Confessions of a Mid-Life Entrepreneur

5 Tips for Competing in a Pitch Competition

We recently competed in SxSW Accelerator.  We didn't win but made it to top 18 out of 550 startups competiting and top 3 in our category (social) and learned a bunch from the experience. 

In hindsight, here are a few things that either worked well for us or we wish we had known before entering the fray.

1.  Practice, practice, practice (a few times a day for a month or more).  We practiced our pitch so much my entire team and family knew it by heart because they kept hearing me pitch.  Imagine the power goes out, you get interrupted, the slides are all messed up, and your audio is broken.  You should still be able to pitch like everything is perfect without missing a beat.

2.  Know the game you're playing: competition, the competitors, the judges, and the criteria.  Don't just give your normal pitch.  The same way you'd customize a pitch for a specific investor, think carefully about who else is competing, who is judging, what criteria are scored and ask yourself if you were a judge, using the criteria stated in the competition, and comparing the other companies, would you pick you?

3.  Bring friends. It's a pretty intense experience with a bunch of illustrious judges, emcees, cameras, microphones, spotlights, journalists, etc. in the room.  Having your team with you sending you positive energy can make sure you are in the zone when you walk up to that stage.

Seven things I learned as a Founder at SxSW

Founding Yabblers: Ian Shafer, Steven Neuman, Tom Leung

Well, it's almost done!  I'm sitting in a downtown Austin restaurant a couple of hours before we head over to the airport.  We've been at SxSW for the last 7 days and feels like we're at the tail end of an overseas trip! Here are some takeaways off the top of my head.
 
SxSW is best with friends.  Luckily, I was down here with my two co-founders and we ran into fellow Northwest startups like Nick from LikeBright (thx to the LB team for all the crowd support in the finals) and Kevin from DiscoveryJar and also was delighted to run into Julie from Madrona right before we went on stage (you know, b/c there wasn't enough pressure already). Even though SxSW is about meeting new people, seeing some familiar faces in the crowds made the experience that much better! Also, I kind of feel like this was a bit of a bonding process for tech leaders and knowing we all went through SxSW feels like an interesting affinity.  Maybe we'll create a NW SxSW Alumni club :-)

Pitch competitions are intense.  We spent months preparing for a 2 minute pitch plust 5 minutes of Q&A.  We were very lucky to perform well enough on the first day of the competition to advance into the final round where we were in the Top 3 in our category (Social) but that also meant we spent all night and the next day preparing our expanded 5 minute pitch plust 10 minutes of Q&A. As much as we were loving the exposure, it was pretty taxing from an emotional, mental, and physical point of view.  (e.g. I lost my voice the day before the first round.) In the long run, the press coverage (Mashable, MSNBC, Forbes) and investor interest (stay tuned for news on this front) we received was well worth it but just be prepared to put some of your normal day-to-day venture development on lower gear once you decide to enter one of these competitions. Feels like it's worth doing one in your first year but I wouldn't want to do too many of these for fear of optimizing the company for pitch competitions versus just killing our KPI's.

showtime.

Don't take it personal.  It's easy to say but hard to do. You pour your heart and soul into something and when a few judges pick someone else to win the top prize, it stings a little. Ultimately, just remember that in the long run, it's all about solving a big problem in a scalable and sustainable way. That's the biggest competition of all.  

Lastly, my brother texted me from London after hearing we didn't land the first prize, "Don't feel bad.  Everyone in London knows it's the 3rd place winner of X factor that actually makes it big."  What an awesome brother ;-) 

If you're not in a multi-day pitch competition, have a blast but pace yourself. SxSW was overflowing with parties, presentations, workshops, competitions, etc. to watch and schmooze. My main advice on this front is don't book back to back sessions. You often need to show up early to get a seat, some events are 15 minute walks apart, and there's just too much stuff to try and cram in without alloting time to decompress, network, and not run from one session to the next.

Five Things I Learned this Year as a First-Time Startup CEO

All things considered, 2012 was a solid year for Yabbly, my startup.  We put together a varsity core team of 3 full-timers plus 2 part-time consultants. We got some great press (including a review on Fast Company).  We raised money from friends and family and some solid angel investors and advisors (including the former general counsel of Facebook, former CEO of Immunex, current CPO of Acxiom).  And we hit some preliminary usage milestones showing the product has some nice bright embers of usage (but not yet the hot flames of product-market fit).

It was a great learning experience going from a corporate product management role to a founder role.  So in the spirit of sharing, here are 5 things I learned for the first time or I knew in principle but were heavily reinforced and elevated in priority in 2012.

1.  Know the core problem you're solving.  I'm not even talking about the startup madlibs approach (though I think that's a great framework).  If you can't say what giant problem you're solving in 10 words in a crowded party where the other person can barely hear you as he/she is walking away, you probably need to distill it down further.  

Not having that problem laser focused can cost you a crapload of time and resources going after non-critical path goals.  Personally, I like my core problem statement to go something like this "It's really freaking painful to ____."  

This sounds obvious but in the daily startup battle, you can get sucked into all kinds of much more sexy problems like UX, recruiting, PR, marketing, strategy, investor relations, etc. such that distilling the big problem into a few words just doesn't sound all that interesting.  That's pride messing with you.  Screw pride and instead genuflect to the big ass problem.  Once you center around that, everything else will become much clearer.

What's it like being a startup CEO?

Popular Quora thread making the rounds so I gave my two cents here.  Feel free to vote it up if you think it's helpful.  

Excerpt below:

What are your priorities for your company and your employees?

1. Figure out what problem are we really trying to solve (this sound so simple and in reality is one of the hardest things to do).

2. Figure out how we can solve that problem in a way that will generate explosive usage.  This means lots of thoughtful, dispassionate, creative, and measured experiments.

3. Execute.  This is where your seasoned team members need to bring their A-game.

4. Build a culture that supports 1-3 as well as longer term values that you think are important for creating an organization that's truly special.

5. Have fun.  At the end of the day, you do your best, you dig deep, and you try and set the conditions for getting lucky.  But if you take things too seriously, you're probably not gonna do your best work so enjoy the ride.  As important and challenging as entrepreneurship is, it's not like we're running into burning buildings or defusing IED's.

Full answer.

Confessions of a Founder Dad

I recently did a Guest Post on Geekwire about starting a company as a dad.  Feel free to check it out.  

A lot of us may have gotten some more seasoning over the years but the perception of tech founders as exclusively workaholic 20-somethings living off Red Bull and 5-Hour Energy shots still persists.

But here’s the thing: a lot of us who take the entrepreneurial leap aren’t exactly like that.  We’re married, we have kids and receding hairlines, and we’re doing a daily high-wire act in order to make the dream happen.

 

Above is an excerpt but the full post is here.

 

Lessons Learned Post Friends and Family Round

If only all my previous startup adventures started out this smoothly!  I'm savoring every minute because I'm sure there will be plenty of curve balls and sliders thrown our way before too long but so far, it's been a great 3 months on the entrepreneurial journey.  

We hit a bunch of great milestones in May like closing a healthy friends & family investment round, hiring a great lawyer, finding a potential office, buying a cool domain, and most important: hiring a founding engineer!  We also have some great leads on our second engineer and founding designer. All of that said, I suspect you're not here to read a status report on my consumer mobile venture (though you're welcome to sign up for the beta and tell all your friends about Yabbly ;-)  

You came here for some insights.  So here's some stuff that wasn't obvious to me 3 months ago:

1. Your track record and idea matter a lot for fundraising, but don't forget about the value of your deep network.  

Reflections after One Month "In the Wild"

So it's been a whole 4 weeks since I made the leap from small cap VP-dom to hanging out at cafes, interviewing neighbors, churning out mocks in balsamiq (which is awesome btw), and talking to various and sundry members of the Seattle startup ecosystem (vc's, angels, lawyers, realtors, mentors, other founders, engineers looking for adventure, etc.).

Take all of this with a grain of salt since it's only been 4 weeks but here are some quick observations off the top of my head:

1. It's really easy to lose sight of the central focus I pledged my allegiance to which was solving big customer problems.  You can get so fixated on an idea that resonates with potential investors, recruits, and yourself that it's easy to come up with a frankenstein idea that pushes a lot of people's buttons but ends up getting a lot of 8/10 ratings from users (the equivalent of a user saying to your product "let's just be friends.")

2. It may be blessing not to have an engineer in the first few weeks.  Had I had one, I probably would have been focused on building concept #2 or #3 and it would have taken months to realize they're both missing the mark.  People are all familiar with the Min Viable Product concept, it's easy to forget that Balsamiq mocks at your neighbor's kitchen table without a single line of code can often get you all you need to know to iterate to a place that justifies the investment of working code.  It's easier to sketch with pencil (code mvp) then ink (beta) and perhaps even easier with crayon (balsamiq) or chalk (paper sketches) than pencil.

3. Smart people will give you conflicting advice.  As important as it is to talk through your choices and options and decisions, at the end of the day you're gonna hear contradictory advice from people you equally admire.  At the end of the day, you have to have the confidence to marinate on all the external input, digest it, and ultimately trust your adequately stimulated gut.

4. Listen to yourself, literally.  If it's hard to pitch your idea or you feel like you need to think too much to string it together, it's probably not the right one.  Great ideas usually don't need a ton of frameworks or outlines or numbers to give the elevator pitch.  I've found with one of my ideas, people grock it and get excited within seconds and with other ideas, I feel like I need to show tons of screens and use cases effectively dragging the audience along with me.  

5. Be decisive but be deliberative.  Issues around co-founders, fund raising, product strategy, investors, legal, customer research, etc. at this stage could have serious long-term implications.  For sure, go fast but take the time to really think through all the implications, alternatives, and core needs before jumping into bed with any person, idea, or strategy.

That's all I got so far.  Will post more as I learn more!

-Tom

Expanding the blog from Product Management to Entrepreneurial Management

Hello ABS Readers!

As you know, I've been fairly consistently blogging about software product management for the last couple of years.  This made sense because I was the head of a 20 person product team in my last job.  As of this Monday, I've taken the entrepreneurial plunge and am now head of a one man team as I attempt to beat the odds and build an awesome software company from the ground up.  

What's potentially interesting about this endeavor is I left my corporate job without a specific killer idea in mind.  Instead, my hypothesis is that if I take the time to focus on understanding a few interesting and real customer problems, do the deep customer research, flare around a variety of ideas to fix said problems, and run lots of little experiments, at some point I'll have something to build a company around.

I was recently told by someone much older and wiser that this is unorthodox.  "Most people want to leave their current job or have a specific idea they're passionate about.  You seem like you're attracted to the the goal of creating a great company but all of the ideas you've described are merely 'experiments.' "

Dear Groupon and Amazon Offers

Incoming ICBM from Zuck's death star? 

 

Zuckerberg's Hacker Way: Code Wins Arguments

Was just reading the Facebook S-1 and found this description pretty cool.  I love the mantra "code wins arguments."

 

The Hacker Way

 

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

 

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

 

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

 

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

 

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

 

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

 

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

 

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.