Pitch Week

Man what a week.  The soles of my feet are sore from walking, the back of my neck is sore from staring at my computer and my abs are sore from working out so much.  Just kidding about that last one haha.  But in all seriousness this week was a lot of work.

Front of the office

Monday 

The first day was exciting.  Getting to meet the other interns (about 20 of us in total), some of the workers as well as the CIO was really cool.  Did I mention that one of the other interns is my friend Caleb who I've known since the third grade?  Fate keeps pulling us together haha.  Nothing too extraordinary happened, just a lot of paperwork and tax forms.

Tuesday

Tuesday started out with Fulcrum giving us a crash course in what they do, why they do it, and the major problems they are currently facing.  During these presentations, we asked questions and took notes quickly as we tried to absorb and make sense of everything they were saying.  By the end of the first two days we were starting to formulate ideas that could grow into something useful. It was at this point that the teams "organically" started to form.  I put quotations around the word because it seems that teams tended to form based on who was living in the same apartment.

kitchen full of tempting snacks

When learning about Fulcrum, we were told that the law industry is very outdated.  For example, Caleb worked at a law firm last summer and spent much of his time driving crates of papers around to different offices.  Fulcrum was simply able to build the technology that they needed to automate many of their practices and save a lot of time.  Also, that fact that a few years ago they were able to make a "huge" deal with the largest law firm at the time, Baker and Mckenzie, might have helped them out.

Wednesday

Wednesday was pretty stressful, we stayed at the office from 9a.m. to 8p.m. coming up with ideas and giving mini presentations of them at the end of the day.  It wasn't as bad though because some good deep dish pizza was delivered to the office at the end.

THE TEAM !

Thursday

Thursday was also a lot of work.  We spent a lot of time refining our ideas and well as scrapping some.  This was also the day I got to try this fancy massage chair that is in the office.  It's a big, bright red monster and cost a whopping $9,000.  It was very nice.  The people here are great too.  I remember when I first met a recruiter named Rodney at a Hackathon earlier in the year.  He and the company were running a caffeine booth where they had these really good chocolate candies with liquid espresso in the center.  When I sent him a follow up email after the event I included a picture of the candies hoping he'd remember our conversation.  Well on Thursday he tossed me a box of them.  What a guy!

Friday

Friday was pitch day.  The closest situation I could compare Friday to would be an episode of  the tv show Shark Tank.  We were never told this beforehand, although we assumed it would be the case, that the CEO, Ahmed, along with some of his friends came to watch us.  The first group went up to pitch and that's when my heart rate went up and we knew we were on the chopping block.  The first mistake they made was asking where the HDMI cord was to project their presentation. Ahmed heckled them for it and told them not to make assumptions.  And then at the end of their presentation, the first thing Ahmed said was something along the lines of "Does anybody know what the hell these guys are talking about?  No, seriously I'd like to know!"  It was really funny to be honest but I knew I was going to be up there soon enough haha.  We were lucky that we handled their questions well and that they actually liked the ideas we had.

We had one idea related to law which was like a search engine that searches multiple databases, and another I came up with which was a running app.   There's already a lot of running apps out there but what's different about this one is that you can form groups so you'd be able to easily see a groups running routes, pictures, times, and all other kinds of statistics.  I thought this would be great for cross country teams and college running clubs because a lot of the apps out there now focus on the individual.  Additionally, we thought that businesses could sponsor challenges for other runners for hitting a certain number of miles and even offer incentives for running routes that went past their locations.

Saturday / Sunday

We spent a good part of the weekend exploring the city and the shoreline.  I wasn't expecting there to be so much green in Chicago!  There are a lot of really nice parks and trails not too far from where our apartment is.  We also went to a Tigers game Sunday which was pretty cool.  They lost, but the White Sox hit a lot of home runs so it was exciting.  Until next week.