We had a longer than usual session this morning with a lot of good conversation. Two first time visitors were
- Peter Ackerson from Revoluminary (http://www.revoluminary.com/)
- Sara Hassani, a visiting scholar at Stanford studying entrepreneur relations and negotiations with VC’s
Revoluminary is an interesting new service that offers integrated voice, video, and whiteboard for one on one instruction. From their “How it Works” (href=”http://www.revoluminary.com/howitworks.php) page
- How Revoluminary Works: Revoluminary helps connect instructors and students by providing a directory of available classes, easy scheduling and payment collection, clear instructor ratings, and an easy to use online classroom with interactive video. Revoluminary members can sign up for classes they want at a time that is convenient, as well as creating their own classes and setting their own prices and hours of availability.
- How Revoluminary Pays: Revoluminary charges students using secure google checkout system to collect the instructors fees and the Revoluminary network fee (a small fee to cover the cost of overhead, bandwidth and credit card fees). Every two weeks, Revoluminary sends the fees collected by each instructor to their paypal account.
Sara Hassani dropped by to help get oriented to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial scene. We did a little brainstorming on some books that might help her get oriented and came up with four:
- Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely
- Regional Advantage by Anna Lee Saxenian
- Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region by Martin Kenney
- Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson (really more about the dotcom Bubble, but still has a number of interesting profiles)
Sara is interested in talking to entrepreneurs who have gone through the VC funding process for her latest research and can be reached at hassani@stanford.edu
Updated Aug-17-09: Revoluminary site appears to be shut down. I have removed links to www.revoluminary.com