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At that point, I had been working for a full year on a start-up called Pando Projects.  I had mobilized a team to build a prototype of our website, and had tested it out with 15 pilot projects in New York City.  My goal was to help people start their own projects to tackle global issues in local ways.

The bigger vision was to help thousands of Americans run their own amazing local initiatives, share their success stories, promote the best ideas, and scale up the initiatives that could make a greater impact.  So many people have brilliant ideas and good intentions… I simply wanted to give them the tools they needed to change the world.

Pando Project's pilot Project Leaders and their mentors

At the time of the We Media competition, we had so much potential.  The MacArthur Foundation had called us, “the new face of activism.”  The Huffington Post had named me, “the greatest woman of the day.”  Good Magazine had called Pando, “refreshing and inspiring.”  And FastCompany had written, “Pando makes meaningful ideas more executable and brainpower more accessible… and Millennials are demonstrating an inspiring willingness to assume responsibility for the change they want to see in the world.”

We were on fire.

The problem was that I had run out of money.  The month of the We Media competition was the last month that I could have afforded to pay rent.  So when I held that check, my tears were real.  I had literally put everything I had into getting Pando going, and We Media was my first big break.  That day of meeting incredible mentors (like Craig Newmark and Charlie O’Donnell) and fighting for my cause and WINNING… it was one of the best days of my entire life.

After the win, I immediately used money to pay down Pando debts – the lawyer fees, the cost of our pilot website, the expenses from hosting a leadership retreat for our pilot project leaders… it all added up.  I also decided I was ready for the fundraising phase.  I immediately left for the Summit Series Conference where I met incredible philanthropists and VCs and business leaders who promised to help me raise another $250K.  They loved my idea, they loved my sincerity…  The BBC interviewed me as a “the founder of a promising start-up.”

Success seemed inevitable. Joyce’s project taught kids in Chinatown about other cultures, and was featured in “The Epoch Times”

From August through September, I went to countless conferences, meeting people and pitching my idea, knowing that $25K would not last long.  (These conferences included Summit, Socap, Renaissance Weekend, Craigslist Bootcamp, the National Conference for Volunteerism and Service, etc.)

Meanwhile I continued to manage our pilot projects and tried to grow the organization, which now had over 50 volunteers.   I was completely overwhelmed.  I needed help.  Two investment funds committed $100,000 to our growth, but it was unclear when I would get the money.  I was working on a partnership with Ford Motor Company which could have given us $500,000 upfront, but the meetings kept getting delayed.

Ashley’s project was an after-school reading class for kids in West Harlem. I felt things falling apart.  Everyone seemed to love the idea and be impressed by our progress, but no one was willing to write the first big check.

Without a Co-Founder to help me push through the days, I felt myself burning out.  I had poured everything I had into Pando – - my money, my time, and my soul.  I had success stories and press and the We Media win – and yet I couldn’t raise the $250K I needed to build a real site and hire a team to actually take Pando to the next level.

I found myself becoming reckless and irresponsible, not responding to emails and showing up to meetings unprepared.  I started to dwell on the setbacks.  (Our web developer kept delaying the launch of our site… I had a toe infection and couldn’t afford a trip to the doctor… several fundraising leads that I had pursued for months proved to be dead ends… the list went on and on.)

I started to understand why so many start-ups fail and why so many Founders become bitter, emotional, sickly creatures.  My boyfriend and I ended a three-year relationship and I lost the one person that had believed in me from day one.  I knew that I could probably raise the money I needed if I kept fighting, but I had lost my strength.  The battle was over.  I had helped support some incredible projects in New York and I had grown as a leader and as a human being.  But I was ready to admit that I needed help.Jodi organized a dance class to teach kids about confidence and creativity.

In October I put Pando on hold and decided to apply to business school.  I dreamt of attending Stanford, where I could learn how to take Pando to the next level.  I would learn about business, develop my network, and then re-launch Pando upon graduation.  But… I didn’t get in!  The rejection letter was sent on March 31st.  I guess the Universe has other plans for me yet.

I still hope that I can re-launch Pando.  But in the meantime, I’m moving to San Francisco to find a job doing something meaningful.  Before Pando I worked in investment banking and microfinance, so I’m really open to everything.  I just want to make the world better, somehow.  That’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.

I’m so grateful for We Media and feel complete sadness and shame that the failure of Pando might in some way detract from the legitimacy of this competition.  The We Media win changed my life and re-invigorated my start-up.  I had meetings with Esther Dyson, Charlie O’Donnell, Stowe Boyd, Ben Berkowitz and Craig Newmark that all opened doors for me.  Andrew Nachison was a continual source of love and support.

The win gave me so much credibility as I embarked on my fundraising journey. I still don’t really know what went wrong.  I really tried.  I really fought for this. I think the biggest issue was that I didn’t have a co-founder to bring the vision to life.  If I could start Pando all over again, that’s what I would change.  I would find a co-founder to help me make it happen.

I send my love to the current We Media finalists.  I can’t say how your start-ups will turn out, but I can promise you that you’re in for the ride of your life …

Founder Mark Horoszowski pitched his startup idea, Moving Worlds, at the 2012 We Media PitchIt! Challenge April 18, 2012 in McLean, Virginia.

1: Thrive, Don’t Sustain

Find (and communicate) a revenue model that is as robust as it is diverse. With such rapid innovation and fluctuating economic issues, you need to be protected against changes and competitors. Get creative with your core competencies and use them in as many ways as possible. Need inspiration? Look at Amazon. From selling books to its latest innovation, the Amazon Locker, it continues to expand its retail prowess by delivering stellar customer service, and making sure the right things get to the right people at the right time.

2: Make Others Believe You WILL Grow

‘How will you grow‘ is one of the most fundamental questions for any business. As valuable as your core product or service is, it won’t reach critical mass without a marketing and sales plan. You probably don’t have a lot of money, so you have to be reasonable with your plan, but be creative and innovative, too. And when sharing your plan, be specific. Consider reading more about bootstrap marketing, and also 10 Startup Marketing Tips from Mashable.

3: Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

Develop, nurture, and expand key partnerships. EVERY company can have partners to help it achieve its goals. Common partner-types include technology, distribution, retail, promotion, nonprofit, network, and industry to name a few. If you can add enough value, these partners will help you grow rapidly.

3.5: Stand on the Shoulders of Giants, Again

If you’re idea is new, it’s going to take some time for everybody else to understand it. Make it as easy as possible. Try explaining it with using things that already exist, and people are familiar with.

4: Don’t Let Facts Get in the Way

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Check out Simon Sinek’s video, Stat With Why to learn more about that. And if you are seeking investment, know that investors put money behind a person and a team, not the idea. Let your passion for your idea – and how it will grow and make the world better – always shine through. Details are of course important, but they can often overshadow the bigger picture and diminish your passion and commitment.

5. Find the RIGHT Supporters and the RIGHT Money

Don’t seek short-term wins and sacrifice long-term success. Ask any entrepreneur or any VC and they’ll tell you stories about startups that went to VCs too early. If the business model isn’t proven yet, don’t waste your time talking to VCs. And even if the idea is proven, make sure to explore other options. Don’t let the sexiness of raising millions of dollars cloud your vision. Investors want big returns, now, and they’ll push you for it, hard. The same thing can be said about customers, too. Find the the right money, not just any money.

6. Talk About REALITY, Not a Made up Future

Your revenue projections might look great, but we all know they’re wrong. Show investors and partners the reality of your present situation. Show other facts and statistics that show opportunity, but don’t spend time convincing investors that you’re financial projections are perfect and indisputable. You can’t control your revenues, you can only control your costs. As much as you highlight revenue predictions, make sure to spend as much time explaining how you will be controlling expenses.

7. Show IMPACT

Have a clear path to show how revenues will be used, and how they will generate impact. Investors and potential customers want to see that your idea is a game-changer, and that it will be impactful in the near and long-term. And this means more than just huge ROI. It means building a GREAT company that people will want to work at, delivering products and services that HELP people, as well as contribute to the GREATER GOOD.

Go start something. Succeed or fail, you will do something remarkable that will change your life. Need more tips on how to get started? Read about 16 Lessons for Starting Social Enterprises.

Brian Reich pitches his startup idea at the We Media PitchIt! Challenge April 18, 2012, in McLean, Virginia.

Eight minutes is awkward

Each of the eight finalists was given eight minutes to present their project, plus another four-or-so minutes for questions from the judges. Of course, eight minutes is more time than you would need to provide a simple elevator pitch, but not enough time to get into sufficient detail about a platform or plan. If you think that preparing for an eight minute pitch simply requires adjusting your cadence, or offering more/less detail, you are wrong. A specialized deck, and script, for that length of a pitch is required. I
settled on 15 slides and finished with 5 seconds to spare – managing mostly even pacing through my key points and still time for a quick back-and-forth with one of the judges.

Questions have many answers

I prepared for the Q&A portion of the competition by anticipating questions that might be posed by the judges and preparing and practicing some stock answers. Still, when my moment in the hot seat arrived I found myself scrambling. When one of the judges asked how I would integrate an existing platform into my plans, I assumed he wanted me to explain how I would make that work. I had an answer for that, as well as an answer for why my plans were superior to the existing options in the marketplace. I mis-read the tone of his question and provided the wrong answer, thus missing an opportunity to clearly distinguish my plans. I didn’t harm my pitch significantly, but I didn’t do myself any favors either.

Listening is important

WeMedia organized a mentoring session for the eight finalists the day before the big
pitch. Everyone went through their presentations and received feedback from a group of startup experts. Nobody performed particularly well during the prep session, mostly the result of nerves. But, every single finalist made substantial improvements to their decks and their overall presentation overnight – showing a capacity to learn and respond to constructive criticism. We were told that the passion and willingness to internalize feedback was a factor in deciding the future potential of all our projects.

The entire package matters

Finalists were asked to submit background information in writing before the live We Media event. The judges reviewed all that information closely and discussed the different finalists in advance. Most of the judges reported arriving at the final pitch competition with a sense of which projects were the strongest, but also reported that new information, and the quality of the pitch itself, played a role in changing their ultimate decisions. The details of a startup project evolve so quickly that it can be hard to keep information updated and the focus clear, but knowing in advance just how much the written information informed the final choices probably would have changed the entire process of preparing and presenting when the moment arrived.

If I had been a PitchIt! finalist another year the outcome might have been different. PitchIt! is an idea-competition, designed for relatively early stage startups, but this year’s winners were closer to launch and that was a consideration among the judges. The near-ready startups will almost certainly be able to put both the money and access to
the WeMedia network to better use in the short-term than the projects, mine included, that are still largely in the planning stages. I can’t fault that line of thinking by the judges. And I will be interested to see how the organizers update the criteria for the competition in future years to take that into consideration.

If a couple of small things had gone differently I could easily have walked away with the oversized cardboard check. The money was only a small part of the motivation for entering the competition. The feedback, the validation of my idea and the encouragement – from judges and organizers alike – to focus and discipline myself and accelerate my own plans to advance my project towards launch, will have a far greater impact than anything else.

Screen founder Liza Factor pitches her startup idea at the We Media PitchIt! Conference & Challenge April 18, 2012.

Screen aims to build a hub for teams of photographers and video makers to work together on joint productions. It’s launching later this year as a non-profit and has founders based in four countries.

Radmatter founder Katherine von Jan poses with her big check after winning the We Media PitchIt! Challenge April 18, 2012, in McLean, Virginia.

The two winners earned a $25,000 seed investment to help them launch – and access to a network of We Media Mentors who have committed to helping the winners start their businesses.

The challenge was organized by iFOCOS, the Institute for the Connected Society, and sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

• The Advocator
• Feeding Curiosity
• Moving Worlds
• N-1-1
• Newsify
• RADmatter
• Screen
• Semantic News Browser

The founders will pitch their ideas April 18 at the We Media PitchIt! Conference in McLean, Va., where they’ll be part of a day-long deep dive into innovation and entrepreneurship for the digital culture. Two winners selected by a panel of judges will each earn a $25,000 seed investment to help them launch, along with advice and access to a network of mentors.

Tickets are still available. Click here to register.

This year’s submissions spanned an amazing range of new approaches to fields such as news and journalism, civic engagement and government, education, health, agriculture, business and others. We looked for finalists with a mix of these attributes:

• Story: Do they create and apply a unique storytelling experience through journalism, discovery, narrative, exposition, data, visualization, or new methods and metaphors?
• Design: Do they creatively engage multiple levels of intelligence and understanding of complex information with clarity, style, and meaning?
• Social Impact: Do they impact the social condition, stimulate citizenship, raise awareness, influence or marshal support for public policy?
• Pattern Change: Do they pioneer original approaches and paradigms?
• Purpose: Do they express a purposeful vision through values reflecting ethics, credibility, responsibility and authenticity?
• Community: Do they organize community, virtual or geographic, in a new way?
• Business: Do they reveal innovative business practices, entrepreneurial quality or a sustainable model?

You can read more about the criteria and goals here.

One of the things that’s unique about the PitchIt! challenge is that it’s open to both commercial and non-profit ideas. About a third of the submissions were for non-profit ideas.

You can still rate and comment on all of the submitted ideas. The highest rated entries will be named Community Choice winners.

This past week, StableRenters.com reached a huge milestone and launched its first beta version with information on 133,000 addresses in New York City.

The site is still limited to two huge datasets available from the city government, but it details the open complaints made to the city by tenants at each address and lists the humans behind the shell corporations and LLC’s that own the buildings. Also, each of these names is hyperlinked so any user can see what else these landlords own. That’s a huge value for any real estate researcher or tenant advocate, and something no website has done yet.

Because this all uses public data from New York City, I decided to enter it into the NYC BigApps Challenge, the city-run competition that encourages innovation with city data to improve New Yorkers’ lives. With a grand prize of $10k, a bunch of press, and a stamp of approval from the city, the competition is a huge opportunity for StableRenters.

So please cast your vote before March 8 and forever change the nature of renting a home.

Unlike the We Media Pitchit Challenge though, which asked contestants to solicit one vote from each person they could, the BigApps Challenge allows each voter to cast their vote every day. So thank you in advance for all the help you’re able to lend, but this rule is a bit much. The point of voting in contests like these is to raise public awareness about them virally (i.e. turning your contestants into your best marketers), and to force contestants to go all out and tell everyone they know about their project in what is oftentimes their first formidable PR exercise. That’s what I did last year, and it was great.

But I’m skeptical about the benefit of this every-day rule. More tweets will go out, more Facebook posts and emails, but all will reach the same people. The assumption seems to be that it exhibits a greater level of dedication on the part of voters. This may be true, but so what? Just like elections for high school class president, getting more votes doesn’t mean it’s better. In fact, a friend of mine culled through the 30 top-voted apps and found at least five that are completely non-functional or don’t exist at all (some said, “iPhone app coming soon,” for example), and many more that are exact replicas from years past. Some of these have more than 1,000 votes without a product. So let’s stick to “one person, one vote” and quit having to annoy our friends and family with the same request every day for a month.

Calling all media, technology and social dreamers: The 2012 We Media PitchIt Challenge is open to entries. The challenge offers $50,000 in seed funding to help turn ideas for innovative media and technology startups into something real.

To submit an idea to the challenge or vote on others, visit the PitchIt Idea Hub.

The submission and online voting deadline is Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012.

A group of 6-8 finalists selected by We Media will pitch their ideas live before a panel of expert judges and the audience at the We Media 2012 conference on April 18 at Gannett, Inc., in McLean, Virginia. Two winners selected by the judges will be offered a $25,000 sponsorship to help them bring their ideas to life.

The public can also comment and vote on the ideas submitted online. The three ideas with the most votes will be named Community Choice winners.

PitchIt, which in 2011 was ranked by the web site StartupSmart among the world’s top startup challenges, gives a boost to people with big ideas – but not fully formed startups. It’s for would-be entrepreneurs who have bold visions for using media and technology to improve the human experience in the digital world.

PitchIt is unique among startup challenges because it’s open to both commercial and non-profit entries. In either case, the potential for social impact is among the criteria used to judge submissions.

We’ve created a platform for founders with ideas to take center stage – and we’ve helped launch some amazing companies built on powerful ideas. Past winners have included SeeClickFix, Sparked, Audimated, NewsIT and Stable Renters.

This is the sixth year for the challenge, which grew out of activity at the annual We Media conference, where we bring together an influential mix of media, technology and social visionaries for conversations on big ideas driving innovation, investment and opportunities in the digital culture. This is the fourth year with a sponsorship on the line to help the winners do something big with their big ideas.

The challenge is organized by We Media for iFOCOS, a non-profit research center and innovation lab, and sponsored by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Our partners for 2012 include Ashoka Changemakers, a global network of social entrepreneurs, and Gannett, Inc., the US media company that publishes USAToday.

If you’d like to attend the 2012 We Media conference, join the We Media mailing list to receive registration and program details. We’ll be sending invitations soon.

Contact us now if you’d like to participate as a sponsor or exhibitor.

The conference program will also include the live finals of PitchIt, our annual seed investment challenge for innovative startups and social ventures. Last year PitchIt was named one the world’s top startup challenges, along with competitions organized by MIT, IBM and the SXSW interactive conference. We offer $25,000 to each of two winners, along with advice and help from We Media – and access to a network of We Media Mentors who work one-on-one with the winners.

If you’re working on a pre-launch, unfunded startup, or need a kick in the pants to help turn your brilliant idea into something real – read up on the criteria and get your plans in order now. We’ll be open for submissions later this month.

On January 20, StableRenters will go live with landlord identity and a score based on complaints per unit for nearly every rental, co-op and condo property in the five boroughs of New York City!

As you can see, much has changed at StableRenters. I found a developer, made too much work for my part-time self, quit my day-job, and am gearing up to launch a more advanced beta version than I ever imagined.

How in the world did this happen in just two months? After looking tirelessly for the right developer and finding mostly over-qualified develop/design shops that wanted to take all my money and produce a great final product from start to finish, I decided to look farther afield. I wanted a small demo app that I could show the world and gauge response and value before going further, and no one qualified that I knew in NYC would do that for me.

I finally decided to check out Odesk, an online market for freelancers. There I found a qualified and enthusiastic Ruby on Rails developer that was willing to do the project for a few thousand dollars, a common rate among developers in Lahore, Pakistan. Along with a low intensity site administrator I found on Sortfolio to manage access permissions, I was set to begin.

I began working with these two when I still had a job, and quickly it created more work than I was able to handle in a few hours each night. Also, my wife was ready to kill me. I wasn’t sure where this would lead.

Then, December rolled around and I still had about $15,000 left from the Pitchit challenge that would be taxed if I didn’t spend it all on legitimate business expenses by the end of the month. I mapped this out, thought of extended consulting fees, a year’s worth of office space, an iPad, a new computer, and a desk. But as fast as I figured this payment schedule out, I was getting increasingly irritated by the workload of my decreasingly relevant non-profit fundraising day-job, and decided it was time to quit. I bought a few things and took the remaining money as salary. My last day at work was December 16. After taxes, I only had enough money for a few months at my current salary, but I took the plunge. If I hadn’t quit, I’d have known this venture’s outcome 100 percent. Now, at least there’s a chance at funding and success.

So after three weeks of fulltime startup-dom, I made the decision to apply to the BigApps Challenge. I found that the city had released 2 useful datasets: the identity of all landlords, management companies and the shareholders of every rental, condo and co-op property with 3 units or more in the five boroughs, as well as the complaints made to the city by these buildings’ tenants.

Sure, the Big Apps Challenge could win me $10,000. But a friend showed me last weekend that in the 2011 BigApps Ideas Challenge (just ideas for apps, not launch-ready products), one of the winners selected by a panel of judges was a platform that allows “residents to rate their building’s owner, management co., and landlord, and lets interested renters browse those ratings.”

I couldn’t believe I missed this news and it sounded too familiar to pass up. Besides, it’ll be a great opportunity to persuade the city to open up more of its data by showing the value of what could be: a site that uses every relevant piece of city data, including still-closed housing violations and lawsuits, to force slumlords to shape up and reward responsible landlords for the first time with free marketing and a flock of renters eager to do business with an honest professional.

If you know anyone that lives in New York, please like my Facebook page, and in February vote for StableRenters in the BigApps Challenge. It will make your life and city better.

New plan: Build small app, get data from city government, make app bigger, spend less money.

Since my last post I found a developer after months of looking. It was a team of three techies, highly skilled in data scraping, visualization and database architecture. They had everything I needed, and if I went with them, I’d be on my way to launching a great beta site and be dead broke at launch day. Data scraping from very old and finicky databases can cost a lot of money.

But after some helpful conversations with Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) and Anil Dash (@anildash), two of the We Media Mentors I was introduced to during the Pitchit Challenge, my new plan is to make a small app that functions for about 50 addresses, and show it off to city agencies in hopes of persuading them to hand it over in a usable form. This allows me to save money otherwise spent on data scraping, and forces me to build relationships that will no doubt prove vital.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) produces this data by taking tenants’ complaints, conducting inspections, issuing violations, and occasionally bringing legal charges against delinquent landlords. Whatever administrative fee is needed for HPD to part with this data must be nothing compared to the costs of scraping the data of 1 million addresses myself.

So, forging this kind of relationship will certainly be an important step for Stable Renters. But the collaboration created will exponentially increase the impact of HPD’s work, allowing New Yorkers of all kinds to make sense of the important datasets they produce and put them to good use every time they rent an apartment.

With NYC’s Road Map for the Digital City and a newly created position of Chief Digital Officer (former We Media contributor @rachelsterne), this type of relationship is not unfathomable. Stable Renters is just one more way for the city to get the maximum value from the wealth of data it produces every day. HPD recently released its Property Registration information (aka the identity of the landlords and management companies for most rental properties) through NYC’s Open Data hub. This information should change next year as the effects begin to be felt by Intro-87, a city ordinance passed in August 2010 that will require landlords to provide real names and addresses for all human (not corporate) stakeholders holding 25% or more of a property. This will make it harder for landlords to hide behind a different corporation name for each building they own, and easier for tenants to find out who actually owns a building. That’ll be a great day for New York City.

By Ben Sacks
What a kick in the pants! The We Media Pitchit! Challenge really got me to start moving. Not only did I have a chunk of equity-free change to start building with, We Media introduced me to some seriously knowledgeable people.

Everyone pushed me to move as fast as possible towards launching the product in some form. I shouldn’t worry about getting set up with a corporate structure, planning for the project to be larger than it has to be at first, or even soliciting additional investment (if I don’t need it yet) until I get public buy-in in the form of real usage. “Your users know more than you do,” one person said to me. “They’ll even tell you what you want to hear if you just give them a place to say it.”

Stable Renters was pretty hard to think about in minimal terms. Virtually everyone I speak to has a new idea for where it can go. But it has at least one unique aspect: it uses specialized data that few others have endeavored to leverage. If it turns out that no one cares how well buildings are managed, then I’ll know I need to come up with something new.

So not long after I wandered through the train with an enormous check, wondering if I could exchange it at a check-cashing store, my goal became to hold down the fulltime day job and get a lead developer to launch something by the fall.

But it’s been two months since then, and I’m still looking for that developer. Yes I’ve advertized on Craigslist, related Meetup groups and at university departments, and I told everyone I know that I’m looking. But while Scott Heiferman (@heif) celebrated the flourishing of NYC’s startup scene at the New York Tech Meetup last month, a professor in a local CS department sent me a form email (literally said, “Dear So and So”), basically telling me that there were no students that would fit my unmentioned criteria.

And yes, I have met developers. “Oh yeah? What languages do you work in?” I often ask. “Everything, really everything” is my least favorite answer, especially when it’s followed by, “Oh, no, not Python. Not MongoDB.” But while some have presented the right technical capabilities, it seems that many in the startup world don’t care about the social benefit, about media innovation, about real impact. I hear far too often that all these good things must come with a financial drawback. And yet, few question Stable Renters’ profitability. Entrepreneurs don’t let that stop them for some reason. But many think that this revenue model’s inherent social value will hold the company back.

I should note that the terms of employment have almost never come up in these conversations. I’ve been quite flexible as to whether the position would begin on a roadmap to co-foundership, would remain as lead developer, or gain differing amounts of equity as the work progresses. Virtually all of this is on the table in some form. And in only one case did the terms offered actually raise an objection, one that was quickly rectified. In even this case, it seems as though the concept of doing good in exchange for money gives entrepreneurs the willies.

So I want to take a moment to talk about social entrepreneurship. While definitions abound, examples of the phenomenon can be found in almost any industry. And this is where I begin to disagree with the naysayers. In a society with no banks, lending money for just about any purpose could arguably be social entrepreneurship. A society without access to capital means that risk takers can rarely seize opportunities, and that the needed and possible improvements to the public good will go unrealized. Banks fill a real need.

So if banking counts, then what are developers afraid of? If you question profitability, fine. But don’t let good will scare you away. Banks do their job, they make money. We do our job, which happens to do something good, and we make money.

Work for me. We’ll make money and feel good about it. And as long as even one landlord continues to contemplate stiffing a tenant, we’ll never need a bailout.

Photo by Shayan.

In April, I won $25,000 from the We Media PitchIt competition. The following photo
shows how I felt:

The experience with We Media was my inflection point. Since then, we’ve made
some beautiful progress. Fundraising is a lot harder than anticipated (where are the
billionaire philanthropists who write checks for $250,000 over coffee??), but we’re
getting there.

Following the win…

• I met with Merrill Brown, one of my new We Media mentors. (A veteran
  journalist, media executive, consultant, and mocha-drinker.) He offered to
  make introductions to various foundations and venture capitalists around
  NYC.
• I leveraged the We Media win to convince a Palo Alto VC fund to commit an
  additional $50,000. (They rarely give money to nonprofits, but they are
  making an exception because, obviously, Pando is awesome.)
• I met with Stowe Boyd, a web anthropologist, We Media mentor, and urban
  lumberjack. He was incredibly generous and invited me to The Guardian
  Activate Summit, where I met incredible people including Andrew Rasiej,
  who runs the Personal Democracy Forum.
• I met with Steve Rosenbaum, the author of “Curation Nation” and another We Media mentor. Steve has trendy hipster glasses and an amazing business mind. He strongly suggested that I think of ways to open a for-profit arm of Pando.
• I met with Esther Dyson, a We Media mentor and mysterious female VC. It
  was hard to gauge her feelings about Pando, but she did offer to help me
  speak at the New York Tech Meet-Up, whenever I’m ready.
• I met with Charlie O’Donnell, a We Media mentor and Principal at First Round
  Capital. He was incredibly cool and recommended that I spend the summer researching Pando’s competition and carefully planning out our online platform.

For the next three months, I have three goals:

• Plan out and design the official Pando website, which should be capable of scaling to support thousands of projects.
• Recruit two team members: a CTO to build the site and a COO to help me execute our vision.
• Raise $250,000 in seed funding, which will be used to fund the official website and hire two paid staff members to develop the materials that people need to execute their projects.

I’m incredibly grateful for all these introductions, and for the legitimacy that We Media have given Pando. I’ll continue to post a blog every month, to let you know about our progress. Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about Pando, you can reach me at milena@pandoprojects.org.

If you live in Washington, DC, and can offer a little bit of your time, sign up and check out the project details. You can go down into the subway to see how long it takes to escape, or assist with mapping data and other text, photo and video tasks.

Sign up and share this link to invite your friends:

http://newsit.net/assignments/454

I’m rooting for team NewsIT, and I’m biased. NewsIt won our 2010 PitchIt Challenge, and we’ve been advising the project since then.

A few elements of the DC Metro investigation are innovative and notable for those who care about the future of journalism. First, NewsIt is doing its work in public. That’s a departure from the traditional cloak of secrecy that shrouds investigative journalism until the work is done – followed by the traditional “big reveal.” NewsIt has told us exactly what they’re working on – and they’ve asked for help.

Second, they’ve asked for help in a manner that should be appealing and practical to a broad network of individuals who care about the investigation and its results – whether or not they care about or want to call themselves citizen journalists. This rips a page out of citizen science – built around volunteers who collect data to contribute to large-scale research projects; and from the world of micro-volunteering pioneered by services such as Sparked and SeeClickFix. (Both of those also launched as winners of our PitchIt challenge).

This version of collaborative, volunteer-powered investigative journalism curated and produced by a commercial, professional hub also offers an alternative vision for the future of local journalism – compared, for instance, to AOL’s Patch, which is building out a network of local sites built around volunteer bloggers. You don’t need to be a dedicated or good blogger to make a meaningful contribution to NewsIt.

Finally – this project is an important test for NewsIt, a startup from Washington founded by journalist Melinda Wittsock (@cncpundit). NewsIt needs to prove its model to prospective investors and industry partners.

One thing the Aussies liked, and we do too, is that the PitchIt prize does not require commercial winners give up any equity. But we do ask for something back from the winners – they’ve got to “pay it forward” by sharing what they learn with founders who follow in their footsteps. We think that’s a fair bargain with real value on both sides.

We’re working on plans for the next PitchIt Challenge. For news and announcements on submission deadlines, join our email list, follow along on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.

NEW YORK – Projects that support community activists and renters were the big winners in the 2011 We Media Pitch It! Challenge, which concluded at the We Media NYC conference on April 6.

Pando Projects and Stable Renters each earned seed investments of $25,000. The prizes represent the first funding for each project.

The We Media PitchIt! Challenge, ranked one of the world’s top startup competitions, begins each year with a simple goal: to find brilliant ideas and help turn them into something real with advice from funders, investors, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, attendees and media. The contest is open to commercial and non-profit ideas.

Stable Renters

Pando Project