Dave Mann on Learning to Resist Shiny Objects

Dave Mann, Founder of VisualCMS

Right now, Dave Mann’s coveted “shiny object” is a red and white RV nicknamed “the Beast.”

The giant vehicle will carry him and his family on adventures all over the country. A part of Dave’s evolution toward semi-retirement, the Beast perfectly embodies his family-centric balance of freedom and innovation. It’s the next stop on a journey that spans philosophy, retail, consulting, and more.

Origins
Dave started his consulting career in 1996, but not until after he experienced a job in retail over the Christmas holidays which made him realize the retail industry wasn’t for him. His English major/Philosophy minor degree, although “perfect for arguing both sides of a point with myself,” wasn’t getting him where he wanted to be. So he jumped into consulting, becoming an MVP for Microsoft’s SharePoint platform at the just the right time, watching the technology explode exponentially soon after joining the space. Today, Dave is one of only 215 SharePoint MVPs in the world.

The grind of the consulting lifestyle began to wear on him, though. “With consulting, If you don’t work any hours, you don’t get any dollars. I didn’t want to do that anymore.” It was time for a change, so Dave sat down and put together a 3-year plan.

In the Startup World
For the first part of Dave’s plan, he decided to build a marketing channel that would leverage his SharePoint knowledge. Enter “Office 365 Concierge,” a weekly newsletter covering all the developments surrounding the cloud-based Office 365 platform. He hired a contractor to write and categorize content, after which Dave would review and publish the newsletter.

The second part of the plan included developing some training videos and starting to work on a new product. Things were moving along as intended….until the app that Dave had designed to generate his newsletter started capturing its own attention.

VisualCMS
Dave’s newsletter publishing app creates HTML that can be published to WordPress. Information is stored on Trello cards (online index cards) that can be managed visually by dragging and dropping from one list to another.

“Someone approached me about selling it. I thought, ‘Do I make it a SaaS application? Might people want to buy it?'” It became a shiny object that distracted him from his original plan. “The problem was that it was completely outside my wheelhouse. I had zero credibility in the space.”

But the diversion was tempting. “I’m easily distracted by shiny objects. I move from one interesting thing to another. It’s been my biggest problem in the startup space.”

Must. Resist. Shiny. Object.
Dave had an epiphany. “The mailing list was only supposed to be a marketing channel. VisualCMS was only ever intended to be a prototype. I would run it when I needed to and it would do its thing. It took me maybe 20 minutes to make the newsletter. I would put an RSS mail feed from mail chimp and send it out to my mailing list.”

He sold the usage rights to a company that manages content in the Office 365 space. “I still own the code and I get some advertising income from the newsletter. But it keeps my name out there.”

The plan is working. “At the end of January 2015, I had 23 subscribers. In the middle of April, I had 7,412. And that’s just from jumping into bed with this company.That number is what convinced me I was making the right decision.”

Remember the End Game
Dave says the moral of the story is to know when to pivot, and know when a “shiny object” is distracting you from your original purpose.

“I don’t want to work so damn hard. I don’t expect any of my products to be my single source of income. I want to have 3 to 4 smallish products, little plugins for Office 365. Each one brings in an ok amount of money, and I’m good. I don’t need to have that one huge single product.”

Today, Dave’s working on an umbrella product (code name: Blackburn), an “intranet in a box for small to medium businesses. A family of products that will allow small-medium businesses to spin up their intranet quickly.”

He’s also self publishing some ebooks and creating software products and packages, as well as speaking and teaching. “Everything is repurposed,reused, and recycled. I do things one or one and a half times, but I get multiple uses out of them.”

WSL and Unisys #ProtoComp2015 Launch Party

Huge thanks Ideas x Innovation Network and InvisionApp for helping sponsor the event!

The Walnut St. Labs Team and a few key Unisys people, namely Brittney Burchett, have busted their humps to ensure that our Prototyping Competition was a complete and utter success. There were a number of immediate challenges that beset the group in light of the event’s more “nuanced” format. The most blatant of which was the problem of ambiguity.

We blasted out emails and targeted newsletters, posted blogs and social media campaigns, got featured in a Technical.ly Philly article, passed out flyers to West Chester University’s brightest, and probably bugged the sh*t out of everyone we knew, but the questioned still remained, “What the hell is a ‘no code’ hackathon?”.

Despite the presence of some trailblazing-related obstacles, last night’s turnout was further validation that an inclusive framework for building competitions is really the way the go! Our recent mention in About.com’s article pretty much sums up the ethos for this event, “You don’t need to code to be in tech.”

We’re used to sweating bullets at Walnut St. Labs because we do events all the time, but this time was special. We had 20 pizzas on the way, a blank sandwich board, five cases of beer, a couple waters, a cobranded sheet cake and 100+ people registered to cram themselves into our space. Our team had ascended to a whole new level of uncertainty that few human beings are capable of sustaining. Luckily, its part of our organizational values. We find that comfort zones are a killer of rapid progression.

Brittney did an awesome job reaching out to various educational institutions who are leading the way in #edtech. Very few schools are aware of the disparate gap that lies amid a hungry tech job market and a dearth of available and qualified technologists, much less ambitious enough to bridge that gap. It was refreshing to see that so many of our contestants were young and, to some capacity, technologically adept.

STEM Academy and The Westtown School are two such institutions that really “get it” and are providing their students with opportunities to gain functional/practical knowledge for a digital age. Our hope is that the reverberations of such novel concepts will be heard by more conventional institutions who focus on fact recall.

Our launch party was the first time that we had the chance to show off the 3D printers to the public, and it was a total hit! While running the gauntlet with Unisys, we’ve also partnered with NextFab to create a “Mini Makerspace” at WSL. The mission is to expand the reach of newer fabrication technologies to populations that might not otherwise get the exposure. Wilhem Barnes did an incredible job entertaining a hoard of STEM Academy students. They really couldn’t get enough of the Bukito.

Brittney Burchett has worked really hard over the last several years to pioneer a whole division dedicated to innovative projects. Last night was a culminating experience for her, and it really showed! She was elated (and beaming!) to see these efforts displayed in the form of a community coming together to build teams and solve problems.

We’re infinitely grateful to her and Jim Thompson, the VP of Engineering and Supply Chain, who’s led the way in visionary efforts at Unisys for over 25 years.

Mary Fisher (pictured above with Commissioner Terence Farrell) was recently named Chief Operating Officer of Walnut St. Labs by our Founder, Chris Dima. She’s helped coordinate all aspects of Walnut St. Labs’ primary source of income, 23 North Digital. In addition to playing a leading role at our digital marketing company, Mary is also a mother of four. Her music choice is indicative of the combined weight of both her work-related and domestic responsibilities, ‘Deep Jazz’.

Chris explained how our relationship with Unisys was the result of continued serendipity. His neighbor and Score members, Bob Fedor, introduced David Houseman to Chris at our 2nd Startup Meetup. David was a former COO at Unisys, loved what we were doing and, in turn, introduced Chris to Jim Thompson.

Walnut St. Labs was tasked with the unique opportunity to convey a piece of highly technical internet security software to a group with varying levels of technical skill, in a party setting. We didn’t want to ‘kill the vibe’ by diving straight into the deep-end, so Chris and Brittney kept it light and fun, while informing the group about the importance of STEALTH’s social and economic context.

The truth is that some of the content from last night’s presentation was pretty heavy, but Chris did a great job of conveying the concepts with the oldest tactic found in “The Art of War”—humor. His decision to rely on the mystifying charm and energy of America’s most recognizable TV exercise personality was just what the doctor ordered.

Despite Richard Simmons’ more laughable attributes, he is the basic archetype for our Prototyping competition. As Chris so clearly stated, “It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, Richard Simmons would include everyone”.

It may seem like a strange call to action, but Richard Simmons inclusive approach to exercise was a perfect candidate to drive this point home to our audience. We don’t care how experienced or well equipped you are. We just want to give you an opportunity to create with us.

Innovation favors those who question the norm. If the current perception of technology suggests exclusivity, then we need to relinquish all barriers that reinforce that perception and actively promote inclusion.

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It was wild and crazy, but we were able to form 17 different teams, some of them containing up to five contestants. Many groups came prepared to sign up together, others entered alone and joined a team on the spot. We ended the night in a general state of disbelief. We had high hopes for this kickoff and we were able to supersede them.

We’re looking forward to the next 4 weeks where we turn the party into prototyping!

Bitcoin Panel Discussion

Four bitcoin enthusiasts weigh in on the current stage of bitcoin evolution during a collaborative panel discussion.

The Panelists
Ryan Findley, founder of Neomind Labs, a Philly-based custom software company focusing on Ruby on Rails development. “We accept bitcoin as payment, but so far no one has taken us up on that.”

Andrew Schwabe, CEO and founder of new startup Formatic. “We want to find out why people don’t hit the submit button on your form.” Andrew has bought, held, and sold lots of bitcoin over the years but emphasizes, “Today is about us expressing our opinions. Nothing we say is buying, selling, or legal advice.”

Patrick Millar currently works with startups after serving as CTO at Chatham Financial. “My experience in the financial industry taught me about the annoying little things that have big implications.”

Jonathon Beschen, founder of FaceCrunch, a digital advertising platform, and a partner at SparkNET Technologies. “I’ve watched bitcoin in Hacker News from the beginning. Even though it took 2 years of studying it before I grasped what it can do, I purchased it early on.”

Bitcoin 101: What is it?
Patrick: “What is money, period? Bitcoin is an invented currency, not tied to anything underlying, like the state or gold. It has no value other than that people are using it, but can be used as a medium of exchange. How do you value it? It’s worthless, yet it has value.”

Jonathon: “The founding premise is that it solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. How do you facilitate a trustless interaction between 2 parties? With the current system, you have to trust the bank or state that backs the currency.”

Andrew: “It wants to be currency, but in my mind it’s a science experiment. If you put your trust in the government that has that money, for example, and that government decides ‘we’ll just print more money,’ then that affects everybody.”

Ryan: “Bitcoin is unique in that there is a fixed supply. There will only be 21 million bitcoins, ever, but it is infinitely divisible.”

Benefits of Bitcoin
Jonathon: “You have a ledger available that is totally transparent. It has a publicly auditable trail of every transaction. Even though originally, it was supposed to be completely anonymous, that audit trail helps keep regulators honest.”

Patrick: “In the developed world, bitcoin becomes a competitor to Visa and Mastercard. Since bitcoin doesn’t charge anyone a 3% transaction fee, companies that accept it are excited because it’s an immediate 3% addition to their bottom line. In the developing world, bitcoin can allow a young female farmer to be paid and to have control over what she is paid. That, in turn, has huge economic impacts to the developed world too.”

Ryan: “By using bitcoin’s marketing change tip, you can give someone a tip based on something they said on Twitter or get access to news stories.”

Jonathon: “With micro transactions, if everyone subscribes to driverless cars, you could say ‘I need an express lane,” and all the driverless cars that don’t need the express lane would get out of the way. Your fridge could buy milk for you buying bitcoin.”

Patrick: “There are privacy concerns with having people knowing where you are driving using trackable technologies like EZPass. With a bitcoin pass, payment and privacy could be guaranteed. It’s highly secure.”

The Block Chain
Andrew: “Block chain is like the old-world ledger books. Two different columns, with each volume of that book being a block. Inside a ledger is a list of transactions that are sequential . The value is cryptographically, computationally, very hard to fabricate, because of all the CPU effort required to build the block. Everybody has a copy of the entire ledger, so it can be proven.”

Ryan: “The process transactions are created by happen in blocks. Each transaction is linked to the one before it. The latest one has to have a value that depends on the prior ones. With mining, you take the transactions, put them in a block to do a computation and put a value on it. Mining takes hardware and makes valid blocks. The network pays people for mining, and through the process of creating new blocks, you get paid in bitcoin.”

Patrick: “You’re bundling transactions in a block, and there’s a race to get the bundle approved, which is correlated to processing power. But there is also an element of chance. The more horsepower you throw at it, the better your chance of winning a race.”

Ryan: “In 2011, I was using a GPU graphics card with limited success. At one point, I had 4 graphics cards. Today, you need to build custom hardware.”

Jonathon: “The algorithm becomes more difficult as more power is applied to it. Specially made units can barely do the computations. So now there are networks and pools of people contributing their processing power in ‘mining guilds’ to harness the shared processing power.”

Summing up
Andrew: “Like I said, it’s a science experiment, not a revolution. But a surprising science experiment. It’s not going to be a dominant currency. It takes too long to process transactions and the spend for CPUs is huge. But I think the underlying block chain technology is probably where the gold is, long term.”

Little Talkers Demo

Little Talkers

Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers

What was the problem that you aimed to solve with Little Talkers?

“Little Talkers aims to make it easy for parents, caretakers or family members to record, store, view and share their children’s first words and expressions.”
— Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers

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How does little talkers app solve that pain point?

“Little Talkers has a simple interface which makes it easy for anyone to start recording a child within seconds of starting the app. It then stores the word, location, date, and any other information that the user wishes to enter into its database, which can later be viewed in the app’s dictionary view. A phrase can be shared with others, and the entire dictionary can be exported to a file for easy viewing or printing.”
— Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers

What’s next for little talkers?

“Improved sharing, ability to sync data to cloud and possibly ability to follow friends. I would also like to come up with a convenient way to export and bundle all the data for those users whose kids have grown up and they no longer need to input data through the app.”
— Nada Jaksic Pivcevic, Founder of Little Talkers

Leveraging the Fantasy Market w/ John Walters of StockJock

John Walters, Founder of StockJock

@PlayStockJock
@WaltopiaNow
@sirchristian

“We want to be the Flintstones vitamins of stock market games.”

John Walters is bringing the thrill of fantasy sports leagues to the stock market. The Villanova grad started off at First National Bank, where he learned first hand about the problems confronting small businesses. Today, he’s a Senior Living Balance Sheet Specialist at eMoney Advisor, as well as the founder of StockJock, an online fantasy stock trading game.

Although finance consumes his professional life these days, his path to entrepreneurship started out in a much, well, sweeter way.

The Origins
“Crepes are the ticket.”

Needing an infusion of cash, John took a semester off from studying at Villanova to work at a bank. “That was the first time I ever had a chunk of money in my pocket. I thought I’d use that $2500 to buy a bass amp.” The universe had different plans, though. A buddy of his was working at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire and noticed that the crepe stall was killing it. “He called me up and said ‘listen man, we gotta make crepes,’” John says. “‘Crepes are the ticket.’”

Three months later, John and his friend started Main Line Crepe Company, selling their crepes at festivals and catering events. “We did the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival, and we were in the black after that first time. Everything was going fantastic.”

Then, a couple weekends later, the two friends ended up at a bluegrass festival at Lake Wallenpaupack, an event populated with bluegrass fans, but not necessarily crepe aficionados. “We slept in a tent. It was a great musical experience, but that kind of trumped what we were trying to sell. It gave us perspective on our business.”

“When you think about finding your drive, although it’s personal, you have to realize what you have to do every day to reach the goals you have.” The duo realized that crepes weren’t in their long-term future, but the endeavor prepared John for his next venture.

StockJock
“We’re bringing Wall Street to Main Street.”

Like fantasy sports leagues, StockJock involves building a roster. Once users pay the entry fee, they proceed to set their stock picks. StockJock pulls data from Yahoo, and at the end of the day, users find out how they did compared to their competitors. John says, “StockJock gives people a foot in the door to learn about the volatility of the market and how the economy works.”

StockJock went to Philly Startup Weekend, where John and his team earned second place. “That second place kind of bugged us, but it showed us that we’d begun to validate our idea.”

“We are changing the way stock games work. We’re introducing people to what it is about the market they’re trying to get into.”

Unisys and Walnut St. Labs Partner for Innovative Prototyping and Software Design

WEST CHESTER, PA – Walnut St. Labs, an Innovation Lab in West Chester, PA, is partnering with Unisys Corporation to hold a product prototyping competition.

The prototyping competition, to be held at Walnut St. Labs across five weeks starting on April 15, will be geared towards user interface and user experience designers. The winners of the competition will receive a cash prize and will have the chance to meet with Unisys to discuss details of their design. Both Unisys and Walnut St. Labs will deliver eight micro courses during the competition in areas like Rapid Prototyping and Design Thinking.

“This is what we always dreamed about doing — elevating innovation by partnering with great companies like Unisys and doing innovative things,” said Chris Dima, Founder and CEO of Walnut St. Labs. “The team at Unisys understands innovation and will be a super productive partner.”

Walnut St. Labs was formed at the end of 2013. Its mission is to foster innovation through co-working, weekly events and technology incubation.

“Unisys has a long, proud history of innovation,” said Jim Thompson, chief engineer and vice president of engineering and supply chain at Unisys. “We also see a new wave of ideas from innovation labs like Walnut St. Labs, and we want to be a part of that. By combining Unisys’ tradition of innovation with the capabilities of Walnut St. Labs, we can have the best of both worlds.”

Over the course of the next few weeks, Walnut St. Labs and Unisys will be announcing details of the competition. Applications to participate are being accepted beginning April 1. For more information, please contact Ben Bock at Walnut St. Labs (ben@walnutstlabs.com) or Brittney Burchett at Unisys (brittney.burchett@unisys.com).

Get the complete details: https://protocomp.wsldivi4.kinsta.cloud/

About Walnut St. Labs

Walnut Street Labs is an innovation hub located in West Chester, PA. Its mission is to promote and create innovation in greater Chester County and Southeastern PA. WSL has established a physical space for startups to work and collaborate, a robust event calendar filled with inspirational entrepreneurs and innovators along with an advisor network, comprised of business leaders with a wide range of expertise.

About Unisys

Unisys is a global information technology company that solves complex IT challenges at the intersection of modern and mission critical. We work with many of the world’s largest companies and government organizations to secure and keep their mission-critical operations running at peak performance; streamline and transform their data centers; enhance support to their end users and constituents; and modernize their enterprise applications. We do this while protecting and building on their legacy IT investments. Our offerings include outsourcing and managed services, systems integration and consulting services, high-end server technology, cybersecurity and cloud management software, and maintenance and support services. Unisys has more than 20,000 employees serving clients around the world. For more information, visit www.unisys.com.

WSL’s Incubating Big Data Technology, MongoSluice, to Participate in Phorum Philly 2015

We are proud to announce that our incubating company MongoSluice, will be included in this year’s Phorum Philly event. MongoSluice streams MongoDB to any RDBMS. Simply point MongoSluice to a MongoDB collection and any RDBMS data store and hit enter: watch data stream from MongoSluice to SQL — all data types preserved.

Phorum’s website: “Phorum is a technology conference, for business and technology executives, which focuses on how enterprises can maximize the business value of specific technologies. Phorum 2015 features leading industry experts, business executives, and cutting-edge technologists who will examine how emerging technologies such as big data, mobility and cloud strategies factor into the integration of systems, technical support and global security policies.”

Jason Cox Demos MilkCrate V2

What was the problem or pain point that you and your team were hoping to solve?

“We noticed how challenging it can be to live sustainably, especially in an urban setting, and we wanted to help people live more sustainably.”
— Jason Cox, CTO of Milkcrate

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How does MilkCrate actively approach solving this problem?

“We are a digital hub of data that helps people live sustainably. Right now, this is mostly sustainable businesses in the Philadelphia metro area. Very soon, this will include products, services, tips, events, and news. As we grow we will find more and more ways to help people live sustainably.”
— Jason Cox, CTO of MilkCrate

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Whats your vision for the future of MilkCrate?

“I’d love to see us make a marketplace to help small businesses provide services or sell products through MilkCrate. Many of the sustainable companies I do business with track everything through spreadsheets and pdf files. Even the somewhat large companies. We could build something that both makes their lives easier and expands what MilkCrate can offer.”
— Jason Cox, CTO of MilkCrate

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What’s Worth Building w/ Jason Browne

Jason Browne, CEO of SPOR

sporchargers.com
@SporrChargers

“It’s wildly popular to call yourself an entrepreneur these days.”

Jason Browne thinks that lots of people want to be entrepreneurs simply because they don’t want to be labelled as anything else. “Is it that you want autonomy, or because of the impact you want to make? If it’s just that you don’t want to have a boss, then don’t be an entrepreneur. Because you just get a different set of bosses as an entrepreneur.”

In 2011, the Drexel business and finance grad got a 3D printer and started experimenting. The ‘every day working and living me’ needed a charging source for my electronics. The ‘hacking side of me’ wanted to break things apart, make something of my own.” And the Spor charger was born.

The Approach
“It needs to be less about the what or the how.”

“I’ve found that a lot of electronics companies compete on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of their product. We’re taking it to the next level by focusing on the ‘why.’” For example, Jason is passionate about hardware. “With hardware, you need a certain amount of confidence, and that comes from exposing yourself to the tools and the people involved in making the hardware. We have access to the same tools as the factories in China, just on a smaller scale. We want to know everything about how our product is manufactured.”

The Product: Spor
“You can 3D-print your own funky skin.”

The palm-sized square will charge your iPhone 2 1/2 times. A solar panel is mounted on the top so you can leave it in a sunny spot to recharge.

Comprised of a battery, a circuit board, and the solar panel, the elegantly simple concept is housed in a 3D-printed shell. The shell on Jason’s prototype is pink, green, and wood-grained, but the possibilities are endless. “We’ll sell you the solar panel, the charger, and the battery and you can 3D-print your own funky skin.

Spor’s MVP was a non-functional 3D-printed prototype that Jason and his team literally put in people’s hands. “We wanted to know how this feels in your hand. In your pocket. How much would you pay for it?”

The Financing
“How hard could it be? Really hard, actually.”

Jason and his team raised $100K in 30 days through Kickstarter. “I can attest to the power of the crowd. I raised $100K from people I don’t even know. I think that’s because Kickstarter gave us a platform to tell our story the way we wanted to tell it.”

Even though they met their goal, it was a stressful month. “I’d go to sleep at night hoping there will be a little bit more in there in the morning. You stress about reaching that bar you’ve created for yourself.”

Sharing It
“If I wanted a cup, I wouldn’t design it. I would download it for free and print it myself. That’s the power of the crowdsourcing movement.”

Spor’s initial activities were largely crowdsourced, including the logo, marketing, and early web site design. Jason is a big believer in open sourcing. “Don’t build up a wall–let everyone in there together. My board design might cost $50, but somebody in Uganda can’t pay that. I can put my design up on the internet and somebody will redesign it for 80% cheaper.”

Jason also releases the designs for the D-printed 3shells for free. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s only a quarter of my product. Someone who can print a shell themselves might buy my product where they wouldn’t otherwise.”

Making It
“It’s easier to build 50,000 things than it is to build 2,500.”

There are challenges in moving from prototype to small production, and to full-scale mass production. “It’s totally different to build 5 things than to build 2500 or 50,000. It’s actually easier to build 50,000 than 2500. Unless you’re building 10,000+ things, a contract manufacturer isn’t going to take you seriously.”

Right now, Jason’s house in West Philly is filling up with boxes. “Storage is a real thing when you’re talking about hardware. We’re getting a sense of ‘what do 3,000 adapters look like? What do 3,000 adapters look like?’ I can’t imagine doing this in my apartment. You need room.”

In just a few months, Jason envisions Spor being being all over the world. “We’re trying to put as much love in this product as we can. Our fingerprints are all over this. If you’re building something, put some of yourself into what you’re building.”

Year 1 Numbers, Year 2 Plan, Walnut St. Labs Acquires 23 North Digital +

When I started Walnut St. Labs it was based on instincts—with a half-a-dash of empirical data. Kinda risky. But I had a back up plan: 23 North Digital—a digital innovation consultancy. I launched it at the same time and have been running it simultaneously along with Walnut St. Labs. And to my surprise, WSL + 23ND became BFFS. They enhanced each other. Here’s a shot-glass worth of a recap for both sides of the house.

Year 1, 2014 Recaps

Walnut St. Labs

110 Events
Over 3,000 people through our doors.
4 startups in our incubator
5 partnerships

23 North Digital

35 clients – big to small
3 new media properties/products
Developed an in-house video production team

1 + 1 = 3

So, to bolster the WSL mission, I’ve decided to bring the two sides together. Going forward, 23 North Digital will run as Walnut St. Labs’ services arm. The added advantage is that the revenue that 23 North Digital drives will directly benefit the long-term strategy of Walnut St. Labs, which includes events, the coworking space, as well as the incubator—and a few other items we’ll be talking to you about very soon.

Then Mary Walked In

mary-bw One thing I love about the Lab is the serendipity that it creates. A key strategic decision I made in 2014 was for 23 North Digital to merge with Brandywine Creative—led by Mary Fisher. Mary is the consummate multi-tasker and has an almost pathological attention to detail 🙂 Mary turbo-charged 23 North Digital through operational excellence, management awesomeness and most importantly, 100% commitment to the goal of growth. There aren’t too many people willing to jump onto a careening experiment, but I’m glad she did. Mary Fisher will assume the role of Chief Operating Officer across Walnut St. Labs, including all business lines: 23 North Digital, Coworking, Events, and the Incubator. If you have a question, she knows the answer. Connect with Mary if you haven’t already.

Welcome to Walnut St. Labs, Mary Fisher! Let’s continue to get $*&t done!

Chris

CEO and Founder
Walnut St. Labs

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