We all know that students have no money- many of us have been there and scraped by on ramen and coffee often for weeks on end, and now we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, burdened by the cost of our education as we have leveraged part of our future to gain the success we have now. It’s part of our environment. It’s who we are, it’s what we expect, it’s part of our lives, and it will be part of our childs’ lives as they grow up. We don’t think much about it- it’s simply there.

If you’ve watched this video from TED on how schools kill creativity, you know that there are some salient points to be made about how our primary and secondary educational system encourages a certain type of talent – science and maths – while actively discouraging the humanities and arts. While I would love to see more study on the topic, I want to extrapolate on Sir Ken Robinson’s argument and apply it to the space of postsecondary education.

Consider: If you were a student entering college today, and you were told that you’re going to walk out with an average of $23,000 in debt ($33,000 for private schools, according to this study [PDF] ), would you choose a career in engineering or in the fine arts? To quote one student, borrowing so much only makes sense “as long as you’re going to the school for a career that will pay enough”, so it certainly seems like we are actively discouraging pursuit of “cultural” careers in the arts and humanities.

Is this a problem? Good question, but it certainly shapes our national identity. If we want to be known as a country of technical innovators, then this system is perfectly fine as it fills our homes with highly technical thinkers. If in contrast we want to be known as a cultural mecca, it’s the worst thing ever as we are actively discouraging our students from pursuing fields that contribute to that.

But that’s not the point I’m trying to make here, it is simply the path to how I got to this blog post. See, I see this as a problem, and problems need solutions, so I want to take a business-side approach to this issue and ponder on any market opportunities that might exist. After all, if federal programs are unable to meet this country’s educational needs, then private business will have to pick up the slack, and they’re only going to do it if there’s money to be made.

Some Numbers

To take some numbers from this study [PDF], I’ve extracted the following table:

Table 1: Total Student Aid and Nonfederal Loans Used to Finance Postsecondary Education Expenses in Constant (2008) Dollars (in Millions), 1998-99 to 2008-09

What we can easily extract from this is the individual line items which add load to students. The loans are easy, and I am also including Work Study and Institutional Grants. The former, because it’s activity that actively detracts from a student’s attention to their studies (by having a job) and the latter for reasons I discuss below. Given that, I’ve generated the following table:

Table 2: Total unmet need covered by students in Constant (2008) Dollars (in Millions), 1998-99 to 2008-09

Do you see what I see? I see a $128 billion dollar demand for a solution, but demand is only useful if a supply may be found that may be profitably offered to that market. Thankfully, the actual act of marketing any solution you can come up with is easy- between high school career counselors and college students’ naturally viral nature you effectively have a captive audience, assuming your solution is a good one. But unless you’re the treasury or the federal bank you can’t exactly pull $128 billion dollars and slap it on the table, and even if you were I doubt the taxpayers would be willing to pay for that (though we do love our bombers).

Universities as Contributors to the Problem

On of the real culprits in this whole situation is Universities themselves. College Tuition has been increasing at an average rate of 8% a year, while the median household income is hardly keeping up, especially if you take inflation into account. My own Alma Mater for instance (Carnegie Mellon) posted an annual tuition rate of $40,000 dollars this year, which from what I can tell is the highest in the nation and a significant uptick from the $18,000 I was paying in 2000. So how exactly can universities justify this increase?

Fact is, those tuition numbers are simply not real, because universities are skimming the market. Simply put, all the financial data a student is asked to report when they apply for financial aid year after year is used to calculate exactly how much the student and their family can afford. Once they have this number, they will add as many student loans as the student is eligible for (maxxed out of course), and might even add some private loans to it as well. Once they have that number, they will add something called a “Need based grant”, “Merit based grant” or “institutional grant” (or something similar) as a line item to make up the difference because they can’t charge you any more.

This makes identifying a good solution to student debt a far more difficult problem, because as soon as you find a business solution to meet the above noted demand, universities can simply respond by adding another line item to their financial aid calculations and the problem is right back where it started.

Or… is it?

Here’s where things get a little devious, and I apologize for suspending my personal ethics to even suggest this. Consider: If you provide a method for students to raise money against their debt, and universities in response raise their tuition to capture that value so that the debt doesn’t actually go away… then they are increasing the size of the market. That’s right, simply by helping students find a way to meet their debt obligations, the behavior of the other actors in the market environment will ensure that your market size grows. And while this certainly doesn’t provide a real solution to the actual problem, it should have any finance guy’s salivary glands working in overtime.

If, of course, you can meet the demand. In a new and successful way.

Before we get into the meat of this article, however, you have a decision to make: Will your organization truly benefit from such a celebrity? The benefits are significant- both your company and brand are affiliated with one of the names in the industry, and that comes with no small amount of prestige. Business will come to you simply to be associated with your celebrity(ies), and their name can be a valuable asset when converting new customers. The downside, however, is that celebrities are a pain in the ass to manage. They demand that their input is heard on everything that falls in or even remotely touches their domain of expertise, and will seed dissatisfaction if their input isn’t heard or integrated quickly. If your organization isn’t ready to support them, be very cautious- the last thing you want is for your celebrity to leave dissatisfied and publicly discredit your organization.

Identification

So let’s assume you’ve decided that a celebrity can add significantly to your business. You have two choices here- you can either attract existing talent, or you can nurture one from your existing employees. In both cases, it behooves you to be selective about their domain of expertise- attracting an expert in finance isn’t going to do your manufacturing business one whit of good, so make sure their knowledge matches your own business objectives.

Identifying talent should be pretty easy. Chances are they are already well established within your company or the community, and you won’t hurt for individuals willing to recommend them. The real trick here is substance- there are tons of individuals who have blogs that are little more than regurgitated trends, so what you’re looking for is someone who is adding to the conversation by providing their own ideas and insight. Just because someone has a twitter account doesn’t mean they’re adding to the conversation, it could just be that they’re a habitual retweeter or shameless self-promoter. A good rule of thumb to use for this is the “Holy Shit” effect- if, while reading a blog entry or paper of theirs, you have a moment of true “Holy Shit” insight, then you know that this person is capable of inspiring ideas and is an expert at quality content generation (Note- you’ll need to adjust for your own self-confidence, experience, and… a-hem… arrogance).

The other option you have is to nurture someone within your own organization, which provides the added loyalty benefit of gratitude. Again, identifying them should be easy- everyone knows them, they are frequently sought out for advice, and at meetings they are the ones willing to bite the bullet and ask sometimes stupid, sometimes compelling questions, and not just to hear themselves talk. Chances are that their hobbies are social in nature, and when given the opportunity they thrive in the limelight.

Engagement & Support

Having identified your desired celebrity, the next step is to establish a working relationship with them. It’s your choice on whether to engage them as a direct employee or as an affiliated consultant is up to you, though each comes with significantly different expectations. The former is an employer/employee relationship, where you can directly leverage their expertise to support your business (as well as promoting it). The latter is more of a client relationship, and convincing them to consult on internal projects will normally cost you a commission. Support is also fairly straightforward, and should already be in the skill set of anyone who’s worked in PR for a decent amount of time. Speaking pitches, convention appearances and invites, book authoring and more are things your celebrity might be interested in, and usually it’s only a matter of presenting an opportunity to get them to bite.

Fact is, being a celebrity is hard work. Authoring presentations, writing whitepapers and blogging each take quite a bit of time, and one has to remain image conscious at all times. Add to that the constant industry monitoring that these individuals engage in, and without support it’s practically impossible for one person to do it as anything other than a full-time job. This is where you, as an employer, can speak from a position of strength. As long as you provide them an environment in which their skills are applicable and their public identity is supported (with a little judicious image coaching in extreme cases), you present them with a rare and invaluable environment.

The Point of Arrogance

There is a point in time when you will realize exactly how arrogant your celebrity is. This is a crucial point, where they feel they could cut loose and do their own thing- in short, you need the celebrity more than the celebrity needs you. This point can happen anywhere: Raise negotiations, Watercooler conversation, a happy hour comment like “What are they going to do, Fire me?”, and it’s up to you to recognize that point and understand that all the investment and time you put into this celebrity is about to walk out the door. (Caveat: This doesn’t always happen- if the individual is already substantially invested in other ways in your company, chances are they need the company as well and recognize this fact).

Let me let you in on a little secret: The vast majority of professional “celebrities” out there have gotten to where they are with a significant amount of corporate support… and whatever you do, DON’T TELL THEM THAT! Instead, spin their own arrogance against them: If they think of themselves as an entity easily separable from the company, then frame the conversation as a mutually beneficial partnership: You get to promote through them, while mitigating the workload of their own self-promotion.

This can be as easy as changing the nature of your conversation with them. Instead of directing them to promote a particular product or attend a particular convention, you simply ask whether they’d like to do so (Frankly, you should have been doing this all along). Most humans have a really hard time saying no when a friendly favor is asked, and while it will appear as if you’re granting them the right to manage their own appearances, in reality you’re simply taking advantage of human nature.

Leader of the Pack

So what now? Well, at this point you’ve shown your organization that you’re capable of engaging and retaining a celebrity, and are reaping the benefits of their affiliation and advocacy while providing them with the recognition they desire. Unfortunately, this is also going to bring all the hopefuls out of the woodwork- sleepers that desire the limelight and see it as a source of long-term professional advancement, but have not until this point had the energy to pursue things themselves.

This halo effect is perhaps the most dangerous effect of having a celebrity in your organization, because no matter how experienced they may be, your hopefuls either consider themselves equal or firmly believe that with the same level of company support they would be. The question “Why them, and not me” is inevitably asked, and will generate substantial professional dissatisfaction through your entire organization.

You have two choices on how to deal with this: The first is to really understand everyone’s personal value structure and assist them in realizing that. This should work for most, though it might mean a few unscheduled promotions or raises. For the others, chances are most hopefuls are not willing to trade fame for their free time, but nothing short of personal experience will convince them of that. To assist with this you might do well to create a group much like Adobe’s Tech Evangelism program. A basic coaching program should suffice to give them the exposure to the hard life of self-promotion, and should weed out anyone but the most determined individuals.

The important thing to note here is that you have to support your hopefuls, if only long enough to convince them that they’re not cut out for the celebrity life. Giving someone the Standard Lecture About Community And Corporate Values (TM) is just going to sound like a lot of sensationalist crap.

Parting Ways

Fact is, the United States is culturally very focused on the individual, which means that sooner or later someone will make your celebrity an offer you can’t match. The more famous someone is, the more likely this is to happen, so get used to the idea; hopefully you’ll already have someone ready to take their place.

Having said that, all of your investment in this individual is hardly in vain, because they won’t forget all the support you’ve offered them. You can go the extra mile and commit to any future speaking engagements you’ve scheduled on their behalf, but that would just be icing on the cake. Make them feel welcome, support them in their new career path, and with this continued positive support you will ensure that you will get free advocacy from them in the future.

Most startups start off as LLC’s, largely because it protects the partners from liability while still being a valid corporate entity. The catch is that these organizations can’t have more than 99 shareholders, which puts a serious limitation on the micropayment idea. If you’re looking for $1,000,000, your investors have to be able to pony up at least $10,000 each, and there’s nothing micro in those payments.

Therefore, for the concept to be viable, the company has to take the role of the investor on behalf of the fund contributors (either directly or via a subsidiary), which means it must become a financial entity structured like a credit union or a mutual fund. This then means SEC regulation, transparency, due diligence and most of all a cubic boatload of fiscal liability.

These are not insurmountable- in fact we’re fairly confident the model remains viable and profitable, however none of us felt confident enough to continue development on a prototype without getting some better expertise. It is, in short, an idea for mature and experienced entrepreneurs- One Security Lawyer, One Finance Guy, and One Technical Genius.

So where does that leave us? Well, we realized we had to get out of the Equity field and into offering Grants, because that removes the liability. Yet nobody’s going to offer a grant to a startup without equity, unless they are personally invested- and there exist plenty of companies that address the philanthropic market.

So where does that leave us? Scholarships. Create your own Scholarship. Students can display a YouTube video explaining why they should get a scholarship, and visitors can pay into a scholarship fund. All I have to do now is deliver in 24 hours.

This is an Idea Foundry post. For more information on what this is all about, take a look over here.

This weekend is Startup Weekend Columbus, a three day skunkworks convention where 150 people walk into a building for a weekend and do their best to get a few companies started. I registered for it a few months ago with the thought that it’d be cool to really dig into something new and shiny for a short amount of time, and have some good fun networking with others. Unfortunately, three things happened that I wasn’t expecting at that time.

First, I didn’t realize is that I would decide a week beforehand that the idea I’ve been kicking around my mind might actually be worth pitching.

Secondly, I wasn’t expecting this idea to be extremely popular- it swept the vote during the first elimination round, and now there’s a bunch of people here who’re interested in making this happen.

The third thing I wasn’t expecting is exactly how far out of my league I feel right now. I’m a developer- a damn good Developer, Sysadmin and Architect. I’m also really good at identifying trends and turning commonly held assumptions upside down. Strategic thinking comes fairly naturally, but writing a Business Plan? Identifying revenue streams? Not exactly my forte.

So, first things first, I’m going to stop referring to this as My Idea (TM) and start referring to it as Our Idea- I’m part of a damn good team from what I can tell, which is the entire reason Startup Weekend exists in the first place. Everyone’s bringing their expertise to the table, and creating a company.

So what will this company do? Well, we want to Crowdsource Startup Capital.

Startup (or Angel) investment has so far been the realm of individuals with enough net worth that this risky pursuit is offset by existing capital investments. Normal people don’t have five, six, or seven digits to drop into a new company, yet many people would be interested in doing so if they could. So… why not take a page out of the book of Barak Obama and Howard Dean, and source startup capital from smaller donors? Open up the field of Angel investing to people able to contribute $100, $200, maybe $500 each, and facilitate crowdsourced investment. Individuals seeking to fund their pitches would list their credentials (via LinkedIn or reference) and their business idea, including any supporting documents and research they may have.

That’s pretty much it. Conceptually extremely simple, with a target market of “everybody who wants to get in on that startup thing”. Once you get under the hood a little you realize there’s a lot of things one has to worry about- SEC regulations, how to handle the money, do you structure yourself as an investment firm/bank/communications business, how do you handle Fraud and so forth. And most of all, what’s the first step in the business plan? This is an industry so heavily regulated that releasing functionality and additional features are dependent on lawyers and accountants rather than developers and project managers, so the first thing we have to do is identify a revenue stream that will get us to the point where we can afford people like that.

In other words, the trick is finding step one, and executing on it by Sunday. What happens after that … well, one thing at a time.

This spits in the face of my own personal philosophies: “Inspiration, no matter how trivial, should be pursued and encouraged”. I just don’t have enough energy, time, or brain capacity to pursue all this crap, whether substantial or whimsical, so I figured I’d start posting some of the ones I really love (but don’t have the capacity to pursue) here, just in case someone else wants to pick something up. I’ll be labeling them with the project names I used when I first started investigating them, so if you see a blog post come through called “Project [something or other]” you’ll know that it’s an idea open for grabs.

I’m really not happy about publicizing them. None of these ideas will do anyone any good if I keep them to myself, yet I’m still possessive… and admitting that I do not have the capacity or time to pursue them myself is little better than admitting defeat.

Lastly, I make no guarantees about the profitability or viability of any of these ideas. It sounds like legal boilerplate (and to some extent is), yet once you hear some of them you’ll understand what I mean: For example, I once was infatuated about starting a chain of high-end dairy bars to challenge Starbucks. Profitable? Unlikely- milk isn’t caffeinated… unless you have a very hyperactive cow.

Bovine jokes aside, I hope you find something interesting, or at the very least something inspiring.

First of all, in an effort to deal with blog neglect I’ve shifted my usual authoring time to before work rather than after. Afterwards there are simply too many distractions- mental, physical and… ahem… social for me to really get focused on my thoughts and get them down. Whether I can keep it up is anyone’s guess, but for now I’ve got a nice cool morning, a full battery and a patch of sunshine to write in. What else could you want?

Secondly, we had our annual reviews here at work recently, and by all accounts I did pretty well. I had to go out and get a short-term prescription for insulin to deal with much of what was said during the review, and after a rather superfluous compensation discussion (what am I going to do, argue about a raise? Oh no! You’re giving me more money! Whatever will I do!) I’m now happily sitting on a modest increase. Given that my last three places of employment didn’t really believe in “raises” per se (one of my coworkers was fired because she asked for one), it’s a welcome change.

Thirdly, we released a bunch of new content for my project, HP Print Studio yesterday, which marks our first major push for international content. Included was pretty much all of south america, so in the end it was only two new languages (Portuguese and Mexican Spanish), but given that every country can customize the application down to the last background image, rolling out those 18 new countries was no small feat.

Of course, doing a rollout of that scale showed some of the cracks in our localization strategy, so I won’t lie and say it went smoothly. I was at work until very late on wednesday resolving last minute inconsistencies, and had to give up my weekly salsa lesson/social for the project (which I find amusingly ironic- latin america, salsa… get it? . Having said that, I now have intimate knowledge on what’s broken and how to fix it, and an initial cost/benefit analysis means we might even be able to charge the client for it (though at this point I’m doing it simply for my own peace of mind).

Lastly, we had some… unfortunate downsizing at work. I won’t go into the detail of who, how and why, just to reassure my readership that I wasn’t affected (well, other than the shell shock). The reason I brought it up is because, having gone through two business evaporations, two acquisitions and a few other unfortunate staffing events, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of event handled so well.

How do I mean that…

First of all, most of my downsizing experience has been reactive, in that a business had to suddenly adjust to an unexpected market adjustment or ‘catastrophe’. Fact is that most of those events could have been predicted with a little foresight, and reductions came as a surprise to the majority of the organization- even HR in some cases. My takeaway from those was that the business is poorly managed, and that there is no real driver at the helm. In short, that the only direction the business had was as a result of momentum.

In contrast, everything about yesterday’s event seemed strategic, well thought out and considered, and ultimately necessary. It was done because of the recession- I won’t lie there – but it was also done because of a whole host of other (undisclosable) conditions had been factored into the decision process. My takeaway here was that not only is there a driver at the helm, that driver also likes to to pull into a garage every so often, adjust the mix, check the fluids, clean the filters, refill the nitro and get a new set of fuzzy dice for the mirror. In short, someone who knows exactly what’s going on under the hood.

Having said that, if any of my former coworkers would like me to use my burgeoning network within the digital creative community to help connect them with potential opportunities, let me know- I’ve made some contacts through the Adobe User Group that may prove valuable.

The following question is asked: “What does the computer of the future look like?” Discussion follows. Things are moving online, so the need for the desktop will dwindle. But then there are games, right? They’ll always need more hardware, but even there that hardware is becoming so specialized, with expensive graphics cards and embedded physics, that sooner or later that niche is going to specialize itself out of the desktop computing market. Developers will still need power, yes, as will those that deal with graphics and video processing, but in the end that’s a pretty small market, yes? Everyone else will simply need some kind of a portal device to online applications. There may be voice recognition, there may be contact management, who knows. In the end, the home computer of the future will no longer require processing power.

So if power is not a requirement, what else will happen? Well, mobile computing is brought up. If customers are going to rely on their computers even more in the future, they’re going to want rapid access to said information. Will the home computer be portable? It very well may be, constantly connected so that the web applications will always be available at a touch. But the need for a larger screen will never dissapear, so perhaps it’s a two-piece device. Regardless, sooner or later the room comes to a consensus that the computer of the future will be a screen, and a portable CPU/Memory unit, and the key selling point of the device is simplicity and interoperability.

“What will this portable unit do?” The answer is “Everything anyone can do on their desktops today”: Email, browsing, games, office applications, movies, music… you name it.

“Which of those can we do now?” Games require too much hardware, unless we want to make Gameboys. Email and browsing… well, the networks arent’ well established enough. No-one’s got a battery good enough for music, office applications require a large interface and screens aren’t large enough… so the only real thing remaining is …. Music. And once technology catches up, we can start adding the other ones, right?

Apple started with the iPod the same time that they started working on OSX. The seed of portable computing and an operating system built on a scaleable kernel. Since then we have seen the advent of larger portable storage, a move to safer flash memory, better batteries, larger screens, enough processing power to do video. Driven by sales and technology improvements in cellphones, we’ve seen a continued convergence of technology. This convergence has brought the mobile market ever closer to the desktop market, but not on the playing field of processing power, but rather on the playing field of actual customer useage. More features do not matter to the everyday consumer- simplicity does. We are not all technowhizzes who can dissasemble a computer and install our own RAM- people like us are in the minority, regardless of what you might think. Make the interface intuitive, the functionality what-I-need and no more, and you’ll have a customer for life.

And now, with the release of the iPhone, the plan suddenly becomes clear. While wireless providers have pushed the limites of what our phones are capable of, desktop hardware and software producers have mostly abandoned developing the functionality of the common user to really push into the niche of power applications. Who really uses more than the basic features of Word, after all? Games are moving more and more to the world of consoles. In the meantime, Apple has moved off into left field with its iPod and with clever advertising and a seeded and loyal userbase has overrun that market, and now- flush with an absurdly strong brand message and five years of tenure as a leader in technology, interface, innovation and simplicity is revealing its hand to the world.

Lets be honest: The iPhone appears to be one step away from the holy grail of mobile computing. It performs all basic communication options that other cell phones can, and the entire product has been designed to scale: It runs a kernel that’s a scaled down version of what’s running Macs right now, proving that as mobile hardware capabilities increase, they can easily add to the feature set to bridge the gap between the mobile and the desktop. It’s an excellent test platform for the large questions that remain on mobile UI (How do you format a word document on a PDA, for instance). Memory, screen resolution, battery life… all these things will only improve over time- hardware presents the only limitation, and that’s only temporary. Really, the only thing we’re lacking is a screen to plug it into… and we’ve all seen the iMac.

And I wouldn’t be surprised that the strategic vision for this was hatched five years ago. Brilliant.

• It helps to be diversified.
• It helps to be branded.
• It helps to be big.

Their major competitive advantage is not that they’re organic- United Natural Foods is organic, but they’re really just a distributor with exclusive supply contracts. No, they’re branded. In a world where organic foods are the new yuppie fad and via that fad organic produce is slowly turning into just another commodity (albeit a premium commodity), Natural Selection Foods has managed to build a strong organic brand and, unlike UNF’s deals that make their produce sell under the Whole Foods label, have managed to significantly penetrate the organic isles of more mainstream retail outlets (Costco, for instance- Go Soccer Moms!).

Of course, the E.Coli Spinach problem didn’t help much, but given that it hit spinach more than it hit their Earthbound Farms brand, I suspect they’ll be fine.I kinda want to work for these people. The idea makes the treehugging hippie in me a happy camper.

The European organic market is significantly more mature than the US market, with 3.4% of its farmland certified organic. Top country on that list? Austria, with 9.7%. After that it’s Sweden, Greece, and Denmark. In contrast the US has… get this… 0.2% organic farmland. Mind you, it’s growing at 20+% a year, and there’s significant consolidation going on in the sector (actual acerage is three times as much as austria, with half as many actual operators). From trends I see in europe and some analyst reports, it seems like we’re going to see that growth rate in America increase for at least another 5 years, and then eventually settle do a more respectable 7% annual….

…and remember, there’s a finite amount of cropland in the US. 442,120,449 (average) acres, of which we’re looking at a 30% fallow rate.

Anyway- total EU vs. USA is 5M vs. 800K acres, but the market sizes are 13B vs. 10.3B. This is likely because the EU has 17 times the operators(134K vs 8K), leading to strong diseconomies of scale. But it also gives us a good idea of where the rediculously large markup we’re seeing in the US (100%+ per channel point) will move in the not-so-distant future.

More discoveries as I come across them. Or I might just post the paper.

Now, after reading the paper… well, take a look at this quote from their Sales Manual- Their Proprietary Sales Model is apparently so good and amazing because it is “based on the process by which customers in our market decide if they want to give a vendor hundreds of thousands of dollars”…. so how, exactly, is this different from any other B2B Sales Organization model out there?

That’s just one quote, and man, lemme tell you, I had fun with it. To be completely honest, Brian made the mistake of letting me give this presentation without supervision… because I ripped into Confluence. Seriously ripped into them, to the point where the Professor was laughing at some of the processes and methods I was pointing out.

On one level, I feel bad. On the other, he left me hanging.

Providence is a very pretty city, and I honestly wouldn’t mind living there. It’s small enough to not suffer the problems that many big cities have, large enough to have its own identity, is extremely cultural, and is close enough to Boston and the Big Apple that road trips are a question of hours, rather than days. It would be a nice place to raise a family I think.

And then, when I came back, I thought it would be a bright idea to go work out. After the plane ride. Without breakfast. Lets hear it for masochism! Ehn- I’m cutting my exercise routine down to an hour each session, and instead am going to try to do it every morning before work. We’ll see how it goes.

And thus, life goes on.

You don’t count your money
When you’re sittin’ at the table,
There’ll be time enough for countin’,
When the dealin’s done.”

Words to live by, though the song comes with a slightly darker message: No matter how well you do in life, the best you can do is break even, in fact the only thing you can do is break even. Given that, even if everything is transient, you can still have fun while doing it. Nothing is Permanent, Entropy will assert itself. This is what makes me think that all humans are actually engaged in two ratraces. The transient one: Trying to make the most of their lives to maintain an acceptable lifestyle and propagation of the species, and the spiritual one: To make sure that once you break even with the first rat race, you don’t lose the game that matters. Luckily, the latter one is a personal journey, so you’re not competing with anyone but yourself, and the only expectations you have to judge yourself by are those you set for yourself. The former one is the rough one, and unfortunately tends to make people lose track of the latter.

Given that,… Subway really has absolutely no competition, and is dominating a market that is, quite frankly, ready for some variety. Anyone with a good business plan and an interesting idea could start chipping away at their empire. Though… how do you make health food fast, tasty, cheap, and appealing to the average American?