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.

4.  Believe in your bones.  Don't put anything in your pitch that you can't defend confidently and in front of smart people who can smell BS from a mile away.  If you don't believe in your heart that what you're pitching is true, awesome, and crystal clear, you should consider pivoting your strategy.

5.  Practice both pitches (in multi-round events).  This may not apply to all pitch competitions but SxSW Accelerator has a 2 minute round and a 5 minute round.  Our 2 minute pitch was dialed in to pretty much as good as I could give it.  The next day, in the final round, we had to give a 5 minute pitch and I'll be the first to admit we did a really bang up job but it wasn't as polished and perfectly timed as the prior pitch simply because we had practiced the round one pitch 50X more.  If we could do it all over again, we'd started practicing and dialing in our 2 minute pitch earlier before the competition so we had more time to get our 5 minute pitch more polished. 

Hope this helps!

Tom

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.

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.

Enjoy the food!  Austin has some amazing food. My personal favorite was Lambert's which had upscale local cuisine (my beef ribs were amazing), nice ambience, and great service.

Book a hotel, like now.  Places fill up incredibly fast. Hilton in downtown Austin is like the epicenter and we LOVED staying there. (Thanks to the SxAccelerator organizers for hooking us up!) 

Get an extended battery case.  This place will suck your phone down because you'll be constantly tweeting, following, researching, mapping, schedule checking, emailing, downloading, etc. I used the Mophie and was pleased -- I only went down close to zero on the main battery once since I was always recharging (thanks to advice from Ben Huh) but having the Mophie ready to engage was a nice safety net.

And if you're considering any new product purchases for the trip, always remember: before you buy, Yabblify ;-)

Namaste,
Tom

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.

2.  A Players make each other A+ Players.   We all know this one but I tend to think this principle is exponentially amplified in an early stage startup.  A+ players ideate, iterate, pivot, scale, evangelize, and raise money 10X better than even A- players.  As a founder, if you spent literally all of your time assembling a dream team, you'd be setting the venture up for more long-term success than if you spent all of your time coding, designing, pitching, or even talking to customers (!) etc.  

3.  Raise as much money and spend as little as you can.  Unless you hit the jackpot, you will not achieve product market fit in the first 6 months. E.g, we've been iterating and experimenting like crazy and we're close but haven't cracked it yet and it's been almost a year.  Pinterest, Bourbon, etc. are all examples of multi-year hikes through the desert.  So even if you love your initial idea, you'll need to assume it's not gonna be an instant success nor will your next several iterations.  

If it were as easy as launch MVP and pivot, everyone who read Lean Startup last year would be going public or selling for $1B to Facebook by now.  Plan to wander in the desert for at least 2 years before you get something that looks truly disruptive and delivers legit, organic usage charts. 

4.  Honor the Startup Sabbath.  I've recently turned off my phone's wifi and cellurar data from Friday night to Sunday morning.  Don't worry, you'll be thinking about work anyway but muting all the micro-interruptions one day a week can do wonders for your forest from the trees state of mind.  If you combine this with some outdoor excercise by yourself (I'm a big fan of the long walk), you'll be smarter, more focused, and more centered the other 6 days.

5.  Maximize your Luck surface area.  In order to come out of this a winner, you need to be lucky and good.  Just working hard and building a great product isn't gonna be enough to rise above the noise of the thousands of other startups who are trying to do the same thing.  

In order get as lucky as possible, you have to be out there as much as possible.  This means going to networking events that you really find a bit lame, attending social events when you'd rather veg at home after a long day at work, blogging, tweeting, commenting, applying to competitions, pinging journalists, you name it.  There are probably 20 other startups trying to solve the same problem you are (and it they're aren't, you're probably not solving a real problem) and chances are they're not all morons.  Do everything you can to be the one investors, journalists, recruits, partners, etc. think of when they decide whom to pick as the lead horse.

So that's it for now.  I should emphasize I'm an entrepreneur but not a successful one (yet) so take all of this with a grain of salt.  It's just the conclusions I've personally drawn from my experience at a non-VC funded 9 month old startup ;-)

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.

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.

 

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.  

When I say "deep" network, I mean people who really know you.  People you've worked with who have seen you deliver on promises for extended periods of time, people you went to school with who also got a sense of who you were as a person, and friends and family.  For our first investment round, I've either worked with, studied with, or grew up with each of our investors which made the fund raising process really straightforward since pre-product, folks are mainly betting on you and only partially your idea so it makes a lot of sense to raise Phase 1 capital with people who know you best.  

For those of you thinking of starting a company in a few years or more, there are some other potential lessons here.  Personally, I think attending and doing well at schools and working at companies that have people who are likely to invest in startups is a huge deal and one I didn't really anticipate at the time.  In hindsight, it makes a lot of sense but it didn't occured to me when I went to HBS in 2001 or joined Google in 2006 that I was studying with and working with future investors in a startup I'd found 11 and 6 years later.  I also think this might be one small advantage to being a mid-life entrepreneur just because those classmates and former colleagues are now at at place where they can write some good sized checks into high-risk bets like an early stage startup.  

I also think the deep network underscores the importance of karma or not being a DB.  While doing the right thing isn't easy, treating people fairly and working hard to deliver results over the years helped make this investment round go really smoothly since I had built up a lot of trust and good will.  On the other hand, if you were mean, not effective, or dishonest, I suspect that will not serve you well when it comes time to pass the tin cup around.

2.  If you want to be a founder, you need to know that means you'll be full-time fund raiser, recruiter, and administrative assistant.  

If you love writing code, interviewing users, designing UI's, or whatever the vertical bar of your T shaped skill set is, just know that founders don't really have much time for that.  Between working with investors, recruits, vendors, lawyers, landlords, realtors, random guys on Craig's List who sell furniture out of the back of a van, you really don't have time to be anything but a founder.  

For me, I'm fine with that because I kind of like orchestrating and cajoling and pitching but what that also means is I will need to eventually hire people to do things I'm pretty good at (i.e. product management) just because I don't have bandwidth.  I think this is one reason why everyone says single founder teams don't work.  There's just way too much stuff to do in creating a product, a team, and a company that one person would never be able to get it done even if he had all the skills and talent.

3. Not every A player should be at your startup. 

As I've had dozens of informational coffees with potential recruits since starting this journey, I've come across a lot of smart people.  They tend to fall into three categories and it's important to know which one.  The first category is the easiest.  These are people who do not have key things you're looking for from a skills, experience, and temperment pov.

The second category is really smart people who are not really ready to leave their current job (though they may think they are).  These folks have great background and horsepower but are looking for an opportunity that's perfect in every way or more likely, will probably move up the foodchain at their current company for many years and be a super powerful VP some day, or will only leave their job to work for themselves.  I love these folks and maybe I fell into this category not long ago but they really aren't the right fit when you're recruing a founding team.

The last, and most rare, are the folks who you have instant chemistry with (usually within 20 seconds), they are genuinely excited by your prototype and can't help but see its potential and can see the challenges but aren't intimidated by them, and are at a startup now or have worked at one and know all that that entails.  These are the ones you want to get on the boat pronto and they will feel the same.

 

Hope this helps, I'll do another installment in a few months once we've gotten some more code written. 

-Tom

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

Incoming ICBM from Zuck's death star? 

 

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.