Bilingual Education Enthusiast

Week 5

Photo Credit: The Odyssey Online

This year marks my fourth year working with StartUps and I am amazed at the overall personal and professional growth I’ve gained from such involvement. To begin, LearnerNation taught me the importance of content for marketing one’s business. I thought to myself content? I was assigned to produce content in the form of blogs for the company’s website. It took me days to write out three short paragraphs. The title alone was difficult to come up with. Alia, my mentor, helped me by introducing me to HubSpot (an inbound marketing and sales platform). I watched their videos and learned so much. Now, I understand what inbound marketing is and why small businesses who use it thrive. First, I need to compile thought leaders in the e-learning industry, follow what was trending and/or what were popular topics, then I would devise blog topics that were relevant and engaging. The idea is that a business owner, seeking to train his or her employees, would come across LearnerNation’s blog, and eventually to its services. 

My second year I worked with Rokk3r Labs, particularly with Juana La Iguana, through this startup and my mentor Charles, I learned the importance of doing marketing research. We had to do comparative analysis of successful children’s learning applications. Juana is a kind of Barney (but based in Latin America). Our job was also to clean up the company’s WordPress website and keep up with google ad words. This experience also allowed me to see the steps that a company goes through to develop new material. Juana had three applications we were finalizing the second, and working on building the third. Working in this capacity allowed me to live a day in the life of CEOs and the staff who put the application together (physically), marketed the application, and who financed the project. 

For my third and fourth years, I continued to learn about the effect that marketing tools through my mentors Corey and Kiesha. I learned the importance of tools such as SurveyMonkey for writing newsletters, google surveys to quickly gather data, and the importance of staying true to your brand. More importantly the processes large organizations use to execute various functions. 

My participation in various startup events has also been very beneficial to my growth. It has allowed me to put what I’ve been learning into practice. When I speak to other attendees, participate in workshops, and share in front of a group, I feel confident sharing the knowledge and experience I bring to the table.

Week 4

This evening I finally got to share my participation of the Work on Purpose workshop I attended about two years ago. This event took place during Teach for America’s Educator Conference in Jacksonville, Florida. My colleague Michelle and I got funding from the Collective (TFA’s National Alumni of Color Association) to attend. This was a major incentive to attend. As though that weren’t incentive enough, TFA’s Miami-Dade Alumni and Community Impact team provided a charter bus for its South Florida conference registrants. Michelle and I (along with our significant others) trouped it up and a made a trip out of it. 

What I gained from this workshop initially and now sharing it with others inspires me to converse more with others to help align their passions and work. 

Like the old adage goes:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” 

- Confucius

Photo Credit: Greatcourses.com

In order to achieve this goal we first need to think about what our figurative heart beats for. My heart beats for justice, peace, and humanity. When I think of where this came from, I think about the experiences that have shaped my childhood. I grew up with two parents who worked really hard. I understood social economic injustice early on. Most recently, I watched the latest season of Orange Is The New Black (OITNB) on Netflix and one of the episodes deeply resonated with me. One of the characters Janae Watson, a star student, takes a field trip to tour a wealthy private school. Watson is deeply angered when she comes to realize the injustice of wealth disparity and even worse - the appropriation of black culture. I attended a bilingual school in East Harlem before moving to the affluent Upper East Side. For me, it was not a field trip, it was my young developmental years. I understood early on that social class, ethnic, and cultural differences could keep people apart. More importantly, that it could perpetuate disenfranchisement of some communities and segments of people. 

Then, thinking about when my life has felt out of whack, I think about all of the time I tried to make a lesson plan, a behavior management plan, or set up a classroom routine and I can honestly say my heart and mind were out of balance. There were moments of teaching I loved and live for: helping students, inspiring students, caring for young people. Other times (when I had to do those aforementioned things) they were exactly what made me want to drop whatever I was doing and run out the door. The actual teaching never seemed to go how I wanted it to go - how I imagined it would go. 

When syncing my heart and mind, I think of working to empower individuals to become self-sufficient and change-makers themselves. I always think back to what my life would be like if I hadn’t immigrated to the United States, if I hadn’t moved to the Upper East Side, if I hadn’t gone away for college, if I hadn’t studied abroad, etc. I have all this knowledge and I want to share it. What use is it if I keep it for myself? When I think of what “work” I want to do? I want to educate, I want to heal, I want to serve.  

Week 3

This summer Venture Hive will be offering a four-week accelerator program, which aims to teach Current Teach for America Corp Members and Alums, the entrepreneurship processes of StartUp CEOs. 

So what exactly is an accelerator program and what can I hope to gain from one? 

An accelerator program provides new StartUps businesses with advice, guidance and support for a designated amount of time. Usually, StartUps must exchange some equity (ownership of their company) in exchange of said service. Accelerators also invest money into their portfolio StartUps. Accelerators help with business aspects important to emerging companies such as marketing plans and strategies. 

What is Demo-Day and why is a pitch important?

A pitch, is the determining factor as to whether or not your receive seed funding for your StartUp. An accelerator will work with you to refine your pitch. A pitch should generally give a brief synopsis of what your company is, tell who the target audience, and give convincing reasons for why your StartUp will thrive. Think about the value it will bring to the market and our society. What problem will it solve? This pitch is usually given at the end of the allocated time an accelerator has spent with its portfolio startup. Demo-Days are also commonly seen upon completion of a coding boot camp or hackathon. 

Fun facts: 

FaceBook’s CEO received $500,000 from Peter Thiel (billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur) to fund his company.

AirBnB is famous for its highly effective, simplistic and engaging pitch. 

Other effective pitches such as Youtube offer social proof, or informational social influence, a psychological phenomenon and marketing technique that eases the mind of customers. Social proof is when “people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.” In short, the decisions we make are based off of the decisions others make, this goes for the cothes we buy, the music we listen to, the food we eat, etc. This is why it is an important element of a pitch. 

Week 2 

StartUp Summer was designed to provide teachers with technical and entrepreneurial skills they could bring to their classrooms, schools, and communities. Their experiences in the StartUp industry should inspire and provoke action toward advancing educational equity. In this post I’d like to highlight some of those teachers 

Photo Credit: LinkedIn

Diego Lugo interned at Wyncode (a full time developing boot camp) in the summet of 2014. He then worked for them as Campus Director and Director of Admissions. During this time he also learned to code. He currently works for Udacity (an online teaching startup) as a course developer. 

Matt Campbell also interned in 2014 but for a different company ClassWallet (a tracking platform for Educational Funds). Yet he ended up woring for Wyncode as well. He has served as Admissions and Operation Intern, Campus Director, and now currently as Director of Admissions. 

Today, Wyncode provides high school students with the opportunity to partake in a 6 week coding boot camp and also offers a Future Leaders of Tech Scholarship to their 10 week development boot camp. I’d like to think Wyncode will continue to work with TFA teachers and put out initiatives that will serve to bride educational inequities. 

Image Credit: squarespace.com 

Another inter, Oneika Osborne, teacher and former trainer at the Posse Foundation, partook in FIU’s Cohort 1, where she founded College Pop (a mobile student development and college preparation hub) For more information see: http://startup.fiu.edu/cohort-1/. Prior to doing this, she interned at Code Fever, where she assisted in initiatives to immerse youth to Uber and Facebook, making these work places achievable possibilities. and created an event for Black Tech Week called Glitter & Grits, where female entrepreneurs spoke about their roads to success. Attendees of this event attended workshops and conversed with these women over brunch. Oneika continues to work for children by ensuring access to higher education. 

Photo Credit: Miami Herald

As for myself, I partook in a Reforming Education hackathon, where I, along with three other people (a former TFA alum and two developers), won 2nd place for creating Bridge (getbridge.co is a multilingual text-messaging platform that would allow teachers and parents to communicated in a simple, affordable, and highly accessible way. Since then, I have been inspired to actually be able to enact change. 

Week 1

Summer Startup makes it possible for teachers to intern in fantastic startups. It  is up and running once more! For its fourth consecutive year. I have been a part of this program since its inception and am serving for the second time as the managing intern for the program. This summer the program will be running for five weeks and is now led by Scott Richards, the Senior Managing Director | Program Continuum for Teach for America. 

This year we are proud to again be working with the following companies: Wyncode, Wynwood Maker Camp (01), CodeFever, and Class Wallet. We are also thrilled to begin working with Caribu and Hero K12. 

Photo Credit: https://cic.us/miami/ 

Caribu is a platform that enhances inter-familiar learning by creating an engaging reading experience. The application happens to be co-founded by our very own Maxeme Tuchman, former Miami-Dade Executive Director for Teach for America. 

As for Hero K12, is a cloud-based platform that manages student behavior for both schools and districts. 

As for myself, I am excited to continue advancing this program’s objectives, to take on additional responsibilities, and to continue developing myself professionally. This first week I have learned how to develop a Wix Page. So now I know how to put together web pages on WordPress, Tumblr, and Wix. I get excited about seeing the final product and am meticulous about details.  

Week 6:

This past week, I had the privilege of partaking in IronHack Miami’s We/Code: Women’s Weekend with my younger sister Aaliyah. 130 women applied and there was a wait list of over 60 people. I’m so glad we were part of the chosen few! My manager Kiesha Moodie, Managing Director of Alumni and Community Impact for Teach for America Miami,  was also in attendance. I also got the opportunity to reunite with Alia Poonawala, Marketing & Community Engagement at Ironhack, she was my previous manager and mentor at LearnerNation, my placement site during the inaugural Summer Startup program. 

This event had a diverse group of women with ages ranging from 14 to 55 who came to together to learn to code a personal website using HTML and CSS. IronHack started in Madrid during a huge economic crisis, cofounders Ariel and Gonzalo wanted to find a solution to a problem: finding developers. The youth unemployment rate was at 57%. Educational institutions were simply not preparing its workforce for high-demand computing jobs. In order to bypass this, IronHack’s founders decided to create boot camp courses in HTML, CSS, UX, UI, etc. 

Our instructor, Apoorv Gupta, explained that servers are what provide or access information whereas clients are what consume information. He stated that browsers are our gateway to the internet (the web). He showed us how to use the inspect “sandbox” tool on a site to manipulate the browser. We learned about responsive web design. A responsive website works on any device and screen. As well as mobile or native apps, created specifically for Android or iphone. These are apps are coded in swift, Apple’s coding language for mobile apps, one downloaded, these apps cannot be viewed on a browser. *Whether you choose responsive or mobile depends on what type of user experience you want. 

Day 1:

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and it describes the semantic structure of a website (something visual for the browser). We learned that what you see or is visible goes in the body, HTML elements (block level vs. in-level), as well as how to create lists and div tags.  

CSS stands for Cascading Styling Sheets it is visual styling. We learned about the three types of CSS selectors (type, class, and ID), cascading vs. inheritance, and multiple selectors.  

Day 2: 

We learned about marketing through Linda Koritkoski, Head of marketing at STRAAT, she spoke about automated email campaigns, custom analytics systems, websites & blogs, and automated CMS. In addition, she discussed SEO (on-site and off-site), Adwords, Meta Tags, Google Analytics & webmaster tools, and Facebook Ads. 

Alexandra Floresmeyer, Graphic Design & Communications - ‎LiveAnswer, Inc., as the lead designer at her company, she discussed UI (User Interface), UX (User Experience), and QA (Quality Assurance). She shared a tool called Sketch which she stated was more user friendly than Photo Shop. She stated that boot strap, “a free and open-source front-end web framework for designing websites and web applications.” Bootstrap provides you with the most basic level which allows you to get your site up,without worrying about the details, it provides you with commonly used icons, gives you forms, and drop downs. She advised that the future is in app development and states that Miami is a place to stand out because the market is not oversaturated. 

Our last presenter, Marsha Belinson, Managing Director, JBC Connect, was also a registered participant, she discussed hiring & interviewing. She gave advice to job seekers and showed examples of powerful resumes.  

The day concluded with certificates of completion. It was such a great experience putting together my personal site and meeting such wonderful women. IronHack provided all attendees with a discount for courses it offers as well as introduced a discounted $2,500 scholarship application opportunity for four women.  

Week 5:

How amazing it has been to see this program grow over the past three years. Planning for this event was exciting because I was able to select the venue, thanks to Wifi (Co-Founder of The LAB) for the connection, select the food (everyone enjoyed Tijuana Flats catering), create the program outline, and then execute. Every stage of the way, from inviting guests to working out the logistics, I had the assistance of Corey White (Manager, Alumni and Community Impact at Teach for America) and the mentorship of Kiesha Moodie (Managing Director, Alumni and Community Impact at Teach For America). In college, I remember hosting events but it was always in a team, work tasks were delegated among team members). In this case, I held the ropes and learned how to project plan the way Teach for America does. 

This year’s summer mixer included a hands-on workshop where interns worked with one another to identify target markets, create marketing strategies, marketing campaigns, and create SWAT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for several startup platforms. As they worked, I walked around the room and listened in on their conversations, they used startup jargon and marketing language with fluidity. With the mentorship of our startup partners they were able to go further in their strategizing. I am grateful for the startup partners that made it out the event and for Samantha Hoare (Executive Director at Teach For America - Miami Dade). 

As the Summer Startup program continues to expand there will be more opportunities for professional development. It feels great to know that interns are leaving with tangible skills learnt at their placement sites, through our weekly webinars, and workshops. To whoever has my role in future years, I would highly recommend continuously finding ways to expand the role and program. We have supportive managers who are welcome to ideas and encourage innovation. 

Cheers!  

Week 4 Part B:

This past Tuesday, July 26th, I had the privilege to partake in CodeFever’s second Career Jam, this time at Facebook Miami’s offices. The lobby was packed beyond capacity! 

We were graciously welcomed by one of Facebook’s employees who is in charge of strategic partnerships for Latin America. She said that a big part was being the liaison between the developers (or the code) and the product. The youngsters in the room were fascinated to hear that she previously worked in the White House and met the President and one of his daughters. Facebook has some great perks for employees including a very generous maternity leave policy. The Miami office tries to build great culture as well by hosting social gatherings for its team members and families.

She also spoke to us about where the company currently is, having acquired Occulus, a head-mounted display for immersive technology virtual reality (VR), Instagram, WhatsApp, a messaging app which allows you to exchange messages without having to pay for SMS, and Boomerang, a built new video app for making short, action-packed video loops, all of which are managed independently. In addition, Facebook launched Amber Alerts to help locate missing children, this is done simplly by checking the platform. Facebook has no problem scaling, with over 1Billion users globally, and averaging 3M users in Miami alone. We learned that what makes the Facebook platform so successful is by making it customizable for its users, allows people to connect and exchange ideas globally, and is able to identify customer’s wants and needs for the purpose of marketing goods and services to them. Facebook is also able to target ads in the mobile space. What gives Facebook a competitive edge is constantly asking themselves, “Where are there gaps in the market?”, determining what those gaps are and then building around them. Facebook also strives to ensure excellent user experience, by having the best speed and agility; this means loading content quickly, providing high-quality videos, and live videos.

Then, we got to hear from Brian Brackeen, one of the co-founders of Kairos, a human analytics company that can analyze emotions (through facial expressions and engagement of people in video), facial recognition (match and remember people in photos and images), and crowd demographics (measure quantity and characteristics of people in real-world settings). Some companies interested in this kind of software would be film-makers who want to know what parts of movies to include in trailers, law enforcement for lie detecting, airport security, elevators and taxi TV commercials, and employee time clocks for businesses. Facebook uses Karios’ facial recognition when it automatically tags your friend’s faces. Cabs and elevators play vide ads and the screen can determine if you are watching the advertisements.  Similarly, movie theatres have ipads that track your viewing to determine the best scenes that they want to include in their trailers. Kairo has even been used to rescue children who were being trafficked. All of this was fascinating and Big Brother scary at the same time. 

Brian has previously worked for Apple, IBM, and Comcast. He encouraged the young coders in the room to learn PHP and added that Kairos is always hiring new developers (and they have great perks!). He encouraged them to pursue careers in development. He said his office begins the day with roundups where team members check-in and assist one another in problem solving.  

Photo Credit: https://s3.amazonaws.com/kairos-media/blog-images/timeclock.jpg

Take-a-ways from this event were that building an idea like Facebook or Kairos takes time, this can be years, and as such requires a lot of work, perseverance, and good faith. Brian Brackeen reminds us that Miami is the place to be for startups, there are three investors available for each startup idea.  

Week 4 Part A:

This week I got the opportunity to meet Code Fever’s founder Felecia Hatcher-Pearson at Code Fever’s first Career Jam. Uber graciously opened up their doors to local youth. The event commenced with socializing, giant connect four matches, and eating pizza.

Uber Miami recently launched UberEats Where you can “get the food you want, from the Miami restaurants you love, delivered at Uber speed.” The marketing team introduced the application to its attendees and allowed them to order up to $25 worth of food! After having eaten pizza, wings, and cheese sticks, the attendees ordered dessert ranging from Macaroons to cookies. 

After a tour of the office, which included a fully-stocked kitchen, ping-pong table, and ice-cream cart, Uber’s team and Felecia Hatcher-Pearson engaged in a Q&A panel. Panelists shared what their roles were at Uber, what brought them to Uber, and what it was like to work at Uber. The attendees were surprised to see that the dress code was not suit-and-tie and that the team had such a flexible working environment. 

When I asked my fourteen younger sister what her biggest take-away was about the event, she said it was to not be afraid of failing. She is about to start High School in the fall and she worries about not majoring in the “right” field or of not earning enough in the future. Through the panelists she learned that by making unconventional decisions and taking leaps of faith can result in favorable career outcomes. 

                                               Uber freebies!

Week 3:

Despite having been engaged in Summer Startup since its inception, I had not had the opportunity to meet with Matt Haggman, Miami Program Director for The Knight Foundation. The Knight Foundation “supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts.” 

At this event, we had the pleasure of meeting the winners of StartUp Weekend at FIU, another innovative program launched by Kiesha Moodie, Managing Director, Alumni and Community Impact at Teach For America and financially supported by The Knight Foundation. The winners, Liber-P, pitched a content delivery platform that would give inmates access to resources, both online and offline, in order to help leverage their skills and education. One of the team members articulated the problem that led them to their winning idea, inmates leave prison with major gaps in skills and knowledge which prevent them from re-entering the workforce. In addition, team members discussed how low-self esteem and limited access to resources in prison hinders their rehabilitation.  The goal for Liber-P is to provide inmates access to higher education, prepare them for the 21st century workforce, build self-esteem, and regain society’s trust. 

Liber-P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFYVEhCrBMk

I found this lunch to be incredibly empowering and motivating. Liber-P has the capacity to truly make a difference. It is evident in the successes of its founding members, who act as mentors to their communities and have the capacity to employ former inmates. Liber-P is expected to partake in South-by-Southwest EDU in Austin and we wish them all of the success in the world!  

Startup Summer interns got the opportunity to discuss their hopes for the remaining weeks of our summer internships as well as the plans we have upon completion of the internship. We also had Oneika Osborne, one of our fellow interns present her Startup Weekend team’s pitch. As finalists, her team Blueprint, created a technological tool that would help High School students keep track of their academic and to determine if their grades align to their goals. In addition to this service, the platform would provide students with resources to support them in their goals. The idea arose after discussing challenges students faced in High School such as access to continuous one-on-one conversations with guidance counselors. Throughout the weekend, Blueprint went out and surveyed high school students at a Miami mall to confirm the value of their idea.  

Overall, this lunch and learn opened up some very interesting conversations, allowed us to connect with one another, and refueled us for the remaining weeks left of the program. 

Week 2:

This is the second year that Summer Startup is hosting a series of webinars to ensure that interns have the tools and the support necessary to be successful during their internship. These webinars are conducted bi-weekly and cover topics ranging from marketing to technology. 

Interns commit to at least one webinar per week but are encouraged to partake in both. Upon completion of the webinars interns complete a survey. The webinars allow time for us to learn and leverage each other and our collective experience.

These webinars were introduced by Denzel Currie, who interned with me at LearnerNation in 2013, and then interned as a Summer Startup Intern. As a former intern, he understood that the environment and context of what interns are attempting to do during the summer is much different than teaching. He wanted interns to be prepared to make a lasting impact in their respective startups. 

The webinars provide opportunities to learn new skills (or polish old ones) that translate well into their current positions as interns. The webinar schedule and content overview for the remaining weeks of the program are as follow: 

This week we kicked off the first of 9 webinars with “Startup Survival Skills.” The purpose of this webinar was to share best tools and practices to be successful in a startup environment. 

During our WebEx webinar and conference call, Interns, such as Michelle Cunningham, shared great learning resources such as using Coursera (a free online course platform) that allows users to become certified in technical skills such as coding languages and SEO. These certifications can be added to their resumes and are useful to their internship experiences. Another intern Lwigy Collado added that his internship’s heavy use of google spreadsheets has taught him neat commands and tricks. Lastly, the startup CodeFever has provided its interns with crash coding courses, these interns have been able to immediately put their learning to use.

Week 1:

I have been a part of Teach for America’s Summer Startup since its inception in 2013. Summer Startup provides internships for TFA corps members and alumni with local startups. This program was created by Kiesha Moodie, Managing Director, Alumni and Community Impact at Teach for America and has been backed by the gracious financial support of the Knight Foundation. 

Just to recap, in my first year I interned with LearnerNation mainly writing content for their blogs, during my second year I worked with Rokk3r Labs, primarily doing research analysis. 

This summer, instead of interning at a local startup, I am interning for the program itself.  I get the opportunity to work with a rich talent pool of fellow TFA corps members. In doing so, I will work to broaden their experiences of Miami, and provide them with a greater understanding of opportunities that are available to them. I also hope the Miami startup community is able to take advantage of what these talented individuals have to offer.

Photocredit: http://www.intrepid-geophysics.com/ig/uploads/images/Webinars1.png

Webinars

I will be designing and facilitating the scope and sequence of topics for webinar curriculums over the six weeks. In drafting curriculums for these workshops I will be utilizing skills I learned as a teacher. The purpose of these curriculums is to educate and arm interns with tangible skills.

Communication

As the communication point-person, I will be sending out weekly newsletters, I will create timed - reminders in MailChimp, and design handouts. I will also manage survey and data collection to track program effectiveness.

Compliance

I will be tracking timesheets and blog completion to ensure my peers are paid in a timely fashion.

Events

I will be working on the operations, planning, and execution of mixers and lunch meetings. The purpose of these gatherings is to build community among startup partners and interns alike.

Week 6:

This past week I have been working on a comparative analysis of popular children’s youtube songs and generating a calendar of important Latin American celebratory dates (partly for future social media posts). I have learned over the past couple of weeks that research is such an integral component of launching a successful company. Research takes time. One must be selective in selecting, condensing information gathered, displaying information in an efficient and coherent way, and then analyze the information collected. 

One of the interns I worked closely with, Rebecca, told me that communications is very much like psychology and sociology combined. I never thought of marketing in that way - that there is a direct relation between what appeals to humans - their desired and perceived needs - and the technology, services and material objects that help satisfy those needs. 

As a high school student, I considered myself to be artsy and was interested in marketing as a college major. I even took a college course: Marketing 101 in Monroe College. I though the class was very interesting (taught by Ms. D who was very experienced in Hotel, Tourism, and Restaurant Management industry. I spoke to my college counselor about my desire to pursue marketing in college, he told me (with good intentions) that marketing was evil because it made people feel inadequate and fooled them into thinking that they could solve their insecurities through purchasing something. I agreed that I did not want to be part of a public or private sector that specialized in manipulating others.

Photo Credit: instagram: rokk3r_labs 

In college, as a social science major (Anthropology & Gender and Women’s Studies), I despised the business department. They stood for everything that I was against: materialism, capitalism, and inequality. As the years have gone by I learned that marketing isn’t inherently evil, but rather a means to promote or inform audiences about products or services. 

I hope that young adults learn to code and how to become entrepreneurs. Growing up I was part of the Mount Sinai Scholars program, after interning in the OB/GYN department of Mount Sinai hospital I realized that medicine was not my calling. I also partook in various engineering, architecture, and other science related programs, none called my attention. 

If I had more access to programing and exposure to communications media, entrepreneurism, and digital media, I would have realized earlier on the movement of the future. I would have discovered spaces like Rokk3r Labs sooner and my entire career trajectory would have been different. I now understand some basics, the way start-ups think, collaborate, and enjoy their time learning and working with other up-beat and intelligent individuals. I would have learned that marketing is not solely made to manipulate others but rather as a vehicle to connect people to tools and services that can improve their lives.   

TechCrunch published Nabyl Charania’s piece, “Exponential Organizations Are The Future Of Global Business And Innovation.” Nabyl explains that the “agility” and “leanness” that StartUps have - are today’s determining factor of market competitiveness. Why is any of this important? Because ExO companies have the capacity to take the place of fortune 500 companies. Rokk3r Labs partnered with Salim Ismail, author of “Exponential Organizations” and the visionary founding Executive Director of Singularity University, to present a daylong workshop outlining the principles of ExO. Principles that Rokk3r currently practices and plans to implement with the companies they co-build. 

There are 7 principles of ‘Lean’ intended to optimize processes:

1. Eliminate Waste: This does not mean literally garbage but things such as unnecessary waiting and extra processes.

2. Amplify Learning 

3. Decide as Late as Possible

4. Deliver as Fast as Possible

5. Empower the Team

6. Build Integrity Within

7. See the Whole

For more information about Lean see the article: “The lean startup: How to stay lean when your company takes off” by Marcio Cyrillo (http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/14/the-lean-startup/).

As for agility, dictionary.com defines agility as: 1. the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness: exercises demanding agility. 2. the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity. 

Although this definition applies to athletics it can also be applied to organizations such as software development companies. The following visual  beautifully illustrates the 12 principles of agile:

Photo Credit: (http://www.biggerplate.com/mapImages/xl/64fc52c5-ce73-4757-b208-b4f6463a5879.png) 

PMI created a report that details the benefits of implementing the principles of agility and summarizes its report with the following equation: “Greater Organizational Agility = Better Performance =  Improved Competitive Advantage.”  http://www.pmi.org/~/media/PDF/Research/Organizational-Agility-In-Depth-Report.ashx 

Rokk3r staff and interns brought dishes to the office on Friday July 17th. The food was displayed buffet style. 

Unfortunately I missed this event but here are some photos from the event: 

Food presented buffet style.

Photo Credit: Joel Mena

Grilled Cheese sandwich station.

Photo Credit: Joel Mena

This week has provided me with insurmountable perspective and motivation to aspire for a meaningful career. I recently read “Work on Purpose” by Lara Galinsky, this quick read chronicles the path five remarkable humans took toward creating purposeful careers for themselves. In order to change the world or “unleash or hustle” we must combine listening to our hears (discover what moves and motivates us)  and using our heads (our skills, beliefs, and gifts). 

I got to participate in this year’s Teach for America Educator’s Conference in Jacksonville, Mississippi. There were two sessions that most resonated with my experience at Rokk3r Labs. 

One of the sessions was Making the Match: Finding Work that Gives you Passion and Purpose. This professional education workshop was geared toward alumni seeking to pursue roles of increasing impact and leadership in education. The purpose of this workshop was to align alumni toward roles that would allow for systemic change that would further TFA’s movement. 

During this session and through reading, “Work on Purpose,” I learned the positive psychology term, flow or “zone.” A person is in the zone when they are completely immersed and enjoying what they are doing. Hours pass by and you don’t even realize it because you are so enthralled in the activity. I need to be more reflective in my daily activities to determine what drives me. 

 Another session I attended was: Immediately Useful Alumni Innovations where we got to meet two successful TFA alums.

 CommonLit is an educational resource created by TFA alumnus Michelle Brown. ComminLit has a collection of poems, short stories, news articles, historical documents, and literature for classrooms.

Kinvolved (An app that seeks to improve PreK-12 student attendance by sharing real-time information among families, schools, and after-school programs) was Co-founded by a former TFA educator and a parent advocate in 2012. Since then, the app has since received numerous awards and distinctions. These two women were deeply dedicated to creating technology that would improve parental communication about school attendance, behavior, and academic progress.

Teach for Americas is committed to supporting meaningful careers for its alumni. The Social Innovation Award, for instance, provides entrepreneurs with $100,000 in seed funding and professional coaching. How awesome is that?

Rokk3r Labs celebrates and appreciates it’s staff. In turn, it’s staff creates greatness!

The interns and I decided to go to the beach this Friday for a picnic. We are taking advantage of our close proximity to Miami Beach and celebrating Nestor’s birthday.  

Rock3r Labs Intern picnic lunch at Miami Beach: