Alex White

My Travel Apps

I travel all the time and been meaning to log this for a while.These apps have saved me time and time again and figured I should share.

1. FlightCaster

This app calculates the predicted arrival delay for every flight based on Inbound Aircraft, Departure and Arrival Airport status and Weather. Often more accurate than airlines themselves (h/t Mason Jendelson). 

2. GateGuru

I use this to know if I should get food/drink before security, after security and to see everything that’s available in an airport or specific terminal.

3. MyRadar

I know a Captain for United and this is apparently the radar app that pilots use to check weather.

4/5. HotelTonight & Uber

When I need a hotel or ride at the last minute.

Thank you, Boulder.

Thank you, Boulder.

Next Big Sound is moving to New York City June 1^st, but not without first saying a very sincere thank you. We literally could not have gotten Next Big Sound off the ground anywhere else in the country besides Boulder, Colorado.

David, Samir and I are from Reno, Florida, and upstate NY, respectively. We had no ties to Boulder, Colorado other than my aunt who happened to move to town a year before we got here.  I was the only member of the founding team that had been to the vibrant city nestled under the foothills of the Rockies before the summer of 2009.

We started the company in Chicago, IL right after graduating and were willing to live anywhere, and do almost anything, to get Next Big Sound started. We spent a summer down in Champaign, IL. We set up an office in David’s apartment and I slept there for a month.  We tried to raise money in the valley, from the east coast and from wealthy individuals and venture firms throughout Chicagoland. We raised $25,000 that we stretched to last 9 months. That was when we were completely out of money and about to shut the company down. That’s when we got accepted into TechStars. That’s when we packed everything we had into David’s Volkswagon Rabbit and drove 1000 miles overnight to Boulder, Colorado. That’s when our company’s trajectory, and all of our lives, changed completely.

I could list out the people that I remember from the first week – David, Nicole, Jason, Brad, Tom, Micah, Howard, Jud, Eric, Matt, all the TechStars Boulder teams from 2009 – but I would need the rest of the page.

I could list out all the people that I remember from that whole summer but I would need five more pages. 

And if I listed every local person we’ve talked to at BDNTs, shared coffee with at Atlas or the Cup, responded promptly to an email I sent, saw us present at various stages of development, wore our t-shirts around town, talked us up at cocktail hours, joined us for beers at the office, danced at our parties, or helped Next Big Sound in some immeasurable way – I’d spend the rest of the week writing names.

Boulder was a special place when we got here. Boulder is even more special 3 years later. Not just for me, my co-founders, and our team, but for thousands of entrepreneurs, developers, designers, investors and companies large and small. I couldn’t recommend a better place to get the company off the ground.

While the realities of our business dictate our move to NYC, we will never disappear. We’ve got three board meetings in Boulder this year, will be here for demo day and we will be back as much as we can. We wanted to rename the corporation Next Big Boulder but our lawyers advised against that.

But in all seriousness, we didn’t want to move on to the next chapter of Next Big Sound without first pausing to thank the city, and all of the people, that helped get us here.

Thank you Boulder, we love you.

If you want to read…

Pick up the book.

If you want to run, take off your sandals and put on your running shoes.

If you want to cook, preheat the oven. 

If you want to write, open the blank Word document. 

If you want to talk, pick up the phone.

We all play procrastination games with ourselves but at the end of the day, it’s really quite simple to get started.

Don’t check facebook and twitter. Don’t turn on the TV. Don’t open the fridge. Just take the first small step towards what you want to do.

(that’s it for my seth godin inspired post) 

12 ways school can be rethought and re-imagined

From Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams:

1. Homework during the day, lectures at night
2. Open book, open note, all the time
3. Access to any course, anywhere in the world
4. Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction 
5. The end of multiple-choice exams
6. Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement 
7. The end of compliance as an outcome
8. Cooperation instead of isolation
9. Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas 
10. Transformation of the role of the teacher
11. Lifelong learning, earlier work
12. Death of the nearly famous college

Some more I would add off the top of my head:

• Ability to choose electives starting in elementary school. 
• Taking exams as a group instead of individually. 
• Annual externships - day long shadowing sessions of relevant professionals.

1000 Days

When starting a company time is measured in days. How many days until launch? How many days until the big presentation? How many days until we are completely out of cash?

David, Samir and I moved to Boulder, Colorado to be part of Techstars in 2009 on a hail mary pass.

We had no money, no previous success and the idea that we applied with, we no longer wanted to pursue. For some reason David Cohen, Nicole Glaros, Jason Mendelson, Micah Baldwin and the Techstars family at large took a chance on us.

That’s when we started counting days. 79 days until demo day. 65 days until our sublease ends. 7 days until the first mentor presentation.

We just crossed 1000 days since moving to Boulder. It’s incredible to think of everything that has happened in that time. Hiring employees, signing six figure global contracts, moving into our own office space, two global major label deals, licensing two charts to Billboard magazine, winning accolades throughout the music industry and just announcing a $6.5m Series A financing with our dream investor syndicate.

David Cohen just did a great deconstruction of our pitch on demo day at the end of Techstars and published it on This Week In Techstars. It’s true that we didn’t have any real investor interest going into that pitch. It was the most important 8 minutes of my life. I haven’t thought of that presentation in many months but realize that without that day, none of the subsequent story of Next Big Sound unfolds in quite the same way.

We are still counting days. It’s a snowy Friday in February and David, Samir and I (and the rest of our awesome team) are at the office. David and Samir are leaned over a computer reviewing designs and discussing user flows while I catch up on email and the projects I don’t have time to tackle during the week. So much has changed since those first days in Boulder, but the day to day hasn’t changed much at all. A very sincere thank you to Techstars for making it all possible and wishing everyone a productive today, tomorrow and the next thousand days.

Apply to Techstars Boulder

nextbigsound.com/jobs

Alex White is the Co-founder & CEO of Next Big Sound. Follow him on Twitter.