Tag: entrepreneurship
I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time in 1975 when I was about 10 years old. I’ve read it several times over the last 35 years, but probably hadn’t read it in over a decade. My first business partner, Dave Jilk (now the Standing Cloud founder / CEO), gave it to me as a birthday gift last week.
I just read it again and it was as powerful, inspiring, and enlightening as I remembered it. I’m often asked what books I’d recommend to an entrepreneur (especially an aspiring entrepreneur). There are two: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Whenever we are in the upswing of an entrepreneurial cycle, like we are right now, I start seeing all kinds of weird stuff appear. Random people, who get notoriety for themselves, blow up. The media is aggressively negative presumably in the quest for getting readership. Entitlement behavior runs rampant. The quick buck artists appear. Money becomes a central topic of many conversations. Established companies and government suddenly wake up to the power of innovation and try to co-opt the energy. The word bubble becomes so popular that a bubble builds around using the word bubble.
The great entrepreneurs just keep building their companies. They focus relentlessly on their products, their customers, and their people. They create things that delight, take chances, make mistakes, and iterate as they, and their organizations, get better. They just keep at it and the very best ones shut out and ignore all the noise. And they learn, and learn, and learn.
Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Young Jonathan realizes he is different and then outcast, but he discovers himself. He then discovers others like him, including his great mentors. He learns, experiments, tries new things, makes mistakes, and learns. And learns. And then he becomes the mentor and teaches other young seagulls to discover themselves. Throughout, he does what he loves the most – he flies, and practices, and learns.
If you are an entrepreneur, take one hour out of your day this week and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And then spend another hour, alone, thinking about it. I assure you that it’ll be worth the time.
My friend Paul Kedrosky – who spends some of his time as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation – has a thoughtful short video (as part of the Kauffman Sketchbook series) on where entrepreneurs get their money. While it’s easy to get confused and think that VCs are the center of the financing universe, Paul reminds us that most entrepreneurial companies are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family.
It’s a creative three minute video with plenty of meat to it.
I love books. I love to read. I realize I’ve had a dry spell – I’ve hardly been reading books at all this fall. That hasn’t stopped them from piling up as my infinite pile of books to read remains – well – infinite.
I gobbled down some entrepreneurship books in the last week. There are a number of great ones coming that seem to have been kicked off by Eric Ries’ dynamite The Lean Startup.
The first one is Walter Isaacson’s incredible biography of Steve Jobs. While I knew many (but not all) of the stories, Isaacson is a total master at putting together a fast paced, thorough, yet extremely readable biography. Jobs is a fascinating, incredible, and extremely complex person – Isaacson captures his essence. While this book is about more than just entrepreneurship, Jobs has had such a huge impact on the computer industry that anyone interested in entrepreneurship must read this book. If you love biography, are intrigued by complex heroic figures, love your Apple products, or are anyone else, I put this book in your must read pile. Yes – I loved it.
The next is Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours. I recently joined the board of Startup Weekend, which I describe as a weekend-long simulation of entrepreneurship. I was at the very first Startup Weekend in Boulder in 2007 and was blown away by what Andrew Hyde – and the Boulder entrepreneurial community – did while creating Vosnap. Four years later Startup Weekend is an international phenomenon that I believe is one of the key activities required in any entrepreneurial community that aspires to grow and develop of a 20 year period. This book helps you understand what Startup Weekend is, how it works, and is filled with stories of people who have gone through it, what they learned, and why it matters.
The last two books are ones that won’t be out until the spring but I had a chance to read galleys of each. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn cofounder / chairman) and Ben Casnocha (who I’ve now been friends with for almost a decade – eek!) have written an important book titled The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. I believe this will be the contemporary version of What Color Is Your Parachute (which – unfortunately – now seems to be a whole series of books – which I put in the “very tired” category.) Reid and Ben take a fresh approach to how one thinks about “career” with a book I expect will be atop the NY Times Bestseller list for a long time.
Finally, Jason Baptiste (OnSwipe CEO – TechStars New York 2011 class) demonstrates his awesomeness with his new book The Ultralight Startup: Launching a Business Without Clout or Capital. This puppy is packed with very specific advice about launching a business that come from Jason’s experience with OnSwipe and Cloudomatic. Jason is a great writer – the book is direct, clear, actionable, and fast paced – just like Jason.
Finally, I’d be remiss in my job as a book salesman for Wiley (our publisher) if didn’t mention the book I wrote with David Cohen last year titled Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup as well as the book I recently wrote with Jason Mendelson titled Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Hopefully you have them and are giving them to every entrepreneur and aspiring entrepreneur you know.
It’s Black Friday. Buy some books!
Today’s “founder hint of the day” is to create an email address called founders@yourcompanyname.com and have it automatically forward to all the founders of your company.
I interact with a ton of companies every day. For the ones we have a direct investment in via Foundry Group, I know each of the founder’s names (although with 40 companies, at age 45 – almost 46, there are moments where I have to sit quietly and think hard to remember them.) For the TechStars companies, especially early in each cycle, I have trouble remembering everyone’s names until I’ve met them. And for many other companies I have an indirect investment in (via a VC fund I’m an investor in) or that I’m simply interacting with, I often can’t remember all of the founders names.
Ok – that was my own little justification. But your justification is that as a young company, you want anyone interested in you to be able to reach you. While info@yourcompanyname.com is theoretically useful, in my experience very few people actually use it because they have no idea where it actually goes. On the other hand, founders@yourcompanyname.com goes to the founders. Bingo.
We’ve been using this at TechStars for a number of years and it’s awesome. I’ve set up my own email groups for many other companies, but this morning while I was doing it for another one I realized that they should just do it. Sure – there’s a point at which the company is big enough where you probably don’t want to have this list go to all the founders, or there are founders that leave, or something else comes up, but when you are just getting started, be obsessed with all the communication coming your way and make it easy to get it.
founders@yourcompanyname.com rules.
I heard a fascinating one-liner the other day that I had knee jerk negative reaction to but when I thought about it more thought was deeply insightful, especially in the context of big established companies vs. new entrepreneurial companies.
A CEO of a very large, successful company said “execution is an order of magnitude easier than opportunity.” In the context of young startups, I often feel exactly the opposite. Opportunity is everywhere, but execution in a bitch.
But then I thought about this a little. For a big company that dominates a market, it’s totally focused on execution. The company is built for execution and, assuming it is built well, just cranks things out. What it cranks out might be inspiring, or it might not be, but it’ll keep cranking things out.
For these companies, finding the new opportunity is really difficult. The company is tuned to defend its turf, not go find new turf. Execution is all about defending market position, maximizing profit, expanding market share in existing markets, and allocating resources. In a few extraordinary cases, this activity is massively inspired, usually around companies that love their products (Apple) or their customers (Virgin). So – for most of these companies, “execution” is easy relative to finding the new opportunities. And many of these large companies don’t focus on finding the next opportunity, or expanding their existing opportunity, until their business hits major headwinds, is in decline, or is massively disrupted. I give you Borders, B&N, and Blockbuster as examples here – awesome at execution until what they did became irrelevant and then it was too late for them to do anything about it (other than maybe B&N, who might pull off their transition.)
In contrast, startups are totally focused on the new opportunity. Assuming they find it, and it’s a big one, execution becomes the main challenge in front of them. Their activity is all about scaling up the organization, hiring people like crazy, building a culture of shipping great product consistently, reacting effectively to early customer feedback, and continuing to evolve their products to meet the new massive opportunity they are going after.
From the eyes of a big company CEO, finding the opportunity is hard. From the eyes of a startup CEO, the opportunity is everything – execution is hard.
My insight is simple: “context matters immensely.” As young companies grow rapidly, they have to focus on becoming execution machines and recognize that at some point they’ll start struggling with identifying the next evolution of their opportunity space. Assuming the opportunity they are going after is massive, this won’t matter for a while. But the execution dynamics will. And when you find yourself executing well, dominating your market segment, and growing quickly, you’ve got to make sure you keep focusing on expanding the opportunity, especially since that’s going to get harder as you get bigger.
One of the jokes in my little universe is that “every time I hear the word ‘marketing’ I throw up a little in my mouth.” I’ve been joking about this long enough that it’s become conventional wisdom that I hate marketing. Yet, if you look at many of our successful investments, they are extraordinarily good at marketing and some people suggest we (Foundry Group, me) are also good at marketing.
Thirty minutes ago, Chris Moody – a long time friend and COO of Gnip – sent me an extremely thoughtful email titled “Food For Thought”. I read it, thought it was 100% correct, and asked if I could reblog it verbatim both as (a) an explanation of how I actually should / do think about marketing and (b) an example of how I learn through direct feedback.
Chris – thanks for taking the time to write this. You nailed it. The way I articulate how I think about marketing will be permanently different going forward.
At this point I’ve probably heard/read most of your basic philosophical points on the various aspects of building a successful business. I agree with most of them of course. However, there is one area where I’ve consistently felt that you have under represented your true feelings and it feels like your general input on the topic has been mostly nonconstructive. I’d like to try to help change that for the good of the broader entrepreneur community (and to make you look even smarter).
The topic is marketing. I have no doubt missed some brillant thoughts you’ve offered to the community and I’m sure you’ve provided countless pieces of good advice to individual entrepreneurs in one-on-one situations. But, the sound bite version I’ve heard from you on a few occasions goes something like this “I hate traditional marketing. Focus on building a great product or all the marketing in the world won’t matter.” When I think about the first time entrepreneur, this response feels particularly unhelpful. And, the second part of the quote could be applied to almost all aspects of a startup business including sales, finance, etc. If you don’t have a great product, none of the other shit matters.
And yet, when I see how Foundry Group approaches marketing and when I look across your portfolio companies, I see a very common thread around how you guys approach marketing. I would characterize the theme as “marketing through thought leadership.” In more basic terms it is expressing marketing ideas via “this is why we are doing what we are doing and why it is important” instead of “hey, look at me.” Have a new product feature? Sure blog about the feature, but spend way more time on why the feature is important to your overall purpose and beliefs.
To illustrate the point, I’ve recently talked to/interviewed a few current/former people from Rally and ReturnPath. When I ask them “what is the most significant thing you did from a marketing perspective to accelerate the business” the answer across the board has been “we focused on being a thought leader in our space.” As you well know that is the same approach we are taking at Gnip and I see it in many of your other portfolio companies too. Not sure it is always a conscience effort by the companies, but it seems to be pretty consistent across the portfolio..
When I think about FG itself I see tons of “marketing activity” but most of it could also be just be labeled: thought leadership. You sponsor conferences around topics that you care about. Your blog post are rich with “here’s why did it and why it matters” instead of “here’s what we did”. In fact, your whole theme based approach is really about thought leadership focused in a few areas. Foundry Group clearly believes that startups have the power to change the world. You guys spend countless time and effort expressing your opinions on this topic. You write books to support your beliefs. If you only talked about what you do with your startups “we invested in x, we sold y”, the conversation would be short and have a limited audience. Instead, you talk about what you believe and why startups matter. As a result, you have built a real following around people that care about the topic.
If I were going to create the Brad Feld sound bite for Marketing it would go something like this “Don’t do marketing. Focus on becoming a thought leader in your space. Talk everyday with your customers, perspective customers, partners, and the world about why you do what you do and why you think it is important. The reality is you can only talk about what you do one or two times before people think ‘got it’ and stop listening. But, if you talk about what you believe and point to countless examples that exemplify your beliefs , you can build real engagement with people who care/believe the same things.”
Not trying to put words in your mouth. Just saying that the actions that I see don’t match the words that I hear and I think there is easy opportunity to change that for the better.
Amy and I spent the last week in Tuscany with some friends, including Howard Lindzon. Howard is the CEO of StockTwits, a company we’ve been an investor in for a few years. I was an investor in Howard’s previous company WallStrip, met Howard through an introduction from our mutual friend Fred Wilson (it’s a pretty funny story, as are many things with Howard), and have worked closely together on a bunch of things including TechStars where Howard has been a great mentor and investor since the beginning.
We had an incredibly wonderful week last week and Amy has a great post up on her blog titled Our Revels. If you know Howard, you know he’s an always on, mostly hilarious, sometimes crazy (like a fox), super high energy except when on ambien guy. After four days of Tuscany, Howard was completely chilled out and more relaxed than I’ve ever seen him.
But don’t let this totally chilled out Howard fool you. He was on his computer a lot. Whenever I looked over at him, he was on the Stocktwits web site communicating with the stock community he’s helped create and loves. As the market was gyrating around he tweeted up a storm, put up a bunch of content on StockTwits, did some trades in his hedge fund, and wrote a few insightful (and funny) blog posts about the market including his discovery that the Tuscany VIX is always less than 10.
Howard loves Stocktwits. He loves his business. He loves stocks. He loves the community of people that care about stocks. And he’s creating a company – a really interesting and important one – around his passion. It’s wonderful, infectious, fascinating, exciting, and awesome. And yes, today is adjective day.
While Foundry Group generally avoids investing in vertical markets, we make an exception for our Distribution theme. One of the key attributes of this theme is that the company must be led by an entrepreneur who is completely obsessed with a vertical market. They must be thinking – every single waking moment – about how they are going to change the way the world interacts with the vertical market they are attacking.
Howard defines this type of entrepreneur. It was incredibly inspiring to be around. We had a blast doing non-Stocktwits / non-stock stuff, but when he was working he knew exactly what he was going to work on.
We have either recently closed (but not announced) or are about to close several other investments with entrepreneurs who have similar characteristics. None of them are in our Distribution theme, which is pretty cool, as the entrepreneurs are completely obsessed with the problem their business is addressing.
When an entrepreneur is trying to decide between a couple of different ideas, I often ask the question “which one are you in love with?” If there’s a quick response, then the answer is easy. If the answer is none of them, that’s the answer to which one he should pursue.
Howard reminded me of this again last week. Thanks Howard.
Public Service Announcement For Entrepreneurs: Ignore the Dow
Today is Finance Friday and post #2 has been drafted by the Finance Friday team from University of Chicago Booth and is waiting for my edits. I’m procrastinating so I thought I’d write one of my periodic public service announcement for entrepreneurs. This one is more specific than “ignore the macro economy” – instead, it’s “ignore the Dow and the stock market and get back to work on your business.”
Tom Evslin had a post up this morning titled Don’t Watch The Dow! that caused me to say “right on.” In 1999, 2000, and 2001 I had a my.yahoo.com page up with a bunch of stocks, including a number of companies I was an investor in, as my home page. I’d hit refresh 5,321 times a day, generating plenty of CPM-based revenue for Yahoo. I’ve written about the emotional ups and downs in the past so I won’t repeat myself here other than to say this activity had zero impact on the stock market (I couldn’t do anything about it), it didn’t change my short term decision making (I’m not a trader), and all it resulted in was sucking a huge amount of emotional energy out of me.
When the market went down, I felt sad. When it went up I got the emotional equivalent of a sugar high. When it went back down again, I was bummed. Up – smile. Down – depressed. Up – happy. Down – cranky. And this was all before lunch time. Maybe it was too much coffee or not enough sleep, but it got even worse when the market shifted from 1/8s too 0.01s.
As an entrepreneur, this was all noise. As a long term VC investor, it was also all noise. Sure – the broad cycles had impact, although lots of people disagree on what they actually mean (e.g. do VCs actually benefit long term from down cycles, are the best companies started in recessions when everything is cheaper and more available).
Over time, I’ve learned that none of the short term moves in the stock market matter at all in my life. It’s occasionally entertaining to turn on CNBC and see my friend Paul Kedrosky in the octobox telling all the other people that they don’t actually understand macro-economics, but it’s no different than watching McEnroe when he’s announcing a Nadal – Federer match. It’s just sport.
So – for all the entrepreneurs in my world, take Tom’s great advice. Don’t Watch The Dow! And if you think Scott Kirsner is being sarcastic in his post titled How the players in the innovation economy rationalize away stock market dives, take a deep breath and consider whether the use of the word rationalize is correct or not.
Now, get back to work on something you can have an impact on!
I received an email from an entrepreneur today asking me about something that made my stomach turn. It’s a first time entrepreneur who is raising a modest (< $750k) seed round). There are two founders and they’ve been talking to a VC they met several months ago. Recently, the VC told them he was leaving his firm and wanted to help them out. This was obviously appealing until he dropped the bomb that prompted their question to me.
This soon to be ex-VC said something to the effect of “I can easily raise you money with a couple of phone calls, but I want to be a co-founder of the company and have an equal share of the business.”
In my email exchange with the entrepreneur, I asked two questions. The first was “is he going to be full time with the company” and the other was “do you want him as a third full time partner.” The answer was no and no. More specifically, the VC was positioning himself as “the founder that would help raise the money.”
I dug a little deeper to find out who the person was in case it was just a random dude looking for gig flow. David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars, has written extensively about this in our book Do More Faster – for example, see the chapter Beware of Angel Investors Who Aren’t. I was shocked when I saw the name of the person and the firm he has been with (and is leaving) – it’s someone who has been in the VC business for a while and should know better.
I find this kind of behavior disgusting. If the person was offering to put in $25k – $100k in the round and then asking for an additional 1% or 2% as an “active advisor” (beyond whatever the investment bought) to help out with the company, I’d still be skeptical of the equity ask at this stage and encourage the founders to (a) vest it over time and (b) make sure there was a tangible commitment associated with it that was different from other investors. Instead, given the facts I was given, my feedback was to run far away, fast.
Entrepreneurs – beware. This is the kind of behavior that gives investors a bad name. Unfortunately, my impression of this particular person is that he’s not a constructive early stage investor but rather someone who is trying to prey on naive entrepreneurs. Whenever the markets heat up, this kind of thing starts happening. Just be careful out there.