From Fitness to Philanthropy: S. Daniel Abraham

The health and fitness industry is booming. After decades of abusing the body with work and unhealthy eating habits, consumers are starting to take an active role in restoring their body’s normal functions. Entrepreneurs immediately saw the demand for health-related products as a potential billion-dollar market. And they were right.

One of those entrepreneurs was S. Daniel Abraham, who introduced Slim-Fast, a line of diet shakes. He is one of the first to venture into the fitness industry during the 1940s with Thompson Medical Company, which sold a variety of diet supplements, including the controversial Dexatrim. But his introduction of Slim-Fast in the late 1970s made him a household name and one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the fitness world.

Slim-Fast became so popular that many people considered it the pioneering product of all diet supplements. Abraham marketed this product by incorporating it into the daily diet of all people, thus the phrase “a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, then a sensible dinner” arose.  With the success of Slim-Fast, Abraham was able to accumulate a fortune worth $1.4 billion. Every cent came from his own hard work and determination. Slim-Fast also remains to be one of the oldest diet products in the market today, thanks to Abraham’s solid long-term plan.

Today, the entrepreneur is busy doing philanthropy. From physical fitness, he now focuses his attention to healthcare and nutrition, education as well as peace talks. He also founded an organization dedicated to his advocacy for peace, Center for Middle East Peace. Through this, he gained the attention of leaders to help end the Arab/Israeli conflict.  As a passionate advocate of education, he has funded several programs and projects for the improvement of the academe.

Being an entrepreneur helped Abraham fulfill his other goals in life. With his contributions in both the private and public sectors, he is indeed one of today’s most influential people.

Dropbox and Drew Houston’s Green Thumb

Say you’re at home, working on a file, but you won’t finish before you need to leave… and not only is your laptop completely dead, but you can’t find a single USB drive. How can you finish your work somewhere else? You could email the file to yourself, assuming you know that exact situation is going arise. But what if you forget? In 2007, Drew Houston left home without his USB drive and decided to write the code for what would become Dropbox.

Dropbox is a free file-syncing, cloud-based service that eliminates the need to send files to yourself, to remember USB drives, or any other awkward work-around. It began as a simple cloud service, and now boasts more than forty-five million users worldwide with different types of Dropboxes for different uses. Its key to success lies in the way Houston navigated the problems he saw in competing file-hosting services — slow servers, complicated interfaces, and errors when they tried to handle large files. His vision for the company is to keep it lean – free from features that distract from the goal of a speedy, reliable service.

Houston’s success with Dropbox drew the eagle eye of Steve Jobs in 2009, who saw both that the cloud-based service was key to the future of computing and that Dropbox was number one in the arena. Houston and his Dropbox partner, Arash Ferdowsi, turned Jobs down; they wanted to build a big company, not to be beholden to another, Houston said.

With a huge number of users signing up every day, Dropbox has arguably already attained “big company” status. And even though ninety-six percent of users are signed up for free plans — which allow up to two Gigabytes of storage a month — they often surpass the storage limit and sign up for paid plans. Dropbox’s business model means that even if no new users join in 2012, sales will still double what they were in 2011.

But Drew Houston is confident Dropbox will continue to see remarkable user growth, especially given its current numbers are up three-fold over 2010’s and only continue to climb. All thanks to a misplaced USB drive.

Model-Turned Entrepreneur Kathy Ireland

Swimsuit model Kathy Ireland has been turning heads since her late teens. Featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for thirteen consecutive years, it’s clear that her career as a model has been very successful. Despite this, Ireland decided to venture into the world of business as an entrepreneur. 

The supermodel was born in 1963 to parents who worked as labor union organizers and charity volunteers. Coming from humble beginnings, Ireland felt she needed to do something in her life to change her family’s situation. Opportunity knocked when she was discovered by an agent for the Elite Model Management Company, but she only saw modeling as a way to pay her way through college and start a business of her own. After a long and lucrative career in front of the camera, Ireland started her first business. 

She put her name on a line of socks in 1993, which soon proved to be a best-seller at Kmart. Seeing the potential returns, the retailer gave Ireland her own clothing line. This prompted her to create “Kathy Ireland Worldwide,” a brand product marketing company. 

With her partnership with Kmart, Ireland was able to market products from sixteen different manufacturers, including Standard Furniture. When the exclusive contract with Kmart Corporation ended in 2003, she was able to take in more clients, mostly independent mid-tier retail stores. Thousands of clients brought her an annual take of about ten million dollars, making her Forbes prototype for model-turned-mogul. 

In addition to her marketing firm, Ireland recently launched her latest business, wedding dresses. 

Ireland used modeling as a tool to reach her goal and never lost sight of what she wanted in life. With her perseverance and relentless drive, Ireland is a perfect example of a person who uses her strengths to fulfill her ambitions.

Kathy Ireland's interview with Parents TV

The First Black-American Female Entrepreneur, Madame C.J. Walker

Way before Oprah was considered the most powerful Black-American woman, there was Madame C.J. Walker, a pioneering entrepreneur who built a multimillion-dollar enterprise during early the late 1800s. During her time, she was known as a leader in the beauty industry who skillfully assembled a grassroots sales force and tapped into a new market of American consumers. She is also the first self-made female millionaire in the United States.

The daughter of freed slaves, Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana, year 1867. Both her parents died when she was just seven years old, and seven years later she found herself married to her first husband. At that time, some people might have thought that her life would never amount to anything valuable.

With little formal education – mostly because laws of the land did not provide equal opportunities for colored people back then – Walker had to make a living out of menial jobs. But destiny had other plans for her.

Walker contracted a hair and scalp problem, which she desperately tried to cure through a self-made formula that she said, came to her through her dreams. She also started working as a sales agent for another black-owned beauty business, which ultimately encouraged her to launch a line of hair-care products.

It didn’t take long for Walker to become the founder of Madame C.J. Walker Enterprises, a company which manufactured a series of hair-care products.  Her second husband, a newspaper salesman, helped establish the company by guiding its advertising in black newspapers. Walker also sold her products door-to-door, from churches to houses all over the South.

At the turn of the century, Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower has gained a following. She started to build a beauty empire during this time by training her “hair culturists” at a college in Pittsburgh. Eventually, her empire – The Walker System – grew to employ almost 3,000 people, offering meaningful employment to thousands of Black women.

A century after her rise to success, Walker is remembered as the first female entrepreneur who overcame the odds with relentless ambition.

Robert Nay Defeats Angry Birds with Bubble Ball

At 14, Robert Nay was able to do the impossible: dethrone Angry Birds as the top free game in Apple’s App Store. While most kids his age are watching TV, experiencing the joys of puppy love, or spending too much time on Facebook, Nay is busy launching the birds into oblivion with his own programmed app, Bubble Ball.

If that’s not enough, Nay also decided to start his own company, Nay Games, instead of just being a single person app publisher. The kid obviously has goals in life, several of which are to expand his business, involve more people, and create more games.

As an eighth-grade student, Nay seemed to have it all figured out. But how exactly did the 14-year-old build the number 1 iPhone game?

Nay used his spare time to build Bubble Ball, an addictive multi-level physics game. The entire concept and programming of the app was created by Nay himself, with no help from professional game developers twice as old as he was.  He only asked his parents for money to purchase the Apple Developer license, the Android Market license, and the license for Corona SDK, which is what he used to make Bubble Ball.

He already had all the equipment he needed at home, so Nay gave it a shot – and landed right on target.  He managed to unseat the mega-hit Angry Birds, surprising many giants in the game development industry, as well as himself.  “I never imagined my game could be the number one top free game,” the young entrepreneur said.

Experts comment that Nay made a smart marketing move by offering Bubble Ball for free in App stores. This way, he has set the stage should he decide to charge for his next app. With six million downloads under his belt, Nay’s future in game development looks promising.

Shawn Smith Welcomes You to Ninja Town

Shawn Smith’s youth was filled with video games and cartoons; and like many other children, Smith became obsessed. This obsession soon turned into a hobby as he learned to draw the images he saw in games and on television.

When he went to college at Illinois State University, Smith met his future wife, Jen Brody. For fun, both of them would create hand-sewn plush dolls based on Smith’s comical character sketches. The couple’s hobby soon turned into an idea for a business.  In 2002, they launched Shawnimals, a Chicago-based character design studio.

Today, Smith’s designer toys, lifestyle accessories, apparel, and comic books are available for sale in more than 100 stores located all over the world. He has created over 400 characters since, and some of these characters now appear in Bean Village, Hotdog Kingdom and Ninjatown.

Smith’s latest success came with Nintendo DS’ release of the strategy game based on the Ninjatown brand. As a former editor at Electronic Gaming Monthly, the entrepreneur had a lot of contacts in the industry. One of those included the video-game publisher SouthPeak games. Smith heard that SouthPeak needed a unique IP, and he was quick to jump in on a deal. It wasn't long until they licensed the Ninjatown brand for development. Their site traffic went up to 500 unique visitors per day since the game was released.

Like many artist-entrepreneurs, Smith finds it difficult to strike a balance between business development and creativity. He carries the responsibility of making sure that a certain level of creativity is maintained while still making a profit. Despite these challenges, Shawn remains optimistic regarding the future of his business.
Smith is making this world a better place, one ninja at a time – for video game addicts, at least. With the success of his company, he has built a popular toy line and lifestyle brand.

A Closer Look at Tech Entrepreneur and Angel Investor Joshua Schachter

(image by Joi Ito)

Back in the late 1990s, when blogs were still hand-coded and almost exclusively run by techies, Joshua Schachter maintained one of his own, named Memepool. His blog consisted mainly of daily links and information about interesting Web sites he stumbled upon while surfing the Internet. Schachter also took in suggested links from other users. At times when he had no time to post in his blog, he copied the links to a single file. This file grew to contain more than 20,000 links after a couple of years. During this time, the financial analyst felt he had to do something about it. 

In 2001, he wrote a single-user tool to track the suggested links. Muxway, as the tool was called, was written during his free time as he was working full time in finance. But four years later, Schachter quit his job to focus on Muxway, which became the multiuser del.icio.us service. Del.icio.us allowed users to save and share bookmarks, which they can describe with keywords or tags. This made the whole experience of using bookmarks easier. 

During its peak, del.icio.us had 300,000 users – quite an impressive feat for a project made by an accidental tech entrepreneur.  Schachter later on sold his business to Yahoo! to become an angel investor. 

Schachter has made angel investments in about 45 companies since then, including Foursquare, SimpleGEO, Square, DailyBooth and Bump Technologies. He also worked at Yahoo! as an executive until 2008, then joined Google as engineer. However, he left the search giant early last year to start a new project which the tech world has yet to see.

Although it has been quite a while since Schachter managed his own business, his contributions to the tech industry are still at large. Whether as an angel investor, corporate executive, or entrepreneur, his participation in the modern trade is highly regarded by many.

Evan Williams

Twitter has become a byword in the social media scene. Online and off, everyone seems to be talking about it. Remarkably though, its founder has managed to keep a pretty low profile. For someone who has created something that’s often compared to Facebook, this is definitely interesting. Evan Williams grew up in the countryside so his main concern while growing up was farm irrigation. But Williams was a farm boy with big dreams. 

Evan Williams attended the University of Nebraska in pursuit of higher education. He initially worked for news firms in Texas. However, after working for several years, he decided to go back to the family farm. An opportunity arrived at his doorstep – he was asked to work for O’Reilly Media. Evan started in marketing before becoming an independent contractor writing computer code. 

Soon, he established a reputation. Companies like Intel and Hewlett Packard invited him to participate in some projects. He then worked with an old friend, Meg Hourihan, and they co-founded Pyra-Labs – the company that made Blogger. They popularized the term “blogging” and Pyra-Labs was acquired by Google. While many other people would have retired upon reaching the heights of success with Blogger, Williams’s creativity knew no bounds. 

The result of this, as we all know, is Twitter. The micro-blogging platform was supposed to be a minor project but it soon became famous. It has revolutionized the way people interact using social media, whether on their laptops, on their phones, or on their tablet computers.

Carlos Slim Helu Stays Simple Despite Being the Richest Man in the World

A quick Google search of Carlos Slim Helu yields thousands of results – all containing at least a sentence that declares him “the world’s richest man.” True enough, Helu was named the richest in the world, according to the 2010 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires. His net worth reached $53.5 billion last year. He was declared the richest again this year, with an estimated fortune of $70 billion dollars. Some say that his wealth is equivalent to that of small countries.

Helu, however, wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Born in Mexico, the telecom tycoon and his siblings were taught basic business practices by their father, a dry goods store owner. He learned how to make, handle and invest money at a young age; he even bought his first shares in a Mexican bank at the age of 12. Helu then proceeded to study engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico while teaching algebra and linear programming.

Just a few years out of college, Helu earned $40 million by acquiring a couple of businesses. His conglomerate grew as he established and merged several other companies, mostly in construction, mining, retail, food and tobacco. But it was the telecom industry where Helu struck gold.

Today, he gets 62% of his fortune from American Movil, the leading wireless service provider in Latin America and fourth largest in the world in terms of subscribers.

But despite having all the riches one could ever dream of, Helu adheres to a simple lifestyle. The article At home with the world’s richest man says that the tycoon did not adapt well to a lavish lifestyle. He stays in a six-bedroom house – quite modest for a man of his stature – a mile away from his office; he does not have a yacht or several real estate properties like other men with privileged backgrounds. His only passion, aside from business, is fine art.

It’s good to know that despite being the richest man in the world, Helu remains a grounded and humble person.

Ashok Bagdy of Cameo Corporate Services Limited

An executive with Cameo Corporate Services Limited for more than eight years, Ashok Bagdy has held the post of Vice President of Outsourcing Services since August 2005. Cameo, a respected provider of business process outsourcing (BPO), specializes in data conversion, document management, registry and share transfer, and medical transcribing.

Ashok Bagdy works at the company’s U.S. office in Tampa, Florida, where he oversees the American division’s profit and loss, finance, operations, and human resources. Headquartered in Chennai, India, where it maintains nearly four dozen offices, the company entrusts Ashok Bagdy to lead a staff of more than 350 employees, who handle the company’s client base in the United States.

Mr. Bagdy initiated Speech Recognition (both M-Modal and iChart), which has grown to more than three-quarters of Cameo’s business. Under Ashok Bagdy’s leadership, employee retention has increased signifantly with.  Mr. Bagdy also reduced production costs at Cameo.

For more than two years prior to his current position, Ashok Bagdy served as Vice President of Business Development at Cameo. He increased the firm’s BPO in the U.S. by building relationships with American companies, especially in the field of medical transcription.

Ashok Bagdy’s previous jobs included Director of Business Development for Copytalk in Sarasota, Florida; a similar position at YouKnowBest.com in Celebration, Florida; Head of U.S. Operations for Hiltex Exports in the Philadelphia office of the Indian textile importer; and Database Administrator positions with The Hay Group, also in Philadelphia. He came to the U.S. in 1991 to earn his Master’s degree in Computer and Information Science at Temple University. Ashok Bagdy’s previous education, in his native India, included a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce and Finance from Madras University and an M.B.A. in Management Information Systems and Finance at Bharathiar University.

Ashok Bagdy maintains active membership in the Indo-U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Inc. He also volunteers for the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, a nonprofit that encourages education and development in India’s villages.

The Synth Retains The Name

Few inventions have so directly shaped the fundamental character of popular music as has the Moog synthesizer. Dr. Robert Moog's brainchild, first introduced to the world in 1964, heralded the potential versatility of the looming presence of electronic keyboards. Within twenty years of its arrival, the technology behind the Moog synthesizer had completely transformed the global soundscape of popular music.

Dr. Moog himself had been a protege of the inventor of the theremin, Leon Theremin. Moog set about implementing some of the conceptual principles of the theremin -- particularly the ability of a musician to smoothly modulate, or bend, a sound signal as it was being played -- into a keyboard interface. Though the Moog received relatively minor attention from fringe music experimentalists when it was first released, the synthesizer did not wait long for the mainstream to discover its powerful capabilities.

Throughout the 1970s, popular art-rock and progressive-rock bands wove the Moog into their heady repertoires. Bands such as Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Rush built loyal fan followings in large part on the strength of musical progressions that were constructed around the distinct spacy-sounding presence of the Moog. Both of those bands routinely sold millions of records and topped album charts.

For his part, Dr. Moog struggled with all of the legal implications that accompanied his name becoming synonymous with his invention. His company, Moog Music, never completely capitalized on its phenomenal success as a brand. Despite this, Robert Moog, upon his death in 2005, left behind the Bob Moog Foundation, which continues to share his significant impact on the music world with new generations of musicians.

Passion and Business Savvy

Danny Shabat of Chicago, Illinois, has successfully managed many businesses over the years. With a passion for geriatric care and an understanding of the need for quality and compassion in today’s busy society, Mr. Shabat has owned Diplomat Nursing Home, Heritage Nursing Home Inc., and Royal Gardens Nursing Home. After successfully directing homes for the elderly, Danny Shabat also invested in other companies in the Chicago area including PharMore Drugs, LLC, LifeCare Ambulance, Inc., and LifeScan Laboratory, Inc.

A devout follower of Judaism, Daniel Shabat is an active member of the Jewish community, working with many charities and regularly performing community service. He is a member of Adas Yeshurun Synagogue in Chicago and is a board member for Helping Hands as well as for the Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study. Other service roles include Mr. Shabat’s tenure as President for Arie Crown Hebrew Day School.

Born in Washington D.C., Daniel Shabat attended the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington until his family relocated to Brooklyn, New York. In Brooklyn, Mr. Shabat finished his traditional Hebrew education at Mirrer Yeshiva and pursued higher education at Brooklyn College. He began his career working for well-known caterers in New York, including Katz Caterers and Catering by Michael Schick. In 1977, Danny Shabat relocated to Chicago with his wife, Margie. The Shabats have two grown children, Ari and Chaim. In his spare time, Mr. Shabat enjoys golfing at some the nation’s most challenging and beautiful courses. He and his wife have traveled extensively around the world.

Redefining The Sound Of A Rock And Roll Guitar Amplifier

A notable entry into the crowded field of musician-built guitar amplifiers arrived on the German rock-and- roll scene in the mid-1990s. Peter Diezel was a guitarist performing with rock bands in Munich, Germany during the 1980s and early 1990s. His dissatisfaction with the Marshall amps that he favored for his rig drove him to modify his gear to better match the sounds and tones he was seeking.

Incorporating midi tone-modeling technology, Diezel crafted his first signature amplifier for the German market in 1994. Dubbed the VH4, it modeled four distinct guitar tones in a single cabinet, and each tone could be easily accessed through a simple channel-switching configuration designed for ease of use onstage. Despite its hefty price tag, the Diezel VH4 became a hit among the guitar crowd in central Europe, which quickly came to appreciate Diezel's intense commitment to product quality.

Several years after the VH4's success had been established in Europe, a single VH4 found its way to a studio in Los Angeles, California, where it caught the attention of several prominent music acts that ended up recruiting its services when they booked that particular facility. By the early 2000s, Diezel Amps were penetrating both the American market and American airwaves. None other than Journey, Guns n' Roses and Metallica were rocking with Diezels during that period.

Peter Diezel spent much of the decade of the 2000s developing a series of follow-up products to the VH4, focusing his efforts on expanding beyond the rock guitarist  market to genres such as jazz, blues and country andwestern. Today, every Diezel product maintains its creator's overriding principles of quality: performance, functionality and durability.

In Search Of The Perfect Electric Guitar Tone

It's one thing to be resourceful. But stretching the boundaries of imagination far enough to include aircraft components in a guitar amplifier is an entirely different thing. It is a commitment to a greater vision that is a level beyond the reach of most. Such is the case with Michael Soldano, whose self-proclaimed "Quest for Tone" in guitar amplifiers traces its humble beginnings to his native Seattle in the late 1970s.

During that era, Soldano, who was building and modifying cars, motorcycles and even hydroplanes, began to tinker with electric guitars, which was a hobby he was passionate about. He eventually drifted into modifying and building guitar amps as an extension of his pursuit of ideal tones for guitar players. Soldano produced his first amplifier in 1982, but struggled mightily in establishing his embryonic business for several years, before finally gaining widespread acclaim from prominent guitar players in the industry in the late 1980s.

The roster of rock and roll royalty that has deployed a Soldano amplifier in the past quarter-century reads like a comprehensive history of the genre. No less than Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Edward Van Halen, Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Page and many, many others headline a list that's the envy of any mainstream guitar equipment manufacturer, let alone a boutique shop like Soldano.

Today, Mike Soldano's one-stop shop outfits discriminating guitarists with a full complement of amp heads, combos and speaker cabinets. Such a full-scale operation is a far cry from a young man's hobby of customizing guitars in his home, and the guitar-playing world is forever grateful to Soldano for his weighty contributions to their craft.

Go-Kustom TV - Soldano Kustom Amplification (posted by sebasstian33)

What? There Was A Search Engine Before Google?

There was a time, long ago, when search engines other than Google prominently roamed the internet. Excite, Infoseek and Lycos (among many others) were all popular destinations for millions of budding internet users. Prior to the eventual conquest of the search engine landscape by Google, one service notably stood above the others in popularity: AltaVista.

Introduced to the public towards the end of 1995, AltaVista was born in a Palo Alto, California research lab during the spring of that year. At that time, Louis Monier and a colleague programmed a means by which every word contained in programmable HTML could be both housed and accessed in index form. Monier implemented multiple-language functionality into the new tool, along with a speedy and scalable ability to "crawl the Web" allowing the tool to be used as a search engine.

Following AltaVista’s release, the web-surfing public quickly recognized the search engine as the preeminent tool available for info search purposes, and as a result AltaVista's usage skyrocketed exponentially in its first two years of existence. Foremost among its innovations was its then-unique ability to search for images, audio and video.

As Chief Technical Officer of AltaVista, Monier did not rest on his laurels; instead, he concocted the internet's first human language translator, Babel Fish.

During the dot-com craze at the turn of the century, AltaVista was sold and resold, and in the wake of that operational turbulence the search engine lost its commanding presence to the rise of Google. For his part, Monier moved on to play roles with eBay and even Google, as well as less-successful start-ups later in the decade.

AltaVista's current owner, Yahoo, only recently announced that the demise of the seminal search engine is nigh, which will bring to an end a definitive chapter of the internet's colorful history.

Huizenga's Hat Trick

There's not much Wayne Huizenga hasn't done in his 72 years of existence. He has owned several professional sports teams as well as held ownership shares of several hotels and resorts, not to mention the three companies he built from the ground up. Huizenga was born in Illinois and lived in the suburbs of Chicago until he was 15 at which point his parents moved the family to South Florida. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan and joined the Army reserves before marrying his first wife.

Huizenga began amassing his billions by driving a garbage truck in Fort Lauderdale in 1962. He responded to an advertisement regarding a route for sale and borrowed $5,000 from his father-in-law to purchase the truck and route. In just six short years, Huizenga parlayed that into 40 trucks and a major chunk of the garbage hauling in Broward County (Sun-Sentinel.com). He later took the company, Waste Management, public in 1972 and retired from the business in 1984.

His next big venture came three years after retiring from the garbage hauling business when he bought into the Blockbuster franchise. Huizenga was hesitant at first to get into the video rental industry but he and Steve Berrard bought it in when the company owned eight stores and 11 franchises. They sold Blockbuster to Viacom Inc. seven years later for $8.4 billion.

In 1995, Huizenga purchased Republic Waste and turned it into AutoNation, a used car franchise that quickly became the largest U.S. auto retailer. Although the company struggled at the end of the millennium, Huizenga hired Mike Jackson from Mercedes-Benz USA to take over as CEO and revived the company.

In addition, Huizenga owned the Miami Dolphins for 20 years and was the original owner of both the Florida Marlins baseball franchise and the Florida Panthers hockey team. Even though Huizenga is a billionaire and in his seventies, he doesn't show signs of slowing down. In 2010, he set his sights on Swisher International Inc., a company that provides commercial cleaning products (Bloomberg). Having already scored a hat trick, perhaps Huizenga is looking to achieve a second one in his lifetime.

Merlin Mann

“Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging”

-Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies) via Twitter

Perhaps the most compelling thing that drives people to reading things about, by, for, and involving Merlin Mann is his personality. He has made a career as a nerd that delivers talks, cooks up media like movies, music, podcasts and even writes blog posts about issues like productivity and time management. Somehow, in other words, Merlin Mann has made a career about time management by preoccupying peoples’ time with his media barrages.

This isn’t to say that Merlin Mann’s tweets, blogs and talks are devoid of real content.  Quite the opposite, there’s a great deal to ponder for he is relentlessly self-critical and sarcastic, frequently punctuating his fast-paced talks with profanity, comedic stock images, nerdy jokes, images of himself and his family, and links to interesting reading material on related topics. Moreover, Mann’s philosophy on productivity and distraction is a relatively simple one that can be broken down into a five-point system that he discusses at length on his productivity blog, http://www.43folders.com/

Like a lot of brilliant Silicon Valley nerds, Mann is from far away.  He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio some time in the latter half of the twentieth century, was raised in Florida and attended the prestigious  New College of Florida (http://www.ncf.edu/).

Launched in September of 2004, 43 folders has the largest internet-audience of any of Merlin’s projects.  Through 43 folders, Mann approaches “finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.”  A creative himself, Mann exhibits a disdain for highly corporate or technical methods of producing work.

Primarily for Mann, humans generally suffer from a problem of organization which is poorly suited for creating tasks for themselves, and once they create those tasks, they find that the tasks are far too complicated.  For Mann, “old-fashioned” tasks are those which are actually mini-projects.  In order to make a list actionable, one must break these mini-projects into their component steps and ruthlessly eliminate these steps. If this particular approach sounds familiar, it’s likely because you’re already acquainted with the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) philosophy from an evangelical friend, or the book which started it all, Getting Things Done by David Allen.  Mann’s blog post about how to get started with GTD remains the most-read piece he’s written and serves as the basis for his increasingly illustrious consulting and speaking career. Mann however prefers to be referred to as a writer.

Merlin Mann also works on a number of different other popular products, including: You Look Nice Today, an “audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene;” as well as his podcast on the 5by5 network, Back to Work where he and Dan Benjamin of 5by5 Studios and Hivelogic discuss “productivity, communication, work, barriers, constraints, tools, and more.”

Finding Fortune and the Future with Fungi

I think we all know the old saying about being treated like a mushroom, being kept in the dark and covered in crap. Such is the lot we are led to believe of the lowly mushroom. However, there are two young entrepreneurs who say we have got it all wrong when it comes to mushrooms.

University of California, Berkeley business school graduates Nikhil Arora and Alex Velez say that mushrooms are easy to grow, have no need to be hidden in the dark and are a profitable, sustainable business opportunity.

The pair started Back to the Roots Ventures in 2009 to grow mushrooms using discarded coffee grounds. According to BTTR Ventures’ website, the duo got the idea of growing gourmet mushrooms with used coffee grounds from a school lecture. While still in school, they honed their mushroom-growing art in a bucket in Velex’s fraternity kitchen. Once they had successfully grown a batch, they knew where their future lay. Arora is quoted as having said they loved “creating a business out of waste streams."

BTTR gets most of its used coffee grounds from Peet’s Coffee and Tea. Once BTTR has used the grounds to nourish its mushrooms, they donate the grounds to local families, schools and communities. These coffee grounds would have otherwise merely been thrown away.  

With a $5,000 grant from the UC Berkeley Chancellor for social innovation along with some interest from Whole Foods, Chez Panisse and Berkeley chef Alice Waters, BTTR Ventures was quickly up and growing gourmet mushrooms in a 2,500-square foot warehouse and selling mushroom growing kits on its own website, at Whole Foods, and on Amazon. The kit averages five out of five stars on its Amazon reviews.    

Arora and Velez take their duties as urban mushroom farmers seriously and are heavily dedicated to giving back to their community. In 2011, BTTR estimates it will “collect, divert and reuse one million pounds of coffee grounds.” Additionally, BTTR says it will “help families grow over 250,000 pounds of fresh food at home” this year, while at the same time, donate premium soil amendment to 10 urban school and community gardens.  

To learn more about Nikhil Arora, Alex Velez and BTTR Ventures visit:

• BTTR
• Video: Talk Given by the Two