Launch: Silicon Valley 2008

Well, it's here (or at least it's on coming...) - Launch: Silicon Valley 2008. I attended last year's event and found the event to be a raw look at the start-up world.

At Launch: Silicon Valley, 30 presenting companies make a 10-minute onstage presentation, then receive candid feedback from a panel of venture capitalist and Silicon Valley professionals.

Companies that presented last year included several in the social media space, data security, and Guy Kawasaki's Truemors. Guy is well-known for his presenting ability - worth the price of admission on his own.

For entrepreneurs interesting in seeing companies that have gotten over some initial hurdles - developing a working organization, getting a product to market - but still a ways from getting to the finish line, this a great event. Check it out.

Funding 2.0 - SVASE

Last Thursday, I attended an SVASE event - "Funding 2.0 – How To Build A High Growth Startup Fast And Cheap." It's always interesting to check out the mindset of the Valley's newest entrepreneurs and hear what its successful members have to say.

Panel members were:

Mike Cassidy, Entrepreneur in Residence, Benchmark Capital
Matt Mullenweg, Founder, WordPress
Naval Ravikant, Partner, The Hit Forge
Peter Yared, Founder & CEO, wdgtbldr

Here are a few memorable one-liners (might be slightly paraphrased, but I think I'm close....):

Mike Cassidy on developing a strong Web 2.0 company:
"Find the lock-in effect; the network effect. That makes it hard for users to switch."

Matt Mullenweg referring to start-ups that are beginning to turn the corner:
"When you're in the green, the best times are ahead of you."

Peter Yared about outsourcing hardware:
"There should be no IT people in a software company."
"Why buy the elephant when you can ride the elephant?"

Naval Ravikant on making money on the web:
"Most money on the web comes from search mistakes."

I spoke to Peter for a couple of moments before the Panel began. Unfortunately, I didn't know of his success as an entrepreneur - our conversation was rather light. Had I known, I would have pressed him for some advice about Altos Research and our AltosCharts application...

SVASE continues to impress with their abundance and quality of events. I recommend their events to any enterpreneur that wants to get out, practice their pitch to strangers, meet people like you, and learn more about what to expect in getting your ideas from concept to realization. Must have been 150 people there.

"Your ideas are wrong, but. . ."

The second of the key concepts presented at the SVASE "Leveraging Service Providers" lunch event was:

"Any idea you have is the wrong idea. But then you learn from running the idea and figuring out what works."

This concept was introduced by Christopher Keene, and I nearly laughed out loud in agreement. I thought immediately about Economic Information Services LLC. I founded the company to focus on technology transfer services for new developers based in the former Soviet Union. The territorial coverage was intended to include the entire CIS, including Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, the Caucuses, and Central Asia. I planned to go at this alone from my office in San Francisco. (“Entrepreneurship is a team sport!")

After six months of slogging along, I attempted to plan a three-week business trip to Kazakhstan and Ukraine by myself. This included the notion that I would be able to pin down local companies and government agencies in these markets to a specific day and time for a meeting well in advance. Well, it doesn’t work that way in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, you notify someone of the week when you will be in the city, and then they inform you that they may be available, give you their cell phone number, and tell you to call them the morning of the day that you would like to meet. For an organization nut like me, you can imagine my consternation at this.

I enlisted the help of a friend in Almaty, Kazakhstan that assisted with collecting information and agreed to take his vacation time from the university when I was in town. By the end of the two weeks, I hired this friend away from the university to be the director of our Central Asia office that we decided to establish. From there, we were off and running.

And by the way, in the course of the two weeks we realized that there wasn’t the funding available to support a private sector company solely dedicated to assisting with technology transfer, and over the course of the next year, we transformed the company to provide investment banking, business plan development, and project management services – what the company exists as today.

This macro-level example is one of hundreds of ideas that I’ve had for Economic Information Services LLC that when put into motion, produced vastly different results. But only after acting on the ideas was I able to determine the correct path to success.

"Entrepreneurship is a team sport."

Last Thursday (6/14/07), I attended the SVASE "Leveraging Service Providers" lunch event hosted at DLA Piper's office in San Francisco. The speakers of the event were Christopher Keene, CEO of Active Grid Software and Radu Barsan of Redfern Integrated Optics.

A couple of key concepts were presented throughout the course of the discussion. The first of which was:

"Entrepreneurship is a team sport."

Although we all here about the tremendous success and innovations of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, their success was only made possible through the major contributions of those around them. This is a key idea with which those in the start-up world struggle – founders struggling with the necessity to delegate key aspects of the business to others and venture capitalists struggling to help company founders understand this concept.

At Aplia, I stepped into the lead Business Development role with semi-defined company structure in place. There were those that focused on product management, those that focused on content development, and those that did business development. Though we all cross-pollinated with support to each other, this structural concept was well enough defined already that those of brought on to the team for a specific purpose. And most importantly, the company founder was generally supportive of loosening the reigns to each of us to excel at what we did. Of course, there were always developments and conversations behind closed doors between the founder and CEO, but the fact that there was a CEO separate from the founder showed the understanding that entrepreneurship had to be a team effort.

There are important applications in for those leading teams in larget organizations as well. I can remember my first district sales manager at Prentice Hall – William “Butch” Porter (now the CEO of Optimized Learning. It seemed that he was only a “manager” for a few months each year – mostly in the summer between sales cycles in the Spring and Fall. During this time, he helped to define sales targets, territory goals, and lead training to increase our capabilities. The rest of the year, he took the active role of a customer service and sales support personnel, insuring that each of the reps had the adequate resources to close the sale. He had the faith that he hired the right people to do the job. Same concept as understanding that business is a team sport, even as a manager.