Southern Startup Hospitality from chris mcintyre on Vimeo.

This is my presentation about my involvement in the Jumpstart Foundry, as well as why I believe in the Southern Startup Hospitality that exists in Nashville. From the Jumpstart Foundry Investor Day 2011.

Open your rolodex. Open your laptop. Open your checkbook.

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On August 25th, 2011, the start-up accelerator I have spent the better part of the last year planning and working with is having their grand finale, the Jumpstart Foundry 2011 Investor Day! 6 companies were chosen and given 14 weeks, $15,000 and a hand picked group of 60 Nashville mentors (who are rock stars in their own right) to build their companies. Would you like to watch this awesome bunch of start-ups launch their companies right here in Nashville? Signup today to attend the Investor Day (limited seating, sign up fast)!

What can you expect to see? Well, I don’t want to give too much away (you can read a bit about the companies here), but let me tell you – this is an amazing bunch of entrepreneurs! We took submissions from companies all around the world to come to Nashville and work with the JSF. Over 100 applicants, 8 countries and 25 cities applied! It was hard to whittle down the list, for sure. Lots of reading, exchanging 100′s of emails, flying around for meetings, skype meetings, in person meetings, and lots of internal debate. Needless to say, I am absolutely amazed by the companies we chose and how far they have come in the last 13 weeks.

The JSF is in it’s second year, and last years start-ups are doing amazing things! Check out some of the following 2010 companies if you don’t believe me: Bizen, SourceYourCity and SplitSecnd (see them all here). This is what I consider to be a historic event for Nashville – 6 start-ups exploding out of an intense accelerator program, primed for investment!

Don’t miss your chance to attend Investor Day, get your name on the list today! RSVP Here.

As a final note, if you are a technologist, startup or entrepreneur looking for a way to accelerate your company, you should check out the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. If you are on the brink of a great startup idea and think the 2012 Jumpstart Foundry accelerator might be right for you – we will start accepting applications soon. Hone your presentation now!Similar Posts:

• Southern Startup Hospitality – My Pitch for Nashville at the 2011 Jumpstart Foundry Investor Day
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I had the opportunity to sit with Nashville great Mark Montgomery yesterday for a couple of hours and exchange life stories. For as interesting as he is (read: very), what was most interesting was his straight forward approach to getting the info he wanted/needed from the conversation. An interesting example of this, and the reason for this blog post, was because of a very pointed question he asked…

“As an investor, if I was looking at your company to invest in and saw all the things you were involved in outside of that company, that would scare me. How do you get away with all of it, and why?

My answer was simple: “I take my work life as serious as I take my personal life“. At first he looked at me like I was a little full of crap, but then I went on to explain.

Loving What You Do

Most of us have hobbies or things we LOVE to do: gardening, biking, playing music, mentoring, volunteering, mountain climbing… you name it. Because we love these things, and because (for the most part) we don’t get to do them as much as we would like, we can become obsessed with them. We read articles, write reviews, enroll others, buy gadgets and in some cases fundamentally change our lives for these personal life things. That’s pretty serious. I take my job that serious.

I love what I do. I love where I work. I love the people I work with. I take my job as seriously as I take my hobbies. I approach each day like its that one week a year where my friends and I get together to hike into the woods and camp, climb mountains and tell stories by the fire. I love my job. Everything in my life is part of one story. My personal life bleeds into my work life. I believe it should be that way. When you are a well rounded person, you are a better employee, a better friend, a better spouse, a better parent. Don’t believe me? Ask the people I work with. It’s a shame I have to call them “people I work with” because for the most part, these are my greatest friends and people I share most of my personal and professional time with.

Work Life Balance is for Wussies

Some people call what I have explained here “work life balance“. That is such a politically correct way of explaining peoples lives in this world. Why would you not work for a company you believed in? Why would you not love your job? Why would you not work with people you would call family? Work life balance to me says “I know you hate your  job, but if you have hobbies and friends that will make it better.” I know I’m making generalizations and stretching the definition, but whatever. I have no work life balance and I love it. There is no line between where work ends and life begins.

About My Imbalance

I am a founder (or founding member) of many companies, some here in Nashville (Anrovia Design, ShirtsBymail, Podcast Alley, Mevio/PodShow, CarlSays, Checkd.In, Jumpstart Foundry, Change:Healthcare, EVBE, etc). This is my work, and my life. No balance. I love my startups, as a matter of fact I love many startups (Im a mentor for Source Your City and NextGxDx, and others too). I also love being outdoors, gardening, cycling, motorcycling, family time, creating things with my hands, and more. My work life balance is so out of whack, but that IS my balance.

I work hard because I play hard.

Work/life balance is for wussies.

I take my work life as serious as my personal life.

Do You?

In Summary…

Mark, thanks for the time we spent together. To anyone reading this, I would love to talk to you more about this topic and help you find a way to work as hard as you play. Most importantly, don’t let people tell you about you. You decide who you are, what you love, and what you do… not others. Don’t be afraid to go balls out.Similar Posts:

• Life Always Gets Harder Near the Summit…

I recently had the opportunity to be interviewed by Lee Turley of the Edison Equation about being a failure. It was a really great, off the cuff kind of interview that really makes you think about what it means to fail as an entrepreneur. Is it bad? Is it good? What did you learn? How were you better because of it? Answers to all these questions help every entrepreneur grow, and failing is a crucial step of entrepreneurship.

From their site:

“Thomas Edison is repeatedly quoted and sited for his perspective on failure. This perspective has seen many packages; “fail fast, succeed fast,” “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Those tag lines are great for movies but failure in reality is both sharp and blunt like the corner of a steel table.”

I rarely do interviews (and this one is kinda low quality due to internet lag), but I hope it explains a little bit about my philosophy on failure and my failures along the way. My wife and brother are starting a new company called evbe (or Everyday Better). Im hard on them. I have failed a lot and it has hurt. Hopefully they can learn from me to not get hurt so bad, but letting them fail is part of their growing experience as well. In the end, their product, and they as entrepreneurs, will be better for it :)

Watch the Video Here

If you know me, you know I don’t really do interviews. I don’t really like to be on camera or in the spotlight… I’m more of a behind the scenes get-shit-done type guy. But I make the exceptioin every once in a while, and this time it was for Travis Robertson at PodCamp Nashville 2011.

Enjoy the video (ps, the audio is bad for like a minute but gets better).

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Just found this video commercial from when I was working at PodShow. It was a lot of fun to be a part of (even though I was just behind the scenes). This I believe was for GoDaddy UK in cooperation with Mevio in the UK. The video is the “I want to be a GoDaddy Guy” spoof and features Candice Michelle, the GoDaddy Girl. Enjoy!

BTW, if you want to see some of my behind the scenes photos of the event, click on over to my flickr set to see them.

GoDaddy, OJ Borg, Candice Michelle from Wonkles on Vimeo.Similar Posts:

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Well, the news is official now. I left Mevio about 5 weeks ago to move back home to Nashville, TN and to start a new career…this time, in healthcare.

Through my early days of podcasting I was extremely fortunate to meet tons of great people. But in 2005 I was contacted by a gentleman by the name of Christopher Parks. At that time he was just a lowly podcaster to me (jab), host of a show called the BizCast (don’t look for it, you won’t find it. He pulled all the links down). Turns out he had a lot more to offer to the world than just a small town business podcast.

Christopher started the company I now work for as Product Manger, change:healthcare, out of frustration with the healthcare industry, and all the medical bills resulting from both of his parents unanticipated deaths within 1 year of each other. While this seems like a sad story (with no disrespect to Christopher or his family), it truly is a blessing to Americans everywhere who struggle with healthcare, related costs and confusion every single day of their lives. Because of this tragic event, Christopher was driven to make sure no one had to suffer through the confusion of paperwork, rejections and health jargon while dealing with sick and dying loved ones like he did.

You will no doubt hear more and more about this rising star, change:healthcare, in the coming months & years. We are growing explosively, releasing robust bill management tools and helping people save TONS OF MONEY on their healthcare costs every single day. But I will save the details for a later post.

For now, let me just say I am proud to be working with this company. They epitomize everything a company should strive to be: energetic, proud of their offering, revolutionary in their product and services, leaders in their field, and making a difference that is monumental to the growth and education of our nation as a whole.

If you are interested, you can read more about change:healthcare and the products and services offered here.

Links of Interest for this Post

• The official Press Release of My Joining change:healthcare
  
• The Change:Healthcare Website
• The Nashville Post Coverage of My Joinging the company

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I use Twitter.com daily. If you use twitter, you should add me. You can find me on twitter with username theferf. If you do not know what twitter is, there are many resources you can find about it including information on how to register for and master twitter, listings of the top twitter tools for your computer & phone, and more… so I won’t go into that here. Visit any of those links are do a google search for twitter and start your journey.

And dont forget to follow @theferf!

I found this cool widget to track the presedential results in pretty much real time. Enjoy!

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What started as a joke years ago at PodShow has now become a tradition at Mevio. If you are unlucky enough to find an error or 404 page on the Mevio.com website you will find the back of my head not looking back at you. We have had a number of different versions of these over the years within the company for some reason. It’s sad that I look forward to the site crashing and burning to get a good laugh at the images that show up that we have forgotten about.

Thanks to a few of the people (jawbone, sue, bryn) who made me a living error.

Here are a few of the previous ones I could find:

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A new feature just released on the Mevio site is the ability to embed videos, shows and channels found on the site in other locations. I thought I should test it out… so enjoy Amy Mac’s Fit Life below!

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It has been a crazy few months so I thought I would give another quick update. The marathon training has been going great. Logging lots of miles, until, I got shin splints. I have been not running for the last week or so and have been trying to stretch and relax a bit to ease the pain. It was probably a good thing though, because I had a LOT of work to do last week as PodShow released a major upgrade to the site, as well as a name change to Mevio.

So a little bit about the name change. PodShow, the company I have worked with for the last 3+ years, has re-branded to Mevio (found at mevio.com of course). There were many reasons for this but I don’t really need to get into all of that here. If you would like a great take on the transition from one of our producers standpoints, you can check out the GeekBrief blog with Cali Lewis. She wrote up a great post on it. I am excited about the changes happening at the office and am looking forward to where the company is going.

Now back to the marathon training. In preparing for the big race, Amy and I (as well as Nick a little bit and our friends Joe and Pam) are going to run in some other races as well. Mid May we are going to be taking part in the Bay to Breakers 12k and then the San Francisco 1/2 marathon in August before we take off to the Portland Marathon in October! Lets hope my shins heal up nicely before we get too much further :)

What else? In August, Amy and I will have been married for 7 years. At that time, we will be taking our first official vacation as a couple! We have taken a weekend here and there, or went home to Tennessee for a week but still working regular hours, so this is a pretty big deal for us. We will be taking off to Hawaii (Kauai and Maui I believe) for around 10 days and if the timing works out, maybe a trip through Las Vegas on the way back to attend the Portable Media Expo… we will have to see about that one, though.

Other than that, I guess it is work as usual. Long days and nights trying to build the best online entertainment hub on the planet :) Stay tuned for more updates and photos, I have lots of them but no time to post regularly. Nick and Amy are both up to some amazing things that I can not talk about yet… but soon!Similar Posts:

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You may not know it, but a change is coming. Soon we Americans are going to breathe a collective sigh of relief and wonder to ourselves, “what the hell were we thinking?”. The healthcare industry as we know it is seriously fucked up. It is not going to change over night, but with the help of one small company it just may be changed from this point on. Enter change:healthcare.

change:healthcare has one mission… To provide consumers with the tools, services and information they need to make the best healthcare decisions possible. Period.

Did you take a minute to read the words in the image above and grasp how awful this is?

“20% of every dollar in America is spent on healthcare.”

With the amount of money, time, energy, frustration and confusion that exists within the healthcare system, hardworking people like you and I have previously been left out of the conversation. We have been left to fend for ourselves and to find our own information in order to make intelligent decisions about how we spend our money in regard to health related expenses. Do yourself a favor: visit this page and learn about the change that IS coming. Starting March 3, 2008, you too will be able to change healthcare.

>> Change Healthcare WebsiteSimilar Posts:

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This Photo taken by theFerf

If you haven’t visited www.PodShow.com yet today, you should do so… Amy Mac and Fit Life are featured on the home page! Congratulations Amy!

Oh yeah, and once again… don’t forget to Buy the Fitness Attack Book on Amazon today.

Friday is the Big Day!! Amy Mac has published her very first book titled, “Fitness Attack” where she gives you 101 easy to implement tips & tricks to hack your body (and your life) into being better. If you have the $15 to spare, buy her book from Amazon.com on Friday (leap day)!

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There is no denying the fact that my wife, Amy Mac, kicks some serious ass. To prove it I would like to present the details to you. She is on TiVo. Need I say more?! If you own a TiVo purchased in the last couple of years you can now access Amy Mac’s Fit Life (from PodShow) on your TiVo box. The photo is the night it happened… Amy Mac watching Amy Mac on TiVo (it was too funny not to take the photo).

Anyway, if you own a TiVo there are a few different ways to find the programming. But Basically, this is the deal…

How to Get Amy Mac (Fit Life) on Your TiVo:

1. Push the TiVo button on your remote
2. Click on “Find Programs”
3. Click on “Download TV & Movies”
4. Click on “PodShowTV”
5. Click on “Fit Life with Amy Mac”

That’s it! From this point, I recommend that you get a season pass so it will automatically download the episodes when they are published. Enjoy, and congratulations to my wifey!
>>View the Slide Show of the TiVo Photos Here
>> View Just the TiVo Photos HereSimilar Posts:

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PodShow recently upgraded their PodSafe Music Network music player widget… so I thought to myself, why not rock out to the Dizzy Band to give it a test!

We finally released the first episode of Amy’s new video podcast, Fit Life. It is a little rough, but check it out below. We are beta testing the flash player as well, which seems to squish the video a little… so if you want a good version you are going to have to download or subscribe from the links below. Otherwise, enjoy the video!

>> Download Here
>> Subscribe Here

Today is an exciting day, dear friends. PodShow announced their partnership with BT and launched the first stage of BT PodShow (found at www.btpodshow.com)! Soon audio and video talent from the UK and Ireland will be able to be part of ‘the show’ with a reliable and powerful content creation, promotion and discoevery engine!

Check out the PodShow Pressroom for more information.

Hello family and friends. As you know, we have been developing the PodShow+ Social Media Network for sometime now and we have finally opened the doors! You can find my profile at Ferf.PodShow.com or you can browse the main site ore create an account at www.podshow.com.

There are a lot of fun things to do there like finding and interacting with old and new friends, finding great content to subscribe to, listen to or watch, and more. Make sure you check out the Program Guide on the site, it will help you find some of the best shows on the site.

If you have any troubles and are looking for ‘insider help’, don’t hesitate to email me (yes mom, this is meant for you). I would love your feedback and any bugs you find, be sure to let me know as well!!

PS> after you get into the site, make sure you go to my profile and click on the ‘dig me’ link to add me to your friends list. :D