What should you study at University?

I have a lot of time for @angusblair, an awesome Sparkie from back in the day, and always full of great ideas. While my own path (BCom/LLB) doesn’t follow his advice at all, if I were to go back in time I’d give this advice a lot of thought.

His advice of BSc/BA allows you to follow a great combination of the creative thinking approaches from liberal arts papers, with a technical foundation (e.g. physics or maths). Yes, commerce is useful, but I agree with Angus in that some of the best commerce education I have gained has come from extracurriculars such as Spark and MCC, which have the scope to teach so much more practical aspects.

A great read! 

Startup Weekend AKL 2012

While I didn’t get to participate in Startup Weekend this time around (Law Dissertation SO CLOSE), I took the time out to go see the announcement of the winners last Sunday. When i got there I saw a great number of Sparkies and others involved in the weekend, and my friend (and ex-Spark marketing lead!) Lisa Jansen just posted a great review of the weekend. Go check out her writeup at the link above! 

The Creative Monopoly - NYTimes.com

Sweet little bit of advice from Peter Thiel (hat tip: Angus)

In fact, Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.

It’s a SmallWorld after all

We had a real treat last night at the Spark IT Roadshow. Mitch Olson, the founder of NZ’s largest online social game (7 million users!) - came to speak. Mitch gave us an outline of his career path, what he’s done with SmallWorlds and how he moved into the gaming world.

Mitch Olson

Mitch Olson at Spark’s IT Roadshow

SmallWorlds is an online social world targeted mostly at teens. It is similar to SecondLife, but runs entirely in your web browser. Users can interact with each other, build a home, customise their avatar, and purchase things like in-game TVs which let you watch YouTube videos with other players in the game.

As you see from the photo, before building SmallWorlds, Mitch started out on some old school equipment (the first one, which I missed a picture of, was an old punch card machine… and I thought my old 286 was ancient!). A huge difference from today’s computers. One of the first key things I remember though was Mitch’s emphasis on finding a co-founder. Mitch founded SmallWorlds with Darren Green, a fellow computer science grad. The combination of the two, both with expertise and passion in the same area, made for an excellent team.

Passion

“Do exactly what you love doing, and find a way to get paid for doing it…”

Another thing that really struck me was Mitch’s passion. You can really tell that he loves what he does, and can’t think of any better career to have. Mitch tells a story of a graduate  they tried to hire. After going through piles of applications, they settled on one person - who had the perfect combination of creativity and analytic expertise. After proudly offering this grad the job, they were turned down… for a bank. “A bank!?” Mitch exclaims, with a mix of surprise and incredulity. “Ah well,” he shrugs, “hopefully that worked out for him.” You could see the question on everyone’s faces, who would choose working in a bank over being part of one of NZ’s most exciting game dev companies?

Mitch also spoke of his belief in the kiwi innovative streak, and the knowledge we have some really amazing people doing cool stuff in NZ’s IT world. It is this belief that led Mitch to start the Gamedojo, which is a co-working and accelerator programme for fledgling game development companies in NZ. I’m very keen to see some of the Gamedojo graduates and what they go on to achieve.

Overall

The message really for me was that kiwis can really do big things. As Mitch mentioned, with just a laptop and an internet connection, someone way over on this end of the world can create incredible value. SmallWorlds has been featured on TechCrunch, Mitch has been intervewed by Fast Company, and gave a pretty inspiring mini-talk at last year’s ICE Ideas Conference.

Jeremy Moon - Icebreaker

Jeremy Moon was Spark’s first speaker of the year, at the Spark Launch in March. Jeremy is the founder of Icebreaker, one of NZ’s most successful clothing companies, and an amazingly innovative company at that. Jeremy spoke to our crowd of 550+ students at the University of Auckland Business School, and got everyone amped up for an amazing year ahead.

Spark - what it's all about

Among my other pursuits (law, graphic design), I’m currently the CEO of Spark - we help aspiring entrepreneurs at the University of Auckland get the inspiration, education and motivation they need to turn their ideas into businesses. There are two main ways that we do this, through Spark’s Educational programme, and our Spark Challenges - business planning competitions designed to help you learn how to develop a business plan and put it into action.

We run an inspiring speaker series (this year we’ve had, among others, Jeremy Moon from Icebreaker, Derek Handley from The Hyperfactory, Hamish Pinkham from Rhythm and Vines, Peter Beck from Rocketlab, Mike Carden from Sonar6, Mitch Olson from Smallworlds), as well as our Ideas 2 Business one-day startup workshop, and the invite-only LaunchPad series.

On top of all that we also run two major competitions, the $1,000 for 1,000 words Ideas Challenge, with $33,000 in $1,000 prizes available, and our flagship competition the $100k Challenge, providing up to $25,000 in seed capital plus business incubation time.

As you can see, it’s an extremely busy programme, but my intent is to keep on top of everything going on with with blog - so you get to see some of the amazing things Spark is doing this year!

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