austinpreneur

The penny gap between founders

2010-01-25T09:00:00-06:00

For a founder, it's common to start by splitting things 50/50 (or 33/33/33, depending on the number of founders). This makes sense if two people think up an idea together, are both committing to it full time, neither one is taking a salary, and they both can contribute in a significant way to the business.

There are a lot of reasons why you might not split it 50/50.

If one founder is much more seasoned than the other founder. ie. If I've sold 5 companies and you're right out of college, you should expect less than 5% of the company even if we're both founders.
If one person is taking a small salary and the other isn't
If one person is putting in cash and the other isn't (it's usually better to handle that separately as an investment or convertible note)
If one person has been working on the company for a year or two already and the other is just starting
Many more - every situation is different

In the end, the actual number you come up with is fairly arbitrary. It's whatever you can agree to. Some people just go 50/50 and others come up with a justification for some other number.

Kind of like Josh Kopelman's "penny gap", there is a huge difference between 50/50 and one partner with 50.1% and the other with 49.9%. One clearly says, "We're partners" and the other clearly says "I'm in charge." Actual control is probably not directly tied to the way the founders split the stock, so its more emotional than practical. But that doesn't make it any less significant. The decision you make here will set the tone for your entire relationship.

How I use iPhoto to publish to Facebook

2010-01-23T09:30:00-06:00

I have a pretty good routine down now for uploading and sharing my photos and videos on my Mac and in the cloud. Good because I'm able to do it frequently (a few times a week) and don't spend too much time on it (usually about 15 minutes). This system is actually based on a similar method for managing music songs and playlists that I use for iTunes.

I manage them in iPhoto, edit them in iMovie, and share them online via Facebook, Flickr and YouTube and also through devices such as my iPhone, screensavers and digital picture frames. I'm able to upload a lot of content with minimal time.

Here is what I do after returning from a trip or event where I took pictures and video.

First, I organize the photos:

Connect USB cable to camera, videocamera, and iPhone. iPhoto automatically launches and goes directly to the Import screen.
Click Import in iPhoto to copy photos from camera to computer
Hygiene - delete bad photos and duplicate photos in iPhoto
Tagging - Add tags to photos in iPhoto
Ratings - Rate all photos 3 stars in iPhoto
Ratings - Upgrade individual photos to 4 or 5 stars in iPhoto
Events - Break into Events if needed and name events in iPhoto
Smart Albums - Update MobileMe galleries by dragging and dropping new photos from Smart Albums in iPhoto

Next, I publish them to various physical devices and online:

Screensaver on my computer
iPhone Photo Albums
Digital Picture Frames
Facebook Photos - Publish new photos to Facebook from iPhoto, then update permissions from Facebook website
Flickr Photos - Publish new photos to Flickr if appropriate
iMovie Editing - Edit videos in iMovie if necessary (usually not)
Facebook Video - Drag videos to the desktop and then upload individually to Facebook and YouTube

Usually this entire process takes about 15 minutes. If its after a big trip with 1000 photos and a bunch of video then maybe an hour or two.

Do I have to use a Mac?

This is one of those places where the Mac really shines. No one has made it so simple to manage your photos, videos and music and the software is all completely free with every Mac. Everything is integrated and mostly automatic. You plug in the camera and it launches iPhoto and goes right to the Import screen. My screensaver automatically gets the latest pictures and so does my iPhone when it syncs. Everything is automatic. Everything is easy.

Tagging

I'm pretty religious about tagging my photos and videos. I have about 20 tags that I use to keep things straight. Most photos get 2 or 3 tags.

A few tags may eventually be replaced by iPhoto facial recognition - I've played with it a bunch but I haven't integrated it into my process yet. I also need to work geolocation tagging into this process.

The most common tags that I use now are:

Family Members *
Josh *
Baer **
Family **
Friends **
Business
OtherInbox
Capital Factory
Ignite Austin
Home
Holiday
Travel
Cars
Dogs
Documents (pictures of awards, certificates, etc.)

* could be replaced by facial recognition
** could be replaced by facial recognition if it had groups

I can use the same criteria to do one-off searches and I have found it to be very easy to find specific pictures I'm looking for. Usually I can just narrow it down to 2 or 3 tags and then scan chronologically to find it.

Ratings

iPhoto has a five star rating system. My default rating is 3 stars. After deleting bad photos that are out of focus and duplicate shots, I "select all" and set the ratings to 3 stars. Then I look through them for any that I want to upgrade to 4 stars or 5 stars.

5 stars - the very best pictures
4 stars - better than average, but not the very best
3 stars - default rating for pictures that are worth keeping
2 stars - below average, but kept for completeness (usually pictures from an event)
1 star - never show in albums, probably some special case, not usually normal pictures

By rating every photo, I can create Smart Albums (below) that contain my "best" pictures from the past few months. Or I can combine with Tags to search for the "best pictures of Cars".

Smart Albums

Smart Albums are like "saved searches." I combine Tagging and Ratings to create Smart Albums that update their content automatically. I then connect these Smart Albums to screensavers, my iPhone, and the albums that I publish to Facebook.

My most frequently used Smart Albums are:

Kids Best - tagged Kids and rated 5 stars
Kids Recent - taken in the past 3 months, tagged Kids and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
3 Months Best - taken in the past 3 months and rated 4 or 5 stars
3 Months Recent - taken in the past 3 months and rated 3, 4 or 5 stars
Family Best - tagged Family and rated 4 or 5 stars
Travel Best - tagged Travel and rated 5 stars
Amy & Josh - tagged Amy and Josh and rated 5 stars

How do I decide how many stars? Mostly be trial an error. I start with 4 and 5 stars and if that is too many then I just go with 5 stars. If its not enough then I go to 3, 4 and 5 stars.

iMovie Editing

iMovie is a simple video editing application that comes pre-installed on most Macs. It's really easy to make professional looking videos with it. You can easily cut and paste clips together, overlay slides from a presentation, add titles and effects, and more.

It is integrated with iPhoto - so as long as I upload my photos and movies into iPhoto (which is what happens by default when I plug a camera into my Mac) then iMovie can automatically see all of those media assets and I can drag and drop them into movies I'm editing.

Facebook

For photos, I usually let iPhoto organize them into Events and end up wanting to publish Events as Albums on Facebook. After all of the hygiene, tagging, and rating, I'm usually left with exactly the group of photos I might want to share. So I just name the Event the same name I would want the Album to be named in Facebook and then click the Facebook icon in the bottom right of the iPhoto window.

If you want to share your photos with Everyone or with Just Friends, its easy. You just click go and you're done. I think that somehow it even matches up the facial recognition and will automatically tag photos with your friends.

If you want to share the album privately on Facebook with only certain people, it gets a little tricky. iPhoto only gives you the option to share your album with Everyone, Friends of Friends, or Just Friends. Most of the photos that I share are only shared with certain Facebook Friend Lists and not with Everyone. So I have to publish from iPhoto to Just Friends and then immediately go to the web page and reset the privacy controls from the web after the first photo is uploaded. Even still, I've had a few times where some friends on Facebook have seen pictures (I know because they commented on them) that they weren't supposed to see (fortunately nothing embarrassing, just cute family pictures).

This only works for uploading photos to your own personal account. Once they are in your account, you can easily post them to a Facebook event. However, if you want to post pictures to a Facebook Page for your company, you need to export the photos to a folder and then use the Facebook photo upload process from the web page.

For videos, it's similar to Facebook pages. You have to upload the video files directly using the Facebook web page. I usually end up dragging and dropping the video from iPhoto onto the desktop so that its easy to find when I'm uploading it to Facebook.

Flickr

I don't really publish many photos to Flickr but it works with iPhoto a lot like Facebook.

YouTube

Publishing movies isn't quite as simple with YouTube. The maximum time is 10 minutes, so long movies require extra editing to chop them up into 10 minute chunks and upload them each separately. This is a big pain in the ass and is making me seriously consider switching the bulk of my video to Vimeo because it has fewer limitations.

iPhone

My iPhone automatically syncs the Smart Albums to my iPhone, so it always has the best and most recent pictures on it. You configure that from within iTunes.

Screensavers

You can choose a Smart Album as a screensaver on a Mac, so I usually have the "3 Months Best" album with the Ken Burns effect on my screen. Its counter-intuitive to me at first, but I find that I prefer seeing the most recent pictures all the time, not the best old ones over and over.

Just go to the Screen Saver in the System Preferences and your iPhoto Albums and Events will appear in the list. Sometimes it takes a minute for them to appear.

Digital Picture Frames

I have a Philips digital picture frame on my desk. Unfortunately the only way to transfer pictures is by connecting it to a computer via USB or using SD memory cards. This means manually dragging and dropping images from iPhoto to the SD card and physically moving around the cards or cables every time you want to sync them. I'd really like to find a good digital picture frame that would stream the photos off of iPhoto (the problem with Facebook is that the pictures are so low quality).

What about you?

How do you manage your photos? Any tips on how to make my process smoother or more automated? Have you worked facial recognition and geo-location into your process? Please comment.

@TexasVentures gets executive director

2010-01-20T23:46:17-06:00

Tonight I attended a Texas Ventures panel discussion talking about the future of the Texas entrepreneurial economy. It was well attended with more than 100 students and many other members of the entrepreneurial community.

As usual, Austin Ventures was a headline sponsor. As the 800 lb gorilla in town, sometimes they get a bad rap. After all - it would make sense to assume that they have said "No" to a lot more people than they have said "Yes" to. But if you are trying to do something to support entrepreneurs, Austin, or world catastrophes like Haiti, Austin Ventures is the first one to step up and write a check to help out. They have supported projects I care about personally such as Ignite Austin, Capital Factory, and Austin City Limits.

Texas Ventures has gotten more juice in the past few months, bringing on a full time executive director Scott Kammerman. I'm not quite sure what to expect over the next year but I think its got to be a good thing that there is more focus and experience on their team. The University of Texas undergrads and computer science department seems strangely disconnected from the rest of the booming entrepreneurial scene in Austin. I hope Scott and Texas Ventures can help to bridge that gap.

Tom Serres from Piryx talked to the group about the value of mentorship. The panel focused on the future of the entrepreneurial economy in Texas. The panel was not surprisingly bullish. Here are some of my tweets during the panel:

John Henry McDonald: risk will migrate to the areas with the least government regulation
Colin Pope: Austin strengths - entrepreneurial spirit, high quality of life, great labor pool, networking & support systems
Mike Dodd from Austin Ventures: it's a hard time to raise money, but good time to hire employees, get office space, use cloud

You can see pictures from the event here.

Overall I was impressed with the event and hope this is just the start of much more to come from Texas Ventures in 2010. I hope we can find ways for Capital Factory to work more closely with Texas Ventures to bring in speakers, provide mentoring, and connect with student entrepreneurs who might apply for the Capital Factory summer program.

Listening but not paying attention

2009-12-28T15:05:00-06:00

I've been presenting a talk titled, "Complainers into Champions" lately that gives examples of why many companies can benefit from using social media to engage with customers and talk about their problems in public. I'm usually pushing companies to engage more, listen more, respond more.

However, I recently had a personal experience where a company was listening to social media, but wasn't really paying attention - and it cost them. A tweet that I sent was taken out of context and a big company spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars investigating it. Bryan Menell also talked about my experience on the Dachis Group Blog.

It all started with a phone call to my cell phone. This was strange to begin with, because I use Google Voice and I don't give out my cell phone number to anyone. I was immediately suspicious and figured that it was some kind of strange solicitation. Here my best recollection of the conversation:

Caller: "Is this Joshua Baer?"

Me: "Who's calling?"

Caller: "Enrico XXXX"

Me: "Who are you with?"

Caller: "Bose Security"

Me: "What's this regarding?"

Caller: "It's a personal matter."

Me: "You're going to have to give me more information than that."

Caller: "Is this Josh? It's regarding your business selling stolen Bose headphones."

Me: "This is Josh. I'm not sure what you're referring to. What makes you think that?"

Caller: "I'm looking at a Twitter message that says, 'joshuabaer @jotto I've actually got a side business moving hot bose headphones'. Did you send that?"

Me: "I didn't say that. It must be some kind of mistake... Oh wait a minute. I think this was part of a joke. I was selling some used headphones on Facebook and my friend said that as a joke. I think if you look at the tweets before and after that it will be pretty obvious that its a joke."

Me: "Look, I'm a big fan of your products and just got the latest version. I was selling two old pair."

Caller: "Do you know where you purchased the two headphones?"

Me: "Not really, it was a long time ago. I probably bought them directly from you, or maybe from Amazon. Come to think of it one of them was my wife's so I have no idea where she purchased it."

Caller: "Are you sure?"

Me: "No, I just told you I'm not really sure because it was a long time ago. I was really just selling my used ones on Facebook."

Caller: "I know, we bought a pair from you."

Me: (laughing) "Are you serious? That's hilarious! So you know it wasn't stolen then."

Caller: "Well we can't verify that. I need to know where you purchased them."

Me: "Look, I wish you the best and must admit that I'm kind of impressed that you're paying attention to Twitter, but this is a waste of your time."

Caller: "Well we're going to continue to investigate this. Is this the best number to reach you at if I have further questions?"

Then we exchanged contact info.

So basically, Bose Security was watching Twitter and took this one tweet out of context. They spent at least $165 so far (that's how much they paid me when they bought the headphones) and have spent many hours researching it, tracking down my number, calling me, etc.

If they had looked at my Twitter page and just seen the tweets sent around the same time, I think they should have been able to tell it was a joke.

How much did this cost Bose? At least $165. Assuming that they spend a few hours researching it, we're probably looking at hundreds of dollars if not more!

Here is the original Facebook post in the marketplace:

Mission: Austinpreneur on assignment in Puerto Rico

2009-12-22T09:30:00-06:00

Earlier this month I was fortunate and flattered to be invited to keynote the Puerto Rico Venture Forum in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This was my first trip to Puerto Rico but it definitely won't be my last. My wife Amy came along for the trip and we got to spend a day exploring through the forts of Old San Juan. It was such an easy trip - no passport, everyone speaks English, and they use dollars for money. Gowalla was already there too - most of the places I visited were already listed and one of the old forts even has a custom stamp! On our next trip we want to explore the bio-illuminescent algae, caves, mountains, beaches.

I want to thank Grupo Guayacan and all of the great people we met - everyone was so welcoming! Special thanks to Francisco, Bob, Eva, Joanna, Paul many others. And of course thank you to Manuel Rosso for introducing me!

The Puerto Rico Venture Forum is the culmination of the EnterPRize competition - a business plan competition that on its face looks very similar to Capital Factory. They have a longer process that starts with a business plan competition and extends over the course of a year or more. There are five finalists each year and the top 3 receive $25k, $15k, and $10k in addition to other free services and mentorship.

I was very impressed with the Puerto Rico startup scene. The community is highly educated, with expertise in biotech, aerospace, manufacturing, and more. I met a dozen young entrepreneurs and many of the elders of the community as well. The energy and enthusiasm was infectious!

The five finalists that presented were:

Adiestrate.com - Online Learning Classes
Edunarium - Online Learning Store
EMM - Simulations for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
NanoEssentials - Nanoparticle production
Sonar Sending Technologies - Medical device for improving catheters

Unfortunately, none of the five really got my juices flowing. All of them had interesting ideas and viable businesses, they just weren't in my areas of expertise or interest. I wish there had been an email marketing company! Still i was impressed by what I saw and wish all of the companies the best in their entrepreneurial journey.

Angel Investor Panel moderated by Frank Peters

Frank Peters of the Tech Coast Angels led a fun and informative panel of angel investors with Mic Williams of the Boston Harbor Angels and Christian Meade from a Mexican angel investor group. Here are some of the best quotes from Twitter:

"Don't tell me what the rate of return will be, tell me who your potential acquirers are" - Frank Peters

"Investors want NO risk, high return" - Mic Williams

"Investors want to give you money once you don't need the investment anymore." - Frank Peters

"New angel investors should 'just watch' for 6 months before investing. At the start, every deal looks good!" - Frank Peters

I definitely plan on checking out the Frank Peters Show podcast about startups and angel investing.

Corporate Venture Capital with Blake Modersitski

Next we heard Blake Modersitski speak about corporate venture capital. For a while he ran the venture capital group at Novell (reporting to Eric Schmidt, who is now CEO of Google) and now he's with UV Partners.

Blake warned to "be careful about taking a high valuation early on [from a strategic investor who might be less valuation focused], it can make it harder to raise more money later."

He also cautioned that "if you're taking venture capital from a company, cut your business deal first because it can be harder to do it after."

From Bootstrapping to Venture Capital with Brian Halligan

My favorite talk of the day was probably Brian Halligan from Hubspot. He had great content but also a fun and engaging delivery. Many of his points resonated well with the Startup Lessons portion of my keynote that followed.

Brian presented an interesting equation to illustrate just how hard it is to get funded by a VC. Most VC's require up to 8 meetings to a termsheet, and at each step of the way it just takes one "No" to eject you out of the process. He gave most people a 50/50 shot at each step, which leads to the following formula:

F(VC) = 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2
F(VC) = about 1 in 200 = 1/2 of one percent

I don't think he was trying to be exact, but more just to show how the process works and how easy it is to get a "No" somewhere along the way.

Some of my favorite quotes from Brian's talk:

"Syndication is bad for founders - it's better to make the VC's compete"
"Build it or sell it: you only need 2 founders for your startup"
"Series A is about founders, Series B is about market, Series C is about business model"
"don't bootstrap by just writing checks from your bank account, instead you should invest with a convertible note"

Keynote - Mission: Austinpreneur by Joshua Baer

My keynote was the conclusion of the event and I presented over lunch in a beautiful room overlooking the sea. I talked about my passion for entrepreneurship and the companies that I've started, described Capital Factory 2009, and shared some Startup Lessons I've learned along the way. I wasn't able to record the whole thing but I have 20 minutes that tell my story from my first dorm-room dotcom in 1999 to the founding of Capital Factory.

I'm hoping to be invited back next year. I would love to come early and help the companies to prepare their pitches.

Keep your eye on Puerto Rico

Some of the entrepreurs that I talked to said that they often are discouraged from pursuing entrepreneurship - they are told that it would be better to get a safe government job. I think they just need some success stories to point at. And with them, more successful entrepreneurs as mentors. Fortunately there seems to be a strong sense of loyalty to the homeland - many of the people I met were born in Puerto Rico, went to school or a job in the US, and then came back to Puerto Rico. And I could see that they are bringing back more and more of the entrepreneurial spirit.

Overall I was very impressed with the entrepreneurial community in Puerto Rico. It's small but passionate. It's just going to get easier and easier for startups in Puerto Rico. The same forces that made "$500,000 the new $5,000,000" will soon make $5,000 the new $500,000. As the cost of starting new companies drops capital will no longer be a limiting factor.

Here are the complete slides from my keynote:

It's evolution - physical signatures need to evolve or die

2009-12-09T22:44:49-06:00

In general I think that physical signatures are archaic and not that meaningful. It's not impossible to forge a physical signature by hand and its even easier with computers. More and more documents are made into PDF's so you end up with digital copies of your signature being sent around in insecure emails.

This is about evolution and survival of the fittest. Physical signatures are slow, stupid and ugly and they should get eaten by the digital signatures.

Here are some things to consider:

Have you ever sent signature pages for a contract without the rest of the pages?
Do you regularly compare (using "Find Differences" in Microsoft Word) the "final version" of a contract against the redline version to make sure its correct?
Do you regularly initial every page of a contract, in addition to signing the signature page?
Do you have a scanned copy of your signature that you just cut and paste onto digital contracts?
Do you use a convenient service like Zosh to save time executing PDF agreements by email?
Do you always get back the countersigned document with BOTH signatures on it?

How hard would it be for someone to take your signature off of one document and cut and paste it onto another one? How hard would it be for someone to take a 10 page contract with your signature on it and swap out one of the pages in the middle with different terms.

Even worse, many people these days just sign the signature pages and send them separately from the rest of the pages. At that point, the other party can attach whatever they want to the beginning of it.

And it doesn't have to be a malicous act. What if someone just sends you the wrong final contract to sign. Would you notice? What if they send an old version by accident?

I know what you're thinking... I'm being paranoid. No one does stuff like this right? I must admit that no one has ever done anything like this to me before. However, if you put any faith in physically signing a document to begin with, I think these are all reasonable concerns.

So here is how I sign contracts:

Compare the final version to the last redline that I approved to make sure I'm signing the same document I think I am.
Initial the bottom of every page of the document (except the signature page). If a page has blank space, initial at the end of the text not at the bottom of the page.
Always send the entire document, never just the signature pages. At least this way I have record of the fax or email with all of the pages together in one place so I can prove what I signed.
When I send my signed contract, I create a reminder to make sure I receive my countersigned copy.

EXCEPTION: If I'm working with two lawfirms (mine and the opposing counsel) and they are handling all of the paperwork then I expect them to be responsible for most of the process I outline above. In those cases I'm comfortable signing only the signature pages and putting them with the lawyers "in escrow" until we agree on the final document.

How long will it take for physical signatures to go away? They really are an archaic legacy of the pre-digital age. A signed document doesn't "prove" much it just makes us feel good. It helps to avoid confusion by making it clear what copy of the document is the final one. There are better ways to handle this today, such as digital signatures and other forms of authentication. However, they are still "geeky" tools that haven't hit the mainstream.

Companies like EchoSign are paving the way for a more secure and more efficient way to execute documents and its slowly taking on. Recently I signed an NDA with Microsoft using a fully digital signature process and so I'm optimistic that over the next 5 to 10 years we will see most large businesses moving away from physical signatures and towards something like Echosign's model.

How do you sign contracts? Do you take any other precautions besides the ones I list here?

"Shit, that's not fair!" When does a competitive advantage matter most?

2009-11-22T23:27:28-06:00

I often see startup pitches that contain slides on competitive advantages. I rarely see startups with any real, significant competitive advantages and when I do I get very excited.

Here are a bunch of (not) competitive advantages I've seen:

we're enthusiastic!
we have having passion!
we are going to work harder than everyone else
we're built in the cloud (I put this one in an OtherInbox deck once)
we're students so we know the student market (replace "student" with anything)
we're going to charge less money (I hear this so often)
it's going to be just like XXX but we're going to let people do YYY
we're very, very excited!

None of these are real competitive advantages. You're better off just saying that you don't have any significant competitive advantages at this time and focus on why that's not as important in your situation or how you plan on acquiring competitive advantages.

Most startups don't have any significant competitive advantages (besides being a startup). You don't have to have a competitive advantage to succeed. But competitive advantages reduce risk and that's why investors are trained to look for them.

What are some real competitive advantages?

Network effects (once you get there)
Intellectual property
First mover advantage (debatable)
Relationships
Rare expertise

Does a competitive advantage matter more at some times than at other times?

Competitive advantages are rare. They can be very significant. They are the kind of thing that makes the other guys say to each other, "Shit, that's not fair!"

I think that there are times when competitive advantages matter more than others. If you are entering a mature, crowded marketplace then having a competitive advantage is more important to me. If you are creating a completely new space or if all of the competitors are small and insignificant then a competitive advantage is still desirable but can be offset by other benefits. If you're in a niche that no one else is paying attention to then there may not be any competition to worry about anyway.

If you're a startup entering a mature market, you're fighting uphill to begin with. The existing competitors have more resources, existing customer relationships, and probably know the market better than you. If you don't have some secret weapon it's going to be hard to make any progress or get any attention.

If you're creating something completely new or in a market that is immature and doesn't have any entrenched competition, the playing field is fairly even. Chances are no one has a competitive advantage.

If you're niche is so small that there is no competition at all, then competitive advantages don't really matter (at least not right now).

Competitive advantages are always good. I don't want to downplay them or say that they aren't important. But I'm tired of hearing about fake competitive advantages. If you don't have any, just say it.

Case Study - Infochimps 90 second pitch for DEMO

2009-11-01T09:30:00-06:00

I first met InfoChimps when they applied to be part of Capital Factory 2009. They were selected as a Finalist but just missed the cut for the 5 companies that we invested in. I really like the three founders and the vision and have kept in touch with them and help out in any way that I can.

Recently, InfoChimps presented at the DEMO event and I spent some time helping to improve their pitch. We recorded a few of the pitches along the way and I think this is a useful example of going from good to great. There was one meeting in person but the rest happened virtually so it is easy to follow along by just watching the videos and reading our emails and comments in order. The comments are just copy-and-paste from the YouTube video comments for ease of reading.

If I had to pull out a few key points to summarize it would be:

The goal is different with a 90 second pitch versus a 10 minute vs. a 30 minute pitch
Always start by describing the PROBLEM
With a short pitch, its more important to clearly communicate the problem than your solution. If they care about the problem, they will follow up to ask more about your solution
Tell a story about how someone uses your solution to solve the problem, don't describe your features
Only try to get across 2 or 3 key points in a short pitch. Repeat them multiple times.
Practice your pitch 100 times before you give. Keep count. Record 1 in 10 and watch it.
Close by making a point, not by saying "I'm done or thank you". This is your big chance to leave a lasting impression and its probably the most important sentence in your pitch.

Here is the play by play...

From Joseph Kelly:

We are good. Sorry we missed Demo Day last week, we were just too busy. We have made some great strides on the website and will be showing it off as an Alpha Pitch company at DEMO next week. We will also be announcing the few vendors we have signed up to sell data, including Zogby the polling firm.

From Joshua Baer:

Do you want help preparing for DEMO? I've done a lot of pitching... I'm at TC50 right now seeing tons of pitches. I'm back in Austin on Friday and could get together that afternoon or over the weekend if you want.

Session 1 - in my office

From Joshua Baer:

The first thing I suggested to them was to plan on practicing the pitch at least 100 times before they gave it. With only a few days to go, that meant 30 times a day. I asked them to keep count and to record themselves occasionally so that they could review it and so that they could share it with me privately over YouTube.

We talked about what their goal was with the 90 second pitch. We agreed that the main point was to get people excited about InfoChimps enough to talk to them in person or visit their website to learn more. In 90 seconds you can't describe everything you do - your main focus should be on describing what a big problem it is. If people care about that problem, they will be interested in finding out more about how you solve it. If they don't care about the problem, they probably won't care about how you solve it no matter how cool it is.

From Joshua Baer:

After hearing the pitch, the focus of my feedback was on simplifying the message. Say less. Give fewer examples. Take out all of the distracting name dropping of people and company names. With 90 seconds, you can only get across two or three key concepts. Things go in one ear and out the other so you need to repeat the messages multiple times in order to get them to stick.

Feedback I end giving almost every entrepreneur the first time I see them present is:

Tell a story, don't describe your features
Close by making your point with a strong sentence they can remember.

Session 2 - in the airport

From Joshua Baer:

You're talking slower but you still need to slow down even more. And that was still over the time. Even if they won't cut you off at 90 seconds its rude and unprofessional to go over. You should try hard to end right on time.

Instead of the first example that talks about the iraq researcher and how she uses InfoChimps, give that same example but describe what she would have to do WITHOUT InfoChimps. Describing the problem is more powerful than describing your solution.

If you want to think in terms of time allocated, you should probably be spending at least 30 seconds of your 90 seconds talking about the problem (not about how you solve it, just describing the problem).

Make sure you have a strong closing! It should be one sentence and you need to say it with passion!

From Bryan Menell:

If you have time in those 90 seconds, include your success to date: "We're already the largest data set provider on the Yahoo blah blah thing" it only takes one sentence, and makes be believe you have some traction already. You can also add "with additional capital, we can do even more" or whatever that part needs to be.

Session 3 - in the hotel

From Joshua Baer:

Nice! The pace is right - you've slowed it down and you're taking some nice pauses. Don't forget that when you're up on stage and nervous!

Great job starting with the problem. The example, and the story that follows are awesome!

Shorter is better than longer! Finishing early is IMPRESSIVE!

This really sounds fantastic. GREAT JOB guys! You're going to kill it tomorrow!

From Bryan Menell:

I agree! Great pace makes you sound relaxed and confident. We hear the problem, your solution, you're already getting traction in the market, so come learn more. Love it.

To reiterate what Josh says, when people are nervous they tend to talk faster, so be aware of your pacing. Keep the pace you have here, it's excellent.

The most exciting thing I heard was about how a family could use your site to figure out the area for their next home. I like Josh's idea of here's what it would take without InfoChimps.

Definitely close with "the site is live right now, and you can learn more at booth X"

post another when you refine it again, and memorize that pitch! You'll do great!

The Real Deal - DEMO

I must admit that was very impressed with the final result. Dhruv obviously practiced it over and over and was receptive to the feedback we gave him. And here is Dhruv's 90 seconds of fame at DEMO

Bonus Material

Here are the comments from Dhruv's mom.

From Meera Bansal:

Dhruv, I hope to goodness that none of these are the actual pitches. They all sucked.

1.The bathroom one was spontaneous and well spoken but are you selling yourself or Infochimps?? Totally unprofessional.
2. Stop looking at your teleprompter. Memorize the lines please!
3. Very amateurish.I would not invest in your company.

The sum of all three: The content is good The examples help. The delivery has to be worked on and be absolutely professional. You are all big boys now
playing & competing with other big boys. So go work on it some more.
Call after the actual pitch is done. All the best.
Love, Mom

And just in case you're curious, here is InfoChimp's original video application for Capital Factory 2009 and Dhruv's now infamous "shower pitch".

My Backup Strategy for Macs

2009-10-19T21:04:20-05:00

I use Macs at home and at work. Here is my backup strategy:

Level 1 - Hardware RAID

I use a redundant RAID configuration for the hard drives that store the primary copy of the data so that if there is a hardware failure it can continue to operate without any interruption. This doesn't protect you from accidentally deleting something, but it does protect from hard drive failure and ALL HARD DRIVES FAIL.

Level 2 - Time Machine

I use the built in Time Machine backup program from Apple. It's easy and seems to work well. I haven't had to restore much yet so I can't say from personal experience but I've heard that the restore is easy an reliable. I do find that it slows down my computer when its backing up a lot of data and sometimes I use the menu bar icon to cancel the backup if I'm in the middle of something.

Time Machine is brain dead simple. It literally is like plug in your hard drive and press one button and forget about it.

In addition to being easy and automatic, Time Machine stores many 'snapshots' of your data at different times and makes it easy to browse these snapshots and restore. This does protect you against accidentally deleting something because you can go "back in time" and get the file you deleted.

Time Machine backs up to an external hard drive attached to an iMac at my house. That disk is shared so that all other Macs in the house (and my laptop when its home at night) can backup to the same disk using Time Machine. I'm currently using a 2 TB drive for my Time Machine but I really should upgrade it soon.

Level 3 - JungleDisk

But what if my house burns down? I use JungleDisk from Rackspace to backup all of my local data (and I mean EVERYTHING) up to Amazon's S3 file storage service or Rackspace CloudFiles. This way all of my data is stored securely in the cloud.

I have over 500GB of data, so it took many months to complete the initial upload. Once that completed, I don't seem to have any problem keeping up with the new data that I bring (mostly through photos and video).

You have to be a geek to set up Jungle Disk because you need a separate account at Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloudfiles. I would expect that its going to get easier now that Rackspace owns JungleDisk but I haven't tried setting up a new account in years.

Level 4 - Safe Deposit Box

What if my house burns down AND Amazon loses my data? Every six months or so I swap out the hard drives at home with a duplicate set in my safe deposit box. Every year or two I buy new, bigger hard drives, copy the data to the new drives, and put the old drives in the safe deposit box. This is pretty fast and easy. Each year my storage needs grow and hard drives get bigger and cheaper.

How do you backup your computer data? Leave a comment below or talk to me on Twitter here http://twitter.com/joshuabaer

Quick links to your company Facebook page and Twitter search

2009-03-31T21:58:19-05:00

For most of my companies that I work with I've created quick links to our Facebook page as well as a Twitter search for our company. This makes it really easy to promote the pages by word of mouth (literally) or on Twitter where every character counts.

For example, if you want to go to OtherInbox's Facebook page, you can just type in facebook.otherinbox.com (or even shorter, facebook.oib.com). That link is a redirect that sends you to our Facebook fan page for OtherInbox.

To see what people are saying about OtherInbox right now, go to twitter.otherinbox.com. That link is a redirect that sends you to a pre-defined search on search.twitter.com.

Here's how to set it up for yourself.

Go to your Facebook fan page. The URL will probably look something like this:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=69949101476#/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

I don't know why Facebook does this because its unnecessary and really ugly, but you probably want to clean it up first. Look for the "/pages/" that appears the farthest to the right (it could be in there twice). Delete everything to the left of it other than "www.facebook.com".

http://www.facebook.com/~~video/video.php?v=69949101476#/~~pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now this is the nice URL to your Facebook fan page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Capital-Factory/62503086648

Now all you do is set up a web redirect for a certain web page or domain name to go that URL. I like to use custom domain names because I think they are easy to remember: facebook.oib.com. However, you could also do oib.com/facebook just as easily. I use Register.com's RComExpress service to host my domains and they have a great feature where you can set up a subdomain and enter a page for it to redirect to and they take care of the rest.

Next, I do the same thing for Twitter search and twitter.otherinbox.com. First I go to search.twitter.com and manually type in the search that finds the content that I want to show.

For OtherInbox that is:

otherinbox OR "other inbox" OR #OIB OR oib.com OR "mr. spam" OR mrspam OR "mr spam"

which results in the URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=otherinbox+OR+%22other+inbox%22+OR+%23 OIB+OR+oib.com

+OR+%22mr.+spam%22+OR+mrspam+OR +%22mr%20spam%22

When I tried to put that URL into Register.com's redirect it didn't like some of the characters, so I put it into TinyURL first and put the resulting TinyURL into Register.com's redirect. But that worked fine.

It doesn't take long to set up, and I find it quite handy. I hope you do too!

Do you know any entrepreneurs who could use $20k in cash, $20k in free stuff, and 20 successful mentors for their startup?

2009-03-23T10:09:53-05:00

I need your help to get the word out to entrepreneurs about a program that may help them.

I am a mentor and investor in Capital Factory, a new seed capital and mentorship program in Austin. We're choosing 3 startups to spend 10 weeks here to build their company. They receive $20k in cash, $20k in free stuff, and 20 successful mentors as investors. The 10 weeks end in August with a Demo Day to potential investors. It's the mentor's job to ensure they head in the right direction, and introduce them to potential customers and investors.

http://capitalfactory.com

This is an unbeatable opportunity for a technology-based entrepreneur to get an accelerated start, especially in tough times. The reason I'm emailing you is the deadline of April 3 to apply is fast approaching. I want any entrepreneur in your network to have the opportunity to consider this program.

Could you take a few minutes to forward this to your network? Or introduce me to someone who may be interested?

If you're on Twitter or Facebook, please update your status with:

RT @CapitalFactory get $20k in cash, $20k in free stuff, and 20 mentors to help launch your startup http://capitalfactory.com (please RT)

I appreciate your help. Think of it as rebuilding our economy one startup at a time!

KXAN story on the Tesla

2009-02-12T09:06:59-06:00

On Wednesday morning KXAN met me at the Harris Hill Road track to take a look at the Tesla Roadster #83.

We need new security questions - obscurity is no defense in the long tail of social networking

2009-01-17T13:14:46-06:00

Everyone knows that financial institutions are behind the times with technology and are way too paranoid to participate in social media. But it seems like they aren't paying enough attention to social media and the trend to publish more and more information publicly that use to be private.

If you're friends with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn and troll through their Twitter and Flickr feeds, you'll find that you can answer most of the typical "security questions" for financial institutions. They picked obscure questions such as, "What was the name of your first pet?" and "What street did you live on in your first house?" thinking that they would be difficult for someone other than you to figure out. But these days most of the questions are pretty easy to figure out for a social media sleuth.

This problem is just going to get bigger and bigger. With hundreds of millions of people using social networking it is clear that its not just a fad. The generation of tomorrow will grow up without many of inhibitions that we have about sharing information about ourselves publicly. Today your photos, your day to day activities and your relationships with others are available to the world through Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. The trend is to share more not less, so what else will be shared tomorrow?

I think this is a real concern! This is ripe for abuse and needs to be addressed proactively by financial institutions before clever social media criminals expose this common vulnerability for rampant identity theft.

So what can you do to protect yourself? Lie. Come up with alternate answers to the common security questions such as "what is your home town?" and always use the fake answer that only you know (after all, you've always wanted to be from the Bronx, haven't you?). That way even your mom can't figure out your security questions.

I want an eye.fi card that works in reverse (thanks @egoh)

2009-01-13T11:38:37-06:00

This morning I was tweeting about how much I love the digital picture frame in my office.

The reason I'm loving it is because I just put new pictures on it. The problem is that it's hard to get pictures onto the digital picture frame - it has an SD card that I need to pop out, take home, copy new photos onto, and bring back.

What I really want is a picture frame that downloads new pictures wirelessly from my Facebook account - including my own pictures as well as those of my friends (similar to what Chirp does on my desktop). There is a Y Combinator company called PicWing that does this, but I'm hesitant to get tied into a proprietary platform.

Eric Goh had the great suggestion of trying to use an Eye-Fi in reverse. An Eye-Fi is an SD card with a wireless chip in it so that it can upload pictures to your computer or the Internet wirelessly (the good ones geotag the photos with GPS too). What I really want is one that works in reverse, downloading pictures automatically to whatever picture frame I put the SD card into.

Great presentation on Agile programming by Alan Cooper

2009-01-12T20:45:28-06:00

Thanks to Jason Stoddard for sharing this link with me. Alan gave the closing keynote at the Agile 2008 conference and this is a link to his presentation deck and the notes that accompany them. It's worth reading and sharing with your non-Agile believers!

The Richter Scales sing the Startup Depression

2009-01-11T09:22:51-06:00

Here is a funny spoof by the Richter Scales about the startup depression. It was performed at the Crunchies awards this year.

What if your email account got deleted?

2009-01-03T19:33:55-06:00

TechCrunch reported that a blogging site called JournalSpace lost all of its customers data. It sounds like their database crashed and they didn't have any good backups. What a nightmare!

Have you ever thought about what would happen if you lost access to your email account? What if you logged into your Gmail account one day only to find that all of your email messages were gone? Or what if you just couldn't remember your password and the password reminders went to an old email address? It is also quite plausible that your account could be incorrectly suspended for abuse (the bad guys also try to make it look like someone else).

I use Google Docs, and I have a number of important documents up there that would be quite painful to lose. A few times, I've logged in only to see a warning that my documents weren't available. I almost had a heart attack! Fortunately it wasn't long before they re-appeared.

What about your photos? I have the master copy of all my photos on my local hard drive, I back them up with Time Machine on my Mac, and I also upload them to Amazon S3 with JungleDisk. So I feel pretty safe. But I have heard of lots of people who start out with their photos on their computer and on Flickr, but then their computer crashes and Flickr becomes the master copy. What if your Flickr account got deleted along with all of your photos? Or what if they just decided your pictures were obscene and took down your account?

Have you ever lost something important that you assumed was safe "in the cloud"? Have you heard of any major websites losing customer data?

Twitter is my RSS reader (and OtherInbox)

2008-12-27T16:14:17-06:00

I read lots of RSS and blogs (I'll collectively refer to them as "feeds"), but I don't regularly use an RSS Reader. I've toyed around with Google Reader and with Bloglines but just never take the time to go browse them. I have some feeds bookmarked in Safari and Firefox but never take the time to look at those either.

For me, feeds can be easily grouped into three categories:

important - I want a chance to read or ignore every post
interesting - occasionally a post is interesting to me
one-off - a post caught my eye, but I probably won't read that blog again

I find that I prefer to read important feeds just like they were email messages. I want to see an "Inbox" with all of the new postings in these feeds and either read or delete each one. If I don't check them for a few days a bunch pile up, I want to be able to quickly browse the list of old posts to see if I missed anything interesting. Apple's Mail.app Program has a nice feature that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds in Mail and have them show up in your Inbox just like email messages. There are also other services out there such as RSSFwd that will let you "subscribe" to an RSS feed by email. I use my OtherInbox account for this - you can set up any RSS feed to automatically get delivered to an OtherInbox Mailbox just like email messages (similar to Mail.app).

The interesting feeds and the one-off feeds come to me through Twitter. I don't actually subscribe to the feeds, rather I depend on my network of Twitter friends to post links to blogs that are of interest to me. A big part of why I follow certain people is because they post useful links. Many people log into Bloglines or Google Reader to scan for interesting posts - I just watch my Twitter feed.

iPhone vs. G1 - Forget the Internet, which is a better phone?

2008-12-27T09:20:59-06:00

Lets start off simply. What's it like to make a phone call on an Android G1 phone versus an Apple iPhone? I show the screenshots of exactly what you would see and then talk a bit about my experience with the headset, microphone, and speakerphone quality. Finally, I hit on the carrier issue - because you're not just choosing a phone - you're married to either T-Mobile or AT&T as well.

Both phones have similar interfaces for the basic functions of dialing a phone number by the digits or by selecting one of your existing contacts. Making a phone call is pretty much the same.

Android G1

Apple iPhone

(I redacted some phone numbers and email addresses)

Headset & Microphone

Both have loud, clear headsets that can easily be heard. Both have good microphones and everyone else can hear you. they work great as phones. The iPhone is about half as thin and lighter so I find it a bit nicer to hold, but that's a minor issue and a personal preference.

Speakerphone

Both have a speakerphone built-in, but neither would take the place of that Polycom at your office. Both are comparable, although the speaker on the G1 is a bit louder and the microphone on the iPhone seems to be a bit clearer. I remember my old Nextel had an excellent speakerphone so I would use it all the time. I don't find myself using it on these phones very much because the overall quality is just too low.

T-Mobile vs. AT&T

This is probably a bit of a religious issue. I mean, its not like any phone companies are actually GOOD are they? I have hated every phone company I've ever worked with (AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile). I have yet to try Virgin Mobile but I have high hopes that they could be different like the other Virgin brands.

It's hard to go wrong with AT&T. It is the original phone company after all. Coverage is really good and the 3G network is fast. There are stores everywhere. They work internationally. Even better, most of the time you don't have to deal with AT&T, you just deal directly with Apple.

BONUS! Dealing with Apple is a billion times better than dealing with a phone company. For those of you who aren't familiar, Apple is "genius" at customer service. You can schedule an in-store appointment at their "Genius Bar" from the web for the same day. Instead of hiding it in the back of the store, it's right in the middle where everyone can see it. The Apple techs are super helpful and if there is a problem, they will often just hand you a new phone. If you do need to ship something off, its fast.

T-Mobile has most of the same benefits of AT&T. Good coverage, lots of stores, international coverage. I'm not sure if their network is as fast - I'll do a separate post comparing the speed of the two.

The big thing they are missing is Apple - Google search is no replacement for Apple customer service. I'm sure that over time the community resources around the G1 will grow into something much better than today. However, I don't think it will ever match the Apple experience.

Conclusion

All other things being pretty equal, having Apple for customer service is the most significant factor in making me say that the iPhone is a better PHONE than the Android G1. I also like that its thinner and fits in my pocket better. So if you got rid of all the other functionality and all these could do is make phone calls, I'd go with an iPhone.

Google G1 versus Apple iPhone

2008-12-26T17:02:20-06:00

I definitely would qualify as an early adopter. I bought the original iPhone on the day it came out, and then the iPhone G3 on the day it came out. I tried to order the Google G-1 phone on the day it came out but had problems ordering from the T-Mobile website and took me until early November to get around to picking one up.

I'm so torn. I love Apple and I love Google. How's a geek to choose?

I've decided to put them head-to-head. I'm carrying both around and I have my GrandCentral account set up to ring both of them at the same time, allowing me to easily switch from one to the other. Too bad neither of them will let me listen to my GrandCentral voicemail messages...

I was trying to write up one master review and after more than a month I've decided to release it in smaller chunks (so that it actually gets released). Each blog post will focus on a particular aspect, such as making calls, taking a photo, download speed, or typing.

In addition to the normal tags, everything in this thread will be tagged "iPhone vs G1".