life of 80

Last week my friend and Carlson School of Management colleague Dan Kaskubar and I joined forces to form a consulting partnership. Dan and I are both rather obsessed with social enterprise, mission-based for-profits, earned-income non-profits, and all sorts of other ways to use business to add social value.  Dan brings non-profit experience and has lived in Africa.  I bring corporate experience and have lived in India.  We think it’s a great partnership.

Mere days after we decided to work together, we’ve secured our first paying clients.  While I’m very excited, it does launch me into a whole new set of challenges like keeping track of time, saving for taxes, keeping each other updated, and, of course, what to call our company.  We are open to suggestions (feel free to add them in comments here) and have only 2 days left until our (self-imposed) deadline for the best name ever.

Here is Dan and I with one of our favorite people, Mary Jo Kochendorfer, who is the Microfinance Alliance creator and is currently at the Grameen Foundation.

For those of you in the Minneapolis area, there is a Minnebar tonight at 7PM at Intermedia Arts.  Minnebar is the Minneapolis version of Barcamp, which is an international organization that brings together technology start-ups for demos, support, and networking.  It’s free and generally pretty interesting.  For more information, check out their Google groups page.

I have also had several requests for a little more info on that $3,000 I received from Innocentive.  The challenge I won was posted by Innocentive (normally challenges are posted by companies like Proctor & Gamble and Eli Lilly) for new ideas for their website.  It was pretty straightforward, but I did spend a good amount of time organizing my thoughts and creating small mockups of web pages.  Apparently they liked it!