I apologize for how dark this video came out (we were in an outdoor courtyard with no lights), but the sound is fine, so you can get the gist of the presentation. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is a video of my presentation to a group architects at an AIA Los Angeles event. I was one of seven speakers. We were each allowed 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. There were approximately 50 people in attendance. I got to talk to a couple people afterward and received encouraging feedback, but I think my presentation was too general to really spark people’s interest. That will come as I continue to refine the idea.

I’m still super early on in concept development for my venture, so the idea is changing almost every week. Of course, ideas build on each other and I want to show the progression of thought, so I’m posting this up. I spent a good chunk of today on instantdomainsearch.com, trying to find a better available domain name than Vverdant. Gotta sleep on a few gems I came across. I don’t want to take too long though, as I’ve already seen one good name disappear before I could register it: fillvoid.com.

A friend from the Emerging Green Builders Los Angeles (EGB-LA) Steering Committee, Justin Valis, sent me some logo design ideas! Check out his concept sketches below. Great brainstorming. I love having people contribute ideas!

Set 1: Vverdant logo concepts by Justin Valis: June 27, 2009.

1A – the bottom of the V is a taproot, the horizontal line creates the 2nd smaller V, the right side curves like a leaf, blade of grass or fern
1B – same but line is lower, the colors could be different on either side of the line
2A – the small V “slides” into the large “V”
2B – just seeing how a large V in first looks
3 – a hedge, high grass, field of green wheat, is cut down to show the large V. the top of the hedge would be like a saw tooth, the rest of the letters would be white letters, I was thinking of facebook’s logo
4 – like blades of grass or the trail of a rock skipping in water, w/ cursive or print
5 – the same hedge, but both V’s are cut out
6 – trying out different V combos
7 – the hedge goes up like a graph, or the hedge turns into a cityscape outline, the left of the large V curves like a leaf, blade of grass or fern

Set 2: Vverdant logo concepts by Justin Valis: June 27, 2009.

1 – 2 logos in one, they both share the same large V, similar to the first file’s #1
2 – further refinement of the previous one. Using “square root” to play with the 2 V’s and a plant’s root.
3 – bubble letters, because I felt all my other logos were too thin, because from what I read, verdant is suppose to be lush, I kept thinking of an overgrown garden on steroids and I can’t seem visualize that in a logo.
4 – staircase similar to the sawtooth hedge and graph
5 – blades of grass
6 – just trying to work w/ the double V
7 – trying to give the effect that you’re looking down into a box garden and the letters are make out of plants
8 – name split over a building, w/ little V flags on top
9 – trying to give the effect that you’re looking down into a rooftop garden of a highrise rectangular building, and the letters are made out of plants
* – enjoy the doodles

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My favorite concept of Justin’s is his use of the “v” as a square root symbol ( √ ) as seen in Set 2, number 2. Do you have a favorite? Feel free to leave a comment. And please also check out my previous post on logo design from June 23, 2009.

LinkedIn Founder & CEO, Reid Hoffman.

I was happy to read that Reid Hoffman, Founder and CEO of LinkedIn, also studied Philosophy before entering the business world.

I studied Architecture with a supplementary major in Philosophy at Notre Dame, and Reid earned a masters in Philosophy at Oxford. Some of my favorite thinkers are Socrates, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Reid is a great role model. He has dominated in Silicon Valley, helping to finance over 60 companies, 25+ from initial conception. He has been an angel investor for:

facebook.com, digg.com, bioscale.com, nanosolar.com, lulan.com, taxipass.com, naseeb.com, technorati.com, grassroots.com, friendster.com, socialtext.com, realtravel.com, rhythmnetworks.com, ravenflow.com, targetedgrowth.com, wink.com, wikia.com, adventsolar.com, bioscale.com, ning.com, tagged.com, tinypictures.us, etology.com, winster.com, rupture.com, jaxtr.com, kongregate.com, powerset.com, care.com, funnyordie.com, ironport.com, flixster.com, flickr.com, last.fm, grockit.com, and sixapart.com

These are some major Internet powerhouses. Ironically, I had a temp position at Ironport in 2006 before they were acquired by Cisco. I was living in Oakland at the time and temping in “The City.” It was a fun experience — data entry into Excel spreadsheets for eight hours at a time, hahah…. I also temped at Wired magazine during that period (answering the phone at the reception desk = BIG TIME BABY!) before I moved to Los Angeles in 2007.

Getting Reid Hoffman to invest in Vverdant, would be the equivalent of an up-and-coming rapper getting a co-sign from Jay-Z. Let me go brush my shoulders off….

The green light bulb went off in my brain (and it was a compact fluorescent).

So I have this idea to start a company:

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple months, but the concept is just a sprout. It’s barely started to germinate in my brain. This blog is meant to change that. I plan to write about my entrepreneurial ideas here, both to catalogue my thoughts, and to provide a forum for feedback.

This is the concept:

I want to create a global Web 2.0 platform for the green building (GB) industry. A knowledge center: news, jobs, links, community, calendar. With user generated content. This will be a one stop shop for GB professionals — a resource I would use every day in my profession (I’m an architect), but which does not currently exist. I think this is a big idea because the construction industry is one of the largest in the world, and the entire thing is shifting to green. There is a large potential user group for this site.

My idea is to organize a website by location (similar in concept to Craigslist), so GB professionals can tap into their local networks. I plan to start with my current local network of Los Angeles, and spread to other cities if this is a success. I’m using Curbed as a model of a similar idea that is working for the real estate industry.

Phases:

I: Create GB network for Los Angeles. II: Spread to other cities in the U.S. and globally. III: Apply this model to other professional communities: artists, non-profits, financial executives, etc….

It’s all about scalability:

I think I’ve generated a model that could have a lot of potential. We’ll see how this blog and this idea continue to grow. Stay tuned.