Category: Entrepreneurship
A handful of folks that I know and respect have gotten involved in the Founder Institute’ Denver program. Andy Vuong of the Denver Post wrote a nice article on it titled Founder Institute is training minds for a great idea. Several people have suggested that the program is competitive with TechStars – including the first sentence of Andy’s article. However, I just don’t see it that way and encourage all kinds of programs like this in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In the case of the Founder Institute, it has a very different tempo and dynamic than TechStars per their weekly agenda. While there is a little overlap in the mentor group, their’s is very Denver centric. And it’s a part time program vs. something that is fully immersive.
Jon Nordmark, a well known Denver entrepreneurs who founded eBags is running the program. John previously ran a fun program called Startup Basecamp – I was at the one in 2000 where my infamous “bowling and get wasted test” (actually, just the description) made an appearance. I have a lot of respect for Jon and expect he’ll do a great job with this.
If you are interested in starting up a business and looking for an educational program around it, consider applying to the Spring 2010 Denver Founder Institute program.
We’ve been having a running joke within Foundry Group for several years about “stealth mode.” My partner Seth alludes to it in his blog post a few years back titled To stealth or not to stealth. I’ve always been on the side of “not to stealth” but after watching the remarkable stealth experience of Trada, thinking about how Niel Robertson (Trada’s CEO), Seth, and the Trada team have effectively used stealth mode, and reflecting on what “stealth mode” actually means, I’ve changed my mind.
Niel wrote a brilliant post on this titled The Stealth Mode: Trada’s Position on Staying Stealth. I read it carefully when he first wrote it. I just read it carefully again. You should also. It’s one of the best posts I’ve ever read on this topic.
Even though I enjoy hazing Seth, after reading the post again this morning, I thought about how other companies in our portfolio have been effective at using stealth mode principles from Niel’s post. Even though Zynga is extremely visible these days, a number of the principles have consistently applied throughout the business, especially in the first year. Oblong, which is absolutely crushing it, has been “playing their own game” for a long time. AdMeld, another company that Seth is on the board of, adhered to many of these principles as they built up a massive position in their market. And we’ve got another stealth company quietly building something amazing which I’m sure they’ll start talking about when they are ready.
Niel redefines stealth mode very nicely in his post and then applies it to how Trada went from an idea being bounced around between him, Seth, and a few other folks to a very unique business, growing like crazy, with no direct competitors or fast followers. Sure – competitors may appear over time, but the head start that Trada has is dramatic and their ability to lead their market segment now that they’ve emerged from stealth mode is insured.
Read Niel’s post The Stealth Mode: Trada’s Position on Staying Stealth. Actually, read it once, send it around to your executive team, read it again, and then discuss how it applies to your business. It’ll be worth your time.
On a daily basis, I get an email from someone at a seed-stage startup where their email address does not include their website URL. For example, I just got an email from joesmith@gmail.com for his company CoolThing.
I wouldn’t have thought of this except for I’m deep in the proofreading of a book that David Cohen and I are editing called “The Tao of TechStars.” One of the essays in the “Working Efficiently” section is written by David, titled “Don’t Suck at Email”, and talks about this.
Specifically, David says:
“Another way that founders suck at email is by sending email from a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or other generic account. Every time you send an email like this you’re missing a branding opportunity for your company. Send and receive email from your company domain so you don’t suck at email.”
Joe’s email to me should have been from joe@coolthing.com. There are so many reasons this is better than joesmith@gmail.com, including the simple reason that the chance of me associating “Joe” with “CoolThing” in two weeks is much greater than the chance of me associating “Joe” with “Smith” and then with “Coolthing.”
Now, I know some of you out there will say, “but Feld, you use brad@feld.com instead of brad@foundrygroup.com for your email – what gives?” Ah, the irony of some things in life (although brad@foundrygroup.com works just fine.)
A week ago the MIT Entrepreneurship Review launched. Today it’s up on MIT’s home page.
The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is a new online publication about entrepreneurship that is produced and written by MIT students dedicated to analyzing trends in entrepreneurship at MIT and beyond. I’ve been involved with some of the folks behind this and I think they are doing an outstanding job. If you are interested in entrepreneurship, I’d add this to your must read list.
Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons. These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have. On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed. As I looked through the list of things that the various teams created, I got chills of excitement.
Most of the companies we invest in release software at least once a month. Some release weekly, or even daily. I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuous deployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries.
If you are releasing at least monthly, it’s easy to do a full day hackathon at least once a quarter. And, rather than have it be an “engineering thing”, you can (and should) make it a full company thing. Here’s how:
- Pick a date during the quarter for the hackathon. Mondays and Thursdays are best.
- Designate one person in charge of managing the hackathon. This person has a budget for food and prizes and is encouraged to do whatever they want to publicize it throughout the company (easy for 10 people, not so easy for 1000 people). The goal is to engage 100% of the company in the hackathon.
- Form teams. The teams should be between two and five people. The teams should be self-selecting. The Hackathon manager should come up with an easy way to manage the team list (hint – wiki). Each team should have a name and, in advance of the hackathon, should spent at least one meal together talking about what they are going to work on. People should be encouraged to work with folks they’ve never done anything with before, although this shouldn’t be a requirement.
- The hackathon starts at 12:01am and ends at 5pm. Whatever is done, is done. Demos and awards start at 5:30pm. Food is included. The hackathon manager is responsible for coordinating all of this, including the mechanism for judging.
In the best hackathons, there is a wiki that is very dynamic during the hackathon. This way all of the activity is captured and can be reviewed afterwards. The goal is not to include everything from the hackathon in future releases; rather it’s to stimulate a bunch of ideas, generate some prototypes, end up with some useful code, but get everyone in the company thinking about all the products.
Not all of the hackathon projects need to be about code. I’ve seen things like help systems, new web sites, better customer support processes, better management of social media activity, and lots of business process stuff created and implemented during hackathons.
After the hackathon is over, publicize what you’ve done to the world. FeedBurner used to do a great job of this with a simple blog post that highlighted every project and the teams that worked on them.
Oh – and don’t forget to invite your board members. If I can make it, I’ll always spend a day at a hackathon. It’s one of the best ways for me to really engage in and help out the companies I’m involved in. Plus it’s a blast.
Jon Hansen has started interviewing me periodically on his show on BlogTalkRadio as part of his Thought Leaders Series. Yesterday’s interview focused on my experience of investing in Rally Software and included short discussions on how Rally got started, how and why I decided to invest, and the role various factors play in my decision making process. Jon does a nice interview.
I’m very proud of my friends at Rally – they’ve created a company that is well on its way to being one of – if not the – most significant software company in Boulder.
Every day I get emails from folks either raising money or telling me about their new idea and asking for feedback. The conventional wisdom is that VCs rarely invest in things that reach them randomly (or “over the transom” in someone’s VC vocabulary – I can’t for the life of me figure out why that phrase hangs around.) However, this isn’t the case for us as 10% of the companies we’ve funded in the past two years were initially from “cold call” email inquiries (Brightleaf and Organic Motion). So – I’m very happy to get a steady stream of random emails – keep them coming!
I’ve noticed a trend toward more video presentations lately. I looked at one this morning and it reminded me of the old writers adage “show don’t tell.” This applies nicely to every pitch you ever do. Specifically, I don’t want to hear you describe what you are going to do, I want to see it. Or – if it’s not built yet, see an example of it. It’s always better to point me at a URL, even if it’s a very rough prototype, as I can usually get a much quicker view of what you are doing by simply playing around.
The video I watched today was a two minute segment of the entrepreneur looking into the camera and describing his business idea. The idea was fine although I could tell within 15 seconds that it wasn’t something we’d invest in given the market he was going after. I ended up watching the full two minute video to see if he ever shifted from “tell” mode to “show” mode. He never did – the two minutes ended and the whole video was the entrepreneur describing his idea.
In my book, this was a wasted opportunity. I could have read one paragraph that contained the same content. The entrepreneur didn’t take advantage of the medium (video) in any way. While he did a nice job on the monologue, he wasn’t trying out for a TV commercial, a TV show, or a movie. He missed the goal – get my attention and hopefully get me to engage to the next level.
For most of the great VCs I know, the way an entrepreneur makes a connection when there is no pre-existing relationship is to generate an immediate interest with the product. That’s what happened for us in the case of Brightleaf and Organic Motion. The entrepreneurs were highly credible, but more importantly we immediately got excited about their products, which caused us to be more interested in going deep and exploring an investment.
This is a repeating theme that for some reason isn’t said strongly enough. The great entrepreneurs (and sales people) “show”. Just think of how Steve Jobs does it. Show me!
Innovation happens all over the place. While I typically write about innovation in software and the Internet (which are the two areas I invest in), it’s useful to occasionally step back and tell a story about innovation in a different area that I’ve been exposed to.
Peter Frykman was 15 years old when Muhammad Yunus proposed alleviating poverty through the innovation of the social-objective-driven entrepreneur, one who “competes in the marketplace with all other competitors but is inspired by a set of social objectives.” In 2008 Frykman founded Driptech, his for-profit social venture located in Palo Alto, CA, with a mission to create extremely affordable, water efficient irrigation solutions for small-plot farmers in developing nations.
By devising drip irrigation technology that eliminates the complexity of emitters, Frykman and his team reduced the number of parts for a drip system by over 85%, cut the costs typical of commercial drip irrigation by over 60%, and simultaneously improved reliability and ease of maintenance.
This innovation makes Driptech the first company to design and manufacture drip irrigation specifically for the world’s poorest farmers, allowing them to grow crops year-round while conserving water, labor, and time. Not only can these farmers now finally produce enough vegetables to meet their own families’ nutritional needs, they become micro-entrepreneurs by growing additional crops to sell in local markets, substantially raising their incomes.
But Driptech’s contribution to poverty eradication doesn’t end there. Frykman’s decentralized manufacturing model will deploy production facilities directly to where the product will be sold, allowing for local customization of the systems, additional cost reductions, and added benefit to rural economies through the generation of jobs. The for-profit nature of the venture is not only economically sustainable, but scalable as well, promising future positive social impacts that will grow along with the company.
Having proven his product through a pilot study in India and initial sales in China, Frykman recently raised angel funding to ramp up his manufacturing capabilities. While this isn’t an area that we invest in, I was turned on to Peter via a good friend, Scott Petry, who was the founder of Postini (and is now at Google). Scott pulled in another long time friend – George Northup – the President of Memeo (Foundry Group is an investor). I find it easy to be supportive of entrepreneurs in social ventures that are supported by good friends.
So, congratulations to Peter Frykman and Driptech. Don’t miss his panel on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business 2010 Conference on Entrepreneurship coming up February 26th from 1:30-2:45pm.
Scott Kirsner had a fun article in Boston.com today titled The Red Line Tour of Innovation in Boston. Several of the stops were regularly hang outs of mine between 1983 and 1995 most notably #10 (Miracle of Science) and #11 (Toscanini’s) but also including #5 (MIT Media Lab), #6 (Muddy Charles Pub), #7 (MIT Lobby 7), and #8 (Central Square and the Necco Factory – back when they made Necco wafers.)
I lived at ADP at 351 Massachusetts Avenue for four years as an undergraduate at MIT. It was the first frat I went to when the freshman picnic ended (Mark Dodson grabbed me, shoved me in a white van, and said “you are coming with me.”) I stayed the first night and never left. Yes – it was a fraternity.
But we were also nerds. There was something in the water and a lot of companies were created. Scott got a few of them such as Colin Angle of iRobot, Jeet Singh and Joe Chung of ATG, and Frank van Mierlo of Bluefin Robotics, but I thought I’d add a few more. While the founders of Harmonix (the guys that brought us Rock Band and Guitar Hero) came from the Media Lab, one of them (Eran Egozy) also lived at ADP. As did my first business partner Dave Jilk, who is now CEO of Standing Cloud. And two of the founders of Oblong – John Underkoffler and Kevin Parent. Let’s not forget two well known VCs – Sameer Gandhi (Accel) and Mark Siegel (Menlo). Oh – and Carl Dietrich’s flying car from Terrafugia. We also lived next door (WILG – 355 Mass Ave) to some other impressive entrepreneurs including Megan Smith (Google and PlanetOut). There have been plenty of others through the years – these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. If you should be on the ADP entrepreneur list, please comment on this blog and add your name for posterity (and Google searches).
My first company (Feld Technologies) used 351 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 as my office address for the first few years of its life (I officially started the company as a sophomore, although my partner Dave Jilk joined me shortly after I got my undergraduate degree.) But Feld Technologies wasn’t the first company I started at 351 Massachusetts Avenue – that honor went to Martingale Software and my partners Dave Jilk, Sameer Gandhi, Andy Mina, and Jeff Pierick. We raised $10k, bought a Lisa and a Compaq luggable, earned about $7k, and eventually folded the company and sent the $7k back to our investors.
During the four years I lived there and the two years I had an office at 875 Main Street, I ate an enormous amount of ice cream at Toscanini’s. To this day, Cocoa Pudding with chocolate fudge syrup on top rates as the best ice cream choice I’ve ever had on planet Earth.
One fall, after Feld Technologies had moved to Boston, we hired a recent graduate from Brown named Jonathan Lutes. While interviewing him I asked what he had done over the summer. He mumbled something like “screwed around a lot and built a bar called Miracle of Science with my brother Eric.” Yup – same bar – this was 1990-ish – and it was at 321 Massachusetts Avenue.
Sometimes I actually miss the smell of Necco wafers in the morning. It smells like ADP.