Tag: techstars
If you’ve ever shipped anything, you understand the power of a deadline. It’s incredibly helpful to me as an investor to also be a maker, as I get to experience the same pressure many of the people I’m investing in feel, as I try to weave the creation – in my case of books – into a very busy life. Blending the creative / maker experience with a very full manager experience is fascinating, hard, and very enlightening.
The latest maker experience I’m having is the book my wife Amy and I are writing called Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. The deadline for the draft that “goes into production” with our publisher (Wiley) is due on 10/22. “Going into production” means the writing is done – the next thing we get back is the copyedited version, which we can tweak, but not make major changes to. Basically, once we submit on 10/22 other than cleaning stuff up, the ship has sailed.
While the Startup Life deadline looms, it’s not at the top of my work priority stack. My top work priority is my activity as a partner at Foundry Group. This is unambiguous to me and everyone around me – I spend the vast majority of my time on this and any time an entrepreneur I’m working with needs me they get a top level interrupt on anything I’m doing. Next in line is my work with TechStars. Next is the book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your Community which shipped at the end of September. Then Startup Life. That’s it – I’ve got no capacity for anything else right now.
When I got back from “summer” – which was my return to New York from my bike trip to Slovenia – Amy and I had 15,000 words written for Startup Life. The book was put together pretty well – we knew what we wanted to write, but we had a ton of writing to do. We were together in New York for two weeks so we got a lot of writing done in between all the other stuff we did. I’ve been traveling around the country since and our weekends have been dedicated to writing while Amy writes all week as I run around and do my thing.
Last night after getting to the hotel room in San Francisco at 10pm, I spent three hours making a bunch of minor edits to the current version (we are still using SkyDrive and it has been awesome.) My assistant Kelly printed a copy out on Monday morning for me to drag around. It’s the first time I’ve read the book from beginning to end on paper and it validated that we are almost there. Last night when I went to bed we had 65,656 words. We’ve still got a few things to add in, but we are close.
The deadline dynamic is fascinating. Originally we had a “publisher draft deadline” of today (10/12/22). This is the version we submit to our senior editor and his team. They do a quick review with broad suggestions. This was due back to us on 10/17/22. We then have a “production draft deadline” of 10/22/22 (five days in this case.) While all of that feels very tight, given that this is my fourth book with Wiley, they are comfortable with my approach and I know what to expect back from them. But five days still isn’t very much.
So Amy and I beat our deadline and shipped the publisher draft early Monday morning on 10/8/12. This bought us an extra weekend of work since we’ll get the feedback today rather than on next Wednesday, 10/17/22. We now have ten days until our final deadline on 10/22/12, instead of only five.
Several people have suggested we write a book titled “Startup Author: Surviving and Thriving Writing a Book With Your Significant Other.” It’s been an awesome experience to do a collaborative project like this with Amy. I love her brain and how it works. It’s very different than mine and we each know and understand that. We complement, and compliment, each other a huge amount, and I feel this is reflected in the book, which makes me happy.
The deadline is such a powerful forcing function. I’m experiencing it again first hand and it gives me even more respect for the entrepreneurs I work with everyday. After I finished up last night, I gave myself a pre-sleep treat and watched Episode 3 of the founders. As I was watching it, I thought of the title for this post. So – count this riff inspired by all of the founders at TechStars – y’all are the really awesome ones who inspire me!
Are you watching The Founders Season 3 on TechStars.TV? If not, why not? Episode 2 (and Go!) is below – it echoes the points made yesterday in my post If You Can’t Explain What You Do In A Paragraph, You’ve Got A Problem.
There’s a cameo from my dad (Stan Feld) at 2:05. See – even dad’s care about TechStars. In addition to seeing Stan, you get to learn what a 10:10 meeting is. And you get to see the teams struggle with their shitty elevator pitches at the very beginning of the program.
Early this morning I got a note from Allen Morgan pointing to a blog he wrote titled Entrepreneurs: For Venture Capital Pitches, Say What Your Startup “Does” not What It “Is”. It nicely reinforces the point that active voice wins over passive voice. As Allen says at the end, “Be active, not passive. Passive puts audiences to sleep; not good in a pitch where you’re asking for money.”
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If You Can’t Explain What You Do In A Paragraph, You’ve Got A Problem
Here’s an email exchange that I had in the past 24 hours with an entrepreneur. Remember, I try to answer all of my emails and be responsive to any inquiry – this was a random one (which I get between 25 and 100 a day).
Entrepreneur: I just wanted to touch base with you and see if you are taking on new startups right now.
Me: Can you send me a paragraph and I’ll tell you if it’s something we’d be interested in. Everyone else to bcc:
Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph.
I responded politely that I didn’t think this was something I’d be interested in exploring. I did skim his longer description and took a look at the website (which was a landing page with some a vague description of the business.) I could determine from this that it’s not something we’d be interested in (it’s outside of our themes) but this entrepreneur also missed his chance to engage me more deeply since he couldn’t articulate what he was doing.
I was in Oklahoma City earlier this week with the entrepreneurs at the Blueprint for Business accelerator (it’s a member of the Global Accelerator Network). There were five companies there and in addition to the various talks I did around Startup Communities I stayed at BP4B until about 10pm doing 15 minute meetings with each of the teams. I did my typical 15 minute “top of mind drill” where I start by saying “tell me about yourself as quickly as you can and then let’s spend most of the time talking about whatever is on the top of your mind.” Several of the teams explained themselves in a minute or less and then had 14 minutes to ask me questions; several of the teams took five to ten minutes to explain themselves leaving less time for questions.
I strongly believe that a founder should be able to explain what they do in one paragraph. I’m not a believer in the “one sentence mashup approach” (e.g. we are like pinterest + groupon + facebook for dogs). Rather, I like three sentences: (1) what we do, (2) who we do it to, and (3) why you should care. Sometimes this can be two sentences; sometimes four, but never more than a paragraph.
Yesterday, I spent 30 minutes with one of the teams in TechStars Seattle that I’m a lead mentor for. They are a month away from Demo Day and wanted to practice the very rough version of the demo day presentation. I gave them a bunch of feedback – some specific, some general, including:
- Show don’t tell
- I hate doing the overview / bios at the beginning
- You wasted the first 60 seconds
- Weak explanation of what you are actually doing and why I care
- Still don’t really know what you do
If you are an entrepreneur, you have less than 60 seconds to get an investors attention. Don’t waste it.
The Companies in the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure Program
I’ve written before about the Kinect Accelerator and Microsoft Accelerator. On Monday, the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure companies were announced. The program begins this week and ends in mid-January. Since the program is powered by TechStars, it’ll follow the standard TechStars timeline, finishing up with a demo day at the end of the program.
This is a global class. The companies included in this group hail from from Australia, Germany, San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles to join the program in Seattle. I’m psyched to see what these companies build for and on top of Microsoft Azure.
Meet the ten Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure companies that made the cut:
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Follow the program on Twitter: @bizspark and @
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When I started Retrofit last fall, I weighed 216. I’ve struggled for a decade to get below 210 – it would happen sometimes but I’d quickly end back up in the 210 – 220 range. I ran marathons so this was frustrating – I am a pescatarian and eat healthy, just too much.
I started Retrofit and within three months was down to 200. I’ve been between 195 and 200 for the past six months and have a clear understanding of how to be at 195 by simply cutting out a few things for a few weeks. My running has improved by a minute a mile, I’ve dropped from a 38 waist to a 36 waist (and could probably pull off a 34), and feel so much better.
If your have been struggling to lose weight for a long time, give Retrofit a try. It’s not a diet, it’s a complete and total reprogramming of the way you think about food. The founder Jeff Hyman is a long time friend (I was a seed investor in his first company in 1996) and is incredibly passionate about Retrofit and what he and his team is doing. I’m not an investor (it’s outside our themes), but I’m a huge supporter of Jeff and Retrofit – it’s been amazing for me as a customer.
Following is a short video that will start appearing on national TV in the next month. I’m honored to be part of it with David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars, who has lost over 30 pounds (and looks awesome) since starting Retrofit at about the same time as me.
While I feel like the guy on late night TV some times, this experience has been transformational. Seriously, take a look. I can’t rave enough about what Retrofit has done for me.
This is the second year that TechStars is running a thematic accelerator in Texas focused just on cloud computing. At Foundry Group, we believe in thematic investing both as a way to organize and filter the massive number of opportunities to look at, but also as a way to build a set of muscles around a sphere of knowledge. It’s been fun to experiment with this approach at TechStars.
While we recognize the tidal wave trend of all technology becoming ‘cloudy’, we are approaching TechStars Cloud with specific focus. The companies in TechStars Cloud are the ones enabling the trend of cloud computing and providing the underlying technology, versus just the ones that are being carried along with it.
An example of just such a company is Cloudability, who is a graduate of last years TechStars Cloud program, who we subsequently funded this past summer. They are taking the pain out of managing and monitoring the dozens and often hundreds of individual cloud provider accounts that companies end up with. It’s a big need and the early success of Cloudability validates this.
Cloud computing is still an amazingly nascent field with opportunities everywhere you look. From database technologies to network, big data to analytics, security to hosting platforms, documents to video, the next wave of companies are turning cloud technology into leverage for all businesses – tech and non-tech. The world now has an API and we call it cloud.
If you are a part of that landscape, or want to be, this is a great first step -> apply.techstars.com. Tell them I sent you.
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A few months ago TechStars ran a program for military veterans called TechStars Patriot Boot Camp. It was powerful and well received. Since then I’ve had a few emails exchanges about the lack of veterans, especially entrepreneurs who are veterans, in Boulder. Several negative perceptions and biases arose and as the conversation continued, Taylor McLemore and Dave Cass asked if they could put a guest blog about the issue and their perspective up on this blog. I agreed and thought what they wrote up was important. It follows.
What if I told you there is a valuable group of entrepreneurs that know Boulder to be a great place for startups BUT a place that is not welcoming to them…WHAT?…”our Boulder. No way!”
This past summer, I worked with David Cohen, Tom Chickoore and the great people at TechStars to develop and organize a startup boot camp for Veterans. The program was a great success, however, a theme arose that startled me. Multiple Veterans told me: “I know Boulder is a great place for startups, but I hear it is not that welcoming to Veterans.”
After hearing this, Dave Cass (a Veteran and Boulder entrepreneur) and I surveyed a number of Veterans about this perception. Not all Veterans feel this way, but many do. Much of the perception comes from the political lean of Boulder. But some of it actually comes from individual experience who recounted negative experiences while wearing a uniform in Boulder.
I don’t expect Boulder to change, but the startup community should act to change this perception—Veterans should feel welcome.
Veterans are kick ass entrepreneurs. There are many examples of successful Veteran entrepreneurs, but very few in Boulder. I am a firm believer that Veterans have a skillset well suited for startups. They are problem solvers and master risk managers. They understand that failure is not an option. They understand leadership and commitment. For almost every startup, hiring a Veteran will add to the collective diversity of perspective and experience.
What I think we should do:
Spread The Word: Ask a veteran for their perspective and ideas on how we can do a better job of including this community. Talk about hiring Veterans with your co-founders and employees. Dave Cass and I are starting an online community as a means for Veterans and supporters to share their entrepreneurial stories, advice and wisdom. Stay tuned for details!
Take Action: If you are a founder, ask “How can we actively involve the Veteran community to find the right candidates for these jobs?” If you are an investor or mentor; seek out veteran founded companies.
Veterans, Come Check Out Boulder: Consider this your formal invitation! Start your company here.
If we can make Boulder a haven for military Veteran entrepreneurs, we will be a stronger community.
That said, Veterans will need to have an open mind about Boulder. Perhaps, It is best they hear from one of their own.
-Taylor McLemore / Founder of Prediculous (@T2theMac)
Sun Tzu wisely stated that “victorious warriors win first and then go to war”. It’s true; in the military we love intelligence. We never start a mission without first studying the players, threats, and opportunities. This reminds me of the importance of geographic choice when starting a company. There are a few communities in America that serve as model examples of a thriving startup ecosystem; Boulder is at the top of the list thanks to leaders like Brad Feld.
If a startup ecosystem is a community of players that work in balance to increase the likelihood of success, isn’t that the same symbiotic relationship displayed by military on the battlefield? And yet I see almost no military veteran first-time entrepreneurs here. Yes, our town is far left but our military community could just as easily be criticized for being politically one-dimensional and avoiding great startup communities due to political perceptions reduces our own potential and opportunity.
We left our comfort zone when we joined the military and my challenge to veterans is to do it again. If you start your company in Boulder, you will learn immensely from a new perspective and the startup community will be support you. We also have a great opportunity to serve as a positive ambassador for the military in a community that largely doesn’t understand us. Personally, I find it honor to represent the armed forces in Boulder and I enjoy the challenge that it brings.
So if the intelligence brief is telling us that Boulder could increase your odds of startup success, then more veterans should be starting companies here right? If we respond no, then we are ignoring intelligence–something we would never do in the military. If you’re a veteran and considering a startup community: Come to Boulder to attend a startup event and see for yourself what we have to offer. You may never want to leave.
-Dave Cass, Founder of Uvize (@uvize)
We constantly hear about “product market fit.” But my post yesterday about The Power of Passion When Starting Your Company was about “founder market fit.” And I’ve come to believe that – especially among first time entrepreneurs – founder market fit is much more important than product market fit at the inception of the company.
I stumbled on the phrase a few times over the past year and it’s been rolling around in my head a lot since. The first time was on Chris Dixon’s blog Founder / market fit which led me to a guest post by David Lee of SV Angel on More Thoughts on What Makes Great Entrepreneurs Great.
I’ve seen this over and over in TechStars. Founders come in with something they are super excited about. As they get exposed to mentors and feedback, they quickly start moving around within the market (or domain) as they search for a clearer focus, which could be defined as product market fit prior to getting a product out there and doing any real testing. This search is usually qualitative – it involves real feedback from potential customers and users, but it’s not a measured, tested approach.
In parallel, there’s often a Lean Startup methodology going on that does more quantitative tests of the specific product. But in a lot of cases, the qualitative feedback at the very formative stages is just as, if not more, important to make sure you end up in the right zone to test.
Underlying all of this is the regular shift away from something the founders are passionate about. The Orbotix example in my post is a great one – it would have been easy for Adam and Ian to decide to work on something that had a better product market fit, like iPhone enabled door locks, instead of something that not only hadn’t been invented yet, but also wasn’t obvious what market would really want it (a ball controlled by your smartphone – ok – that’s cool, but who will buy it?)
They, and their co-founder and CEO Paul Berberian had a vision for who would want a ball controlled by a smartphone. And Adam and Ian were obsessed with the idea. The three of them had extraordinary founder market fit, well before they figured out the product market fit.
We’ve got lots of other examples of this in our portfolio. I can’t tell you the number of times I get asked “what would someone ever use a personal 3D printer for?” But Bre Pettis at MakerBot is completely and totally obsessed with bringing 3D printers to the masses. While product market fit is getting clearer with each new product release, the founder market fit in this cases was awesome. Or Isaac Saldana of SendGrid, who initially named the company SMTPAPI. He has a great chapter in Do More Faster where he wrote about how he “Looked for the Pain” as a developer, found it in sending transaction email, and created SMTPAPI (now SendGrid) to address it. Or Eric Schweikardt who is unbelievably focused on creating the next generation robot construction kit at Modular Robotics. Sure – the “market comp” in this case is Lego Mindstorms, but Eric’s vision for the market goes well beyond this, and the product follows.
I’m not suggesting that product market fit isn’t an important concept. It is. But at the very beginning, especially with first time entrepreneurs, founder market fit is even more important.