The “Invisible Inventor” Robert Morris

“I’ve made things that touch your life but you don’t know who I am.” It takes awhile to comprehend the magnitude of inventor Robert Morris’ journey. After telling us how he invented multimedia, he’s now moved onto the web browser. And the list of inventions doesn’t stop there. The title of his presentation, “How I Changed the World and Kept my Privacy,” contains a certain irony. While it suggests intentional ownership of that privacy, the situation is actually the result, to a large extent, of others taking his ideas. DSC_2380 Multimedia Robert’s first big invention was a linear video program called V_GRAPH that allowed for video sharing between computers. It was the early 1980s, and “People were used to computers connecting to each other using text, not video,” says Robert. He took the prototype to a friend, setting up the TV monitor that displayed video housed on a computer, and stood back so his friend could see it. “He didn’t get it. He was convinced there was a VCR attached to the TV. He couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing.” Robert then showed it to an investor, telling him, “You’re going to have multimedia on every desktop in 5 years. He told me I was crazy. But that was the same person who turned down Steve Jobs so I don’t feel so bad.” Robert and his partner struck a deal for V_GRAPH to be bundled as a part of a software package for creatives from a company called Tempra Media. But through a series of missteps, Robert lost out on the financial windfall from his invention when the company became the subject of several patent disputes in the late 1990s. DSC_2413 The Web His next project was an object-oriented platform called Ozone. “It allowed multimedia components to be displayed in one view. It could run over the web.” Most significantly, the package included a web browser. Robert and his partner took it to Microsoft. “It was responsible for them getting the AOL contract instead of Netscape.” But Robert and his partner, on their shoestring development budget, hadn’t navigated the patent and copyright implications. Once again, they lost out on the big time to a company with far greater resources. A similar fate befell an early calendar product they designed. DSC_2393 On Doing Other Things Frustrated, Robert changed gears and wrote a book (working title: Inside the Revolution: The Story of Robert Morris). It’s about Robert’s namesake, who in addition to signing the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the United States Constitution, also served as Superintendent of Finance from 1781 to 1784. DSC_2459 On the Future, and “Working for the Man” Robert considers himself unsuited to be an employee. “I have to put my heart and soul into things. I’m too weird to get a job. I’m just a basic guy who comes up with something he thinks is a good idea.” His next big idea? Robots. “Not a creepy plastic person or a squeezy cat, though. It will be simple and useful like everything else I’ve made.” Stay tuned.

CoreDial’s Alan Rihm on Being a “Real Entrepreneur”

“I didn’t think of myself as an entrepreneur until 2 or 3 years ago. I just thought I was dumb enough to keep going no matter what.”

CoreDial’s CEO Alan Rihm found his status as a “real entrepreneur” further validated when he was recently honored as a 2015 Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in Greater Philadelphia.

But it took getting let go from his first job more than 20 years ago to fully plunge Alan into entrepreneurism. “I’d been working on a business plan all along. Now, I had just been given 3 months of pay and told goodbye. I realized that I just got pushed off the diving board, and if I don’t do it now, I’m never gonna do it.”

And so, with a 100K loan from the Small Business Administration, Alan told his wife, pregnant at the time with their first child, “I’m going to start a business.”

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The ISP Craze
Alan’s first business piggybacked on the ISP craze, selling web and dialup access. In need of some guidance, he approached a senior corps of retired execs. “They told me to get a good lawyer, get enough money, and to go get out there. I discovered that people will give you help, but you have to do all the hard work yourself.”

The year was 1995. “We bought 2 servers and rented 1500 square feet of office space,” says Alan. With no one to actually run the servers, though, “We put an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer. We got 2 people, including a guy working part time at DuPont.”

“We went from selling 2-3 accounts a day to 20-30 because we went on the Howard Stern Show and gave away Netscape disks for free.” Alan needed help. Fast. “I recruited my mom to answer the phones. She said, ‘But I don’t know what to say!’ I told her just to pick up the phone and put them on hold.”

He sold the enterprise within 2 years, paid off his credit cards, and prepared for his next venture.

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Next Steps
Alan started ASPRE, an e-commerce company, in 1998, quickly adding 7 employees to the roster. They won a collaborative deal with AT&T that allowed them to grow to 75 employees in just 4 months. “I loved the culture there,” says Alan, which taught him the importance of intentionally building the culture you want to have in an organization.

After selling ASPRE, Alan founded a CRM company called CentraView. “It offered one central view of everything I need in my business. I put half a million dollars of my own cash in. We worked on it for 2 ½ years and raised another million in angel money. And then we hit a wall and couldn’t raise any more money. I had to put it to bed. ”

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CoreDial
In 2004, Alan spent 3 months helping out a local ISP, Chester County Internet, get their business on track. After counseling them to sell off the ISP portion of the business and focus on developing a spinoff VoIP service, the founders came back and asked Alan to help them run the new enterprise.

“I tried to leverage everything I had learned about business. We applied all those things, but I still made all those mistakes again. We weren’t fully funded. I was still paying guys out of my personal bank account.”

Alan’s approach to leadership and culture is strongly influenced by the book Great by Choice. “One thing I’ve learned about culture building is that it takes a constant drumbeat to build a culture of success. You have to constantly talk about it. And then you start seeing people in the hallway saying ‘if we’re using the hedgehog strategy then we should do it this way.’”

Now, CoreDial has grown to 100 employees, and they’re looking to add 30 more. “I’ve also learned that you not only have to hire the right people, but get ‘the right people in the right seats on the bus.’ And also at the right time.”

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Another cultural choice is the foosball table. Just not in front of the CEO’s office. “I was so excited, gushing about this table when I bought it at 3 am. We put it outside my office, and no one used it, because they didn’t think they were actually supposed to play. So we moved it to a spot away from my office where people are comfortable.”

Alan’s approach to culture includes firm roots in Philly. “I believe that if you can’t make an opportunity happen here in Philly, you can’t make it happen anywhere.”

Frank Coates on the Transformative Power of Failure

“When people ask my kids what their Dad does, they tell them, ‘My Dad’s the biggest failure in the world.'”

It’s an arresting first line for a presentation, and it only gets better as Wheelhouse Analytics founder and CEO Frank Coates explains how failure drives him to success. Founded in 2010, Wheelhouse Analytics helps financial services companies analyze data.

Frank shares his story, noting how “in every one of my public failures, something good came out of it.”

“In 1983, I almost flunked out of the electrical engineering program.” His academic near-failure led to success, though, when he eventually earned a computer science degree from Siena College and headed to the Army for 3 years, where he moved up the ranks to first lieutenant.

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On Getting Fired. 3 Times. From the Same Guy

“Dick Strong (of Strong Mutual Funds) had been after me for years to come do for him what I did for Dreyfus. Strong had started one of the biggest mutual fund companies in the country. He told me he didn’t want a ‘yes man.’ Well, the first time I told him what he didn’t want to hear he didn’t like it. That was the first time he fired me.”

Frank transferred into Strong’s brokerage business. “One day, I fired everyone in the office for going out to lunch and leaving the office open. I thought I was going to ride into Dick’s office on a chariot, but when I got there, it was just the opposite.” And Frank was out again.

“I learned a ton from being fired. I love the guy and he taught me a million things that I took to my companies.”

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Wheelhouse Analytics

Wheelhouse’s angle is small—not large—data. “We call ourselves ‘the king of analytics,’ but most of the time I feel like the dunce of analytics. I show up at a presentation and say ‘I’m here to talk about little data.’ It’s all about finding small pockets of need in these big financial organizations that other IT companies find underworthy of their investment. A small company like ours can do that.”

Frank says he’s happy to play in the little part of the market, what he calls “the day-to-day analytics.” “In financial services, broadly, generic capabilities won’t win the day,” he shares. “We’re killing it against global companies, because we walk in and know what you should be doing. We know where your messes are. We know when not to use the data.”

“Our approach is to get the data to them, let them learn, and then go back and talk to them. It’s a 6-month process. Within 6 months we might have 100 dashboards for them, and we ask how it’s working. They might say, ‘Well, we’re still not making any good decisions.’ Now they are ready. Now we can go back to the key questions.”

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On Picking Good Partners

“The first thing is that I’m a loyalty guy. My second hire was a guy whom I worked with at another company. Your partners should be loyal to you and loyal to the mission.”

Frank also believes in the power of transparency to attract the right people. “Be as transparent as you can up front. I’m not that good at accounting, or paying attention to finances, and you need to know that about me. If someone knows that about you and still wants to join you, then you have the right person.”

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The Future

“Right now we’re looking for partners. We don’t want to sell right now, even though we’ve had offers.”

Chasing Small Ball Counts with Alchemy Learning

Henry Blue, Co-Founder of Alchemy Learning

@AlchemyLearning

Henry Blue was restless.

“The cyclical nature of education had started to worry me,” confesses the former teacher. “I didn’t necessarily see a direction to progress in, doing the same thing year in and year out. How do you reconcile that need to impact major change during your day-to-day work?” In need of some wisdom, Henry turned to one of his mentors, who sent him off with a quote that still resonates: “Little by little, small ball counts,” a nod to the game-winning baseball strategy chronicled in the movie Moneyball.

The quote has guided Alchemy Learning’s co-founder along the startup path. 

The Classroom Inspiration

After college, Henry traveled abroad teaching ESL before returning to the Boys’ Latin School of Maryland–his alma mater–to teach. “It was great. I got to coach and teach alongside the people who had taught me.”

During this time, Henry’s buddy and fellow Davidson College grad Win Smith was working nearby in Baltimore, and they started chatting about the software education space. Henry was using more technology tools in the classroom, and together they hatched the idea for a web-based curriculum program that would allow teachers to create and deliver e-lessons for students. 

The First Version

They needed help with development, and turned to outsourcing as a solution. “Outsourcing development is kind of risky, though,” Henry advises. “We had trouble getting work done. Suddenly, we were being assigned the junior folks just cycling through.” In the end, Henry and Win were victorious, getting a minimum viable product out of the process.

They released the free tool for teachers. “Bloggers loved it, the industry loved it. It got some awards. There was a good pace of onboarding new teacher users, which allowed us to raise a little more money to build it out beyond just a free tool.” 

On the Digital Revolution

Henry was encouraged by the technology buzz going on at the time. “We saw iPads trending in schools. The White House was pushing for 95 percent connectivity of schools in a 5-year period.” He pauses. “Well, we’re still waiting for that to happen. It’ll happen…we just thought it would happen faster.” 

The Competition

“We weren’t backed by a foundation or major corporation, so we started worrying about competitors. Unlike other industries, our SaaS numbers didn’t mean anything in the education industry.”

Google Classroom, another free tool, provided an alternative for teachers to manage lessons and grades. Additionally, Khan Academy and Guru offered similar features. At the same time, “We saw some other startups running similar things and folding up shop.”

Henry and Win needed to shift gears. “We looked at our user base on the free version. Users tended to be high energy, tech-adapting teachers. Our assumption is that excitement matters for adoption when you’re talking software. And another assumption is that it’s useful for learning outcomes, but also for creating learning engagement, especially for learners who have trouble with traditional textbook learning.” 

The New Reality

Enter virtual reality. “We found that cultural institutions, museums, nature centers, and the like wanted a tool for their learning and outreach portions.” Henry and Win decided to use virtual reality in K-12 classrooms to connect those institutions.

They got funding for a first pass of the project, where students wear Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets and “float” down the Amazon. Students take photographs and get information on the things they photograph, culminating with a trip over a waterfall. 

“We took this basic prototype to education camps to see if anyone wanted it. And we saw there was a lot of excitement. Now, it’s a matter of proving the use case and seeing that people will actually use it in the classroom.”

It’s an interesting challenge. “How do you build both ends of a network?” Henry asks. “You need both schools and network providers. So we’re thinking through niche angles. This is a tool for more technical development. We’re putting students in situations they wouldn’t get in.”

Henry knows the future won’t wait. “Right now, we have the early mover advantage. We want to do everything for the school so they don’t have to do anything.”

A Trip Down Memory Lane: Melissa Alam’s Path to The Hive

Melissa Alam, Founder of The Hive and Femme & Fortune

melissaalam.com
@RingTheAlam
thehivephilly.com
@TheHivePhilly
femmeandfortune.com

There is a joyous fearlessness in Melissa Alam. Her latest venture is The Hive, a coworking space for female entrepreneurs in Old City. Although she’s only officially been on the entrepreneur path since graduating from Temple University’s marketing program in 2010, really, she’s been an entrepreneur since grade school.

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“Growing up, I was obsessed with magazines like Teen. The boys in my sixth grade class felt weird about buying them, but they’d come to my locker and want the pictures of the hot chicks. So I made bundles of photos and sold them to people for $1.

2010:
“I’m a Leo, so I’m a power hungry person.”

Melissa grew into her own as a force, leading a small new sorority on Temple’s campus. She also started a blog. “It was a way for me to get better at writing. I never had the confidence to be a writer, and I have the worst memory. So it was kind of an online diary.”

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2011:
“I realized I wanted to do something where I was in full control.”

She got a job at SEO but quit after a year. “I wasn’t feeling creative any more, so I needed to move on.”

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2012:
“2012 was my year of freelance, and I loved it.”

She began designing web sites and blogs on a freelance basis. “When clients asked me for something I didn’t know, I’d say yes! And then Google it.” It was an exhilarating year. “ I loved being in the wild in my career. Being on your own teaches you the art of the hustle.”

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2013:
“Starting the magazine put me on the path to female empowerment.”

Drawing on her experience as a blogger, she started Femme and Fortune magazine. “I wanted something more professional than just a blog. So I thought, ‘why not start my own magazine.’ It caters to ambitious women.”

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2014:
“2014 is the year that changed my life.”

Melissa moved all her content to melissaalam.com, and the move felt right. “This is when I got cooler in my branding. I used serifs. I used a single color palette. I created the logo I still use today.”

Interviewing a host of women for her blog got her thinking bigger. “All these women I was meeting and talking to were building these awesome businesses. I thought, ‘Why can’t I?’”

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An acquaintance ran into her and mentioned that his office was up for rent on Craigslist. That conversation sparked an idea. “I found an office space, called up the company, and told them I want to open a co-working space for women. I want to provide workshops and resources for women who don’t have as much time to do their own research.”

In September she signed the lease. Then, Technical.ly Philly picked up her story. “I got a lot of interest from women. It’s like this is what I’ve been building myself up for.”

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2015:
“Confidence is a ladder we’re always climbing.”

As of this month, she has 10 women in The Hive. Tonight she’s hosting an event for one of them. “She’s a health and fitness coach, so she’s doing a talk on eating healthy for entrepreneurs.” Also on the radar are The Hive awards, which recognize the efforts of women in STEM careers.

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“With enough support and enough people to help you, anything is possible. Trading services, being available…all that has helped me.”

Melissa Alam was our Startup Meetup presenter on January 20, 2015.