Mon, Nov 29 2010
… and tune in to CNBC’s Worldwide Exchange. Ben will be live on air talking up Quirky starting around 5:30am EST tomorrow, October 12. You don’t wanna miss this!
Oh, and for all the lazy-bones out there, we’ll try to snag a recording.
If you are looking to sharpen your industrial design skills, you DO NOT want miss this opportunity.
The program features a bunch of great courses, plus you get to hear Ben talk about Quirky. What’s not to love??
There are 5 stops on the tour (click the link below for details), but Ben will be only be speaking at the NYC stop on October 7th.
Be one of the first 100 to sign up and you get in FREE, get a FREE t-shirt and, get an opportunity to win a FREE iPad. Who knows, maybe Ben will feel generous and throw in a Cloak to the lucky winner…
Here’s your chance. Ben will be joining Jay Rogers (CEO of Local Motors) and a list of awesome insiders to propose a panel called How Online Communities Co-Create Complex Real World Products at next year’s SXSW Interactive/Music/Film week.
The panel will talk about how companies are bringing concepts to life through collaborative development. Panelists will be discussing how to nurture ideas so that together, people can come up with cool ways of making them real. I know what you’re thinking — right up our alley!
So far, the following folks have signed on to join Ben and Jay on the panel:
David Ten and Derek Halley (Co-Founders of Ponoko)
Chris Anderson (Editor, Wired Magazine and Founder, DIY Drones)
Phil Borchard (VP Sales, Catia)
Dale Dougherty (Editor, Make Magazine)
Kickin’ line-up, right?
But to make it happen, we need you guys to share your thoughts and vote our panel onto the agenda. SXSW is a community-driven event, so they’re looking online to decide which topics should be covered.
Out west? Don’t miss Tahoe Tech Talk, taking place September 30-October 1.
TTT ain’t just your average tech conference.
For one, it’ll be in beautiful Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
For twos, it features a sick line-up of start-up superstars, including wine guy Gary Vaynerchuck; Kevin Rose, founder of Digg; Chris Sacca, a Quirky investor and founder of Lowercase Capital (the coolest VC name EVER) and our very own Ben Kaufman.
And for threes… well… what more do you really need to know?
One of my passions is building companies. I’ve been involved in three start-ups over the past 15 years. One was successful and two were not. My definition of success doesn’t mean the company sold for a lot of money. Rather, I define success as building an incredible culture of smart, hungry, and humble employees all trying to build something extraordinary, and having customers who love us. If you can do those two things, really great things happen. That’s the kind of success I want to help recreate at Quirky.
I met Ben through a mutual friend in September. Over the next couple of months I got to know Ben and Quirky much better. Ben is an incredibly gifted person: bright, creative, and driven to see his dream of social product development become reality. I also got to take a hard look at the team and the business model. It’s innovative and disruptive. I fell for it completely. Ben also got to know me and my philosophies for building a company. In November, Ben asked me to get involved with Quirky in a big way. So I did. I made a significant investment and agreed to make Quirky my top business priority. My role is as a co-pilot to Ben, to help advise and coach him and the team.
It won’t be easy. No start-up is. But Quirky especially will take incredibly hard work, imagination, a willingness to take risks, and an incredible team of employees and community members. We’re trying to do something absolutely profound here. We’re trying to bring the dreams of inventors from all over the world to life. We’re trying to build a consumer brand from scratch. We’re competing in many different consumer product categories against many entrenched companies. We’re sharing rewards with thousands of contributors from around the world. We’re building an entirely new kind of consumer products company. We need to build robust capacities in design, manufacturing, and distribution. We need to build a great team. And we need to manage cash flow. Like I said, this won’t be easy.
This works if we do it together. We’re committed to building an extraordinary team at Quirky: a team of employees who are smart, energetic, driven, great teammates, and passionate about building something great. But that won’t be enough. We need your participation. We’re going to let you inside the Quirky business in a way that I don’t think has ever been done by another company. You’ve begun to see it: the forum and our blog posts. That’s just the beginning. We promise to be honest and fully transparent with the community. And in return we’ll ask for your participation and your bright ideas to help us navigate the difficult choices we’ll face as we grow. I’ll be writing regularly with progress, the difficult issues we’re facing, and thoughts on areas I find fundamental to our success. Tell me exactly what you think. Be direct. We need everyone’s best thinking.
Together, we can do something really extraordinary here. I’m honored and humbled to be a part of it.
– Mitch
QUESTION:
What do Abraham Lincoln, Coco Chanel, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Christopher Columbus, and Quirky founder Ben Kaufman have in common?
ANSWER:
They all made YoungEntrepreneur.com’s list of 100 Top Entrepreneurs Who Succeeded without a College Degree.
Go Ben!
Ahoy! We’re rockin’ out early on a Sunday morning here at Quirky HQ…..
Quirky, Marc Zech of Split Stick fame, and the Digidude are all featured quite prominently in todays New York Times Magazine. You can read the article right here on the interwebs, or run out to your local starbucks and grab a copy.
So, welcome to any new eyeballs that have found our little website from the Times… Thank you to Rob Walker for the great coverage, and congratulations to the entire community for the work done thus far– and the work about to be done in the coming weeks and month.
This should be a super fun week coming up, we have something interesting planned– not sure if it will work as good as it sounds in my cabeza, but we’ll give it a go anyway.
Shake & Bake
- B
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