Not another bar...

I recently (I'm very late with this post) attended the Mentoring by the Masters round table/web cast presented by the Nebraska Center for Entrepreneurship. The main reason that I attended was for a class requirement - but I think I would have gone anyway (of course I would have). The master Entrepreneurs in attendance were Joey Knecht of i2rd/Vipa Solutions, Carol Farnham of Signa Solutions, and Eric Dinger of Thought District.

The talk was web cast to several other Nebraska college campuses through an awesome room in the teachers college. The place was full of flat screens and microphones - easily 20 thousand dollars worth of equipment. Of course it was not working correctly, so the talk got started 20 minutes late.

The content covered basic Entrepreneurship questions: What was the hardest part of starting your business? What is the one thing that I can do to make me successful? Questions along those lines. The content was not mind blowing, but Dinger and Knecht would crack jokes whenever they spoke to keep things interesting. Dinger's answers were effective and concise - which I greatly admire.

Other sites had their masters on hand as well, but I did not find them nearly as interesting.

Carol Farnham mentioned lighting darkfiber for distributed computing between universities - which I thought was the coolest topic mentioned during the web cast. Dark fiber is also an awesome name, and the phrase "light the dark fiber" sounds straight out of a fantasy novel.

Before the talk started, Knecht was talking to the group of students in attendance - nearly all of which were in a new venture management course. He asked the group, "So what are you going to start? And don't tell me it's another stupid bar."

This made me chuckle, because about half of the students in the management class are writing business plans for some form of bar or restaurant. However I quickly straightened up, because M7 is developing software to make losing sobriety that much easier.

Don't discount HappierHour. It took creativity, engineering knowledge and discipline to get the app up and running (and we are far from done - Follow Us!). The end goal is like any other venture, to add value to a large group of users.