lew McMurran

Lew McMurran is a  lobbyist. What is a lobbyist? Honestly when he first came in to talk I had no idea. He is responsible for persuading members of the government to enact legislation that would benefit the Washington Technology Industry Association. The WTIA promotes and works with Washington industries that involve technology. It is like a social network for technology industries where they can contact and share information with each other. WTIA also offers a wide variety of business services, holds events, and does advocacy/lobbying.  The WTIA has approximately 600 members and has 11 employees. They focus on starting up new companies as well as helping other grow and become successful. Many major companies are currently members such as Verison, Microsoft, Google, HTC, and Facebook. This is a good place for companies in the technology industry to get their company noticed by others.

Jeff Goodwin

Unlike most teenagers, Jeff Goodwin wanted to be an entrepreneur. Though only being 17 he came up with an idea to start a business power washing roofs. This idea came to him when he realized how much people were paying professionals to do it. He watched other people do it and said told himself he could do that. So he rented a power washer and went house to house offering his services. But with him being only a young teenager he went through many rejections before he could finally get a yes. After he got his first job though the neighbors around began to take notice and realized that Jeff could actually do a good job for less cost.

After college Jeff worked for Boeing while also taking night classes learning basic computer languages. Then while on his honeymoon he was offered a job. He had two choices to choose from but instead of choosing the higher paying (and what seemed like a more successful job at the time) he chose to do what he thought he would love doing which is writing assembly code. With this new found expertise he then got a job at IBM. While working there he started pitching business ideas but received no interest from the company which lead to him quitting his job. He started another company building fixed price device drives in Texas and managed the company for 10 years. Eventually he was put into the position where he needed to sell his company. His customers were starting to feel skeptical and worried about relying on a small company for their device drivers. So Jeff sold his company to Cisco then continued to work for them as part of the contract. As soon as that contract was over however, Jeff returned to Washington where he would start his next venture.

Lynette Claire

Lynette Claire is the first female entrepreneur for me to meet. She told us her favorite thing to do was start a company, but did not care for the work needed to maintain one. She went to University of California Davis and received her bachelors in English. From there she interned for Horticulture Magazine but instead of moving to Boston to continue working for them she decided to move to the Puget Sound. This is where she helped start Simply Seafood Magazine. She later accidentally ended up running a business by herself that involved association management and event planning. She also helped start the 6th ave farmers market in Tacoma. Believing that entrepreneurships can be used to build communities lead her to creating an entrepreneurship network that could do this. She is working on a project called Tacoma Entrepreneurs Network. TEN focuses on building entrepreneurial careers and is a supportive organization to Tacoma college students.

Startup.com

Startup.com is a movie that is a documentary of an entrepreneurship journey. They chose found three guys whom were starting up a service company that allows people to pay for taxes and tickets online. Though the company ended up sinking, at first it was a great success. Though there were three co founders, one was bought out for a great sum of money and from there the story focused on Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman. Kaleil was the financial/business savy guy and Tom was the programming savy guy. The company they started was called govWorks.com. The idea of it took off and they were able to get funding that kept them expanding. They even got to the point of VC funding and after visiting a few VCs they received funding. Which only a small amount of companys ever get.
The film was well documented capturing the ups and downs of the company's life. The camera men seemed to have eventually became invisible to the entrepreneurs because they didn't hold back what they said in front of the cameras. The path to completing the website puts a lot of stress on the founders and they hit a lot of rough patches. Finding secure funding was not as easy as they had hoped and they did not always see eye to eye about how they should present themselves to potential investors. After they secured funding and started to grow they were able to about 300 people. The negative thing with funding from VCs comes the chance that they will want to change something about your company. They wanted just one person running govWords and made Tom resign. This was the final straw in Kaleil and Toms friendship. They ended up patching their friendship but not till after govWorks went bankrupt. They learned a valuable lesson, don't let business get in the way of friendship.

John Dimmer

John Dimmer came in on a day I was sick, so I did not hear what he had to say. But from what I have gathered from other people he lived a very interesting entrepreneurship lifestyle. His talk focused on the topic of financing for entrepreneurs. He called it the financing life cycle and it follows these steps:
1. Self funding
2. Friends and Family
3. Government grants or loans
4. Angel Investors
5. Venture Capitalists
John Dimmer also said another powerful VC is the use of your own visa credit card to fund your business. However my professor disagrees with this and believes that you should only go this route if there is a very high chance for success of your business.
He became this financially savy through perusing a degree in finance at University of Oregon. After college he worked for Reliance Insurance handling surety bonds. Many years later he left working with bonds and jumped into the life of an entrepreneur. He co founded Free Range Media, which later sold allowing John to retire.
Retirements wasn't the life for John, he is now co-founder of the Tacoma Angel Network. As an angel investor he told us what attracts investors attention. Venture Capitalists funding is hard to receive and cannot always be trusted. While angels are more trusting towards small businesses and do not demand as much from them.