Journal

When Jonothan/Komodo came to present, I really liked how he talked about communication between everyone. I like that he brought up that making sure everyone feels included and that no one is above another is important, some people just have different jobs. For example, Jonathan seems to be the main idea guy (or one of them) behind the whole venture but yet he didn’t identify himself as the CEO (correct me if I’m wrong). He said he was focusing on the financials at the current moment and some of the hiring. He seems to do a little bit of everything, and he hires other people to take on the things he doesn’t have expirence with.

One question I have is I want to know how the boat covers are sustainable, and do they pay themselves off at any point? Why is this a better investment besides easy installation, and new technology? Overall, I really enjoyed the presentation though, at some points he lost me and I spaced out when we went on tangents but for the most part, I was engaged.

I wasn’t a fan of when he said small business owners aren’t exactly entrepeneurs or that there is a big difference. I don’t think there is a difference at all between small business owners and entrepreneurs. Same thing different words. Being an entrepreneur is finding a creative solution to a problem you’d like to see fixed. My mom owned a wine bar downtown for a number of years (she sold it right before covid which was a pretty good move in my opinion) but that is all she did. She didn’t expand or try to do other things and that is totally fine! That is all she wanted to do and I don’t think it made her any less of an entrepreneur. I think being an entrepreneur can mean owning a small business or creating a huge corporation or even writing a travel blog and doing that for a living. I think it goes against what entrepreneurs stand for when we put limitations around the word and its meaning. Anyone can be entrepeneur and I don’t think its fair to exclude anyone. Starting any sort of venture or business is hard and that should be acknowledged, not used to discriminate against the people who don’t want to expand and keep creating once they’ve established a business.

VPC’S

I like the vpc’s I think they are a loose, easy, forgiving way to start generating ideas and the bones of a venture. I use them often to come up with quick iterations of different propostions, or the same idea. I think they do help by allowing me to see if I am on the right track when it comes to helping my customer and figuring out how to solve the pains. The process is going well overall. My group created 3 different maps to showcase 3 ideas we had so we could have a direction to follow when we picked our final event idea. I think the Product matches the customer for the most part. The event is hard to come up with the customer side because I feel like we are picking and choosing the problems people have. For example we chose very general problems like bordeom and it being winter and covid etc. The event has very broad problems because the main reason people go to ANY event is because they want to or they are bored. Unless the event is for work or school. I hope that makes sense.

But things are going well with the vpc although we would have liked to have done an outdoor music event, that seemed to be more challenging than we had time to wrestle with. our first survey indicated that was the prefeered event college kiddos were interested in. But we found the next best thing that maybe hasn’t been done in the E&I world at WWU in a while. Perhaps next time or for another venture I could follow in Zosia’s footsteps and make my own festival haha.

I dont have a lot to share besides my answers to my questions this week, so here is a funky picture of my friend in a tiny green hat in the sun.