Steven Cown RFinity

Summary

The first speaker was Steven Cown who was the CEO of RFinity. He started off his presentation by talking about his career personally, telling about how he didn’t settle for what he was given and instead took the initiative so that he could advance his career. He worked of the INL hacking cell phone and was able to use the knowledge he gained there to start his own companies.

As his presentation continued Cown discussed the benefits of working for a mature company as opposed to a startup company. He said that mature companies have job security, stability, middle management and that their purpose is to leverage their existing value. He said that the downfall of that is that middle management is very risk adverse and that they usually don’t want to allocate resources to new ideas.

He then talked about the risks and benefits of working for or creating a startup company. He explained that there are huge risks and that they allow a lot of room for innovative ideas and projects. He said that when you do a startup company you do everything.

In addition to the contrast between startup and mature companies, Steve Cowen also talked about getting investors for startup companies. He explained the process of a term sheet contract and how that will bind your investors to investing in you. He also explained that it’s best to keep your day job and do your startup work on nights and weekends.

Personal Reflection

I really enjoyed this speaker because a lot of the information he was giving made sense. One of the biggest things that interested me was when he talked about not settling for the career that he was given and taking the initiative and talking to people and doing things to advance his career. One of my biggest fears about joining the current workforce is that I will get stuck in a stagnant career that I hate and that my skill set will become obsolete. Although I have already been making plans to avoid this it was good for me to see someone who had been successful in his career talk about how he avoided that same situation.

I would like to use the point on this to make up for the points I lost in catagory d being unable to get client side validation to work.