John Coogan

March 30, 2012

Today is my last day at Invested Development. Although the firm hasn’t existed for 12 years and I’ve been there less than 12 months, I had an incredible experience and couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to put what I learned to good use and potentially help solve a problem that I have identified in today’s educational system.

While my experience of going through Teach For America recruiting spurred my interest in addressing the educational achievement gap, I think my personal experience with the educational system in America was a much more fundamental driver during the ideation of The Cato Project. Everything has turned out great and I couldn’t be more satisfied with my experience at Northeastern, but I have always felt that I learned in spite of the system.

A major tipping point for me came while working for Bain Capital a few years ago. Although the halls of 111 Huntington did feel a bit cloistered at times, I loved the level of discourse within the office and the entrepreneurs that came through Bain Ventures. The problem was that I had built little to no credibility within the academic community to allow me to be taken seriously. Consequently, I languished on the lower floors assembling computers for their quants. The good news is that I was able to move to a much friendlier office at a speech-recognition startup named Vlingo that had just closed a large C round and was rapidly scaling their operations. Working on the business side of the company and watching the fierce competition between Vlingo, Siri and Google VoiceActions was an incredible experience. It seemed that everyone was genuinely too busy doing deals and building products to notice that I was commuting to Cambridge from Boston.

As cool as Vlingo was, an IPO seemed out of the question and I was interested in exploring the product side of the business. Since I was in Harvard Square every day for work, I decided to attend the Harvard Summer Internship fair and see if I had any upward mobility. Being the only Northeastern student made me a little uncomfortable but I decided to focus on my experience in finance and talk to the quant hedge funds in attendance. Most recruiters tended to lean heavily on their desire to hire from Harvard exclusively, but Citadel, a fairly successful fund started in a Harvard dorm-room, gave me a chance. The founder was in the process of filing an IPO and seemed to be very interested in entrepreneurship and innovation (Good To Great and Hardball were both required reading).

This was major validation of my personal development methodology. Although none of the e-learning I had done with Stern, Yale and MIT was on my resume, I was still able to land the job, move to Chicago, and gain access to some of the most coveted resources in the financial world.

My attitude upon arriving in Chicago was aggressive to say the least. It became clear very quickly that recent legislation was deathly serious and the financial industry was getting rocked to its core. Aspirations of going public were immediately shelved leading to a case of serious one-percent-problems. Ken Griffin grumpily fired the entire banking salesforce and began carving up the company. Although they were nice enough to give me an offer in a unit with a semi-bright future, it was clear that I needed to move on to greener pastures.

Back in Boston I was ready to rock. Econ, check. Business, check. Finance, check. Hacking? Lacking.

Although I’d gotten to dabble in Python, R and database design at Citadel, it was clear that my CS skills were an AFD (area for development). I started attending hackathons and was fortunate enough to land a job at the first for-profit VC focused exclusively on social-enterprise. Invested Development is an amazing place because Miguel practices what he preaches. With such a small team (only three full-time employees when I arrived), the firm exudes agility and hustle. I’ve never had so much freedom in a job and, although it was tough at times to balance personal development with the principles of the fund, it has felt like an autodidact’s coming out party.

From using Python to scrape data from sundry government organizations across the globe, to working with Mike Bostock to figure out the optimal way to express my findings via D3.js, ID was a pleasure.

I couldn’t be more excited to observe what Miguel has up his sleeve and, after seeing The Gates Foundation test the ID model domestically with Inigral, I can only imagine positive scenarios for the impact investing industry as a whole. As someone with a bit of a Robin Hood complex himself, I can’t help thinking that SRI companies like Kiva will be extremely successful.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I leave ID today, for the vision of the firm is truly beautiful down to its core. I hope that those who read this will take a second to examine the firm and think about the incredible potential what they’re talking about has. Stepping out into the great unknown of entrepreneurship has already been a wild ride but my experience vetting early stage tech companies and helping develop product roadmaps leads me to believe this could actually work.

12:00am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZgwrGyNJ-26t

Filed under: InvestedDevelopment SF career northeastern

March 26, 2012

Can’t get over the @TastemakerX idea. First sticker worthy of the iPhone. (Taken with Instagram at Virgin America’s Google Chrome Zone)

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March 26, 2012

What an amazing trip. Thanks for everything to everyone who’s helped so far! (Taken with Instagram at San Francisco International Airport (SFO))

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March 25, 2012

Taken with Instagram at Roam Artisan Burgers

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March 14, 2012

(Source: theblacktie, via couldbecomeanything)

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(Notes: 404)

March 1, 2012

Startup Weekend

I know it’s been a while since I posted last but I assure this inactivity has far from mirrored the rest of my life. From reports for classes, to research at work, to my newly launched venture, the Cato Project, things have been going extremely well. Even as busy as I am, I still feel that it’s important to take some time to reflect.

My Startup Weekend Pitch

I had the pleasure of working with some extremely talented people last weekend to flesh out an idea that has been sitting in the back of my mind for quite some time. I explain the product in fairly deep detail in the video, but if you’d like to know more, please visit the site for yourself. I’m really looking forward to getting it fully functional and doing some Alpha testing with friends and family.

The presentation was really quick and, although I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, I’m happy with the way I articulated the key points of my thesis.

In hindsight, the critical missing piece, and ultimately why we lost the competition, was undoubtedly distribution. While I had always taken “business skills” for granted in the past, the importance of having a ruthless business team willing to aggressively hit the streets and develop customers cannot be stressed enough. I know I’ll never make the mistake of slacking on validating my assumptions early on again. We simply had too much talent to loose and yet it seems perfectly clear why now when I look back on the structure of our process.

I firmly believe that a successful startup will be able to accomplish three key tasks:

Develop: Build technologies and systems to solve problems.
Design: Understand how human factors behind problems and shape user experience.
Distribute: Learn from and sell to the people whose problems are being solved.

Although my reading list has never been longer, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup has just jumped to the top. I know I sound like a broken record at this point but I urge anyone reading this to always keep a firm user acquisition strategy in the front of their minds at all times.

Anyway, I’m off to Ecuador tomorrow to build water filtration systems and research the potential for technology to improve education. I’ve been planning this trip for over 5 months now, but the fact that it’s right around the corner has me really excited. I can’t wait to share my experiences and hopefully develop a sustainable plan for improving education in the developing world. The beauty of solving problems in education, I always remind myself, lies in the fact that education suffers from cost, not quality constraints. Establishing this simple fact allows one to effortlessly apply Theodore Schultz’s theory of investment in human capital and reach the conclusion that education is merely suffering from a market slowly approaching an equilibria. I believe that incentives can be used to solve the market inefficiencies plaguing education globally and am overwhelmed at the positive response I have received thus far about my theory. I can’t wait to see what comes next and hope to share more positive news here soon.

12:00am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZgwrGyNJ_kOm

Filed under: event presentation startupweekend video

February 27, 2012

The Fulbright Program

Northeastern held an info-session today about the Fulbright Program and all-in-all it seems like a great opportunity. The goal of the program centers around increasing mutual understandingbetween people of the U.S. and people of other countries through exchange and the presenters all clearly got a lot out of their experiences. It was interesting to hear about the diversity of topics covered by grantee projects. Examples ranged from film making to education to public health initiatives. I liked how much freedom grantees have to explore a project of personal interest and gain culture understanding in a very unstructured way.

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Filed under: event fulbright grant northeast research

February 25, 2012

SEI Event: Iqbal Quadir

Professor Iqbal Quadir came to Northeastern tonight to speak about social entrepreneurship and his experience founding both Grameenphone and the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. Professor Quadir constantly engaged with the audience and stimulated a lot of participation from the office. At times, it seemed that he honestly believed that the problems he was discussing, although huge (like “How can economic growth be created in the developing world”), could be solved within the short lecture if everyone just put their mind to it.

The core of Professor Quadir’s presentation focused on a historical overview of development economics that took a much wider view than I was expecting. Hopefully I’ll be able to link to his slides, because I won’t be able to do his presentation justice here. He made a great point about natural resources and foreign aid, explaining that both have consistently led to the empowerment of government authorities, and not citizens.

If your country has oil and receives foreign aid, your citizens are going to be in trouble.

In response to the usual perception that foreign aid is a best way to help developing nations, Quadir suggests that the creation of “tools” is far more important. Neoclassical development economic theory stresses the importance of the free-market in developing countries and, while this is far from radical economic theory, his point is undoubtedly worth emphasizing when discussing the value of foreign aid.

Professor Quadir identified 3 key misconceptions about developing countries:

Poor countries are under-resourced

Reducing rampant waste can dramatically improve this.
Poor people lack buying power.

Selling productivity tools creates buying power.
You need money to make money.

Shared-access breaks that cycle.

Professor Quadir provided a great overview of the many surprisingly simple solutions to the major problems faced by poor people in developing nations. He was an incredibly inspiring speaker and I look forward to learning more about his work at MIT and elsewhere.

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Filed under: entrepreneurship event mit northeastern social speaker

February 22, 2012

Boston Predictive Analytics

Last night I attended a meet up hosted by the Boston Predictive Analytics group on social network analysis. Big data has been a growing interest of mine for the past few months and the event showed me some pretty powerful possibilities. Graph analysis is really interesting stuff in general, but seeing it’s commercialization become more intuitive is great news for industry as a whole. Read on to hear about each individual talk in detail.

Ben Vandiver of Vertica

Vertica is offers an analytics platform that allows businesses to quickly and efficiently query structured databases. It seems like they do have a solid solution and understand the key issues to social network analysis (churn, viral coefficient & revenue per user), but I think the fact that they don’t support NoSQL is a problem. Given the current trend, the value of a schema-driven analytics platform is diminishing, fortunately a free community edition coming out soon which should be fun to play around with.

Vipin Sachdeva of IBM

This was the quickest presentation ever. It was good to hear that IBM is embracing social businesses and doing so on a global scale but I wish he had discussed a little bit more about some of the projects they are working on.

John Baker of Moontoast

Interesting talk about value of analytics for social commerce with two new buzzwords, “Return on Fan” and “Optimized Return on Investment.” I’m looking forward to see what develops in the social commerce space. I imagine that buying through Facebook isn’t far off, but I wonder if Facebook, an existing e-commerce company like Shopify or an entirely new entrant will take the lead.

Lynn Cherny

This presentation, A Fast-and-Dirty Intro to NetworkX (and D3), was the real reason why I was interested in the event to begin with. Although I’m still relatively new to Python and D3, I love seeing practical applications because they always inspire me to work on projects of my own. Lynn’s presentation was extremely practical and I can’t wait to implement her process in a real world situation.

Her overarching goal was to show how she simplified the Infoviz VIZoSPHERE using Python, NetworkX and D3. Visualizing social networks has been a difficult challenge because of the amount of attributes that are simultaneously relevant. Lynn showed how an adjacency matrix, chord diagram or network graph can be used to better understand the visualization community on Twitter. After showing how key influencers on Twitter were identified, she added algorithmically detected community structures to the data using the Louvain method. It will be interesting see new applications of community detection algorithms going forward. Although marketing is the most obvious application, I wonder how they could be used in more meaningful ways, like disaster relieve or public health.

Although I’m very familiar with D3 and Python, I had never heard of NetworkX before. NetworkX is a Python library for social network and graph analysis and it looks extremely helpful and easy to use. Lynn was nice enough to send me her code and tasks such as reading in edgelists, calculating degree and eigenvector centrality, adding attributes to nodes and saving the output to json all seem very simple using NetworkX. The great news is that once all the influence measures have been calculated, D3 makes it really easy to visualize the json output in a meaningful way. I will definitely have to spend some more time learning more about eigenvalue algorithms in the future, but for now the basics should do fine.

If you’re interested in more of Lynn’s work, I highly recommend reading her blog or taking a look at her slideshare and delicious accounts.

John Verostek

John, the organizer, gave a talk about his attempts at finding relevant statistics about meet-up groups in Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston. He had some useful insights but seemed to be throttled by their API limit unfortunately. I liked his overview of using gephi and R to visualize his results though.

12:00am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZgwrGyNJzSmz

Filed under: meetup predictiveanalytics graphtheory

February 15, 2012

TiE Social Entrepreneurship

I attended a presentation tonight hosted by TiE Boston at MIT and thought I’d share my experience. TiE is my new favorite entrepreneurship organization in Boston and, after hearing Jeff Bussgang moderate the TiE VC Outlook Dinner 2012, I’ve made sure to attend all of their future events. The following is an overview of pitches by seven “social” entrepreneurs.

Pravin Chaturvedi on Mentorship

Pravin Chaturvedi, the Chairman & CEO of IndUS Pharmaceuticals, kicked off the event by telling a story about mentoring an young entrepreneur focused on education. He said that he was unsure about how he could help at first, given his background in biotechnology, but agreed to advise her anyway. After working with her over several months, she went on to win a business plan competition at Harvard. Pravin is a really nice guy and his story definitely illustrates how mentors can help, even when their experience may not seem relevant.

Nathan Bernard from AnagGenesis Impact

Nathan Bernard leads a business called AnaGenesis Impact that helps match students in India with companies seeking to expand internationally. He gave an interesting overview of his work with one of his first clients, a clean tech startup named Waste 2 Watts. He helped Waste 2 Watts find students to help them conduct market research to validate their business plan assumptions and projections. Nathan seemed very optimistic about his company and is looking forward to working with Waste 2 Watts again in the future.

William Dixon from Relief Labs

William Dixon identified a problem with controlling the use of internet bandwidth in the developing world while volunteering in Haiti. His company uses a low-cost home router to block wasteful web use and allow communities and companies to ensure that bandwidth is used for high-value activities (like sending medical x-rays to laboratories in the US).

Greg McHale from good2gether

Greg McHale’s good2gether sounds a lot like FourSquare for Social Entrepreneurship. His goal is to spread information about non-profit activities and social responsibility through a mobile social app. His launchrock page reads a little too much like the color.xxx pitch deck though, so I hope he can find a deeper message soon.

Antoinne Machal Cajigas from AltrUHelp

Similar to good2gether, AltrUHelp is basically Facebook for social entrepreneurs. He hopes to increase impact of social ventures by facilitating connections within the community. Sounds like some people might enjoy the ability to share stories and connect over past accomplishments, but this is just about as low of an impact as you can possibly have. Impressive press coverage so far though, and I’m sure the team learned a lot from MassChallenge.

Annie Ryu from Global Village Fruits Inc

Although fruit importation is just about the last think I would want to do, Annie seems to have her stuff together. I’ve never heard of jack fruit, but she claims the market is terribly underserved. She has a pretty well-thought-out Kickstarter page and has raised almost $3,500 as of this writing. I don’t really understand this application of Kickstarter, but more power to her.

Mark McCurdy from Scion Non-profit Staffing

Dangerously close to “LinkedIn for social entrepreneurship”, I felt like Mark used a few too many buzzwords (is it really a platform?) to describe what seems like a pet project of a large, for-profit executive search firm.

Ehren Foss from HelpAttack!

This seems like a good way for corporations to make donations more public but I think it will have limited real impact. The business will probably be successful because companies are stuck in a bit of a CSR arms-race and need better ways to promote what they do.

Final Takeaways

It was great to hear about what social entrepreneurs are doing currently in Boston but very disappointing to find out that most of these companies lacked true disruptive innovations at their core. The creation of sub-social networks to cater to people interested in social entrepreneurship is extremely counter-intuitive and feels very wasteful. Why not just let these people use prominent social networks and instead focus on building a product that would have real impact? By sequestering these users to a less-public service you’re only going to limit the value of the information they share. Ideally, people who acknowledge and publicize social responsibility should be able to reach as many people as possible.

Either way, good to see entrepreneurs attempting to validate their hypotheses and soliciting feedback from experienced professionals.