Big KC

This week I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to Big Kansas City. This was put on by the Silicon Prairie and hosted at Hanger 9 Aircraft museum. Which is an awesome place if you ever get the chance to go, go. This was a 2 and a half day long event. With about 20 speakers there was a lot of information to take in. You can find the full list at http://bigkansascity.co/. There was a common theme with all of the speakers, that was, if you are going to do something don't half ass it.

The first speaker was Dan Hesse from Sprint. There we learned a lot of statistics from him. Like that this time next year there will be more cell phones made a year than people. Or that every month, more mobile data consumed than all data that has ever been before in all of human history. The most astounding fact, there are 4 jobs in the midwest for every 1 person needed to work them. That is fantastic news if you are in IT and work in Kansas City.

The next speaker was Alexis Ohanian. The guy who created Reddit, so kind of a big deal. He spoke about SOPA and PIPA as well as how cheap it is getting to create a new company thanks to services like AWS.

Next was Adam Wilson, who was by far the most important speaker to take notes from on day 1. Adam works for a company called Sphero. They make robotic balls! No seriously, they make remote controlled balls. They can be controlled by whatever device that you want, as every ball comes with an SDK. The theme was if you application or device doesn't have an API/SDK at this point, you system is broken. Because of this, spheros can be controlled by anything and are exploring brave new worlds of gaming, medical help, and military applications. By making the controls be open, you can wire these up to a wheelchair allowing kids who can't interact with more than a joystick, a new way to play with friends. The idea that you should be able to interact with everything is amazing.


The rest of day one was mostly the same. Crazy entrepreneurs talking about how they got their start. Most of them quit their jobs with pregnant wives or while in need of money and it worked out great. They covered things like keep strong in front of your employees, understand payroll, don't give up, and chase your dreams, blah blah blah blah. Every single one of these guys left out one very important detail. BE FUCKING LUCKY!!!! Without luck, your idea won't get funding. Without luck, you won't meet the right person to buy your idea. Without luck, you won't make the right connections to get your ideas off the ground. Yes, I understand the idea is to get people to start new businesses, but either these people didn't realize how lucky they were, or they didn't want to discourage people.

Any way that was day one, I will write more about day two next.