capped. If you’re ready to lock in your seat, escape the heat and have one of the most memorable weekends of the summer, register here and we’ll see you up in Flag.