April 30
By Seattle 2.0 Follow Friday
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
April 30
Here's my start up tip of the day. Follow up.
I've been trying over the past 2 to 3 weeks to get investors in TechStars in Seattle (and everyone else for that matter) to put a 1 page TechStars prominently in their offices.
I sent an email about this topic two weeks ago. Then, I sent the exact same email as a reminder 1 week ago. Then, I sent the same email a third time and changed the subject line to : "TechStars....soup for you? In that email, I wrote the following:
"Now -- I know that you know that this is the third time I'm sending this email -- and I know that many, perhaps even most, have not yet printed out this b
rochure and put it up prominently in your offices for all entrepreneurs to see. And I suspect that even more of you have not yet forwarded the email to your portfolio companies management teams...
We also know that you have written TechStars a check and you're an investor.....
So, come on get in the spirit -- actually do the steps in this email -- TechStars and the Seattle Tech community depend on it....no excuses....
Chop, chop as my grandfather used to say. Time is of the essence -- applications are due June 1.
I'm not saying I'm going to -- but I may make a phantom visit to your office -- and if I do, and the TechStars brochure isn't up, no soup for you. (I hope you're a Seinfeld fan) :-) "
Guess what -- it worked. I got emails from my investors stating that this task had been done! I even got a photo from Erik Benson at Voyager of the TechStars 1 pager prominently displayed at the reception desk (if I could figure out how to upload it I'd show it to you -- but I couldn't figure it out..so here it is on my blog And yes -- it's almost all the other investors offices too. My guess is that I went from 90% no response prior to the third email to about 90% follow through -- because I followed up three times!
Lesson learned -- Follow up. This applies to every step of building a business. Marketing, sales, fund raising, customer service. Follow up ...up to 3 times.
Oh -- and while I'm at it....I have a favor to ask all of you:
i) Please forward this email around your company -- particularly if you're at a BIG company.
Re: Want mentorship and investment for your startup?
TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment program. It is now accepting applications for the inaugural 2010 Seattle class. Applications are due by June 1, 2010 and the program kicks-off on August 16, 2010. The Seattle program is funded by every major venture capital firm in Seattle. We are reaching out to every organization in Seattle that works with entrepreneurs to help spread the word about the program. There is more information about TechStars online, www.techstars.org. Any help you can provide in promoting the program or encouraging exciting young companies and engineers to apply is greatly appreciated.
ii) if you walk into on of the vc's in Seattle and they don't have the TechStars brochure displayed in their offices -- tell them. No soup for you ....and email me.
April 30
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: TechFlash Three of the top 10 companies in the monthly Seattle 2.0 Startup Index are directly involved in the online real estate business, a sign that the Seattle area... OVP It has come to our attention that in certain parts of the world, the How to Avoid a No from VCs series, originally written for Seattle 2.0, is not... Davis Wright Tremaine/Startup Company Law Blog As a proven source of funding, it’s understandable that emerging companies often look first to venture capital firms to support their big ideas. Today... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law Since returning to private practice, almost four years ago now, my team and I have been trying to improve our efficiency each time we document the... anthonyrstevens/Anthony Stevens Direct from Andy Sack, Executive Director of TechStars Seattle, a reminder about the TechStars Seattle application deadline: Want funding and mentorship for... asack/Andy Sack (Founder's Co-Op) Last night we had most of the founder's come to the Founder's Co-op office for our second "founder's only" event. We now hold these meetings every... afranklin/Click Send - Aaron Franklin's Blog There is an ongoing debate about whether startups need to be based in the bay area. Chris Dixon, who is a major leader in the movement to create a New York... Glenn Kelman/Redfin Just a reminder that Redfin’s brown-bag program this week features Michelle Broderick, a savvy, new-generation marketeer who understands guerilla warfare... Administrator/Curious Office Curious Office invests in Bonanzle! I’m really happy to be writing about today’s news. Bonanzle is a 2-year-old company founded by Bill Harding which has... Luke Timmerman/Xconomy Seattle by Gregory Huang Qliance Medical Management isn’t the richest startup in Seattle, but it may have the most star power behind it. The company, which deals directly with...
April 29
Seattle 2.0 is launching its newest event today –
Deploy. Deploy 2010 is a one day
conference designed to help developers and technology managers create better
products in a faster and cheaper way.
Deploy will be held at the Bell Harbor International
Conference Center in Seattle on June 24th starting at 8:30am.
Topics will be geared toward the technologist and
include:
- Key steps to get your product ready to launch
- Creating a development shop for your startup
- Building a lean startup
- Social media api and location
based services
- Cloud computing
- Building for mobile
- SEO for startups
- Design for non-designers
- Pair programming
- Engineering best practices
- Using continuous integration
to stay production ready
Here are some of the amazing people speaking at Deploy
To reward our friends we are offering a two-day only
special.
All tickets will be 20%
off of the early bird price. Just register now and use the discount code 2day -- the code is only good through midnight,
April 30th. This will be our best price so we strongly recommend you register right away.
We are also still accepting sponsors, contact us for more information.
If you’ve ever been to a Seattle 2.0 event you know how fun and informative they are. We know
Deploy will be the same way.
Hope to see you there!
April 28
The Seattle 2.0 Awards 2010 will be in just a few weeks and if you have not bought your ticket yet, you should do it quickly (it takes just one minute), before it sells out. Jonathan Sposato, the former CEO of Picnik which was recently acquired by Google will be our guest speaker and you won’t want to miss his inspiring startup story. We have more than 8,800 votes registered so far on the 11 categories. We certainly would like to break last year’s record of 13,156 votes, so if you haven’t voted yet, do it soon. Tell your friends to vote too. The “voting booth” closes on May 11. And then...
The finalists will be present at the best tech startup gathering in town and we’ll celebrate all of them, announce the winner and have a great time.
April 28
OK, it's certainly premature to open the bubbly at this point. But given all that we see, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to get one of those bottles chilling for later.
Across our portfolio and with conversations with our colleagues in other venture funds, there is a steady, rising drumbeat of, "Hey, things are feeling better...in some cases much better!" We're seeing increased customer activity across our companies. Budgets that were frozen in late 2008 and stayed that way in 2009 are starting to loosen up. A couple of our companies are actually ahead of plan for the year so far (unheard of in 2008 & 2009).
In the last six months, we've seen the return of investment bankers on our calendar (over the last few years, we thought of them like unicorns - cute but imaginary beasts). They see a recovery in the economy, bulging corporate balance sheets, and investor cash on the sidelines all pointing to a release of pent up demand for products, companies, and public stock offerings. Are they right? Are we right? Time will tell...but as of this time, it feels SO much better than it did even three months ago that we have to believe better times are not just ahead, but with us already.
The data below point to how hard and fast the fall was in the second half of 2008, and it appears a sustainable upslope forming now.
April 26
This is the second in a series of blog posts I'll be writing on Seattle 2.0 about the "tech" in "tech startups".
Last week's post talked about source control
; today I'll discuss another key element in your arsenal, Continuous Integration.
Continuous Integration (often referred to as "CI" - pronounced "see eye") is the process whereby new software that you produce is built, tested, and (optionally) deployed to the team as soon as it's written. The primary goals of Continuous Integration are:
- Ensure that defects are identified as early as possible
- Ensure that your software is kept in "production ready" condition at all times
- Ensure that the software you write is not hampering the ability of someone else on your team to contribute to the codebase.
- Reduce the amount of time you need to take to get from idea to delivery
So how does Continuous Integration work? The workflow is generally something like the following:
- I write some new software code.
- I commit it to the source control system.
- A trigger fires that alerts the Continuous Integration system to start.
- The CI server gets the latest version of all the code, including the code I just checked in.
- The CI server builds* my software.
- The CI server runs automated tests* against my software
- The CI server automatically deploys* my software to some staging site or system
- The CI server alerts me and the team if it found any problems.
A few implications. The first one is that you're using source control - and if you aren't, start. The second is that you have a separate CI service. There are several good ones out there, and I'll talk more about that later. The third, and most important, is that you can define what "good" means for your software.
This third implication - that you can define what a "good build" is - varies according to the programming language you're using, the development methodology, and the testing methodology, and it gets complicated. First of all, not all programming languages are compiled, and so Step #5 is not something that makes sense. Second, and more problematic, not everyone writes code with automated tests in place, and so Step #6 may not make sense for you.
Having said that, it's my very firm opinion that you should be writing automated tests against your codebase from Day 1 of your startup journey, but that is a different blog post.
Third, and finally, you may not have a staging website or system in place, so Step #7 may not make sense.
Does a CI system have to have all three of those components? Compile, Test, Deploy? Absolutely not. Of the three, though, Test is by far the most advantageous component. It's a wonderful feeling to know that every time you add new lines of code to your software that your ENTIRE codebase is going to get tested and alert you if you have problems. And for compiled languages, the presence of Test implies that you've been able to Compile, so you've knocked off two out of three.
Deploy - Step #7 - is a definite nice-to-have, but it's not critical IMHO. Having said that, I think a lot of startups underestimate how much effort is taken to deploy their software assets - website, middle tier, database, resources, scripts, batch jobs - and could gain a lot of time back if they spent more time on automating their deployment. Again, this is a separate blog post.
Let's talk for a minute about the pragmatics of setting up a Continuous Integration system. You could roll your own. Write a script that checks your source control system every few minutes, and, if it finds any changes, gets the latest bits, compiles, runs tests, and deploys. I've seen enough homegrown systems to know it can be done. However, tooling around CI and SCM (software configuration management) has gotten so much better over the last decade that there's no reason to roll your own.
My favorite system, and the one I've personally been using for a couple years now, is TeamCity, which was created by JetBrains. This has all sorts of hooks available for power users, but is easy and intuitive for those just getting into Continuous Integration.
I'm curious to hear your experiences with Continuous Integration - both as a practice, as well as your feedback on specific tools or frameworks. Share in the comments!
April 26
We just published the latest Seattle Startup Index for the month of March. The biggest news is Redfin moving 3 positions into #9. It’s no surprise Glenn Kelman, Redfin CEO, is so optimistic about the future and heading to an IPO.
On the top 25, Cozi is worth mentioning by moving two positions to #15 -- maybe a sign more families who are finally using the web to communicate and organize themselves – and AppStoreHQ moving 7 positions to number 25.
On the top 75, Google Apps marketplace (or whatever that thing is called) certainly helped Smartsheet which was one of their launch partners and they moved 15 positions to #48. Pelago moved 10 positions to #39, Zulily moved 20 positions to # 59 and Kashless moved 11 to #58.
New companies on the list include: MiKandi, Add Three, Zendorse (Koitunes), Hello Scheduling, HomePipe Netowrks, SignSwift, EmailSynergy, YongoPal, Xref.us, Moprise, App and Seek, Drink Studio and BluCapp (Scrubly).
April 23
By Seattle 2.0 Follow Friday
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
April 23
As I witness more and more start up companies in action, I've recently developed a hypothesis. The hypothesis is simple: the founding teams who embrace the uncertainty of a startup with fun, whimsy, and lightness build more successful companies.
When starting teams embrace the fun along with the hard work, a number of important things happen:
The hypothesis is based on my own anecdotal observations and isn't backed up by hard core data. If anyone has data that supports or refutes this idea, I'd love to hear from them. One last thing: the title of the post obviously comes from one of my favorite books by Milan Kundera.
It's spring time -- enjoy yourself and your startup.
April 23
If you're thinking about launching your product in the next year it's worth checking out the the DEMO Meetup at Madrona Venture Group on Tuesday, May 4th.
DEMO is probably the premier event to launch your tech product. Companies that have launched there include TiVo, LeapFrog, E-Trade, Salesforce.com and more. They're inviting 10 companies thinking about launching products at DEMO (either at the
upcoming event September 13-15 in Silicon Valley, or DEMO Spring
2011) to pitch.
Companies will be pitching the DEMO Team including Executive Producer and VentureBeat Editor Matt Marshall, and they'll meet with the senior partners at Madrona. Each presentation
will get at least 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of feedback. DEMO did
something similar last year at Kleiner Perkins, in Silicon Valley, and it was such a success they wanted to take it on the road. As was the case with Kleiner, there’s no exclusive deal with Madrona.
If you’re interested in attending the open house, fill out this form. Ten companies will be picked to pitch, and a few more will be invited to a private cocktail party with the DEMO team, Madrona and some other local investors.
For those who aren't ready for the pitch but just want to meet the DEMO team there will be a party at the The Crocodile Club from 6:30 to 9 p.m. It's open to everyone in the tech scene who registers here and the first 75 people who show up will get a free drink.
April 23
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: asack/Andy Sack (Founder's Co-Op) Seattle needs: ...more big exits from Seattle technology companies Picnik was nice. But zillow, redfin, cheezeburger and others. It'd be good if we could get... virginia/Picnik Seattle 2.0 Prime your browsers and get your mouse warmed up because Team Picnik has learned that our very own Darrin Massena (WTIA Technology Innovator of... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) issued a statement today from its President, Denise Voigt Crawford, stating that NASAA doesn... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick I have a new post out on Seattle 2.0 : Envy the paper boy. When the papers are delivered in the morning, he knows exactly how much work has ahead of him... Gregory T. Huang/Xconomy Seattle by Gregory Huang Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Seattle-based Technology Alliance’s “Innovation Showcase” at the Rainier Square Conference Center downtown. This is a... jheitzeb/Currently Obsessed I’m helping a startup founder who is outsourcing the development of a project. Tensions are running high on both sides as the project slips. The CEO is... TechFlash Ali and Hadi Partovi, the twin brothers who sold Seattle-based iLike to MySpace just nine months ago, are leaving the social networking company, according to... Diane Tuman/Zillow Hey friends and fans of Zillow: We need your vote! The Webby Awards are here and we’ve been nominated in the real estate category. If you like us (and we... Martin Tobias/Kashless blog At Kashless.org, we try to make it easy to do the right thing: Reuse to extend our natural resources as far as possible. We have a great web site that makes... Dave Hardwick/Job Hacking Going through my RSS feeds today, and noted a comment by Matt about The Role of HR in Hiring, which referenced a thought-provoking post by "Ask the...
April 20
Envy the paper boy. When the papers are delivered in the morning, he knows exactly how much work has ahead of him. He knows how long it takes to fold and put a rubber band/plastic bag around each and stuff it in a bag. He knows how much the bag weighs, and where along the journey it’ll be hardest to carry. At the end of their route, he knows when he's done. And when he walks away from his route, he's done for the day, he doesn't have to think about anything work related until the next morning, giving him complete freedom for the day. What white collar worker can say this? We're all tethered to our Blackberries/iPhones/G1s, answering mails, being randomized to the nth degree and working against arbitrary and deadlines every hour of every day – and, more often than not, getting nothing really done. Yes, envy the paperboy.
When I was at MS, I knew a very senior individual who had a simple philosophy – accomplish three things every day. Three simple things, no more. Three things, you ask? That seems ridiculously low – shouldn’t they be driving through everything under the sun? Ah, grasshopper, you have fallen into the classic trap.
Scott Porad has a
wonderful post
on this very thing, and while his is related to development, it’s appropriate for your entire business. To summarize, if you try to attack 5 things that each take a day in total to complete, at the end of a day, you have 1/5th progress against 5 things, and nothing done. If you spent that whole day on ONE thing, you’d have one thing done – hello sense of accomplishment! And beyond that, should things change direction on day three, rather than having 2/5th of 5 things done, you have two things actually accomplished – and can move on to the next set of work cleanly.
Yes, there have been about a
hojillian
books
,
blogs
,
time saving tools
all about how to manage your time, be efficient, reduce your time spent and generally spend 15 minutes working, make a billion dollars and spend the rest of your time drinking martinis and tanning when the rest of the suckers are out working like dogs. Sounds great right? But we’re Seattle 2.0 – it’s all about startups here, if I’m working 24 hours a day on a million different things, shouldn’t my company be along for the ride?
Slow down. As many studies have shown, multitasking is a ginormous fail on an individual level. The cost to task switch is far greater than we imagine, and, as a result, you spend so much time ramping down, switching, and then ramping up that you would have been far more efficient to just stick with the original, power through, and move on. The problem comes with the size of the tasks – no one does the work to chunk. That’s where the paper boy comes in.
In a single year, assuming no vacations and a 50 house route, he’s got to deliver 18,250 papers. HOLY COW, that’s a lot of dead trees. But fortunately for him, he has simplicity forced upon him - no matter how hard he works on a single day, he knows he can’t deliver more than 50 papers, so don’t try. Focus, get the 50 houses done quickly and it’s off to the arcade to play DDR. This is the philosophy you need at your business.
Figure out, in a given day what the top 5 things you want to accomplish that will take a day to do, and pick them off. It doesn’t matter what discipline (sales, marketing, development) – nearly everything can be chunked broken up into pieces of eight hours of solid work (I’m a huge fan of Joel Spolsky’s assumption that
anything measured in days is not a real estimate
). If there are separate teams, or multiple people, who truly don’t overlap, feel free to have each group come up with a single set of tasks. Agile/Scrum guys call this the “
backlog
”, and I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t use this term generally. However, I think it needs to be a lot more lightweight – you’re not doing estimation, and every task’s only requirement is that it’s less than 8 hours of work. Congrats, you have your paper route. By the end of the day, if there’s a newspaper on every doorstep you’re done. That doesn’t prevent you from doing more, but it focuses the team to the nth degree.
The beauty of this is many-fold:
-
You know when you're done with every task
-
You get a sense of accomplishment every day
-
Anything that's not on the list can be rejected (with authority)
It’s not hard, but it’s certainly counter-intuitive – so it’s rarely done. And it requires discipline – you’re desire to take on just one more thing will kill you. But focus on the paper boy and you’ll be sipping Mai Tais in no time.
April 18
This is the first in a series of posts on Seattle 2.0 that aims to give the newly-minted tech entrepreneur an overview of the key elements of the “tech” in “tech startup”. In so doing, I hope to start a conversation about the things that are “must –haves”, things that are “nice to have”, and things that are fluff and are not necessary.
Oh, and I’ll also answer the age-old question, Microsoft or open-source for your tech startup? OK, not really. That’s not going to happen.
Let’s start today with the simplest of simple, the notion of source control. Sometimes called “version-control systems”, or VCS, the high-level purpose of source control is to allow you manage the software code that you’ll be writing.
What do I mean by “manage the software code”? Well, let’s see:
- prevent it from being lost due to a developer’s laptop being stolen
- allow you to test out new ideas quickly and with the assurance that you can always get back to a known-good version
- allow you to keep multiple copies of the project going at once, each in different states
- allow you to recover from hardware failures
- allow multiple people in different locations to collaborate on a project at the same time
- allow you to respond quickly to customer bug reports and analyze where the defect was introduced into your code base
The gist of source control is that you have a repository into which developers commit changes over time. The repository doesn’t live on somebody’s laptop; so, being shared, multiple developers can contribute the codebase. It’s a safe, centralized, shared, always-available resource.
And let’s be clear: at a tech startup, your code is perhaps your most important asset. Not because it’s secret or has tons of IP embedded in it*, but because it provides a constantly-improving foundation upon which you can quickly iterate in response to market feedback.
You’ve heard the horror stories of people losing the source code, and trust me: you don’t want to be those people.
So how do you get started? First, hire or partner with people who know how to use source control. In addition to that, mandate that everyone at your tech startup use source control. There should be no soft assets – including source code, diagrams, presentations, documents, etc. – that are not committed to the source control system. Third, pick a source control system. It doesn’t matter so much which one – 90% of the benefit is just picking one – but pick one, and start using it. Every day. Become so fluent with it that you don’t even think about it. It takes two seconds to learn; it’s a tool, just like an IDE or a blog dashboard or Google Analytics.
Now, the flamebait: I’ll tell you which source control system is the best.
No I won’t. Ha! Had you scrambling to reply, didn’t I? The truth is that there are several categories of source control systems to choose from, and each has its place. Your circumstances – geography, technical expertise, financial situation – affect your decision. Having said that, here's a few pointers:
Subversion. Subversion probably the most widely used VCS out there, and for good reason. It’s robust and feature-rich and proven. It’s a much-improved descendant of CVS, and let me tell you – if anyone suggests using CVS instead of Subversion, give them a squint and wonder about why they recommend that. Subversion is by far the superior choice, in terms of tooling, hosting, and general lack of kludginess. One thing about Subversion: don’t run your own Subversion host. There are a million free hosts out there in the cloud who will host it for you. Unfuddle is a great example. And don’t worry about your codebase living on someone else’s server.*
DVCSes. There is a new variety of VCS that’s appeared on the landscape, called “Distributed Version Control Systems”, or DVCSes for short, and they have a fanatical, if still small, following. The theoretical advantage of DVCSes are that they allow each developer even more independence in time and geography and network connectivity while still providing neat facilities to merge everyone’s changes together. Git and Mercurial are a couple examples of hot new (free) DVCS platforms.
Paid. Paid has its place. If you’ve convinced companies over the years to pay for your source control software, odds are it’s pretty stable and feature-rich. Perforce, in particular, is a paid product that has been around for a long time and which gets really high marks from its users. Perforce has a free 2-user version that your very early startup may be interested in checking out. If you’re a Microsoft shop, Team Foundation Server may be to your liking; but without a BizSpark program membership, cost may be a prohibiting factor.
Have any thoughts about source control systems or tools? Horror stories about losing code that wasn’t under source control? Share them in the comments!
* the approximate value of your source code to someone else is approximately zero (multiple sources)
April 16
By Seattle 2.0 Follow Friday
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
April 16
We've received a great response so far to TechStars applications being open in Seattle. We're already approaching 100 applications -- and my expectation is that we'll likely have more than 300 applications submitted before the June 1, 2010. So it's going to be competitive and you've got to have a really good application to get a spot. Here's some tips and answers to help you make your application stand out:
TEAM
Team -- your team and past accomplishments of your team are really important. We look for clear evidence of successful technical prowess and projects.
It's rare -- very rare -- that TechStars admits one person applicants. There have been one or two exceptions to this rule -- but that's what they are -- exceptions. The reason for the rule is simple. Companies are built by teams not individuals. You will need 2 or 3 people with diverse skills to create a successful company. You will need to work well with each other and enjoy each other. Better to figure that out before applying to TechStars.
During the TechStars program, teams must work and live in Seattle. TechStars applicants must be onsite at the TechStars office (location still TBD). You can apply from anywhere in the world as long as you are willing to relocate to Seattle for the 3 months of the program.
Teams who outsource technical work overseas are at a disadvantage. Outsourcing isn't an application killer but we encourage your team to contain a technical co-founder that is on-site in Seattle.
IDEA
Your idea should be clear and well thought out. Ideally, it is differentiated from other solutions in the market. You should make sure you've spoken to lots of customers in the process of understanding the customer and the customer problem. If you haven't spoken to 100 customers -- I assure you it will show in your application. If you have spoken and listened to 100 customers, your application will shine above others. Ideally, your idea solves a real problem for an identifiable and accessible customer base.
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Think about how your business is going to acquire customers. This is one area of ideas that new entrepreneurs don't spend enough time thinking about and articulating. You can have a great product but if you can't acquire customers your product won't get used.
APPLICATION
This may sound stupid but complete the entire application. Put the time and thought into the application to make it look good. Make your case for why we should choose you over the 300 other applications. Anything you can do to stand out will help. Pictures and short videos help a lot (make videos less than 2 minutes). Complete applications help -- you'd be surprised how many people submit incomplete applications. Early applications help a lot! Given the number of applications, getting your application in early gives us the time we need to review it and ask questions. Early applications also gives us time to get to know founding teams. This increases your chance of getting in. Most applications come in during the last week (and many the last day) -- if you're serious about applying, I'd suggest that you demonstrate your seriousness and intent by being organized enough to apply early. This simple step will help you stand out -- and it helps us spend the necessary time to get to know each applicant team.
If you have other questions, simply email me or come to open coffee Tuesdays 8:30AM to 10AM at Louisa's Cafe on Eastlake Ave. E.
April 16
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: Marcelo Calbucci/Marcelo Calbucci Once more I’m organizing the Seattle 2.0 Awards. I have not written much about it on this blog, since most of the posts are going to the Seattle 2.0 blog... Steve Murch/Northwest Passages I’m honored to hear that BigOven has been selected as a finalist again this year for “Best Bootstrapped Startup” in Seattle, by the distinguished selection... TechFlash Nominees were announced today for the second annual Seattle 2.0 Awards, a startup awards ceremony which will take place at the Bell Harbor conference center... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law Dan Rosen, Joe Wallin and I have collaborated on an amendment to Senator Dodd's financial regulatory reform bill, the Restoring American Financial Stability... Gordon Empey/Xconomy Seattle by Gregory Huang I was recently headed down the fund-raising road with one of my technology startup clients, when something strange happened. This client is a company founded... noreply@blogger.com (DaveSchappell)/Dave Schappell (TeachStreet) I haven't researched this, but I'd bet that the original business schools (and MBA programs) were meant to train/develop business creators, and not just... Glenn Kelman/Redfin Redfin published an essay in TechCrunch today, “To Steve or Not to Steve,” about entrepreneurs who impose their personalities on a startup. Redfin’s Matt... Brent Frei/The Productive Will Rule the World Philip Odence the VP of Biz Dev, Black Duck Software, is the next newest member of the “paid crowdsourcing really works” club. He writes a very tight article... Spencer Rascoff/Zillow Please join me in welcoming Howard Hanna to the Zillow Listings Feed Program. Starting today, visitors to Zillow will now see an additional 21,000 for sale... Kyle Aevermann/iePlexus Social Media Advertising Are China & Google getting friendly? What the country did this week, that’s confusing everyone. Then how many American’s are really using social media...
April 15
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April 14
This past Tuesday I attended NWEN’s First Look Forum. This is the third time this event is being held and the goal was to bring to light startups that are on their seed stage. For me it was a disappointment because the excessive number of non-high-tech companies presenting! Here is what I learned…
InsideTrip: They are building a rating system for flights and airlines using 100 data-points – I can’t even imagine where they get 100 data points from a single leg of flight. They created a score called TripQuality and they are already partnering with Orbitz to integrate that score into flight searches.
Qworky: Horrible name, great idea. Qworky is about making meetings more productive. Got your attention, right? Their CEO, Mikal Lewis, did a superb job of pitching their startup. I really believe on their innovation as long as they integrate what they are doing in how I do things already (for me is Gmail, for others is Outlook). If you care about making meetings productive you should check their product.
Zendorse/Koitunes: By their own words, Zendorse builds social marketplace for sharing and selling digital content. They are trying to be the connector between people listening to music, sharing it with friends and giving them the opportunity to buy it. This is a very fragmented industry, with dozens of players on each leg of this stool. If they can squeeze themselves right in the middle it can be great. The one thing I think Tom Damico, Zendorse CEO, could have done better (and he agreed with me) is to explain to the audience how people listen and share songs nowadays. You see, the audience on this event is older than your typical 25 year-old using Last.fm, Lala or Pandora. For some of them, sharing a song means to write down the name of a music on the back of the business card and going to Amazon.com to buy the CD.
The other 9 companies were not high-tech companies and I won’t write about them to not bother you. I think NWEN’s should probably split FLF into themes. Bringing a bunch of bio-tech companies to present to high-tech investors, or vice-verse, won’t do well. When I asked one angel investor what he thought of the event, he was disappointed with the number of bio-tech companies, paraphrasing him: “I don’t invest in bio-tech, I know nothing about their business”. My suggestion is to hold a FLF 100% about software/web and another about bio-tech/nano-tech/clean-tech, this way investors can decide which one to attend and it might be more interesting to attract outside (of Seattle) investors to come see these companies.
April 14
Here’s something you might not know: sex sells. No, I’m not talking about prostitution or advertising. If you are reading this right now it’s because you thought the title was intriguing enough to warrant you spending a couple of minutes. This morning as I was reading a blog post on iPhone and sex being indispensable to young business people, I thought how many news articles have been linked to sex just for the sake of getting some boost behind a press release, a news story, a product launch or a business.
Are you using sex to sell your story?
Sex really sells your story to the press if done in a way that makes sense. But sex is not the only topic to sell. Popular culture and daily live elements also sell. Do you want a lesson on what people will pay attention to? There is a 30-minute TV show every night telling you exactly what kind of stories people want to listen to: It’s called the 10 o’clock news on your local channel.
If you have a consumer startup – even if you have a B2B startup – you can learn a lot about how to sell a story by paying attention to what the local news talks about. It’s all the same, everywhere, at any day of the week. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things local news talk about (and what people pay attention to):
- Sex stories (“City residents are outrage by bikini baristas”)
- Health risk stories (“What you should know before you go to the produce aisle that could kill you”)
- Unsung heroes (“Man saves family of 4 who fell on a ditch by calling 911”)
- Pet miracles (“Dog wakes up owner who’s house had a gas leak”)
- Distrust on people (“School Supervisor is caught drunk driving after a night at strip club”)
- Celebrity (“Glenn Beck to appear on book signing”)
- Rags to richies, dumb to smart, unlikely to likely, etc.
The list could keep going and going, but you get the gist. People want to read about what kills them, what saves them, what pleases them and what displeases them. What they don’t want to read about is boring stuff, and as far as I know “marketing speak” is boring. Your typical way of delivering a presentation to investors or partners is very boring. People don’t care for you. And journalists and bloggers – at least the good kind – have a very good sense if a story will go well with readers or not.
Here is your homework: Watch the local news for a couple of days and make notes of every story you hear and how it fits inside a category. Then go back to your team and brainstorm funny, outrageous or mind-blowing stories about your startup inside those categories. You don’t have to pitch them to the press, but it will open your mind and teach a valuable lesson on stories the press loves to hear.
One final note: any kind of story telling how you donated 5% of something to charity doesn’t cut it. Every other business is doing that, so just skip any story that has a non-profit angle to it, unless you can be sure no one has ever done that. That’s no reason to not be charitable, but if you are doing just because of a PR stunt, I can tell you it won’t work.
April 13
The word “startup” is used so ubiquitously these days that it’s hard to figure out what it actually means. When I hear that someone “has a startup,” it sounds no different to me than to hear that someone “has a dog.” Or you hear people ask how “that startup is doing” as if it is a patient in a hospital. And, of course, there’s the “startup community,” which is made up, presumably, of people who have startups or work for startups, one way or another. But what is a startup? Is it a noun? Is it a verb?
I may not be able to define it, but, like art and porn, I know it when I see it. And Zillow is not a startup. This is on my mind, of course, because we’re gearing up for the Seattle 2.0 Awards, which are by, for and about the startup community. You all – LOTS OF YOU ALL – nominated and voted for your favorite Startup All Stars. And a lot of the nominees just make me scratch my head. Like Zillow. And Redfin. And Cheezburger. I just don’t think they’re startups. In order to seek some clarification about what a startup is, I checked with the questionable wisdom of Wikipedia and the conventional wisdom of the Seattle Tech Startups list. The simple definition on Wikipedia is as follows: A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets. The term became popular internationally during the dot-com bubble when a great number of dot-com companies were founded. A high tech startup company is a startup company specialized in a high tech industry. Tony Wright offered this definition: A smallish, youngish product company aiming at rapid experimentation and growth. I generally qualify descriptions so I know what game they are playing. i.e. "Venture backed startup" indicates one game, "lifestyle startup" indicates another. If you're done experimenting and done growing (in a dramatic way), then you aren't a startup. The thing that both of these definitions have in common is newness: rapid growth, frequent experimentation, evolution and limited operating history. I think that a startup is not quite up and running smoothly yet. That it is working on defining it’s offering, building it’s team, getting to market and getting to the point where it no longer needs to raise money from outside sources to get itself up and running. I think of it like the process of starting up my car. I put the key in, I turn it, I push down the gas pedal, I wait until I hear everything engage, and then the car is started. There is that “in between” period next, where I’m backing slowly down the driveway, stopping here and there to look and see if there’s oncoming traffic and it’s safe for me to get on the big road that will take me where I’m going. But once I’m on that road, I’m no longer starting up my car. I’m running my car. I think the analogy holds pretty true to illustrate when you’re done starting up a company and when you’re running a company. The folks at Zillow, Redfin and Cheezburger are running companies now. They’re on the interstate, not in the driveway hoping the engine will engage. That doesn’t strike me as the whole story, however, at least when we refer to the startup community here in Seattle. It seems to me that any community is fundamentally built on the idea of commonness. That the group of people who “have startups” (cute little startup puppies,) are sharing a similar set of experiences. Off the top of my head, those experiences may include things like writing a business plan, defining their market, building a go-to-market strategy, identifying strategic partners, doing the fundingpitch circuit, building your team, defining your cap table etc… Obviously there’s wiggle room in there, but there are some things that just don’t seem to fit in. Cheezburger, for instance. (And before anyone thinks I’m picking on them, I LOVE THEM. I am sick that it wasn’t my idea, it is brilliant and successful and they have executed well at every turn. They are a fantastic example of how to run a business, stick to a brand, be true to yourself and monetize the hell out of a hungry market. Genius.) Although there is a lot to learn from Cheezburger about RUNNING a business, I'm not sure how they fit into the shared struggle of startup experiences. I could be totally wrong, but I think that their initial success was largely luck – their continued success is brilliant business. Did they define a product and a market, think through a long range plan with exit, raise venture capital, do the pitch circuit, etc? I think it was a little more like striking gold and then knowing what to do with it. Where is the common experience that we can share, learn from, compare other startups to? I think that by the time they did all that, they were already successful by any measure. Growth, however rapid and huge, is not the same as startup. So, I gotta go with the “not a startup,” if being a startup is based on the shared experiences of startupness. (And even if they were, they're not now, though I know this one is going to be very debatable.) Tony Wright, again, offers his own take on when a company is no longer a startup: When it stops aiming at rapid growth or rapid growth is no longer practical due to company size or size of addressable market. Or maybe just when it gets big. Or maybe when it stops experimenting significantly. I'm not sure why I feel like it matters, but I do. It’s not because I want to see anyone kicked out of some club or anything, but in a community that is so prone to comparison and judgment, I think it’s healthier – and more helpful - to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. That’s how we learn from and support each other. Beyond it just not being “logical” to compare Dan & Lara McComb (who built and bootstrapped Biznik slowly, deliberately, brilliantly and quietly) with Rich Barton, it also isn’t helpful. They do not have shared experiences, shared obstacles, shared struggles. Suggesting that Dan & Lara could do what Rich did (at least with that speed) would be insulting and unreasonable. They never had the resources that Rich had, their experiences were hardly related. And more of us face Dan & Lara’s struggles than faced Rich’s. Lastly, I have questions about the difference between someone having “a startup” vs. just starting a business? A startup, to me, implies something that needs all that care, feeding and building before it can deliver its goods or services to the world. But there are lots of businesses that one can just start, with nothing, and grow organically using their own revenue and momentum without having to meet external investor and larger market expectations. Matt Terich had an interesting way to look at that: One question my business partner and I have been pondering is whether we are building a startup or operating a small business. As we haven't yet even talked about raising capital, but have built technology that has already made, albeit a small amount, some money. By thinking of ourselves as a small business, we are focusing on business development and revenue and ignoring things like courting investors, making powerpoint decks, etc, I believe this mindset has helped keep us focused. This kind of gets me back to thinking about “a startup” as a noun and “starting up a business” as a verb. And on this one, Bryan Starbuck has a typically magnanimous thought:
I’m fine if a new mom & pop local restaurant wants to call themselves a startup. I often say ‘Tech startup’ or ‘Internet startup’ to capture the unique aspect of having the Internet or tech be a critical part of the business model giving it leverage. People who want to filter often care about filtering to that sub-set that match ‘tech startups.' This helps avoid the needless stomping on egos. It would be great if people were passionate about talking about their new service provider as being a ‘Services Startup’ or a ‘Consulting startup.'
I like the spirit that both Brian and Matt bring to this. And I think they’re right. I would like to see more people start more businesses, regardless of whether those businesses are nouns or verbs. But I don’t think that Zillow and Redfin are startups any more than Ichiro is a Little League player. (Though they were, and I’m sure Ichiro was.) Cheezburger? I dunno, they might be an American League pitcher. They pitch damn well, but they don’t have to bat. __ Alyssa Royse, as a person, plans on always being in the startup stage of growth, experimentation and evolution. She hopes never to get very big. She has exactly the opposite hopes for JUST CAUSE, and for the other little startup puppy that is now resting in her lap.
April 12
Today we are announcing the nominees of the Seattle 2.0 Awards 2010. If you can’t wait to see who they are skip this preamble, but you should also know Jonathan Sposato, who just sold Picnik to Google, will be the keynote speaker.
 This is going to be the first time Jonathan will be addressing a crowd of this size since the acquisition by Google, and as the former Picnik CEO, Jonathan certainly has a lot of lessons to share.
Picnik was the big winner last year, taking four Awards home for Best Startup, Best Boot-strapped Startup, Best CEO for Jonathan Sposato and Best Designer for Peter Roman.
Now to the finalists. The process to get here was fairly straightforward. Anyone and everyone
was invited to make their nominations. We received more than 6,900 of
them. Then, the 36 people on the selection panel got
to choose two nominees in each category, and the top five companies or
people with the most votes in each category became finalists.
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Best Startup: Apptio, Blue Kai, BuddyTV, Cheezburger Network and Redfin
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Best Boot-strapped Startup: BigOven, Biznik, Bonanzle, HasOffers and Survey Analytics
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Best Nonprofit Startup: Jolkona, One Bus Away, Startup Weekend, TisBest and Vittana
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Best Startup CEO: Rich Barton (Zillow), Sunny Gupta (Apptio), Glenn Kelman (Redfin), Andy Liu (BuddyTV) and Dave Schappell (TeachStreet)
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Best Startup Technologist: Damon Cortesi (Untitled Startup), Joe Heitzeberg (WhitePages), Darrin Massena (Picnik/Google), Daryn Nakhuda (TeachStreet) and Scott Porad (Cheezburger Network)
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Best Startup Designer: Alex Berg (ex-Wetpaint), Greg Bowers (TeachStreet), Aviel Ginzburg (Untitled Startup), Jenny Lam (Jackson Fish Market) and Matt Lerner (Front Seat)
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Best Venture Capitalist: Geoff Entress (Voyager Capital), Michelle Goldberg (Ignition Partners), Greg Gottesman (Madrona Venture Group), Nick Hanauer (Second Avenue Partners) and Andy Sack (Founder’s Co-Op)
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Best Angel Investor: Bill Bryant, Clark Kokich, Andy Liu, Dan Rosen and Kelly Smith
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Best Service Provider to Startups: Pearl Chan (CFO Selections), Geir Hansen (Silicon Valley Bank), Eric Koester (Cooley Godward Kronish), Craig Sherman (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati) and Joe Wallin (Davis Wright Tremaine).
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Best Entrepreneur Blog: Inspired Startup by Andy Liu, Quick Sprout by Neil Patel, Redfin Blog by Glenn Kelman, Startup Front End by Tony Wright and Untitled Startup Blog by Damon Cortesi & Aviel Ginzburg.
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Best Event for Startups: Hops & Chops by Dave Schappell & Daryn Nakhuda, STS Meetings by Chuck Groom & Gaurav Oberoi, TechFlash Live by John Cook, Todd Bishop & Eric Engleman, Ignite Seattle by Brady Forrest et al., and Seattle Open Coffee by Andy Sack.
Voting opens today on the website and runs until May 11th at midnight. Also don’t forget to register for the Award ceremony event on May 19. We’ll have a lot of interesting things going on, including a Poker Tournament as a pre-event, open bar, food, a Startup Showcase and lots of interesting people for you to talk to.
April 10
Entrepreneurs like to complain about VCs not “getting” them.
Or their ideas. Or their businesses. Or VCs not knowing when they are being
snowed. Or…. I’m often baffled by the companies that do and don’t get
institutional funding. I’ve tried to figure out why some total duds get big VC
cash, and I’ve had a hard time finding the through line. It’s tempting to say
something like, “they’re just stupid.” But come on, that’s obviously not the
case. Nor are they uncaring, reckless, or out of touch. Wait,
maybe they are out of touch. A couple weeks ago, I was having dinner with friends – as
usual, I was cooking too much food and drinking too much wine. Amongst those
gathered were a local VC (who is just awesome) and his wife (who, frankly, is
even more awesome.) Because a disproportionate number of those gathered were in
the startup world, we inevitably allowed conversation to drift to startup
talk. And then ‘the wife’ said it.
To paraphrase, with questionable accuracy, she said, “I always tell him, before
you consider investing in anything, ask a middle-schooler what they think of the
idea.” Which reminded of me of the often-quoted Guy Kawasaki
sentiment that you should always get a woman’s opinion. It’s not because he thinks women are genetically superior (though he does say
that,) it’s that we’re better at evaluating a bad idea when we hear it. He
blames it on the fact that men have a “killer instinct” that makes them
predisposed to think that any idea that will lead to “killing” an existing
company or product is a good one that should be pursued. This killer instinct
(which I think sounds very similar to the instinct to get laid,) supposedly
clouds men’s ability to think clearly and rationally, and sometimes makes them
make stupid decisions, (which again, sounds very similar to that instinct to
get laid.) Hmmmm, now I think we’re on to something. I mean, really,
there are shockingly few women VCs in Seattle (or anywhere, for that matter.)
We have a bunch of guys making decisions to fund companies that are, generally
speaking, run by a bunch of guys. Unfortunately, it is women who make up the majority of the
purchasing power in the US. 85% of all consumer purchasing – of everything from
cars to travel to homes to household goods and services, many of which are researched and
purchased online – is done by women.
Do you know how women make decisions? If you do, then you can write the
algorithm, market it and have the next killer startup. Barring that, however,
we make decisions based on the intensely fuzzy, deeply biochemical and
intuitive logic of “gut instinct.” How many men do you know who can successfully
navigate the gut-instincts of women? Hold that thought, we’ll get back to it. The other thing you’ll notice as you look through the
rosters of our local VCs is that they are all experts in their fields. At first
blush, that sounds like a great thing. But it might not be. Anyone who is in an
expert in any field is holding on to so many innate biases that they may not be
able to cleanly evaluate the broader market appeal of a company. A genius computer engineer may be brilliant at evaluating
whether or not some system of code will successfully execute a task, and the market value of that task being executed efficiently. But they
may not be so good at assessing whether or not consumer markets – people who
are not experts in computer engineering – will actually want to use the
service. They may get so excited about the cool technology - how innovative,
disruptive and proprietary it is – that it automatically seems like a good
idea. An idea worth investing in and owning. It doesn’t get any better when you throw in people who are
“experts” at business. They are likely to use their same limited MBA lens to
make sure all the bullet points are hit, all the classical elements of a solid
business plan are there, and judge it based on how it looks on paper.
Unfortunately, startups and entrepreneurs are inherent rule-breakers, and they
have to be in order to break through. So, expert assessment of adherence to
business rules may not be useful when fostering innovation. It’s not that they’re stupid, in any way. It’s that they are
classically short-sighted. After all, any of us can only see things from our
own perspective. So, when the VC world is filled mostly with men who are
experts in their industry, it stands to reason that they would evaluate things
from that perspective and get most excited about ideas that appeal to men who
are experts in their industry. Which is not what the larger market, for any
product, is comprised of. It’s starting to look to me like the problem with VCs isn’t
that they’re stupid, (and we’ve all heard people say that,) it’s that they’re
too smart. They’re experts. What if my friend and Guy Kawasaki are right? What if we
simply need more women and middle-schoolers using their gut-instincts to
evaluate the viability of a company? If you take technical expertise out of the
evaluation equation, how might that look? Well, I’m just one woman, but I can think of a few obvious
things that would and wouldn’t have happened if I were making the call: 1. There is no way that a woman would have invested in Earth
Class Mail. Here’s why, technically speaking: it was stupid. They pulled in
more than $21 M, including more than $7M from Ignition. I think the closest
I’ve ever come to an actual fist-fight was telling an ECM investor that it made
no sense to think they were going to replace the postal service because nobody
would want strangers opening their mail, only to be stored in incredibly expensive
facilities that could not be used for anything else, or sold, when the company
folded. Especially since gifts, packages and magazines would still be shipped
directly to my house, so my address would still be on all the DM mailing lists
and junkmail would still arrive. Every woman I talked to shared that sentiment.
But the men I talked to were throwing money at ECM because it was so
paradigm-shifting. 2. There are several local companies, whose founders are
currently in jail, that would not have been funded by any woman. Why? In some
cases, because the claims the companies were making were the business
equivalent of, “really, baby, it’s 10 inches.” But also because the people
running those companies were just plain slimy and most women saw through it,
the whole time, and were not the slightest bit surprised when the stories of
their deceit and demise turned up on Techflash. Gut instinct. 3. Then there are great little companies like Braincandy that I
think most women would fund, because it’s a product that most of us would buy
(if we had kids.) You had a great team, a great product that was fully
produced, a proven market, proven market appeal, great distribution partners.
All they needed was that last push to fully fund the marketing. If I had a
million bucks lying around, I’d still give it to them. Was it
paradigm-shifting, killer and destined to be the next Google? Nope. Would it
have been successful and made a good X return for investors? Yup. Setting aside the classic male desire to kill, acquire,
conquer and make things seem bigger than they are, I think there is something
to be said for a “jury of our peers” approach to institutional investing. I think that VCs may be suffering from
the “if all you have is a hammer” syndrome. Your assessment tools – and
assessors – should more closely resemble the consumer perspective of the target
markets you are hoping to hit. Don't get rid of men and experts. You need someone to say, "that won't work." But add another voice, someone who will say, "that's just stupid."
I love men. I love experts. I love smart, geeky, gutsy
people who are willing to put it on the line to support innovation. I have yet
to meet a VC in Seattle that I didn’t really like. That said, I think it’s
possible that the problem with most VCs is that they’re men who are experts in
their field, and most markets are not. And that when one has too much “data”
they may ignore logic and instinct. Women rarely ignore their instincts, and will usually tell
you what they think. And any middle-schooler will tell you when something is
just plain stupid. ____ Alyssa Royse really does like men, startups, investors and
innovation. If she had lots of money, she’d totally be a VC, but until then,
she has lots of opinions that she’s more than happy to share. She believes that “judgmental” is a
compliment, and she may contain more killer instinct than your average women.
April 9
By Seattle 2.0 Follow Friday
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
April 9
I won't have my post be about TechStars every week because there's lots of other stuff that's going on here at Founder's Co-op that's exciting and interesting. But there's no doubt that TechStars is off to a great start and I want to continue to share what's going on with all of you -- TechStars is after all about you.
Funny video on King 5
You can check out some funny news coverage on King 5 here
Great OpenCoffee at Louisa's this past week -- be sure to apply early
We had an applications are open for TechStars Seattle OpenCoffee at Louisa's last Tuesday. The turn out was excellent. I'm guessing we had about 100 people there and I personally spoke to about 12 teams at various stages of development. I want to encourage all the teams to apply -- and apply early because as soon as we receive an application we'll start looking at it and I'll try to engage with the entrepreneurs when I can.
One piece of feedback on the event from an attendee
"Excellent event. There's nothing like walking away from a large company to do your own thing, and having such a supportive community in Seattle helps make it possible. It was great meeting you - look forward to chatting more at another open coffee soon. Thanks again for hosting. "
By Aaron Franklin
Answers to common questions
- At Louisa's I found myself answer some questions repeatedly. I figured I'd write some of the answers down.
- Team matters a lot -- applying as a single applicant reduces your chance of getting into TechStars and more importantly, of building a successful business.
- Apply early -- it helps your application
- Don't give us a choice of "ideas" -- you need to choose what business you're in
- If you want to learn more about the kinds of company that have gotten into the program previously -- goto the website. Actually, I encourage you to poke around the website generally -- you'll get a much better idea for the program. NOTE: TechStars is a .org and not a .com
- Selection is made by a small committee of people....there's no one decision maker. And at least 2 different people will review every application.
- Videos and visuals help applications a lot!
New Tagline - Seattle's brewin'
I got this email from David Cohen -- the founder and grand poobah of TechStars....
Boulder
rocks
, I <3 Boston, Seattle _________?
I filled in the blank pretty quickly....Seattle's brewin'. So -- you'll see that tagline around.
That's it for now.
April 9
I love a good catch-phrase. A good mantra can rock my world.
And oh daddy, the hard smack of a good platitude knocks me off my ass like
nothing else. Mostly, however, I love them like I love Beevis and Butthead. I
love them because they remind me how stupid most people are. For a few moments,
I can revel in my own intellectual superiority, confident in my belief that
it’s not the meek who will inherit the earth, but the innovative brainiacs like
me who are going to forge new markets – no, whole new lifestyles – into which
the unwashed masses will pour, bathing in the glow of innovation that changes
the course of humanity. Wanna buy a bridge? One of the problems with entrepreneurs – especially those of
the tech-geeky ilk – is that our vision is so clear, conviction so strong and
enthusiasm so infectious that we lose touch with reality. We make it worse by
cheering ourselves on with phrases like “first to market,” “paradigm-shifting,”
“proprietary IP,” and “disruptive technology.” We forget that, no matter how
cool our offering is, we still have to convince people to buy it. And in most
cases, that first means convincing them that they need it. Which first means
convincing them they have a problem that we can fix… And so on. Let’s take a quick look at some of our most beloved
catch-phrases. Specifically, the ones I see in every single Power Point pitch
deck, usually right before the slide with the hockey stick graph showing your
company in the upper right hand corner of some statistically relevant
collection of competitive data. First To Market This is a HUGE red flag for me. There are only a handful of
reasons why it would be good to be first to market, most of them involve
profoundly and simply changing the way that everyone in the known universe does
ONE thing that they all do already. Like Amazon.com and shopping. And it’s
worth pointing out that Amazon didn’t have to convince people that they should
shop, they were already doing that. You have to define and build a market for your product. That
means a lot of marketing to educate consumers about why they need a product
like yours, not even specifically about your product. You have to make a lot of
guesses – however well researched – about how people will use your product. You
have to support a very long runway to while you research and build your market
AND your product. You will go into revision the moment you launch as a result
of market feedback, meaning you are probably launching two products in rapid succession,
not one. Your competition – and you WILL have some, no matter what –
will reap the rewards of all of the market education and definition that you
did, get to market much faster because you will have done all the dirty work
for them, benefit from all the mistakes you made, and will be able to release a
“better” version than yours – probably faster than you can get out your version
2. Most importantly, you will only really have access to the
early adopters, which is always a very small portion of the larger market that
you probably did your financial modeling based on. Basic laws (and I’ve rarely
seen them bent) of the Diffusion of Innovations theory suggests that the bell
curve for consumers of paradigm-shifting, disruptive technology is as follows:
Innovators: 2.5% of market Early Adopters: 13.5% Early Majority: 34% Late Majority: 34% Laggards: 16%
So, first to market gets you 15% at incredible cost an
effort. Best to market gets you 85%, and you can let the first to market people
do most of your R & D. Paradigm-Shifting People like their paradigms, and they don’t want strangers
to shift them. It may be easy for you to see how the world would be better if
people would shift their paradigms, that doesn't mean they will do it. The “my
business will succeed, if only the market will change,” doesn’t work any better
than, “this will be the best marriage ever, if only he will change.” Can I just
say, “Earth Class Mail” and rest my case? (You know, because people will want
strangers opening all their mail for them.) The upside? Probably not tons of existing competition in
terms of other products. The downside, tons of competition in terms of habit
and closed minds. Do not build a business plan on the idea that you will get a
huge mass of people to change their behavior. People still smoke cigarettes,
and that behavior kills them. So what’s their motivation to change their
behavior for you? Disruptive Technology That is code for “confusing.” Similar to paradigm-shifting, the idea here is that people
who are already doing something will now do it a different way because of your
product. Sure, you don’t have to convince them to do something, but you still
have to convince them to do it differently. And you will be battling
established brands, methods and products who will fight you tooth and nail to
retain their existing customers. Proprietary IP This is probably my favorite catch phrase in all decks.
Translation: I have an idea. So what. I have billions of them. We all do. Many
of us – at least the entrepreneurs I hang and drink too much with – have a
dozen ideas a day, sometimes at very inopportune moments. (Oh honey, no, that
feels good, I’m just distracted because I realized that if I could….. ) Ideas are awesome, innovation is the
best drug and the only path to the future. However, if you can’t get it to
market, with the right team, it doesn’t mean anything. You can’t build a
business on an idea, you can only build it on a market, a team, and a ton of
blood, sweat and tears. Maybe I’m cynical. (Ya think?) In the year since being first
to market with the first all-digital national lifestyle magazine, I’ve been
kicked around hard by the harsh reality that paradigms don't shift any faster
than markets, disruptive technology scares the shit out of people and my
intellectual property isn’t worth a thing if there isn’t a market that is ready
and willing to pay for it. As a good entrepreneur, I still know that I am right
and will keep working at it until I stop breathing, but I’m not going to get
all excited every time the whiff of change blows past my lonely station at the
First To Market outpost in hell. My addressable market is huge, my product is awesome and it
is, without a doubt the wave of the future for publishing. With 50,000 readers,
I’m hacking away at the innovators and early-adopters (and am actually a pretty
big magazine.) But, on a daily basis, I am still forced to answer the question,
“what is a digital magazine.” Can you imagine trying to sell a car to people
who didn’t know what a car was, how they would use it or why it was any better
than a horse? (Especially if you are understaffed and underfunded, like most of us are!)
Which is why I didn’t buy an iPad, even though JUST CAUSE is
available on it, for free using the Zinio reader app. I just can’t get excited about the iPad as a market
because it is based on disruptive technology, and I believe that it will take
years – YEARS – before a critical mass of people begin using it. Obviously, the
iPad will not be a viable third-party distribution platform for any media
partner until that happens. For
Apple, and even for Apple app developers, the big test is simply, “will people
buy it?” That’s easy. For the rest of us – and for people who want it to change
the world – the larger question is “how will people use it?” Followed closely with the most
important question, “will this become a lifestyle?” Will an ecosystem of goods and services grow in it? In agonizing over whether or not to spend money I don’t have
on a gadget I don’t really want in order to see how JUST CAUSE works on it, I
found the words of wisdom that forever soothed whatever buzz of excitement I
had. Cory Doctrow, of Boing Boing fame, said in a Gizmodo post: “The real issue
isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the
technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” And therein lies the rub for all of us innovators. We can
have great ideas, create amazing products, and have the potential to change the
world, but none of it matters unless the world changes with us. So should we do it? Well jeesh, we have to. Just as sure as
Tiger needs to putt and text, we need to make products and companies. It’s fun,
and yes, it’s necessary. We create the future, fuel the economy and sometimes
change the world. I wouldn’t want to do anything else. And I wouldn’t want you to either! Go
for it, with everything you’ve got. You’re probably going to fail – the odds
really are not in your favor. But go! Fail, and fail HUGE! Try everything,
learn everything, and then do it again! But be clear. Your biggest challenge is not your product, it
is the people who you need to buy it. Without them, you just have an idea, and
that’s not worth a damned thing. __ Alyssa Royse is still planning to change the publishing
industry by creating a national magazine dedicated to ideas of positive change
in the world. She’d love to see it on the iPad, so if you have one and want to
let her play with it, she’ll totally let you buy her a drink. Her next startup
(yes, again) is also first to market and paradigm shifting, but it uses old
technology, and just gets people to do something they already do, but better.
April 9
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law Interesting exchange of tweets this morning between @marksuster and @scottedwalker, over the extent to which VCs may or may not be on board in opposing... nic/eVenues Blog By Mitchell York , About.com Guide The Internet has enabled countless business models, one of the most useful and popular being the online... TechFlash aQuantive co-founder Mike Galgon has been named to the board of Market Leader, the Kirkland online real estate company. The 11-year-old company's was... Dave Hardwick/Job Hacking Recently, I've added some responsibilities to my role at Smith & Tinker, and have encountered an important point for startups and small companies (again... Gregory T. Huang/Xconomy Seattle by Gregory Huang Tired of Seattle-area tech startup events? Well, get ready for a whole new one. It’s coming April 26, and it has been a closely guarded secret until now. The... asack/Andy Sack (Founder's Co-Op) This post could have been about the great aspects of being an entrepreneur. The sense of adventure and discovery that comes from working toward your own... Glenn Kelman/Redfin Redfin’s brown-bag lunch program, designed to inject a big dose of alien super-power DNA into our little startup, has been a smash success, both here at... Jenny Dibble/Small Businesses - Big Marketing by Jenny Dibble We all know the importance of good health and have a general idea of how that is achieved...eat healthy, exercise, etc. But what might not be as clear is how... Kyle Aevermann/iePlexus Social Media Advertising It’s been a slow week across the social media and search engine world. Most of the online hype has been about the iPad, which came out over the weekend... jheitzeb/Currently Obsessed 1) “try before you buy” –> enlist contractors that aren’t tied to agencies so you can retain the option to hire full time. 2) “lots of coffees” –>...
April 8
Yesterday I attended the STS Meeting, an event organized by Chuck Groom and Gaurav Oberoi every month with informal talks about topics interesting for entrepreneurs and startups. Every once in a while they switch from topics to the startups themselves to come and talk about their products and businesses and last Wednesday four Seattle-area entrepreneurs presented their companies: James Dailey for MicroEnergy Credits, Marc Barros for VHoldr, Maya Bisineer for Memetales and Ken Watson for ir2020.
I’ll not talk so much about their products or businesses, but talk about things these four presenters did right or could have done better and those are just unorganized thoughts:
#1 What’s Your Name?
Every presentation should start and finish with a slide that has your full name. The last slide should also contain your email and Twitter username. You don’t want to make it harder for people to remember your name or how to find you.
#2 Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur
Maya Bisineer of Memetales gave a great presentation for the audience. Since they were mostly entrepreneurs and techies, she focused on telling her story instead of boring the audience with details of a product (kids’ books marketplace) that wasn’t a fit for them. Entrepreneurs love to hear entrepreneurs talk about their stories, because they can extract bits and pieces of wisdom and find common patterns with what they are going through now.
# 3 Too Many SlidesMaya used about 40 or 50 slides and each one of had a word, a phrase or a picture and she moved from one to the other pretty fast. That was a distraction from the message. I didn’t know if I looked at her, but then I might miss a slide or if I look at the slides to see which word was coming next, but then I wasn’t paying attention to her. That would have worked if Maya was not in the room, in other words, just a voice-over.
#4 Know What Your Audience Knows
James Dailey of MicroEnergy has a product that involves micro-financing for clean energy with cap-and-trade on the carbon market. Get it? Neither did I. If it wasn’t for an NPR talk I heard about Cap & Trade for Carbon I would never have heard about it. And when he talked about Clean Energy on Developing nations I was completely lost. I have an idea what’s clean energy, but it took a while to know what he was really talking about. And about 5 minutes into his presentation someone on the back asked “What’s Cap & Trade?” That threw James of the track. He had to backup quite a bit to realize the last 5 minutes were probably lost. After listening to him for 20+ minutes and another 15 minutes of Q&A, I think I might know what he’s business is, but I’m still not sure. You have to make a presentation in terms the audience will understand. Don’t assume people know things and don’t ever ask the audience “do you know about XYZ?” because if one person says he does, it doesn’t mean the rest does, so that’s a pointless question.
#5 Why Are You Here?
I don’t mean to pick on James Dailey, but after his presentation I was lost why was he presenting at the STS Meeting, so on the last minute of the Q&A I wanted to throw him a soft ball and I asked: “Why are you here? Are you looking for investors? Customers? Developers?” The answer was all of the above, but that should have been his last message. Actually, it should be the last message of every entrepreneur presenting in front of any audience: What do you need/want? Ask and you shall get it!
#6 Tell How The Industry Works
Ken Watson of ir2020 could have given the most boring, hard to understand presentation given his startup for Investor Relations Management Software for publicly traded companies and no one would think less of him. Yet, he delivered a superb introduction by explaining what “investor relations” is? Who are the players? And what are their interests? That’s even before he explained the problem and the solution. He absolutely understood that without that intro, we (entrepreneurs and techies) would be lost. Now, don’t take my comment as a reason you should always explain how the industry works because nothing is more annoying than an entrepreneur who tries to explain how “email” works before he tell about a new plug-in for Outlook. Everyone knows how email works.
#7 Touch & Feel Rules
Marc Barros of VHoldr could have given a presentation where he didn’t say a single word and just passed around his ContourHD camera and people would have loved “the talk”. Sure, we love the web, software and our iPhone Apps, but we still love gadgets more than anything else. And there aren’t many gadget startups out there. Marc did a good job at focusing his talk on the experience, instead of trying to explain the detail mechanics of building a product, uploading a video. He made everything sound very simple. In other words: tell a story!
I loved attending that event. I should go more often. It’s not very friendly to networking and the talks and Q&A could be shorter, but overall it’s a great place to present your startup and to learn of what people are doing. There were 37 people present (I counted them) and only 4 women. Two of them were either presenting (Maya Bisineer) or with a presenter (Laura ODonnell with VHoldR), which leaves just two women watching it, and that is a topic for some other blog post.
April 8
Yesterday, Fred Wilson, a VC in New York, a prominent blogger and investor on Twitter, wrote a provocative post by saying two things: First, most of the services and applications built for Twitter are trying to fill a hole on the Twitter service and, second, Fred believes is about time for some killer apps to be built on top of the Twitter platform.
I’ve built (and sold) TweepML exactly because I thought Twitter was not doing a good job on lists/groups of Twitter users. I agree with him in 5 years most services that are filling holes on the Twitter service will be gone as Twitter itself add features to its service.
The second point about the killer apps is where he’s very much wrong [note to Fred: I’m not trying to offend you and I admire what you’ve done, still, you are wrong on this case].
Twitter is like Email, not a Macintosh
On his post, Fred argues, that “...Desktop Publishing business… ‘saved Mac’…” and he asks where are the killer apps for the Twitter platform and even enumerate a few areas where killer apps might emerge, including social gaming, verticals, enterprise, etc.
His argument is wrong because Twitter is not a platform. Twitter might have an eco-system around it, but that doesn’t make it a platform. Windows is a platform, Mac is platform, iPhone and iPad are platforms, the web itself is a platform and even Facebook is a platform, but Twitter is not. To be a platform you have to work as the basis for something else to be built upon (Twitter is that), but you also need to be a distribution channel for people building on top of your infrastructure (Twitter is not that).
Let me make it clearer. Twitter is like a Department of Transportation providing an API for people to consume real-time traffic data and provide data-points back into the system. That’s it. Twitter doesn’t allow anyone else to extend twitter.com (the website). You can’t create a Plug-in for twitter.com like you can for Facebook, which would drive millions of people to use your product. Twitter gives you an API and tells you to go do it all by yourself. They don’t even provide basic supported development libraries and let the community do it all.
Twitter is like Email. There hasn’t been any killer app on top of email. Email is the killer app on itself. Twitter is the same thing. Yes, it will and it has spurred dozens of sub-industries, like analytics, consulting, marketing services, management services, tools, scammers, etc.
Twitter could be a platform: Distribution, Distribution, Distribution
I’ve been saying to whomever wants to hear that Twitter biggest mistake right now (and for a long time) is not have its own Twitter client. Downloading a Twitter client should be part of the sign up process. Yes, it would effectively kill all other client tools out there, but that’s the right thing for Twitter to do to really increase engagement and retention – that is a problem for Twitter right now as I can see many of my friends who create an account, do one tweet and never go back.
And that’s part of my 3-steps remedy for Twitter to become a platform:
Step 1 - Create a Marketplace: I’m not the first one to say this, nor the last one, but creating a marketplace would re-energize the developer base. You can do something as simple as the Wordpress Plug-in directory, but Apple has proved that developers really want help making money, so if Twitter can integrate a payment system it’s even better.
Step 2 – Create a client: Twitter has to have a Windows & Mac client, and that client must support plug-in extensions, just like Firefox. It has to be easy to browse the Marketplace (see step 1) for interesting extensions and easy to install. The client itself can be a very bare-bone client with basic functionality and let the Plug-ins make it cool. But Twitter should be careful. There are too many developers who write really crappy plug-ins and make the entire experience awful. They must have some balls to reject bad plug-ins.
Step 3 – Make Twitter.com a destination and an extensible platform. @anywhere is the opposite of what Twitter should be spending time on. Twitter doesn’t need more websites integrating them. That might feel good at first and it seems people are demanding that, but developers really need help with distribution, not building cooler widgets. Twitter has to support a widget plug-in inside twitter.com. Like Facebook did. What if Twitpic could write a plug-in and every a tweet with a Twitpic appears on the Timeline there is Thumbnail of the picture right by it?
The Entrepreneurs Are Gone
In all honesty, I hear ideas and products from entrepreneurs multiple times a week. I hear them well before investors (like Fred Wilson) even get a chance to know what’s coming down the pipe. It was just September of 2009 (six months ago) where every other day someone would tell me about their new Twitter product. Probably 40% of the products or ideas I was seeing and hearing about at the end of last year were Twitter related.
It has been months since any entrepreneur told me they are building anything on the Twitter eco-system. More than half continue to be web-based services that don’t relate to Twitter. Lots of those have something integrating with Facebook and the big gainer is iPhone and iPad apps, which I keep hearing ideas and seeing products.
As any entrepreneur (and investor) will attest, we want the shortest path with the least resistance to the gold. Technology is not the barrier anymore to create something. The biggest barrier is distribution (and marketing) and the iPhone and iPad make that really, really easy. Even after Twitter follows my advice and does step 1, 2 and 3 described above, it still will take a year or more for the great entrepreneurs and developers to come back, because they spent their chips, the reward wasn’t great and they moved one to a different game. Twitter must prove, once again, they should come back and build for that platform (once it becomes one).
April 7
Sramana Mitra, the "Forbes" columnist, strategy consultant and author, is offering a series of free online strategy roundtables. The roundtables are part of here 1M/1M initiative, a program that aims to help one million businesses reach one million in revenue. Although listening in should give you some new insights, five entrepreneurs at each session will be able to pitch Sramana their business ideas. She will review the material and provide feedback as well as address specific positioning questions. There is no charge for entrepreneurs.
April 2
By Seattle 2.0 Follow Friday
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
April 2
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