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02 Jan 2015

IEEE Rising Stars Conference - Day 2

This are some notes from the second day of the 2014 IEEE Rising Stars Conference.

Notes

Unleashing Your Inner Entrepreneur

Presentation by Dr. Catherine (Kate) Jenkins

  • Software is eating the world
  • But hardware is still needed
  • Often times, companies/groups can get cynical when something gets difficult
  • Case Study: Jawbone
    • Founded in 1999 to do military contracting for acoustics
    • In 2007, pivoted and came to CES with badass headset
    • In 2011, enters health- and life- tracking with wrist wearables * Sept 2014 valued at over $3B
  • Get users to want your thing!

  • Take the best path

  • Case Study: Adafruit
    • Founded 2005 and influential in open source/DIY hardware and electronics learning kit
    • 839% 3-year growth
    • NEEDED VC BACKING
    • 50 employees
  • Case Study: Transatomic
    • Molten salt tech to safely burn and reduce nuclear waste
    • 5 nuclear waste startups in last decade after 20 yr break
    • $1.7B for “Enough energy to ppower the world for 72 years”
    • Contrast: MIT prof and 2 former grad students vs US nuclear regulatory body
  • Areas to start with (22)
    • www.ycombinator/com/rfs/
  • Where to start? (Conceptual)
    • Get a coufounder you trust
    • Build interesting things (ship them)
      • Process and product optimization
    • Get users ASAP. Outsource everything else.
    • Be lean (nimble/agile/whatever)
      • The goal is still to succeed!
      • Fail FAST not FAIL fast
    • Incorporate
      • Paperwork
    • Document everything
    • Write one page of your business plan and nail your pitch
  • Where to start (geographic)?
    • Location, ecosystem, runway
      • Where are your customers?
      • How does your company work? Can you all meet together?
      • How long can you survive on the takeoff phase?
    • Valley generosity steps from recognizing that new markets are not zero sum
      • Everyone is friendly with their time and resources
      • The gain: they might expand their market - it isn’t zero gain!
    • “Silicon Valley in (blank) Valley”?
      • Aerospace valley, example
      • Doesn’t have to be web-dev, etc.
      • Ecosystem of people that can take care of each other, and not work in isolation
  • Resources and reading
    • Stanford - How to start a startup
    • MIT Technology Review
    • Communications of the ACM
    • Sequoia Grove – “Founders Helping Founders” www.sequoiacap.com/grove (business, legal). This is especially helpful for engineers who are looking for business resources!
  • Who not to listen to
    • Experts - being a leading expert in a field is a trailing indicator of the relevance of that field
    • People who just want you to be like them
    • People who are afraid you are better than them
    • Most of your friends
    • Anything called a networking event
    • Business majors - You don’t need them until later
    • University career centers
    • People in academic who say “A professor is like a CEO of their research group”
    • Recruiters for startups where they tell you about the office trampoline before the business idea
  • Who to listen to:
    • Your co-founders (find ones you trust).
    • Your users
    • Yourself
  • Think about this now
    • Do you have a mentor? Get one for business and one for engineering
    • Do you have a role model? Not someone to mimic but just someone you can benchmark against and who you respect
    • It’s all controlled chaos anyway
      • It’s hard to predict things
      • You just have to work hard
      • Deal with things when you face them

  • “Find a frontier and go for it!”

  • Questions
    • Mentorship - do they get a stake in your company, equity, etc? How do you work that out?
      • It’s a great relationship to have someone that is genuinely interested in hepling you out
      • The best that you can do to be a good mentee is to do the best that you can
      • Be motivated!
      • Beneficial, but should never involve any sort of money
      • Silicon Valley Generiosity again, people help each other out
    • When looking for co-founders, what should you be looking for?
      • Depends what you’re dong
      • The people who you work with best
      • Known for the longest
      • Those people who look like they’ll be friends forever
      • Their absolute ability to work together…traction
      • Need to absolutely trust that they’re doing their best (in your heart)
    • When should you worry about IP and things…documents.
      • IP is almost not the first thing to worry about
      • When you incorporate, start to worry about this.. IP should be owned by the company, and then the founders agreement is done
      • Value is in patents, etc.
      • Provisional patent is very important to show that you’re moving forward.

The Internet of Things

  • Connected devices
    • A large range of devices
  • Technology Trends in 2015
    • CES 2015: Internet of things to take centre stage with over 900 innovations on display
  • Technology has reached a tipping point
    • You can connect devices to the internet, connect everything together now
    • Enabled a whole set of possibilities
  • Why now?
    • Cheap computing power
    • Sensors (large amount of sensors packed into devices)
    • Pervasiveness of mobile devices
    • Energy Harvesting Circuits
      • Energy is always a big concern
  • Question to audience: what would be interesting to connect to the internet
    • Fridge and Microwave
    • Toilet
    • Sink
    • Home’s foundation
  • Connected devices enter retail space
    • Square, google wallet, etc.
  • Connected devices enter supply chain
    • Manage inventory
    • Efficient manufacturing
  • What future do you imagine
    • Contactless sleep monitoring
      • Would be helpful for students to monitor this

Personal Branding

  • Apple: what does it mean to you
    • Well made
    • Status of symbol
    • Probably would be taken care of
  • Harley-Davidson Logo
    • Motocycle
    • Black Leather
    • Made in America
    • Obnoxious
  • Coca-Cola vs Pepsi
    • Do people choose coke based on taste?
    • Mixability - we are in vegas
    • Blind taste tests (Pepsi)
    • Similar Products
  • Toyota vs Lexus
    • If I gave you keys to a Toyota vs a Lexus, what would you choose
    • Comment from Audience: Toyota cheaper to repair
    • What is the difference?
      • Quality
      • Status
      • Luxury
  • Brand
    • A set of expectations perceptiosn and beliefs about a particular product, service and entity
    • The ability of that product, service or entity to deliver on expectations
    • The ability to deliver is just as important
  • Personal Branding
    • Bad news
      • We label people the same way we label products
      • You know the best dressed, smartest, etc. person you know
    • Worse news
      • People are labeling you in the same way
      • This is just something that we do
    • Good news
      • You have the opportunity to conciously shape what those perceptions are
      • It’s not going to happen on accident
      • Think about the future, how you want to people see you in the future
  • Personal Brand
    • The sum total of your findability, repution and ability to deliver results
    • Findability: the probablity that a peson hiring for your dream job can, with reasonable effort, find and engage with you.
  • Where do companies find the people they hire?
    • Pretty diverse (CareerXRoads 2014 sources of hire survey)
    • Referrals - 19.2%
    • Career site - 19.1%
    • Direct Source - 12.1%
    • College - 7.5%
  • Why you’ll show up
    • Offline presence - relationships, involvement, impact
      • Friend, family, social, academic & professional networks
      • Industry contributions
      • Introduction vs referral vs recommendation
        • Introduction > recommendation > referral
        • Introduction is the best way, is a stronger recommendation
    • Online Presence - content, location, quality of signal
      • Being in the right places with the right information
      • Some people look at top down for talent
        • Look at successful people
        • Look at those people who they’ve worked with
  • Integrity
    • Very important
    • Need to walk in with this
  • Reliability
    • Jumping jobs every 2 years might not be good
  • References
    • Stated References
    • Internal References
      • Google - anytime someone would be hired, look for evidence someone could vouch for them
    • Back Channel References
  • Ability to deliver results
    • Knowledge - do you know your subject matter?
  • Practical skills and experience
    • Vast majority of people graduate with no practical or work experience
    • Document your work, capture your proccess
    • Capture some of your details - do some stuff!
  • Attitude
    • People want to be with those who are easy to work with
      • Collaboration! This is what companies look for
      • Can you work with other human beings
    • Communication
      • You can either remove friction or add friction
      • Need to be able to articulate your ideas
    • Willingness
      • Some people are releuctant to communicate
      • Others are excited
  • Resilence
    • How quick can you bounce back
    • Top companies tend to prize this
    • Startups don’t have the luxury of having to wait
  • Are we talking about marketing stuff? Or is it something else altogether?
    • Personal brand: the external, discoverable representation of who you are and who you are capable of becoming
    • This is where the juice is.. YOU control this
  • What can you do?
    • Learn how to write a clean clear, findable resume
    • Build a simple searchable site for your resume
    • Contribute to online forms. help solve problems.
    • Clean that stuff up! Clean up your social media so companies don’t find stuff that makes you less awesome than you actually are.
  • Offline recommendations
    • Get involved… IEEE!
    • Join toastmasters
    • Read. A lot.
      • The more stuff you read, the more you can articulate
      • Creativity isn’t a fixed quantity
      • The more things you are exposed to, the more connections you can make
  • Extra Mile
    • Read
    • Compete
      • Hackathons, codejams, international competitions
      • Companies host these, recruit from these
    • Watch
      • Your body language shapes who you are
    • Publish
      • Write blogs, write good stuff (you want someone to like it!)
  • What’s the ultimate goal
    • Opportunity magnet - A person whose personal brand consistently attracts positive attention from recruiters and companies
  • Questions
    • Willingness
      • Look at the challenges that your coworkers are afraid of and take them!

Engineering Excitement

  • Presentation by William Whurley @whurle
  • The thing that is missing today is imagination

  • With all the tools we learn, without imagination it is useless

  • Creative
    • Using the ability to make or think of new things
    • Everyone has creativity
    • As engineers we have to be more creative
  • Agile
    • Able to move quickly and easily
    • There are a lot of people doing engineering who aren’t engineers
    • Some people might not understand the repercussions of what they’re doing
  • Passionate
    • Having showing or expressing strong emotions or beliefs
    • Have you ever gotten fired from a job?
  • Examples
    • Board of awesomeness
      • Kinect controller electric skateboard that violates EULAS
      • Cease and decist from Microsoft
      • Done in less than 48 hours
    • Gesture controlled audio
      • Gesture controller audio interface for drivers
      • Leap motion control
      • Engineers always want to show the final products
      • But things always break anyways!
      • Get caught up in the engineering, but don’t deliver good products
      • We often don’t involve users in the creative and engineering processs
        • They’re a problem
        • They don’t understand
        • But we need to empower the users with creativity
    • Touchable Tables
      • Touch interface table for ordering food and entertaining
      • Job as an engineer is to make things a reality - not to tell users what they want
      • Not to dictate what people use it, how people use it
      • Take a problem, solve it and deliver it
    • Social Bottle
      • A bottle that knows who you are, where you are and who you’d like to meet
      • A premium social bottle for social drinking
    • Virtual Classroom
      • Virtual reality classroom that offers unique experiences
      • Occulus rift + leap motion
    • Virtual Shopping
      • Virtually shopping experience that delivers real goods
      • Facebook shopping interface
    • Shark Punch
      • Punch sharks in virtual reality
    • Helmet of Justice
      • Black box for cyclist in an accident or emergency
      • Had an employee who got hit in a hit-and-run
      • Cost of helmet is around $300
    • Window interfaces
      • Windows on your vehicle that provide valuable information
    • Smarter Cart
      • Autonomous shopping cart of the future that works today
    • Board of imagination
      • Mind controlled skateboard powered by imagination
      • Example of why imagination is so important to engineering
  • Engineers
    • We take risks (physical, etc.)
    • We build a lot of things, that do many things
    • Social responsibility
    • CUPID
      • 80,000 volts of awesomeness in a drone that knows who you are
    • There has to be a responsibility somewhere
    • If you’re not waking up every morning freaking out about what you’re doing at work, quit!
    • Willing to take that personal risk
  • We don’t do enough collaboration
    • We don’t do enough collaboration
    • We don’t have enough creativity
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