Entrepreneurship at Cornell (which I run with a great team) just held one of our big annual conferences called Summit.   Summit is in NYC.  The photo gallery and speaker videos will be posted in about 10 days to the Summit site.  We had some fabulous speakers and tried out “real time” audience Q&A with hand held microphones.  That actually worked out very well and the speakers seemed to truly enjoy the unscripted questions.  Summit is held at the Times Center in midtown Manhattan.   The venue auditorium holds 380 and we had over 520 registered.  Just like an airline!

One of my favorite speakers of the day was Barry Beck, the co-founder of Blue Mercury.  His Q&A was hilarious actually and he really opened up on some of his experiences.  Anyway, in his prepared remarks, he commented on the concept of DROOM.   I had never heard this acronym, but Barry quickly told us what it means:  Don’t Run Out Of Money.   Obviously smart advice for any company.  Unfortunately though it seems to happen all the time!

An acronym that we use at CVF often is SOM.  SOM = shit out of money.  Maybe we will start using SOOM intead.  Suffice it to say that good DROOM planning will avoid the SOM situation.  DROOM planning is one of the CEOs main responsibilities (add to hiring a great team and being a great leader to round out the top 3).

Barry’s acronym will stick with me. I will be using it and passing it along often.

Happy Thanksgiving!