Eric Hanberg's presentation

I enjoyed in Eric’s presentation that he talked about his successes and failures.  He started with talking about how he got his start in running a business with his time at the non-profit theater, before buying his own theater.  He mentioned that a lot of what he had learned had translated over well, and even though he had the experience, it still did not work out.  He admitted that it was in part due to it being harder to sell people on plays as opposed to movies, but there was still a lot that he had learned from the experience.

I also thought it was interesting that he was selling/advertising a book that he had not even written yet.  By creating a site for the book and a waiting list he was able to gauge interest in running small non-profits before writing a book about his experiences.  I also liked that his presentation showed that entrepreneurship can be for small niches.  His book may not have mass audience appeal, but it still sells very well, especially in the past decade, and he even gets flown out to events to speak about it.  Sometimes entrepreneurship feels like it needs to be a big, grand idea, but he showed that isn’t the case.

The part of his presentation on A.I. was interesting as well.  He analyzed how rapidly it was improving over just 3 years.  It went from not being able to create a story on its own, to getting pretty competent at it.  I know for me, as a Computer Science major, A.I. feels very doom and gloom when all I hear is how it is going to take all the jobs, but Eric pointed out that it can really go either way.  Sure, some jobs can be lost, but others will most likely take their place.  The way we accomplish tasks is always evolving.