March Links: Business Plan Competitions!

Apologies for the delay, but the good news is, it's college business plan season!

Pepperdine's Graziadio School winners were Kimberly Foster and Mara Kamins from the morning MBA program with Nurse Education Web, which helps to alleviate the bottleneck in the RN world by enabling clinical training to tale place more efficiently.

Also at Pepperdine, the Values-Centered Leadership Lab awarded it's second annual Social Entrepreneurs of the Year award to Luke Marvel and Brett Clouser for The Monument of our Hearts, an attire company that addresses both ecology and self-image. For the 2nd straight year, The Lab is able to help incubate its winning team by offering them professional review and critique from real investors at CT Ventures, DFJ Frontier and Maverick Angels- three highly esteemed organizations that generously off their time to participate in the student initiative. (Disclaimer- I am an alumni of The Lab and get very excited about this annual event!)

Nice link from The Earth Times on both Pepperdine winners.

Babson, among the most entrepreneurial of colleges, announces that student Jennifer Green is the winner of its first annual Wal-Mart Sustainability Business Plan competition with her Generate Change concept of connecting retailers and non-profits.

U. of Michigan students bring home honors from interscholastic U. of Cincinnati Spirit MBA Business Plan Competition with their military inventory tracking plan for ArmyProperty.com.

In Green Bay, the Urban Hope Education Center announced these winners to their annual competition, including Of the Earth Artisans of Green Bay.

More to come on business plan competitions...

Vinod Khosla Interview at earth2tech

Outstanding, if too short, interview with Vinod Khosla, The Optimist's (among others') favorite future-savvy investor, at GigaOM's earth2tech.

I especially love how Khosla admits he drives a Lexus hybrid because he can- not because he believes today's hybrids are whether the cost the incur to save 1 ton of carbon. He falls short of saying he's not for incremental improvements and doesn't invest in them (but is willing to drive one!)

John Doerr, Ben Godhirsh, Gaiam and Change

ZDNet leads us off with some coverage of one of our favorite social entrepreneurs, Steve Glenn of LivingHomes, who literally introduced this Optimist to the phrase "Profit and Purpose" during a chat at Pepperdine University two years ago. The author dwells on the apparent lack of privacy in a LivingHome, given the demo's (and Glenn's home's) many windows. Dwell-caliber design critique it's not, but all coverage is good, I suppose, with Glenn's goal of hundreds of homes over the next few years.

Silly author above, though, links us to a bit on summer 2007's Solar Decathlon, in which 20 universities competed in a Department of Energy contest to create a village of off-the-grid homes on the National Mall. Champion: Germany's Technische Universitat Darmstadt. University of Maryland was runner-up.

Inhabitat shows us this Taiwanese solar-powered car (don't look at it if you're predisposed to believing that "good" vehicles are "ugly") out of a university project.

Meanwhile this LA-based company, Venture Vehicles, led by Rick Balsiger, has a great-looking site, and a much more attractive three-wheeler.

Nice Motley Fool follow-up on legendary VC John Doerr's continued commitment to cleantech; he has previously called environmentally-friendly technologies the Biggest Economic Opportunity of this Century. (Needless to say, this is one investor to take cues from). The Fool's spin this time is on which large industrials (BP, DuPont) will jump on Doerr's bandwagon to reduce greenhouse gas 25% by 2010.

From the LA Times archives: a 2006 profile of young social entrepreneur and philanthropist Ben Goldhirsh, founder of Good Magazine and Reason Pictures

The Daily Green reports on the continued growth of $70M Boulder-based Gaiam, the "mother of all green product marketers," with 10,000 offerings.

Here's the blog of workplace revolutionaries Cali and Jodi, authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It and pioneers of ROWE (the Results-Only Work Environment.

Today's post on Change in the above blog made me think of how difficult Change is, and I recalled a 2005 Fast Company by article called Change or Die on that topic. This article is one of the two or three most stimulating things I've ever read.

Fantastic web home of The Good Store, a beautiful and simple Australian purveyor of stuff that is good. Not Good, good, in the sense that we normally discuss it here. Just...good, as in gifts, mostly, from a Bialetti Moka Express to a Hohner Harmonica.

Social Entrepreneur points to non-profit Conscious Lifestyle's Ventures program, which (with Youth Ventures) awards $1000 seed prizes to social innovators. Deadline: Feb. 15.

Muhammad Yunus

John Tepper Marlin at HuffPo writes about the Ashoka Foundation's Social Entrepreneurship Series of inspiring videos. They both focus extensively on Muhammad Yunus, legendary Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank, the $1B microlender that empowers entrepreneurs in developing nations.

I was lucky enough to hear Yunus speak recently about his new book, Creating A World Without Poverty: How Social Business Can Transform Our Lives. For an incredibly accomplished man of such diverse and international endeavors, he speaks in an unbelievably down-to-earth tone; as Marlin writes, Yunus speaks incredibly humbly about launching the Grameen Bank. The very phrase "social business" is so simple and plainly descriptive that we will hereby adopt it to describe businesses that address social problems.

All Business Is Local

It's an election year and you'll probably hear "All Politics is Local" a few times. It's also a good time to remember that much (inarguably not all, but a lot!) of business is local, too. (In fact, if anyone has the numbers out there on how much of the economy flows through locally-owned companies I'd love to see it!)

Here's a quick article out of the Harrisonburg, VA Daily News Record on the benefits of businesses belonging to their local chamber of commerce. It's not just about free marketing, sponsoring the local arts and crafts fest or making a float for the Founder's Day Parade. According to a recent study, it's about trust; potential customers appear to find a company's products or services more credible if they are members of the local chamber.

The question, even for local companies with a national or global scope, is: why WOULDN'T you belong to the local chamber? It's not only part of being a good corporate citizen- to be active in your neighborhood- but it's also where your employees (and you!) live. Here's hoping the biggest of the big remember to participate locally, too.

Hope Wine

Business Week does its annual salute of America's Best Young Entrepreneurs. My personal favorite is our neighbor, Number 15, Jake Kloberdanz (24!) of Newport Beach, California. His simple business model (I didn't say Easy!) is to contract out wine production, market it and distribute it under the Hope Wine label, and give half of all profits to AIDS, Breast Cancer and Autism charities. Congratulations to this young leader and his peers.

Green Vision in Toledo

We at The Optimist Company are so proud of the visionaries driving downtown Toledo's development of a green arena. According to Jessica Luther at Toledo City Paper, it's Tina Skeldon Wozniak and the Lucas County Commissioners, in cahoots with building supplies giant Owens Corning (owners of a green building themselves, and headquartered a few blocks away on the downtown banks of the Maumee River), pushing for the new multi-purpose venue to attain LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building certified status. Read the link for a meatier explanation of what this designation means.

But to suffice it to say, to whatever extent it happens (and we'll track the early-stage story, as the ground-breaking ceremony was just today and not all green plans are yet in place) it will be a great merit badge for the city and a statement of T-town's commitment to urban regeneration and the environment!

Negroponte and Buy One, Give One Laptops

Nicholas Negroponte is combating slower-than-expected adoption of his One Laptop Per Child initiative with a simple and brilliant marketing ploy. Steve Hamm and BusinessWeek have the scoop: the $100-per-laptop goal is not quite yet achievable (unit cost is still at $188), so Negroponte's OLPC is going with a "Give One, Get One" plan to encourage American consumers to pay $400, get one laptop for themselves and have another sent to a child in one of four underdeveloped nations.

In the sense that all companies/organizations have to "market" their ideas, I love this "Buy One, Donate One" ploy and hereby nominate it as the Good Marketing Ploy of the year. See how TOM's Shoes does it, too, and more importantly note that my use of the word "Ploy" is with all due respect. Getting peoples' attention is a competitive thing in any endeavor. I bet this works.

Grist's Top 15 Green Entrepreneurs

Today Grist.org listed their favorite 15 Green Business Founders. This inspiring leadership list included the likeliest suspects, like legendary Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard and Ray Anderson, whose modular commercial carpet company Interface may be the largest on this list ($1.07B in 2006 sales).

The Top 15 also includes some more under-the-radar innovators, like Pizza Fusion, a Florida company that delivers pies in hybrids, and YOLO Colorhouse, which makes contaminant-free house paint.

It's an inspiring list of entrepreneurs who had social impact in mind from the beginning of building their successful business fact, rather than adding it as a consideration after the fact (which is nonetheless a great alternative).

More Dairy Do Good: Ben and Jerry's

If you like rich ice cream with clever flavors named for (mostly hippy) inspirations (like Cherry Garcia) OR the music of the best guitar/bass/drums/ fiddle/sax quintet (that isn't really a quintet since it also has a piano) in rock and roll OR both, and are concerned about the environment and global warming, then you'll love "Lick Global Warming", Ben & Jerry's collaboration with the Dave Matthews Band and SaveOurEnvironment.org.

The program sports a number of educational tidbits and calls to action, like letters to Congress or support for renewable energy efforts like myclimate and NativeEnergy.

Cutting-Edge Self-Awareness: Timberland

Leading the way, as it often has, in corporate ethics, social responsibility, and environmental care, Timberland releases its 2006 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. (Thanks to CSRwire.com for the release.) Jeffrey Swartz (City Year board member and long-time CEO of another of Fortune's Best Companies to Work For) and Timberland are evolved well beyond the earthy nutrition label on each shoe box, although they study environmental impact as scientifically and openly as could be possibly be imagined, and have evolved to include things like quality of life for factory workers in their worldwide supply chain and providing micro-banks for their employees and keeping acquisitions (GoLite) in line with its core values.

Check out the report online if you have a second; it's a cross between the comprehensive, data-driven fundamentals of a 10-K Annual Report and the sleek attractiveness of a brochure for...something really cool that other companies should do, too.Other Bloggers: Do Well and Do Good

Google: Doing Good, Locally

Google. Do No Evil. Google.org. There are so many "Optimist" facets to one of the most fascinating and fastest growing companies out there (and one with unbelievable brand-building momentum, according to Interbrand.) Here's another:

If you believe that small business is the life blood of this country, which we do, then this project, Google Local Business Referrals, is an example of a technology company doing good while probably also doing well. Google is enlisting paid local representatives to take digital photos and collect information about local businesses for integration with Google Maps (with the participation and permission of the business, of course.) This is a win for the small business, the end user looking for a solid referral, and certainly, in some way, Google.

If promoting small business doesn't meet your definition of doing good, consider:

• Free AdWords advertising for non-profits through Google Grants
• The business world-leading solar installation at the Google campus (see BoingBoing)
• How Googlers and non-Googlers like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have teamed up to use Maps to track Darfur and the genocide tragedies of the region (also see StopGenocideNow.org)
• Google releasing a version of the Apps suite for non-profits and educators
• Google planning to go Carbon Neutral by next year (see Shiny Shiny)...

...and of course, the legendary treatment of its employees, from work-life balance to the fabled amenities to a stipend for buying a hybrid, all well-document on the Fortune 100 Best Companies To Work For list and even on Oprah...

...and underlying it all, Google.org, the philanthropic arm which, lead by the legendary Dr. Larry Brilliant and endowed by Google cash and equity, is focused on public health, climate change, and global development, and supporting or launching great programs from the Acumen Fund (supporting entrepreneurial pursuits against poverty) to RechargeIT.org, which targets auto emissions.

(Equal Opportunity: Yahoo! For Good is a great program for using Yahoo tools to make a positive impact. No one could say it simpler or better than that!)

Critics point to privacy concerns, click fraud, or other standard criticisms, but that's not what this is about; they may also scoff that any company with Google's cash position could do such good things.

To which we say, to all other huge companies with lots of money, "Great, so do it like Google does it."

Disclaimer: The Optimist Company doesn't reflect Google's position and in no way are they connected; the only things they have is a vision that companies can make money while doing good. Even though The Optimist isn't about journalistic integrity (which I respect as a trained journalist) and instead simply celebrating companies that make money while doing good, this bears mentioning, because I can't go much further without mentioning Google.

Al Gore and Live Earth

Trying to keep things apolitical around The Optimist Company will not be easy given highly charged public opinions on topics like the environment and business' role in the community. At one point only a few years ago mentioning Al Gore may have been as politically charged as we could get.

But now that Gore has distanced himself from politics (a stance that, obviously, could change at any given moment in the next 6-9 months) and turned to building private ventures like Current TV and employing his own soaring Q Rating to making the topic of Global Warming both celebrity-cool and about as politically agnostic as it can get, it seems safe to plug MSN's archive of July 7's Live Earth "Concerts for a Climate in Crisis," staged around the world by master promoter Kevin Walls and emceed by Gore himself. Check out Optimist favorites Jack Johnson in Australia, Lenny Kravitz in Brazil and the star-studded London lineup.

Also, checkout this month's fantastic Fast Company profile by Ellen McGirt on the "brand makeover" of the formerly droll pol. Al Gore.

Love An Inconvenient Truth or dismiss it as propaganda, but you must at least grant Gore some serious marketing credibility for his ability to make the global climate a talkable topic.

Alternative Transportation Week: Biodiesel and BioWillie

With an admiring nod to WorldChanging and their regular feature The Week in Sustainable Mobility by Mike Millikin, we hereby launch our own inaugural Alternative Transportation Week.

Alternative Transportation can- and, in this case, will- be broadly encompassing, from automotive innovation to non-car transportation alternatives. We'll highlight the start-ups that are poised to make some noise in the game of "Reinventing How Humans Travel." It will take us more than a week, too.

Leading off is a company and a namesake entrepreneur that may not have been on the tip of your tongue for pioneering alternative transportation. But Willie Nelson is a Good Business Optimist, for sure. This legendary singing/song-writing country/folk musician and long-time-Highwayman, reformed bandit, one-time Taco Bell pitchman, near Octogenarian, weed-legalization proponent is no stranger to social activism, having stirred up great awareness for the plight of the American farmer with fellow troubadors Neil Young, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews in the festival form of Farm Aid.

Now his brand graces BioWillie, a Dallas-based brand of premium biodiesel distributed to a current roster of 13 truck stops in 7 states in support of both the environment and his familiar farming friends, who of course produce the earth stuff of which biodiesel is a product.



Willie, maybe we didn't love you quite as often as we could have in your early days as a country crooner (although if you ever get a chance to see the man and his band live, do it, still, and be mesmerized by his enduring persona and the emerging stage presence of his young, prodigious guitar-shredding son.) But, with much more to be said in the nascent dialogue of biodiesel and other alternative fuels, we salute your leadership in the alternative transportation space.

News and What-They're-Saying:
Domestic Fuel News on BioWillie distributor Earth Biofuels' financial struggles
Sarah Rodman on the green-ing travel habits of conscientious musicians and touring acts
Stillisstillmoving.com on the rebel Willie Nelson
GreenTechnolog on a recent PBS segment on BioWillie (with a YouTube clip)
Fairfax Digital, 2005 (photo credit, too!)

Dear Craigslist: Make More Money, Do More Good!

If you're not familiar with the fantastic start-up story of Craigslist and how it rose into the top 10 websites in the US, Dylan Tweney of Wired's podcast interview is one starting point. But it's enough to know that a huge part of the lore is that Craig Newmark never intended to make money with his list of San Francisco-area events and announcements. And that he's one of the very few internet prodigies to resist making every vain attempt to monetize the eyeballs he began accumulating over a decade ago.

Revenue estimates for the small private company are normally in the $20-50M range; despite all its traffic, Craigslist still only charges for job postings in seven cities and apartment listings in the Big Apple (according to wikipedia).

What we propose is a simple innovation designed NOT to suddenly make Craigslist a billion dollar business but to "leverage" its popularity to introduce a much-needed web innovation that improves the user experience while also giving the company more money to do more good.

It's simple (or so I, a techno-moron, pretend): design a micropayment widget and collect a small fee, $1 or $2, for a lot more of the posts. A good rule would be that any category typically posted by businesses would require the tiny payment: job postings and apartments, and maybe service offerings. The rest of the community categories remain free and untouched.

Why this would be good for Craigslist's legion of devoted users:

1) It would actually improve the user experience by clearing out a lot of the clutter and crap that is currently spammed in the job postings and apartment settings. Craigslist is an amazing marketplace, but everyone once in a while, especially in these two sections, you the user can definitely start to feel like the target of rip-off artists.

2) It may help discourage lecherous third party profiteers from trying to capitalize on the big board's success (great Josh Lowensohn CNET article on CL turning of Listpic for such maneuvering)

3) There is no single pervasive micropayment system available on the web. Paypal and Checkout are proving that a secure, ubiquitous payment system can work at regular retail scale, and maybe one of them could even provide this micropayment platform. (Paypal is owned by eBay, which owns 25% of Craigslist.) A simple, secure and widely adopted micropayment system could be used far beyond Craigslist, from non-profit fundraising to microlending or investing in urban, youth or international startups. Few companies would have the clout to launch such a tool, but Craigslist has a dedicated audience that would probably tolerate it and access to a huge readership of talent that could make it a reality.

4) It would give the Craigslist Foundation a bigger warchest to pursue its Activist/Philanthropist goals like helping non-profits focus their strategy or helping communities rate and rank service providers or even political candidates. (see Donna Bogatin post on ZDNet)

Small is the new big, as Seth Godin would say, and Craigslist is the poster child of providing a focused service that is unparalleled and uncompromised. Still, opening up the revenue stream just a wee bit could be a good thing for everyone.

LivingHomes and Steve Glenn: Inspiring The Optimist

When LivingHomes launched last year, it was the first I’d really heard about modular construction or sustainable living, and the first time I thought about the business attitude that later inspired The Optimist. LivingHomes is fittingly our first Optimist Company.

The pioneering developer of eco-friendly modular residential construction, LivingHomes launched last year, installing their first home in one day last April in at their home base in Santa Monica, CA (check out the amazing video diary). Their houses are high-end, cool, and make only a tiny “ecological footprint.” LivngHomes is on the leading edge of Green building, and last April their model home was the first residence to attain the U.S. Green Building Council’s Platinum certification in the LEED ratings program. The home is a big zero, as in zero waste, zero emissions, zero carbon...

Founder Steve Glenn is a successful serial entrepreneur, the founder and former CEO of PeopleLink, and an alum of the dotcom incubator eCompanies, . He’s also a friend of Pepperdine University graduate marketing professor Molly Lavik, who invited him to speak at the Graziadio School of Business and Management last year. He sat casually on an entrepreneurial panel and talked about his goals: Profit and Purpose. He wasn’t the first to use those words- just the first time I’d ever thought about business on those blunt terms.

What I love about LivingHomes is that they are a "Green" company unabashedly targeting a luxury market. They went with an A-List architect (Ray Kappe) and definitely do not scrimp on the interior fixings (check out the great photography in the November Dwell.) And they definitely could have found a cheaper test market than Santa Monica.

(I actually think it’s a perfect test market: there are thousands of Considerate Consumers within a few miles, a vibrant entrepreneurial and media community in L.A., and an appreciation for high-end residential design, eco-friendly or not. There are also enough squalid, broke-down, environmentally disastrous eyesores nearby to contrast a constant reminder of how far we have to go in building responsibly.)

Critics have been quick to grunt, “So what? LivingHomes is for the wealthy; out of reach for the masses.” That’s exactly the point. Optimism- and in this case, sustainable building- isn’t about trying to change the world at the expense of running a solid business. If you believe that businesses are in a great position to lead social change, then it still has to be business-as-usual; The business model has to be sustainable. As former Patagonia CEO Michael Crooke said at the 2006 LOHAS conference, “It’s not enough to be eco-grovy.”

LivingHomes’ business model is to serve a high-end market with a high-end home that also happens to be the first to be LEED Platinum-Certified. And that’s what I love about it- they saw the luxury home buyer as one worth targeting with a "Green" product. It's no low-margin business serving as a vehicle for a purely altruistic cause (although there is clearly a huge role for business-like leadership in the non-profit arena). Instead it's a seasoned entrepreneur addressing an underserved market, and it's a great sign that the demand is there, as are the leaders interested in pursuing it.

Press: Business 2.o