Archive for December, 2007

Why I Love California

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

I watched the Red Sox beat the Indians in a wild romp that sent Papi and the boys to a killer World Series streak in Denver. I’ll watch the Celtics play at the Garden in February and the Patriots have just ended the best season in NFL history. There’s something in the air in New England and it has turned our athletes into super machines. Whatever. I’m just glad to be back in California and seeing the sun again.

One thing New England the bay area share, besides lots of clam chowder, is a penchant for entrepreneurship. In the year that I’ve spent on Scripped I have picked up a few nuggets of wisdom and would like to do my best Guy Kawasaki on this blog every once in a while. Entrepreneurship is a tough gig, and if I didn’t have the bug so deep in my system, I’d have given up long ago. And yes, it does a require a good amount of luck.

For example, Sunil smells like Indian food, and I love saag paneer. So it works, and we get along. We’re also lucky that Zak was on vacation when this blog started. If he saw the junk we have on here, he’d probably puke. He is the real writer on the team and it’s a good thing we have him tied up doing product development. That’s what happens when you have two MBAs and one person with unrequited passion for the product. Sunil and I let Zak slave away while we talk “numbers” and “business.” Somehow it works. Luck, you see?

Most of all, I’m lucky to be born and raised in California. I find it incredible that my two passions for media and technology can converge as epicenters in one state. I am proud of the role California plays in setting precedents nationaly and around the world on any number of political issues (but Scripped is nonpartisan, of course). And I’m proud of the respected academic institutions that all of the UC campuses have become.

And the Indian food. The Indian food in California is awesome.

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11 Days to Go

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

Facebook group picture

It’s amazing how Facebook has completely dominated the competition in social networking. It’s just so easy to use, it’s not completely dirty like Myspace, and it’s completely addictive. That being said, I’m not sure I am the biggest fan of the whole concept of “applications.” By making the Facebook platform completely open source, any hack developer can create an application in a pretty short amount of time. There are tutorials online that teach you everything you need to know to create a Facebook application, and there are large chunks of code for existing applications that are publicly available.

I only mention this because we’ve been giving serious thought to developing the rest of the site using only open source software (i.e. using pre-built community structures, etc, etc, etc….). Ok, I’d better make this blog a hell of a lot funnier quickly, or I am going to lose you.

Right, so I was at the mall today and there is this place that gives half-hour massages for $20. You are outside for the entire mall to see, and your neck is bent onto one of those “mouth” pillows that doesn’t look terribly comfortable. The people who run the place look pretty shady, and I seriously doubt they have any experience other than mall massages. Yet somehow, EVERY SEAT was full! You walk by, and they point to you and basically do their sales pitch in a few seconds, and boom, you’re off and running. Who would EVER do this? Are you so stressed from shopping that you need a half-hour massage from a guy that looks like he hasn’t taken a shower in at least a week?

Fortunately, everyone except Ryan on our team showers regularly.

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12 Days to go

Friday, December 28th, 2007
Turron

Hello again everyone - hope you’re having a nice night wherever you are. I took a picture of my favorite Spanish treat while I was visiting my sister in Barcelona a week ago - it’s called a “Turron.” The Turron pictured above is extremely special - not only is it very pricey (25 euros), but you have to special order it, and it is considered the best Turron in Barcelona. When you bite into it, it literally tastes like you’re eating pure sugar and Creme Brulee. Great combo - trust me on that one.

Twelve days to launch and it feels like I accomplished very little today. I started off the day by trying to contact publicists to get press for the upcoming launch event, but my emails yielded very little in the way of results. Fortunately, the event is basically full at this point, so we do not have to worry about showing up on the day-of and having an empty room.

Entrepreneurship is a strange thing - I talk to some of my business school friends about this from time-to-time, but you either ride on these incredible highs, or just feel like you accomplished nothing some days. That being said, I still feel like things will go well on the 8th….

One thing I did manage to accomplish was to delegate, and put other people to work. My girlfriend is a lot more thorough and organized than I am, and she has been helping me think of every possible detail that I could miss prior to the event. She’s super. My sister, and fam have also been reviewing the site thoroughly for copy errors and things of that nature. I’ve been trying to create instructional videos for the application itself, and I’ve been using this program called Camtasia Studio - I highly recommend it.

I managed to eat pretty well today. I’ve been eating well this entire break as a matter of fact. My whole goal has been to experiment by mixing different/new foods as much as possible. I ate liver for the first time every a week ago (without knowing it) and it actually tasted pretty good (until my brother-in-law told me it was liver).

Ok, back at Coffee Society and turning the focus back on…. It is absurdly loud in here today and there is a group of pretty annoying high-school kids talking about their exploits right next to me. One is wearing a Transformers T-Shirt and they are playing chess.

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WGA strike rolls through Harvard

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

I like to write. It’s always a rewarding process. Sometimes it feels like exercise, but I eventually break through the wall and can coast for as long as my wrists can manage. But for me this is just a hobby, not a job, and it is unfortunate that artists have to struggle to make a living. That’s why I’m sympathetic to the WGA strike.

I like Cambridge. With the bricks, the history, and now, covered in snow, it feels almost surreal. With some 50 colleges and universities in the Boston area, it’s also a great place to go to school. I was in Harvard Yard when the writers descended. I was looking for a place to study and heard chanting. Curious about who would protest around Harvard, I followed the noise and ran straight into a long line of picket-yielding actors, writers, and other WGA strike sympathizers.

I paced alongside Chuck, an actor from New York, who believes the studio position is unfair. He recognizes the sacrifices that both sides are making by pursuing this bargaining strategy, but insists it’s the only way for the writers to get the compensation they deserve.

Ever the entrepreneur, I told him about Scripped. I explained that I’m a student at MIT and that my friends and I produced a free online screenwriting software and are offering it for free to writers. So instead of spending $200 on software like Final Draft, you can use Scripped for nothing. He thought this is a great contribution to the strike. I like to see it as even more than that.

We created Scripped to try something new in a rapidly changing market. We are artists too and want to provide useful services to the writers who need them. We also think interesting things can happen when a great group of writers shares some cyber space and is able to collaborate on new pieces of writing. Ultimately we want to improve the quality of scripted online video. That’s what drives me, at least. I can’t really speak for Sunil and Zak.

Seeing the writers march and picket through Harvard Square brought much of what I’ve been reading and hearing about home. To see and talk to real writers involved in the struggle, in a region about as far from Los Angeles as you can get, pronounced the importance of the strike and the impact that it is already having.

I was glad to see the strike in person, but I’m more glad about the other eyes and ears they reached. Parents with their kids, tourists, and local residents each got a taste of what the WGA and the writers are trying to do. I hope Scripped can expand the impact even further.

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13 Days ‘Till Launch

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Scripped Laptop

This is not an advertisement for Apple (you can barely tell that I’m using an Apple from the grainy image), nor is it an advertisement for http://www.scripped.com (the world’s first web-based, free screenwriting software), but it’s just a random blog site from an overworked business school student trying to launch a website. I’m at Coffee Society in Cupertino, CA trying to think of everything that could potentially go wrong with our official launch on January 8th, 2008. I am not making crazy New Year’s plans, had a pretty quiet Christmas, and actually worked pretty hard during my vacation in Spain this past week (except for the 6am night at the discotheque - yeesh).

Zak Freer (a former college classmate, USC Film School graduate, and recent winner of the Hollywood DV Short Film Festival for “Best Horror Short), Ryan Buckley (Harvard/MIT MPP/MBA student, hippie, former consultant and generally good guy) and I started Scripped a little over a year ago and we finally have a beta site. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned over the past year about entrepreneurship, each other, and how optimism needs to be tempered with a good dose of realism. We thought we would have a full site with all of the bells and whistles 8 months ago, we’ve changed the business model at least a dozen times, and we thought we would be way further along than we would be at this time. That being said, we’re happy with where we are, what we’ve learned, and we appreciate all of the support that our friends, family, and classmates have provided over the past year-and-change.

We were fortunate enough, thanks to a classmate of mine at UCLA, to make a connection with the Writer’s Guild. After a couple of successful meetings, we were able to come up with a pretty good barter: the WGA Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of the guild, will send two writers to UCLA on the 8th of January, and we will plan the event. In exchange for filling all of the seats in the audience, and taking care of the logistics, Scripped Inc. gets full sponsorship of the event. I think that’s a great deal. This is a huge opportunity for us to get some publicity and network with the guild (and take business plan number 15 to the guild in hopes of getting support and goodwill). If you’re interested in attending the event, email me at sunil@scripped.com. The two writers are superstars - one was nominated for the Academy Award for Field of Dreams (which he also directed), and the other was the former chair of the screenwriting department at USC.

Tuesday Jan 8th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, UCLA Anderson campus, Panel Discussion about the strike. Come with your questions!

More to come tomorrow - I am too busy burning a hole in my stomach with all of the caffeine I’ve had here… Thanks for keeping up - I’ll post every night ’till the event (and the night of the event, though admittedly, I have a bottle of Absinthe which I brought from Spain and I plan on opening after the 8th is over).

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