Jim gives preparation tips and tricks when giving a core conversation speech at SXSW, or at your next meeting.

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$1,200 in 10 minutes

I made $1,200 within the first 10 minutes of being an entrepreneur.

How did I do that? Well, it wasn’t through marketing or selling a product or closing a deal. On November 1, 2011 I was called into a director’s office and was told my position had been eliminated. Although I was a bit shocked at the sudden layoff, I was actually pretty thrilled at the prospect of starting my own business.

I walked back to my desk, checked my personal email, and sitting in my inbox was an invitation to speak at SXSW 2012. I still wanted to go to the conference, but obviously my company – now my former company – wasn’t going to pay for it.

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Online learning has been around for some time, but Jim is seeing a new resurgence.

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About that college degree…

Will your son or daughter go to college?

I’m not asking if they are smart enough to get INTO college, or if you’ll be able to afford the tuition. I am putting the emphasis on a certain word.

Will your son or daughter GO to college?

And by that I mean, in 10 or 20 years, will the concept of leaving home and living in a dorm and “going off to college” with other students for 4 years still exist?

Three trends that are happening right now

1) The cost of college continues to escalate at an alarming rate, I saw a great infographic showing it is about 4 times the rate of what the housing bubble was doing

2) The return on investment for the skills learned for that amount of money continues to get murky, as recent graduates aren’t assured jobs, students are graduating with enormous debt, and the skills taught in college don’t always keep up with what is needed in the real world.

3) The quality of alternate forms of education, along with the technology behind it, keeps improving dramatically

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Jim interviews Nate Cooper to find out advice on how to do a successful project on Kickstarter.com

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Kicking things off

Over the past few years a completely new way of raising money for funds has burst onto the scene, giving inspiration — and much needed cash — to artists and dreamers to fund their projects. Still, there’s an art to doing things right, as more than half of all kickstarter projects fail.

So who better to learn some tips and tricks from than someone that has been there, who not only successfully funded a project, but scored a book deal in the process. This week I sit down with my Reboot Workshop business partner Nate Cooper to talk about the crowdfunding service.

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Jim has returned from the World Domination Summit conference. Here’s what he learned.

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“I went through a phase of self-employment evangelism, encouraging everyone I knew, or didn’t know, to work for themselves, until I learned that not only was it unrealistic since some people like working as an employee, it was downright obnoxious. So although I have toned it down over the years, my zeal for entrepreneurship and my love of working for myself has never waned.”

This was from Pamela Slim, author of the book Escape from Cubicle Nation, and I am reminding myself of this for the second time. The first time around was in the 2 months following my departure from the corporate world, when I was drinking Malbec and eating steak while working remotely from Buenos Aires. Oh my, what a life. Everyone should be doing this. So I tried to scale back the bragging as much as I could. What’s awesome is I got to meet Pam in person, and she is amazing.

I am now trying to constrain myself in the aftermath of a conference called The World Domination Summit. I had unrealistically high expectations for this gathering, and incredibly, they were exceeded ten-fold.

What is WDS? It is a conference in Portland, OR with the tagline of “Leading a remarkable life in a conventional world,” put together by author, entrepreneur, and traveler Chris Guillebeau. I reviewed his book The $100 Startup and interviewed him in Episode 186 so check that out.

Here are 5 things I learned:

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Photo above: The sold-out crowd at the premier Reboot Workshop Conference.

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Jim sits down with business partner Nate Cooper to talk about how they created, planned, and got sponsorship for a successful conference in less than 60 days.

Below are the highlights from our conversation. Listen to the audio to get the entire lowdown.

In this podcast we answer the question:
What the heck were Jim and Nate thinking planning a huge conference with no experience?

We break down the steps as follows:

1. Choose the right business partner
Hear the back story of how Jim and Nate connected. Working with the right business partner can make all the difference in the world. We were connected through two different mutual friends, and found ourselves in a position to help each other out.

- Nate wanted to learn more about book publishing.
- I wanted to pick his brain about entrepreneurship.
- We both wanted to quickly get to work on something awesome that would help people and maybe make a little money.

While Nate had a background running events at Apple, and I’ve run large events at SXSW and well, everything from fraternity parties to impromptu roofdeck concerts in Manhattan, we just knew that we could pull it off.

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