Brett Kopf's Posterous

A 2 minute documentary: SXSW through our eyes

Watch Bryce & myself experience sxsw for the first time. Big shout to MSUAA for sponsoring us to go! I can't beleive they caught me trying to crip walk. Sheild your eyes! 

If you want to see all the blog posts go here. Like the video? Well two very talented MSU students filmed it. They caught 18 hours of footage! If you are looking for video work let me know and I'll introduce you. Even though they spelled my name wrong (ehem) (; 

People in the video:

 

Pre SXSW Thoughts

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For a soon to be 24 year old fella with tons of energy & ADD you can imagine anticipation to the biggest startup conference in the country is a bit overwheleming. 100,000+ people: developers, marketers, investors... Over the past month I've been trying to figure out how to prepare and make the absolute best of the expereince. 

How it'll start

Bus

It all starts tomorrow at 5:45am. Myself & Bryce (a fellow educational startup founder) will hop on the bus with 25 U of M Business School MBA's and drive 24 hours straight to SXSW in Austin Texas.  They were kind enough to let a few MSU student join them. They are actually having a "Startup Weekend" on the bus which will be pitched to investors & sucessful entrepreneurs on Sunday. Sign up here if you are going. Some pretty cool people judging: 

Why am I going you ask?  

Well, last year I watched Twitter & the news from a distance and it seemed incredible! I promised myself I'd find a way to get there this year. Thankfully, the Michigan State Alumni Association invited me to head down to SXSW with them. I never actually new what goes on there, so I suggested bringing a few film students down and filming our experieince, then sharing it with MSU students and the rest of the world. This, is exactly what they decided to do!

Who is going from MSU?

Sxsw2

You can follow the Twitter hashtag #msusxsw and to participate with everything we are doing check out our blog alumni.msu.edu/sxsw. We're actually partnered with Techsmith! Ever use Snagit or Camtasia? Great products. You very well may see a lot of Betsy Weber on our video's. She's Techsmith's Cheif Evangelist. 

Who I hope to meet? 

I'm going in with a pretty open mind, but anyone that that has something to do with education. Startups, existing companies & innovators alike. I think the main reason I'm so excited, is because all year long I read about, tweet about or communicate with cool startup people around the country. Now, I finally have a chance to meet them in person! Who? Justin Miller (co-founder of Notehall), and a very helpful biz mentor. Charles Hudson who has helped advise us informally for months now, the Collaborize team (who I met on Twitter last week!) the Twilio & Sendgrid teams...the list goes on. 

The point of this blog post was to unload all the things I've been thinking about and intend to do at SXSW, sorry if it was a bit long. Of course if you have any questions, ideas or are at SXSW and want to meet let me know! You can follow my schedule on Plancast, Tweet me, see remind101's Twitter account (big announcement in T- 24 hours, stay tuned here) and of course don't forget to keep track of all the MSUsxsw 

-Brett

 

 

The life cycle of starting a company at 22 years old: MSUglobal

I was geeked to be one of the 20 or so speakers at MSUglobals 10 year Symposia. They asked me to speak about my lessons & challenges in starting remind101.   A few people have asked me to post the video, so here it is. Only 5 minutes long, so keep up. The other speakers rocked. I especially like Leigh Graves Wolf on edupunk movement, Scott Westermans keynote on everything from inspiration to leadership with a whole lotta energy as usual. Paul McConaughy's Prezi on Pie ups was good too. Of course, all of them were good: check them out here 

p.s. I'm out of Alka Seltzer (;