Reflection

July 29th, 2021


I had a lot of fun putting together this assignment. My fiancée has been an on-set tutor in the movie industry for the past three years, and we're both educators with an interest in technology and design, she is quite entrepreneurial. We've discussed the many short comings of the movie industry being behind in their technology use for the day to day. This A3 is a result of many conversations that started with "What if...".


For the first time I really had to consider what was needed to get a start-up off the ground. That initial seed round, or having an angel investor is incredibly important. Just to hire the personnel would is a tremendous expense, doing a quick google search, and please correct me if I'm wrong, would be about $75K annually for a software developer. You'd probably have to pay more to be competitive with the likes of Electronic Arts, Black Berry, Microsoft, and IBM. Just thinking off the top of my head, maybe $750K to $1M would be needed for the first year, and hopefully, the start-up can start generating revenue.


Revenue is where there is a weakness in this venture. How do I set the price? If the initial expenses are that high, how many subsriptions would have to be purchased. I am assuming that a subscription would be way to generate income, and would it be a tiered subscription? Is there enough of a market to warrant such an expensive initial cost. Speaking of the "what if..." from earlier income generatation creates a lot.


I also had to consider a cloud service. These products just can't come out of nowhere so it was really interesting to look in to services like Microsoft Azure. The pay structure is something that I am still trying to understand. Also, it's interesting to see that a service like that is also constantly evolving with new technologies.


Creating the elevator pitch was fun and a challenge. My original pitch was two and half minutes, and I couldn't believe how much I had to cut to get it down to a minute. It ended up being 1m 4s. So close! I could have been more brief on my first two introductory statements. I also originally tried shooting it in the elevator in my building, but the camera was unsteady while I was trying to glance at my notes, other people getting on the elevator, and it just wouldnt work unfortunately. That goes to show how thorough one needs to know their pitch and give it in a short amount of time. Being knowledgeable and confident is key.


I'm looking forward to adding to this reflection after reading everyone's feedback. Thank you for reading.


-Mark

August 4th, 2021

After thinking over this assigment over a few days and receiving valuable feedback it is incredible the amount of work that would have to go into a real tech venture. Some questions I thought of are:

  • What is the scale of the venture? Is it too grandiose?

  • Should the venture focus on one or two aspects of service?

  • Is the venture in a "vacuum," or can it function with other established products?

Lots to think about.

-Mark

August 8th, 2021


I’ve never had much of a changemaker mindset, I like using technology and learning about it, but this assignment allowed me to think about what it takes to create a venture. Personally, the only thing I could bring to the table would be my background in education, how technology is used in education, and some management skills. I would have to hire web developers (I could initially do some of this), software engineers (front end and back end), software architects. It’s a competitive market, and it would be a challenge to hire and retain quality personnel.

This assignment also gave me an opportunity to work on some skills that I have always wanted to work on, audio editing and video editing. I was able to create professional looking video presentations and podcasts. The podcast-like content I incorporated were a lot of fun because I am a huge fan of the medium. I learned that I had to speak at a slower speed and clearly, taking advantage of my operatic training. Still, lots of work to do. It also helped my writing skills because I had to be sure that my writing had a good flow for speech, and I was forced to not be redundant.

-Mark