After a week in the mountains this Summer, two weeks in Frankfurt in September, the Sandbox crew just arrived in Berlin! Nico, Noor, Lilly and I will spend two weeks at Betahaus in a temporary office.

We love to change location whenever we can: it re-energizes everyone and makes us more creative. More importantly, moving to new cities allows us to deepen our relationship with the local Sandboxers and to strengthen our hubs. Tomorrow, we will be attending TEDxBerlin and in the evening, Rainer – our amazing Berlin Ambassador – is organizing a dinner with the local community.

We are  based in the Kreuzberg borough, a really nice neighborhood full of cafés and bars, and we spent our first hours in the Bundeshauptstadt exploring the area, stopping by for a Currywurst at Curry 36 yesterday evening and for a gigantic brunch at Café Atlantic this morning. More about Berlin soon. And a surprise guest will join us next Saturday, stay tuned

Antoine is a co-founder and the CEO of Sandbox and sees Berlin as a culinary paradise. He also took his sport apparel with him to not loose the good habits.

Nirav Devnani is a student at Columbia College, originally from Dubai, and supports the Sandbox community in New York. He’s excited about all the Volcano-stranded Sandboxers in NYC.

Sandbox member Brian W. Jones is currently living in Greensboro, Alabama where he helped start PieLab, a welcoming community space focused on civic engagement, economic revitalization, and job training. He describes himself as a designer, “trying to redefine what that means and the role I play in business”.

What is your latest project?

I’m working on a few things right now, but a recent project getting a lot of notice is PieLab—an idea developed at a Project M session last spring with a group of 14 designers. I showed up as an advisor, but ended up leaving as a participant, really believing in this idea. But, to make the project really happen, someone needed to act. So in just a few weeks, three others and myself moved to Alabama and began building what would become PieLab.

PieLab is a welcoming community space focused on civic engagement, economic revitalization, and job training in one of the poorest counties in the U.S. It also operates as a design studio working on community development projects and small business incubation. The initial plan was to open a pop-up shop for the summer, but after receiving a few small grants and being well received by the community, we opened a permanent location on Maine Street earlier this month.

What are you doing and how did you get there?

I’m no longer involved in the daily routines of PieLab, but I take part in meetings, volunteer on weekends, and continue to run my own studio from the back of the shop. Project M—a program started by John Bielenberg that inspires young designers to prove their work can have a positive and significant impact on the world—has played a large role in where I am now, as well as a number of the places I’ve been in the past. John is a good friend and colleague who I continue to collaborate with on various endeavors.

Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

The day PieLab opened may have been one of the most successful of my life. To see something so large, conceived of and brought to life in less than two months—with just $600—had a profound impact on what I view as possible. I haven’t really had a major failure, but I’m still young, give me time. One thing I continually learn from everything I do is that there will always be people doing nothing, who will criticize everything you do—ignore them and don’t give up.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

This week I’ll be in New York, so I’d like to meet a few Sandboxers in real life and continue to grow the relationships I’ve begun virtually. In the next year, I hope to start grad school at Yale or live overseas. There’s a lot to be learned from European culture and business that I think will be imperative to future success in the U.S. In the next ten, I’d like to start a profitable business that’s just as engaged in the community as a non-profit one.

What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

A delicious bowl of mushroom risotto. Great food is a tangible example of creativity at its best.

]]> http://www.sandbox-network.com/meet-a-sandboxer/meet-a-sandbox-member-brian-w-jones/feed/ 0 http://www.sandbox-network.com/meet-a-sandboxer/meet-a-sandbox-member-fraser-doherty/ http://www.sandbox-network.com/meet-a-sandboxer/meet-a-sandbox-member-fraser-doherty/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:01:56 +0000 Sara Usinger http://www.sandbox-network.com/?p=271

Fraser Doherty is 20 years old and comes from Edinburgh, Scotland. He runs SuperJam, a company making a range of 100% fruit jams and supplies all of the major UK supermarkets. He is a member of Sandbox since October 2009.

Hi Fraser, what is the story behind Superjam?

Aged 14, my Gran taught me to make jam in her kitchen at home. I started selling jam door to door and to small shops. After a couple of years, I had developed a process for making jam entirely from fruit and fruit juice; without adding any sugar or additives. I set up factory production and got the products into Waitrose and later Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and hundreds of independents.

What were the biggest failures concerning your project? What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

I spent a year developing the recipes, setting up production and creating a brand. I pitched to the supermarket buyer and he said it was too expensive, he didn’t like the flavours and the branding was off-message. I threw it all in the bin and started all over again, which was hard to motivate myself to do.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

I am giving a few talks in the coming week, at universities, conferences and awards dinners; I hope that people enjoy what I have to say and maybe even laugh at my jokes! In the longer term, I hope that SuperJam will become successful around the world and we will launch a variety of other flavours.

What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

Every month, I co-host a dinner where my friend and I each invite three of the most interesting people we know. There’s always a really interesting group and on Monday, I was inspired by some of the stories people told about getting their ideas off the ground and building amazing companies.

12 potential and current Sandbox members joined us for our inaugural dinner at San Francisco’s Bissap Baobab restaurant, which features the cuisine of Senegal. Over couscous, kebabs, and ginger juice, dinner guests shared their startup experiences from a host of diverse backgrounds. Participants present were from Germany, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States.

Some concepts and companies featured:

• Inviko: A social graph startup
• Startup School: An invite-only platform for outstanding and upcoming entrepreneurs
• Sparkseed: A nonprofit organization that invests in top college student social entrepreneurs through guidance, funding, and tools.

One of the issues that has been discussed is the following: what makes a city attractive to artists and young entrepreneurs? What are the conditions needed for new projects to emerge? Munich is a good example of a city with a historically large cultural life, home to a lot of painters, writers and musicians. Due to the high prices of what has become a big business city, many artists and entrepreneurs are now emigrating to Berlin, where they can find workspace easily, meet their peers, save costs of living and find restaurants open at night when working late hours.

There are nevertheless a lot of very active young individuals in Munich and this Dinner was definitively not the last: the next one should take place in January or February already. If you are in Munich and want to join us next time, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

Selling Muesli (the german word for cereals) doesn’t sound like the most exciting job in the world, right? But actually, it can be. At least when you’re doing it over the internet, in Web 2.0-style. And this is exactly what Hubertus (27), Philipp (28) and Max (26), three friends who studied together in the german city of Passau, are doing.

It all started with a radio ad for muesli they overheard a couple of years ago, explained Max when I called him to hear more about the story of their company. “We immediately thought: We can do better – not only the ad, but also the product.” Muesli, said Max, is one of those products who hasn’t really been changed since its invention by Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner more than hundred years ago.

The three friends immediately realized the potential of web-enhanced muesli. Since muesli is mixed together from different ingredients such as cereals, fruits and nuts, it is a highly customizable product. And what better way to offer customized products than through a website?

In 2007, Mymuesli.de went live and, despite no advertising at all, became an immediate success. The site not only allows you to completely customize your muesli by chosing every ingredient (thus allowing for 566 quadrillion combinations, as the site proudly states) – you can also save your mix, share it with others and even embed it in your blog. Those features, says Max, were and still are crucial to the success of the young company, which by now has 40 employees and delivers to Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK.

“The internet is still a place for great innovation”, says Max. It’s also a place where you can buy excellent muesli.