Break
waiting for the passing of a few days..
18
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JE!!
A look back on Imagine Cup
Perhaps its a little bit too late, but its been said that the wise man learns from his own failures as well as those of others.
Reading this post on on a failed startup really brings back (fond?) memories of FYP, and JonShonRonVons’ adventures with Bolesis as an entry for the Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition (2007).
I realise Bolesis and GameClay faced similar problems despite being completely different projects, and on hindsight, would seem like it (Bolesis) was doomed to fail from the start as well. So the question then would be if I, having known that we would fail before starting out, would have bothered to even embark on such a project?
Hell yes.
(This is, of course, putting aside the fact that we didn’t have a choice to not even begin since it was, in all actuality, our FYP submission as well and was required for graduation.)
If you have not already read that post, go read it. Now. It presents a very candid look of the rise (and fall) of aN IT startup. If you’re not in the software industry. You can stop reading here.
Bolesis. It seemed like a very novel and innovative idea at that time, providing a framework to catalogue and distribute the educational resources of the world, especially those that were just lying around in cyberspace collecting cyber-cobwebs. But further down the road, it proved to not be the holy grail we thought it was.
Perhaps the idea was too young and ‘before-its-time’-ish. Perhaps the (greater part of the) industry was not ready to share their materials, which was the basis for our entire project. Perhaps the team (myself especially) wasn’t competent enough to undertake the ambitious project. Whatever the case, I’m officially classifying Bolesis as a ‘failed’ project (since it wasn’t really a startup per say).
But the one thing this failure has taught me is that failures are not necessarily all bad. Mr Maran, the HOD for Pupil Development in VS had a saying that went along the lines of ‘In Victoria, we don’t teach you to stay down when you fall, we teach you to get back up and climb higher.’ I think that’s exactly what the failure of Bolesis is. A wake up call and more importantly an opportunity to climb higher.
What exactly are the factors that I feel led to its failure? I’ll leave that for another post. But for now I guess the summary of that post by Jonathan Tang can be condensed (somewhat) as written (in bold) on the 2nd paragraph,
If your idea starts with “We’re building a platform to…” and you don’t have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now.
For those who don’t know, our ‘elevator pitch’ for Bolesis went something like this. “We’re building a platform to enable the widespread distribution of credible learning resources, allowing both learners and content providers to collaborate in a content rich environment.”
And no, we did not have a billion dollars in capital. In fact, we had none.
Impulse.
Jonathan for the first time, did IMPULSE shopping.
He walked into a spectacle shop (still miss his Oakley deeply), and came out with a receipt in his hands.
TSK TSK TSK!
What can i say.
You’re seriously cute.
Calling for donors!
Come join,
The buy Jon a new pair of Oakley s fund.
Any takers? =)
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Quotable Quotes
No one hates software more than software developers.
— Jeff Atwood -
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