The competition runs through June, 7th. You can brush up on the official rules here, but basically teams must either use an existing NYC data source to create a software application or generate a new data source. Entries must also fit within one of these core challenge areas: Jobs and Economic Mobility, Cleanweb: Energy, Environment, and Resilience, Lifelong Learning, Healthy Living or Wildcard.

We focused this week on applications that help facilitate Healthy Living:

Suppr – A NYC Healthy Supper Club: Alex Platt, Analyst
Airbnb for healthy meals. A user hosts a dinner and makes a healthy home cooked meal. Other busy families and members sign up and contribute a small amount per person to pay for the meal.

Off A Stop Early!: Osei Kwakye, Associate Strategist
A crowdsourced databased filled with the average steps, calories burned and walking distances from certain points in NYC.  Would partner with Hopstop and/or Google to encourage New Yorkers to get off a stop early and walk the remainder of their commute.

Restaurant Nutrition API: Jim Babb, Senior Strategist
A database and API of every entrée and menu item for NYC restaurants. We’d create our dataset from DIY calorimeters kits and estimated nutritional information based on menu ingredients. Our goal would be to partner this database with services like Seamless, GrubHub and Yelp.
 
Health & Physical Activity Concierge: Sandra Hong, Digital Marketing Manager
Helpful suggestions for quick, easy and nearby activities and exercises to do. Suggestions would be generated based on amount of time, location and interests.

 
Walk & Discover: Nadia von Osterreich, Associate Strategist
A mini-site-seeing application that proposes scenic walks based on where you work, live or two points on a map. Besides broadening your walking routine, the app gives you interesting facts about the points of interest around you.

 
First prize winners can receive up to $20,000 in cash for apps that help people of all ages eat better, get in shape, and liver healthier lifestyles.

If you’re a designer, developer, or software engineer interested in helping bring any of these ideas to life, please reach out!

From the very beginning, we’ve had unrealistic expectations for our leaders here at Undercurrent. While most firms rely on separate teams for sales, design, management, consulting, and innovation, our leaders do it all. And as you’d expect, a group of polymaths at the cutting edge of digital strategy need to work together with people who balance their skills. To be the best we can be, we need a collaborator to direct traffic, look down the road, and be the spark that enables all of us to go from good to great.

At Undercurrent, we know that the wizard behind the curtain is every bit as essential as the performer on stage. When it’s done well, a great assistant’s work feels like magic. And, not-coincidentally, finding awesome executive assistants feels a lot like searching for unicorns.

Starting today, we’re on the hunt for the best and brightest minds in the world of executive support. We’re looking for seasoned (5+ years exp.) and more junior people to join our team (2+ years exp.). If you think you (or someone you know), might be right to help us deliver on our mission of creating an Ever Better Future, read on…

Joining our Experience Team (often called Operations or Administration at other firms) as an Executive Assistant means taking on a role that focuses on creating experiences for our senior leaders. You’re right for this job if you’ve got a background in administrative support – you’re currently working as an Executive Assistant or Coordinator in a creative industry (consulting, design, film/tv, marketing). Here are some more clues that you may be cut out for this line of work:

• You’re excited by collecting and connecting pieces of information about people, relationships, places, and things. Your friends describe you as a “social savant.”

• You are the ultimate liaison and caretaker. People come to you for advice about others. You know who needs attention and when. You know what people need to be their best.

• You are a “travel agent” to friends and family. You know the complexities of a heavy travel schedule, nationally and internationally, and are comfortable planning a seamless and stress-free travel experience.

• You’ve got an eye for detail, and the precision to do things right the first time. You love process and are always looking for ways to improve methods (especially yours).

• You’re a team player. While you can work autonomously and you know how to be a soloist, you prefer to collaborate.

• You’re good in the present and enjoy getting things done here and now, but you cannot help but look three weeks, six months, one year, and five years ahead to map out your game plan.

• You take pride in being behind the scenes making the magic happen.

The role you’ll play

On a macro level, your job is to get the most out of the 1-3 senior leaders that you support – to make them the best they can be, and make our business hum as a result. On a micro level, your days will involve managing our calendars, scheduling meetings and work sessions, booking travel, running interesting/bizarre errands related to our work (i.e. go buy a MakerBot!), and managing relationships between leaders and their teams. You’ll be the ultimate partner in crime, and will work side-by-side with some of the smartest thinkers in the world. Everyday is different, and your job is as flexible as your abilities and imagination.

Who we are and what we do

Like the rest of Undercurrent our Experience team comes from an array of disciplines – diversity of perspective is something we actively look for during our hiring process. Our current Experience team draws on backgrounds in psychology, architecture, business, and anthropology. We all share a passion for creating dynamic experiences.

What we offer

Working on the Experience team at UC means working in a mission-driven culture that provides you with the autonomy to get your work done, and the opportunity to shape and influence the systems, mission, and processes around you. We’re actively looking to improve the experience of doing what we do, so we want pragmatists who understand the challenges of building something great. With competitive compensation and benefits tuned to achieving a work-life balance, we’re looking for enterprising individuals who relish the opportunity to play a role in creating excellence.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it

If Undercurrent sounds like it might be the place for you, we encourage you to send us an email – ea@undercurrent.com – and introduce yourself. Tell us who you are and why you’re interested in becoming a member of Undercurrent’s Experience team.

At a high-level, viability is comprised of two different traits:

1. Utility: This is the core mechanic that creates value by answering a user’s need. It answers, “how useful is my idea?” Prototyping is a great way to uncover the utility at the heart of your product. The greater the need you solve, and the more completely you solve it, the more value you can create.
2. Usability: This is the interface between the user and the core mechanic of your product. Ease of use is a metric for defining usability – maximum value comes from eliminating points of friction between the user and that core mechanic. Answering the question, “how easy to use is my idea?” will help you identify the usability of your product.

These core traits, along with external factors such as social acceptability and price (which might be considered part of usability), ladder up to predict the potential viability of the product.

(click to embiggen)

Successful products rate high on at least one of these traits, and the best products nail both. For example, a product like Tinder has high Usability and low Utility, but it’s so frictionless to use that it doesn’t need to provide amazing and lasting Utility. However, having an amazingly strong trait in one area alone will not save your product. Over emphasizing a specific trait or not testing for both will lead to creating a Polished Turd (Usability without Utility) or an Ugly Duckling (Utility without Usability). When prototyping and testing ideas, it’s important to explore both types of value to minimize the risk of building out a product.

Utility Prototyping 

Utility Prototyping can take many forms and operate at many levels of fidelity, from activities like focus groups or polls, to manually creating a version of the core experience. What form it takes it will most likely not be automated. The best utility prototypes test a user’s need for the product by replicating the product’s core experience as completely as possible. In testing the utility of AirBnB with a prototype, for instance, it would be important to find someone who wanted to rent their place and facilitate someone wanting to stay there. This testing would likely require phone calls, Craigslist posts, manually emailing users, but the goal would be to sufficiently replicate the experience of renting out an apartment to test the need the product (AirBnB) fulfills.

Usability Prototyping

This is what commonly comes to mind when “rapid prototyping” is mentioned and usually consists of clickable wireframes, user flows and testing design comps. While these allude to the experience of using the product, they do not (in most cases) replicate the core experience or actually test how well a user’s need is fulfilled. These prototypes do, however, test how intuitive, easy to use and user-friendly the application is.

Testing the usability of AirBnB would involve testing the experience of using the site, helping to guide the information architecture, interface design, and flow of the experience. It would explore whether the right information presented to the user at the right time, and whether the user experience is simple and streamlined.

By testing both utility and usability, and asking the right questions of your test subjects, you’ll be able to gain a more complete picture of your product and lower your risk before building. The insights generated from both are not exclusive: each individual test will inevitably feed into the other. You’ll learn about your usefulness from a usability test and the other way around, too.

After testing both, you’ll be ready to create a Minimally Proof-able Product (MPP), which is a working prototype that contains both the core utility and basic usability. Depending on the level of risk, time, and cost of your specific product concept it may make sense to skip directly to your MPP. This prototype, while still very rough will marry the learnings and key experiences from both of your previous tests. An MPP should then become the basis for a public or investor facing Minimally Viable Product (MVP).

By testing your utility, usability and MPP, you can discover more insights about both your product and your user while decreasing your risk and increasing the speed at which you prove value.

1.) What problem are you solving?

We’re helping couples have kids when they want them, and not have kids when they don’t want them. We want more wanted children in the world, and fewer unwanted children.

2.) What gets you excited about the Boulder tech scene?

When we moved here last year from New York we didn’t know what to expect. We had heard that there was a good start-up scene in Boulder, but with only 100,000 people living here, I was skeptical. It turns out that even with the small population, there are an insane number of start-ups and start-up resources here. And on top of that, everyone is amazingly friendly and helpful. Apparently it’s only in the last 3 years that the scene has blown up here in Boulder. It’s fun to be part of a growing community that is excited about the future.

3.) The interaction between startups and large corporations is often a tenuous one. Better facilitating these interactions, between “startups” and “endups,” is particularly interesting to us at Undercurrent. As you grow your business, how can we be most helpful in closing this gap?

I think this comes down to relationships – make it easier for start-up founders to connect with the right people inside large companies. I think as startup founders we’re so focused on short and mid-term goals that we don’t spend the time to seek out, create, and nurture relationships like these that will pay off in the long term. So making it easier to connect and create these relationships would make a big difference. If executives inside large corporations better understood the value that startups can create, and reached out more directly to start-up founders I think more fruitful collaborations would be created. Every startup founder would love to take phone calls like these.

4.) Outside of work, what gets you out of bed every morning?

Wow, great question. Honestly, Kindara is the first thing I think about when I get out of bed! Some of our development is overseas and I’m always curious to see how it’s going each day. But over and above Kindara, I have a desire for my life to make a difference and I want to reach my potential as a human being. On the deepest level, that’s what gets me out of bed: There’s so much to learn and experience on this planet, and I’m excited to get through as much of it as I can before I die. Kindara is a great vehicle for this urge right now and I’m excited to watch it grow as I grow as a person.

5.) What advice would you give to an aspiring first-time entrepreneur?

I have tons of advice. A top 5 off the top of my head:

- Who you choose to work with will shape your future more than any other decision so choose wisely.

- Read Mark Andreeson’s classic post on Product/Market fit, and read The Lean Startup before you do anything

- Learn to sell the dream and never stop.

- Chances are you will make big mistakes and shit will go horribly wrong, but it’s never over until you say it is. Don’t give up.

- Work on yourself relentlessly: chances are you need to be a different person for this to be a massive success, so become that person.

 6.) One interesting link (it can be anything).

Kindara’s first ever ad. I recently read Insanely Simple about Apple’s advertising and it inspired me to start creating great ads for our vision at Kindara. This is the first of many called “Your Fertility. In Your Hands.” and we’re asking people to share their stories about taking their fertility into their hands as part of the launch:

http://www.yourfertilityinyourhands.com/

Five Questions and One Link is a brief conversation with the noteworthy companies we believe are transforming the way we use technology. Interested in having your company featured? Please, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

The competition runs through June, 7th. You can brush up on the official rules here, but basically teams must either use an existing NYC data source to create a software application or generate a new data source. Entries must also fit within one of these core challenge areas: Jobs and Economic Mobility, Cleanweb: Energy, Enviroment, and Resilence, Lifelong Learning, Healthy Living or Wildcard.

Our first post will start with ideas around Jobs and Economic Mobility:

Job Ramp: by Jordan Husney, Strategy Director
A progressive skills training/jobs application that helps identify workers with specific skill sets and help workers identify and develop new valuable ones.

Revitalization Marketplace: Sandra Hong, Digital Marketing Manager
An online and open marketplace for struggling business to bring in new ideas and people to help them innovate on failing businesses and business models.

The New Job Market: Vladimir Pick, Strategist
An online marketplace for business to sell, auction, or trade skilled employee hours without having to downsize and/or rehire in times of flux.

Public Project Via Accelerator: Matt Daniels, Associate Strategy Director
Local community members submit micro-public projects (like graffiti removal, etc…) to a crowd-funding platform where once funded local workers could apply to receive the funds and complete the projects.

Social Job Referrals: Jim Babb, Senior Strategist
A website that enables employees and friends of employees to become headhunters by providing a customizable trackable unique URLs and referral rewards to employees or friends of employees that help find suitable employees for open positions.

Candidate Tracker: Daria Lombroso, Experience Coordinator
A one stop spot for HR professionals to track potential candidates. Interfaces with Gmail, Calendars, Linkedin, Pipeline tools, surveying interviewers.

First prize winners can receive up to $25,000 in cash and up-to $20,000 in follow-on funding for apps that help New York City’s underserved residents find gainful employment, develop workforce skills, and/or access worker support services.

If you’re a designer, developer, or software engineer interested in helping bring any of these ideas to life, please reach out!

1.) What problem are you solving?
Dispatch makes creative teams more productive. It’s the place where their work lives, for things that too often get lost in email, shared folders, or chat.

2.) What gets you excited about the NYC tech scene?
Two things: youth and diversity. The scene here is young enough where things aren’t settled yet, so it’s easier to have an impact. Also, the cross-pollination of ideas from across industries is really exciting. Tech for tech’s sake is boring to me. I’m excited by tech that’s applied in novel ways, or in unexplored places.

3.) The interaction between startups and large corporations is often a tenuous one. Better facilitating these interactions, between “startups” and “endups,” is particularly interesting to us at Undercurrent. As you grow your business, how can we be most helpful in closing this gap?
I don’t know much about large companies, but I think one of the biggest frustrations as a startup dealing with big organizations is a mismatch in speed. Startups’ atomic unit for time tends to be days (sometimes hours), and big companies just don’t move that fast. This can be surprising, and frustrating.

4.) Outside of work, what gets you out of bed every morning?
I’m lucky to have an amazing wife, great friends and family and a very cute orange tabby cat, Pickles.

5.) What advice would you give to an aspiring first-time entrepreneur?
Figure out the game you want to play, and define what winning looks like to you. Surround yourself with as many smart people as you can, you can’t do it alone. Don’t wait for financing, or to find the right co-founder, or to win Startup Weekend. Startups are about pushing forward when it’s not comfortable.

One interesting link (it can be anything)
Have you heard about this Harlem Shake thing? Kidding. This keynote speech by Paul Ford about time, product design, and technology is one of the best things I’ve read on the internet in the recent past.

A story about where you’re from: While most of my childhood was spent growing up in CT, my family also spent several years living in Laguna Niguel, California. The area was totally undeveloped at that time (no Ritz Cartons or mega mansions in sight) and the land behind our house was filled with untouched rolling hills. My next door neighbor and I would spend hours on these bluffs searching out rattlesnake dens and seeing who could find the largest snake. It was all completely normal at the time…not so much when I look back now.

How did you end up here? Josh Spear and I had a ton of mutual connections in the startup world, but had never met. When I got back to NYC I randomly jumped into a Twitter conversation he was having and set up a time to finally introduce myself. I had no idea that Undercurrent was looking to add a role like mine, but was super impressed with the vision and we made something happen quickly.

One thing that scares you about technology: The ease with which it can potentially be used for unethical, illegal or harmful activities.

One thing that gives you hope for the future: The importance that is now being placed on improving our education system and the spotlight being shown on initiatives like the Startup Visa.

The problem you’d most like to solve, given $100MM to spend: I would probably open a venture fund and focus on deploying money around areas like bioinformatics, healthcare, cleantech, education, and transportation.

An obsession you’ve had (or continue to have): Outside of work, I would say that I’m obsessed with skiing. Spending time in the backcountry and pushing the boundaries of my abilities has shaped a lot of who I am as a person and has given me great perspective on risk-taking, perseverance, success and failure.

Your goal for your time at Undercurrent: I have two main goals that I’d like to address during my time at UC. The first is to build Undercurrent into the preeminent firm that connects “startups” and “endups.” While talked about a lot, this idea has yet to be implemented well, and I’d like to try to crack the code.

The second goal is to build upon what is already happening organically and institutionalize the angel investing that is going on in and around our ecosystem. UC sits at a unique intersection of innovation and proven industry knowledge/leadership and I would love to harness this expertise in the form of a dedicated investment arm.

1. Start small. Everyone should agree at the outset to limit the scope of what the lab aims to do. Groups seldom follow this advice; there seems to be a natural desire to add features and commentary, even when they’re unsolicited.
2. Be okay with the duct-taped solution. Someday you may need an enterprise email solution, but today, just use Mailchimp.
3. Ship early and often. This is an easy one to preach, and to rally behind, but many labs fail to follow through. What constitutes “shipping”? Engineers will argue that refactored code and server enhancements count, and they’re right. But the most important thing for the success of the lab is to have working stuff in the hands of users.
4. Make hard decisions as a team (regarding design, functionality, etc.), but let the user’s voice speak loudest. If they don’t give you great feedback on a feature, kill it. If they don’t use your product, pivot. And when we refer to a “user”, that can be an internal audience, too.
5. Before actually building a lab, come to a highly specific and mutually agreed understanding of what is broken in the organization. Is it the culture of work? Is it the output? Is it a customer experience? Come back to this constantly.
6. Determine the single metric by which the lab will be judged. Stick to it. Develop foolproof ways of measuring it. As best you can, tie compensation of lab participants to their success against their metric.
7. Create a dedicated, protected budget for the lab, and do not ask the lab for breakouts of their costs. Instead, judge them by the metric described above. Carry this learning to other digital efforts by defining goal-based budgets, rather than line-item budgets (which encourage the maintenance of status quo).
8. Aside from compensation, do what you can to connect participation in the lab to individual glory, promotion, and/or fame. In highly hierarchical environments with immobile compensation models, getting a seat at a key internal meeting (as a result of lab success) can be a huge motivator.
9. When determining who will be in the lab, look first for a charismatic, fearless, knowledgeable leader. They must be able to get up-and-down buy-in about/within the lab, and must be an effective politician. This does not need to be a digital leader, but if they’re not born-digital, they must be willing to learn.
10. The lab should be a priority for the C-suite.
11. C-suite leaders must be disciplined: they must fight for the autonomy of the lab, but resist the allure to roll up their sleeves and work inside the lab. Note: as the lab gains momentum, this allure will grow stronger.
12. Project liaisons for the lab must not require frequent reports of lab activity. However, the lab should maintain comprehensive documentation of its efforts.
13. Assess and understand the level of risk associated with the work of the lab. Might you infringe? Might you fail to protect customer data? The answer to both of these, unfortunately, is a likely yes. Most people will demonstrate a high appetite for risk at the outset of a lab project. This appetite tends to decrease over time, and early recognition & accounting for risk is important.
14. Consider building for internal audiences first. Risk escalates when the output is customer-facing or public in some way.
15. Decide how much impact you wish to achieve with the formation of the lab, and weigh that against the risk associated with the effort. In general, labs will accept risk in trade for organizational impact. Due to their typically in-house nature (which ensures that the lab owner captures the benefits associated with intellectual property and group learning), risk will likely come direct to the organization rather than through a third party.
16. If enough upside is available through creating a lab, do what you can to bring the lab in-house. This will require a significant amount of legwork and persuasion; adding new headcount is always an issue. With that said, it’s essential to bring the company (through the lab) as close as possible to the customers, and the ongoing skill-building within the lab isn’t something you want to give away to another organization.
17. Get the team working together as soon as possible. If you’re bringing in new resources from the outside, have them do homework together to test their collective skills and inherent project management capability.
18. Labs accelerate over time. Their pace improves, and the impact they have “tips up” rapidly after slow initial growth. As such, at the beginning of the effort, it can feel as if nothing is working, or that no progress is being made. Resist the urge to intercede.
19. Plan for the end of the lab effort. How will their outputs scale? What is their “time to proof?” How will their focus change after they prove success? How will the lab grow without becoming bureaucratic?
20. Allow the lab some measure of isolation from the day-to-day operations of the company, and aim to physically locate their workspace as close to customers as possible.
21. Legacy systems and existing plans should be avoided at all costs.