One interesting fact Scott Shane mentioned recently was the “Top One Percent” (in the US) own businesses. Honestly, I’m not surprised.  But, it is nice to bring it to be explicit and have this knowledge at our the forefront of our brains.

Think about it.  There’s all these people who are running around ticked off (with no particular common reason, which is a different post altogether), and nobody is at work. Either they are out of jobs, or think their particular job is inconsequential enough to ignore for a few days, weeks, or months.

Regardless of the things they’re rallying against, one thing is certain.  Hopefully everyone can now put two and two together and figure out that owning your own business is truly the only way to have any possible control over your own financial security.

Screw the banks.

Screw the bailouts.

Obviously there are macro-economics in play here which matter also in the long run. But, from the standpoint of the individual, voting with your jobs – perhaps by not having one – seems to continue to be the epicenter of change.

Trust me, there’s a movement going on.

It’s not Occupy. Occupying is passive.

It’s Become.  Becoming is active.

Become a business owner.  It’s tough, but you need to be tough.  The days of taking what people give you (a job) is over.  Jobs aren’t secure.  The only person who’s secure is the owner.  Become an owner.  Become the bourgeoisie.  You can be what you want to in this country, so Become.

Stop Occupying.

In no particular order, here we go:

• Imporium Angels
• Aztec Venture Network
• Bill Payne & Associates
• San Diego Launch Lab
• Connect.org
• Keiretsu Forum San Diego
• Tech Coast Angels
• Hamilton Bio Ventures
• Mission Ventures
• San Diego Band of Angels
• Timeline Ventures
• Enterprise Partners

If you have any other resources of angel networks, groups, or incubators that I should add to this list, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks.

Tuesday night, Tilly and I met with some of our closest friends – a husband and wife who we’ve been blessed to live life with.  Both are leaders and visionaries. The husband is a close friend with an amazing heart and powerfully driven entrepreneur, and the wife is one of the most inspiring, leadership-driving, beauty-loving person I’ve had the pleasure of spending a dinner with.

In our conversations, our personal lives naturally mingle with our professional and Tuesday was no exception.  One of my takeaways from the evening was the following:

Entrepreneurs create.  Everything else (even the money) takes second seat to the act of creation.  It’s one of the biggest pleasures we get out of having the freedom to do what we want, how we want.

But the number one problem with entrepreneurs is being able to say “no” to things. It’s what breaks up marriages, ruins friendships, and makes us unhealthy while we work at our desks all day.  Many of us understand the power of saying “no”, of focusing.  We don’t, however, understand what this kind of inherent trait does to us.

It means we’re in a perpetual state of reaction.  And, the irony of it all, is that reaction is not creation.

The solution is this one tiny phase.  “Create your life.”

Notice, it’s not “create your lifestyle.”  That’s a given. We all work towards that.  But creating your life is a different thing altogether. It means creating a structure, a foundation, by which we will choose to live our lives on a daily basis.  Not because we want more structure, but because we want to be free to live our lives the way we want.

Seriously, what’s the point in being an entrepreneur if you’re simply reacting to everyone else all day long.  Create boundaries.  Create the life you’ve wanted.

A few days ago I wrote about a new project I’m working on which is going to be Gluten free guides for your city. I got to thinking though, and although I’m pretty quick at developing web sites, it still does take a little time to do. So, in the meantime, I’ve come up with a stop-gap solution and created a series of “Gluten Free in [x]” Facebook pages. I built three of them already for (San Diego, CA, Seattle, WA, and Boston, MA.

Those pages are done, and have Discussion forums on them which include Restaurants, Grocery Stores, and Recipes for each city. Please feel free to add your favorite places in your city. I’ll be using that information when we add the cities to Gluten Free Guides once it’s up and running.

The other cities I have pages for already, but there’s not much content in there yet. But, if you want to… feel free to go to one and start us off in the right direction. I’ll be there soon to put up the same format there. Here’s the list of cities…

• Boston
• Chicago
• Colorado Springs
• Dallas
• Denver
• Duluth
• Eugene
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Minneapolis – St. Paul
• New York
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Portland
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Reston
• Richardson

And please share and tweet these page urls out to your friends who are gluten intolerant or celiacs. We could use the support and we’d love to see their feedback on what is useful.

Thanks.

Gluten Free Guides (.org), a guide to local gluten free restaurants, menus, grocery stores, and foods.

This is the newest project I’ve started recently.

The story behind it is that my wife found out about a year ago that she was gluten intolerant. Some people have what’s called Celiac disease, which is not just being gluten intolerant, but actually deathly allergic.

If you don’t know already, gluten is a byproduct of wheat. The theory is that the problem is that our food has been engineered so many times over that the byproduct (gluten) has now become too large to digest. So now, there’s a massive amount of weird symptoms for those who are gluten intolerant – many times the person doesn’t even know they’re gluten intolerant at all, so we just go along our daily lives not even thinking about it.

In my wife’s case, she had a direct correlation between gluten and what we thought was IBS. 15 minutes after eating anything with gluten in it, she’d have a stomach ache so bad she’d double over for the next hour.

So, after living with it for 25 years, she finally figured out what it was by process of elimination and a ton of experimentation. Now, she’s not deathly allergic to it like a celiac would be, but it’s enough of an allergy and consequence of eating it that it makes a pretty compelling motivational factor to avoid it. She figured all this out about a year ago (we think not coincidentally the same time she became pregnant).

Since that time, she’s become a wealth of knowledge to her friends who are just figuring out now that they are gluten intolerant also, or at least have the symptoms.

I thought it was time we started sharing this information a bit easier than by word of mouth. Thus, the Gluten Free Guides was born… well, almost. It’s being built as we speak, so if you follow the link today you’ll not find anything of value… but this is where you come in.

How you can help:

If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably got some knowledge of gluten intolerance or celiac disease. And if that’s the case, you can be a huge resource to your community too! We don’t pretend to know everything about gluten. We know some of the restaurants who have gluten free menus, grocery stores which have good (and terrible) gluten free foods, and some gluten free recipes you can make at home. But we don’t know them all – even for just San Diego.

So, we’re starting a website that will allow us (and you) to add, review, and discuss all these things. We plan on starting with San Diego, but if you’re in another city, let us know and once it’s ready we’ll open it up to you in your city too (tell us in the comments which city you’re in).

That all being said, we want your ideas too. What would make your day in regards to gluten free city guides? What would make you come back and use it all the time? What information would you think would be invaluable? Tell us everything. We want it to be the best possible guide possible – and applicable to our every day lives.

Come on… give us your best shot.

Thanks!

The Entrepreneurial Kid

Once upon a time, way, way back, we used to dream of being happy. We dreamt of fire trucks, climbing trees, and hoping that we could just eat mac and cheese for dinner and get ice cream before bed time.

Once upon a time, we weren’t stressed out about money.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about those days. But today I hit the reset button at least for the day.

See, I get in this funk every now and then where all I can think of is business. How people make money, how to drive web traffic, how to do arbitrage (everything in business is arbitrage or knowledge brokering), etc.  I mean seriously! I was with my wife buying baby stuff and all I could think about what the profit margins of the store.

What happened to thinking about the smiles, the joy, the excitement of a new toy (just kidding, sheesh)?

So even though I couldn’t get my mind completely off of business, I did come across an interesting exercise.  Instead of always thinking about how to build something new, exciting and different, I thought of what I did as a kid, when I had no money at all.

I was innovative.  I recycled for money.  I bought supplies for lemonade stands and then franchised them around the neighborhood. I created and sold art. I did neighbor’s chores they didn’t want to or couldn’t do.  And it was great!

Then I started thinking about microfinance borrowers.  Some, even in San Diego, are taking out a $250 loan and running their businesses and their lives off that loan.

$250!  In San Diego, California!  Seriously?  How do they do that?

So, I’m now thinking small.  I’m thinking like a kid, or a microfinance borrower.  If they can leverage their $250 and make enough money to live on, so can we.  Yup, we have some things that make it a bit more difficult (a car, higher rent, etc).  But that’s not stopping me.

Now, if we’re going to do this right, we need to think about assets and scaling.  So, here’s a few Big Business Mindset things to remember for the task:

1. Buy an asset: $250 could purchase an asset which could be resold later for more money.  I’m not very excited about this, because it doesn’t create cash flow. But, it’s an option.
2. Buy low and sell high, but quickly: As I said before, all business is about arbitrage.  I’ve been thinking that product arbitrage is tough to come by these days because of the internet.  And it is difficult to find, but not impossible.  The trick here, though, is to buy and sell quickly to realize the profits as fast as possible.  I’ll take a $1 profitable transaction 1000 times a day over a $500 profit one time a day.  Think about that for a second.

So, now what do we do?  We’ve got $250.  How do we make it work for us as fast as possible without a high risk of losing it all (ie, gambling and the lotto are not options, they are not assets)?

Interested in playing along? Tell me in the comments what you think, or what you’re doing with $250.

1. The management paradox

The first issue I’m calling the management paradox. When we start a project, however big or small, we’re excited about the possibilities, the way it’s going to solve a problem and better our or other’s lives. It’s exciting.

What we don’t think of is what happens if it gets popular. Do we open source it? Do we let others contribute to make it better? Do we try to monetize it and make it our new company or job?

There’s a level of minutia that we don’t have to think about when we start projects until a tribe adopts it. Once that happens, we have a new problem – management.

2. Focus vs Spaghetti

This one seems rather easy to digest, but I’m going to mention it anyway. There are benefits to being unfocused at times. Creativity flows and dot connecting becomes easy. We start seeing relationships between things we hadn’t seen in the past. We start coming up with new ideas. It’s a great time.

But it has it’s problems too.

Building solution that comes to mind is fun. But doing something for 10 hours rather than 10,000 hours makes us a jack of all trades and a master of none. Our ability to push through the dip and get our projects some attention. Throwing spaghetti against the wall is definitely fun. Seeing if something sticks is fun. But if it does stick, it would be a good idea to be prepared to open the doors for others to see your masterpiece.

Conclusion

So I’m still all for projects. But, I’m also for measuring to indicate if you’ve hit success, and when you do, picking it up and running like mad. Just be forewarned about the pitfalls of projects too.

Split test your projects, take the ones that are working and focus on making them better.

This kind of thing didn’t surprise me, coming from Ted. He’s one of the most vigilant awesomeness advocates I know. But, one thing I realized during that conversation…. if he could get the stack of front-end engineers together with the purpose of producing awesome stuff, there would be almost nothing stopping them except for one thing. The same kryptonite which stops all great developers – marketing.

Competition, Collaboration, Complaining

Marketing is the bane of a developer’s existence. It’s the thing we ignore, but we need.

Marketing is similar to tourism. The locals hate tourists, yet they depend on them for their survival in the modern age. It’s a love/hate relationship. Development is no different. We need marketing, but we hate it too. It’s so fake. So contrived. So finicky. Why can’t the quality stuff just get to the top of the list and get popular simply because it’s awesome? It’s sad really.

But, it’s needed. And, there are plenty of people out there who love to market. They just don’t like developers.

Why do developers have to be so agitating, so controlling, so vigilant and annoying to work with? If marketers could just have an idea and get someone to build it without complaining, the world would be a much better place, right? I mean, marketers know the market. It’s what they do. They know what people want, so the developers should just listen to them.

Ah, conflict. Gotta love it.

So, here’s the point… I live in both worlds. I see both points. I understand both pains because I’ve been both. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to shine the spotlight on little projects that developers are creating which are awesome. On the other side, I’m going to highlight some marketers who are pushing some great stuff.

In doing so, I hope to make some connections, smooth out the rough edges, and bring two communities together. There’s nothing we can’t accomplish if we actually get along. My vision is to see developers with great ideas and great talent build awesome stuff, and have a great local marketer pick that up and make it huge. On the other side, I want to see marketers with amazing ideas get their stuff built by some crazy awesome developers. Everyone would benefit from this.

It should be noted that I skipped one major aspect of the community, and that is designers. I didn’t do that on purpose in this article, and I do recognize how different each skill is. I do think design is a major aspect of adoption, usability, etc. Thus designers play a critical role in the awesomeness quotient of a project as well. We’ll add designers to the batter when we get the first two ingredients playing nicely and that’s when the world will explode and finally realize that San Diego has some major powerhouses in all three specializations.

Here’s the boring definition:

A type of lending involving small, non-collateralized loans to low-income, typically self-employed, workers who do not have access to traditional financial lending services.

The more interesting definition includes the belief that microfinance is one of the most powerful methods by which people can be assisted out of poverty. Depending on the community, it could rely on a group-lending model by which multiple entrepreneurs in one group agree to effectively be the co-signers for each other. If one person misses a payment on a loan, it jeopardizes every individual in the group’s chances of getting loans in the future. Other models (namely domestic micro-credit) simply create loans for individuals who, for one reason or another, are unable to get traditional bank financing for their business.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

About the Microfinance Summit

The San Diego Microfinance Summit was created in 2009 by a group of aspiring students from Point Loma Nazarene University, USD, and local domestic microfinance institutions (MFIs). The idea behind it is to (1) bring awareness to the area regarding microfinance, it’s ability to reduce poverty and empower the poor, (2) give a forum to discuss academic and practical issues and controversy surrounding microlending as a whole.

Last year, the Summit was an outstanding success with local media coverage including TV stations and newspapers covering the event. San Diego microfinance borrowers from all walks of life came to participate as well, selling authentic food from far away countries, hand made jewelery, and other wares. It definitely was a sight to be seen.

This year, the Summit and the San Diego Microfinance Alliance are expecting an even bigger turnout and more detailed dialog. There will also be more time this year to network with each other and find out about microfinance opportunities (how you can get involved with MFIs in the area.

Excited yet?

The Microfinance Summit Details

American University – School of International Service

The International Development Program of The School of International Service at American University offers an M.A. degree in international development and an M.S. degree in development management. Specializations include: business, community development, conflict and development, development management, democracy and governance, economic policy, environment and development, gender, microfinance, small business development, and trade.

Brandeis University – Heller School Program in Sustainable International Development

The Sustainable International Development (SID) program of the Heller School at Brandeis University is a graduate program offering a two-year M.A. degree and an innovative professional curriculum. This includes a year in residence studying with senior researchers and field-level development practitioners, and a second-year field project, internship or advanced study applying and evaluating methods and models of development. The SID program examines broad development concerns that ultimately focus on the alleviation of poverty and the sustainable use of natural resources. The program includes the opportunity to concentrate in microfinance.

Duke University – Duke Center for International Development

The Program in International Development Policy (PIDP) is designed for mid-career professionals seeking to dedicate their careers to policy making and public service in developing countries and countries in transition. The PIDP provides interdisciplinary training in policy analysis on issues related to long term social and economic development. Upon successful completion of the program, PIDP Fellows will receive a Master of Arts degree or Certificate in International Development Policy, and typically go on to serve in their home countries or in international agencies at senior levels as public officials, policy analysts, independent researchers, and leaders of non-governmental organizations.

Fordham University – Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development

The Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (offering an M.A. and certificate programs) is designed to train students for international careers in the business, nonprofit and government sectors. Specializations include comparative politics, development studies, emerging markets, and development economics.

George Washington University – Elliott School of International Affairs

GWU’s Elliott School of International Affairs offers a M.A. in international development studies. Course work includes a multidisciplinary core and the opportunity to concentrate in fields such as anthropology, geography, economics, or health and development.

Harvard University – Kennedy School of Government – Financial Institutions for Private Enterprise

John F. Kennedy School of Government offers its annual, two-week program on Financial Institutions for Private Enterprise Development (FIPED) for professionals working in the areas of micro enterprise finance and commercial banking for small- and medium-sized businesses. This program is designed to aid participants in the sustainable provision of financial services for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). FIPED presents participants with an opportunity to learn from the successful experiences of other countries. The course shows how to design appropriate financial instruments and to adopt market-oriented management approaches to serve the needs of MSME.

Harvard University – Kennedy School of Government

The master’s degree in public administration with a concentration in International Development (MPA/ID) at Harvard University is designed to prepare the next generation of leaders in international development. It is an economics-centered, multi-disciplinary program, combining rigorous training in analytical and quantitative methods with an emphasis on policy and practice.

Johns Hopkins University – Nitze School of Advanced International Studies

The Masters of Arts program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins aims to produce specialists in fully developed concentrations. Students pair a regional or international relations concentration with international economics and language training. Courses devoted to microfinance and development are found within the International Development program at SAIS, and can be taken as part of the M.A degree program.

The Ohio State University – Rural Finance Program

Ohio State’s renowned Rural Finance Program, home of the DevFinance email listserve and a participant in the Microfinance Best Practices project, also offers a M.S. and a Ph.D. in agricultural, environmental and development economics. The program focuses on strong economic foundations and allows specialization within a desired discipline.

Southern New Hampshire University – Microenterprise Development Institute

Southern New Hampshire University (formerly New Hampshire College) holds an annual Microenterprise Development Institute training program for microfinance professionals. The program is dedicated to building both financial and social capital, and to helping practitioners to find a balance between these two important aspects that will stimulate sustainable growth.

Tulane University – Payson Center for International Development and Technology Transfer/ Department of International Health and Development

Jointly, Tulane University’s Payson Center and Department of International Health and Development offer several post-graduate development degrees: an M.P.H. and Ph.D. in international health and development; a joint M.P.H. and M.S.W.; an M.S. in applied development; and an executive master’s degree in applied development and health. The programs focus on international socioeconomic and health development issues.

Business Degrees and Majors Resources

Below is a list of other resources:

• Free Business School
• Running a Business on 5 Hours a Day
• Top Undergraduate Business Schools
• A List of Different Business Degrees