danhou.com

For the past year, I’ve been experimenting with, starting and running a few online small businesses.  The most recent is a startup guide that I co-authored with my fellow Wharton alumni and former Microsoft colleague Peter Burchhardt.

I’m extremely pleased with the way Fundamentals for Founders: A Practical Guide to Kick-Starting Your Business turned out, and feel it does an excellent job distilling the learnings from both my entrepreneurial and corporate career.

If you only have a passing interest in startup and aren’t remotely interesting in purchasing an ebook, then the blog might be a good place for you to begin.  We’re still learning at a ravenous pace, so definitely check back periodically for updates!

- Dan

Wedged between gently rolling hills, a calm meandering river and a stunning slice of rugged Eastern Cape coastline, Bulungula is easily one of the three most heart-wrenchingly beautiful places I’ve been to on this trip. Yet its the extraordinary degree of consideration given to its development that places this charming backpacker’s lodge head and shoulders beyond anything else in South Africa.

Environmental
The kitchen and common rooms of Bulungula are lit in the evening by an array of candles and a few solar-powered lights. The drinking water provided is simply cached rain water and other facilities consist of composting toilets and innovative kerosene heated showers. The staff has committed to planting enough trees each year to ensure that the entire operation is carbon neutral.

I must admit I rather enjoyed toasting my lunch in the solar cooker out front.

Cultural
It’s clear that Bulungula was built with the intention of being an integral part of the local village, rather than separate or adjacent. The rondavels are all constructed using traditional techniques with thatched straw roofs, mud brick walls and beaten mud floors. The village remains only accessible by an hour’s hike from the nearest dirt road, effectively filtering out the typical tourist dross and ensuring that the number of travelers passing through is low enough to have a minimal impact on day-to-day local life.

Ethical
Best of all, any profit generated from the lodge goes directly into the hands of contributing villagers. The backpackers is 40% owned by the Bulungula village, and the proceeds for the excellent tours are kept by the guides themselves. Locals with an entrepreneurial spirit are welcome to participate, offering travelers a variety of goods such as solar-baked Xhosa bread and cookies.

The result of all this is unique opportunity to experience South Africa at its finest. Every traveler who passes through this region inevitably develops an emotional barrier to fend off the constant barrage of touts, beggars and destitute children screaming for sweets.

Bulungula is a refreshing change of pace where travelers interact with the Xhosas on even terms and can move freely through the village knowing that they’re truly welcome.  Its impossible to spend a few days in this small slice of paradise, and not have those barriers rapidly melt away.

I’ve spent one hour a week for the past several months volunteering with Junior Achievement and teaching economics at an inner city Seattle high school. I was initially intimidated by the prospect, but quickly developed a rapport with the students.

I ended up really enjoying the experience and even though I was there to teach them commerce, they also taught me the importance of a few classic business principles. Here are the top 3 things I learned from Barbara Lynch’s third period business class:

1. Roll with the punches.

Every class has a class clown (or six) that will try to heckle the teacher, incite laughter and generally disrupt things. One day, I asked the class to think of a problem that they could build a business around solving. Several kids blurted out answers, but one smart aleck yelled out, “I hate it when, after I go to the bathroom, I wipe but I don’t get it all.”

Rather than ignore his outburst, I went along with it and conceded that this was indeed a valid problem. I put the guy on the spot, asking him what product would he develop to solve this problem. “Extra grippy toilet paper” was the response I got. The remainder of the discussion focused on target market (”old people who have to go a lot”), competitive pressures (”wet wipes”) and start up costs (”need a factory”).

Everyone in the class got a good laugh out of this. But they were also very much engaged and it ended up being a memorable lesson.

Good corporations are also able to take the hits in stride; the best ones can make lemonade. Jeff Bezos was able to take one of Amazon’s money pits, under-utilized storage capacity, and turn it into arguably the most important web service of Web 2.0.

2. Be relevant or be ignored.

No high school sophomore gets truly excited about supply and demand. So how do you teach economics to adolescents raised on the bite-sized over-stimulation provided by the likes of YouTube and Robot Chicken?

I put supply and demand in the context of over-inflated Xbox 360 and PS3 prices on eBay. I used the DeBeers diamond cartel to illustrate how monopolies can disrupt normal competitive forces. Every lesson was encapsulated in a larger story that was as entertaining to a teenager as I could make it. It was clear that I had to stay relevant if these lessons were to stick.

Teachers certainly aren’t the only ones with this challenge. MSN has spent millions developing a search engine that delivers more relevant results than Google. Established publications find themselves competing with the blogosphere to produce more relevant content. Good advertising is targeted advertising is relevant advertising.

3. Respect must be earned.

I remember my high school teachers, and some of them acted as though their position as a teacher made them superior. While it did inherently make them the authority figure, it did NOT automatically make them worthy of my respect. Case in point, President Bush.

These high school students didn’t give a rats ass what school I’d gone to or what my job title was. They demanded (rightly so) that I prove my worth before they really began to open up to what I had to teach.

Whether you’re a young professional starting to teach a high school class or a new CEO taking over the reins of a company, I would argue that your previous accomplishments have little to no meaning. What matters is what you do now, with the new set of people you’re interacting with.

My mom is a Comp Sci instructor at Norfolk State, and being the concerned educator that she is, she forwarded me this article regarding trends in her field.

To sum it up, the number of CS majors in the US has been in a downward spiral over the past few years. Between 200 and 2004, the number of college freshman listing computer science as their probable major fell by 70%.

This isn’t breaking news - back in early ‘04, I’d coordinated a speaking tour for Bill Gates, during which he attempted to drum up interest in CS as a major. Fast forward through two additional years of software experience, and I’ve got to wonder whether this is still a cause for concern.

In the past, Computer Science was more of an esoteric science - the inner workings of programming were borderline black magic to the common man. These days, nearly every other punk kid on MySpace knows at least a little HTML, and probably a bit of scripting as well. The proliferation of blogging, personal websites and graphics design leads me to believe that CS is going the way of the liberal arts - you no longer need to study it in an academic environment to build a career in it. Just because you didn’t major in English doesn’t mean you can’t write.

The very first day of CS 101 at Penn, there were nearly 800 students present, filling every seat in the lecture hall and spilling over into the stairs as well. By the time midterms rolled around, at least 50% of the students had dropped the course. Of the students in attendance on that first day, maybe a third actually received degrees in the field. When you combine this with the results of the Middlesex Tests, you quickly realize the students who remain are the ones who are seriously interested in the subject, the ones who are truly meant to be there.

These special few now have better opportunities to learn because the professors can now focus on the brightest, most dedicated students. I won’t delve into the details of Brooks’ Law, suffice it to say the Silicon Valley has proven time and time again that a few brilliant hackers are significantly more valuable than a stable of mediocre programmers.

What this all means is that while we’re getting fewer CS grads, the overall pool of programming talent in the US remains the same, if its not in fact growing. Mom, Bill, you can both rest easy.