Over the past few months I’ve had a number of people ask me if I know of any TechStars like accelerator programs for people creating non-software / Internet products and services. Some of the obvious vertical markets have been around cleantech and bio / life sciences but some of the more subtle ones have been around government services and non-profits.
I’m interested in examples of accelerator programs in the areas such as cleantech, bio / life sciences, medical devices, university R&D, inner city development, natural foods, women, and non-profit entrepreneurship. I’m also interested in people in these areas that already providing leadership in their entrepreneurial communities, especially in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York (the cities where TechStars operates.)
If you fit in this mix or know someone or an organization that does, can you leave a comment on this post?
If you are in Boulder, come to my community hours today between 1 and 5 at the Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street. David Cohen (TechStars CEO and co-author of Do More Faster) and I will be hanging out all afternoon, talking to whoever shows up about anything that is on your mind, and signing copies of Do More Faster until the Boulder Bookstore runs out of them.
As readers of this blog likely know, I do monthly community hours (also known as random days) where I’ll meet with anyone for 15 minutes about anything they want to discuss. Usually they are scheduled – today’s is an open free-for-all.
Come hang out, buy a book, and talk about entrepreneurship with me and David.
Last week I posted an article on peHUB titled How to Create a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community. Here it is in its entirety.
I’ve lived in Boulder for 15 years after living in Boston for a dozen. While I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — both as an angel and venture capital investor — I’ve never lived there. While the firm I’m a partner in — Foundry Group — invests all over the United States, I regularly hear statements like, “The only place to start a tech company is in Silicon Valley.”
When David Cohen (CEO of TechStars) and I co-founded TechStars in Boulder, Colo., in 2006, we had two goals in mind. The first was to energize the early stage software/Internet entrepreneurial community in Boulder. The second was to get new first-time entrepreneurs involved more deeply in the Boulder entrepreneurial community. Four years later, we feel like we really understand how entrepreneurial communities grow and evolve.
First is the recognition that Silicon Valley is a special place. It’s futile to try to be the next Silicon Valley. Instead, recognize that Silicon Valley has strengths and weaknesses. Learn from the strengths and incorporate the ones that fit with your community while trying to avoid the weaknesses. Leverage the natural resources of your community and be the best, unique entrepreneurial community that you can be. Basically, play to your strengths.
Next, get ready for a 20-year journey. Most entrepreneurial communities ramp up over a three- to five-year period and then stall or collapse, with the early leaders getting bored, moving away, getting rich and changing their priorities, or just disengaging. It takes a core group of leaders — at least half a dozen — to commit to provide leadership over at least 20 years.
But these two things — playing to the strengths of your community and going on a 20-year journey — are table stakes. Without them, you won’t get anywhere, but you need more. In Boulder, we’ve figured out two critical things for creating a sustainable entrepreneurial community.
First, do things that engage the entire entrepreneurial community. Over the years I’ve been to many annual entrepreneurial award events and I’ve gone to endless cocktail parties for entrepreneurs. These are nice, but they get boring quickly. More importantly, these types of events don’t actually engage anyone in anything functional — you end up seeing the same old people and saying the same things to each other.
You need to take the next step and create real events that have entrepreneurs work together on a regular basis. Meetups and Open Coffee Club type events that occur on a regular basis are a great start. Hackathons, Startup Weekend, and Open Angel Forum events are the next level. Events at the local university, such as CU Boulder’s Silicon Flatirons programs, including Entrepreneurs Unplugged and Entrepreneurial Roundtables, involve the entrepreneurial community with students who are the future entrepreneurs in the community. And programs like TechStars — which engage the entire entrepreneurial community for 90 days a year — are the icing on the cake.
Next, you have to continually get fresh blood into the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It has to be easy for a new entrepreneur to emerge in your community and get connected with the experienced entrepreneurs and investors. If someone moves to your community, it has to be easy for him or her to engage. Experienced entrepreneurs and investors should want to work with new entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs should have their minds blown when they move from their otherwise dull and disengaged community to your exciting, welcoming and engaging community.
We are in the midst of an entrepreneurial revival across the United States (and the world) right now. Hopefully we’ll learn from the past cycles and do things to keep things going this time around so that in 2025 there are numerous strong entrepreneurial communities throughout the United States. My partners and I at Foundry Group look forward to helping nurture many of these communities with investments and our engagement over the next 15 years.
As part of our Do More Faster book tour, we’ve been having a pitch session each day called “Pitch More Faster.” During the hour, we hear four pitches that are five minute each and give direct feedback / suggestions on the pitch itself (not the content or the business, but the pitch.)
In my experience, most people suck at the five minute pitch. It’s really hard to do well. There are lots of variants of suckage, including cramming a 30 minute pitch into 5 minutes, doing a 5 minute pitch for the first time (and having no comfort with the material), or talking at 732 word per minute and being impossible to follow.
We’ve done Pitch More Faster in about ten cities now and it’s been really interesting. I think we’ve been helpful and have found that when everyone is in the room (e.g. all four companies that are presenting) the conversation becomes even more impactful and robust as by the fourth presentation everyone is weighing in with feedback.
I’ve noticed one consistent thing in virtually every presentation. It’s what I call the “read vs. listen” problem. Most of the presentations have slides with lots of words on them. Since the presentation is only five minutes long, the stuff being said is important. Most presenters know not to simply read their slides, so they say things that are not necessarily on the slides. And that’s the essence of the problem.
I learned a long time ago (probably junior high school) that I learn by reading, not by listening. In college, I was a “go to the minimum number of lectures that I can get away with but read everything” guy. As an adult, I’d much rather read and write email that talk on the phone. When someone wants to explain something to me, I’d much rather they just email me. And when I want to really understand something, I need to sit quietly and read it (or about it).
Furthermore, when you talk to me, if you don’t keep my attention, or if I don’t purposely focus on you, I drift quickly. If you’ve ever interacted with me, you may have noticed the look in my eyes when I drift. It’s sort of the equivalent of my eyes rolling up into my head. It’s definitely a me problem, not a you problem – it’s just hard for me to process a lot of verbal information for a continuous time.
Now, map this to the five minute pitch context. I can concentrate on you for five minutes. But if there are words on the screen, I go straight to the words and start reading them. And then I can’t hear anything you are saying. If there are a lot of words, I spend all my time on it trying to read everything and absorb it. And I hear nothing.
It turns out there are a lot of people like me. Many of them don’t realize it. When you are presenting, you probably have a mix of “readers” and “listeners” in the audience. In a five minute pitch, you want me to listen the entire time since your goal is to get me to engage and want to spend more time with you. So the words on the slides are a distraction.
I’ve long been a fan of minimalist slides – a few words and/or a picture to use as a guide for whatever is going on. I never completely understood why – now I know. If I close my eyes the next time you are presenting to me, it’s because I’m trying to concentrate, not because I’m falling asleep.
David Cohen and I will be hanging out at the Boulder Book Store from 1pm to 5pm on Thursday 11/4/10. Come see us, buy a copy of Do More Faster (and we’ll sign it), and ask us any questions you want. It’ll be a chaotic version of my Community Hours – instead of having 15 minute slots I’ll just talk to whomever shows up.
If you are based in Boulder, come support your local community bookstore and have some fun with us.
As week two of the Do More Faster book tour winds down (with a full day at MSNerd doing the 2010 version of ADPrentice with Sameer Gandhi from Accel Partners and Mark Siegel from Menlo Ventures), I’m starting to feel like Caine from Kung Fu.
Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
Caine: No.
Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
Week three begins in New York on Monday, home of the newest TechStars program. David Cohen and I have a series of events throughout the day, starting with Pitch More Faster, TechStars for an Hour, and Angels in the Architecture being hosted at Cooley’s office. In the evening, we are having a TechStars party at The Hill from 6pm – 8pm being hosted by David Tisch, the Managing Director of TechStars New York.
I then travel to Quebec to give one of the keynotes at The Quebec City Conference. Yes, I brought my passport.
On Wednesday I join up in the DC area with David Cohen to do the Pitch More Faster, TS4AH, and Angels in the Architecture Drill again at Cooley’s offices in Reston, followed by a party there.
Thursday finds us in Chicago at the Tech Cocktail Startup Mixology Conference followed by Tech Cocktail Chicago at John Barleycorn Wrigleyville.
I’ll be back in Boston for Friday for an NCWIT board meeting and a bunch of other stuff, followed by what I hope is a very chilled out weekend.
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.
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.
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.)