Michael Horn :: New York Based Internet Entrepreneur

I’m a lawyer. But for the past few years, I’ve focused the bulk of my professional time on building things (web applications and startup companies, in particular).  Recently a number of my friends who are building companies in New York have expressed some interest in working with an attorney who has been in their shoes.

I’ve always been excited about adding value to the startup equation wherever I could be helpful.  As every founder knows, the answer to “where can I be helpful?” might include an insanely diverse array of tasks that you never imagined tackling when you started out.  Personally, I’ve built complex financial models, mastered social media and SEO, taught myself to code in Ruby on Rails, turned myself into a frontend ninja and even learned to manage Apache servers.  Along the way, I’ve also handled all the legal matters for my own projects: from company formations to team-building to financings.

Today I’ve decided to expand my role in the startup community by providing legal counsel to founders and investors.  I plan to leverage my in-the-trenches startup experiences to help you launch and finance companies with a keen eye towards on-the-ground entrepreneurial realities.

I will continue working on my own startup projects as well, and I hope that my clients will benefit from my ongoing entrepreneurial endeavors. If you’d like to contact me about legal work, please use the contact information at http://nycstartuplawyer.com.

As an entrepreneur in New York, you quickly learn the value of a good networking lunch.   So many new ideas and relationships can come from a great lunch meeting. Still, too many people probably eat lunch alone.  I know I often get caught up in work or I’m not sure what my schedule will look like on a particular day, so I don’t schedule a lunch ahead of time.  Then, suddenly 2pm hits and I have a free hour.  Right at that moment, I wish I could connect to somebody interesting in my neighborhood who might be up for lunch.  I want to build an app for this.

Sure, you could post a message on Twitter to see if somebody is around, but I don’t think most people have a critical mass of followers for that to be realistic.  A Facebook post could work for some people, but it would be cool if serendipity could play a larger role, and you could connect to an interesting person that might live or work near you, but who you don’t actually know yet.

I’d like to build an app for this exact use case.  When you realize that you’re about to have a free hour, you could post your location, time and place.  Then other people could either check a site that lists everybody who is going to lunch and open to meeting, or the user could get notifications if they choose.

I think there are undoubtedly apps out there where some portion of their purpose is to facilitate this type of thing, but I’d like to make something that is super simple, straight forward, and focused only on this particular use case.

If this sounds like an interesting problem that you might like to help me solve, I’d love to hear from you.  I’d be open to coding the web app portion in Rails and handling frontend development, but I’d love to hear from folks who might be interested in handling the mobile side of things, as well as ux/ui designers.  I think it would be a fun weekend project, and it would be awesome to see really cool ideas and relationships form out of connections that we helped to facilitate.

Earlier this week, I was at an event called Clickable Cafe, a monthly get together held at the offices of clickable.com.  The speaker this month was Peter Semmelhack, the CEO of Bug Labs.  Bug Labs is a leader in the open source hardware movement.  This is some exciting stuff.

Open source software is now the norm on the web.  In fact, it’s hard to imagine the Internet without it.  Google has their proprietary algorithm, but they’re still built on loads of open source software.  Facebook is entirely built on open source software (php).  Twitter is entirely built on open source software (Ruby on Rails originally).  Twenty year-olds in dorm rooms can’t build Internet companies if the software costs money.  So imagine what the world would look like without that reality.

Closer to home, I’ve personally experienced the unbelievable power of open source software.  I’m an attorney with no formal training in technology.  Yet, with the amazing open source tools at my disposal I was able to teach myself to code in Ruby on Rails and develop a website in less than two months (http://www.whatisfresh.com).  Open source software empowered me to say “I think there should be a site that does X”, and then go off an literally build it.  That’s the power of open source software – millions of hours of work and expertise available for free, empowering people to create new things.

So that’s software, and that story is pretty well known at this point.  But what about hardware?  Hardware is hard.  It takes prototyping and manufacturing, and it’s expensive.  As Peter points out, only a handful of companies make a vast majority of our electronic goods at this point.  It’s expensive and time consuming and that makes it unattractive to entrepreneurs.  Bug Labs and the open source hardware movement are working to change all that by creating open and compatible standards that can work on platforms and frameworks, much like open source software does today.

There is absolutely no doubt that the change from a closed system to an open system in software has changed the world by facilitating the development of a great deal of the technology we use today.  The implications of open source hardware are just as profound.  Peter imagines a world only ten years in the future where my software experience of learning to code and building a website will translate into the world of hardware.  An untrained individual can decide that they want a gadget that does Y, and using open standards and available parts, they can easily prototype it and launch a physical product at a fraction of today’s costs and timeframe.  This is big stuff.  I hope he’s right.

I’m a coffee fanatic.  Love the stuff.  I go through a pound of espresso beans every ten days or so.  I’m also an entrepreneur, and as such, I see annoying problems for what they really are: opportunities.  I’d like to see somebody design a better coffee bag that satisfies the needs of the coffee shop, while also preserving the freshness of my beans for an extended period.

The 1lb coffee bag makes no sense.  The quality of the coffee bean degrades significantly after a bag is opened.  If you grind your coffee at the store or buy it pre-ground, that’s even worse.  You lose all the key oils shortly after grinding coffee and exposing it to air.  So you don’t realize it, but you don’t even know what coffee tastes like when it’s not stale.  All your coffee is stale.

But even for fanatics like me who buy whole beans and grind only the amount they are going to use right then, we still lose a significant amount of quality after that bag is opened.  There’s a whole lot of science behind this, but it’s obvious in the taste and quality of espresso shots I pull on my home machine.  The day I buy a new bag of coffee, it’s amazing.  It’s noticeably different.  And that quality steadily degrades over the next few days, and finally hits a bottom around 5 days out.  The last half of each bag is noticeably worse than the first half.

There’s probably some arbitrary reason that coffee was first bagged in 1 lb bags, but why is it still bagged that way today?  Mostly it’s because the coffee shops have no incentive to decrease bag size when the consumer is already conditioned to buy a 1 lb bag, whether they need it or not.  I’ve seen some shops experiment with half-pound bags, but that kills their bottom line.  They need to sell you a 1 lb bag and they don’t want to stop.  There are also some high end shops that sell 12 oz bags (3/4 lb), but that’s not an attempt to solve this problem.  They do this because those high quality beans cost so much that they need to decrease the weight to keep it within the consumer’s perceived price point for a bag of coffee.

So that’s where it stands today.  I pay $15/lb of espresso beans and my coffee degrades in quality every day after I open it.  By the time I get to the last couple days of a bag, I can’t wait to go buy a new one and get a day or two of top quality again.  There’s got to be a better way.

Here’s my solution.  We need to keep the 1lb bag because the businesses don’t want to sell less volume and hurt their sales.  The coffee beans stay good until the air seal is broken.  So, why not make a one pound bag that has three or four compartments?  Each would open from a small strip that could be pulled back, and would open only the individual compartment.  The challenge would be designing a bag like this that does not significantly increase the complexity of packing the bag for the roaster.  If we can solve this problem, then both me and the growing consumer base in the high end coffee industry would be very happy.

I have no physical engineering skills, so if anybody wants to team up and prototype this thing for fun, let me know.  Consider it a challenge.

Welcome to my new blog!  I’ve run a few anonymous blogs over the past few years, but this will be my first time blogging as me.

I’m a Brooklyn-based Internet entrepreneur, attorney and technologist.  I practiced law for about three years at a large corporate law firm before giving in to my longstanding desire to get more involved in technology and Internet startup companies.  You can learn a lot more about me by navigating the links at the top of this blog.

I recently closed down my first major Internet project, and I’m excited to be launching a brand new site in early October 2009.  This time around I built it myself, and that’s been an exciting challenge.

Thanks for stopping by!  More news soon.

Mike