I love my partners at Foundry Group. They keep me humble. Very humble. I speculate that the following video is the work of Jason Mendelson. Payback will be sweet.
On a more serious note, Andrew Warner has a great interview with my co-author and TechStars CEO David Cohen up on Mixergy.
Oh – and if you haven’t already, go buy a copy of Do More Faster.
Andy Sack, who runs TechStars Seattle, has been all over the Seattle entrepreneurial scene in the past few years. I’ve known and worked with Andy since 1995 (I was on the board of his first company – Abuzz – which was acquired in 1999 by the New York Times) and am awed by the amazing things he’s doing in Seattle these days, including Founder’s Co-op, RevenueLoan, and of course TechStars Seattle.
On November 11th, Andy is hosting TechStars Seattle Demo Day. As is my custom, I’ll be in attendance. But, as a special bonus, he’s also hosting an Open Angel Forum at 7pm on the night before (November 10th) with Jason Calacanis. We did this in Boulder this summer the night before the TechStars Boulder Demo Day and it worked out great so I’m hoping this becomes a regular tradition.
Info on the two events and how to register are listed below:
November 10th – Open Angel Forum, 7pm: Join Jason Calacanis, Andy Sack and many other angel investors for the first meeting of the Seattle chapter of the Open Angel Forum! There will be food and drinks while hearing 5 minute pitches from 6 start up companies. We’re planning for plenty of fun and time for networking – even a poker game. Register online here: Angels, Entrepreneurs, Service Providers.
November 11th – TechStars Investor Day, 9am: Ten exciting new companies from the TechStars class of 2010 in Seattle will give short eight minute presentations highlighting the business and investment opportunity. The style is fun and entertaining, it’s a different kind of pitch event that includes amazing opportunities for networking as well. This event is invitation only and registration is required. Please email kayla@techstars.org if you’d like to attend or if you have any questions.
Well, week 1 of the Do More Faster book tour was a blast, but I’ve contemplated renaming it the “Do More Faster And Then Sleep All Weekend to Recover Book Tour” based on the empirical data from my 24 hour sleep session from Saturday at noon to Sunday at noon.
The book tour is in Boulder on Monday and Tuesday, then Denver on Tuesday night, and then Boston on Thursday. If you haven’t yet signed up and want to come, there are still some slots open as follows:
Monday Night – 10/18 – Two Guys and a Book – Beer with Brad and David. We’ll be at the Dairy Center for the Arts (2590 Walnut Street) from 7pm to 9pm tonight handing out book, drinking beer, and having fun.
Tuesday – 10/19 – We have two events during the day at the TechStars Bunker. If you are interested in TechStars, come to TechStars For An Hour from 2:30pm – 3:30pm. Then from 4pm – 5pm we’ll be having an event called Angels in the Architecture where we will discuss the local angel and VC landscape with co-panelists Howard Diamond, Brad Bernthal, Dave Carlson, Ray Crogan, Ari Newman, and Paul Berberian. Howard, Brad, Ari, and Paul also contributed to the book so come and get them to sign your copy! You need to register for each event – TechStars For An Hour or Angels in the Architecture.
Tuesday Night – 10/19 – We are having the big Boulder / Denver event at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup on Tuesday night. As of now 425 people are coming so don’t miss out. We have a bunch of the contributors from the book attending – maybe I’ll make them read their chapters.
Finally, on Thursday, I’ll be in Boston. We are doing an Angels in the Architecture event from 2:30pm – 3:30pm and then heading over to the MASS Challenge from 5pm – 9pm.
I’m officially in the daily deal business. Check out my new “Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals” store and shop online for some outdoor gear from Giantnerd.com.
Rather than simply observe new things, I like to use them. I’ve been keeping an eye on the daily deal phenomenon and have had an opportunity to explore it in more detail mentoring Deal Co-op, a TechStars Seattle team. Deal Co-op is in the program via Alabama and has been running a profitable online deal company for the last three years. During one of our weekly mentoring meetings, they told me they could turn anyone with good business contacts and an online audience into their own Groupon. They asked me if I knew anyone that fit the bill, and I told them I did… me!
Deal Co-op thinks that daily deal marketing is best served at local levels, with more targeted distribution. I’m interested to see if they are right. My first deal features $50 in credit from Giantnerd.com for $25. Giantnerd is a Boulder based company that specializes in “Social Shopping” for outdoor apparel and gear. You can shop online at Giantnerd.com, so anyone reading this blog can taking advantage of the offer.
I’ll have more offers coming up soon, so sign up for the email alert list, and keep an eye out for more Amazing Deals.
David Cohen and I were interviewed on KRON Channel 4 in San Francisco for Do More Faster. It was our first TV interview around the book and was fun.
It’s a good example of giving more than you get and letting the universe do its thing. Gary DiGrazia, the CEO of Mindjamz, emailed me with some questions about his startup. I didn’t know Gary but as is my habit I gave him some quick feedback. We went back and forth a few times and then he told me that he helps produce the KRON 4 Weekend Morning News show and asked if I wanted to do an interview about Do More Faster on it. Um – duh – yeah! Two weeks later we tape an interview which just aired.
Karma Matters. Oh – that’s one of the chapters in Do More Faster (written by a long time friend of mine, Warren Katz, founder/CEO of MaK Technologies.)
I periodically write the first column for PE Hub. Dan Primack, who is now writing a great column at Fortune called Term Sheet used to do this; there are now guest writers (including me) who do this column. Yesterday, I wrote a column about the book that David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster. Enjoy!
Writing a book is hard. Really hard. Much harder than I thought. So I’m extra satisfied that “Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup” is finished.
Ive been helping create software and Internet companies for over 25 years, starting with my first company, Feld Technologies, in 1985 when I was in college. By 1987 I had a partner, a mentor (my father) and a company that was capitalized with $10. (Yes, 10 dollars.) We bootstrapped the business because we had to and by 1993, when we sold the company to a large public company, we’d built a nice, consistently profitable business.
Since then, Ive been involved with creating and funding hundreds of companies both as an angel investor and a VC (now at Foundry Group). Four years ago I co-founded TechStars with David Cohen (CEO of TechStars) to help first-time entrepreneurs create new software and Internet companies while simultaneously working to energize the Boulder, Colo., entrepreneurial community, which was vibrant but small. Boulder’s population is just 100,000.
Over the past four years, my partners at Foundry Group and I have spent a lot of time talking about, thinking about, and studying how software and Internet companies get started. We’ve done this through our seed investments as well as through our activity at TechStars, starting in Boulder, then expanding to Boston, Seattle and New York.
A year ago, David and I decided to try to put our thoughts down in a book. Ive been blogging–along with my partners–for a number of years. So it seemed logical to organize some of our thoughts into a book. One weekend about a year ago, David and I holed up at my house in Keystone and sketched out the first draft of what became “Do More Faster.”
We decided to write a book by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Rather than preach, we gathered first-person accounts from the entrepreneurs who have gone through the TechStars program and their mentors. It is primarily made up of 80 short chapters (two to three pages each) and organized by seven themes: idea and vision; people; execution; product; fund-raising; legal and structure; and work/life balance. David and I then wrote a bunch of connective tissue between each chapter to create a cohesive narrative.
The title of the book comes from a common phrase heard around TechStars. Startups have an important advantage over larger companies when they use the philosophy of doing more faster. By trying more things in a short period of time, they can adopt their product better to the market and their customers. It’s also related to the idea that TechStars is a three-month program and doing more faster is a survival skill for both the program and for early stage entrepreneurs.
“Do More Faster” is also the title of one of the chapters, while the other 79 take as their titles other one-liners from TechStars, such as “Trust Me, Your Idea Is Worthless,” “Usage Is Like Oxygen For Ideas,” “Hire People Better Than You,” “Be Tiny Until You Shouldn’t Be,” and “Seed Investors Care About Three Things.” Each of the chapters stands alone and includes a first-person account from me, David, a TechStars entrepreneur or mentor. While we originally envisioned that “Do More Faster” would target first-time entrepreneurs, now that it’s finished we are hopeful that it is valuable for any entrepreneur, investor, and early employee of a startup.
When I reflect on the process of writing this book, I realized that I accomplished several goals at the same time that are all related to my lifetime commitment to continually learn, with a specific focus on entrepreneurship. At the most obvious level, I learned what it took to write a book and become a published author. But the process of writing the book gave me a lot of time to reflect on what it takes to create a new company, the attributes of a successful entrepreneur and how entrepreneurial communities work.
Most importantly, it exposed me to the deep thoughts of over 70 other entrepreneurs and mentors who contributed to both TechStars and the book. Hundreds of companies later, I’m still learning all the time from other entrepreneurs, especially those doing it for the first time. I hope you will also.
Simplification and iteration are two key themes that repeatedly show up in the stories from Do More Faster. Today I’ve been watching a real-time case study of those two themes unfold from our portfolio company BigDoor. The guys at BigDoor are trying to build a platform that powers game mechanics for any site or app, and they recognized early on that this isn’t as simple as just adding badges to your site and calling it good. So they built a powerful and flexible API that allows site owners and developers to create a meta game that will compliment and promote the site experience, not just be a tacky add on. That is the right approach, but with flexibility and power comes complexity and as a result there has been fairly high learning curve for a publisher or developer to use their system.
After getting live with their first dozen companies they learned that the gamification process shares some very key characteristics with social gaming, most notably that the game experience for your users can’t be built in a vacuum and the best way to implement gamification on your site is to implement something relatively simple, see how (and why) your users react, and then iterate and improve the game mechanics from there.
So BigDoor iterated their own approach and made the initial gamification implementation process much simpler. This morning they announced the “5 minute gamification process.” They even posted a video (with a timer running within the video) to prove that you really can add game mechanics in under 5 minutes. That may sound absurd to game developers, but the concept behind that simplicity is right on. Get initial gamification on your site quickly and easily, see how the community on your site reacts, and then iterate and improve your game. The response from their customers so far has been really positive and they’ve already increased their registered partners by more than 20% since this announcement just a few hours ago.
It will be exciting to watch the gamification movement unfold over the next few years, but from my experience its pretty clear that simplicity by itself won’t be a good solution. However, a flexible, powerful solution that provides an easy on ramp makes a lot of sense.
Try it yourself, gamify your site in 5 minutes.
At a talk I gave recently to a room full of first year graduate business school students, I was asked “what motivates me.” Before I answered, I felt compelled to explain what intrinsic motivation is and used the following example to describe it.
“Tonight, I’ll spend about 90 minutes talking to y’all. I’m doing it because I enjoy it and I learn from it. While I hope it is useful to you, that’s not the reason I’m doing it. While I hope you have fun, learn something, and enjoy our time together, I won’t feel better or worse if you do. In fact, since my goal is to learn from everything I do, I’d much rather you give me feedback about things you think could have improved our 90 minutes together.”
I then went on to explain that I’m motivated by learning. I’ve decided to spend my entire professional life learning about entrepreneurship and have decided that my laboratory is “creating and helping build software and Internet companies.” I derive enormous personal pleasure from the act of working with entrepreneurs, helping create companies, and learning from the successes and failures.
Over time, I’ve expanded the range of things that contribute to my learning. During the past four years I’ve spent a lot of time with first time entrepreneurs through the creation and development of TechStars program. As part of that, I decided to try to codify some of what I’d learned. That led to me writing Do More Faster with David Cohen, which led to another opportunity to learn, this time about the process of creating, publishing, and promoting a book.
In each of these cases, I’m intrinsically motivated. I hope that TechStars is a success. I hope that every company that goes through TechStars benefits from it. I hope that the book that David and I have written is good. I hope that it is well received. I hope that people learn from it. But none of these are why I spent enormous amounts of time and energy on each activity.
I spent the time and energy because I continuously learned from my experiences. And I deeply enjoyed the activities I was involved in. Sure – I had plenty of difficult moments (or days), lots of things that didn’t work, and plenty of things that I felt I didn’t do nearly as well as I could have. But I learned from each of them.
I recently was in a conversation with someone who was clearly extrinsically motivated. He approached me as though I was extrinsically motivated. He kept thanking me for what I was doing for him and then asking me what he could do for me. I finally stopped him and explained the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I told him that I had no expectation that he’d do anything for me – that I was spending time with him because I hoped to learn something from every interaction I had.
While I’ve presented this as an absolute (e.g. you are either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated), I know that it’s a spectrum for almost everyone (including me). But I think it’s important, and very useful, to understand which end of the spectrum someone is on. Don’t assume everyone is like you!
Sunday morning I read The Power of Less by Leo Babauta. I’m a big fan of Leo’s Zen Habits blog (I was turned onto it a few months ago by Amy) and I had high hopes for the book. It delivered.
Several times a week I hear from a friend or colleague that he or she is overwhelmed with the amount of stuff going on in their world. Occasionally someone ends up in my office in tears as they struggle to make sense of the madness that has become their life. I continuously gets email responders from people I email that say some variant of “I’m way behind on email – be patient” which is often foreshadowing for their subsequent blog post or tweet that says “I’ve declared email bankruptcy – starting over.”
A decade ago I figured out a rhythm that works for me. I’ve always managed to get through an enormous amount of stuff, but I would periodically go off a cliff and just completely melt down from complete exhaustion. I’d either end up asleep for a week or in bed with a nasty cold (trying to sleep, but mostly just feeling shitty) until my body (and brain) recovered. My ultimately solution was a combination of some of the things I’ve talked about in my Work-Life Balance posts (and that I’m writing about now in my Work-Life Balance email newsletter).
Some of my tactics show up in Leo’s book. As I read through it, I thought to myself that “everyone I know that struggles with being overwhelmed” should read this book. As fits the title, it’s not a long book, but it’s well organized, has a clear philosophy throughout, and is easy to relate to and understand.
I was already a fan of Leo’s, but now I’m even a bigger one.