Clean Kitchen

 

This week is finals week at UCLA, but fortunately I have no finals. Instead, I have to deal with writing a 20 page paper, and giving two presentations. I’m not sure which I’d rather deal with – papers, or presentations. Regardless, I think we can agree that both are an incredible pain.

 On the bright side, I FINISHED MY FIRST SCREENPLAY ON SCRIPPED! I am super, super excited about the work I put into this thing – I hope my screenwriting professor likes it. I talked about it before, but it’s basically about two middle-aged guys competing for leauge tennis glory. It’s almost like a “Dodgeball” for 40 year olds.

 Oh, and I also cleaned my kitchen, which I’m super proud of. It has been weeks since I’ve had any meaningful time to clean anything, so I’m happy about that. Userbase is growing, positive feedback is rolling in, and we’re really happy about the site!

Screenwriting Class

This quarter, I decided to enroll in Dee Caruso’s screenwriting class at the school of Theather and Film at UCLA. One of the great things about going to business school at UCLA is that you’re allowed to take electives outside of Anderson. I took an intro to directing class a couple of quarters ago, and I’m planning on taking some foreign affairs classes before I graduate.

The screenplay I’m writing (using Scripped of course) is about two 40-something defense contractors who compete off the court in meaningless league tennis matches. I’ll tell you more about the plot later (hey, I don’t want to give away my great idea), but I am excited to be writing my first Scripped screenplay.

I’ve included a picture of the WGA event (previously unpulished) for your viewing pleasure…..

Launch Goes Well

Well the launch ended up being a huge success, and we were very happy with the way the event ran. I was a bit nervous, because a few minutes before the event, it looked like no one was going to show. Thankfully, a lot of people ended up showing up late and we  had about 70 people in the audience. It was a great moment for us.  Varitey Magazine, the Santa Monica Daily Press and The Daily Bruin were all present – we hope to get a mention, or a write-up somewhere, but that wasn’t the real victory here. More later – I woke up for a meeting that I thought I had, and I am completely exhausted. Loooonnnnnggggg week.

11 Days to Go

It’s amazing how Facebook has completely dominated the competition in social networking. It’s just so easy to use, it’s not completely dirty like Myspace, and it’s completely addictive. That being said, I’m not sure I am the biggest fan of the whole concept of “applications.” By making the Facebook platform completely open source, any hack developer can create an application in a pretty short amount of time. There are tutorials online that teach you everything you need to know to create a Facebook application, and there are large chunks of code for existing applications that are publicly available.

I only mention this because we’ve been giving serious thought to developing the rest of the site using only open source software (i.e. using pre-built community structures, etc, etc, etc….). Ok, I’d better make this blog a hell of a lot funnier quickly, or I am going to lose you.

Right, so I was at the mall today and there is this place that gives half-hour massages for $20. You are outside for the entire mall to see, and your neck is bent onto one of those “mouth” pillows that doesn’t look terribly comfortable. The people who run the place look pretty shady, and I seriously doubt they have any experience other than mall massages. Yet somehow, EVERY SEAT was full! You walk by, and they point to you and basically do their sales pitch in a few seconds, and boom, you’re off and running. Who would EVER do this? Are you so stressed from shopping that you need a half-hour massage from a guy that looks like he hasn’t taken a shower in at least a week?

Fortunately, everyone except Ryan on our team showers regularly.

12 Days to go

Hello again everyone – hope you’re having a nice night wherever you are. I took a picture of my favorite Spanish treat while I was visiting my sister in Barcelona a week ago – it’s called a “Turron.” The Turron pictured above is extremely special – not only is it very pricey (25 euros), but you have to special order it, and it is considered the best Turron in Barcelona. When you bite into it, it literally tastes like you’re eating pure sugar and Creme Brulee. Great combo – trust me on that one.

Twelve days to launch and it feels like I accomplished very little today. I started off the day by trying to contact publicists to get press for the upcoming launch event, but my emails yielded very little in the way of results. Fortunately, the event is basically full at this point, so we do not have to worry about showing up on the day-of and having an empty room.

Entrepreneurship is a strange thing – I talk to some of my business school friends about this from time-to-time, but you either ride on these incredible highs, or just feel like you accomplished nothing some days. That being said, I still feel like things will go well on the 8th….

One thing I did manage to accomplish was to delegate, and put other people to work. My girlfriend is a lot more thorough and organized than I am, and she has been helping me think of every possible detail that I could miss prior to the event. She’s super. My sister, and fam have also been reviewing the site thoroughly for copy errors and things of that nature. I’ve been trying to create instructional videos for the application itself, and I’ve been using this program called Camtasia Studio – I highly recommend it.

I managed to eat pretty well today. I’ve been eating well this entire break as a matter of fact. My whole goal has been to experiment by mixing different/new foods as much as possible. I ate liver for the first time every a week ago (without knowing it) and it actually tasted pretty good (until my brother-in-law told me it was liver).

Ok, back at Coffee Society and turning the focus back on…. It is absurdly loud in here today and there is a group of pretty annoying high-school kids talking about their exploits right next to me. One is wearing a Transformers T-Shirt and they are playing chess.

13 Days ‘Till Launch

This is not an advertisement for Apple (you can barely tell that I’m using an Apple from the grainy image), nor is it an advertisement for http://www.scripped.com (the world’s first web-based, free screenwriting software), but it’s just a random blog site from an overworked business school student trying to launch a website. I’m at Coffee Society in Cupertino, CA trying to think of everything that could potentially go wrong with our official launch on January 8th, 2008. I am not making crazy New Year’s plans, had a pretty quiet Christmas, and actually worked pretty hard during my vacation in Spain this past week (except for the 6am night at the discotheque – yeesh).

Zak Freer (a former college classmate, USC Film School graduate, and recent winner of the Hollywood DV Short Film Festival for “Best Horror Short), Ryan Buckley (Harvard/MIT MPP/MBA student, hippie, former consultant and generally good guy) and I started Scripped a little over a year ago and we finally have a beta site. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned over the past year about entrepreneurship, each other, and how optimism needs to be tempered with a good dose of realism. We thought we would have a full site with all of the bells and whistles 8 months ago, we’ve changed the business model at least a dozen times, and we thought we would be way further along than we would be at this time. That being said, we’re happy with where we are, what we’ve learned, and we appreciate all of the support that our friends, family, and classmates have provided over the past year-and-change.

We were fortunate enough, thanks to a classmate of mine at UCLA, to make a connection with the Writer’s Guild. After a couple of successful meetings, we were able to come up with a pretty good barter: the WGA Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of the guild, will send two writers to UCLA on the 8th of January, and we will plan the event. In exchange for filling all of the seats in the audience, and taking care of the logistics, Scripped Inc. gets full sponsorship of the event. I think that’s a great deal. This is a huge opportunity for us to get some publicity and network with the guild (and take business plan number 15 to the guild in hopes of getting support and goodwill). If you’re interested in attending the event, email me at sunil@scripped.com. The two writers are superstars – one was nominated for the Academy Award for Field of Dreams (which he also directed), and the other was the former chair of the screenwriting department at USC.

Tuesday Jan 8th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, UCLA Anderson campus, Panel Discussion about the strike. Come with your questions!

More to come tomorrow – I am too busy burning a hole in my stomach with all of the caffeine I’ve had here… Thanks for keeping up – I’ll post every night ’till the event (and the night of the event, though admittedly, I have a bottle of Absinthe which I brought from Spain and I plan on opening after the 8th is over).