Some of you may have noticed a cowboy riding around Philadelphia. He may have even said “howdy” to you.
Well that cowboy is me, thanks to a crazy fundraising dare we ran on my new online fundraising startup, MyDunkTank. This dare raised $2,095 for an amazing non-profit called Startup Corps.
I’ll be sharing all my cowboy adventures on the MyDunkTank Cowboy Blog so be sure to follow me there.
And don’t miss this funny video of my transformation produced by my friends at Revzilla:
I’m super excited to announce that less than 48 hours ago, my business partner Chap and I launched the first version of our new startup, MyDunkTank.
MyDunkTank is a humorous twist on non-profit fundraising. It allows you to do a fundraising dare in support of whatever cause you choose.
A fundraising dare is a simple game that takes place entirely online. You list a few dares that you’re willing to do and your friends and family vote for their favorite dare (they can also add their own creative dares). You agree to do whatever dare raises the most money.
Here’s a picture from my fundraising page and a link to Blake’s dare and Chap’s dare:
Most of the time, it’s noisy inside my head.
Noisy with things I need to do and things I don’t want to forget. With emails I wish I had worded differently. With new ideas I want to follow to maturity. With interruptions I invite by leaving email and Facebook open. With phone and text message interruptions I don’t invite at all.
My guess is that it’s noisy inside your head too. Especially if you’re successful. A lot of people depend on you, and you probably have the bloated inbox to prove it.
The problem with all this noise is that it makes it hard to hear anything.
The market isn’t listening to you and you don’t know why.
Your product will change lives. Your company will make investors rich. Your idea has to spread.
But no one cares.
You can tell because every sale is a struggle, investors won’t return your calls and your customers aren’t telling their friends about it.
So you have two options.
The first option is to think like Sisyphus and keep pushing the boulder uphill. The second is to think like gravity and use the hill to make the boulder roll faster.
Forgive the crickets and tumbleweeds on this blog during the last few weeks. I’ve been pulled every which way in the rest of my life and have sorely missed you all while I’ve been away. This community keeps me smiling and thinking, and I’m looking forward to sharing a life update soon to reignite things on the blog.
In the meantime, here’s an update on the Missioneurs Movement, one of the many things I’ve been working on. Building movements is hard, and one of the hardest parts of this movement has been agreeing on answers to tough existential questions about what we believe and what we hope to accomplish together.
I’m just one voice in this conversation. Here’s my most recent take on missioneurship from a presentation I gave at the Philadelphia kickoff event for Good Company Ventures.
You’ll notice that I try to be funny with my slides. This is new for me, as I’m sure you can tell. They say that comedians have to try out a new joke at least a dozen times in front of audiences before they nail it. We can only guess where that leaves me!
Google’s deadline has passed for communities to apply for an all-expenses-paid gigabit test network. So now what?
The 600+ communities who rallied for Google gigabit have fallen silent, including here in Philadelphia. This silence speaks volumes. If gigabit really matters, shouldn’t we still be talking about it on our own?
Do we really want gigabit, or do we just want to win Google’s favor?
I think we really want gigabit, and this is a golden opportunity – not only to bring gigabit to Philly, but also to show communities around the world how they can do the same.
The world needs someone to fill the gigabit vacuum left by Google. That someone should be Philly.
Gigabit was never about Google. Google is only installing gigabit in one portion of one community. That leaves the rest of the 600+ communities who applied for Google’s gigabit experiment to fend for themselves.
Google drew worldwide attention to gigabit. Now the rest is up to us.
In Philadelphia, we know exactly what to do when people with money and power don’t step up to help us. Hell, that’s what’s been happening here for decades.
We do things ourselves.
I’m not saying that a bunch of entrepreneurs and hackers can wire our entire city with gigabit fiber ourselves. What I am saying is that we can create so much demand for gigabit that the people with money and power would be crazy not to invest in gigabit.
That’s the vision for Gigabit City.
I’m writing from Warsaw, Poland just one hour before leading a “masterclass” on missioneurship at the European Creative Cities Conference.
I’m surrounded by young social entrepreneurs from places like Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, England, Ireland, Thailand and, yes, the good old United States — although I’m one of only two Americans here.
The social entrepreneurs here get missioneurship, they really do. It’s intuitive to them to put mission at the center of their universe and to treat entrepreneurship as a means to that end. They get the importance of driving revenue from their core services, even though they don’t know how to do it. They understand that by building mission enterprises, they can revolutionize their communities, even when governments and established institutions aren’t willing to help (or actively oppose them).
What don’t they understand? Above all, me! Sometimes they ask me to repeat myself because they can’t understand my English or I talk too fast. I adjusted my presentation slides to make up for this, with lots of text slides so that they can follow along when they have trouble understanding me.
We snapped some lovely photos of the mob of missioneurs who attended the first ever Mission Mob event this Tuesday. I hope these smiling faces make you half as happy as they make me!
I spent most of last night awake and working frantically on this big announcement by Philly Startup Leaders. We felt we had to act immediately if Philly’s effort to bring gigabit broadband here was going to succeed. We also thought that whether or not Google chooses Philadelphia, this is an opportunity to shine a worldwide light on our grassroots tech and creative communities.
Here’s a summary of the announcement with a link to the full version:
Philly Startup Leaders needs your help to do something big for Philly. Really big.We’re pledging $5,000 toward a prize for the best gigabit idea submitted on Gigabit Philly. This is all the money we have available as an organization — it’s our savings for the last two and half years. We need you and the city to match it.The Google gigabit competition is a golden opportunity to prove that we have the best grassroots tech and creative community in the world. Our grassroots communities have already started the campaign with Gigabit Philly, a website that collects your big ideas for how to harness gigabit connectivity to change the world.
Yet we will fail in this campaign unless we do something dramatic. We have to show Google what’s special about Philly. And we haven’t done that so far.
So Philly Startup Leaders is taking a gamble on Gigabit Philly, and we need your help. Our $5,000 pledge is just the beginning. We need our donation to spark a wave of pledges large and small that will draw worldwide attention to Philly. This prize will help us generate hundreds if not thousands of big ideas on Gigabit Philly from all over the world.
Make a pledge now and send the full announcement to everyone you know. We need help from every one of you!Here’s the link to share: http://phillystartupleaders.org/news/philly-startup-leaders-goes-all-in-for-gigabit-philly/
We literally went from idea to launch in about 12 hours. At 9pm last night, a group of us were sitting at the Philly Startup Leaders fishbowl event with an idea, and by 9am this morning our announcement was live.
Olympians do super human things, but they aren’t super human.
Sure, they can push themselves harder and longer than the rest of us. Lance Armstrong’s heart is about twice as strong as mine. At rest, his beats 32 times per minute while mine is in the high 50s.
This means that during a sprint in the Tour de France, when his heart is exploding at 200 beats per minute, he’s pushing blood and oxygen through his legs with twice the force of my heart when I’m maxed out on a soccer field.
He could make a fool out of me in any test of physical endurance. And he’s 38 years old.
But here’s what he can’t do. He can’t train his body not to scream in pain when it gets tired. He can’t train his mind not to consider quitting when his body is broken and hurting like hell weeks into a race.
His body obeys the same rules mine does. It breaks and hurts and gets so tired that it tells him to stop. So does his mind. It tries to rationalize the easy way out. It tells him that it’s okay to slow down. Everything will be fine.
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