Opening Remarks

During the opening remarks, SR alumnus Oscar H' 13 communicated excerpts from the following message.

I'd like to thank everyone that helped bring us together, especially Iman and Samarth.

I'm Oscar, and it's a pleasure to meet you. I'd like to take 5 minutes to do three things: (1) tell you how I broke into tech (2) convey a crucial lesson, and (3) challenge you to put it into practice.

1. If you "seek to make the world otherwise" as Professor Asma Abbas put it, then your success is incumbent on your ability "to make". Outside of class, I learned to make by attending Hack Dartmouth with a group of my Simon's Rock peers invested in the success of our project and our team. I went on to attend and win prizes at two other hackathons, and I landed my first contract in tech by showcasing those hacks to a software freelancer at a local coworking space which my brother's friend belonged to. After I auto-drafted a short contract, he sent me 50% as a deposit without ever asking for a resume or code interview. Like making a ~$10k web app, making the world otherwise requires more than making other technology. It requires making observations, questions, connections, conversations, designs, teams, and especially customers that are willing to give you the resources you need to make your dream come true. These customers can be public agencies, private organizations, donors, or individual consumers just like us.

2. So how do you gain the experience to make something good? Talk to people to identify problems they face, and figure out a good enough way to make that problem go away; then repeat.

3. Today, I encourage you to make anything good enough, whether it's a slow-growing sustainable project or a startup design with explosive potential. To show that we alumni support you taking intelligent action to make the world a better place, we will award the top project idea with a nominal cash prize with no strings attached.

The jury will evaluate your project idea according to the merit of your hypothesis and the strength of your presentation, based on the areas explained by YC's Kevin Hale -- see How to Evaluate Startup Ideas and How to Pitch Your Startup -- below.

3. • problem: popular, growing, urgent, expensive, mandatory, frequent. what is the problem? who is the customer? how many of the customers that you interviewed agree that this problem is really hurting them?

   • solution: don't start here. what are you making? can you feasibly make it? does the problem go away?

   • insight: competitive advantage related to growth, explanation. why is now the perfect time to solve this problem, and why is your team exceptionally well suited to do so?

   • pitch & star quality. presentation and all other criteria. more details forthcoming.

We recommend that your team fill each of the roles.

• Product: talk to customers. create hypothesis (problem, insight, solution). pitch.

• Design: design solution. assess feasibility. create low-fidelity mockups.

• Tech: build increasingly sophisticated prototypes.

Call to Action

Details on more specific criteria and jury procedures are coming to this page soon. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

Lastly, please share this broadly to reach as many Simon's Rock Alumni as possible!

Thanks,

Oscar Hernandez

ohernandez13@simons-rock.edu