I’ll be using the Jetblue AYCJ pass from September 7th – October 6th for a vacation (I haven’t taken a proper one in over two years!) While on my month-long vacation, I’d love to volunteer at an innovative non-profit organization for a few days while on my trip. If we can get my housing sorted, I will be more than happy to come out and work on a short skill-based project.

If you’re wondering who I am, you can view my bio here. And I can help with any of the following:

- Digital
- Marketing
- Product Development
- Brand Development
- Culture
- Organization & Productivity

While I have a varied skillset, you can view me as an outside creative problem solver. If you are really, really, really stuck within one problem area, we can work together to come up with a couple of creative solutions. I’ll even throw in an action plan so you can make it happen. I can also do workshops, brainstorm sessions, etc. Whatever you need! I’m here at your disposable. If you want to stay up for 72 hours to work together, count me in. If you want to work from the beach, count me in too : )

I’ll be in Costa Rica from September 9th to September 20th on a Yoga retreat, but can fly anywhere afterwards that Jetblue covers which you can view here.

I’m interested in non-profit organizations in New Orleans, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles but open to other cities. More specifically, organizations related to education and learning will pique my interest. If interested, please leave a comment below with the following:

- Name of organization
- Website of organization
- Project/Problem Description
- Possible dates between 9/20 – 10/6
- Can you house me? (which is more fun that staying in a hotel)

Looking forward to seeing what’s out there!

If I had all the time and money in the world, I would spend it on documentaries that create world-shaking change that ultimately shift the ways things are done in culture, society, and the world. My favorite documentaries include The Cove, Food Inc, and The Corporation, and I’m really looking forward to Waiting for Superman, which comes out this fall. All of these documentaries shed an exposing light on things we often overlook – food, business, and education – revealing truths and problems that need to be collectively reformed in order to make the world a better place.

After watching The Lottery, which uncovers the failures of the traditional public school system, I started to think about the shortcomings of the current traditional education system. Since the pinnacle of education is getting into college, I believe higher education has shifted from learning to profit maximization as its core purpose. The pursuit of short-term profit and greed is a common theme in all of the documentaries I have listed, which is what ultimately led to the predicament we are in today.

If I had to produce a documentary, I would shed a light on the inevitable student loan crisis, and the collective action we can do to prevent it from happening.

Much like the Great American Banking Crisis (this is a must read article from RollingStone), I believe we will witness something just as globally shattering with the looming crash of higher education loans. The rising cost of higher education coupled with the diminishing value of college degrees can only lead to a downhill spiral.

But with the credit crisis come signs that the college bubble is bursting, as “consumers who have questioned whether it is worth spending $1,000 a square foot for a home are now asking whether it is worth spending $1,000 a week to send their kids to college,” the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests. Further evidence: The New Yorker aims to deflate creative writing programs, “designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem.” — Freakonomics

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article that stated that “Americans now owe more on their student loans ($830B) than their credit cards ($827B)… He estimates that $300 billion in federal student loan debts have been incurred in the last four years.”

What?! $300B of the $830B came in the last 4 years?! At this rate, we’ll break 1 trillion in no time. To put this in perspective, the US economy is burdened with $4 trillion of excess mortgage debt, which is equivalent to 30% of GDP (source).

And to make matters worse, the WSJ reports that “defaults on student loans are skyrocketing amid a weak job market for graduates and steadily rising tuition costs. Default rates for federally guaranteed student loans are expected to reach 6.9% for fiscal year 2007. That’s up from 4.6% two years earlier and would be the highest rate since 1998.”

From New York Times: Cortney Munna hoped for the best when she decided to attend New York University. Now she owes $100,000.

The New York Times also wrote a great article titled “Another Debt Crisis is Brewing, This One in Student Loans” which goes over this problem in intricate detail.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.

Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.

One thing to note is that student loan debt is different from credit-card and housing mortgage debt. Student loans can’t be washed away when you file for bankruptcy. “Ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.”

Most students view college loans as “good debt” because they’re hedging it against future earnings. But what happens when you switch careers, get laid off, or work an underpaying job? Do students really want to spend the next 50 years paying off a degree in XYZ that ended up being utterly useless?

Good news is that Obama has already signed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act.  ”Student loan reform will mean big savings for the US government, but not much change for students until 2014. Instead of private banks issuing loans guaranteed by the government, the government will now become the originator of the loan. The change will eliminate private banks as “middlemen” in the loan process and will save the US government about $68 billion dollars over 11 years, according to the White House.” However, this seems to benefit the government more than the students in our country…

So, what are some other innovative ideas we can implement to curb the increasing education problem for students? Whether you agree with the value of a college education or not, it needs to be reformed and improved. Below are some initial crazy ideas off the top of my head.

1. 2-year Universities: Who made up the rule that we have to attend college for 4 years? By decreasing the amount of time we spend in college, it decreases the amount of loans a student has to take on, so why not spend the 3rd or 4th year interning at a company? Or building a company? Or traveling around the world? I guarantee that students will learn a lot more by DOING something versus SITTING in a classroom.

2. Student Loan Awareness: Most students do not know the terms and conditions of the loans they take on including the repayment process. All colleges and universities should mandate incoming freshman take a 30-minute “entrance loan counseling” class on student loans. As well as seniors that are graduating to take a short session on “exit loan counseling.” A lot of the criticism of colleges is that they just throw students out into the real world with no preparation. This could be a great start.

3. College Loan Repayment Reform: If anyone files for bankruptcy, the student loan should go along with it.

4. Cultural Paradigm Shift: College is NOT the Answer to Success: Yes, it can be a great start for people in different income brackets, races, for the networking opportunities, confidence, etc. But having a college degree will not ensure that you will be 100% successful, or rake in the money once you graduate. College isn’t for everyone.

5. Adopt the Finnish Education Model and Abolish Tuition for Public Schools: According to Wikipedia, “The Finnish education system is an egalitarian Nordic system, with no tuition fees for full-time students. Attendance is compulsory for nine years starting at age seven, and free meals are served to pupils at primary and secondary levels, where the pupils go to their local school. Education after primary school is divided into vocational and academic systems.”

6. Public Service (great idea from Nathan Hurst): More programs like ROTC whereby the government would pay for your education in exchange for public service (teaching, software engineering, accounting, etc).

7. Halt Education Inflation (great point from Matt Lehrer): The best solution I know of is to halt education inflation (http://bit.ly/anl1hM) at the source: the US government / Sallie Mae. There’s no way tuition would be up 10x in 30 years if there wasn’t a huge, mandated buyer and guarantee on student loan debt. Regulate that better and most of the other problems go away.

These are some initial ideas off the top of my head. Would love to hear more from you guys as I think this is a major problem that needs to be addressed in our society. Fire away!

“I call!”

Those were the last two words that came out of my mouth at the 2010 World Series of Poker. It was Day 3 of WSOP with 1,800 remaining players out of the original starting field of 7,319 (and the top 800 makes the money). The blinds were $1,600/$800 with a $200 ante and I had around $30K left in my stack. Not a lot but enough to make a huge dent in someone else’s stack and double up. There were lots of pre-flop raises, re-raises, and re-re-raises. For those of you that don’t play poker, it’s similar to the scene from The Big Hit with the phone tracer blocker that gets trumped by the phone tracer blocker blocker. In other words, the cards in your hand don’t really matter anymore.

UTG, I get KQo, which I normally never play in early position, but it was the perfect stealing hand, considering I haven’t played a hand in the past 30 minutes (which is an eternity when you’re short stack). People would respect my raise and fold to me right?  I raise to $4,100 which was the opening raise at our table (the least amount you can bet to get people to fold). And if everyone folds, I easily pick up $4,200 for nada. Not bad. I decide to take the risk.

I try to look calm and represent a “strong” hand like AA, KK, or AK. First guy folds. So does the second. Then the third and fourth and fifth. The guy on the button stares at his cards, and stares back at me. He looks at his cards again, thinks about calling or maybe raising, but I give him the “if you raise, I’m putting all my chips in the middle” look and he decides to fold. The small blind folds. Almosttttt there! And the big blind decides to call. Shit.

** Backstory: I’ve been hammering away at this guy all day. Every time I sit at the poker table, I pick 2 people I want to stay away from, and 2 people I can get involved with. This was my numero uno target all day. I think I stole around $20-$30K from him. He had his tells written on his forehead. Unfortunately, this was the one time he decided to stand up for himself. **

The flop comes Qo8s4s. He quickly checks, and I bet $5K thinking he would fold (like he did all day). Surprisingly, he instantly check raised all-in for my remaining $20K. I wanted to punch him in the face for pulling the 2001 amateur internet poker player move on me. I tanked and thought about all the possible hands this guy could have and narrow down that range to a few. I put him on the flush draw or AQ (worst case scenario for me), or JJ or lower (best case scenario). I didn’t put him on a set as he was the type of player that would bet big on his draws and value bets when he hits. I thought about my other option: folding. If I folded, I still had enough chips to double up and wait, but I decided to call. If he had the flush draw, I was the huge favorite to win, majority of the time.

He flips over 9s5s for the flush draw against my KQo on Qo8s4s flop. Woo! The turn came the Ks and river 7d. Busto!

So, there you have it. After playing poker for 3 days, I’m out. Looking back, I’m real proud of how I played and wouldn’t take it back for anything. I made a lot of hero calls when the other player was bluffing. I re-raised when I thought players were weak when I didn’t have anything. I went with my gut in a lot of marginal situations which is how I lasted so long.

Pushing how I played aside, looking back over the project, I’m really proud of our accomplishments. I had three major goals for WSOG.

1) Raise over $100K for various charities. We raised over $150K!
2) Get on ESPN to spread awareness about the project. ESPN wrote an article and did a short video about our project. We’ll also probably be on Day 1 of 2010 WSOP since we all wore lady track suits : )
3) Get the professional poker community on board. Rafe Furst, Annie Duke, Phil Gordon, Phil Ivey, Joe Sebok, Ali Nejad and Andy Bloch stepped up to support and encourage the poker community to get involved.

Wrapping up, I would like to thank everyone that donated on Kickstarter. We raised a little over $5,000 which I matched to get us to the $10K buyin for WSOP. And thanks to all the professional poker players, charities, and everyone else that made this project a huge success. Thank you! I could’t have done it without all of you.

Until next year…

It’s no secret that I like playing poker.  It’s one of the best games in the world that combines strategy, decision making, competition, math, statistics, psychology, behavior, patterns, etc.  And you can win a lot of money playing poker, so what’s not to like about it?

Every year, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) is a series of poker tournaments held in Las Vegas.  WSOP culminates with a $10,000 no-limit hold’em “Main Event”, which attracted 6,494 entrants in 2009 and had a first prize payout of $8,546,435!  Through all of the 2009 tournaments during WSOP, they have currently awarded $173,335,842 in prize money.  $173M!!

At the 2009 WSOP in Las Vegas, I was talking to one of my personal adviser/mentor Rafe Furst (who is also a professional poker player) about how to combine poker and good — we came up with an interesting idea…

WHAT IF WE COULD ENCOURAGE POKER PLAYERS DURING THE WSOP TO DONATE A PERCENTAGE OF THEIR WINNINGS TO CHARITY?

Rafe Furst and Phil Gordon have already started an initiative to make this happen called Bad Beat on Cancer (BBOC).  Here’s how it started…

They asked their friends to pledge just 1% of their winnings at the WSOP Championship Event to the Prevent Cancer Foundation as a tax-deductible donation, resulting in enough money to fund a research grant for an entire year.

Since its inception six years ago, Bad Beat on Cancer™ (BBoC) has raised over $2 million for cancer prevention research and has grown to include other major poker tournaments, leagues and home games.

How can we take this to the next level?  What else could we do to encourage more poker players to donate 1% of their winnings?  Here’s what we came up with…

What if I enter the World Series of Poker and donate 100% of any potential winnings to charity, and encourage other players to pledge 1% or 100% as well. Here’s how I envision that it’ll work.

1. I will post a project on kickstarter.com or chipmeup.com to raise $10,000 to play in the WSOG Main Event.
   • Option A – I sell 100 shares for $100 each.  Each shares equates to 1% of my potential winnings and each funder can pick whatever charity they want to donate for the potential winnings.
   • Option B – I cover the cost and donate 50% of winnings to Bad Beat on Cancer and 50% to Ante up for Africa.
2. To ensure that I play the best to my ability:
   • I’ll be personally trained and coached by professional poker players Rafe Furst and Phil Gordon.  And maybe Annie Duke if she agrees : )
   • I’ll enter WSOP Circuit Events (on my own dime) like the Bayou Poker Challenge at Harrah’s New Orleans next month to get some practice.
3. I’ll design and develop worldseriesofgood.com to encourage other poker players to donate a percentage of their WSOP winnings to Bad Beat on Cancer (Rafe and Phil’s charity), Ante up for Africa or DEF (Annie Duke’s charity), or any of the charities supported by Barry Greenstein.  The website will allow players to make a pledge with the goal of raising over $1MM for the charities.
4. During the WSOG, it will coincide with a one-day conference before the main event.  Every poker player that pledges to WSOP a percentage of their winnings will receive 50% off their ticket prices.  (Maybe in 2011?)
5. The Big Idea is to encourage ALL poker players to donate 1%+ of ALL their online and offline tournament winnings to charity.  Imagine if Full Tilt Poker allowed online players to automatically donate to charity?  And all the WSOP tournaments allowed you to automatically pledge when you register?
6. And of yeah, we’ll make small 1% patches (like the one Rafe is wearing below) and huge 100% patches that take up you entire shirt.

That’s pretty much it.  Simple eh?  We’re still in the idea generation phase so please leave any comments, suggestions, ideas below to improve the World Series of Good.  Would love to hear them!

Last week, when I was at the VCU Brandcenter, I gave a presentation called “Start Brands, Not Bands” on creative entrepreneurship and how that intersects with branding today.

Basic premise of the presentation: Do Not Work in Advertising!

Probably not that smartest thing to talk about at an “advertising” school when your audience consists of art directors and copywriters during the FIRST week of school.  But nevertheless, I saw a couple of head nods in the audience, so as long as I connected with those few, it’s all good in the hood.

I started off the presentation talking about my favorite brand in the world: Paypal.  Most people would have said Nike or Apple or Google or some other cool and typical brand.  I dropped Paypal.  Why?  First off, I don’t even like Paypal as a product or as a brand.  I don’t even care that they sold to Ebay for an estimated $1.5B or the fact that they had a genius marketing strategy.  I really like Paypal because of what everyone did AFTER they worked there.

I can pinpoint the exact moment that I decided to pull the trigger and get out of advertising.  I was flipping through the November issue of Forbes when I came across an article called the “Paypal Mafia” which talked about all the different projects the original team from Paypal were working on.  It was insane.  Everything from Youtube to LinkedIn to Kiva to launching rockets into space.  How insane is that?  And why?

“You never think it could happen to you,” says Hurley. “But seeing Peter and Max and the guys come up with ideas and seeing how to make things work gave me a lot of insight. You may not have a business degree, but you see how to put the process into effect. The experience helped me realize the payoff of being involved in a startup.”

I recently came across another article called the Google Mafia which is along the same premise: startup founders leaving to invest and help launch other companies.  Entrepreneurship is thriving and it’s even easier to start a company today.

“I had one of the best jobs in the world,” said Mr. Sacca, who as head of special initiatives at Google led a number of high-profile projects, including the creation of a free Wi-Fi network in the company’s hometown, Mountain View, Calif. “But there is a world of opportunity.”

So, if you’re thinking about going into advertising and working for an agency to write briefs on selling sugar water, or concepting ads for dog food, you should really think twice about it.  Why not take your skills and apply it to something better like making the world a better place?

In a world where we are combining business + creativity; it only makes sense to launch or work at your own startup.  Dan Pink states that we’re moving into a conceptual stage where creativity will be the leading competitive advantage.  It’s no longer to safe to be a Microsoft.  The next powerhouse companies will be the Apple’s of the world.  And there are already a ton of companies where the founders are under the age of 30:  GOOD Magazine, Tumblr, ETSY, Behance, All Day Buffet, Kluster, etc.  The list can go on forever.

Why help a client make a couple hundred million when you can make it yourself?

And to end, here’s the list of the 8 things I wish someone told me on my first day at VCU…

1. Become a creative entrepreneur/intrapreneur: Build a brand.  Launch your own company.  Fix a problem…  It’ll be the best piece in your book.
2. Find good partners: Work in teams of 3: strategist, technologist, creative.  Or any other combination.  Collaborate, cross-pollinate, and most importantly, DO something.
3. A great brand is a business, a great idea is not:  Learn the business side.  Read Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, etc.
4. Brand “me”: The most important brand in the world is your own.  Identify your strengths, network, and make yourself memorable.
5. Steer in the right direction:  Know where you’re going before you go there.  Even if you don’t know where you’re going, know your interests, and stay close to them.
6. Find mentors around you:  Stop looking above you and start looking around you.  Your classmates will be the greatest mentors you’ll ever get.
7. Don’t skip the Friday Speaker Series: Would you skip out on the TED Conference?  Each Friday speaker will teach you something new; don’t take it for granted.
8. Experience new things: If you’re a first year, try the Sticky Balls at Sticky Rice.  They are to die for.  If you’re a second year, drive an hour west to Charlottesville and grab a sandwich at Littlejohn’s.  Trust me, it’s worth the drive.

A Billie Remix

Takes a nation of millions to hold us back
But when your boy reach a billion it’s a wrap (off of RAP?) YEAH!
Roc nation it takes a nation to stop
I’m signin off, it’s the hood’s Barack, BRRRACK!

Put On Remix

I put Prodigy in his place on that Summerstage Screen.

American Boy Remix

Because my jewelery is currently being guarded by the Queen….

The R.O.C. in NYC

This concert was hot fire.

We often assume that the number of hours spent at work are an indication of one’s effort, interest, and accomplishment. However, in reality, the greatest ideas and the execution of these ideas happen in spurts. The best ideas often do not require a lengthy conception, and the most productive days are seldom the longest. But still, managers instinctually measure employees with an eye on the clock. Working hours remain rigid, and morale suffers when the rules fail to support the ultimate goal: a productive creative workplace. What working conditions are ideal for maximum creativity and productivity?

Read the rest here…