Rajat Bhageria's Blog, page 2

Here’s How to Launch A Product Without Spending a Dime

Note: This post was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Entrepreneurs

This is the second article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created a non-profit commercializing a product that helps the visually impaired recognize what they are looking at. Check out the first article here.

After building the first prototype of ThirdEye (see a demo at ThirdEyeGlass.com) over a weekend at a hackathon, we had tested it with several visually impaired people at the National Federation of the Blind. The next step was to commercialize it.

Learning How to Run a Business 

Of course, as students with very little “real world” business experience, we had no idea how to go forward and actually bring our product to market. Having very few contacts with successful entrepreneurs, for the next few weeks we lived on our school’s alumni directory. Whenever we found anyone–entrepreneurs, founders, medical personnel, CEOs, friends, and investors–we would pitch them and ask for advice on how to go forward. Almost all agreed to have a quick call. After all, who doesn’t like to talk about himself and his experiences?

Other times, I would directly ask alumni from my school for investment.

So what do you do? 

“My team is building ThirdEye, a product that empowers the blind by helping them recognize what they are looking at.”

How does it work?

“Well let me show you!”

I would put on Glass, say, “Okay Glass, recognize this,” and within a few seconds a computerized voice would say “white iPhone 5s.”

“My team is building ThirdEye, a product that empowers the blind by helping them recognize what they are looking at.”

How does it work?

“Well let me show you!”

I would put on Glass, say, “Okay Glass, recognize this,” and within a few seconds a computerized voice would say “white iPhone 5s.”

That’s exactly what we wanted. My job became to decipher the feedback, combine ideas, throw out most of the suggestions, and then work with my team to implement the best ideas.

Simply asking successful founders who graduated from my university for guidance allowed us to save both time and money that we would have had to spend learning via traditional methods. Plus, I was indirectly able to meet and establish relationships with some of the most successful entrepreneurs around the world.

Applying Theory to Practice

We had one big advantage because we were in college: we didn’t have any particular need to fundraise. After all, we were building the product ourselves, the product itself cost basically nothing to use, we didn’t need to pay ourselves, and we were already living and paying for food because of school. Our opportunity costs were basically zero and we knew that college was one of the best times to work on a startup.

Life became a cycle. Get up at 8. Go to classes in the morning. Hold phone meetings between classes. Apply to competitions and grants afterwards. Talk to advisers. Work on homework (a little). Have dinner with a more experienced entrepreneur. Attend school or startup events. Go to the gym. Read business books. Sleep at 3 AM.

But it didn’t feel like work. We were learning so much about everything–how to talk to people, how to work with people, how to influence people, accounting and finance, how to become a better software developer, the legal aspects of entrepreneurship, how to work with the media, how to write a business plan, how to talk to customers, how to research competition, how to pitch to investors, how markets work, how to analyze companies, and how to publicly speak–that it felt like an opportunity.

“Failing” In the Public’s Eyes Only to Revitalize Our Operations

Early in 2015, we were right on development schedule when news came out that Google was apparently shutting down Glass. Almost instantly, everyone assumed that ThirdEye was done.

In fact, the Google Glass delay became one of our biggest assets. We knew that Google would be developing a new consumer version of Glass later next year. But now, since everyone thought we had “failed,” we didn’t have any pressures from the outside to launch soon. For the next half year, we decided to reduce our dependence on Glass altogether and focus on porting our app onto iOS and Android.

Not only would this allow users to download the app right on their phones to use the product for free, but we could launch sooner and distribution/scaling would be significantly easier.

Building A Product We Didn’t Know How to Build 

The question became how do you build the app on iOS and Android? We had all done software development before starting the company, but none of us had ever built an app before–let alone publish it for thousands of people to use it on an everyday basis.

Still, rather than paying someone else to do it, we decided to stay lean and just learn ourselves. After all, the skills would come in handy later regardless of whether ThirdEye was successful.

Indeed, while I and a couple newer team members were hustling on the business front, the other original co-founders–Ben Sandler and Joe Cappadona–were hustling through Stack Overflow and learning software development on the go while building the mobile apps.

Despite the fairly simple nature of the application though, “things that were easy to program into the Glass app, like taking a picture and storing it on the device, were not as straightforward on iOS. I had to scrap several different versions of the app simply because my code wouldn’t work and I had no idea why; it wasn’t until several months after the initial deadline I had set that I finally managed to finish a working prototype” says Joe.

For a stretch, nothing seemed to work. We missed deadlines because we were too ambitious about getting newer iterations of our product to market as soon as possible (not to mention having to deal with school as well).

The hardest part however was creating an intuitive experience on mobile. Since we were targeting visually impaired people–as opposed to completely blind people–we knew that members of our target audience would be able to see and touch “blobs” in front of them, and thus would be able to point their phone camera at the blob. But how do you design the best interface for that?

Rather than hiring and paying videographers, product designers, and web designers, we just decided to teach ourselves the basics of design. We learned Photoshop ourselves to create a logo and the UI/UX, learned frontend and backend web development to build our website, and learned Final Cut Pro to create a video. Why pay people when you can learn useful skills yourself?

After testing both platforms with visually impaired people, we finally had a product that we knew the market wanted.

Hustling Through The Other Aspects of Launch 

Our goal became to leverage every penny of the absurd tuition we were paying to even go to college. For example, rather than paying thousands of dollars to do additional structured medical testing (not to mention time and stress), we would go to our school’s eye hospital, sit in the lobby, and every time we saw a visually impaired person, we would politely approach, show them our product, and ask them a few questions. Through this, normally inaccessible customer interviews became free and interesting.

Rather than pay lawyers to take care of our legal work, we convinced a law professor to accept us into our law school’s Legal Entrepreneurship Clinic. At the clinic, third year law students completed all of our legal documents for free, and in return gained practical experience working with a startup. After our basic documents were done, anytime we had a legal question, we would just ask one of our professors (or reach out to a local Philadelphia law firm and ask for pro bono work). Why pay lawyers $500 an hour?

Marketing and advertising? We didn’t spend a dime. Instead, we would cold email every alumni in major media, tell them that we were students working on a product to help the visually impaired, and just ask them for advice. Instead of asking them for an article, they would ask us if they could write about us. We were able to access thousands of friends and families of the visually impaired.

Thoughout this entire process, we spent a total of zero dollars. The only thing we did spend was time…. Time that taught us practical skills that we’re going to use for the rest of our lives.

Remember, you never really need money to start a company. If you just hustle hard enough, there’s always a way to make things work for free.

Come back next week to read more about how to manage classes while working on a startup in school. 

Rajat Bhageria is the author of What High School Didn’t Teach Me, the founder and CEO of ThirdEye and, currently a student at UPenn. Follow him at RajatBhageria.com

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How We Launched ThirdEye in College To Help Visually Impaired People

Note: This article was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Entrepreneurs.

This is the first article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created a non-profit organization commercializing a product that helps the visually impaired recognize what they are looking at.

Think about what you did yesterday. Have something in mind? Now think about how that something would be different if you were blind…. Difficult to imagine, no? You see, we often take our eyes for granted, when in reality we’re almost dependent on sight. In fact, the lives of visually impaired persons are significantly different than our own, with independence being one of the main problems. But what if we could change that? What if we could empower visually impaired persons by allowing them to recognize what they are looking at?

For the last year, a team of four students and I have been building ThirdEye Technologies: a non-profit organization where we are commercializing a product that visually impaired persons can use to recognize exactly what they are looking at.

Here’s how it works

Using ThirdEye, we hope to empower the visually impaired to go about their days with more independence than they ever had before.

“Unlike conventional interventions for the blind, which may involve invasive surgeries or the use of seeing eye dogs, who can only provide limited information about the user’s surroundings, ThirdEye provides a simple and safe way for the visually impaired to collect objective information from the environment that can improve decision making and increase efficiency. They join a hot industry of wearable technologies that is also being tackled by companies like IBM and Apple. However, ThirdEye has shown that being a large, well-known company is not a requirement for technological innovation” writes our partner The Michelson Medical Research Foundation.

In fact, our small size allowed us to move faster and bring a better product to market. Here’s how.

Sweet Serendipity

At the beginning, ThirdEye was just a simple project I was working on with Ben Sandler and Joe Cappadona–computer science friends–in addition to attending school as undergraduates. In fact, we had built the prototype of ThirdEye in a weekend hackathon–an event where hundreds of “hackers” collect to build a cool product with their team in 36 hours.

My “team” was just two friends who I had met during our New Student Orientation for freshmen and who I didn’t know well. None of us had ever programmed in Android (which we needed to make the final product), we were competing against some of the best hackers in the world, and we had absolutely no idea how to build our own product.

A bunch of hype for nothing?

By the end of the hackathon though, we were able to build a working prototype; the sheer practicality of our product along with the wow-factor–every judge seemed to laugh when our app returned back “5 US Dollar Bill” when we pointed the glasses at a bill and said “Okay Glass, recognize this”–earned us not only a finalist spot in the hackathon but also four or five press articles right after the event. A student journalist–who would actually end up joining our team later–asked in one article whether 3 Penn freshmen had built the future of vision at PennApps X. We were the featured story on the front page of the UPenn newspaper within the first two months of school.

But really? Up to this point, we just had a prototype–which didn’t even work some of the time–and yet people were reaching out to us and asking about how much “revenue you guys made in the last quarter.” As Ben says, “a little bit of mentorship and Google allowed us to create a cool prototype on a Saturday night….”

Is this thing even useful?

At this point, we decided to try to commercialize the product. In high school, Ben, Joe, and I had built a few products, and so, coming into college, we were all looking forward to continue working on entrepreneurial projects. But what we didn’t know was that the opportunity to start something new would arise in the first month of school.

Now the question became whether the product was something that visually impaired persons needed or wanted. Was this even something worth working on? It seemed obvious, but we decided to test the market. If nothing else, it would provide us with more feedback.

We cold-emailed around a dozen organizations that work with the visually impaired around Philadelphia, told them what we had built as freshmen students, and asked whether they would be willing to give us some feedback on our prototype. Only two responded. One of them didn’t end up wanting to meet afterwards.

We had only one lead, but that one lead just happened to be the largest organization for visually impaired persons in the country: The National Federation of the Blind (NFB).

Taking the bus to Baltimore in the middle of midterm week, we briefly explained how our product worked to the assistive technology department lead at the NFB, who was indeed sight impaired. She put on Glass, held out a bottle of Lysol in her hand, Ben said “Okay Glass, Recognize This,” and after three stressful seconds, we all heard a computerized woman’s voice say “Blue Lysol Cleaning Wipes Bottle.” The NFB representative yelled “wow” and we took a deep breath. After giving us a host of feedback and testing our prototype with more sight impaired people, she told us that she was willing to work with us to not only test ThirdEye with more patients but also to distribute it when we were ready.

And so the hustle began.

Building a Product

At this point, we had a prototype that the market want. After researching and having multiple conversations with some of our school’s business professors, we decided upon a simple subscription based business model. Users would pay a monthly fee of around $15 for as many recognitions as they want. They could either choose to pay the price of Glass upfront or cover the cost over two years.

The next step was to ensure that the product actually worked 100% of the time. After all, the consequences of a mis-recognition could be dire. For example, what if a sight impaired person took a few prescription pills thinking that they were Advil? We knew we had work to do.

Next week on Sunday, read about how we converted our prototype into a product.

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Dropping Out Is Overrated: Why It’s Better To Start Up While You’re Still In School

Note: this post was originally published on FORBES in FORBES Entrepreneurs. 

Since the beginning of my freshman year, I have been working on ThirdEye, a product that empowers visually impaired persons by telling them what they are looking at (see a demo here). Within nine months, even while being “full-time students” at Penn, our team was able to build a full product on smart glasses (think Google Glass) and mobile platforms that people internationally are already using, partner with the largest organization of visually impaired persons in the country, beta test our product with 15 visually impaired people, write a full business plan, garner 15 press articles, find a full time office, and even establish a board of four well known advisors.

We did all of this without raising a dime in funding. Throughout the entire journey, it seemed like everyone was asking us when we were going to be dropping out since no VC wanted to fund us while we were still in school.

And yet, I am almost certain that we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish as much as we did had we dropped out of school; staying allowed us to run our company with virtually no risk and at no cost while giving us access to resources that we normally wouldn’t have expected.

Here are some ways we were able to leverage every penny of the tuition we were paying to go to school in the first place:

1) Every single person on our team was a Penn student.

Our university attracts brilliant and highly motivated students who will soon be engineers, designers, lawyers, accountants, and business people. All of them want to be successful and are looking for experiences to improve their resumes. Similarly, we were looking for motivated team members who would be okay with working for equity and no pay. By working only with students, not only were we able to offer them real-world experience in a real company where they could have a real impact, but we were also able to minimize our product-development costs.

Of course, hiring only students has its challenges (everyone has to take care of school and so tasks will often be delayed). But regardless we were able to build out a prototype and ship it quite fast. You don’t need to hire developers and designers and marketers and pay them $40,000 each.

For most potential tech businesses, you can market test and even build a initial prototype for free right on a college campus. There’s no excuse for not at least trying–especially when there’s so much talent around you.

2) We were able to build capital bit by bit via campuswide competitions.

All of the people who were telling us that it’s hard to raise money when you’re still in school are right; investors generally don’t want to put money into a startup when they know that the employees have another major commitment. Still, that doesn’t mean that you have to finance your entire startup with debt–especially when you’re already paying a fortune for tuition.

The great thing about being on a campus is that there are plenty of competitions where organizations more or less give away money. Many of these competitions require very little on your side–maybe just a simple pitch deck–and have a huge payoff. Too many students forgo these opportunities just because they offer small amounts (or they don’t think it’s worth their time). Remember that it may be only $2,000, but it’s $2,000 for 4 hours of work….

Through business plan competitions, pitch competitions, and prototype competitions, we were able to raise enough money to create prototypes. And keep in mind, you’ll probably have to do all the things these competitions require you to do anyway, including learning how to pitch better, how at least a basic business plan, how to write a financial model, and how to build a full prototype. Why not earn a little bit of cash out of it?

3) Founders and other students are eager to help students.

During the hackathon when we built the very first prototype of ThirdEye, we knew we wanted to build something to empower visually impaired people, but we didn’t have a Google Glass or any other smart glasses at all. But simply asking around the computer science community at our school, we were able to find multiple individuals (who we’d never met before) who were willing to let us borrow glasses.

For some reason, people are way more willing to help you if you’re a student. Whenever I needed advice for my startup, I would cold-email or message major CEOs, entrepreneurs, and thought-leaders (especially if they went to Penn or Wharton) all over the globe. All I would say is something along the lines of “I am a student working on this product where we hope to do x and y, and I would love to get your advice on how we can do z.” At the end of the day, people love to talk about themselves and people love to help students; and so I was able to garner advice from game-changers around the globe.

More generally, students around the campus and other founders are extremely willing to put in their time to help you if you’re a student (since they were in your shoes not long ago or even now). On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a random person in San Francisco would be willing to give me a $1,500 Google Glass even for a few weeks.

4) We were able to take advantage of the campus incubators for free office space.

Of course, you can work out of coffee shops or a home when you’re early-stage, but there’s no doubt that having a legitimate office offers psychological validation to team members. The problem is that office space and all of the necessities it comes with can easily put a large dent in a startup’s balance sheet. By staying in school, we were able to take advantage of our school’s incubator–designed for student-run startups–and acquire free office space.

Universities around the country are encouraging entrepreneurship more and more and are creating these kinds of incubators; at schools that haven’t taken this step though, simply asking a dean can do wonders; after all, schools love to be able to associate themselves with entrepreneurial students and are often willing to do anything they can to help. All you have to do is ask.

5) I was able to cherry-pick courses that taught me practical skills I actually needed.

A lot of people argue that you can’t teach entrepreneurship, and that university is a waste of time and money for entrepreneurs. Although the debate to that second point is endless, one thing is certain: entrepreneurs still need to learn about the legal aspects of starting a company (incorporation, patent protection, fundraising, etc.), basic finance and accounting, and public speaking.

Knowing that I would have to learn these skills whether I stayed in school or not, I mainly took legal, finance, accounting, public speaking, acting, computer science, and design classes to maximize my time in school; not only was I able to fulfill degree requirements, but I also maximized my time by learning the skills that I would have had to learn anyways.

In regards to courses, always be looking for workarounds to requirements. Remember that in most cases–finance and consulting aside–a degree with a 3.9 GPA is no different than a 3.1. A degree from Penn or Harvard is a degree from Penn or Harvard–regardless of how “well” you did.  Why spend precious time memorizing facts you’ll never use again instead of learning the practical skills you’ll actually need to succeed?

6) Professors served as our advisors and huge validators for us.

Simply asking a few of the best professors at Penn (for my startup, they ended up being in business, ophthalmology, and computer vision) gave me a huge source of knowledge and advice. Unlike many other full-time entrepreneurs working as advisors, professors don’t require equity and are often just as knowledgeable. Moreover, having professors on your board of advisors serves as a phenomenal validator when raising money in the future.

7) Our legal work was free because of the university’s law school.

Another major reason why a lot of students don’t want to fully commercialize their product is because of the vast expense of doing legal work. In fact, our student status allowed us to take care of legal work for free. Indeed, many major law schools have some sort of “Entrepreneurial Law Clinic” where law students gain practical experience by providing free legal services for startups.

Plus, we were able to advantage of the pro bono legal work that many law firms are required to provide to help the entrepreneurial culture of the city. We received advising and basic contracts that would have been worth thousands of dollars for free simply by calling the firm, telling them that we’re students working on a social enterprise and that we needed a little bit of help.

8) We were able to test our product with the medical school.

Beta testing ThirdEye was going to be one of the most vital parts of the entire project; we needed feedback to improve the product and do market research on how to actually structure the business model.

And yet testing was also going to be one of the most difficult parts of the entire operation to coordinate; we could have spent hundreds of dollars traveling to organizations specifically for visually impaired persons and then paying thousands more to actually do a full beta study for our product. But by simply sending a few dozen emails to the Penn Medical School, we were able to set up meetings with ophthalmologists at the school who were willing to run the full beta-study. People really were willing to help students trying to help others.

At the end of the day, I suppose we could have dropped out of school to pursue ThirdEye full-time–and perhaps we would have had more physical time to work on the company and could have raised more money. But we probably would have spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring full-time employees, finishing up legal work, beta-testing the product, and finding office space (not to mention spending time learning about how to run a business and finding advisors). By hustling just a bit harder, not only were we able to stay in college and enjoy this special time in our lives, we were also able to minimize costs and create a product that we hope will radically improve the lives of thousands.  There’s always a way to kill two birds with one stone; you just have to go find it.

 

About the Author:

 

Rajat Bhageria  is the author  of  What  High School Didn’t Teach Me: A Recent Graduate’s Perspective on How High School is Killing Creativity  and an incoming sophomore at Penn. Additionally, he is the Founder and CEO  of ThirdEye . Find out more about Rajat at his personal blog:  RajatBhageria.com

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Leveraging Every One of Your Tuition Dollars for Your Startup

Note: This post was originally published in Wharton Entrepreneurship.  

For the entirety of my freshman year, I worked on building a startup with a group of three other freshmen. Our big idea was ThirdEye: a product that empowers visually impaired persons by telling them what they are looking at. During our freshmen year, our team of engineering freshmen was able to build a full prototype of our product on Google Glass, iOS, and Android, get accepted into the Wharton Venture Initiation Program, partner with the largest organization of visually impaired persons in the country, beta test our product with fifteen visually impaired persons, get selected as finalists and award winners in the MBA-dominated Wharton Business Plan Competition, and even establish a board of four well known Silicon Valley advisors.

We did all of this without raising a single dime in funding. How you may ask? Rather than dropping out of school to pursue ThirdEye, we leveraged every penny of the tuition we were paying to come to Penn in the first place.

Indeed, most students are paying nearly $50K per year in tuition and fees to come to Penn—plus any additional living expenses. And yet many seem to be okay with only taking advantage of classes (and mind you, that’s the least number of classes they need to pass), a few clubs, and maybe a fraternity or sorority. In reality, too many students are forgoing too many incredibly accessible opportunities. Here are some of the ones we took advantage of to minimize costs for our startup.

1) Most of our team members were Penn students 

Penn attracts some of the most brilliant and intrinsically motivated engineers, designers, lawyers, accountants, and business leaders in the world. All of them want to be successful; they’re looking for experience and want to improve their resumes. Working for ThirdEye not only offered our team members experience but also allowed them to make a meaningful impact on the world. Plus, choosing cofounders who are students puts them right on campus, five minutes from you, and most of them likely have meal plans to take care of living expenses.

2) We competed in campus-wide competitions 

The fact of the matter is that it’s quite hard to raise money when you’re still in school. Still that doesn’t mean that you have to debt finance your entire startup. There are plenty of competitions on campus that are giving away prize money to the top teams. Too many students forgo these opportunities because they offer financial awards that may seem like small amounts. But the prize money adds up.

3) We leveraged the huge experience bank of professors that surround us everyday

Just as Penn has some of the best students in the world, it also has some of the most successful professors in the world. And guess what? All those professors dedicated their lives to helping teach students and build up experience by researching. Simply asking a few professors at Penn (for my startup they ended up being in business, ophthalmology, and computer science) gave me a huge knowledge and advice source. Unlike many other “professional advisors,” professors don’t require equity and are often just as knowledgeable. Moreover, having professors on your Board of Advisors serves as a phenomenal validator for the future.

4) We attended every single entrepreneurship event we could 

We at Penn are extremely lucky to have such an impressive entrepreneurship program that hosts so many different events, like WE Wednesdays (with free pizza and pretty amazing speakers), quite an amazing speaker series, free tickets to conferences, and most importantly a thriving community of student entrepreneurs who are willing to help you learn. Just being around other entrepreneurs and learning from them gave me access to a huge network that opened countless other doors.  Plus, the events are actually incredibly interesting and fun.

5) We took advantage of opportunities we, rationally speaking, shouldn’t have 

One of the greatest learning opportunities for me was competing in the Wharton Business Plan Competition. Before the competition, my team was a group of four freshmen who weren’t even in Wharton; we didn’t know what finance really was, and we had never written a business plan. And yet it was precisely that ignorance that gave us the wings to believe that we could in fact do well at the competition; our lack of experience was actually what allowed us to go forward. In fact, if we knew how hard it was actually going to be competing against MBAs, we would have been too scared to try. I feel like too many students aren’t taking advantage of opportunities just because they “don’t have enough experience,” or because they don’t think they’ll “do well.” Well, in reality your lack of experience might just be a silver lining.

6) We attended events and leveraged benefits in as many other schools as we could 

Even though I was part of the engineering school, the simple fact that I didn’t have too much money for my project allowed me to capitalize on opportunities in the Wharton School (business plan competitions, entrepreneur/investor speakers, business classes), the Law School (legal aspects and advice), the Med School (clinical studies for the product), and the School of Arts and Sciences (design work). Being lean prompted us to take advantage of resources that, at first, I didn’t even know existed.

7) We lived on the Penn Alumni Directory

We realized quickly enough that we couldn’t create a product and then bring it to market alone; we knew we would have to ask for advice from people with more experience than us. Indeed, letting go of your ego to ask for help in itself is an incredibly important life-skill—as Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt describe in their book Think Like A Freak, the three hardest words in English are “I don’t know”—but not using them can have hugely negative consequences.

Personally, whenever I needed advice for my startup, I would cold email and cold LinkedIn message major CEOs, entrepreneurs, and thought-leaders (especially if they went to Penn/Wharton) all over the globe. All I would say is something along the lines of “I am working on this product where we hope to do x and y, and I would love to get your advice on how we can do z.” At the end of the day, people love to talk about themselves and their experiences, and so I was able to meet a large number of important people. If nothing else, just speaking with these game-changers inspired me to work even harder.

This is one of the major value-adds of attending a school like Penn, so definitely take advantage of it!

Bio: Rajat Bhageria is the author of What High School Didn’t Teach Me: A Recent Graduate’s Perspective on How High School is Killing Creativity and a rising sophomore at Penn. Additionally, he is the Founder of ThirdEye and the Former Interim-COO of MainTool. Find out more about Rajat at his personal blog: RajatBhageria.com.

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How Running A Startup Taught Me More Than School Ever Could

Note: This article was originally published in Forbes under Forbes Entrepreneurship.

I just turned 19 and started my second year at the University of Pennsylvania; since the beginning of my freshman year, I’ve been running a startup called ThirdEye–a product that empowers visually impaired persons by telling them what’s in front of them–with a team of four Penn students. At the very beginning, ThirdEye was nothing more than a small project that some of my new college friends and I built in a weekend hackathon. And so, just like all the other freshmen at Penn, I focused (or at least tried to focus) most of my time on schoolwork.

The problem was that I was working on writing seminar assignments that required more busy work than legitimate thinking and submitting labs that thousands of other students had done before me. Now I’m not suggesting the classes were “easy.” But they were most certainly unfulfilling, especially knowing that “earning” an “A” or a “B” didn’t actually mean that I knew the material better than anyone else (it just meant that I was a good test taker); and that even if I earned the high grade, I probably couldn’t actually apply the theoretical “skills” later in life. By the way, this isn’t one of Penn’s idiosyncrasies: it’s a demonstration of our broken higher education system.

On the other hand, ThirdEye presented a new challenge every single day. Since it was a project I had built from inception, I was willing to do anything to make my venture a success, even if it meant figuring out graphic design, basic venture finance, and legal terminology instead of hiring someone to handle those aspects of the business.

More and more, I found myself doing the bare minimum necessary in my school work in order to cold-email successful entrepreneurs for advice, visit local organizations for the blind to test our product, talk with interesting people and entrepreneurs, hustle to find publicity, and meet with investors. I loved it. Not only was ThirdEye significantly more exciting, but I also knew I would be able to apply everything I was learning later in life no matter what I ended up pursuing. Plus, rather than deterring my grades, ThirdEye forced me to work much more efficiently and plan my days well.

More importantly, I realized that having absolutely no background in what I was trying to do wasn’t a curse, but rather a kind gift. For example, at the initial hackathon where we built the prototype of ThirdEye, no one on my team had ever programmed on Android or Glass, none of us had ever been to a hackathon, and none of us even knew what computer vision was; but it was precisely that ignorance that gave our team of three freshmen the false confidence we needed to beat out over 1,200 hackers (some of whom were graduate students), make it to the top ten, and win awards in a major hackathon. We were willing to take risks in the methodology we took and simply work harder to learn than the competition.

Later in the year when we needed a business plan to raise capital, we decided to enter a business plan competition sponsored by The Wharton School; again, the fact that we knew nothing about finance or business gave us the wings to believe that we could teach ourselves how to write a plan and that we could win some of the $125,000 in prizes. Much to our surprise, our team of freshmen ended up Googling, reading enough books, and accumulating enough advice from entrepreneurs to write a 30-page plan that beat around 200 mostly MBA-run startups. Ignorance really was bliss because  if I had known how hard it would be to bring a product to life, I would have been too scared to even try.

Now don’t get me wrong. Starting ThirdEye and working on it along with school was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I would have constant meetings with people trying to raise money, and most would say “you’re not at the stage where we like to invest” or “we don’t invest in student run startups.” While I was working at 3AM on Saturday night, my friends were out partying…. Although it was hard to see in the moment, all of this turned out to be a gift. I learned to disregard failure and redirect it toward motivating me to work harder. Because of this, I wasn’t afraid to do normally “rash” things such as cold-calling extremely well-known individuals for help, or traveling to San Francisco right before exam week for an important meeting, or even preparing for a pitch instead of going to class. After all, what’s to lose?  I was just a college student living in a 200-square-foot dorm. Taking a bit of risk–especially in things that society normally deems “necessary” like doing well in school–allowed me to develop grit that helped me in every aspect of life.

By now you’re probably thinking, if startups taught him so much more than college, why doesn’t this kid just drop out? In fact, that is not on my mind. College provided me with an incredibly supportive, fun, and resourceful atmosphere that I doubt I could find anywhere else. But is dropping out really necessary to claim all the fruits that working on a startup can reap? The founder of the prestigious Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, Paul Graham, recommends that in most cases, it’s best to work on a startup after you graduate. Mr. Graham is probably right, but what you have to remember is that his goal is to build multi-billion dollar corporations, not to teach students practical skills and help them realize a bit about themselves. In the latter case, running a startup during school does a phenomenal job.  There’s no reason why you can’t both work on a startup and stay in school.

Ultimately, education is fundamentally about inspiring students to find out what they love to do , not to fill their minds with facts and concepts that they will never use. The only opportunity students really do have to learn practical skills is in short internships–where they will almost inevitably be doing non-serious work. As a result, too many college students today pursue something they don’t actually enjoy, simply because college didn’t help them realize what they truly love to do. You may be right that I’m biased because I’m almost definitely going to pursue entrepreneurship after school, but the beauty of entrepreneurship is that every single person is an entrepreneur and salesman in some regard. Truly, no matter what you decide to do after school–whether it be history, dentistry, engineering, or even entrepreneurship–the skills you learn by starting a startup (call it a large project if you will) will be useful. If you fail, what’s to lose–the fact that you have more experience than any of your peers?

 

If you like this post, please help me inspire other students to pursue independent projects in college by sharing this article on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Rajat Bhageria is the author of What High School Didn’t Teach Me: A Recent Graduate’s Perspective on How High School is Killing Creativity and the Founder and CEO of ThirdEye. He is currently a student at University of Pennsylvania. 

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11 Reasons Why College Is The Best Time To Be An Entrepreneur

Note: This article was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Leadership.

Entrepreneurship is the millennial thing to do. We’re all familiar with the Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram stories, where 20-something college students somehow manage to build-up multi-billion dollar companies overnight. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. The public only sees the tip of the iceberg — success — but what’s hidden from view is all the hustling and sleepless nights founders undergo.

Regardless, college is by far one of the best times to start working on a passion project because of the incredibly low opportunity costs and the potentially huge payoffs. You’re most likely paying a huge sum just for tuition. You have no family to take care of. You’re living in a pre-paid dorm room. And surrounding you are thousands of incredibly motivated students, professors, and advisors — not to mention technology resources, campus-sponsored seed money, and fast diffusion of ideas. Plus the proliferation of cheap cloud computing services has made it easier than ever to make something in your dorm room that people all over the world can use and benefit from.

There are already huge communities of people who just love to build things (Hackathon Hackers being one). Personally, while in school, my team and I created ThirdEye, a product that uses smart glasses to tell visually impaired persons what they are looking at. Here are 11 reasons from my experiences building up ThirdEye that detail why you too should become a dorm room maker:

1) You’ll actually enjoy doing it

The beauty of independent projects is that you have the opportunity to work on anything you want to work on. Since no one is forcing you to do it, the project is more likely to intrinsically motivate you. After school work, which of course is extrinsic motivation, working on something that you just love to do makes college life just a tad more exciting and enjoyable than it already is.

2) It helps you develop a thicker skin in accepting failure and embracing uncertainty

An independent project helps you develop grit. Failure is always possible when you try to build something new, but since you’re intrinsically motivated by the project, you will do everything you can to see it through; in the process, you will increase your tolerance to taking calculated risks and prevent failure from deterring you (watch Angela Duckworth’s TED talk about the importance of grit for success).

In my case, there was a fair amount of (good) stress on me to do well on my engineering schoolwork, maintain some kind of social life, get at least a little sleep, and simultaneously manage my startup while keeping the shareholders happy. As an entrepreneur, you quickly realize that you’re always going to be under some kind of pressure (that doesn’t end when finals week is over), and that you just have to live with it. But at the end of the day, putting up with pressure and not breaking down is incredibly important. No one can teach you this skill. You have to develop it yourself, and working on a passion project does the job quite well.

3) It teaches you more practical skills than any classroom ever could

Classrooms are great for learning theory. But the fact is that they are extremely controlled environments. The professor has taught hundreds of others with the same material for years, thousands of other students have already conducted the labs you’re doing, and you fundamentally cannot learn much by just reading a textbook. In a classroom, it’s almost impossible to teach students how to react when things inevitably go wrong like they will in real life, how to talk to people, how to market and sell yourself, and how to persevere through something from the beginning to the end. Yet these are the practical skills that every single student needs — not the ability to memorize a textbook and find the third derivative of a function.

On the other hand, being a dorm room founder allows you to take advantage of all the “good” theoretical aspects of the classroom while simultaneously succeeding in the practical aspects of building something yourself. Indeed, for my startup, I had to work on not only the development of our product, but also the marketing, the public relations, the finance, the supply chain, and everything in between.

It didn’t make sense for me to hire someone for these individual fields early in the game. As a result, I quickly learned to be a jack-of-all-trades and be able to at least understand the basics of many subjects. As Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk says, “make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

No matter what you end up doing later in life, learning these broad range of skills while completely managing something—no matter how simple it may be—teaches practicality, time-management, and people management like no other.

4) It’s a great way to meet interesting people

One of the main reasons to attend college in the first place is not for the education, per se, but to meet cool, inspiring people. We often criticize individuals who restlessly love to meet new people as networkers, but at the end of the day,the quality of the people you know correlates extremely highly with opportunities and future successes.

Some of the most well-connected individuals are naturally charismatic, or they have built up an interesting persona by working on something they love to work on. Personally, the fact that I was building up a product that helped empower visually impaired persons during my freshman year allowed me meet huge numbers of extremely interesting individuals. Ideas spread fast on a college campus, and very soon people find out that you’re working on some kind of project, and then they come to you. As Jon Youshaei describes in his FORBES post “How To Meet Amazing People Without Sleazy Networking: Insights From 6,220 Conversations,” people love to meet passionate people, and working on something you love shows that passion.

5) You learn how to leverage opportunities you didn’t even know existed

With the extremely low resources that most dorm room founders have (realistically, investors generally don’t well fund startups when the entrepreneurs are still in school), you quickly learn how to find obscure opportunities and then take advantage of them.

For example, even though I’m part of the engineering school, the simple fact that I didn’t have too much money for my project allowed me to capitalize on opportunities in the MBA business school (business plan competitions, entrepreneur/investor speakers, business classes), the law school (legal aspects and advice), the med school (clinical studies for the product), and the liberal arts college (design work). Being lean allowed me to take advantage of resources that I didn’t even know existed.

The only way to become a better hustler is to hustle, and my project opened my eyes to how many doors open up if you just hustle hard enough. I learned the importance of “faking it till you make it” very fast, and soon enough, I was traveling all over the country with phrases like “I’m a poor college student…can you give me some free legal help?” “You went to the same university as I did…can you connect me somewhere?” and “Wow you’ve done some amazing work…can you give me some advice?” This learned ability — which I’m certain I couldn’t have learned without my project — allowed me to save thousands of dollars.

6) You learn how to ask for help, master the cold email, and meet some hugely important people

Even with all the hustling you do though, you realize quickly enough that you can’t create a product and then bring it to market alone; you have to ask for advice from people with more experience than you. Indeed, letting go of your ego to ask for help in itself is an incredibly important life-skill; as Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt describe in their book Think Like A Freak, the three hardest words in English are “I don’t know,” and not using them can have hugely negative consequences.

Perhaps less obvious though is that asking for help allows you to meet some pretty important people. For example, when I needed advice for my startup, I would cold email and cold LinkedIn message major CEOs, entrepreneurs, and thought-leaders all over the globe. All I would say is something along the lines of “I am working on this product where we hope to do X and Y, and I would love to get your advice on how we can do Z.” At the end of the day, people love to talk about themselves and their experiences, and so I was able to meet a high number of important people. If nothing else, just speaking with these game-changers inspired me to work even harder.

7) You learn how to talk to people and how to be an effective communicator

It may seem trivial and obvious, but after talking with everyone from fellow students interested in my project to so-called celebrity professors and high level CEOs, I realized that there is certainly an art to just talking with people. From sheer trial and error, I learned what semantics work while pitching and what body language doesn’t work, how to be very concise while speaking, how to write directly and crisply, how to increase the probability that an important person follows up with my email, how to inspire and keep my team members motivated, the importance of listening more than speaking to the person you’re talking to, and how to generally increase the probability of “clicking” with someone.

As the Founder of Pandora Tim Westergren says, “Of all the skills that an entrepreneur can have, I think the ability to convey an idea or opportunity, with confidence, eloquence and passion is the most universally useful skill.”

8) You really learn how to motivate a group of people

One of the most vital use cases of those communication skills is team-management. While working on a startup, especially in school, you have to manage a group of people whose members you’re probably not paying (or at least well contrasted to what they could be making elsewhere). These people are putting in dozens of hours a week, giving up much of their social life, and maybe even some of their schoolwork to work with you on some project you mutually believe in.

Especially when things go sour — as they inevitably will — you really learn how to motivate a group of extremely intelligent people. You see which techniques work with what kind of people, you learn about human psychology and how to talk to encourage people to work when they aren’t stimulated, and you learn the extreme importance of communication in management. Again, regardless of what you end up doing later in life, these people skills are immensely important in building relations in life.

9) It makes you incredibly efficient with time

Aside from relation building though, projects in school help you realize the importance and value of your time. We are all natural procrastinators, and when we don’t have a lot to do in college, we are inevitably inefficient: we’ll take four hours to complete an assignment that should have taken an hour, all the while checking Facebook and Twitter every 10 minutes. However, a passion project forces you to be extremely efficient (especially when it’s a startup that demands attention) so actually have time to work on it.

10) It’s practical and the skills you learn will be useful in all your future endeavors

At the end of the day, everyoneis an entrepreneur. Everyone tries to “sell” themselves someway or another. College students especially are becoming more and more competitive every single day in selling themselves to recruiters for companies such as Google, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey.

But more than anything else, working on independent projects and startups in school separates you from everyone else. It gives you experience building up something from scratch, selling it, managing a team, communicating with people, and reaching out to others for help. These skills are the ones that actually matter in the workplace, not being able to pull off a 4.0 by memorizing factoids in classes. Employers in any field — regardless of whether you chose law or business or anything in between — jump at any of these hackers they can find.

Of course, if you don’t want to go the corporate route and are a true entrepreneur, there’s no way to improve than by doing it. The only way to become a better hustler is to, well, hustle by actually building and shipping product early on.

11) It helps you find yourself

Since things go wrong far more often than they go right, you’re going to spend a significant time just thinking about what to do next. Oftentimes it seems like everyone is against you and you are battling the world. Personally, I often found myself asking existential questions like, “Why am I working on this when the odds are I’m going to fail,” “Why am I reallydoing this project?” and “Is it worth doing?”

But in fact, I really think that these “crises” were really not crises at all; they were gifts. They helped me find out what I enjoyed doing, what I didn’t enjoy doing, what mattered to me, what didn’t matter to me, and most importantly, what I definitely didn’t want to do later in life. As Ben Horowitz says, the “most difficult CEO skill is managing your own psychology…being able to manage yourself helps you for life.”

The verdict:

Sure, you could argue that “I don’t have time” to work on a project with my schoolwork, but just know that while you are memorizing facts for that exam that means next to nothing, someone somewhere in the world is building something that could improve the lives of millions of people — while simultaneously learning a lot himself. Truly, the first question we should be asking each other is not “Where are you from, what are you majoring in, and where are you living on campus?” but rather “What are you working on to make the world a better place?”

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If you like this post, please help me inspire other students to pursue independent projects in college by sharing this article on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Rajat Bhageria is the author of What High School Didn’t Teach Me: A Recent Graduate’s Perspective on How High School is Killing Creativity and the Founder and CEO of ThirdEye. He is currently a student at University of Pennsylvania.

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Who Needs the Apple Watch? This Startup Is Building Straps That Make Any Regular Watch ‘Smart’

Note: This Post Was Originally Published on the HuffingtonPost.

By now, we have all heard of the “legendary” new Apple Watch. But will it really be that legendary? Ingenious marketing and even more groundbreaking products have allowed Apple to build a brand that carries an aura that consumers trust. There is no doubt that millions will buy the new gadget for no reason other than “it’s an Apple product.” For this reason more than anything, we need to be cautious when assessing its quality, ensuring that we to stick to the realities of this new gadget.

First and foremost, the “watch” isn’t really a watch, and by no means is it a timepiece. It’s a gadget. Just like the current iteration of Google Glass, Apple Watch is bound to be hugely popular in the developer community; but for most individuals outside of the tech industry, there is no way that an Apple Watch will be able to replace classical timepieces.

Why? Classical Swiss timepieces have a brand. They have a culture. They make you feel a certain way. They have emotional significance. Can a smartwatch really replace that Tag Heuer you bought after graduation, that Omega that your father passed down to you, or that Cartier you hope to pass down to your children? Of course not; the technology behind the gadget will be obsolete after only a few years.

But what if we could maintain the culture and sentimental value of a classical timepiece while having all the functionality of a smartwatch? What if we could blend new innovative technology while not radically changing the nature of your classical watch?

Well there is a startup doing that: MainTool. Based in the Paris and Philadelphia areas, this international startup has developed a patent-pending strap that allows watchmakers to make any of their watches “smart.” Indeed, MainTool’s straps come in all forms and can measure your heart rate, track your footsteps, record your skin and the ambient temperature, and alert you via discrete vibrations. The best part is that you can also install the MainTool strap onto any watch model you already own; thus, you can have all the features of a smartwatch without compromising on design, brand or culture. After all, with MainTool, you still have a Swiss timepiece on your wrist — “not a useless, lifeless screen that doesn’t even tell the time if it’s out of battery,” (as the CEO describes the Apple Watch).

This trend of combining game-changing technology with fashion really does seem to be where the future of tech lies. Apple is pointing to a future where technology companies can charge $17k for gadgets. Tesla is selling $100k luxury cars. Nest is even making your thermostat “smart” to give you more luxury in your house. Silicon Valley seems to be pivoting… the inflection point of the fashion tech industry is here. More and more, it seems like innovative tech companies are trying to find ways of embedding game-changing technology into fashion items without altering their “coolness” or prestige. As the CEO of MainTool says, “let’s have the tech you want find a way to work around the watch you love.” Fashion-tech is exploding; let’s take advantage.

All images taken with permission from MainTool

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The Key to Hustling: Have A Story

Note: This post was originally published on The Huffington Post by Rajat Bhageria.

Everyone always says that the key to creating a successful company and then monetizing on it is to hustle. Hustle. Hustle. Hustle. But what exactly does that mean? How do you even get the opportunity to hustle to an investor? How do you approach a major company and try to secure a deal with them?

Jesse Rendell is someone who has secured business deals with major whales including Ebay, Annheuser-Busch, and KPMG as his role as Director of Business Development at Scavify. Here are some of the tips he provides to entrepreneurs when they start a company:

1) Have a Story

Rendell says that the number one way to find success in gaining clients and customers is to have a “story.” People really don’t care about what your product does. It’s boring quite frankly. Rather he advises founders to consistently be talking about their story. He talks about how all his experiences in life–whether it was dropping out of Penn to start a band, or going to law school, or starting Scavify–helped him find his story. “It’s the hook,” Rendell says.

People want to know why you’re doing something. The “why.” People don’t invest or write about what your doing, they write about why you’re doing it, and what makes it unique. Once you know why, it’s much easier to convince others in your “why,” and convince them to help you.

2) Just work hard to find your first customer

Once you have that hook and you have your product, he says that an entrepreneur’s goal shouldn’t be to “get tons of customers.” That’s just not going to happen. “Mass marketing is very hard…. People talk about SEO and everything a lot, and sure that can help, but that’s not where your major customers and revenue is going to come from.” Rather, an entrepreneur’s goal should just be to find his first customer. “You may get press for your company and people may say that it’s amazing, but the big-guys want to see that you have a ‘use case’–someone has actually used your product and benefited from it.” Once you have at least one person using your company, you can show the next company “this is our app, this is how company X is using our app, this is how they’re benefiting, and here’s how you can benefit from it.”

Just by having that one supporter–or “validator,” Rendell says that a lot more people are willing to work with you. There is market authentication.

3) Minimize as much legal work while bootstrapping

Because he is a lawyer, Rendell says that many times, he drafts his company’s contracts. “At the end of the day, it’s all about making a deal, and finalizing it. If some major company doesn’t like our deal, I’ll change it. If we have to pick up some liability, so be it. All I’m looking to do is secure that deal.” In its early phases, Rendell recalls how instead of hiring a lawyer who was going to charge him $300 an hour to put together a terms of agreement, he went to a few of the major app developers, found out what was common within all of the forms, did a little bit of editing, and then had a legal terms of conditions form ready for his app for free.

Accordingly, Rendell suggests that something every entrepreneur should have understandings of the legal aspects of entrepreneurship. He recommends that everyone go online and just read some basic contracts out there; “you can learn a lot just by reading what’s already out there.” He also suggests that entrepreneurs take advantage of Pro Bono work. Each law firm has to fulfill a certain number of pro bono service hours for the community; “use your network and take advantage of that.”

*Image of Jesse Rendell from Haines-Law

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An Interview With Seth Berkowitz | How the Founder of Insomnia has Revolutionized The College Experience Armed Only With Cookies

Note: This post was originally published on The Huffington Post by Rajat Bhageria.

In his book Zero To One, Peter Thiel says that you should never open a restaurant since you’ll just be one fish in a large pond. And that makes sense. You’re probably not going to really “change the world” with a restaurant.

But for many college students, a little bit of money is all that matters. Back in 2003, at The Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania, “everyone wanted to go into banking.” People weren’t really into startups at Penn. Everyone wanted to work at Goldman Sachs. But for Seth Berkowitz, an internship in investment banking was not a very attractive option.

One thing that he did love was eating sweets at night. He loved cookies, but in the wind chill of Philadelphia, he didn’t want to actually go out in the cold to buy the cookies. And so began Insomnia Cookies. Berkowitz baked the first batch of cookies himself, and started giving away samples on Penn’s Locust Walk; the cookies became an instant success. Everyone wanted a sample, and some of his friends said they might actually be willing to pay for the cookies if he delivered.

In between classes, Berkowitz and his friends began baking large batches the cookies and delivering them; monetizing very early on, Berkowitz was able to experiment and find out what recipe worked best. Within a couple of years, Berkowitz received FDA approval, set up his first retail shop in New York, and found angel investors.

What’s more astounding is how Insomnia was able to market itself. After giving away samples and flyers on campus, college students just wanted more; he talks about how the retail store itself became a branding tool. Students were especially interested in buying his cookies as a “late night snack,” while working on exams and studying. He says that the fact that the fundamental reason Insomnia became successful is because word of mouth is incredibly strong on a college campus.

In today’s culture, everyone seems to be starting a startup. Technology, entrepreneurship, and startups have become the topic of all discussion. But in the background of it all, it seems like fewer and fewer people want to involve themselves with other entrepreneurial endeavors. It seems like retail and restaurants aren’t “cool” anymore. In fact, the complete opposite is true; especially on a college campus, providing something as simple as a cookie to lazy students may be one of the most intuitive and yet brilliant business models yet.

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The Importance of Understanding Metadata in Modern Society

Note: This post was originally posted in the Huffington Post by Rajat Bhageria.

Data is the fundamental basis for our lives today. Future generations will able to look back at all our data — via sources like Twitter, Facebook — and paint an accurate picture us. And yet, the vast majority of us simply don’t understand how data works. According to David Weinberger in his article “Digital Meta-Literacy” on KMorld, “we need to be especially wary of believing something because the people we hang out with on the Net believe it. Falling prey to confirmation bias, as it is known, is especially easy online because our social apps work by putting us together with people who share most of our opinions.”

Even fewer have an understanding of one of the most fundamental units of data we have today: Metadata. Metadata directly controls lives, from property taxes to drivers’ licenses to employment records to even web pages. And yet almost none of our pupils know about it; however, even a rudimentary understanding of metadata would allow students to garner a critical understanding of how modern societies drive electronic data.

As a result of the great importance of teaching students about metadata, but a lack of general knowledge, PhoneApp.com has created a lightweight Mac app called Sapphire that gives the students a way to work with project management tasks, study node relationships, and see how data constructions look underneath the pretty web pages or fancy documents.

After downloading the software, teachers can ask students to understand how metadata is stored in all of our modern day files (such as web pages, Word documents, and images), what kind of information does metadata stores, and how the metadata interacts between different sources.

PhoneApp’s ambition with Sapphire is to find some educators — specifically computer science teachers — to discuss metadata and at least make students aware of how tiny pieces of data rule this world.

Why exactly should students care to know about metadata? Well, it’s for the same reasons that teachers have students find the “quality” of the source. According to Weinberger, “physical embodiments of ideas and knowledge usually carry implicit marks of their authority. If you’re reading a printed book, you know that it’s gone through some extensive set of filters because printing books is expensive.” On the other hand, online material doesn’t have these marks on it, and so students should be able to ask questions like “is this a trustable source?” “Is it verifiable?” “Has it been peer-reviewed?”

And sure, students generally can verify the sources without metadata…. At the end of the day, however, understanding metadata will allow students to look underneath the previously assumed-to-be-truthful beliefs and really understand whether or not sources are truthful. Humans have always been on the search for truth, and understanding metadata will allow them to understand the truth behind the institution that literally rules our lives: the Internet.

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