State0 Blog

(OK, I promise Brad does not actually look like this in normal life. YouTube somehow chose that frame to display and I cannot fix it.)

Brad Powell was nice enough to have lunch with me this week. He is the CEO and a founder of DadLabs. DadLabs produces a great show on the web that includes “Advice for the modern dad by dads and daddys on parenting, parenthood, fatherhood, children, and wives.” It is great to see such avid social entrepreneurship here in Austin. I am not a dad myself but I work with youth and I often see the affects of both good and bad parenting. I love that these guys are putting the time in to back dads up. If you are a dad, you should check them out.

DadLabs is sponsored by BabyBjorn. It is a great match up. I almost enjoy the product placement. There are a number of services that could take from that lead. Seamless product placement is a much better strategy for online video than display ads or abrupt transitions to sponsored content.

Brad and his team have built up experience producing the show and have been in the internet video business as long as almost anyone else here in Austin. I have seen the DadLabs team on a few panels and they are involved in the local social media scene. If you are fighting through some of the branding or sponsorship issues associated with online video, you should consider getting in contact with these guys.

I have recently been working with a local program called Tech Tots that is a part of Communities in Schools. A friend of a friend, Josh Gahr, got me involved. Essentially, the program puts computers in houses of lower income families with small children. It is one way that CIS helps to shrink the digital divide here in Austin. It has been great because, despite living in Texas, I do not get much opportunity to speak Spanish. Put me in a place where I am encouraged to speak Spanish and evangelize the internet and I may never leave.

I have visited the family I was assigned to a few times now. At the moment of connectivity, our first stop was Gmail. However, that was only a momentary pause on the way to Craigslist. If you do not understand Craigslist, you should visit my wife’s blog. Today we made $150 on some fans that I would have paid $150 to get rid of. It is the simple and delightful power of the interweb and it is ancient enough that it works perfectly on dialup. As I drove home, I fielded a call from the man of the house on how he was supposed to go about getting a hold of an old car he had found listed. It is simple things like that which those of us who live in front of computers forget the power of.

Last weekend we hit up a few newer sites that are doing cool things with language learning and I watched their son play with the computer for a while. I am often amazed at how much opportunity for equality we leave on the table by not up-fronting the cost to get people online. I look forward to seeing how Chopra handles this situation.

I met Brooks and took this quick interview at SXSWi but I never got around to posting it. In his free time Brooks built TweetChat. It is a quality site for group chatting on twitter hashes. If you would be interested in embedding something like this into your own site, send him an email.

I went to a smartphone gathering last night and met some guys from AccessAble Systems. They are smart, fun folks. They are trying to solve an interesting problem: helping people with disabilities navigate the UT campus. At BarZ, we have done accessibility work in a similar way with parks and zoos and the like. It has generated good press and been a rewarding investment. We may even have closed a few deals based on our accessibility offerings. 

I often wonder what the best way is to fund social entrepreneurship is. AccessAble is directly focused on ADA and related initiatives. The entrepreneurial endeavour is dependant on an already socially conscious movement. BarZ is slightly different because we derive our primary income from tour rentals to non-disabled individuals. That is not to say it is better, but it is different. Google, on the third hand, has ventures that may have no clear connection to their primary mission. They do get benevolence points for it though, in the same way that BarZ gets good press for some of the stuff we do and how AccessAble got funding to start with. 

In the US, non-profits can only generate income in ways that align with the general mission of the non-profit. This implies, to me, that this is the model that we support in the US for social entrepreneurship. However, that is not how I would decide where to get funding. I think a more appropriate model/metric in deciding how to generate funds would be sustainability. Will you continue to keep your doors open and your eyes on the goal while generating income doing x? If you answer yes, that is a good way to generate income.

But what do I know?