Dear Professor Richards,
Sorry I haven’t been to class (Creating New Ventures 101) in a while. Something has kind of come up. The bad news is that you probably won’t see me in class anymore. The good news: Classmates, Ben Turley, Kirk Ouimet, and I got together for a fun little project. We call it Scan. Scan just got funded.
Our investors are real incredible people. We didn’t realize this at first, but a lot of people know them and although it turns out they’re basically celebrities, to us they’re still the sincere and brilliant people that have generously brought their experience and expertise to join the Scan team.
Also, we moved to San Francisco. Everyone here has been incredibly nice. We were feeling like pretty big hot shots in Utah until we moved to Silicon Valley. Ha. We thought we were pretty legit. We’re not legit. These folks are legit. So many amazing entrepreneurs and companies out here for us to look up to and learn from. Time to work harder.
Once we got funded, Kirk and I tried to talk Ben into buying something really expensive. Not his style. But we did grow our team. The Scan team has now grown into a small but highly skilled group of designers and developers. They’re my mini all-star team. You can’t find a nicer group. So smart, so hard working, and so talented. SF is going to go wild poaching such talent ; )
You can find articles about our funding online here here here n’ here n’ here a little bit. People warned me that it would be tough working with journalists. True and not true. There were a few specific writers that I had total reader-crushes on. They were amazingly hard to get a hold of, but sure enough, they were worth every second of effort. One had won me over with his strong sense of value and user-experience. To hear him compliment our product is like Michael Jordan telling me I have a sweet jump shot. HUGE. Another, I had the honor of meeting in person. She’s as beautiful in person as her writing. She has a real unspoken knack for trends.
As you can see Professor Richards, like you, we have had amazing support join us in creating Scan into something special, especially from close friends and family. We’re sincerely grateful. We humbly realize the opportunity before us and our responsibility to work our very hardest. Uncomfortably hard. “For comfort never was happiness”. – LG Neville
We’ll be sure to post stories to our blog along the way. We’ll probably backtrack a little too and share some of the fun stories that got us here. So, Professor Richards, it looks like I won’t be turning in that homework assignment…ever. For this I thank you.
One last thing:
Please don’t tell my parents.
