Elevator Speech

    I had a lot of fun with the elevator speech. It was cool to see how other students ideas have developed over the course of the quarter. You can really see how the business planning process has helped them shape their ideas.
   With my elevator speech, I wanted to get across the idea that my website can help every student in the world bridge the gap between education and a career. It is tough to convey the entirety of what I want to build in such a short time but I think it is important to show that my website can (1) help a lot of people and (2) make a decent amount of money if it is done right. While my elevator speech in class went ok, it is only a start to developing a decent pitch to help grow my business.

Guest Speaker: Jim Kastama

   Jim was a great presenter. I am currently working to get a group together to go view the Lamborghini museum in Seattle. I thought seeing someone face to face that worked in politics for such a long time. Sometimes it is easy to picture the state congress as a bunch of selfish people arguing for hours on end. Jim clearly is not this type of politician(I'm sure most aren't) as his reasons for joining the political world. He gave a lot of insight into his motivations which was cool to see.
   His work in strategic planning seems pretty vague. I wish we could have had more time to pick his brain on what makes a business successful so I could implement them if or when I  start a business. i think it is a great career for him cause he clearly cares about the work he does and has great connections in the Seattle area. Really, that is everything I would look for in a business partner.

Dot com to Dot bomb lecture

    The lecture on the dot com bust was pretty eye opening. I was pretty young when all of these events took place and I vaguely remember them happening. However, I was too young to really comprehend the amount of money that was moving around. Andrew Fry's first hand experience helped to show the blatant disregard for any sort of caution in investing at the time. I also find it interesting that the idea of what the internet was at the time was different. The idea of an internet that is not "world wide" seems strange and completely impractical.
    What worries me the most about the dot com bust is that there may be a similar bubble building in an industry in the current day. We all saw the real estate bubble of 2008 from which the country is recovering. But a current bubble I see building is the student loan bubble and the cost of college bubble. There are similar signs from the dot com bubble such as students "investing" in an education that they are not necessarily going to make their money back on. Copy this with the exponential increase of college costs, colleges investing in infrastructure, and the decreasing value of a bachelors degree, there is more and more risk to getting a college degree. I see the future of an education as being MOOC(massive open online course) based. They are relatively cheap and are becoming more recognized as a respected education. Georgia Tech offers an online masters degree in computer science that can be earned in 2 years for about $4,000, which is equal to the cost of one quarter at UW Tacoma.