Do More Faster

Our friend Howard Lindzon (StockTwits CEO, TechStars Mentor and Investor) did an interview series with a number of the contributors to our book Do More Faster. I’ll post one each day or so over the next week. They are all short (15 minutes or so). Howard starts the series with an interview with me and David Cohen (TechStars CEO and co-author with me of Do More Faster.) This interview happens via Skype when David and I were at my house in Keystone (where we came up with the idea for the book) during the recent TechStars Managing Director retreat. In NY starting tomorrow is the annual TechStars Alumni Retreat (gang – sorry I’ll miss y’all) followed by TechStars for a Day for folks that have applied to the New York program. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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? ...

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: ...

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. ...

I periodically write the first column for PE Hub . Dan Primack, who is now writing a great column at Fortune called Term Sheet used to do this; there are now guest writers (including me) who do this column. Yesterday, I wrote a column about the book that David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster. Enjoy! Writing a book is hard. Really hard. Much harder than I thought. So I’m extra satisfied that “Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup” is finished. ...

One of the events on our Do More Faster book tour will be something we are calling Angels in the Architecture. Mike Platt from Cooley (one of our book tour sponsors) came up with the idea of doing an hour long session with a panel of entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs discussing the dynamics between angels and VCs. Having been all three, I find this a particularly important topic and it’s something we spend a lot of time discussing at TechStars in the third month as the teams gear up for their financings. ...