Hang around a business school long enough and you'll eventually be drawn into one of the many student start-ups that propagate around here like weeds. Some of them are crazy, some of them are doomed, but one or two are genuinely interesting and might have a chance of success.
And so it was that, a few weeks ago, I found myself drawn into an unfamiliar world of financial planning, business models, and actually having to do something after getting out of bed in the morning.
Elad had a clever idea over the summer that e-book readers (like Amazon's Kindle), while nice, have no interactive content for users. You can pay lots of money to subscribe to an electronic version of the New York Times, but you can't do their crossword, Sudoku, or anything fun. That's a problem. It's also a gap in the market.
So the brightest and best programmers he could find (me and Dana - he didn't look too hard) got together and actually managed to make his idea work. No one was more shocked than us. And today we got to enter a competition to win money, mentoring, world-conquering powers, and fame and fortune. Results are due tomorrow, but seeing Elad up on stage made me wonder whether he shouldn't drop this Haas rubbish and become an evangelical preacher. I, for one, was sold.
Signing in.
Look! We get trendy badges with our team name on! One team of four even dressed all the same, which I thought was a little much.
Elad in full flow. And there's a picture of me!
Yes, I've helped make something that actually works. Did you think I was just hanging out in California and surfing?
