Now that Do More Faster is out and I appreciate how hard it is to write and publish a book, I read every book through a different (more appreciative) lens. This morning, I spent three hours on the coach and plowed through Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry. It was excellent.
Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, tells the story of Salesforce.com in 111 short stories. He mixes each story with clear advice, from his perspective, about creating, building, and scaling a business. I loved the format that Benioff used to organize these stories into clear themes, while still marching linearly through the story of Salesforce.com.
This is a book aimed at entrepreneurial CEO’s but scales nicely to any founder of a company. It also reminds us of the actual evolution of Cloud Computing, which several very large technology companies continue to try to claim credit for. When reading this book, you realize how deep and clear Benioff’s vision was from the beginning.
It was well worth the time to read and gave me some structural ideas for some writing that I’m working on.
I think the best way for entrepreneurs – especially first time or aspiring ones – to learn is to hear stories from other entrepreneurs. That was one of the motivations for David Cohen and I to write Do More Faster.
There are two such stories in Westword Denver this week. Both are companies I’ve been involved in that have gone through the TechStars program in Boulder. And both are rich in content.
The first one is about Next Big Sound and is titled Fueled by venture-capital funding and a love for unknown bands, can Boulder’s Next Big Sound predict the next rock star? My partner Jason Mendelson was Next Big Sound’s mentor during the TechStars Boulder 2009 program and led the investment in Next Big Sound shortly after the program ended. In addition to the story of the origins of Next Big Sound, there is a great discussion of TechStars and how it contributes to the Boulder entrepreneurial community. While the article is unrelated to Do More Faster, the CEO of Next Big Sound (Alex White) has several chapters in the book that address similar topics to those in the article.
The second one is about EventVue and is titled TechStars post-mortem: Could Boulder startup Next Big Sound suffer same fate as EventVue? EventVue went through the TechStars Boulder 2007 program (the inaugural year), raised an angel round (which I participated in) but never really got lift off. The founders Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser shut the company down in February and wrote a brilliant post-mortem which was republished in this post. Rob also contributed a chapter to Do More Faster which included this post-mortem by him and Josh along with a lot of additional commentary on what they learned.
When I ponder where / when I learn the most about entrepreneurship, it is when real entrepreneurs tell their very specific stories. Success stories are nice, but failure stories, and all of the ups and downs that occur along the way, are the real winners. Yesterday at Liberty NetLeaders the attendees had a treat as Mark Pincus spent an hour talking about his entrepreneurial experiences and the last night at the Boulder Esprit Awards (where David Cohen and I got an award for co-founding TechStars) there was more storytelling. And on Monday I’m going to interview Greg Maffei and Michael Zeisser of Liberty Media for Entrepreneurs Unplugged.
I never get tired of talking to entrepreneurs. I learn something new every time, and every story makes me a better investor.
During the Tahoe Tech Talk three hour Q&A segment with the panelists, someone in the audience asked about how to create a stronger entrepreneurial community in their city so that it could be “more like Silicon Valley.” After a little banter, Chris Sacca and Dave Morin called me up onto stage to do a short riff on what we’ve done in Boulder and what makes it special. Damon Clinkscales recorded it on his iPhone – the three minute video is embedded below.
The key points are:
There’s a lot of stuff about this in our new book Do More Faster in case you want to go deeper on this topic.
In April I wrote a post about Rally acquiring AgileZen. I’ve been an investor in Rally from the very early days and am incredibly proud of what the team there has created. As I’ve written in the past, I encourage companies I’m an investor in to continually explore small acquisitions when entrepreneurs have created something that is on their roadmap. AgileZen was one such company and the acquisition has been a successful one for everyone.
Recently AgileZen has topped the leaderboard for TwtPick.in’s survey on tools and services for a lean startup. Ryan Martens, Rally’s founder, thought it would be a great opportunity to do some Q&A with Niki and Nate Kohari, the founders of AgileZen. As I’m spending a lot of time these days talking with first time and young entrepreneurs around the release of my book Do More Faster, I thought this would be a fun interview to add to the mix. And, if you are a software developer using Lean or Agile methodologies, take a look at Rally and AgileZen.
1. Why did you start AgileZen? We built AgileZen because we felt like there were a lot of tools on the market that served large organizations, but many of them weren’t designed to support the needs of small teams and startups. As a software developer, Nate had experience using other project management tools, but none of them seemed to work well for the small teams that he worked on. The original idea behind AgileZen started with feeling that pain. When we learned about kanban and understood how others were applying it to project management, we recognized that it would be a great way for small teams to visualize their work. After showing an early version of AgileZen to a few people, we got some very strong positive reactions, so we felt like we were on to something. We originally built AgileZen with software teams in mind, but the more we talked with people the more we realized that it could be used for any project-based work. We felt confident that there was a large enough market for the product, so we took the plunge and decided to launch AgileZen as a startup.
2. What is your mantra and secret to success? We think our secret to success is an obsessive focus on simplicity and usability, so we make every feature fight very hard to be included in the software. We also think that if the feature can’t be explained in a few minutes, it doesn’t belong in AgileZen. In software it’s often very difficult to say no to unnecessary features or complexity, but knowing when not to do something can be the difference between success and failure.
3. What is your goal with this solution? When we started working on AgileZen, our goal was to build a product that helped people work together to become more productive and that remains our focus today. We feel we’re successful as long as AgileZen makes our users more efficient, regardless of what industry they work in. To this end, we’re focusing on improving the product to make it as intuitive as possible. We’ve got some great ideas brewing and we’re excited to start sharing them.
4. Why did you join up with Rally? After meeting with the Rally team in February, we found that their ideas about company culture and vision for AgileZen matched up surprisingly well with our own, and it felt like working together was the right decision for the product and our customers. With Rally’s additional resources and guidance, we can set our sights higher and achieve our goals faster, so it’s a win for everyone.
5. What would you tell other start-ups about being acquired? AgileZen was acquired about nine months after our public launch. We never thought much about acquisition until Rally approached us about a potential partnership. Acquisition isn’t really something to chase from the beginning because it can distract you from what really matters, which is building something great that your customers will pay for. The idea of a big exit might be really appealing, but it’s more important to consider how well the organization’s values fit with your own. If you don’t agree on where the product is going then an acquisition isn’t going to benefit anyone—least of all your customers. Also, in a lot of cases, you’ll end up working with the acquiring company so you need to make sure you’re on the same page from the beginning.
After flying home on an extremely early flight from Tahoe, having lunch with Amy, and then taking a nap, I’ve been pondering why I thought the Tahoe Tech Talk Conference was so powerful. As you may know, I’m not generally a conference goer, usually focus on tech-oriented conferences like the ones we’ve helped create (Defrag, Glue, and Blur), and rarely can sit still for an entire day. Yesterday was an exception – other than a few short phone calls I managed to stay in the conference room at #TTT for the entire day.
I’ve concluded that it was a combination of the format, motivation of the speakers, and desire of the audience which resulted an a heart felt and intense discussion. If you know Gary Vaynerchuk you understand that “heart felt” and “intense” are his way, but it takes the all the participants to play into this. Let me explain.
The format was obviously going to be a winner, as it was one day of eight speakers giving 30 minutes talks. There was a one hour break for lunch and a three hour session at the end (from 3pm – 6pm) where all eight speakers got up on stage and answered questions. Gary moderated the day; every speaker was dynamite: Chris Sacca, Ben Kaufman, Dave Morin, Travis Kalanick, Kevin Rose, Dave McClure, Alexia Tsotsis, and Gary.
The speakers each focused on one thing and built their 30 minute talk around it. Their motivations were clear – they were trying to get a specific message across to the audience full of entrepreneurs. The messages varied, but they were all clear and crisp, nicely supported by well crafted presentations (versus tedious and dull powerpoints), and while they included reference to what each speaker was doing today, they were not commercials. During the three hour Q&A, the speakers answered anything that came their way. They didn’t all agree with each other but knew each other so there was plenty of banter – some of it more aggressive than others (based on their personalities) – and plenty of audibles were called. Gary did a good job of letting the tension build but then moving on when it became non-productive. This wasn’t just eight smart charismatic people pontificating – they dragged a few people from the audience up to address specific things that came up.
Finally, you had a motivated and engaged audience. At the dinner the night before, I arrived late to a room buzzing with discussion. I grabbed my meal from the Harrah’s World Famous Mashed Potato Bar (yeah – dinner kind of sucked for me) and hung out for a few hours. I immediately met a bunch of new people, all interesting, and each focused on connecting rather than pitching me something. I was worn out from the week but oddly energized by the evening (maybe it was the mashed potatoes.) This continued throughout the following day – the attendees weren’t trying to get attention for themselves; rather they were clearly interested in (a) learning and (b) connecting.
When I reflect on the entire experience, it definitely was both heart felt and intense. This was a result of the combination of the three things above – the format, speakers, and audience. Gary curated it brilliantly and the speakers lived up to their billing. But most importantly the audience engaged.
I think I’ll avoid all the “are super angels colluding“, “no they aren’t“, “go fuck yourself and stop talking horseshit“, and “guys, quit being narcissistic and do something productive” blog chatter today and focus on something that came up yesterday.
I was on a call when someone asked a straightforward question that had a binary answer (yes or no). The person responded with a five minute explanation with a lot of details, all factually correct and contextually relevant, but at the end still didn’t answer the question.
My partner in my first company (Dave Jilk – now the CEO of Standing Cloud) used to have an endearing way of dealing with this. Here’s how it would play out.
Dave: “Is the release going to be on time?”
Software Engineer Dave was Talking To: “Blah blah blah, five minute explanation of all the things that he was struggling with, why everything was difficult, what the risks were on timing, blah blah blah, why the client was giving mixed signals and changing things, and can’t I have a faster computer please?”
Dave: “That was a yes or no question.”
We spend a lot of time getting derailed in our work. I’m as guilty of it as anyone as I often answer a question with a story from my experience. Sometimes that’s a helpful thing to do; other times I should just answer “yes” or “no.”
The corollary to this is to ask why. I’m a huge fan of the 5 Whys approach and went through it with a long time friend and CEO of a company I have an angel investment in at dinner last night. He’s been struggling with some stuff and I explained how (and why) he should be using 5 Whys to try to get to the root cause of the issue, rather than staying on the surface and not actually learning anything. In his case he was experiencing the opposite of the yes/no problem – he was trying to ask an open ended question and getting a yes/no answer. For example:
CEO Friend: “Are the trials converting into customers?”
CTO: “No”
The appropriate response from my CEO Friend in this case would have been “Why?” And I’d predict he’d need to ask “why?” several (four?) more times before he got enough information to actually know what was going on.
I encourage all CEO’s in the world to use these two approaches judiciously. Don’t ask me why – just do it.
Last week I co-hosted a lunch for Jared Polis with Kyle Lefkoff at Boulder Ventures which Jud Valeski covered nicely in his post titled Luncheon with Jared Polis. Jared was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder (thanks to an introduction from my long time friend Dave Jilk) and we’ve been great friends and partners on a number of fronts ever since.
The attendees at lunch were a bunch of Boulder entrepreneurs in three areas – software / Internet, biotech, and natural foods. While I spend almost all of my time focused on software / Internet, it’s always interesting to hang out with some of the Boulder entrepreneurs in other segments to hear what they are thinking and working on.
During lunch, I reflected some on the number of times I’ve heard in the past year from people outside of Boulder about how Boulder has become a nationally known entrepreneurial center. The comments come from all over and are often followed by the question “how can we do what you guys have accomplished in Boulder in our city?”
While I was listening to everyone and being proud of the little 100,000 person town I call home, I thought of a new phrase that I hadn’t used before: “entrepreneurial density.” I wondered out loud if Boulder was the “highest per capita collection of entrepreneurs in the US.” I have no idea if this is true but from my travels around the US it feels like something that might be true.
On Saturday morning as I was filling my car up with gas, I ran into someone I know that works at Rally Software. This kind of thing happens all the time – I’m constantly running into, sitting next to, or just saying hi as I wander down the street to people that work at startups in Boulder.
Entrepreneurial density isn’t just the “number of entrepreneurs per capita”, but it’s the “number of people that work at entrepreneurial companies per capita.” It gets even bigger when you include students and calculate the “(number of people that work at entrepreneurial companies + the number of students) per capita.
As ED = ((entrepreneurial_emps + students) / adults) approaches 1, you get complete entrepreneurial saturation. I’m going to guess that Boulder’s Entrepreneurial Density using this equation is somewhere between 0.50 and 0.75, but this is just a guess. I’m curious if anyone out there has a real way to calculate this.
On Wednesday I did two interviews with Mark Suster – one for This Week and Venture Capital and then one before the LaunchPad LA event. TechZulu recorded and broadcasted the second one. The first three minutes are kind of funny as we didn’t know they were recording so we were horsing around talking about funny drinks and the legalization of a particular type of medicine.
The actual investor that happens over the next 45 minutes is about TechStars, entrepreneurial communities, and some of the stuff I invest in. Mark does a good interview – he can have me back anytime.
A week ago I had just gotten home after a month in Homer, Alaska. I was totally chilled out – I worked plenty in July but had very little physical human interaction with anyone other than Amy. I’m sitting here in my Boulder condo today thinking about the entrepreneurial tour de force that was the last six days. I think I interacted with more different people each day than I did cumulatively over the previous 30 days in Homer.
The Boulder New Tech Meetup double header (Tuesday and Wednesday) started things off. The second Boulder Open Angel Forum delivered. Then we had TechStars Demo Day which was amazing, followed by an Open House at Jive Software (they acquired TechStars Boulder 2007 company Filtrbox last year and are growing like crazy), a Return Path board dinner at Black Cat, and the the TechStars Afterparty at the Draft House. Friday saw a Return Path board meeting and lunch with the folks at Return Path followed by TEDxBoulder on Saturday. Oh, and in between I had piles of “regular work.”
There were numerous blog posts and tweets from the week, but my favorite post about an event from the week is up on the True Ventures web site titled On The Road With TechStars Boulder. In addition to all the locals, there were a huge number of folks from out of town who participated in the various events and I smiled a big smile when I read the post.
Last night during the TEDxBoulder intermission break, I had a few quiet moments to myself as I wandered around the grounds of the Boulder Chautauqua. I was filled with a deep satisfaction about the amazingness of the people of Boulder. While there are lots of other great places in the world, I am most at home here. And it’s good to be back home.