Blog posts by author

Alistair Shepherd / Global Ocean Energy Systems

Alistair Shepherd, who is in the final year of a Masters degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Southampton, won the SETsquared competition to find a student to participate in the Kauffman Global Scholars programme. Applicants from across the five universities' 75,000 students were assessed on their ideas for high-growth businesses, and Alistair's winning entry was based around an innovative approach to exploiting wave energy.

Breeding 'Antipreneurs'

A blog about education, entrepreneurship and a few pictures from life in the last few weeks and a recent weekend trip to the Orcas Islands near the Canadian border.

Direction

I spent Sunday afternoon with a new friend of mine. It was a stunningly beautiful afternoon, so much of it was spent outside soaking up the sun (apparently it's as rare here as it is back home in Scotland). We spent a great deal of time discussing and philosophising on social behaviours, what motivates people, why people behave the way they do and how best to gather information from this behaviour.

Opening doors

So I've just come back from Startup Weekend MEGA in San Francisco. Hosted at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, it was a high energy, intense 3 days of building companies from the ground up.

Think.

Me at home last Christmas. Mountains are vast and grand. Being surrounded by them, breathing fresh cold air is a perfect place to think.

Questions?

A few photos I took this evening walking to meet 'the boys' for drinks in Belltown and some thoughts I had on the way home:

Play it BIG

This is an image I took from a plane 6 years ago when I left home at 17 and flew to Hong Kong. I wanted to go somewhere different, to expand my horizons and to push myself out of my comfort zone.

Saturday stroll in Seattle

I've come to the end of my first 'real' week working at Startup Weekend in Seattle. It's been great getting to know the people in the office. They're young, energetic, superbly clever but above all, they're passionate. Passionate about what they do and how they can help the next generation of entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground.

The Yes Men

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be invited to Powder Mountain ski resort in Utah to stay with the guys who run Summit Series. To give you a flavour of what they do, here's a link to a quick video. The weekend wasn't quite to the same scale as in the video but the premise was the same.

Startup Weekend!

First day in the office! I think I caught the team a little by surprise, they've just got back from the HUGE South By South West (SXSW) event in Austin, Texas and are still in recovery mode! The chap i've been liaising with from Startup Weekend doesn't get back for another 2 weeks so there were some blank faces when I walked through the front door. However the expressions quickly turned to smiles and I was introduced to a great team of people.

Goodbye San Francisco

A few quotes and photos from my final days in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

"Do you know what we call a failed entrepreneur in 'The Valley'? We call them experienced - it's a good thing"

Steve Blank - we were lucky to be invited to his home ranch on the pacific coast.