Here are links for my elevator pitch
and my venture pitch
Reflection
This was one of the most difficult assignments I have done. I found myself feeling extremely self-conscious. So much in fact, that I would work on the video portion only when my wife was at work: lucky for me I am on summer holidays and have a lot of time. This really drove the point home that an entrepreneur has to not only sell their product, but themselves as well. Through this project, I realized that I am not a business leader. I should have known this already as my dad and I drove a small business into the ground about 15 years ago. While I am not the right person to lead a venture like this, I would be a valuable part of the team. My skills are in the area of curriculum and pedagogy. My role should be to develop resources.
I tried to start my elevator pitch with a narrative about my teaching experience. I hoped that this would lend me some credibility as an educator while getting my audience interested. I hoped that my experience with plagiarism would help my audience see that there is a need for a service like the one I am proposing.
I tried to organize my venture pitch into sections. In the introduction I tried to explain the current state in many classrooms. I then explained how PicShare works and the strengths of a service that provides open resources, and why people would contribute to a site like this. I wrote the script on paper first, then filmed myself. I ended up editing a lot of material out. Things tended to look and read much better on paper. I have not written many things that were intended to be read aloud and it is a skill that I need to work on.
I struggle with the idea of free and open sharing. In our world, people need money to live and when we share our hard work for free, we get no economic gain. People still make money from our work. In the case of Instructables, a small group of people get a rather large amount of money while the users and contributors get little. I like the idea of offering the most highly rated users the opportunity to make money as it redistributes the wealth and encourages participation. Free and open sharing is the way of the future, but I believe that free is not going to be free in the end. This is a good way to take advantage of free and open sharing in an ethical way.
One other weakness that I see in my venture pitch is that I am focusing mostly on BC educators as my end users. Investors will want a larger customer base for a service like this. Instructables has contributors and users from all over the world.
James.
