Last week, as I was leaving the dog park, a child approached me and asked if my dog was a “good boy today”. I chuckled and told him “of course”! He then asked if I would like to purchase one of his home made dog cookies to reward him. After watching my dog gobble up the carefully made, bone shaped “cookie”, he turned to me, and with overt eye contact, a smile on his face and a glint of charm in his eye, he shook my hand, and said “it was nice doing business with you”.

I bought 10 more cookies.

This 9-year-old kid was no ordinary dime-a-dozen lemonade stand entrepreneur. His vegan peanut butter dog treats were wrapped in a beautifully designed paper wrapper, displaying a company name, logo, and phone number “where you could order more”. I give it 3 years before this young whipper-snapper is the richest 12 year old in the world…. I hope he will be.

My encounter with this child has left me delightfully dumbfounded. The way he interacted with me shows that his business is not a product of parental pressure. He was clearly innovative, a great marketer, and possessed a natural ability to close a sale. Way to go lil’ dude! After a little research, I have learned of many other micro-mega-noggins. One thing that has really struck me, however, is the lack of emphasis put on child entrepreneurs. While some may argue that kids should stay kids, I believe in supporting a child who has a a leaning towards business. A woman called me today here at thinkspace to tell me about a new young business owner here in Seattle. After getting his information (I will contact him this week), we had a discussion about they way our school system prepares children to become good employees, rather than nurturing entrepreneurial minds. She had a lot of great points.

I would love to hear your opinion on this, and get feedback on this topic in general. Also, we are seeking child entrepreneurs to interview, please use the comment forum below for commentary, and email me at Barbara@thinkspace.com to nominate the lil’ business brain that you know of!

Here is the story of a fella that has been featured all over the country as one of the best new brains- Jason O’Neil, the creator of Pencil Bugs. He is truly inspirational!

A Note from Jason O’Neill, Age 12 Pencil Bugs

When I was 9 years old, I had an idea to make a product that I could sell at a craft fair.  I’ve always liked school.  I get good grades but I know school is hard for many kids.  I started thinking about ways to make homework just a little more fun. That’s when I came up with the idea for Pencil Bugs.

With the help of my parents, we bought the supplies and made my first Pencil Bug.
I wanted to make them unique so decided to give them each a name and birth date. To keep them healthy for a long time, care and training instructions were also important.  I decided that a Certificate of Authenticity was the right touch to include with each Pencil Bug.

I hand paint each head in one of the eight colors.  I use twisted black wire for tiny antennas, glue on small googley eyes, and attach black fuzzy pipe cleaners for their bodies that wrap around the pencil. They are removable so you can still use the pencil eraser.   In fact, if you leave them a little higher than the eraser, they’re quite fun and boingy .

After a few months, I came up with the idea of making t-shirts to match and then started making laminated bookmarks in all 8 colors of Pencil Bugs .

* Text taken from http://www.pencilbugs.com

In June, King County named 75 local companies to its 2010 “Best Workplaces for Recycling and Waste Reduction” list – recognizing businesses with exceptional recycling programs and for their commitment to reducing the amount of waste their company produces.  This is the second year in a row that thinkspace has been named to this list.  I have to say thank you very much to the entire thinkspace community for their daily participation in our recycling efforts.  It’s an award that really belongs to our community!

The thinkspace team has grown again!  Hiring people is one of my top priorities.  In my MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program, we focused a lot of time on people as a foundation for building a great business.  One of the books that we had to read was “Who” by Geoff Smart.  The book addresses: “Your number one problem is not what, it’s who”.  My management style is not to tell someone exactly the path to get something done, rather, it’s more important for someone to focus on results rather than process.  After spending a lot of time getting to know Barbara Evans over the last few weeks, it’s become clear to me that she shares the thinkspace core values, has a breadth and depth of knowledge in marketing and branding, is intellectually curious, and is customer focused to immediately add value to our members and their customers.  Barbara loves to work closely with companies and small businesses on how to implement a Social Media Marketing campaign – use Social Media to raise SEO and has taught companies through a wide variety of speaking engagements.

Barbara radiates a true entrepreneurial spirit. Her positive attitude, and infectious personality make her a perfect Community Marketing Manager for thinkspace. After years of Internet Marketing and online community building through Social Media, Barbara applies her skills to build communities and connect with people both within the walls of thinkspace, as well as in the community around us. Barbara is from New York State and has brought with her a MA in Social Anthropology and a cat. She lives life to the fullest with hobbies such as aviation, SCUBA, ultra marathon running, trapeze arts and rock climbing.

The team couldn’t be more excited to have her on the team.  Please drop by and give her a warm welcome.  You can contact her through email barbara [@] thinkspace [dot] com and of course through Twitter (Seattle Wine Gal) and LinkedIn.  I think we all should expect that there will be wine at some future events at thinkspace too.

thinkspace will now be hosting PhyzzYoga classes every Tuesday from 12-1pm! What better way is there to spend your lunch than re-centering your mind and body with a little bit of Yoga?

Karen Lindenberg, Owner of PhyzzYoga, came and taught our first class last week and let me just say that she was a great instructor and I think I know why! PhyzzYoga is dedicated to bringing Yoga to the workplace and I just can’t tell you enough how much this one class helped me gain clarity and focus for the rest of my week. They focus primarily on bringing yoga to workplaces and encourage businesses to attend to their most valuable resource: their people. According to their About Page and apparent in their instructor, Phyzz is “helps people and business energize and innovate the way they work. We [Phyzz] are dedicated to helping you strengthen the core of your business by increasing flexibilty, balance, agility and grace in your workspace.” Does that not just make you excited? I know I am looking forward to the opportunity to spend some time meeting some great business owners during yoga classes right in our building!

If you would like to join us for yoga on Tuesdays from 12-1pm, please do! The classes are $12 for thinkspace members and open to the public for $14 per class and will be held in the first floor conference room of our Redmond location 8201 164th AVE NE Redmond, WA 98052. I am so excited to have PhyzzYoga here tomorrow and hope to see you soon!

In a month from now (August 4-5th), there’s going to be a conference in Seattle about Email Marketing.  The event is being put on by What Counts and is called Summer Summit. I looked at the agenda and I am very interested in hearing the “State of the Union” address about where the State of the Email Industry is.  The founder and CEO of What Counts is David Geller and the President is Brian Ratzliff.  I used to work with both David and Brian back at Starwave.  I’m very interested to hear from them and the other industry experts on this topic.  In my opinion, there seems to be so much emphasis on social media, Twitter, Facebook, customer engagement it seems like people are forgetting about email marketing.  What I’m hoping to learn is to find out how email is evolving, what are the new cutting edge ideas on how best to use email in conjunction with these other social channels.

I have to quote my friend, Anna Billstrom, who wrote a blog article titled “The Demise of Email“: Anna states, “Basically: email is about as dead as your social security number, your physical address, or HTML.”

In the past, while I was working for Disney.  I managed the broadcast email system on the engineering side.  The tools we created were used to send out millions of emails to all the people that registered on websites like ESPN.com, ABC.com, ABCNews, Disney.com etc.  The CRM team that used our tools, sent out over 100 million emails a year.  Now as a person running thinkspace, I’m looking at ways to connect with more people, share the stories of what goes on inside thinkspace, and also educate people about my products and services.  I’d like to build a better strategy and I think email is one of the areas that needs to be used in a more strategic manner.

About one month ago I got back from the Entrepreneurial Masters Program (EMP) at MIT.  It’s a join run program with the Entrepreneur Organization and MIT.  It has been an amazing experience and every day I think about what I’ve learned.  I’m amazed by the other 64 entrepreneurs in my class and humbled to be a part of this group.  When my class graduates in 2012, we’ll be the 20th group to have completed this program.  There have been some very impressive individuals that have gone through this program, like Michael Dell (just to name one).

A few of the thinkspace members suggested that I share what I’ve learned and discuss what I’m implementing in my business from the EMP program.  So next week, on Thursday, July 8th at noon, I’m going to give you guys a quick overview and give you a few takeaways that can help you grow your business.  For thinkspace, my goal is to build a company that will last.  This program is certainly shining a light on what I don’t know.  I’m also seeing that it doesn’t matter what size your company is whether you’re a fairly new startup or a $500M company, we’re all going through similar types of problems and without having a peer group it can be kind of scary and lonely.  I’m putting together my presentation deck and plan to cover:

Building for Smart and Sustainable Growth
•    Strategy
•    People
•    Outcomes

If this sounds interesting to you and you think it might help your business grow, please RSVP by emailing events@thinkspace.com by Tuesday, July 6th.  I’ll have my team order up some pizza for lunch too!

When: July 8th
Time: Noon to 1pm
Where: First floor conference room

Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle)
by Peter Chee Guest Columnist:

Double-digit unemployment, challenging economic times and other reasons for career reinvention have created a community of independent business professionals seeking places to do business beyond the local coffee shop.

Read on to consider options to serve members of what best-selling author Daniel Pink describes as “Free Agent Nation.”

Many independent professionals have experienced the isolation and absence of creative inspiration that comes with working from a home office. Coworking is one of today’s emerging trends that can ease these pains.

The concept is that professionals work better together than they do alone. Securing coworking space is among the most cost-effective options for those who have escaped Cubicle Nation to launch businesses of their own.

Ever since the Parnassus Group started putting together Twitter Conferences in March of 2009, they have thought that the next wave of digital innovation is going to be built by ordinary geeks on top of the rich and emerging foundation of social data platforms.

All kinds of cool things are being built by local (Seattle) rock star developers on top of the available social APIs, ranging from Twitter to Foursquare to Facebook and beyond.

In support of that community, we’re hosting the first Social Developer Meetup at thinkspace in Redmond, on June 28th, 2010 from 7:30 to 9:30pm. It’s free to attend – anyone and everyone is welcome to join us.

We’ll have some snacks and some refreshing beverages available, and we’ll have some brief presentations from a couple of people doing very cool things in the space. We’ll put a few more details of the schedule into this post as they become available.

If you’re interested in social data, the development projects going on, either academically or because you want to dive into the APIs, this event will be a great place to meet with the people who are already forging that path. If you’re deep into the trenches, come and share war stories about finicky APIs and debate the moral uses of individual user data!

So, to recap:

* Monday June 28th, 2010, 7:30-9:30
* Refreshments, short presentations, and good conversations
* Register for free on Eventbrite! (Space is limited)

Ignite Seattle was tonight and it was the 10th time it has happened. I have to say tonight’s Ignite was the best one that I’ve attended. The speakers were great and everyone one of them did a great job.

I went to the Ignite Prefunk event at Pintxo which was coordinated by Giyen Dave Manningsmith (incorrectly gave credit to Dave! Updated 6/16/10).  Seattle’s such a small town and being active on Twitter has made it even smaller.  I love the fact that I can recognize people that I’m meeting at these events because I see their Twitter avatars daily in my stream.  (nice to meet you face-to-face Liana and Heidi Miller!)  It’s pretty cool to feel almost an instant connection with people because of this interaction.

The friendships that are being created are so amazing. Shauna Causey is hysterical. The interaction between Shauna, Scott Ecker, and I was off the chart funny.  Scott’s prerequisite before following someone on Twitter is candle light dinner; Shauna’s clicked this “follow me” button 16,000 times.  The jokes had me rolling… I think we were in tears (at least I know I was). We’ve really got a great community here in Seattle and it’s because of the really genuinely nice people.