As usual, lots of moving pieces going at cavnessHR this past week.

We went to a presentation on applying to YC Combinator that was hosted by Avni Patel Thompson.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/apatelthompson/ She is an alumnus of YC combinator and gave us a great presentation. She covered the entire process from applying to going through the course and answered our questions. The deadline to apply is in a few weeks. So this probably isn't something cavnessHR would apply for as the timing for us is not right. But it was some great information and we made some great connections.

We started doing a daily or almost daily update on cavnessHR on LinkedIn. Not sure how this is going to work out. But just wanted to use another platform to talk about cavnessHR.

We had a meeting with Susan Perreault, DBA of Business Impact NW. https://businessimpactnw.org/ They provide a course about three times a year that covers the basic business functions. Like Marketing, Social Media, HR, etc... The course is about 3 months long and they cover HR as one of the subjects. We will be helping with the HR part of the course. We look at this as another way to get the word about cavnessHR out there and to give back to the community.

We attended the Veterans in Residence Launch at the Lake Union WeWork. This was the Launch Party for our current cohort. Veterans in Residence is a partnership between Bunker Labs https://bunkerlabs.org/seattle/ and WeWork. https://www.wework.com/l/seattle--WA WeWork provides 10 Veteran Entrepreneurs in 11 cities free workspace for 6 months and access to their resources.

We had a great turnout for the event. We each were able to give a quick elevator speech on our company. Congresswoman, Suzan Delbene https://delbene.house.gov/was the keynote speaker at the Launch Party. Thanks to Lindsay Church https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-church/ for getting us such a great keynote speaker.

We attended the University of Puget Sound RISE Internship Symposium https://www.pugetsound.edu/academics/experiential/for-students/featured-programs/rise/
cavnessHR had three interns for the summer from this program. One of them, Kate Moley, was selected to present what she did and what she learned at cavnessHR. We spent some time talking to the other interns and learning about their internship experiences. We met one student who wants to become a HR professional. So we will be following up with him.

We took Course 9 of the HelloSign Digital Strength Course.
https://www.hellosign.com/digitalstrength This is a once a month course for 12-month course that covers digital transformation.

We watched the Later https://later.com/ Later Lecture series on Instagram for Small Business. This is a video series that talks about how to use Instagram for your small business. They are very informative and useful.

We continue to watch the weekly Close.io https://close.io/ video blogs on sales and everything involved with setting up your sales. These are great and very useful for us.

We continue to meet with people on a daily basis about cavnessHR.

Below is our tech update for cavnessHR

• Added zip code to user registration
• Researched digital signature solutions
  • Chose HelloSign Business plan ($40/mo for unlimited signatures) + free read version of API
  • Tested basic HelloSign signature status querying from server
• Researched file storage options compatible with HelloSign Business (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive)
  • Chose Dropbox Business ($75/mo + $25/mo for each new CavnessHR employee--no additional cost as business grows)
  • Tested basic Dropbox API file operations from the server
  • Setup least-privilege controls in Dropbox to protect business data from future employee mishandling
  • Validated system-to-system business asset transfer (keeping business documents off of local machines for transfer)
• Researched various PDF form-filler/server-side creation tools

One big change is that originally we thought we would have to build this massive "cavnessHR database" But after some research from our CTO, DropBox and HelloSign and SendGrid should be able to handle everything we want to do. That should save us lots of time and money.