elizabethbarr
commented
9 years ago Richard Peck:
Tipp — Love it. You expected that, of course, given my experience in the restaurant industry (not as extensive as Chuck’s, but maybe a
decade has had some impact on my thinking!). A few questions:
OK, sure, restaurant owners and managers can rate-and-rank. Good start. How do you keep it from being a gossip site? How do you
protect yourself (and your business) legally, against a claim of bias or discrimination? More important, how do you protect the
contributors of the crowdsourced content? And how do you ensure whoever is posting is legit, but also shield their identity?
Re: the previous point (my bullet-paragraph was getting too long), how do you address the issue we all fought in corporations that were
afraid of lawsuits by employees for a negative reference? I was in more than one corp that said, “You can give employment dates and
salary verification, but NO comments. The employee was simply ‘here’ during those dates.” Does Angie’s List have any related legal
language in their EULA or Terms of Use? Can’t think of a closer comparison in terms of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down site, although there
must be several.
Have you thought about how you might enlist the GOOD cooks, servers, and others to self-report — and to offer feedback about others?
Every server on the team in a big restaurant knows the slackers who don’t do their sidework; always call in “sick”; badmouth the
company (as long as the owner or manager isn’t present).
Just logistically/programmatically: what you are suggesting is, in a sense, a market research project (something I did a lot of at
McGraw Hill and later at Markt+Technik). We call it “crowd-sourced data” today, but either way you have to handle it digitally. How
are you going to gather structured data, rather than open-ended text fields, so you end up with a genuine information product — not
just a digital notebook? What’s your underlying database engine? How are you going to solicit feedback and what’s the mechanism for
input (multiple choice, true-or-false, text boxes, what?). You know you’ll have to make it fast and easy, because Chefs and managers
are busy.
Is there any potential for cooperation with one of the HR software firms? Kronos? PeopleSoft?
Is there any benefit through cooperating with the NRA — i.e., National Restaurant Association, NOT National Rife Association —
not waiting for their endorsement or support to develop the site, but looping them in pretty early, to see what they think?
I’ll keep thinking.
Keep in Touch — Hard to feel passionate about this, and that REALLY matters. Is this also such a small idea, it would be difficult to scale to the point it is financially rewarding? When I was in Silicon Valley and working with VCs, they would CONTINUALLY ask, “Is this big enough to be worth your time? Our time?” How are you going to convince parents this is truly safer than Facebook? And even if you know it IS safer, what if someone flubs an invitation? Or if a predatory camp counselor (you’ve taken Virtus training at St. Mary’s?) has access and creates a false “child” who attended XYZ camp this summer? At what age are children actually able to do texts, emails, or posts to stay in touch with each other? What’s your market? Seems to me that maybe this is an idea limited to a narrow range of ages, after they become capable of using the tool, but only before they just switch over to FB, WhatsApp, or whatever else.
I dunno. I totally understand your interest and perspective on this with Summer. But this one seems to fail on scale, if nothing else? Could certainly be wrong.
Ship It Good — You can tell from my comments on the first two ideas that I usually think (1) market size, (2) partnerships, and (3)
passion. This idea would certainly qualify on (1) and (3)!
So, think about (2), partnerships. Could you go to UPS, FedEx, or _____, and build them into the plan? The infrastructure on this
idea seems the greatest barrier. If there is not staff on site to take the prohibited item from TSA, the schedules we all maintain (
and TSA demands when you are in line) would make this tough.
Who else is on site at airports who could take the items? Any chance of enlisting the TSA themselves? Funding kickback to the
government to help support TSA’s activities? But you still have the back-end logistics issue. Who takes the item from TSA and gets it
back to us.
This is a service UPS or FedEx should offer. They don’t yet. Hmm.
Write a three sentence description for all of your Working Group peers business in the chat bubble by their name on your Founder Institute homepage, and paste the sentences in the assignment. These comments can be seen by your peers in the program. (~45 minutes)