business

Guerilla Dining by brent

There are a few trends in the restaurant world that are really exciting me lately. As most people know opening and running a restaurant is expensive, time consuming, and often doesn't work long term. A few simpler approaches have gained traction that allow chefs and restauranteurs to test concepts and build an audience before committing to a costly physical location.

The Food Truck

The past few years in Los Angeles we've seen a total explosion in the quantity and variety of food trucks. The early success was the Kogi Taco Truck, Roy Choi's Korean inspired tacos. With the success of his truck, it was a natural step to open his own locations, Chego and Sunny Spot. There's more food trucks than can be easily listed here. A quick Google or this list on Yelp is a good start.

Pop-ups

Many pop-up locations pepper the LA landscape. These "underground restaurants" are usually invite only, or have such limited seating that you'll try for weeks to get in before actually attending. My favorite part about them is how social the experience is. Usually you're eating with 20 total strangers but the shift away from the standard restaurant environment makes it easier to socialize. Here's a list of the underground restaurants that have come across my inbox:

STEAM Carnival by brent

I'm thrilled to report that we've launched a high-tech carnival to inspire kids about science, technology, engineering, art, and math! It's called the STEAM Carnival and we're launching it using Kickstarter to raise initial funds and generate awareness. You can see our campaign here.

Please support our Kickstarter today and tell all your friends!

Thank you!

Update: The response has been tremendous and the press responded well too! The wonderful folks at GOOD were kind enough to publish an article here. We've also been covered in: VentureBeat, USA Today, All Things D, Time, NBC's Nightly Business Review (around minute 11:30), Techcrunch, Mashable, SingularityHub, SparkFun, Mtv, Read Write Web, SFGate, myFOXla, Huffington Post, The Next Web, IEEE Spectrum, LA Weekly, TechZulu, LA Business Journal, SoCal Tech, Geekmom, InsideHook, CNET, I Programmer, RISD News, Patch and The Real Stan Lee!

We were fortunate enough to present the carnival on stage at the 11th All Things D conference! You can see the video of our presentation here and the KatieCam post-show interview here

We just got back from Jason Calacanis' Launch Edu conference and I'm thrilled to report we won the Best Presentation award, the Audience Choice Award and (pending due diligence) Launch wants to invest! Woohoo! More details are here. EdSurge covered the event here.

Here's our intro video:

Company Naming Resources by brent

Naming companies is so difficult. The number of constraints a name must satisfy only seems to grow each year. Between the dearth of available domain names, acceptability in other languages and international markets you might go into, it's surprising we don't have more names like Zzyzx.
Here are some resources to help with the process:

Steps to profit by by brent

Step 1: Pick something you like.Step 2: Think of as many ways as possible to make it better, more efficient, more durable, cheaper, longer lasting, more entertaining et cetera. Step 3: Which solution from step 2 are your skills or connections the best fit for? Step 4: Find inexpensive way to put prototype in front of potential customers. Step 5: Note feedback from step 4 and iterate. Step 6: Profit. (Step 7: Contribute.)