Dot.com to Dot.Bomb Presentation

After waiting the entire quarter for it, at last the much anticipated event had finally arrived: we got to watch Andrew play with plastic dinosaurs (I do have to wonder, which one of his children he took them from :)). Although this bit of humor was what I best remembered this presentation by, I found the subject matter very interesting as well.

I liked how the dinosaurs were used to represent Prodigy, CompuServ, Genie, AOL, and Delphi. They truly are dinosaurs, now extinct, existing only in our memories; relics of the past. Overall, it was a very appopriate example, despite the humor involved in it.

I found it amazing how the adoption of the Internet coincided in the absolute explosion of businesses, due to the Internet being a powerful e-commerce medium. The dot-com boom was literally a time when a company could see their stock price shoot through the roof, by simply adding an "e-" prefix to their name and/or adding a ".com" to the end of their name.

Venture capitalists were almost giving out money, only to have their investments go bust in early 2000. It's obsurd to think that a company that was showing absolutely no profit, but infact the exact opposite--enormous losses, would be able to go up for huge IPO, and that the venture capitalists would buy into this all. What were they thinking?!?!

Unfortunately, my family felt the full effect of the dot-com bubble busting as my mom, an Egghead.com manager at the time, was laid off, joining the "Fried Eggs" group as it was coined at the time.

Despite all of the depairity, there were some bright spots that survived the dot-com bubble bust, namely Amazon.com and Google, the latter of which seems bent on world domination. Muwhahaha!!!

Michele Armstrong - Vulcan Inc.

The interview is often an experience filled with much anxiety for me. As a matter of fact, I have to do an interview tomorrow. Having someone that works as a Human Resources manager come to talk to us really helped to clear some of the anxiety up, as well as one of the topics for my business plan.

I found it rather interesting that Vulcan Inc posted job advertisements on Craigslist. I have never really seen Craigslist as a very reputable site for job postings, but rather a place for sleazy dating advertisements. I suppose that it does make business sense to post job advertisements on Craigslist though; after all, it's free.

One of the things that Michele cleared up for me was the issue of employee benefits. I had always been kind of stumped when it came to what exactly employee benefits typically cost a start-up company. Michele told me that this number usually runs at about 20-22% of the company's expense for an employee.

We also talked about some of the things that company's check prior to employment. One of the controversial subjects that came up was that of credit checks on potential employees as part of the pre-employment screening. I must say that I'm a very thorough supporter of that. I think that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their credit in most cases.

Overall, our visit with Michele was very informative, and I'm glad that she came to talk to us.

Derek Young

Although cut short by a fire alarm, I enjoyed the speech given by our guest speaker, Derek Young. I thought it interesting that he co-founded Suite 133, which was much talked about by Andrew over the quarter. What I found to be most inspirational is that he helped to bootstrap not only Suite 133, but the two other businesses (Exit 133, and most recently, Seasonal View), with no outside monetary assistance, turning down even seven-figure dollar amounts.

I must admit that I'm still having a bit of a hard time understanding exactly what Suite 133's main purpose is however. This was one of the reasons I wish that we had a bit more time, but because of that inconvenient fire alarm, this was not possible. I was left thinking that Suite 133 is some sort of incubator for start-up businesses, but I could be wrong, as Derek did say that it was used by individual people as office space as well.

Even more vexing to me was Seasonal View for which Derek is President. Derek claimed that this is his greatest source of income. He said that their goal is to "bridge and supplement organizations," however I had kind of a hard time knowing what exactly that meant. What I do know is that they do call center consulting and help to set up call centers, but most of their time is spent on privacy law. Ask me how these two things go together, and I wouldn't be able to tell you. Also, I do know that Seasonal View has some pretty lofty clients, namely Pierce County, Alaska Airlines (no pun intended), as well as a global marketing company.

Aside from these three businesses of Derek's, he also talked about a web-based apartment management system that he was involved in, as well as a sports team management system, which still exists to some extent.

To answer Andrew's question about how many questions that I have asked our guest speakers to date, I would have to say that I have not really kept track, but I have asked a lot of them. If I had to make a guess though, I would say that this number lies around 25. Had the fire alarm not gone off halfway through Derek's speech, I'm sure that I would have had many more questions for Derek, but none-the-less, that is fate.