‘Design. Build. Bank’ focus of spring break class at UNM’s Innovation Academy

The new year at UNM main and branches campuses is off to a good start with the launch of a new statewide program that promises to boost entrepreneurial activity in communities across the state.

 

The NM Rainforest University Center Program is funded by a grant from the federal Economic Development Administration (EDA) and will provide entrepreneurial training and technical assistance to students and community members at all UNM campuses statewide.  UNM is among 58 other University Centers across the nation who support and foster economic transformation of their state and regional economies.

 

Administered by STC and its partner, the UNM Innovation Academy, dedicated site mentors and staff visited UNM main campus in Albuquerque and branches in Taos, Los Alamos, Valencia and Gallup from January 16-23 to kick-off the program with a series of introductory seminars on program content.

 

The program is geared toward students (including faculty and staff) and community members with ideas for starting a new business and those with small companies who want to grow their businesses.  The training is based on an e-commerce platform.  The program’s theme, “e-commerce for all,” is an especially appropriate approach for New Mexico with its small population and rural environment.  Today, urban centers are not a requirement for starting a business.  Many businesses don’t necessarily need physical storefronts but they definitely need an online presence.  Being able to sell goods and services from a website is a key element for success.

 

Program content is twofold: a series of 12 free seminars for students and community members and a for-credit e-commerce course (already taught in the UNM Innovation Academy). The seminars focus on the basics for starting a business, such as how to generate a business idea, how to do market analysis, what is design thinking, and understanding financing—topics that are helpful for any kind of new business owner.  The e-commerce class, “Create. Sell. Bank.,” teaches students how to build an online storefront and drive traffic to it through social media advertising.

 

Site mentors and other expert instructors present onsite but seminars also are streamed via Zoom for anyone who wants to join from their computer, laptop or phone.  Soon, recorded sessions will be available for those wishing to view at another time.

 

A certificate program in entrepreneurial capabilities is available to UNM students and community members who complete seven of the 12 seminars through UNM’s Innovation Academy.

 

The EDA University Center Economic Development Program’s mission is to make University resources available to regions that are under chronic and acute economic distress due to, for example, high unemployment and low-income levels.  The EDA University Center Program encourages creating strong rural-urban linkages and collaborations, especially relevant to New Mexico.

 

STC CEO and grant PI Lisa Kuuttila sums up what the NM Rainforest University Center program aims to do:  “The goal behind this grant and program is for UNM to have a statewide impact in helping communities create jobs.  What better way to create jobs in your community than to create your own company.”

 

See also Shaquana Desiderio’s January 21, 2019 article, “Takin’ Care of Business,” from the Gallup Independent E-Edition and the KRSN radio interview with Lisa Kuuttila below.

 

http://www.krsnam1490.com/InterviewStreaming/01_16_19%20Lisa%20J.%20Kuuttila%20%20.mp3.

 

For information on the February seminar, “How to Generate a Business Idea,” go to https://stc.unm.edu/event/how-to-generate-a-business-idea-nm-rainforest-university-center-seminar/.

 

Mark Chavez, CEO of one of New Mexico’s newest startups, wants to change the way we think about and use social media, and he’s come back to Albuquerque to develop what could be a disruptive innovation on a global scale.  Read about Ellen Marks’ fascinating August 27, 2018 interview, “One-on-One with Mark Chavez,” from the Albuquerque Journal Business Outlook, reprinted below.  Also see Kevin Robinson’s June 25 article, “Lens startup focuses on cloud-free online privacy,” from the Albuquerque Journal at https://stc.unm.edu/new-startup-at-the-lobo-rainforest-building-creating-next-gen-solution-to-cloud-vulnerability/.

 

One-on-One with Mark Chavez

By Ellen Marks / Journal Assistant Business Editor
Published: Monday, August 27th, 2018 at 12:02am
Updated: Sunday, August 26th, 2018 at 11:27pm

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It was while eating lunch alone in a London restaurant that Mark Chavez had what he calls his awakening.

A South Valley kid who was in the middle of Silicon Valley’s tech boom and was living in London developing new markets for his employer, Salesforce.com, Chavez suddenly realized how completely hooked he was on constantly pulling out his phone to check his email, his Facebook page, his other social media accounts.

“I just thought, when was the last time I had an hour and was just present, and it hit me,” Chavez recalled. “That’s not possible anymore. We’ve raised a whole generation that only understands validation from what other people are telling them (online) about themselves – how many likes, how many comments.”

Chavez says he knew “as part of my job on the inside, how Silicon Valley strived to attract more users to spend ever more time on their platforms and harvest their data” with methods he likens to cigarette companies seeking to keep people hooked on tobacco.

With that realization, he decided to abandon his career and delete his entire online presence.

“I sold everything,” he said. “I burned everything to the ground and went back to the beginning.”

He also abandoned aspects of his personal life, including the name he had adopted when he first left New Mexico for college in Texas – Trae Chancellor – and an accompanying persona meant to “completely run away from who I was.”

“I played a whole different character, totally played it,” he said. “I thought I was completely inadequate, inferior and I couldn’t be that Hispanic kid from the South Valley. And there’s a more personal side. I’m gay. So I learned how to mask things at the earliest age.”

He returned to New Mexico last January, changed his name back to Mark Chavez and launched his new company, Lens, which aims to help people do what he did: disconnect from Facebook and other platforms to reclaim their own data.

Lens will offer a cloud-free device through which customers can share information with people of their choosing, he said. Users will have control over their personal data, and companies that want to see it will have to pay the individual for access.

Chavez said Lens is meant to counteract “these monopolies that get all our data and basically send it out to market to be sold for hundreds of billions of dollars, and we get nothing.”

It’s also meant to help people get away from what he sees as the destructive nature of getting hooked on spending so much time online.

“My personal journey is sort of the story of Lens,” he said. “It’s really to bring sort of the same experience that I’ve had coming to terms with finding internal validation as opposed to looking for it out there.”

For someone who was so immersed in the world of big tech, isn’t it ironic that your new product aims to help people avoid the cloud?

Right. But the conflict I had when I was at Salesforce was to really see the methods that were being applied to create what we considered to be a 360-degree view of the customer. We needed to know every interaction of our customer to understand how we could sell and market to them. It’s scary to understand how much information we could find on an individual. And we bought companies … to fill out this entire profile of the customer. If you want to look at the monetization, just look at the valuation of these companies. It’s incredible how much data is worth in this market that the individual isn’t even participating in.

What were you like as a kid?

First of all, I grew up in the South Valley on a ranch. My childhood was surrounded by ranch life. Getting up early, going to sleep early, but really, really … incredible values that are still with me. I was absolutely fascinated with science and technology, and that’s what really drove me toward nuclear engineering.

You went to Rio Grande High?

Yes, although I actually didn’t fit in anywhere. Obviously, I liked riding horses. I was a cowboy. I did play sports, but I didn’t fit in any one group. When I look back now, I always lived completely independent of systems. I think that really comes out today, and that’s my starting point. That’s why I can disconnect from pop culture and the other things and really question what’s happening underneath this and why is it there. And really being independent of all that.

After working in Silicon Valley and in London, did you ever think you’d be back in New Mexico?

No. I didn’t think I would have the opportunity to be back because my career was taking me to different places, but there are no coincidences, I believe, in life, and I think I do have a special set of circumstances in my own professional, spiritual and personal journey that can be applied in today’s world, and one is to build Lens.

Was it difficult when you disconnected three years ago?

Oh, yeah. What I clearly understand … is it’s not easy to get out of social media. It’s confronting addiction, pure and simple. You feel like you’ve left the structure that has become so life critical to you. All of a sudden, especially friends of mine, of course, they know I’m kind of independent. But they’re like,”we can’t find you anywhere, this is ridiculous.” But what happened is today I actually have stronger relationships with my friends because they’ll send me personal things. It’s not what do I read about them on Facebook or social media; they actually send me something specific with a personal note. I kind of like that.

What do you do in your free time?

My free time now is really about spending time with my family. To be here near my mom is a very special gift to me. It feeds the soul.

Any hobbies?

My newest hobby, being back in New Mexico, is travel in the state. There are so many points of interest that I can learn from and be inspired by. I picked up golf. So we as a (work) team, I thought it would be a humbling sport for all of us.

What are some of your favorite places?

Chaco Canyon ranks as No. 1 for me. I was really moved by being there. For whatever reason, I’m fascinated with former Soviet-era bloc countries – Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia. The richness in that history is quite interesting. London has been a real interesting focal point for me because of the diversity. When you go to dinner, you’re having conversations with people from around the world, and I thrive and starve for that diversity. New Mexico embodies a lot of that, too, but London takes that to another level.

What are your favorite foods?

New Mexican. Barelas (Coffee House) is my favorite restaurant here. I know the whole staff. It’s just a fantastic place to feel like you’re in the community and local.

Any hidden talents?

Writing. I take that from my mom. It’s non-fiction, but I like to put myself two years from now. So right now, I like to write that I’m living in 2020 and how’s my experience. What does the world look like?

What are your splurges?

Netflix is a splurge for me, and I am going to disconnect from that, I decided. I think the reason for that is I just want to know I can. Of course, there’s beautiful, great content, but at what cost (when) you think about the amount of time that’s (involved). And that’s what I try to evaluate now.

Do you have any role models?

My dad and mom, obviously were two important role models for me. The other natural choice is Elon Musk. I mean, where did this guy come from? His investment model is he understands there’s a threat to humanity, so what can he do? Well, he’s going to invest in solar and battery. He’s going to build cars to take carbon dioxide out and, last resort, rockets to get us to another planet if all else fails. I think that’s amazing.

Any regrets?

If you’d asked me that a year ago, I would have had a ton of regrets, but today I don’t. Now that I look at the experiences that I’ve had and how they fit clearly into this role, I have no regrets.

THE BASICS: Chavez, 50, was born near Española and grew up in Albuquerque’s South Valley; bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University, 1991; Rio Grande High School graduate, 1986.
POSITION: Lens, CEO; Salesforce.com, CIO; Los Alamos National Laboratory, technical staff member; volunteers at Camino Nuevo Youth Center; plans to partner Lens with the Wemagination center, which focuses on early child development using the concept of play.
DID YOU KNOW
• Chavez is a “huge fan of the airline industry.” He is working on getting his pilot’s license.
• He had planned to start Lens in London, where he was living, but found “unbelievable resources” through other New Mexico entrepreneurs and at the University of New Mexico Rainforest building, where his office is located.

On August 25, 2017, the Lobo Rainforest Building officially opened its doors to the  UNM and New Mexico innovation and entrepreneurial communities.  The building currently has a 100% occupancy rate for tenants located on the first floor and for the 310 students living in the apartments on the upper floors.

Since 2012, STC has been responsible for carrying out the economic development vision of the University of New Mexico to drive economic growth in New Mexico. It is our mission to foster a Rainforest in the Desert by nurturing innovation and catalyzing economic development.  It is growth through research discoveries and innovation-driven startup activity.

That mission created Innovate ABQ, a UNM and community-based plan to build a research and innovation district in downtown Albuquerque. The Lobo Rainforest Building is the heart of the developing innovation district, connecting university technologies to the entrepreneurial community.

“The Lobo Rainforest Building has activated the core site,” said Lisa Kuuttila, STC.UNM’s CEO and chief economic development officer. “It’s a space where it is easy for the tenants and the students (from UNM’s Innovation Academy) and others to collaborate, which has always been the goal of the entire Innovate ABQ project. This building has been a fantastic catalyst for the innovation district.”

The Rainforest concept is a new model for developing innovation systems that explains how complex innovation economies are able to generate extraordinary creativity and economic output.  Innovation systems use the concept of a rainforest to explain that the talent, ideas, and capital that produce successful innovation economies in places like Silicon Valley move freely, are highly diverse, and rapidly connect and collaborate from the bottom up—just like a biological rainforest.

The Lobo Rainforest Building is a human innovation ecosystem and is designed to carry out the Rainforest concept.  Creativity,  scientific  discovery,  business  acumen,  and investment  capital randomly  propagate and nurture budding  ideas so they can  grow  into  flourishing  and  sustainable enterprises.

The first floor is home to STC, the Cecchi VentureLab, STC’s incubator for startups, the Innovation Academy, UNM’s program for entrepreneurial students, the Air Force Research Lab tech transfer office, Sandia National Labs tech transfer office, tech company General Atomics, and a Nusenda Credit Union branch office.  Everything is co-located on the ground floor so there are more opportunities to meet and work with other inventors, mentors, business advisors, and experienced entrepreneurs. Upper floors feature downtown apartment living for the 310 UNM students living at the building.

The Lobo  Rainforest  Building  is the  first  structure  to be  completed at  the  core  site for  the  Innovate ABQ innovation district.  The next generation of homegrown entrepreneurs and innovators are in the making at the Lobo Rainforest Building.

See Collin Krabbe’s August 27, 2018 article, “What’s happening at Lobo Rainforest one year in,” from Albuquerque Business First, at https://www.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/news/2018/08/27/whats-happening-at-lobo-rainforest-one-year-in.html.

By Catherine Stringam  Published 03/28/18