Authentic Mediterranean Food in Arkansas

Katie and I just returned from a long weekend in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for my cousin’s wedding. Hot Springs is a small town about an hour outside of Little Rock, the state’s capital. You wouldn’t expect it to be a hotbed of international cuisine but, if our weekend was any indication, it most definitely is!

My mom’s sister married into a large family of Greek-Americans who still have strong ties to their ancestral culture. When children in this family are married, it is an excuse for a veritable feast of Greek food – and my cousin’s wedding was no exception! We had spanakopita, tiropita, lamb, and, of course, baklava. The wedding and reception were great fun – Katie even tried her hand at Greek folk dancing – but the best part was definitely the food!

The very next night my dad’s side of the family got together for another feast – this one Italian. Pepperoni arrostiti, fried zucchini, and my grandmother’s incomparable rigatoni with meat sauce (and a vegetarian version for Katie). Nonna may be gone, but she will always live on through her cooking – and through the [loud!] gatherings of all of her children and grandchildren.

Something I love about the US is how you find pockets of international ancestry and culture tucked away in all kinds of random places. Most of us are proud to be Americans, but we’re also proud of our roots – our delicious, delicious roots!

Congratulations to my cousin on her marriage and many thanks to her for providing a reason for us to dine so well all weekend!

World Cup in the USA

Four years have come and gone since the last World Cup, which I enjoyed in Switzerland. This is my first time really following the action in the US, which is – of course – a different experience. One side effect of having attended such a global school as IMD is that I have friends and classmates from almost every country represented in the Cup. This results in friendly rivalries popping up all over my Facebook feed during these few weeks of competition.

The upshot is that, even when the US loses, I hold no animosity toward the victors. For example, it is hard to stay mad at Germany after they beat the US 1-0 when some of my best IMD friends are German. And taking an anti-Belgium stance before tomorrow’s knockout match would be impossible in light of my Belgian classmate and professor / program director.

I suppose this is the intent of the World Cup: to foster friendly rivalries rather than riots and beatings. Much as the Olympics draws attention to more obscure (at least from the American perspective!) sports every four years, it is fun to see so many Americans getting swept up in World Cup fever. Here’s hoping for a strong US showing and for a good World Cup regardless of the outcome!

A Visit to OwlSpark

Last week I was in Houston and took advantage of the opportunity to spend some time at OwlSpark. OwlSpark is Rice University’s tech startup accelerator, providing funding, space, connections, and mentorship to budding Rice entrepreneurs. It actually began as a project in the lean startup course I taught during my tenure as EIR and I’m thrilled to see it taking off so well. This is its second year of operation and it was inspiring to meet this cohort’s eight teams.

I gave two talks (one on lessons learned from my own entrepreneurial journey, one on oral presentation skills) which I will post soon and also sat in on their first pitch practice. The OwlSpark team also posted a brief interview with me, the text of which follows below:

OwlSpark: You were an Entrepreneur in Residence at Rice and taught a project-based startup course. How would you describe Rice’s entrepreneurial environment today compared to before, and where do you see it in the coming years?

Bryan: When I was a student at Rice, there simply was no entrepreneurial environment. Even though it was the peak of the dot com boom, the number of students and faculty starting up companies was exceedingly small.
Today there is much more energy and visibility around entrepreneurship, which is a great trend. Organizations like OwlSpark, Rice Launch, and on-campus business competitions are creating several “entry points” into an entire stream of Rice entrepreneurship offerings. The next step is for Rice to become less insular, engaging not only the local Houston ecosystem but also entrepreneurial alumni around the world. Most people don’t realize that Silicon Valley was built on the backs of several Rice alumni (known in the Bay area as the “Rice Mafia”) and there are many other incredibly successful entrepreneurs, VCs, and corporate leaders elsewhere. We need to establish Rice as THE epicenter of entrepreneurship to draw those people back to campus and entice them to be resources for our next generation of entrepreneurs.

OwlSpark: In your blog “The Green Knight,” you wrote about preparing engineers “to be job makers, not job takers.” Similar perspectives have been gaining popularity lately. Why do you think this is such an important paradigm shift for engineers, and why do you think this is just starting to take hold now?

Bryan: A large percentage of job titles today simply didn’t exist 15 years ago and an even larger percentage won’t exist 15 years from now. We have a responsibility to prepare students not just for historically stable roles but also for a highly uncertain future in which those same roles might be performed by robots or even obsolete. Entrepreneurship is the art of capitalizing on – and even driving – the uncertain future, so entrepreneurial skillsets are highly relevant for addressing this challenge. Entrepreneurship is empowerment. Rice students should not be at the fatalistic mercy of the job market; they should be creating the job market.

OwlSpark: In what ways do you think an engineering education really prepares you for major entrepreneurial and leadership roles?

Bryan: In many ways the traditional engineering education does NOT prepare students for major entrepreneurial and leadership roles. Traditional engineering coursework features endless problem sets all leading individual students toward a single, provably correct, known answer. Entrepreneurship is exactly the opposite: entrepreneurs operate in an environment so complex that the “answer” is not only unknown, but also unknowable. Entrepreneurs *create* answers, test them quickly and cheaply for fit, and rapidly iterate to create better answers – and almost always in teams.

Rice’s George R. Brown’s School of Engineering has introduced a strong focus on collaborative design projects instead of individual problem sets in recent years. This type of multidisciplinary design is much more applicable to both entrepreneurship and leadership. Starting a company is essentially a design problem, but one with commercial and organizational design constraints instead of just functional and technical. The GRBSOE also recognizes that engineers rarely work in environments comprising exclusively engineers, so it is attempting to create more opportunities that transcend academic boundaries. For example, in the entrepreneurship course I taught, only 1/3 of students were engineers. This made for startup teams that much more closely modeled real entrepreneurial ventures.

OwlSpark: You focus on the clean tech and energy space. What does being an entrepreneur in that area entail that may be unique as compared to other industries?

Bryan: Both “cleantech” and “energy” are such broad terms encompassing so many different industries and market segments that it is hard to generalize about them. Still, one of the aspects I enjoy about this space is how incredibly impactful working in the energy industry is. Energy affects literally everything we see and touch and do. As Rice Nobel Laureate Dick Smalley was fond of saying, if we solve the energy challenge, we solve the next nine greatest challenges facing the world for free. As an entrepreneur working hard to have a positive impact on energy use, I find that that sense of making a meaningful impact helps me get through tough times.

OwlSpark: From a business perspective, if present-you could give one piece of advice to past-Bryan, what would it be?

Bryan: “Dear past-Bryan, work smarter, not harder.” When the going gets tough, my natural instinct is to put my head down and power through by working longer hours. However, I’ve now found that I’m most effective when I pull my head up and ask why the going is tough and – and whether there might be smarter ways to address the current challenge. Looking back at my career, there are probably several instances in which I would have been more successful (and better rested!) if I had taken this approach.

When to Listen to Investors

One of the best – and worst – aspects of being a startup founder is being inundated with a nearly constant stream of advice. Advice comes from everyone – friends, business partners, professors, customers, competitors, journalists, employees – but especially from investors. This makes sense as investors have a lot riding on the outcome of your venture.

Part of the art of entrepreneurship is knowing when to take the advice and when not to. I saw an article on this subject today and it resonated with me. Many startup investors have not started up companies themselves. It is important to be cautious with their advice as startups are not simply small versions of large companies. The techniques and decisions used to launch and rapidly scale a disruptive startup are different than those that would make sense in larger companies or businesses in more mature markets.

Even investors with startup experience may be biased by a different time, a different industry, or false attribution of success in previous ventures. But all these investors are [hopefully] smart, experienced, high-integrity people who are earnestly trying to help the founder be successful and they should all be heard. It falls on the entrepreneur to process all of their advice and make the ultimate decision.

At Smart Office Energy Solutions we have managed to bring on some very savvy investors with a lot of valuable advice to offer. Although we don’t always take 100% of the advice offered to us, these investors are a key asset and strategic advantage – and we’ll take every advantage we can get!

Entrepreneurship at Rice

As I wrapped up my role as the inaugural Entrepreneur In Residence at Rice, I was asked to summarize what we accomplished during my time there in this article, published in the trade journal of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. The article is on pages 29-31 of the journal but, for those who don’t wish to click through, following is just the text:

Preparing Engineers to Be Job Makers, Not Job Takers

The entrepreneurial spirit is an increasingly valuable asset in today’s economy. The same toolkit used to launch a business from scratch turns out to be quite applicable to larger, more established organizations as well. Mature energy companies and even
nonprofit or government bodies have just as much need as startup companies for ambitious employees who havethe ability to identify problems, listen
to customers/stakeholders, marshal resources, and inspire teams to create
efficient solutions.

The George R. Brown School of Engineering, part of Rice University in Houston, Texas, is tasked with preparing the next generation of engineers for careers in academia or industry. In fact many of the students could spend the majority of their professional lives working in the energy industry. However, it is difficult in a traditional classroom setting to imbue engineering students with the spirit of entrepreneurialism. In addition, there is a dearth of rigorous scientific research about entrepreneurship and its effective development. So, if entrepreneurialism is an increasingly important skill for engineering careers, how does a university prepare its students today for their careers of tomorrow?

As part of Rice’s vision for its second century of existence, the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL) was given the specific task of helping Rice engineers develop into inspiring leaders, exceptional team members, and bold entrepreneurs. RCEL’s approach to entrepreneurship development is based on three key elements:

1. A curriculum built on rigorous academic research on entrepreneurship.
Myriad authors, speakers, and bloggers profess they have unlocked the formula for entrepreneurial success. However, the evidence presented is largely anecdotal, and more often than not using their formulas only demonstrates their ineffectiveness. RCEL’s entrepreneurship curriculum uses concepts from “effectuation,” which the Society for Effectual Action (SEA) touts on its website as being “a logic of thinking, discovered through scientific research, used by expert entrepreneurs to build successful ventures.” The members of SEA have created a body of research spanning multiple academic institutions and industry partners around
the world.

2. Programming that is experiential in nature.
Students are required to practice entrepreneurship rather than just study it. This requires interaction with real-world entrepreneurs, not just with academic faculty.

3. Focus on the intersection between economic value and social value—called “transformational entrepreneurship.”
Students succeed in RCEL’s entrepreneurship curriculum by attempting to develop
entrepreneurial opportunities that don’t just make money but also provide positive societal value.

To implement these elements, RCEL has taken a three-pronged approach: curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular.

Curricular
The curricular approach is based on the classic academic model in which students take courses offered by faculty. Students complete assignments, and receive course credit and a grade. Rice offers several curricular entrepreneurship courses, ranging from those that are industry-specific to those broadly scoped in nature and from those that provide a light exploration of entrepreneurship to those that are deep experiential dives.

RCEL’s most significant “deep-dive” entrepreneurship course, ENGI 540, is a lean startup course in which students must deliver a business—not a business plan—by the end of the semester. This course attracts students from all disciplines, from engineering to business to architecture to the liberal arts, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The number of male and female students is about equal, and
students come from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, cultures, and continents. Students must perform a lot of work before being accepted into ENGI 540, including an initial application during the semester before enrollment and a significant amount of preparatory homework the summer before the semester begins.

The requirement to perform preparatory work serves two purposes:
It weeds out the least committed students, and it ensures that students are ready to hit the ground running on the first day of class. In essence, students spend the summer developing and refining multiple startup ideas. They arrive on the first day of class ready to pitch their ideas to their classmates.

During the first day of class, students self-organize into startup teams that will focus on the venture ideas they found most promising. No single-student teams are allowed; if a student fails to compel students to join his or her venture, the venture is dead. This closely models the real startup world in which very few lone founders make it very far. The self-organizing policy also creates a free market in the class for talent as teams with skill gaps try to entice key students to join their cause. The breadth of student disciplines and backgrounds ensures that engineering students gain experience working in highly diverse teams—again modeling the real startup world.

The ENGI 540 semester comprises 13 weekly cycles of startup development, during which the students adopt the lean startup mantra of “getting out of the building” to gather feedback from real customers. Each week students must present at the beginning of class what they accomplished and what they learned (rather than just what they did) during the previous week.

The aspect of ENGI 540 with which Rice students struggle the most is the absence of a clear grading rubric. Since they first set foot on campus, Rice students have been optimizing their efforts around a causal grading rubric (“If you do x, y, and z, then you
will get an A”). However, predictable causality has no place in the world of entrepreneurship. We deliberately keep our grading methodology concealed from the students in order to increase their comfort level under conditions of heightened uncertainty—a critical skill for entrepreneurs.

At the end of the semester, student teams pitch their ventures to evaluators—an audience of venture capitalists, angel investors, corporate development officers, academic leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Each evaluator is given a finite amount of virtual currency to invest in as many or as few ventures as he or she sees fit. RCEL uses this investment distribution as the primary determiner of student grades. The final pitch isn’t the first time evaluators have heard about the student ventures. Each evaluator has been introduced to the class over the course of the semester as a potential mentor and network connector. Most evaluators work closely with student teams for months so they can make a much more informed final investment decision than if they had just heard a pitch for the first time.

Co-Curricular
This approach supplements nonentrepreneurial academic curricula with entrepreneurial practicum. There is a lot of intellectual property being developed in every lab and every classroom across the Rice campus every day. However, the faculty leading those labs and classes often lack the entrepreneurial expertise to help students commercialize their work.

Faculty now have the option of adding an entrepreneurship module to each of their courses. In this entrepreneurship module, RCEL entrepreneurship faculty present several guest lectures on entrepreneurship and work closely with the students outside class time to ensure that they take commercial opportunities into consideration when pursuing their work in the lab.

For example, in a course titled BIOE 428 (Bio-MEMS [microeletromechanical
systems] and medical microdevices), several student teams designed and developed nanoscale biosensors. Through the course’s entrepreneurship module, they identified, sized, and validated target markets, and honed in on some applications for their inventions—one of which ultimately became the basis for a startup company.

Extracurricular
RCEL also provides entrepreneurial support that is completely unrelated to academic coursework. Last summer, RCEL, in partnership with the Rice Alliance for Technology
and Entrepreneurship, launched OwlSpark, an on-campus technology startup accelerator for Rice entrepreneurs. OwlSpark—itself a startup that started in ENGI
540—provides funding, space, and mentorship for Rice’s most innovative startup ideas.

There are several student entrepreneurship organizations RCEL supports and sponsors. Additionally, RCEL regularly brings entrepreneurs and investors on campus where they hold “open office hours” for students, faculty, staff, and alumni seeking entrepreneurship advice.

Results
How will we know if our efforts are successful? How can we measure the efficacy of our actions? Most organizations like RCEL choose relatively simplistic entrepreneurship measures—such as number of startups launched or total dollar amount raised. However, these metrics gauge activity levels, not results.

Academic institutions, in particular, are prone to use metrics such asthe number of students enrolled in entrepreneurship courses. Even if we included all the students
impacted by the co-curricular and extracurricular entrepreneurship offerings at Rice, we would still be measuring means to ends and learning nothing about our efficacy in achieving those ends. In startup jargon, these are referred to as “vanity metrics”
because they look pretty but, at best, offer no real insight and, at worst, give a false sense of confidence that leads to complacency.

It will probably be years before we can really tell if RCEL’s efforts have been effective. In the meantime, however, we have turned to a tool gaining significant use in the marketing industry: Net Promoter Score (NPS). Using an extremely simple question—“How likely would you be to recommend Product X to your peer group?”—and a rating system based on a scale from 0 to 10, the team behind NPS has had success segmenting customers into Promoters (9s and 10s), Passives (7s and 8s), and Detractors (0 through 6).

NPS is the percentage of a product’s customers who are Promoters less the percentage who are Detractors and is scored on a scale from -100 to 100. An organization’s goal is to improve the NPS of its product or service relative to its competitors’ scores and/or relative to its historical scores.

In 2012, RCEL began using the NPS system to gauge the perceptions of its entrepreneurship constituents: Rice students, faculty/staff, alumni, entrepreneurs, investors, and even people with no Rice affiliation whatsoever. Our hypothesis was that, if we were effective in our efforts to improve entrepreneurship at Rice, that would be reflected in an increase in our entrepreneurship NPS.

Over 12 months we conducted five NPS assessments asking, “How likely would you be to recommend Rice for entrepreneurship to your fellow [peer group members]?”

In 1 year the three-period moving average of Rice’s entrepreneurship NPS improved overall by 9 points. It improved most significantly with on-campus constituents (students, faculty, and staff) but also improved consistently among alumni, entrepreneurs, and the community at large.

There is no NPS industry benchmark for entrepreneurship at academic institutions; however, we interpret these relative score increases as an indicator that RCEL is having a positive impact on entrepreneurship at Rice.

While we have launched dozens of startups since RCEL began its entrepreneurship efforts, we should be clear that our goal is not for students to drop out of college to launch what they hope might be the next Microsoft or Facebook.

We do believe, however, that many of the hardest and most worthy problems
entrepreneurship can address require entrepreneurs to have spent significant
time in the “real” world. Industries as complex as energy, aerospace, and healthcare need entrepreneurs who have been to the front lines and experienced their industry’s actual, functioning state of the art.

Our hope is that, by preparing students today to take the problem solving and design skills they hone in their engineering coursework and focus them on engineering startup companies, they will be better equipped to make significant contributions tomorrow as entrepreneurial founders, commercialization-oriented academics, and “intrapraneurs” effectively solving meaningful problems within established corporations.

Startups Should Never Pay to Pitch

Several times a week my startup is solicited to participate in pay-to-pitch events at which we are promised access to a smorgasbord of wealthy, capable investors who are just chomping at the bit to invest in companies like mine. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it is.

This has been covered by many other posts, such as from this startup lawyer and from this angel investor, but here is my $0.02 to add as well.

These pay-to-pitch scams start off innocently enough. There is often no mention of a fee up front. Then, if you “apply” (a classic sales/manipulation trick: making YOU apply to THEM so that you want them to take your money in order for you not to feel rejected), you make it to the “next round,” and then they casually drop the bomb that, oh by the way, there will be a fee of several thousand dollars to present.

If you object, it is often glossed over as, “We have to charge the fee to filter out the startups that aren’t serious.” I see, because the “application process” I’ve been going through doesn’t help you filter any startups out? What exactly is the application process for then? Oh, right, see the above note about the sales technique!

Imagine that: the hoards of rich investors want the cash-poor startups to pay substantial fees just for the right to talk to them – makes sense, right?? Seriously, no investor worth their salt needs a forum of curated startup presentations to get access to dealflow. Likewise, no entrepreneur worth their salt needs to pay to have access to a group of such C-list [non-]investors. Or put another way: if investors don’t even see enough value in the event to fund it completely, how likely do you think they will be to invest in the presenting companies? The result is an event consisting of lackluster startups, lackluster investors, and very, very little actual investment activity.

Think about it: how many successful startups do you know whose story starts with, “Well we had this game changing idea and a great team but we were so unresourceful that we had to pay just to get access to some potential investors?” Google? Facebook? PayPal? Nest? Exactly.

The practice of charging entrepreneurs to present is, at best, naive on the parts of the angel groups and, at worst, straight up predatory. I have to admit that, when I first started Smart OES and was raising capital for the first time in my life, I fell prey to one of these events. Fortunately it was a relatively small fee and the damage was minimal.

Of the nearly $1M of angel capital my startup has raised, not a dime of it has come from events like that. It has come from hustling and networking, which are key entrepreneurial skillsets. My advice to entrepreneurs: forget the pay-to-pitch scams. If you’re having a hard time raising money, get out and start networking or, though it may be challenging, take a look in the mirror and evaluate why the people you are pitching aren’t buying in.

The Vibram Five Fingers Lawsuit

Last month it was reported that Vibram, the company that makes the Five Fingers minimalist footwear in which I run, decided to settle a class action lawsuit against it rather than take it to trial. Many of my Facebook friends posted incendiary, sensational articles about it on my wall as if to say, “I told you so,” about my goofy shoes.

The lawsuit alleges that Vibram used deceptive marketing messages to imply health benefits that would come from wearing their product and that those health benefits were not proven to exist. In settling the lawsuit, Vibram has not admitted guilt; rather it has admitted that going to trial would probably cost substantially more than the $3.75M settlement.

Imagine that: a marketing message may have its validity disputed. You might as well sue Axe body spray for not delivering on its promise of attracting hoards of attractive girls every time you use it – or every beer company ever for not magically transporting the consumer to Rocky Mountain streams with his best buds.

For a pretty fair and balanced assessment of the lawsuit, the research that is and isn’t behind it, and its implications, see this post from The Science of Sport:

The Vibram lawsuit, barefoot running and science perspectives _ The Science of Sport

As for me, I’m planning to collect my settlement refund, viewing it as a discount on future Vibram purchases!

Moving Pains

For 10 months I have been meaning to write about our move from Houston to Chapel Hill, which was filled with both [surprising] highs and [expected] lows.

As always seems to be the case, we A. were moving during the hottest, most miserable part of the year, and B. found ourselves with way too much stuff. We couldn’t do much about A but we spent months addressing B by pruning our inventory of clothes, furniture, and various things we hadn’t used in years. We took car load after car load of donations to Goodwill but, when it came time to start packing, we were astounded by how much stuff we still had.

When I lived in Switzerland, I became very enamored of my asset-light lifestyle. Having few things with me made it very easy to move from one place to another (especially including back to the US!) and I rarely devoted any brain cycles to my stuff or anything related to it. It was freeing!

Back in the US I have clearly done a worse job of acquiring things, but at least this move was a good impetus to reduce the collection substantially.

We decided to hire professionals for the move. It would cost more than doing it ourselves, but we thought it would be worth it.

Our move started off on the wrong foot, however, when the company we had hired showed up with a truck that was too small. As a consequence, they had to wait some hours for a bigger truck to show up and then completely unload the smaller one, reloading the items onto the new truck.

They also told us it would cost more since we had more stuff than they had estimated. There is a lesson learned here: only hire movers who actually come out to your house to inventory your items, not ones who give you a low ball estimate over the phone with every intention of upping the price on you, knowing that you have to move out on a deadline.

For weeks leading up to the move we had been watching Season 4 of Arrested Development with some good friends. We would get together in the evening, power our way through a few episodes, and feast on frozen, chocolate-dipped bananas that were absolutely divine. We were just a couple of episodes away from finishing the season, so we had intended to head over to their house for one last hurrah once the movers were done.

Unfortunately the movers took longer and longer, and finally we had to notify our friends that there was no realistic way that we would be done overseeing the movers until way past everyone’s bedtime. Between the wrenches in the gears with the movers and not getting to say our goodbyes as planned, we were bummed. Imagine our surprise, then, when those friends showed up at our door unannounced, delivering frozen bananas, champagne, and good cheer! Talk about turning our frowns upside down!

Eventually the movers finished (Not quite; they actually had to come back in the morning for a few more things that they hadn’t loaded.) and we spent the night at a friend’s house before hitting the road ourselves. We broke up the trip by stopping to spend a couple of days in my childhood home of Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville has changed a great deal, but there was still plenty of nostalgia to be had.

The drama with the movers wasn’t over, though, as they called to increase the price on us again. Now that they had many of our worldly possession on their truck, they were holding them hostage and were clearly in a powerful negotiating position. It was straight up extortion. We felt betrayed by the movers and angry at ourselves for naively getting ourselves into such a situation.

Fortunately, it turns out that we are not the first victims of such a scam. Mover scams are apparently so common that there is an entire office (The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) within the Department of Transportation devoted to protecting consumers from such fraudulent behavior on interstate moves.

We did a little research, talked with a representative of the FMCSA just to confirm that we were in the right, and then talked tough on our next call with the movers. The person on the other end of the line changed his tune pretty quickly when Katie started dropping terms like “federal fraud charges” and, wouldn’t you know it, they agreed to deliver our goods on time for the price agreed to in their binding quote.

At the end of the day our goods arrived, largely unscathed, and we paid the agreed upon price. However, for every one of us who fights back, I wonder how many families give in to the demands – very many, I would guess. Ugh, I feel dirty just having dealt with them.

The irony of the situation is that we actually have a good friend who runs an interstate moving company. We completely forgot about that when we went out shopping for quotes and, in hindsight, would obviously have preferred to deal with a trusted (and trustworthy) business owner.

With 10 months of distance from the move, it no longer seems as painful. At the time, however, it was pretty stressful – and moves are already stressful enough without piling more on top! Let our experience be valuable for you, though: if you are considering a major move, feel free to reach out to me to learn more from our move and I would be glad to put you in touch with my friend who owns the good moving company!

Bragging About My Wife

Although I usually devote this blog to bragging about myself, I must take this opportunity to brag about my wife. Yesterday Katie was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the first fellowship for which she ever applied. Katie was one of 2,000 awardees selected from more than 14,000 applications – huzzah!

I have been very excited to support Katie in her major career move to go “back to school” for her PhD. This is the most enthusiastic I have seen her be about her work since I have known her. Applying for programs and grants and fellowships comes with a risk of rejection and failure. No stranger to failure myself, I would love Katie just as much even if she didn’t get into the top schools, receive the top awards, or have her articles published in the top journals. Over the course of an entire career, those types of failures are bound to happen. However, she is certainly off to a great start – accepted at top anthropology programs, top marks in her courses, and now winning research fellowships – and it is very rewarding to see that others value the work she is doing, too.

It is no secret that I married “up” with Katie. Hopefully I can keep up with her contributions to Team KJBGH!

Fittest Entrepreneur

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fittest [entrepreneur] of them all . . . ? I am! At least according to the Houston Fittest Entrepreneur Challenge, which was organized by Fit Company, a nonprofit seeking to promote health among business professionals. There were several competitor categories: entrepreneurs, execs, doctors, lawyers, and company teams. All competitors descended on the Houston Dynamo practice facility Sunday, February 23, to compete for our respective category titles.

The competition consisted of three courses, with about 10 minutes of recovery time between each. The first course comprised individual strength exercises, the second course offered several obstacles to overcome, and the third course was a 5k run on the premises. The objective was to finish each event in each course as quickly as possible. Each competitor would then be given a ranking for each event and the best average ranking across all three courses would win the category.

I arrived in Houston Saturday after a business trip to Guatemala (more on that in a subsequent post), but I took things easy Saturday evening and was well rested for the contest Sunday morning. In a touching show of support, I was joined by an entourage of two of my former Rice entrepreneurship students and one of my best friends (who was a real trooper battling a significant hangover!). As I am much more of a team sport guy than an individual sport guy, I found these “teammates” to add a great deal to my motivation.

My students brought a sign to cheer me on. They didn’t know whether to put #23 (my high school football number) or #42 (my Rice football number) on it, so they brought stick-on numbers for 4, 2, and 3 to cover both possibilities. When I picked up my race bib, I was astounded to see that I was competitor #423! As if I needed any more motivation, this was surely a harbinger of good things to come.

I ran in the last heat of the day, which started at 11:00 AM. This gave me the advantage of a little extra warmup time and more of a chance to plan for the courses now that I knew what they contained. When we finally got started, though, most of my planning went right out the window!

The first event was 30 bodyweight inverted rows on a suspension trainer. I finished in 28 seconds, #4 among men in that event. Some people finished closer to 20 seconds, which I don’t understand unless they weren’t fully extending their arms. The second event was 40 plyo box step-ups while carrying a 25-lb sandbell. I wasn’t familiar with sandbells before this event, but they’re pretty cool: vary malleable, much harder to deal with than a dumbbell of the same weight, but softer and less bouncy than a medicine ball. I tried to keep an even pace with the step-ups and finished in 1:14, #9 in that event.

The third event was 40 chest-to-the-ground push-ups, which I finished in 29 seconds, a tie for #4. The fourth event was 40 35-lb kettlebell swings, which I finished in 52 seconds, #6. The fifth event was 40 arms-behind-your-head to fingers-past-your-toes sit-ups. I slowed down a bit on this event, finishing in 1:18, #12. Individually none of the events were too taxing, but stringing them all together with only 30 seconds of rest between each was taking its toll.

The sixth event was 20 burpees, which I finished in 45 seconds, #4. The seventh and final event of this course was a two-minute plank hold. I didn’t even make it a full minute, tapping out at 52 seconds. I normally hold a plank easily but my hip flexors were so smoked from the sit-ups and burpees that I just couldn’t keep it together. I thought at the time that I might have lost the contest right there but it turns out that other people struggled too and I finished #8 in that event.

Despite bombing the final event, I still finished the first course #8 overall and #1 among entrepreneurs. I wish I had known that then because I was seriously contemplating not finishing the competition. Although the temperature was only in the mid-70s F, the humidity was 90+% and it was becoming abundantly clear that I was no longer in Houston shape! Suddenly competing in the last heat of the day didn’t seem like such a good idea . . . Fortunately my team got me water and helped me recover in time to begin the second course.

The first event of the second course was a sequence of agility drills: cones, ropes, ladders, hurdles, etc. Light-headed as I was, I took these pretty conservatively but still finished in 1:23, #4. The second event required me to toss a 15-lb sandbell back and forth over a high barrier 10 times before running suicide sprints. I finished in 60 seconds, #9.

The third event began with slamming a 15-lb sandbell into the ground 20 times before a long out-and-back bear crawl. Bear crawl always slows me down, so I finished this event in 1:16, #12. The fourth event required me to start in a push-up position and then pull a 10-ft sandrope all the way under my body with one arm. And then pull it back again with the other arm. 10 times. Then drag the 30-lb rope a distance, pick up a 25-lb sandbell, and reverse toss it out the rest of the distance and back before finally dragging the sandrope back to the start. This was murder! Apparently it only took me 1:12, but it felt like much longer. #7.

The fifth and final event of the second course was a simple out-and-back sprint with a 50-lb sandbell over the shoulder. I finished in 17 seconds, #4. In the end I finished the second course #8 overall and #2 among entrepreneurs. Interestingly, I was starting to regain my energy, though, so I was feeling good heading into the final 5k.

Knowing that I was glycogen-depleted already, I decided to start off easy in the 5k and then speed up if it felt OK. One of my students actually hopped in and ran with me, which helped. My first km was 4:39 and, despite the high-in-the-sky sun, my heart rate was only 166, which is very safely manageable for me. My pacer and I were passing people and not being passed so it didn’t seem like it would be necessary to press too much. That pace felt good, so I finished the second and third km at 4:42 and 4:39 respectively at the same steady heart rate.

As I was feeling good, I picked it up just a little bit in the fourth km, finishing in 4:36 at 171 heart rate – just on the other side of anaerobic. I still had plenty of gas in the tank for the final km, which I completed at a 4:28 pace before the final sprint. My final time was 21:54 – which would be very slow for me on a normal 5k but isn’t so bad considering how exhausted I was – the #3 time of the day and first among entrepreneurs.

Combining my three course rankings (8, 8, and 3), I finished second overall and first among entrepreneurs. Huzzah! I was pleased with my balanced performance too. Looking at the results, it seems that most competitors were “specialists.” Those who did really well on the first course did really poorly on the last course and vice versa. So, all in all, not bad for an old fart who’s about to turn a year older in just a couple of days!

I’m really glad to have participated in this event. FitCompany’s mission is a worthy one, as too many people sacrifice health for their professional lives. The two are not mutually exclusive and do not require tradeoffs. In fact, I find that the healthier I am, the higher performance I have in my professional life.

I’m also glad I participated in this event because this, combined with the Pump n’ Run event earlier in February (I took second place at a 5k in which they subtracted 30 seconds for each rep of bench press bodyweight – it’s probably the only chance I’ll ever have at running a negative time!), has me hooked on multidisciplinary competitive events. I’m never going to run the world’s fastest 5k, nor am I going to set a world record in weight lifting, but putting those types of competitions together tests a much more balanced type of fitness. I’m a fan.