MakerSquare is the kind of idea that inspires ideas. In its simplest form, it is a 10-week, intensive, full-time, full-stack web development program. But if you talk to cofounder Ravi Parikh about the company, the discussion quickly moves from the simple logistics to wider (borderline philosophical) issues about technology, empowerment, community, and innovation. Even Parikh’s simple explanation of the company – “we’re building people who build things” – leads to an exponential visions of builders building builders that spread like some sort of tech version of Pay It Forward, with Parikh and his cofounders in the role of Haley Joel Osment (if slightly less adorable).

But before we run off into the big picture, we’ll hit the details and a little bit of backstory. Parikh has been an active entrepreneur since his early college days. He has started three companies already (with varying levels of success), and, with each of them, he said his biggest pain point was not knowing how to make his own website. Shaan Shah (one of his cofounders on a different project and now with MakerSquare) went through a program called The Starter League in Chicago that taught him the foundation of coding. For a business mind like Parikh’s, it was a few simple steps to go from “the Starter League sounds like something I need” to “why is there not a program like this here in Austin?” to “let’s build one here” to “how much further can we take it?” Fast forward four months and they’ve already sold out their entire summer class and are in the middle of expanding their offering.

MakerSquare is looking to differentiate itself in a few ways from your typical “learn to code” program. First, it emphasizes real-world application above all else. During the program, they essentially recreate the industry setting you will be working in as a coder. Everything is geared towards the workplace, emphasizing team and project-based learning. Students will come out of the program being able to build live websites and database-backed web apps. Second, MakerSquare has a strong internal focus on the actual teaching aspect of their program – which should seem obvious, but is often overlooked, especially in the tech world. Harsh Patel, one of the cofounders, did a Teach For America fellowship. He has meticulously refined the curriculum to optimize absorption and retention and is training the tech masters who teach the actual coding.

Now back to the big ideas. The vision for MakerSquare isn’t just to be a good tech education course. It is to be a “town center” for the community, and a catalyst for technology across the nation. After 5:00 pm, MakerSquare opens its doors to the community for coworking and continuing education classes. They have partnerships with adjunct professors who come in to teach anything from Heroku deployment to Photoshop, and the public can attend all of it for free. Another community benefit they’re providing is an automatic $2,000 scholarship for women to take their course. They see it as essential for more women to be in technology, one of the historically most male-saturated industries in the world. “Just imagine,” says Parikh, “all the innovation that is lost because there’s not a strong female perspective in technology.”

Parikh doesn’t think he’s going to replace college education anytime soon. He sees MakerSquare as a valuable component of a much larger tech-enablement infrastructure that is self-forming right now. The endgame of this process is anyone’s guess, but most versions of it are exciting. As Parikh put it: “There are so many ideas that die because business brains aren’t able to find someone to build out their ideas. That’s a huge loss to society. There would be so much more innovation if businesspeople, creatives, and others had the tools to develop their ideas on their own.”

Think on that for a while. Get excited. Go sign up for MakerSquare.

MakerSquare was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Austin mixer. 

Guest author Austin Rory Hackett is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdHall. He loves karaoke, pinball, and rock climbing. Follow him @austinrory.

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“Everybody’s working for the weekend,” famed poets Loverboy once said. And sometimes on the weekend. We work – too much – and we save what we sow from our weekday grind – not enough – to use to unwind.

We use sports, hiking, or art for an escape. Or music. And as our escape, we pour our passions into this outlet as much as we can. We become “fans” – fans of the opera, fans of the local sports teams, fans of a band that we follow around the country all summer.

As passionate people, we need passionate applications. FanAddict is that passionate app that music lovers can rely on to be as crazed as they are.

FanAddict allows users to track and follow their favorite musical artists as well as discover new artists. Users can search by genre, artist, city, and venue to discover and engage with music. FanAddict takes user engagement one step further by allowing users to create scrapbooks and journals. Photos and notes can be compiled within the application, so users can store their past music experiences in the same application that they can use to search and find their next music experience.

As the name suggests, music fans take their music seriously. It is not just something to do, it is part of our identity. It is something that makes those 40-plus-hour work weeks worth it. If you care that much about music, shouldn’t your music app?

FanAddict was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Kansas City mixer.

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Every startup or business owner has concerns about their online reputation. However, when you’re in the beginning of launching your business, it can be difficult to find room in your budget for your branding strategy.

BrandYourself makes brand management simple and effective for startups. Typically, when you’re first starting your business, you don’t have a large budget set aside for marketing and branding. With the help of BrandYourself, users can make the most of their branding strategy through this affordable reputation management platform.

According to Patrick Ambron, cofounder and CEO of BrandYourself, nearly half of adults in the U.S. search for a business online before they become a customer. Of that group, 45 percent of people have ignored a business because of something they discovered about them during their online search.

The online reputation of a startup or small business is often determined by the first impression their search results make on people who Google their brand. When a person searches for your business, your reputation can easily be ruined by one negative review that made its way to the top of Google’s results list. By implementing BrandYourself into your branding strategy, you can be in control of what people see when they search for your business.

BrandYourself provides you with an optimized profile that allows you to publish relevant content about your startup. For anything from your website to your social networks, BrandYourself helps you create your own personal “hub” that consists of everything you want people to know about your startup’s mission and the services it offers.

Not only can you have control of the content that represents your startup’s brand, but you can also optimize your existing results. BrandYourself helps make your existing content easy for search engine users to find. Whether it’s changing the titles of your content to searchable phrases or changing the structure of your website’s URL, BrandYourself makes it possible for you to optimize your content to make your startup become more search engine-friendly.

If you want to take your startup’s reputation to the next level, consider investing in BrandYourself’s concierge option. If there’s something you can’t fix yourself for your startup’s reputation, concierge can step in and immediately fix your results. This gives users the ability to have dedicated professionals managing their online reputation without the outrageous fees of typical reputation sites.

BrandYourself is the first do-it-yourself platform committed to making it easy for any business to take control of their Google search results. To learn more about how you can put your startup’s reputation back into your hands, visit BrandYourself for information about their free and concierge plans.

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Software solutions are vital to businesses of any size. Incorporating data and information across software services effectively can be the deciding factor in achieving business goals. With the growing number of software programs and applications, businesses struggle to find the best mixture of solutions to work for their company.

Onspring aims at ridding businesses of the hassle of mixing and matching software programs and applications from different providers by offering a comprehensive and customizable software solution that focuses on integration. With Onspring, companies can use an abundance of business applications that share and store information and data in the cloud. Companies can not only integrate and transfer data across these platforms, but also integrate and share the information across departments.

As part of its focus on integration, Onspring created a simple interface that allows users to quickly work between their applications without the need of programmers. With the ease in which information can be transferred within the Onspring applications, businesses can better use time and manpower rather than waste it on integrating and updating data and software.

Users can create, from scratch, business applications that meet their needs as well as real-time reports and dashboards from the Onspring applications. This allows users even more control over integration and efficiency of their business solution software that the traditional mix and match offerings cannot. From tracking sales and service data to employee performance plans, Onspring’s secure, cloud-based apps ensure analysts through executives have the information they need to be successful.

Onspring was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Kansas City mixer.

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At age 18, Rob Gough was diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. He was just finishing his freshman year in college, but he would have to put his studies on hold and spend the next year and a half going through chemotherapy.

Those 17 long months were spent in and out of the hospital. He would do five days of chemotherapy, after which his immune system was completely devastated. He would spend two weeks recovering, avoiding raw fruits and vegetables because they might contain mold spores. If someone hit him, he risked bleeding to death internally. Then the chemo would start again. And over and over.

By the end, he was exhausted and his body needed longer breaks to recover. But when he was awake, he spent some of his time in the hospital dreaming up startup ideas.

Ten years later, Gough has much more energy – he can work 16-hour days on that startup he dreamed up. And he feels appreciative.

“I love what I do. It just makes me feel blessed to be here,” he says. “I was always positive and always believed that I could do anything, but I think going through cancer reinforced that feeling.”

Gough first learned that anything is possible from his mother, who once asked him whom he looked up to. When he hesitantly said Michael Jordan, his mom replied, “Well, who does he look up to?” Gough didn’t know. “The owner of the team,” she said. “That’s who you want to be.”

As a kid, Gough had already started dreaming big – or at least bigger than some of his peers. He opened a lemonade stand, sold candy on the bus, and mowed lawns. When he visited his grandparents in Florida, he would collect sand dollars and bring them home to Indiana to sell. He recalls being excited for his sixteenth birthday not because he could drive a car, but because he could own a company.

These days, Gough is putting his efforts into Eckim, a coupon company that owns DefinitiveDeals.com and CouponChad.com. He cofounded it in January 2012, and it drove over $100 million in retail sales for its merchant partners last year. The team has since grown to 15 – with no funding – and he hopes to prove that a bootstrapped company can sell for $100 million.

Oh, and while he’s at it, he might also buy a basketball team – “just to prove that it can be done.”

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At age 12, Canzhi Ye went to Camp CAEN at the University of Michigan to learn Java and C# programming. A year later, when his mom got an iPod Touch, some new possibilities opened up for him.

After some Googling, Ye figured out that anyone could develop for iOS. “Hey, look, I can make apps,” he remembers telling his mother.

And so began his app development career. It started off simple, with a flashcards app called A+ Flashcards and the EasyTyping app that makes your keyboard bigger. One morning in 2011, when Ye got up early to preorder the newly released iPad 2, he was met with the devastating news of the Japanese earthquake. He had moved from Japan to the United States at age 3, and he wanted to do something to help. So he donated two weeks’ worth of app proceeds totalling $480.

When small business owner Jim Drought was searching online for a developer, he stumbled across the news of Ye’s donation. That was last fall. Since then, Ye has built an app called Rectangle and listed it on the app store for users who want to order prints of their Facebook or Instagram photos. They can order posters up to 24” by 32” or “pictoblocks” (see below), which are printed and shipped from Drought’s sign shop in San Antonio.

Below, 16-year-old Ye talks about being a young programmer and juggling the life of an entrepreneur and a junior in high school.

Tech Cocktail: How did you learn programming? 

Canzhi Ye: I was able to convince my mom to get me a Mac to do developing. So I just went on Amazon and I found a cool book to get started with. Mostly I used that book and I just used online forums. iPhone Dev SDK and Stack Overflow were just awesome resources for me to use whenever I had problems. So I pretty much just taught myself how to do the programming. I started in the fall of 2009 – I was still 13.

Tech Cocktail: What motivated you to learn to build apps? 

Ye: The fact that I learned a little bit about programming before just gave me a little bit of confidence in the beginning that this would be something I would be able to learn. I just kind of dove into it – I was still in middle school at the time; I wasn’t terribly bogged down with schoolwork. Once I got started with it, I just thought it was something really fun to do, and I was pretty passionate about it, so I didn’t give up at it and I’ve learned a lot since then.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the hardest part about it? 

Ye: In the beginning, I made some apps as an indie developer first before I got started with my most recent project. I’d say the hardest part is encountering some annoying bug that takes forever to fix or sometimes you just can’t find what’s wrong with your program. Situations like that are pretty hard. After you release your app and seeing that you don’t get many downloads is also pretty hard. So the post-release stuff – marketing, talking to people, profiling your app, or getting it out to other people – is pretty hard also.

Tech Cocktail: What’s your favorite part about it? 

Ye: I like the initial burst of an idea and then diving into it and getting a basic framework of what you’re going to build out. It’s pretty exciting to see that you can put your idea into practice.

Tech Cocktail: What do your family and friends think? 

Ye: My family is very supportive of it. They think it’s something really cool for a teenager or high schooler to get into. My friends at school, they talk about it a lot. Sometimes they’ll have an app idea and they’ll be like, “Make this into an app!” Everyone’s all-around supportive about it and when I tell them about my new developments, they’re pretty interested.

Tech Cocktail: Will you keep doing this after high school? 

Ye: I definitely want to keep this as a hobby or even when I go to college. It’s interesting and the mobile market is growing constantly, so I think it’s definitely worth staying in this app development business.

Tech Cocktail: How do you balance school and programming? 

Ye: I’ve got to manage my time really well. I’m a swimmer and I play piano and I do some other school activities, too, so I’m pretty busy. I mostly find time on the weekends to program. When I was working on Rectangle, entire weekends would be devoted to coding.

Tech Cocktail: Do you have any advice for young app developers? 

Ye: One main thing is just stay passionate about what you’re doing. You have to love what you’re doing and you have to let that motivate you.

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You have a high-quality stereo system that powers outdoor speakers on your deck? Awesome, but can you manage playlists and change songs without walking inside? Is everything readily available at the touch of a button on your Bluetooth, smartphone remote control? Of course not; that would be impossible. Or is it?

This dilemma was all too familiar for Jason Carman and Mark Vogt, cofounders of Flyover Innovations, but their engineering educations and background work at Garmin gave them the tools they needed to craft a solution.

“From a technical standpoint, it was relatively simple for us to create something new to solve this problem: aka, Blumoo,” says Carman.

Under the banner of Flyover Innovations, Carman and Vogt developed Blumoo to give users full control of their existing stereo equipment, powered speakers, outdoor stereo, or whole-home audio systems at the touch of a button from their mobile device.

Blumoo is a peripheral “pod” device that connects your Android or iOS device, via Bluetooth, to your sound systems. Blumoo itself connects to your stereo equipment via standard 3.5mm jack or RCA connections.

It enables both universal remote control functionality and hi-fi audio streaming. The user interface for the remote is extremely simple, with the standard forward, backwards, stop, play, and pause functions.

Blumoo can work with different hardware, so there are virtually no compatibility issues. It was designed as an inexpensive way to take your existing equipment further in its capability.

Consumers find they have to switch out their high-quality, sometimes embedded, speakers for Bluetooth speakers to obtain the portability that Blumoo offers. The issue that Carman and Vogt recognized here is that Bluetooth speakers are expensive and often provide lower levels of sound quality.

“People have mobile devices that have to be docked for various uses, and that renders them non-portable,” explains Carman. “Blumoo unlocks their truly mobile functionality.”

Perhaps the most exciting feature of Blumoo is that it will be released on an open API platform. This ensures that the app will continue to thrive and grow with the help of innovative developers. The hope is that users might one day be able to go beyond simple stereo capability and utilize their Blumoo and smartphone to control home theater or video functions.

Flyover Innovations wants their flagship product to be held down by nothing as they move forward. They are giving it every opportunity for success, and have launched and Indiegogo campaign to get it as much exposure as possible.

“We want people to use our technology, but we do not want it to be a hindrance to them,” says Carman. “That is why we have designed the Blumoo to be as easy as possible to use – like an ATM.”

Flyover Innovations was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer & Startup Showcase on May 7th. 

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Seamless and GrubHub, both sites for ordering takeout, today announced that they plan to merge.

Combined, they cover over 20,000 takeout restaurants in over 500 cities in the United States.

The new organization will be headed by CEO Matt Maloney, GrubHub cofounder and CEO. Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will be president. The name of the new takeout-ordering site will be determined after regulatory approvals.

The post Seamless and GrubHub to Merge appeared first on Tech Cocktail

This post is part of Tech Cocktail’s “Healthy Entrepreneur” series, bringing you insights on food, exercise, and sleep on Mondays and Wednesdays throughout May. The series is presented by Coromega (more info and a giveaway at the bottom).

At age 19, Robb Wolf was the California State Power Lifting Champion, with a bench press of 345 lbs, and was in what he considered to be relatively good health.  At age 26, despite eating 4,000 – 6,000 calories per day, Wolf was down to only 140 lbs., unable to bench even that, and had such severe ulcerative colitis that doctors wanted to surgically remove his large intestine.

Because both of his parents suffered from cardiovascular disease and autoimmune disorders, doctors attributed his failing health to faulty genetics.  After all, Wolf was exercising and eating the perfect vegan, grain-based diet.

…yatta, yatta, yatta, research fellowship with the godfather of Paleo, health problems disappear, etc.

Today, at the age of 41, Robb Wolf is in perfect health, owns and operates one of the top 30 gyms in America (according to Men’s Health), coaches and consults world class athletes, and is the author of the New York Times Best Selling The Paleo Solution.  

I caught up with Wolf to learn how startup founders can get the greatest performance from their employees, how much exercise is enough versus what’s optimal, and exactly why he believes Paleo is paramount.  Our conversation is below with the transcript highlights beneath.

Who is Paleo for?

“The people who tend to gravitate toward a lot of these approaches tend to be either very, very sick or they tend to be high level athletes who are looking for a performance boost.  So what does that mean for the average person?  Within the Paleo scene, what we have figured out with our research, directly and indirect inferences from looking at epidemiology and other research, is that the Paleo diet is very anti-inflammatory.  It’s a low inflammation producing diet.  Inflammation is a natural process in the body, it’s an outgrowth of our immune system doing what the immune system should do, but it’s kind of like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  You don’t want too much, you don’t want too little, you want the right amount of inflammation.  Too much inflammation, too much immune activity, is an autoimmune situation.  Too little immune function is immune compromise- like in HIV/AIDS or a predisposition for cancer development- so we want just the right amount.  The pieces that go into that are beyond even just food, but sleep, vitamin D levels, photoperiod, exercise, socialization, and then also the food.  It’s interesting, even though I’m the food guy, I’m constantly talking about this bigger picture, kind of evolutionary medicine perspective of us developing and evolving as hunter-gatherers.  There’s much more than just the food that we need to talk about to get to the optimization.

But within the food, what we see is that this tends to be a very, very nutritious diet.  My friend Mat Lalonde did an amazing research project where he took all of the food in the USDA nutrient database – and there are thousands and thousands of entries.  He basically put all of these foods into an Excel spreadsheet comparing the amounts of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants per calorie that these different foods have.

What was interesting that came out of that was that meat, fish, and seafood came out on top as far as nutrient density.  The best foods that you can eat per calorie as far as vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.  

Right behind that was fruits and vegetables.  And then kind of distant from that was grains, legumes, and dairy, which tends to be the cornerstones of this government recommended food pyramid or MyPlate.  Even using the parameters that most registered dietitians would recommend which is a nutrient dense diet, ironically the dietitians will recommend a nutrient dense diet but then recommend foods that are in fact not very nutrient dense.  This paleo/evolutionary perspective actually provides the most nutrient dense foods and then as an aside these foods tend to be very low in immunogenic potential.  They tend not to cause gut permeability.  They tend not to cause allergies.  We get some really synergistic benefits 0ut of all that.  We get highly nutritious food and we tend to have a low inflammatory potential from eating this way.

So is it nutrient density or anti-inflammatory?

“That’s really tough because a lot of the situation that we see some characteristics of autism, some characteristics of type 2 diabetes are far from nutrient deficiency.  But then it’s interesting if you become inflamed from gut irritating foods like gluten – which we get gluten in wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, or some other gut irritating foods – when we go under an oxidative stress from inflammation we tend to burn through vital nutrients like vitamins and antioxidants.  So depending on what day you ask me that question, I could literally flip-flop.  One day it’s way more important to get the nutrients from foods so that we are as healthy as possible, so that the foods we do eat that are pro-inflammatory cause little problem.  And another day, you ask me that question and I’ll say that it’s really important to avoid the pro-inflammatory food because then the nutrients that we are getting are able to act as effectively in our body as they can.  It’s a little bit chicken and egg.  It’s interesting from an anthropological perspective, this is a little bit what we see as the transition from the hunter-gatherer life way into the agrarian life way, is we tend to see an increase in cavities with the adoption of agriculture.  We see increased infant mortality rates, we get shorter, we see less calcium in the diet.  So it tends to be a synergistic effect. When we’re eating these lower quality foods, they’re both inflammatory and lower in nutrient density.  That’s a really good question, depending on the hour or the day you ask me that I may lean a little more in one direction versus the other.

Which diseases/disorders does paleo work best against?

“I was going to say auto-immune disease – that’s still true but, type 2 diabetes and insulin resistant conditions benefit enormously from paleo, but we’ve seen really shocking benefit with type 2 diabets and insulin resistance, peri-diabetic situations, with simply eating low carb.  We’ve know that for thirty years, forty years.  Sticking type two diabetics on a low carb diet is incredibly beneficial.  The fact that our medical community still fights that situation should be grounds for medical malpractice.  Something that mainstream medicine has really failed to address in an effective way throughout all of medical history is auto-immune disease.  This includes lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis – a huge variety of skin conditions, vitiligo, which is a condition where people lose pigmentation in the skin, a variety of alopecia, hair loss.  Autoimmune conditions go on and on and on.  Even narcolepsy, where people will get excited and then fall asleep, that actually has some autoimmune underpinnings.  Very interestingly, we’ve seen shocking improvements in autoimmune conditions with a grain, legume, dairy-free paleo diet.  We still are not 100% sure what’s going on.  There’s definitely appears to be some gut permeability, some ability for the intestinal contents and the bacterial exterior products to make their way into the body, and through a variety of immunologically driven processes we get an autoimmune response.  We also get a systemic inflammatory response, which tends to cause insulin resistance also, but that’s kind of an aside.  What we’ve found is that if we can quiet that gut permeability, if we can dial down the systemic inflammation, we’ve seen people reverse their autoimmune conditions.

It was interesting, we’ve been humping Dr. Oz’s knee for three or four years now to talk about paleo.  One his main producers, her cousin is a beautiful young woman who had multiple sclerosis.  She was actually wheel chair bound.  We had brain imaging showing scarring lesions in the brain.  And then she went paleo and the MS reversed.  Her brain healed, she could walk, run, and lift weights, and live a better life now.  We were trying for years to get Dr. Oz to talk about this.  Apparently his production assistant finally wore him down, and they had several people on the show that have reversed auto-immune disease.  I would say the thing we really have a better understanding for is autoimmunity and particularly severe systemic inflammatory conditions that are not being resolved at all by vegetarian eating, by vegan eating, clearly by standard American eating.  And mainstream medicine is very ineffective at dealing with them.  Besides cardiovascular disease and cancer, autoimmune diseases are the greatest threat with regards to morbidity and mortality.  Mainstream medicine is very ineffective at treating them.

My greasy, used car-salesman pitch on that whole thing is give it a shot for thirty or sixty days and see what happens.  If it doesn’t work, either way please tell me, tell Professor Loren Cordain, tell somebody in the research community around us so we can continue to develop our intellectual framework around this.  We have an NIH funded RO1 study that is hopefully going to launch this year looking specifically at paleo and autoimmune disease, but again my greasy used car-salesman pitch on this, is just give it a shot for 30-60 and see what the heck happens.  If it doesn’t work, you can use something else, but we’ve had really, really good success with people give the autoimmune flavor of the paleo diet a shot.

How to Engineer a High Performance Tech Startup

So I’m the food guy, but I inevitably end up talking about sleep even before food.

If you were to do one thing that was a maximum return on investment, it would be to – by hook by crook, whether it’s buying jawbones for all of your staff – really encouraging people to sleep more.  Sleep more at night, take a nap.  My wife is part of a startup with some really high level people on her team.  These guys will work themselves to the nub, and I’m friends with all of them and help them with their food and lifestyle stuff.  You can see immediate drop-off in productivity when these guys burn the sleep.  They’ll do a really productive night, but then for days afterwards their productivity is impacted.

I just had a guy on my podcast – episode 181 of The Paleo Solution Podcast, Dr. Kirk Parsley, who’s a former US Navy Seal, went to med school, came back and started doing all of the medical concerns for the West Coast Seals, and the guy is a sleep expert.  He’s a wealth of information on this topic and has really helped me refine my understanding of all this.  It’s clear that when we sleep deprive ourselves, we feel like we’re being more productive, but we’re not.  The cognitive neuroscience studies are crystal clear.

There’s a strong argument to be made for wrapping people up at a reasonable hour.  I know that a lot of tech startups will use a lot of monitoring softwares so they know how many lines of code people are writing- and it sounds totally counter intuitive and maybe it sounds a little bit wimpish to recommend it but I would try for a month.  See how people work as a baseline and what their productivity is and what their error rate is – how many bugs you have to go back and fix – and then for a month force people to go to bed earlier.  Turn off the TV, turn off the iPhone, no electronics in the room, pitch black rooms, and try to get people to sleep an extra hour or two.  Try to get people to go to bed without any pharmacological aid and then try to get them to wake up without an alarm and see what their productivity is under those circumstances.

I think what you would find ironically and counterintuitively is that fewer hours of work will end up being more productive because people are on task better and they create fewer errors.

The cognitive neuroscience studies on this are crystal clear.  Even an hour or two of sleep deprivation day in and day out ends up really severely impacting productivity and creativity.  I can’t think about what things are more important for a startup.  I think this is also part of the reason why we see a real shifting toward the youthful side of things in the startup world.  When you’re younger you can withstand the impact of sleep deprivation a little bit better.  As you get a little bit older, in your late 20s early thirties, that stuff really starts kicking your knee caps, and by the time you hit your 40s, you’re ancient like I am, it really impacts you.  But if you can get people to sleep better they can be just as productive, just as creative as they were in their 20s, they just need to mind their sleep a little better.

From there clearly eating better, trying to eat along the paleo side would be amazing.  Ironically, the food guy is recommending that folks focus primarily on sleep as the first they try to fix.  They’re going to get the greatest ROI compared with any other thing you can do.

How much sleep is enough?

There’s huge variability on this.  There are legitimately some people – and I hate these people – but they legitimately, 5-6 hours of sleep and they’re firing on all cylinders, their brain chemistry, their immunological function is normal, their gut function is normal.  One of the insidious features of sleep deprivation is that an hour or two of lost sleep, you notice it the first day in a subjective manner - I feel tired, I feel lethargic, I don’t feel very creative.  But after about 3 or 4 days, this becomes your gray altered world of existence.  You just never even notice that you feel like hell and that you’re really not firing on all cylinders.  There are some people who are fine on less sleep.  Interestingly, these people live less long.  So in total hours of wakeful life it ends up being about the same as those who sleep longer, but live longer.  That’s kind of an interesting aside, our wakefulness seems to be very tied to our total longevity.

The litmus test for me in this whole thing is, when the sun starts going down, the person turns off every electronic item in their house.  This is the test.  They turn off their cell phones, they maybe have some candles lit, their room is pitch black, and the sun is going down.  When you have all of your stuff turned off, you tend to not be fidgety and anxious, and so you go to bed.  It’s like the hunter-gatherer scene.  The sun went down, we went to bed.  The sun came up, we got up.  So in this scenario, if the person legitimately, in a pitch black room, no alarm clock to wake them up, no electronics to mess with their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to keep them awake.  If they legitimately sleep 5-6 hours then that’s what they need.  The main thing is…

…if you were on vacation on a desert island, with no electronics and you were allowed to go to bed when the sun went down and wake up when you want to wake up, how long do you actually sleep under those circumstances.  That is typically what your body really needs to fire on all cylinders.

Other Lifestyle Tips to Maximize Productivity

“People find it very difficult to exercise…I know being a writer, it’s hard to be interrupted and to break focus.  I know when people are writing code, this can be a challenge- but the recommendation I’m going to make, is instead of trying to find a specific block of an hour and half a day to work out, try to do mini workouts throughout the day.

That could involve some body weight activities like getting a TRX setup so you can do some body rows and elevated pushups, air squats, maybe get a kettle bell so you can do some kettle bell swings.  Every hour, every hour and a half you do set a timer, you jump up and kind of run around get a foam roller, do some mobility, do a quick little body weight circuit, and then get back to your work.  It’s interesting, a walk or  a little bit of exercise- again research has shown is much better than even snacking on a sugary snack as far as normalizing blood glucose level and improving creativity and productivity.

Trying to get a little bit of sun on your skin and in your eyes – that interaction of our photoperiod and HPTA axis is really critical for normal sleep and productivity for normal immune function.  From a work and efficiency standpoint, trying to break up, our workout throughout the day.  Get maybe four or five or six mini workouts throughout the day.  You’ll tend to feel better. People who are tending to write code get horrible posture, they’re hunched over, they’re sitting all day.  They get some low back problems, tight hamstrings and hip flexors.  So there’s an opportunity to do that stuff and to do it in punctuated pieces.  You just have to play the ROI element of that vs. having to be able to focus on a project…When I’m working on a long book project it sometimes takes me an hour to just really get a head of steam going.  If you have a really juicy project you’re working on you may not be able to come up for air for 3 or 4 hours because you really need to focus to get that continuity down.  But the one thing folks could try to do is to get mini-workouts in throughout the day.

Optimal Exercise Pattern for Entrepreneurs Willing to Invest More Time

“You really don’t need much.  Full-body circuit training, maybe twice a week.  It would take you 15 to 30 minutes max each session.  Somewhere between a half hour and hour per week.  I really like to get people outside and walking.  If they can do it in nature or a more natural environment, that’s preferable, but short of that just getting sun on their skin.  Again this is all the biophysical communication between our  body and our environment – so getting out and walking.  With that, walking can be a little bit time consuming, because you can go walk for several hours.  Maybe that’s a little bit unproductive in a maximum ROI.  So people would tend to recommend some interval training tabata intervals, 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest, sprinting, exercise bike, or rower, you only need four minutes of that.  You get a potent response.  There’s something to be said also from just really relaxed, low intensity walking.  Getting out in the environment and covering some ground…As much as possible just get out and walk.  Maybe bring a voice recorder and you do some vocal notes of some projects you’re working on. Just getting out in nature and walking and unplugging from the indoor environment is incredibly beneficial for folks.”

Advice to Those Considering Becoming Entrepreneurs

“Having started a couple of reasonably successful businesses now…there’s a cost associated with it.

The worst thing I ever did for my health and athleticism is open a gym.  The second worst thing I ever did for my health and athleticism was write a New York Times Bestselling diet book, and do all of the stuff associated with supporting that.

With that said, I’ve also loved what I’ve done more than anything I ever did in my life and I loved being a research chemist and getting into the scientific underpinnings- I really enjoyed that, but being an entrepreneur I’ve loved like nothing else.

If you’re going to go into the entrepreneur scene there are definitely going to be some sacrifices along the way.  You need to be prepared for that, some people are not.  I had always identified myself as an athlete and that was part of my psyche and my makeup, and I had to really let go a lot of my athleticism to put the work in to be able to do the projects that I’ve done.  Now that I’m 41 I’m actually circling back.  I’m able to go to BJJ 3-5 times per week and lift some weights, and I’m still very busy on the business side but I’ve managed to pull out  of the technicians and be more in the administrative, CEO role, and have people under me and take ideas and implement and run with them.  But it took a lot of hard work to get to that spot.  There are rewards to endeavor, but there are going to be some sacrifices along the way.  Even though I’m constantly talking about sleep and food and exercise, there was a long period of time where my sleep and exercise sucked.  I was the worst example of good lifestyle management, but it’s what I had to do to be able to get through that for that process.  I’ve been able to tighten things up and make them better.  It’s really understanding that you’re going to be in for a long haul.  You may be in a 10-year long battle.

Get more from Robb Wolf at RobbWolf.com, The Paleo Solution Book, and The Paleo Solution Podcast.

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Why do healthy omega-3 levels matter? Because the majority of Americans are omega-3 deficient, which means most of us are losing out on healthier minds, hearts and bodies. Coromega is a unique delivery system of delicious omega-3 fish oil that comes in a convenient, single-serve “Squeeze” – a tasty burst of goodness with two essential fatty acids, DHA and EPA. And it’s clinically proven to have 300% better absorption than regular softgels, which mean you’ll be on your way to healthy levels in no time!

The post Engineering a High Performance Startup with Diet & Lifestyle; An Interview with Robb Wolf of The Paleo Solution appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Today as we reported earlier, Yahoo! agreed to acquire New York based microblogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The bold move by Yahoo!’s CEO Marissa Mayer, which she announced on her Tumblr with an animated gif, has been the subject of analysis from just about everyone. For some, the billion dollar price-tag generated serious sticker-shock, while others thought that Facebook should have swooped in to snatch up Tumblr to hedge their bets.

I think buying Tumblr is a smart move by Yahoo! if their strategy is to be a product company as opposed to a straight media company. They have not done much in the social space since acquiring Flickr & MyBlogLog. Flickr missed a huge opportunity to be the next great social network by lack of forward progress & improvements since being acquired in March 2005. Flickr was the Instagram of the web. They missed a huge opportunity as they failed to offer a mobile application till long after others had taken to that space.

Yahoo!’s move to buy Tumblr will give them access to a coveted audience that not only likes to surf the web & post animated gifs of Justin Bieber, but real content too, as lots of brands like Coca-Cola, NPR, Disney-Pixar and Warby Parker (as well as Tech Cocktail) are using the platform to extend their marketing and some of the most famous memes to hit the Internet have leveraged Tumblr as their vehicle of choice.

This move may have been loosely compared to Aol’s acquisition of Bebo, but I can easily say that Tumblr has a more vibrant offering than Bebo ever did. To be current, it compares much more closely to Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, as they allowed the mobile photo network to remain an independent brand and community with light integrations. Marissa explained that Tumblr will also remain independent (though time will tell). This is great news as the platform should be allowed to continued to innovate and not have to be pulled into slower development cycles that Yahoo! might be used to.

The post Yahoo! Acquisition Of Tumblr Gets Them Fresh Street Cred appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Entrepreneurs have a number of funding options available to them. From crowdsourcing to angel investors and venture capitalists, there are many organizations and individuals interested in backing startups. Businesses can avoid going into debt from high-interest business loans by securing funding through investors. As startups grow increasingly competitive, a new company must really set itself apart. Having a solid brand identity and mission and demonstrating cohesive goals are just the beginning. Take a look at these five ways to appeal to potential investors and get funding.

1. Build a solid business plan

As investors search for startups to fund, they examine which companies will be able to properly use any capital they receive. A solid business plan will go a long way in establishing a startup’s credibility. Many new companies have a lot of raw energy, a pointed mission, and passionate talent driving new products. But often, there is a dearth of business planning. What areas of a business would benefit from new capital? Would funding go toward operations, expanding manufacturing, or opening new offices? How did a startup operate on its budget before an investor got involved? What are the operational costs, tech refresh plans, and long-term growth projections?

2. Future-proof your startup

While a new business may have products and solutions that are exceedingly relevant to current public needs, investors want to see how relevant a startup will be in the future. Does a startup have the talent and resources to grow along with their clients? Future-proofing one’s business plans and products shows investors that a company is flexible enough to stay afloat. When there is no plan in place, a startup may generate a high amount of initial success and then crash. Understanding a startup’s target audience is an excellent way to address their upcoming needs and desires. Marketing strategies should include social networking and community interaction to truly understand how a company can adjust to their clients’ future needs.

3. Be upfront

Some startups are extremely shy about making their needs known to investors. Investors do not have the time or ability to dig through a startup’s plan and identify key areas of need. Startups need to learn how to ask directly for financial help in order to receive it. New companies should clearly identify why they need funding and how they intend to use it. Investors want transparency regarding how a startup is using current funds. If an area requires funding, a startup must show how their resources are being allocated.

4. Demonstrate success

Startups must never be afraid to take credit when it is due. Any major accomplishments, successful product lines, and marketing campaigns should be showcased as investors learn more about a company. Having a track record of success can set a startup apart from their competitors, especially with industries that are flooded with entrepreneurs. Reporting should be clear, with specific numbers and results demonstrating growth and experience. Storytelling can also be a great way to demonstrate community impact, if a startup has contributed significantly to enriching their customers’ lives.

5. Sustain investors’ attention

While many startups are able to secure investors for their initial steps, they may have difficulty in gaining additional capital further down the road. Holding the attention of investors can be a difficult trial. Make sure to keep in touch with current and potential investors, leaving an open channel between decision makers. Be sure to update these contacts with company success stories and updated numbers. Tracking innovations and upcoming funding needs can be a great way to sustain interest, as a startup builds a positive reputation. Having a history of investment capital, future-proof products, and ongoing cash flow can help startups maintain investors’ interest.

Guest author Drew Hendricks is a tech, social media and environmental addict. He’s written for many major publishers such as National Geographic and Technorati.

The post 5 Ways to Get Investors Interested in Your Startup appeared first on Tech Cocktail

In political campaigns, from city councilman to president, candidates first have to fight to get the official party nomination. With that blessing from above comes financing and support, including access to the party’s software and database.

If you don’t get nominated, you’re faced with an uphill battle raising money solely from donors. That money is crucial, as it funds advertising and software that assesses that advertising (and your get-out-the-vote efforts) to see what works and what doesn’t.

Lillian Cavalieri saw this process firsthand as a campaign manager for a 2010 supervisor candidate in California. As she recounts, her team was paying $7,500 per month for software that didn’t always work. So, at the urging of her colleague and now-COO Alexa Straker, she decided to build something better.

It was a leap into the unknown of entrepreneurship, but Cavalieri had survived worse. She had just emerged from a fight with cancer during college.

“When you get a mortality check at the age of 20, it kind of gives you the confidence and energy to know that even if you’re $20,000 in debt, at least you’re not on a bed having things pumped into your system,” she says. “I think it’s definitely given me a level of confidence as well as a disposition that, even if it’s a problem today, you can’t sweat the small stuff.”

The solution she built is iPrecinct, and it costs as little as $400 per month (depending on your voter base). It targets politicians running for city council all the way up to the congressional level. iPrecinct handles lots of the organization that is traditionally done in Excel or on paper, wasting time that could be spent talking to voters. The app creates the best routes for volunteers going door-to-door, automatically generates unbiased questions to ask, lets volunteers submit voter responses in real time, and detects fraud by volunteers (e.g., making up responses).

“We need to reform the democratic process,” says Cavalieri. “It’s not fair that campaigns that have ample warchests are the only ones that have access to quality software.”

If less mainstream candidates have access to that quality software, she believes, they will attract more attention and the public will have more options. In turn, competition will force the candidates to really listen to their constituents, and come up with a clear message.

iPrecinct launched in April and has mostly attracted politicians in Los Angeles, although word is spreading across the country. In fact, Cavalieri likens running a company to running a campaign.

“It’s about efficiency, organization, and making sure you have trusted allies,” she says.

The post iPrecinct Levels the Playing Field in Political Campaigning appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Today, Yahoo! announced that it agreed to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. From the press release:

“Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.”

Tumblr has over 300 million monthly unique visitors. Said Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer:

“On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy.”

This is how they will collaborate:

“Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.”

The deal is expected to officially close later in the year.

The post Yahoo! to Acquire Tumblr for $1.1 Billion; Won’t “Screw It Up” appeared first on Tech Cocktail

It is not everyday that a former trauma surgeon, a former hedge fund manager, and a former Miss Florida USA – who has a fashion background – come together to launch a startup. And it is really not everyday when the trauma surgeon, hedge fund manager, and Miss Florida USA are one and the same. For Indira CEO and cofounder, Carrie Mantha, it is everyday.

Mantha, along with Ajay Mantha and Shekar Mantha, has launched a beta version of her fashion tech company that creates couture-quality products quickly and efficiently for consumers. Their flagship offering, bridesmaids’ dresses, relies heavily on the mix of fashion, engineering, and business in Mantha’s background. Not to mention Indira’s vertically integrated supply chain and highly engineered responsive manufacturing system. The manufacturing system allows Indira to create customized, high-end products at mass market prices.

Indira users can also compare and discuss their customized selections via an internal social shopping platform. Mantha and Indira aim to engage and cater to customers at every touchpoint. From customization, to technological innovation and internal social capabilities, Indira is in a good position to achieve their lofty aim.

Tech Cocktail asked Carrie Mantha about Indira and her experience as a startup entrepreneur.

Tech Cocktail: How do you keep your team motivated?

Carrie Mantha: It’s pretty exciting to play a big part in someone’s wedding, so we keep our team motivated by focusing on our customers.  For example, we don’t use order numbers, we use brides’ names and wedding dates.  We even include their engagement pictures on the order sheets when we can get them, and our production employees include a personal note in each package.  All the thank-you notes from customers are read out loud, and their wedding pictures posted in our factory and offices, so we’re constantly surrounded by awesome reminders of the celebrations we help create.

Tech Cocktail: What common startup advice do you completely disagree with?

Mantha: We follow a lot of the “lean startup” philosophies, but I don’t think they’re appropriate to every circumstance 100 percent of the time. Sometimes it’s worth the risk to make an investment that will position you to leapfrog your competitors, and some products require the kind of branding that necessitates a pretty awesome “minimum viable product.” For example, we had to create an entirely new manufacturing system to be able to pull off what we’re doing, but that also gives us a pretty cool barrier to entry for competitors.

Tech Cocktail: If you had an extra $1,000 to spend on marketing, what would you do?

Mantha: I’d surprise a couple of our customers with a case of great champagne at their wedding. We love celebrating with them, and they’re really our best marketing!

Tech Cocktail: What trend are you excited about as a user or consumer?

Mantha: I love seeing more online brands emerging. The advantage in cost structure that [operating online] provides allows companies to do some really cool things with product quality and pricing.

Tech Cocktail: If you weren’t doing this startup, what idea would you be working on?

Mantha: My team and I built a hack at Conde Nast’s fashion hackathon that was pretty cool. It visually analyzes user-level data from social media streams to determine each users’ current color preferences. We use it as a tool to improve product placement with our customers, and I think it would be really useful to other e-commerce players as well.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the weirdest way someone has used your product?

Mantha: We actually had a drag queen wear one of our dresses to perform onstage. She looked fabulous, so I take that as proof that our Signature Stretch Corset really is universally flattering!

Tech Cocktail: What’s the most encouraging sign of success you’ve seen so far?

Mantha: Virality in customers – we sold 49 dresses off our first customer acquisition! Two bridesmaids and three guests from that wedding became brides and used us for their own wedding, and several girls ordered one-off dresses for themselves. That’s not only exciting from a marketing perspective, but I think it says a lot about how happy our customers are with the product.

Tech Cocktail: What’s your crazy, long-term, huge vision?

Mantha: We think customers deserve couture-quality fashion that’s customized to their preferences, at a reasonable price. And we’re poised to deliver that, not just to bridesmaids, but to the broader fashion market.

Tech Cocktail: Why should I use your product, in 140 characters or fewer?

Mantha: Your wedding should be personal and so should everything about it. Also, it shouldn’t involve polyester. Ever.

Indira was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail New York mixer.

The post Create Custom Couture Fashion with Indira appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Lux Alptraum is a woman of many talents: writer, sex educator, and CEO. Her writings have appeared in Cosmopolitan, Hustler, and at SundanceChannel.com, among many others. She has spoken at notable institutions like Harvard, Brown, Yale, New York University, Columbia, and Ohio State University, as well as SXSW.

After being featured at New York City’s Museum of Sex, Alptraum decided to go deeper into the community. Her most recent and steamy venture provides the web with the foremost blog about sexuality and adult entertainment; this is Fleshbot Fiction.

Tech Cocktail: Where did the idea behind Fleshbot Fiction come from?

Lux Alptraum: I have been reading erotica for my entire adult life, generally turning to free sites, like Literotica.com, to find stories that interest me. But I got really frustrated after a while with the inconsistent quality of free stories.

Print erotica tends to be higher quality, but it is also primarily offered in the form of an anthology. That means I have to buy a volume of stories to get the few I actually want. I grappled with this problem for years, and I decided to devise my own solution with Fleshbot Fiction.

Tech Cocktail: How would you classify Fleshbot Fiction?

Alptraum: Fleshbot Fiction is a publishing imprint. We partner with talented erotica authors to produce medium length, erotic ebooks which are in turn released through the Fleshbot website.

We are approached with manuscripts, and we provide authors everything else they might need like copyediting, packaging, distribution, and promotion.

Through my platform, readers get access to single stories from an array of genres – straight, gay, kinky, and plain – with low price and high quality guaranteed. All of our content is accessible via ereader, tablet, smartphone, desktop, or laptop.

Tech Cocktail: What demographic do you tend to attract?

Alptraum: By the nature of the product, we get tech-savvy individuals who are comfortable with sexuality. That implies, broadly speaking, a younger demographic. Beyond that, we are happy to take all comers – no pun intended.

Tech Cocktail: How do you see Fleshbot Fiction fitting into a larger trend?

Alptraum: Sex-related and adult-oriented projects come with a standard set of issues: promotion is difficult, the risk of censorship looms ever present, and payment processing is often a headache.

However, the Internet offers people an easy way to purchase adult content discreetly, and in turn that has made people more comfortable in the realm of erotic content in general.

Over the last decade, the Internet has helped adult content enthusiasts separate the wheat from the chaff, and now Fleshbot offers erotica enthusiasts a similar service for written smut.

Tech Cocktail: Are you an author?

Alptraum: I am a writer by trade, though at present I have not authored any of the Fleshbot Fiction titles. Keep your eyes peeled, though, because I might get around to it in the future!

Fleshbot Fiction was showcased at the Tech Cocktail New York mixer in May. 

The post Fleshbot Fiction Heats Up the Internet with Electronic Erotica appeared first on Tech Cocktail

We get it, you’re busy.  You weren’t able to get to every Tech Cocktail post this week.  Fear not, because we’ve curated the week’s top 10(ish) posts as determined by the Tech Cocktail editorial team.

To get the Tech Cocktail weekly wrap-up direct to your inbox, sign up for the Tech Cocktail newsletter today.

1. Tech Cocktail Receives $2.5M Investment from Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project
2. Who is San Francisco’s Hottest Showcasing Startup [Poll]
3. Say Howdy to TechStars Austin
4. AnyPerk: Give Perks to Your Employees for $5 per Person per Month
5. 1M/1M: An Incubator for Startups That Accelerators Don’t Want
6. “Remember to Buy Milk”: Send Texts Triggered by Location with Locotext
7. How Going Primal Will Make You a Better Entrepreneur: An Interview with Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple
8. How Stress Works
9. On Your Mark, Get Set, Photo! Sports Photos’ Platform for Sports Photographers
10. 8 Secrets for Recruiting Top Engineering Talent; YEC Weighs in
11. Parenting, Trading, & Risk Taking: Recap of Tech Cocktail Week Sessions
12. Quarterly: Get Boxes of Startup Inspiration from Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, & More
13. [DC's Hottest Showcasing Startup] BestBequest Wants to Be Your Online Legacy Vault
14. Fandium Launches as the Social Game Day Destination for Sports

Special Announcement!

In case you glanced over the top story above, Tech Cocktail recently announced a $2.5M investment from Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project.  We are beyond excited for this new infusion of funds.  Look for big things to come from Tech Cocktail – including a massive national event in Las Vegas in October.   Get excited.

On Tap

May 22nd: San Francisco – Tech Cocktail Mixer

Before the Mixer, check out LogiAnalytics FREE Roadshow seminar covering the latest in embedded analytics.  (Free food and beverage)

Until next week…

The post The Top 10 Tech Cocktail Stories of the Week appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Online shopping has grown dramatically, year over year. And with that growth, new product discovery content has blossomed on the web and on mobile platforms. Pickie is one of the newer, more personalized mobile shopping options. An iOS application, Pickie is a mobile shopping magazine that leverages user interests and relevant web content to create personalized, shoppable catalogs sent directly to your iPad daily.

Pickie presents users with four types of content: New & Noteworthy, Editor’s Picks, Trending, and Your Social Network. New & Noteworthy content is comprised of recently mentioned products by trendsetters and influencers, completely based on the user’s interest. Editor’s Picks consist of the top products Pickie’s editors have chosen. Trending content is a mix of products that are trending on other web sources, like Etsy and department stores. Your Social Network is a feed of products shared by Facebook friends or “liked” pages, along with people and companies users follow on other social media, like Pinterest and Twitter.

Through the four content groups, users can search through a personalized catalog that includes product descriptions, prices, and the ability to purchase. Pickie is also in the process of including coupons and deals to help make the purchasing process more streamlined and user beneficial.

Tech Cocktail asked Sonia Sahney Nagar, cofounder and CEO of Pickie, about Pickie and her experience as a startup entrepreneur.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the hardest lesson you’ve had to learn so far?

Sonia Sahney Nagar: Hiring is hard. It’s important to build out your recruiting pipeline long before you need to hire. I’m always recruiting. Even though we don’t have immediate hiring needs, I make a point to try and get out there and get to know awesome people. As Pickie grows and we start hiring again, I’d much rather hire people I’ve had a chance to build a relationship with over time than have to come into hiring with a cold start.

Tech Cocktail: How do you keep your team motivated?

Sahney Nagar: Growth. We have a couple key metrics we track the business against, and we’re laser-focused on growing those metrics.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the best entrepreneurship book you’ve read and why?

Sahney Nagar: Venture Deals – it’s laden with advice on how to read and negotiate a term sheet. It’s a must-read for anyone who is raising funding for the first time.

Tech Cocktail: If you had an extra $1,000 to spend on marketing, what would you do?

Sahney Nagar: We work with some awesome bloggers. I’d run giveaway contests with our favorite bloggers.

Tech Cocktail: What trend are you excited about as a user or consumer?

Sahney Nagar: The combination of content and commerce. (Though I’m biased, Pickie is all about content + commerce).

Tech Cocktail: What do you wish someone had told you about startup life?

Sahney Nagar: Don’t believe everything you read in the news or on a blog. There’s a lot of hype out there, and it takes a few months to be able to discern fact from fiction. This is important because as a startup founder, you’re always trying to learn from others’ experiences to expedite your company’s growth. However, the signal-to-noise ratio can make it harder to distill down to what’s working and what’s not working.

Tech Cocktail: What personality trait has served you best as an entrepreneur?

Sahney Nagar: I really, really enjoy working. That gives me a ton of productive hours, so I can get a lot done in a day.

Tech Cocktail: If you weren’t doing this startup, what idea would you be working on?

Sahney Nagar: Something in pure eCommerce. Working at Amazon gave me lots of ideas.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the weirdest way someone has used your product?

Sahney Nagar: We have the ability for our users to chat with us as they are shopping in our app. The longest customer service chat we’ve ever had was 1 hour and 45 minutes…it was a woman who wanted help finding shoes for her wedding. She found the chat so valuable that she then expanded her search to include a variety of other accessories.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the most encouraging sign of success you’ve seen so far?

Sahney Nagar: We’re consistently ranked a top 10 app in the Catalogs category of the iPad app store. This week we briefly hit the #3 spot.

Tech Cocktail: What’s your crazy, long-term, huge vision?

Sahney Nagar: We want to be the world’s largest personalized marketplace.

Tech Cocktail: Why should I use your product, in 140 characters or fewer?

Sahney Nagar: We’ll merchandise your catalog based on your favorite brands and help you discover new products through your favorite blogs and magazines.

Pickie was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail New York mixer.

The post Create a Personalized Digital Shopping Magazine with Pickie appeared first on Tech Cocktail

For tech employers, finding the right candidates to fit open positions can be tough. Plenty of technology analysts and education experts have pinned down the problem as a skills gap. So how can employers compensate?

The answer may lie in geography. The infographic below includes data from RemarkableHire, a platform that uses social evidence to locate job candidates. Research shows candidates with top tech skills–like knowledge of Java and mobile app development–are concentrated in certain parts of the country.

A few key points:

• There are 77,052 available tech positions in the U.S.

• 8 out of 10 business suffer because of the tech skills gap

• 40% of companies plan to hire IT analysts within in the next few years

• 25% of companies are planning to hire people with SaaS and related cloud-computing expertise

Check out the infographic below for more data on the best places to find skilled technology candidates.

The post Hiring Skilled Tech Candidates: A Guide for Employers [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Tech Cocktail

FreshNeck is a subscription-based, men’s accessories exchange service. Members can access FreshNeck’s vibrant and versatile stock of neckties, bow ties, pocket squares, and cufflinks based on their tiered subscription, through FreshNeck’s visually crisp website. Membership starts at $15 per month, and designers like Hermes, Brioni, and Versace are just some of the options at the top-tier membership.

CEO David Goldberg, who cofounded FreshNeck with his brother Bryan, believes they address the need for a variety of professional and formal wear accessories for men, without breaking the bank and overflowing closets and drawers. Like Netflix, members can use their accessories as long as they want before exchanging them for “fresh” items.

Tech Cocktail asked David Goldberg about his plans for FreshNeck and his experience as a startup entrepreneur.

Tech Cocktail: What personality trait has served you best as an entrepreneur?

David Goldberg: My ability to shake things off, both the good and the bad. There is always a new challenge to conquer, so you cannot waste time or effort thinking about the past.

Tech Cocktail: What is the hardest lesson you’ve learned thus far with FreshNeck?

Goldberg: Everything takes longer than you plan for. Building the website, acquiring customers, raising money. It’s a grind, but one that is worth the journey.

Tech Cocktail: What is your long-term vision for FreshNeck and the men’s accessory industry?

Goldberg: For collaborative consumption to take over the men’s accessories space. Like how Netflix made Blockbuster irrelevant. And for men to actually wear ties!

Tech Cocktail: What trend are you excited about, not as an entrepreneur but as a consumer?

Goldberg: I’m a huge geek for collaborative consumption.Both the economics behind it, as well as the value to customers. I truly believe its the way of the future and will take big bites out of multiple industries.

Tech Cocktail: New startup founders are always seeking and giving advice. What is one common piece startup advice that you completely disagree with?

Goldberg: “Ideas are worthless.” I understand that the team and execution are critical, but you need to be starting with a good idea as well, solving a true pain point.

Tech Cocktail: If FreshNeck were a cocktail, which one would it be?

Goldberg: Single Malt Scotch. Both FreshNeck and Scotch can be enjoyed by a gentleman.

Tech Cocktail: What is one quirky fact about FreshNeck?

Goldberg: Though I run a neckwear company, I do not know how to tie my own bow tie. My fiancée does it for me!

FreshNeck was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail New York mixer.

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Stripe, a Y Combinator graduate, has become one of the most popular ways for startups to accept payments online. Sites like Reddit, Foursquare, Heroku, and Hipmunk are all up and running with Stripe.

But Stripe is a developer product: you have to integrate it into your website’s code, or download a Stripe plugin for WordPress or Drupal. Dodd Caldwell saw how difficult this could be for the non-tech-savvy, so he launched MoonClerk in February.

With MoonClerk, non-developers can just add a link to their website and start accepting payments via Stripe. Their speciality is recurring payments, for companies like coworking spaces, code academies, and subscription marketplaces. Only available in the United States, MoonClerk also lets you design a customized checkout experience and sends automatic receipts.

The fees for MoonClerk are pretty standard: Stripe’s fee of 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per transaction, plus an additional $9 to $75 per month. Stripe’s fee is the same as that of PayPal, which is available internationally, and Google Checkout, which is available in the United States and the United Kingdom. Other recurring-payment options include Chargify ($65 to $495 per month, with no transaction fees) and Recurly (1.25% plus $0.10 per transaction, plus a $65 monthly fee).

For startups choosing a payment method, Caldwell suggested a few things to consider (besides fees, of course).

Speed. With too few hours in the day, startups should look for solutions that don’t waste their time during setup and beyond. He’s happy to report that MoonClerk (and Stripe) can be set up in about five minutes.

“It’s a lot different than the traditional route of: we’re going to go to a merchant account, get a gateway, get an SSL certificate for security, make sure you’re PCI-compliant, do all the programming. Even integrating an API that already does recurring payments and then getting all that up and running, you could be looking at a lot of time in doing that – and with a small startup, time is money,” says Caldwell.

Portability of data. Startups should have the ability to extract and move customer credit card data to another payment processor, if they so choose. PayPal doesn’t offer this.

Dealing with headaches. Look for payment processors who automatically handle sticky situations like expired credit cards, refunds, and chargebacks.

If that’s all taken care of, you can just sit back and watch the dollar signs come flowing in.

The post MoonClerk Lets Non-Developers Accept Payments through Stripe appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Last week was SFMade Week, a seven-day celebration of San Francisco’s local manufacturing sector. Attendees toured factories, donated money, and learned about the retailers who sell locally made products.

Another champion of the maker community is Localvore, a marketplace for locally made, artisan manufactured goods from San Francisco and Northern California. From cinnamon oat soap to paisley print bags to LED belts, their products are connecting residents to the creative people around them.

Below, CEO Cameron Kramlich talks more about the trend of buying local.

Tech Cocktail: What is a localvore? 

Cameron Kramlich: A localvore is someone who supports their community by shopping local. This means eating food grown nearby and buying products made nearby.

Tech Cocktail: Why do people want to buy local?

Kramlich: People deeply desire an authentic and genuine connection to the food they ingest and the products they savor. Consuming close to the place of production not only creates a unique sense of attachment to a product, but the multiplier effect also serves to turbo-charge the local economy.

Tech Cocktail: Is this a recent trend?

Kramlich: The success of big-box and online retailers in the 1990s and 2000s disintermediated small and medium-size brands without the scale to sell millions of products. I’m a big fan of Costco in no small part because it is designed to carry local products like IT’S-IT Ice Cream or Swank Farms tomatoes at half a dozen stores, while keeping the scale that allows organic Earthbound Farm salad to be accessible to everyone. With its “treasure hunt” items, it proved that significant demand exists for artisan products.

What has changed recently is that sites like Pinterest and Kickstarter leverage the social graph to enable customers to find and fund innovative products without passing the gatekeepers at traditional retailers and media companies.

Tech Cocktail: Why are the startup and maker communities so intertwined in San Francisco? 

Kramlich: San Francisco has always attracted non-linear thinkers who love to solve big problems. I would argue that the best engineers and entrepreneurs are amazingly creative people whose canvas is software and business, respectively. Status here is predicated on solving the most interesting problems, as opposed to selling a million records in LA or chasing the most awesome gnar at Tahoe.

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I was fortunate early in my career to get some valuable, but simple advice. I don’t remember where it came from – probably from some motivational speaker or maybe the Dale Carnegie Course, since I spent my first few years out of college immersed in personal development. The advice is embodied in ten words, 20 letters:

If it is to be, it is up to me.

This simple phrase taught me the importance of accountability. In college, it’s every man for him/herself. You get graded on a curve, and you are actually discouraged from helping fellow students since, if they do better on their tests, you do worse in comparison. I got my comeuppance when I took this “every man for himself” attitude with me to my first job as a robotics engineer at IBM in Silicon Valley. It wasn’t long before I was getting counseled about the importance of teamwork in the real world and the need to lose the attitude that I developed in college. It was around this time that I discovered the phrase above.

I learned that it WAS part of my job description to help others. It was expected of me that:

• My team accomplished its goals.
• If I had something to offer other people in terms of experience or expertise, I needed to go out of my way to help them.
• I could never place blame or make excuses for my failure to meet my commitments.

The corollary to this is that if someone tells me that they didn’t understand me, it means that I didn’t communicate properly, not that they have a comprehension problem. The responsibility for communicating my thoughts/ideas/directions lies with me, not with them.

Being accountable doesn’t mean that you have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, but it does mean that you have to own the responsibility for your results and those of your team. During my career, as I’ve gone from being an employee to a manager to a leader, I never forget this dictum. As a leader, I own the responsibility for my team’s success.

Lessons learned:

• If someone doesn’t understand me, I don’t blame them. I look in the mirror.
• As a leader, I am accountable for my team’s success.

Guest author Neil Kane, a leading authority on technology commercialization and innovation, is a serial entrepreneur and has the battle scars to prove it. He specializes in bringing innovations to market that come from research labs and university research programs. Based in Chicago, he has started or been part of the founding team of over 12 startups in addition to doing time at IBM and Microsoft. He was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2007. His Twitter handle is @neildkane. He’s also on Google+. And LinkedIn.

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The day-to-day for a nonprofit is busy, to say the least. Keeping track of volunteers and their hours, information, and participation history is time-consuming and often falls to the bottom of the agenda.

But Andrew Stanley and Venkat Dulipalli – the good Samaritans that they are – decided to take this problem head-on. VolunteerMark was designed specifically to help nonprofits manage their time better.

“When I first got involved with volunteer work, people would keep track of hours by hand or in an Excel spreadsheet, and it was problematic,” says Stanley. “I wanted to improve the communications of it all.”

The team recognized that most of the nonprofits out there simply do not have a good system of management in place. Stanley and Dulipalli, however, are aiming to be the go-to system for nonprofits by centralizing everything they need.

All relevant user data is compiled for nonprofits to access through VolunteerMark. Volunteers’ contact information, participation history, and internal notes are readily available.

This ensures that time spent combing databases, tracking down volunteers, and reporting service hours, on the part of the nonprofit, is heavily reduced. Nonprofits, free from the administrative burden, can then focus on furthering their missions and goals.

Users who register with VolunteerMark receive a weekly, personalized email that offers volunteer opportunities specific to their skills and interests. From within the platform, they can sign up for any of these opportunities and log their hours after they finish an assignment.

After a user logs their service hours, the nonprofit must go into VolunteerMark and follow up. That is, they verify that the volunteer worked the specified hours and either approve or deny them.

This incentivizes volunteering for the users, as they can download and print official certifications of completed time. For example, users who may have school requirements, court mandated service, or corporate social responsibilities can list their certificates on resumes or use them to garner recognition.

“The last thing volunteers want is to log in to a site only to do hours of extra work,” explains Stanley. “We want everything to be very quick and easy and on their terms.”

Volunteering is always a good thing, but it is not always an easy thing. Making life easier for nonprofits in turn makes life easier for those who volunteer. Easier lives for volunteers make projects go smoothly, and that leads to a net good that is reinvested in the community.

“We will be the reputable service that people trust, recognize, and get involved with,” finishes a determined Stanley.

VolunteerMark was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer & Startup Showcase on May 7th.

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To support entrepreneurship in New York, the City and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are getting behind the startup community.

In 2010, they launched a $22 million seed-stage fund, as well as the annual NYC Next Idea competition. They’re also sponsoring various incubators, from General Assembly to NYU-Poly to the newest space: HarlemGarage.

HarlemGarage, to be run by coworking space operator MicroOffice, is a 6,000-square-foot space at 118th Street in Harlem. Construction will start soon, and by late summer the space should be hosting over 100 people, as well as classes and networking events.

The space is actually a converted car garage, and MicroOffice cofounder David Rotbard hopes to keep the industrial feel, with high ceilings and exposed brick. There will be comfortable chairs for lounging, coworking tables, and no enclosed offices – just semi-private classrooms.

Unlike other coworking spaces in New York, Rotbard imagines that HarlemGarage will mostly attract local residents. He sees it as “place of gathering,” “almost like a community center,” and hopes to bring in art exhibits, live music, and local community events.

That’s consistent with the City’s goals, which include revitalizing the 125th Street corridor.

“Harlem is an area that’s been on the radar for awhile. It’s probably quadrupled in the amount of entrepreneurial residents in the past couple of years,” says Rotbard.

He’s seen restaurants and bars popping up in the area, alongside new condos and old Harlem brownstones. But there isn’t much commercial office space, he says; many residents work out of coffee shops or restaurants. With HarlemGarage, they’ll have a new office-home: just steps away from a Starbucks and nicely situated between Morningside Park, Central Park, and Columbia University.

Desks will cost around $300 per month – with discounts for women- and minority-owned businesses – and you can apply through the MicroOffice website.

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Launching today, Fandium mobile app for iOS gives users a more social game day experience for professional and collegiate sports, complete with aggregated live content and streaming social feeds.

The Chicago-based company aims to be the social destination for sports fans to get the real story from inside the stadium, whether they’re in the crowd or on the couch. Fandium aggregates hashtag and geo-specific content from every major social media channel, providing users with a 360-degree view of the action related to a selected sporting event.

Users click into any of the current day’s games to get started. For example, a Fandium user following a Chicago Cubs game can view a feed filled with photos, comments and updates posted by fans at Wrigley Field from within the app and from external social platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram.

The app’s Ureport™ feature allows users to become a reporter by contributing their own insights and photos, letting any fan instantly become a part of the commentary – from the field to the stands to the couch.

If fans can’t make it to the stadium, they can get an inside look at what’s really happening at the game and the ability to interact with fans in attendance – a virtual game day ticket to any sporting event.

“Complete with scores, statistics, fan-to-fan challenges, plus real-time photos and an interactive social stream, Fandium is the all-in-one destination that’s a must-have companion for complete action on game day,” said Prentice Salter, Fandium cofounder and Conor Sports CEO.

He continues:

“Fandium provides sports fans with all the information, entertainment and interaction they want on game day, all in one place.  With Fandium, watching sports is no longer a passive activity. Fandium takes you inside the game, giving you the tools to interact with other sports fanatics and experience your favorite teams like never before.”

You can get in on the game by checking out Fandium’s website and downloading the app.

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Starting this summer, the newly created FirebrandGroup will be investing $10,000 to $25,000 in very early-stage startups who go through a new accelerator called Progression Lab.

The funding is intended to help new (not serial) entrepreneurs build an MVP for their big idea.

“We’ve always wanted to have a way to invest in early ideas that simply need enough capital to allow the founders to go heads down and prove their concept, but we never had the capacity to do it at VegasTechFund,” says VegasTechFund partner Zach Ware.

The VegasTechFund is the tech startup investment arm of the Downtown Project, a revitalization project for downtown Las Vegas started by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. The FirebrandGroup, as part of the VegasTechFund, will allocate up to $500,000 of the VegasTechFund’s $50 million to pre-seed companies. So far, the VegasTechFund has made around 27 investments itself.

Progression Lab is a three-month accelerator and “residential immersion program” that will run its first class starting in June. The idea is to help entrepreneurs get connected to the community and get mentored by some of the visionaries who visit downtown Las Vegas. Participants will have access to the Work in Progress coworking space, our monthly Tech Cocktail Week events, and the Downtown Speaker Series. FirebrandGroup-funded startups will go through the accelerator with companies in other industries, like fashion and design.

The FirebrandGroup was started by seven Venture for America fellows, recent college grads who work for the Downtown Project.

The preferred application deadline is May 22. Those interested in learning more should contact info@thefirebrand.co.

Tech Cocktail received a $2.5 million investment from the Downtown Project. 

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Tech Cocktail hosted its fourth Boise Mixer & Startup Showcase on Wednesday, April 17^th at Boise State University’s Stueckle Sky Center, along with our exceptional Boise Ambassador Martin Hambalek, IT director at Memjet and Software Alliance vice chair at the Idaho Technology Council. The event allowed us to showcase some of Boise’s most innovative startups.

At the event, we announced the winner of our Boise Hottest Showcasing Startup Poll: Smart PJ’s, which makes children’s pajamas that have special dot patterns printed on them. When users download Smart PJ’s free apps on their smart device, they can scan one of the dot groups to play a bedtime story for their children. The runner-ups were LaborFeed, which matches workers with employers for contract or day job opportunities, and Silverback Learning Solutions, which provides a technology platform that helps educators assess students’ progress.

Boise has a thriving entrepreneurial community, and April’s Tech Cocktail Boise had the largest turnout yet since Tech Cocktail Boise’s inaugural mixer in April 2011. The event had around 275 entrepreneurs and technologists in attendance, who were eager to mingle with startups over cocktails. We asked several startups and attendees to explain why they enjoy Tech Cocktail events and how they impact the local startup scene.

Russ Stoddard, founder of Social Good Network, which presented at the event, described his experience:

“People were engaged and interested, open and friendly – they asked good insightful questions and seemed to be participating in a collegial way. [Tech Cocktail Boise is] another building block, a good step on a journey toward raising visibility for our startup community.”

Other Boise entrepreneurs agreed that Tech Cocktail Boise provided a lot of value through connecting startups with local technologists in the region. Our favorite quote was from Shane Vaughan at Balihoo, whose company sponsored last Fall’s Tech Cocktail Boise:

“Balihoo is a firm believer that building a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boise is critical not only to our success, but to the city and state as a whole. Tech Cocktail is an opportunity to meet and engage with the best and the brightest entrepreneurs our town has to offer and shouldn’t be missed. And frankly, we’re down for anything with ‘cocktail’ in the name.”  

Be sure to check out the event photos and tag yourself online on Facebook.

Special thanks to our presenting sponsor:

CradlePoint: CradlePoint provides 4G/3G network router solutions that provide secure connectivity from networks to distributed enterprise, small business, and mobile customers.

The following startups were showcased at the event:

•  i-KPI Software - FactoryKPIs enable manufacturing decision-makers to monitor their key processes throughout their enterprise, from wherever they may roam. FactoryKPIs run on all Apple iOS touch devices: iPad, iPad mini, iPhone, and iPod touch.
• LaborFeed - LaborFeed.com is a newly launched national employment website with a twist. Using an intuitive fully responsive interface, LaborFeed aligns people looking for contract or day work with individuals or business owners who need work done. The service is free to use, includes a rating system, and offers the option to receive real-time job alert emails.
• Mobi2Market - Mobi2Market is communication platform that allows small businesses to communicate with their customers the way the consumer chooses. Businesses can use it for promotions, drawings, coupon, or events. Once the customer is in the system, promotions start to flow to that consumer. As the consumer uses the system, the system learns from the interaction.
• NetCamps - NetCamps provide online registration, secure payment processing, and websites for sports camps. They basically take a time- and paperwork-extensive process and automate it online.
• One4All - One4All is like the Gates Foundation for the rest of us. You create a charitable fund, you commit and fund it, you make grants to the causes you care about, and you make a difference in the world.
• Pencil Me Down - Pencil Me Down is an online scheduling service that is designed with the small business/contractor in mind.
• Silverback Learning Solutions - Silverback’s cloud-based, results-driven, K-12 instructional improvement system, Mileposts, increases student achievement by enabling educators to collaboratively plan and deliver personalized instruction based on student data collected at the state, district and classroom level and from all types of student information, assessment and curriculum systems.
• Smart PJs - Smart PJs makes and sells children’s pajamas that have multiple special dot group patterns printed on them. There are approximately 47 different dot groups printed on each pair of pajamas. When the user downloads SmartPJs’ free apps from their app store on their smart device, they can scan one of the dot groups on the pajamas with their smart device, and a bedtime story is played for the child.
• Social Good Network - Social Good Network is disrupting cause fundraising. They are replacing static, destination-based donation options with a distributed social model that reaches more supporters and raises more money (6X in initial tests). The platform delivers an easy and compelling user experience that tells a nonprofit’s unique story on their website, on Social Good Network’s community site, on social media, and on partner and brand sites.
• Speak Your Silence - Speek Your Silence has created Outspoken, a peer-to-peer fundraising platform for supporters of the cause, as well as those who have been personally affected, to own the cause in their own unique ways.
• Sunlution - Sunlution has filed a utility patent for a low-cost novel grounding spring that is used to ground solar panels together as well as secure the solar cables.
• Tips for Vino - Tipsforvino is a wine training application for restaurants.

The post Toasts and Technology at the Tech Cocktail Boise Mixer appeared first on Tech Cocktail

What happens to your important documents and information after you die?   The ones that your family and close friends need to access.  It’s an uncomfortable question, but also a topic that needs to be confronted.  Odds are you don’t have a good answer.  The winner of last night’s Hottest Showcasing Startup at our DC Mixer, wants to change that.

BestBequest.com is a service that helps you prepare for life-changing events by storing your docs, photos/videos in world’s first digital LegacyVault.  Unlike Carbonite and Dropbox, BestBequest.com provides personalized encryption of data and does not allow third party applications to access the site.  The site operates on a freemium model, with their most expensive package costing $350/year.

Tech Cocktail caught up with Lauri Tamney, director global sales & marketing at BestBequest, to learn more about their service, her top startup advice, and to learn what it’s like starting up in DC.

Tech Cocktail: What common startup advice do you completely disagree with?

Lauri Tamney:  You can make it work on a shoestring budget is not the best advice. If you want to do it right the first time around make sure you have the proper funds in place.

Tech Cocktail: What trend are you excited about as a user or consumer?

Tamney:  Instant-Era’ is the latest tech term defined as the ability to require on-demand information quickly. The search evolution is quickly becoming a behavior of the past. We want the search done for us and receive that instant gratification and at the same time we have established the mindset ‘forget it, I’ll do it myself.’

Tech Cocktail: What keeps you motivated on the hard days?

Tamney:  We have developed a unique platform giving our users a way to privately and conveniently store details of their personal life, business affairs, last wishes, important documents, guidance videos, family history and digital media. Our users now have a place where all their data is safe from being lost, damaged or destroyed, and their digital legacy will be delivered to the people they have designated at the time they have determined. Knowing our technology is able to make a difference is what keeps me motivated.

Tech Cocktail: What do you wish someone had told you about startup life?

Tamney:  Get plenty of rest now because you’re going to need it working in the startup world.

Tech Cocktail: What’s the most encouraging sign of success you’ve seen so far?

Tamney:  When people sign up for the service, they suddenly realize how beneficial the platform is for them now and down the road for their families and loved ones.

Tech Cocktail: Why should I use BestBequest, in 140 characters or fewer?

Tamney:  BestBequest.com is a Private Digital Life Tech Company developing unique, cloud-based products for today’s digital world.

Tech Cocktail: What is the biggest advantage and disadvantage of starting up in DC?

Tamney:  Advantage – DC has established itself as a huge tech hub in the United States. The tech environment is extremely supportive. There are non-stop brainstorming, networking and other tech related events daily in there area which is beneficial to those of us who need or would like to help.

Disadvantage – There’s never enough time in the day making it tough to be in two places at once.

Think your company has what it takes to be your city’s hottest showcasing startup?  Apply to showcase at your local Tech Cocktail Mixer.

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This post is part of Tech Cocktail’s “Healthy Entrepreneur” series, bringing you insights on food, exercise, and sleep throughout May. The series is presented by Coromega (more info and a giveaway below).

In 2009, Pew reported that 36 percent of people were frequently stressed. The highest-stress group was 30- to 49-year-olds, of which 45 percent were frequently stressed.

Stress is a psychological state that occurs when the demands of life seem greater than our ability to cope with them. It’s commonplace in our culture, but it wasn’t always this way. In fact, the term “stress” as we know it wasn’t really used until the early 1900s.

When we’re stressed, a whole series of events and reactions are going on in our bodies. The adrenal gland secretes cortisol, a hormone intended to distribute energy to our muscles during a fight-or-flight situation. In turn, cortisol suppresses our immune system and hence our ability to fight off disease. Stress can raise blood pressure, and make us more vulnerable to heart attack and stroke. Studies have shown that people who are stressed heal slower, and experience more severe allergies. Stress also disrupts mood-regulating serotonin levels, which can contribute to anxiety and depression.

All in all, it’s a very distressing picture. And in fact, stress begets more stress. Instead of providing a random list of coping tips, I’d like to investigate how you can intervene at various stages of this process to change the results.

1. Avoid Stressful Stimuli 

Stress is a physiological response to a stimulus, so the first, obvious, and simplest way to avoid stress is to avoid stressful stimuli. To do that, you’ll need to identify specific sources of your stress: is it constantly being late on deadlines or to meetings? Is it your ever-growing pile of to-do’s? Is it the suspicion that your girlfriend just can’t put up with your startup lifestyle anymore?

These day-to-day stresses can be reduced, even if it’s harder to escape the more lingering fear of failure. For example, say no to certain commitments when your plate is full. Get your to-do list organized and prioritized, and realize that you will never finish it all. Lori Cheek spends her time at the gym mentally preparing for the rest of the day.

“I actually spend hours each week on the elliptical trainer and double task by catching up on texts, Twitter, and sifting through emails. That time alone gives me the opportunity to wrap my head around the priorities ahead of me each day (600 calories lighter),” says Cheek, founder and CEO of Cheek’d.

2. Change Your Response

If you fail to avoid a stressor, the next step is to change your reaction to it. A “B” is only stressful if you’re expecting all “A’s.” To that end, many entrepreneurs cope with stress by putting things in perspective.

“I always tell myself, ‘THIS is NOT the end of the world,’ and any arising problem is in fact temporary,” says Carrie Turrubiartes, owner of Panticakes.

Volunteer work can also put your problems in perspective. And so can the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, a ranking of stressful life events from 1-100. Take a glance at the top few, and you’ll realize that even a failed startup isn’t the worst situation in the world.

To see the bigger picture, you might need to take a break. Go for a walk, call a friend, or otherwise remind yourself that life is going on outside your office. “Give yourself permission to step back from a situation if you need to. . . . If it is not life and death – and in most cases it isn’t – then give yourself the latitude to take a 15-minute time out,” says marketing strategist and startup coach Andrea Sullenger.

Finally, be mentally prepared for stressful events. That means recognizing that you can’t control everything, and that things will be messed up, late, and frustratingly inconvenient. Investors won’t call back, star candidates will take a job with your competitor, and customers won’t pay. That’s all part of the bargain.

In some cases, therapy can also help you learn to cope with stress if it gets overwhelming.

3. Create Positive Experiences 

Stress has a negative effect on your body, but you can easily do things that have a positive effect. Exercise, laughing, exciting hobbies, and even (or especially) sex can produce endorphins that boost the mood.

“Get laid! One way of releasing nitric oxide, which is relaxing, is by having sex. Nitric oxide has tremendous health benefits in terms of blood flow and protection from strokes and heart attacks,” explain Dr. Ida Santana and Dr. Jay Parkinson, CEO of Sherpaa.

The doctors also recommend being social. “Humans are hardwired for belonging and connection. A medical study found social isolation is as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” they say. Other relaxation techniques among entrepreneurs include meditation, deep breathing, and daily gratitude exercises.

One Wikipedia contributor raised a telling point about stress: we use it as a way to admit negative feelings without revealing too much: “I’m stressed out.” But that statement says so little, about a problem that can be so big. It doesn’t explain what is stressing us out, or whether our response to it makes any sense. To combat stress, we first need to unpack that statement – to ourselves and to others – rather than simply treating the symptoms.

Coromega is offering Tech Cocktail readers a special 25 percent discount on supplements (with the coupon code TECH). Also, the first five people who sign up here will get a free omega-3 test (valued at $150) and a 90-day supply of Coromega.

Why do healthy omega-3 levels matter? Because the majority of Americans are omega-3 deficient, which means most of us are losing out on healthier minds, hearts and bodies. Coromega is a unique delivery system of delicious omega-3 fish oil that comes in a convenient, single-serve “Squeeze” – a tasty burst of goodness with two essential fatty acids, DHA and EPA. And it’s clinically proven to have 300% better absorption than regular softgels, which mean you’ll be on your way to healthy levels in no time! 

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The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

This week we asked the YEC team, “What’s your best advice to a fellow founder looking to recruit top engineering talent?”  Their insights are below.

1) Include Them in Decisions

Top engineers are more than coding machines. They often have valuable insight into the production and usability of the product, and you should seek their input for major product decisions. Doing so will let them know you value them as team members.

Eric Corl, President + Co-Founder at Fundable LLC

2) Consult Your Current Engineers

My technical co-founder has a group of engineers that he calls his “hacking team.” These guys get together once a week and look at new tech tools, help each other out on projects and share tricks. If you know great engineers, even if they are already employed, trust who they hang out with. Smart people hang out with smart people.

Vanessa Van Edwards, Author and Techpreneur at Science of People

3) Simple: Build Something Useful

The best engineers are builders and architects at heart, and they love working with others like them. The best way for non-technical founders to recruit top engineers is to be great at building another part of the business, whether it’s a sales funnel or breakthrough patents.

Neil Thanedar, CEO and Founder at LabDoor

4) Understand Their Motivations

I’ve discovered that engineers aren’t necessary motivated only by money. Some want flexibility, e.g., the ability to work from home. Some want to be able to sign their names to a cool project. Others want an opportunity to work with nice, smart people who value their talents. Some want to work for small teams, while others prefer large teams. The key is to seek understanding about their motivations, and then tailor your offer to their needs.

Jim Belosic, Co-founder and CEO at ShortStack/Pancake Labs

5) Examine Startup Readiness

Look for someone who is not just willing to do the job right, but will also take on other tasks for the company. Look for professionals who will come to you with solutions and not problems. Look for startup-ready professionals.

How do you look for a startup-ready professional? One way is to assess why the person wants to work for a startup. Look for previous startup experience; you may want to stay away from people who have worked mostly with large corporations. State your expectations from the outset.

Another way is to examine their problem-solving skills. Give them a task to do, but don’t provide details. Leave it up to the candidate to ask for more information and suggest ideas. Check for communication, articulation, thinking and creative problem-solving.

Rahul Varshneya, Co-founder at Arkenea

6) Assess Your Needed Skills

One common mistake I see among non-technical startup founders is a lack of fluency regarding technology development. It is usually pointless to pitch a back-end developer about user interaction work, or a QA engineer about mobile app development. Engineering is not created equal. Before you begin the recruitment process, make sure you know what competencies you are seeking to round out your team so you’re not pursuing the wrong type of engineering talent.

Doreen Bloch, CEO / Founder at Poshly Inc.

7) Consider the Hiring Market

Right now, there’s a premium being paid for top engineering talent — pushed up even further because the best people can afford to co-found their own companies as easily as they can print up a new batch of resumes for recruiters. That means that you’re going to have to put a very attractive offer on the table. It’s worth considering what you really need in terms of engineering talent. Is it worth paying top dollar for the best engineer you can find, or can you accomplish your goals with the second-best? Given that you can offer a more competitive deal when you go a tier or two down, it’s worth considering.

Thursday Bram, Consultant at Hyper Modern Consulting

8) Make Your Company’s Needs Visible

Use several high-quality recruiters to build a really wide funnel. Make your company visible through event sponsorships. Tap the network of the best engineering talent in your city. Add a $5-10K referral fee for anyone who refers an engineer that you hire, and include that offer in your email signature and social media profiles. It’s not just for you, but for all of your current employees to see. Hiring great engineers is like an invasion: you need to go by land, air and sea!

Jordan Fliegel, Founder & CEO at CoachUp, Inc.

The post 8 Secrets for Recruiting Top Engineering Talent; YEC Weighs in appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Everybody is a fan in one way or another, and everybody has their favorite sports team. Thanks to season-long data, we are privy to what sports team reigns supreme, but it raises an important question: how do we evaluate the sports fans?

In the hopes of settling an age-old debate, Will Coatney and Hunter Browning have released their flagship app, Fannect. Through its own comprehensive scoring system, Fannect determines who the #1 fan for your personal favorite team is and what teams have the best overall fan base.

“Fans play just as big of a role as the actual players do,” says Coatney. “Now they have a chance to find out who the best among them really are.”

Passion, dedication, and knowledge – gameface, attendance streaks, and score guessing, respectively – are the criteria that can carry a user from zero to hero. All of the points accrued over the course of events are added to your user profile and overall score at the end of each match.

Gameface is a status notification of sorts that lets the Fannect community know you are pumped up and ready for game day. If activated before face, kick, or tipoff, it adds one point to a user’s overall score. Users who physically go to sporting events and check in at the stadium get an automatic 10 points. If you are able to go on a streak and hit multiple games in succession, your score increases accordingly. Getting to an away game while on a streak provides big-time bonuses.

Score guessing is all about nailing the point differential between teams. The closer you guess to the actual score, the more points you get. The points awarded vary per sports league, but offer a tremendous upside for the more studied fan.

Fannect offers other features like photo competitions for best game day photo or spirit wear. The team recognizes that the trend among popular sports apps is that they focus primarily on aggregating news and scores, while Fannect brings the fans into the mix. The competition is fierce, but there is also a viable social network built in.

Users across America can network to discuss topics like player acquisitions, draft strategies, or playoff schedules. Additionally, users can connect with fans locally and nationally to tailgate, go to games, and stand toe to toe against other fan bases.

Athletes have stadiums, and now fans have their arena via Fannect. If you really think you are the top fan, there is only one way to prove it. See you on the field.

Fannect was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Kansas City Mixer & Startup Showcase on May 7th.

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With the emergence of services like Google Offers and Groupon, businesses big, small, and in between are utilizing digital coupons and offers to increase their sales. Tim Rothwell and Brett Berman, cofounders of UMeTime, observed an overlooked gap in this industry trend. How can business owners use couponing services to acquire new customers and increase business at specific times, in real-time – when they need them? UMeTime is a real-time, mobile marketing platform that meets this need.

Let’s face it. With even the most successful business, there are always slow times or days, and there is always extra inventory. UMeTime allows businesses to utilize controlled coupons and offers to acquire new customers during down, or slow, hours and sell extra inventory. The deals and offers can only be redeemed and used in physical store locations.

Users can search through UMeTime’s coupon database by category, and filter results by distance, most recent, and time remaining. Instead of the traditional method of coupons and offers being sent out to email lists, UMeTime allows deals to be sought out by consumers who are interested, and more likely to retrieve the offer and purchase. Users can also follow businesses through UMeTime to get alerts of their future deals.

Businesses can completely control the timeframe, quantity, and details of the offers. If you own a restaurant and Tuesday’s lunch hours are slow, you can create 10 coupons for a free appetizer per table with the purchase of an entree on Tuesdays between 12:00pm and 2:00pm, that expire in two weeks. All facets of the offer are customizable; UMeTime allows businesses to create as specific of an offer as they want. Businesses can even control their company description, photos, and videos on UMeTime.

When users print out or retrieve offers, UMeTime secures that data for businesses to access and export into an Excel sheet. This will allow businesses to better tailor their offers by analysing the number of views, printouts, and purchases made through UMeTime.

The only downside to UMeTime is that it only covers Austin, Texas. However, as UMeTime grows, it most likely will encompass more areas.

UMeTime was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Austin mixer.

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This spring, Tim Ferriss was obsessed with the movie Bigger, Stronger, Faster, the Athletic Greens superfood cocktail, and something called a Buddha Board. And anyone who subscribed to Ferriss on Quarterly got a shipment of this stuff (and more) for $100.

Quarterly sells quarterly shipments of stuff picked out by influential people. And some of them are from the startup world, from Alexis Ohanion to Chris Guillebeau to the True Ventures team. For their latest package, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm shipped out The Startup Owner’s Manual book, some Blue Bottle Coffee, and cool yellow shades.

Here’s a package from Scott Belsky of Behance:

All boxes come with a letter from the sender about why those items were chosen. It also has a hashtag – like #TF01 or #TRU01 – so recipients can gush on Twitter.

Below, CEO Mitch Lowe talks about the goal of these celebrity-inspired shipments.

Tech Cocktail: Tell me about the inspiration for Quarterly. How did it come about? 

Mitch Lowe: Quarterly came out of the understanding that as exciting as it is to live in a digital world, there are still experiences we have in the physical world that trump any electronic interaction. Even something as simple as receiving a postcard in the mail is more personal and powerful than any text, tweet, or other digital message you might receive.

Tech Cocktail: How did you end up working with entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss, Alexis Ohanion, and Chris Guillebeau?

Lowe: In most cases, we’ve reached out to these people directly and pitched Quarterly on its merits. It’s not for everyone, but the people who get the concept tend to be excited from the start about the possibility of deepening the connection with their fans and followers.

Tech Cocktail: Why might entrepreneurs want to subscribe to people like this? 

Lowe: Part of entrepreneurship is listening and learning from those with experience, and finding ways to be inspired. Quarterly is a great platform for both these things.

Tech Cocktail: How does it feel to subscribe to an influential person’s box? 

Lowe: It’s exciting to have such a personal interaction (or what feels like a personal interaction) with any of these people, in the same way that Twitter allows anyone to feel directly connected to the people they admire. You can almost think of it as a Twitter feed for the physical world, where thoughts and ideas are manifested through physical objects sent in the mail.

The post Quarterly: Get Boxes of Startup Inspiration from Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, & More appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Yesterday, WegoWise raised $3 million in additional funding from Boston Community Capital. The platform helps real estate owners compare energy use and efficiency across their buildings to figure out which ones to upgrade first. WegoWise was started in Boston, previously raised $1.9 million from the same group, and recently added a DC office in 1776.

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No one wants to be in a hospital, whether it’s because of your own health or that of a loved one. They are chilling and intimidating. However, they provide a needed and valuable service that we are all thankful for.

Mike Galbo is the COO and cofounder of the data collection application for hospitals, Aidin. Galbo aims to create a better relationship between hospitals, patients, and post-acute providers to decrease the likelihood of patients being re-admitted into hospitals.

Post-acute care refers to the treatment and care patients receive after being discharged from the hospital for serious or life-threatening conditions. Aidin leverages Medicare data and prior patient experience to provide the best quality of post-acute care for patients. Through Aidin, hospital employees can access quality care ratings and reviews of the specialized and local post-acute providers during the discharge planning process, and share them with patients.

Not only does Aidin’s service provide a solution for patients, Aidin also provides a solution for hospitals. By harnessing data on post-acute care providers and matching patients with the best available care, hospitals cut down on the cost of re-admissions. As of October 2012, hospitals can no longer file for reimbursement for patients that are re-admitted within 30 days with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. With 25 percent of discharged patients that enter post-acute care returning to hospital care within 30 days, Aidin’s solution can save hospitals valuable money that they can use to improve their facility or care quality.

Tech Cocktail asked Mike Galbo about his experience as a startup founder for Aidin.

Tech Cocktail: What trend in the health care industry are you most excited about?

Mike Galbo: In health care, there is so much data being generated but there are few ways to understand this information. I’m excited to see companies sprout up that help consumers and healthcare professionals make sense of it all and provide the tools needed to make improvements.

Tech Cocktail: What keeps you and your team motivated despite the challenges?

Galbo: Everyone on the team is here because we want to improve the quality of care provided by the health care system in America. That mission motivates us on Mondays and often gives us cause to celebrate on Fridays.

Personally, I think about the experiences my cofounders and I have had with loved ones and how much better they could have been if Aidin were around.

Tech Cocktail: What is the biggest advantage, and what is the biggest disadvantage of creating and launching Aidin in New York City?

Galbo: NYC has a great health care community and we’re surrounded by some of the best health care institutions in the world. This has made building a support network for our company much easier than in other cities. Because startups are attracted to NYC though, hiring has become a challenge and you’ve got to really shine if you want to attract the attention of a talented developer.

Aidin was a showcased startup for our Tech Cocktail New York mixer.

The post Aidin Helps Patients Get Treatment After Hospital Visits appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Today, top startup accelerator TechStars announced the launch of its newest program in Texas: TechStars Austin.

Starting in August, a dozen startups will work out of Capital Factory for three months fueled by the traditional TechStars perks, including $18,000 in seed funding and a $100,000 convertible note.

It’s not a surprise that TechStars chose Austin as its next destination. It’s the home of the SXSW festival and the second city to get lightning-speed Internet with Google Fiber. As we’ve seen at our Austin events, the city is simmering with startup activity.

“TechStars exists to put the best mentors and the best entrepreneurs together in the best startup communities so Austin is a natural next stop for us,” wrote founder David Cohen.

This is the seventh city for TechStars, which added Chicago and London just this February. TechStars also runs the nearby TechStars Cloud program in San Antonio. The managing director of TechStars Cloud, Jason Seats, will be moving over to Austin to manage the new program.

Applications for TechStars Austin open today – apply here.

The post Say Howdy to TechStars Austin appeared first on Tech Cocktail

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Do you sell on auction sites like eBay or Amazon? Like money, but hate shipping?  Me too!

ShipHawk provides packing, shipping, insurance, and residential or commercial pickup services for shipments of any size.  “You can overnight a letter, or ship an earthmover, in less than three minutes from the comfort of your living room,” says Bodenhamer, the company’s CEO.

How it works:  Users start by selecting the item(s) they want to ship from the ShipHawk database, and the application converts the item(s) into packed weights and dimensions. The service has a unique feature in that it allows any party to control the shipping transaction.  For example, a customer in California can schedule pickup, packing, and shipping for an item in New York.  This is a much needed service for online auction and classified listings like eBay Amazon, and Craigslist.

You can check out ShipHawk for yourself, and get an instant quote, on their website.

The post Shiphawk Offers Headache-Free Shipping appeared first on Tech Cocktail

Whether it is for the office quarterly review meeting, or a 4th of July bash, choosing and organizing an event’s catering is one more pain that you could do without. Chris Collins and Carly Chamberlain created CaterCow to provide a marketplace for consumers in need of catering to discover and order the perfect catering solution from over 400 caters.

CaterCow standardizes pricing, display, delivery, and communication for users, getting rid of the hectic search for, and phonetag with, caterers. Unlike competitors that specialize in high-end catering or corporate catering and use bidding models, CaterCow is for every catering need on the spectrum and uses a search-based model because, well, bidding for caterers is also frustrating.

Tech Cocktail asked cofounder Chris Collins about CaterCow and launching a startup.

Tech Cocktail: In the length of a tweet (140 characters), tell us why we should use CaterCow.

Chris Collins: CaterCow has awesome food. You’re hungry, I know it.

Tech Cocktail: What is the weirdest event that was catered through CaterCow?

Collins: A user ordered a caterer for Canadian Thanksgiving. Who knew that Canadians had their own Thanksgiving?

Tech Cocktail: What is the most encouraging sign of success with CaterCow?

Collins: We keep a huge whiteboard full of positive quotes people say about our company. The whiteboard is currently full. That, and revenue growth.

Tech Cocktail: What is the biggest advantage and biggest disadvantage of being based in New York City?

Collins: There are an amazing variety of businesses that need catering, from small startups to huge law firms. There is also such a huge and delicious food scene that ensures we have lots of good supply. The biggest disadvantage is that New York lacks beautiful nature. I think being able to easily disconnect and head into the woods is one of San Francisco’s biggest advantages for starting a company.

Tech Cocktail: What is your long-term, big vision?

Collins: Every purchase will happen directly from a manufacturer or supplier, facilitated by a trusted third party.

Tech Cocktail: What personality trait has served you best as an entrepreneur?

Collins: Being stubborn. Every day there are opportunities for a sane person to quit, but we refuse to give up.

Tech Cocktail: If you had an extra $1,000 to spend on marketing, how would you spend it?

Collins: There is a large cow statue for sale in Brooklyn Heights that we would buy and make the official CaterCow mascot.

Tech Cocktail: What is a quirky fact about you, your team, or CaterCow?

Collins: The cofounders are dating and this is their second company [after Airbnb] together!

CaterCow was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail New York mixer.

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SMS messaging has been the cornerstone of cell phones since before they were smartphones. Anthony Nguyen, founder of Locotext, posed a question to himself one day though: Why has nobody innovated around traditional SMS messaging? What about geo SMS?

“My initial thoughts lead me to really dig into geo-sensing technology,” says Nguyen. “I thought it would be perfect if I could create a geo-SMS app.”

From question to idea to product, Locotext grew into a geo-communications app that lets users communicate using the native GPS in their smartphones. Nguyen has taken SMS and GPS and mashed them together to give the world a whole new way to send messages.

The idea here is to make it quick and easy to create a geo-SMS message. Users input any recipient, regardless of whether they use Locotext or not, and compose a message. Then they set up a geo-fence, a virtual perimeter, around the location they want the message to be triggered from.

When the user enters the geo fence, the message is triggered and sent. It is the sender’s location that triggers the SMS, not the recipient’s location.

Traditional location-based data fails to pinpoint exact locations of users because it operates via non-GPS sources like zip codes or IP addresses. Since Locotext can pinpoint the precise location of the smartphone, there is no fear of misleading location-based targeting.

“I designed Locotext as a Swiss Army Knife,” explains Nguyen. “It was not designed specifically for any one demographic or function.”

Locotext serves a diverse group of users, specifically those who want to use SMS messaging with the added power of location. For example, people can build ongoing grocery lists and have them sent to their smartphone when they get to the store.

Parents who want to keep a close eye on their sneaky, Twilight-obsessed teen can set up a geo-fence around their house that will trigger a message from the child whenever they leave or get home. Sorry, kids.

Businesses can have a special offer sent to any customer that walks through their geo-fence, so long as they have a smartphone. It is instantaneous marketing in action.

Nguyen has already released Locotext for Android, and he expects the iOS version to be out later this summer.

“The context for all of this comes down to location first,” says Nguyen. “GPS is one of the most impressive features of a smartphone – I want to take it to the next level.”

Locotext was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Austin Mixer & Startup Showcase this past April. 

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On Friday, downtown Las Vegas saw four great speakers at the Downtown Construction Zone as part of Tech Cocktail Week.  This edition of Tech Cocktail Sessions was the highlight of day three of the four days of events put on by Tech Cocktail and the Downtown Project that brought 30+ technology startup founders, investors, press, and luminaries to downtown Las Vegas.

First up was serial entrepreneur, mentor, and investor Ariel Poler, the creator of an early web analytics company. He shared some of the lessons he’d learned in over 20 years of working on the web.  Some of my favorites were that speed is overrated, and that it’s more important to have good execution. Additionally, he talked about how success rarely ever happens overnight, and that it really takes years. At the very end, he talked about how he’d evolved as a parent. Every day he teaches his children something new and writes about it on a blog he created.

Second, we had Dashboard founder and 500 Startups venture partner Paul Singh talk about the evolution of private markets. Early in his career, he became fascinated by how you track private companies. He shared how, in the 1950s, the average stock was being held for six years; in the 2000s, it was 6 months; and now it’s six minutes. Trading is becoming electronic and much easier. It’s more accessible to everyone.  With easier access to trading, that means there are more investors and more money being traded. Plus with the web, there’s more information about what’s happening in the private markets. Soon, you’ll see more public trading in private markets. Paul calls it the “rise of the angels.”

Next up was Rich Winley. He’s the founder and CEO of the startup No Chains. They develop apps that help promote the patronage of non-chain restaurants. His talk was entitled “Who the F is that?” He talked about the importance of not replacing in-person communication with social media. Winley emphasized how “social media isn’t a replacement. It’s an enhancement.” Later, he mentioned how “serendipity doesn’t happen unless you open your mouth.”

Last up was our keynoter Ali Partovi. He was the cofounder of LinkExchange (with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh) and the cofounder and CEO of iLike. He’s now a prominent startup investor. He talked about the “Silicon Valley Gospel.” This isn’t Silicon Valley, the place; he was talking about Silicon Valley, the idea. It’s the idea of embracing risk. He talked about the importance of hiring and investing in great people. Lastly, he talked about how great investors are like children. They question everything. They question the status quo.

It was a fantastic event.  We can’t wait to host Tech Cocktail Sessions in Downtown Las Vegas again next month, where there will be another set of great speakers.

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Would you buy your employees a latte every month?

If so, you can afford AnyPerk. That’s probably why over 2,500 companies – including Pinterest, Hulu, Pandora, and Quora – have signed their team up for perks in fitness, entertainment, travel, and technology.

If you’re wondering about the quality of the perks, look no further than the phone deals. AnyPerk has partnered with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to offer 10 to 15 percent discounts on monthly plans, so your employees will easily save over $5 per month.

AnyPerk, who graduated from Y Combinator last year, offers such a cheap service to help out smaller companies. Traditionally, big corporations are able to negotiate perk-deals because of their sheer size – the number of employees who will be exposed to the brand. Instead, AnyPerk aggregates lots of little companies together and then has some bargaining power. Unlike daily deal sites, all of its discounts have no expiration date.

“We want to provide great perks and high-qualty perks to any size company. We don’t think it’s right that only big companies can get those great perks,” says cofounder and CEO Taro Fukuyama.

In turn, these perks should help startups retain employees. Fukuyama moved to Silicon Valley from Japan, where the hiring environment was less competitive and most of the perks offered were just hotel discounts that employees used a few times a year. But in the Valley, the war over talent is on: everyone caters lunches, he says, and he even heard of a startup that pays half of employees’ rent.

Betterworks, a Los Angeles company that was offering perks, had to shut down last year despite having raised $10.5 million. But AnyPerk has a key difference: instead of focusing on local deals, which require negotiating with tons of local vendors, they work with national and international companies. That also means that their platform can be used around the world.

“That’s how you tell your employees: we think you’re important,” says Fukuyama.

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Foodem, a DC-based startup and marketplace for wholesale food, yesterday announced $600,000 in angel funding and launched a new version. Their platform allows distributors to compare prices, order food, and use analytics and marketing tools. Panacea Capital Advisors and angel Brian Gaister participated in the funding.

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Pittsburgh accelerator AlphaLab is holding its tenth demo day today. Seven startups, who got $25,000 in funding, 20 weeks of mentorship, and office space, will be pitching their products onstage to an audience of press and investors.

The event also includes a “university preview,” with demos by technologies coming out of Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and Duquesne.

Here are the presenting startups:

• SolePower: Shoe insoles that generate power from walking and can charge devices like your smartphone. Launching a Kickstarter campaign today. Cofounded by Matthew Stanton and Hahna Alexander.
• Workshirt: Creators of Photailer, an app for requesting stock photography, and HitchedPic, a wedding photo app. Founded by Matthew Pegula and Dimitry Bentsionov.
• Digital Dream Labs: An educational game for children where, instead of controlling the characters by swiping your tablet, you place physical pieces on a board (representing actions) and the character follows them, almost like programming. Kids can participate in a pilot program running from August to December. Cofounded by entertainment technologists Matt Stewart and Justin Sabo, and game designer Peter Kinney.
• Woo with Style: Fashion shopping for men that analyzes your preferences and serves up links to clothes you should buy.
• NetBeez: A network-monitoring tool that simulates user interactions to catch any errors before real users are impacted.
• PoweredAnalytics: A faster, cloud-based platform for predictive analytics.
• Meaningfy: Business intelligence for sales and marketing, including analysis of trends. Founded by Andre Lessa.

Demo day will be livestreamed here at 3:30 pm ET.

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Locating quality startups in San Francisco is like spotting bees in a hive.  Doesn’t take long.  Finding an event that combines more than a dozen of these startups, a few hundred of your best techno-friends, and cocktails- requires a bit more good fortune.  Well you’re in luck- because on May 22nd Tech Cocktail is bringing the Mixer parade to Jillian’s San Francisco.

- Register for the Event Here - 

We’ll have a dozen up-and-coming startups on hand showcasing their goods, but before the event kicks off, we want to know what you think - who is San Francisco’s Hottest Showcasing Startup?  Let us know your thoughts by answering the poll at the end of this post (ends at 6:00pm local time on the day of the event – cheaters will be disqualified).

The winner will be announced live at the event and will receive a couple additional minutes on stage to pitch their startup in front of all attendees, invitation to an upcoming Tech Cocktail Week, as well as the honor of being recognized as SF’s Hottest Showcasing Startup.  Don’t miss out.

The Startups

• Blacklist - Blacklist.co empowers consumers to react and impact by Blacklisting brands & products they dislike or had a bad experience with. It’s the “Digital megaphone” for people to get heard by leveraging their voice and extending their reach across the web
• Chartio - The problem today is there a lack of easy accessibility to data, there is no ability to explore and immerse yourself in company data and there are giant technical, communication and time obstacles in gaining information from your company data . Chartio solves this problem by creating an easy way to plug into your databases and an easy to use dashboard for exploring data for technical and non-technical people alike.
• Driveway Software - Driveway Software has developed an application capable of monitoring driving style by using the driver’s own smartphone (iPhone or Android) and provides an accurate driving score on par with existing hardware used for similar purposes.
• instaGrok - Internet research is too hard, so instaGrok helps people make sense of information. Users explore graphical concept maps that show how ideas connect. They can also customize the maps (with key facts, links, and images) and share them with friends.
• The Mad Video - The Mad Video is an online platform that helps video publishers to easily convert their videos into interactive experiences, just by tagging any element (products, pleople, places, …) appearing in the video. Video viewers have just to rollover the video to interact with this tagged elements to buy products, share info or get access to pages with further info.
• Mavatar - Mavatar is a smart shopping cart that will automatically apply all coupons available so you get the best deal. It also lets you shop at your favorite stores using just one cart, keeping you organized while shopping online. It is currently available as a free app for iPad and web browsers.
• mYwindow - mYwindow is a self network to live the most important parts of your life on the internet, which we believe is Your identity , Your Passion & Your Family.  Our only focus is to let users live their lives on internet amazingly at one place.
• Nifty - Nifty is a mobile-centric, social marketplace, where users give and trade items with people they know, donate to charities, sell “benefit” items to other people, with charities as the beneficiary and charities, advertise needs, accept donations and promote “benefit” items.
• Open Garden - Open Garden is a San Francisco-based startup dedicated to bringing Internet to every device, every person, and every location by sharing and crowdsourcing connectivity. Open Garden seamlessly interconnects nearby smartphones, computers, and tablets to form a mesh network.
• PivotDesk - PivotDesk removes the pain of finding space by matching companies who have excess space with startups who need room to grow their business. Our online dashboard and management tools make it incredibly simple to handle payments, legal docs and all of the other details that go along with office sharing.
• Plasmapage - Plasmapage  is an online service that help any designer to convert a InDesign catalogue or book into a digital and interactive solutions without writing a line of code. In fact with Plasmapage you can convert any InDesign file (it’s independent of InDesign version) in web, desktop or mobile application and distribute it in a while.
• Second Light - Second Light is building a platform where we use big data to improve eldercare. The family can see what is happening with their elder parents. The elder people can track their life and connect with others.
• Sooligan - Sooligan provides a real-time social search platform where users can find and share opinions regarding daily local experiences in any city. Users leave up-to-second RAVES and RANTS about every aspect of their daily lives— from the weather, to traffic, to classes, restaurants and local businesses, or football games.

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]]> http://tech.co/who-is-san-franciscos-hottest-showcasing-startup-poll-4-2013-05/feed 0 http://tech.co/who-is-san-franciscos-hottest-showcasing-startup-poll-4-2013-05 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechCocktail/~3/bLjyfnIXzsE/see-high-quality-pictures-of-local-restaurants-and-earn-rewards-with-goodybag-2013-05 http://tech.co/see-high-quality-pictures-of-local-restaurants-and-earn-rewards-with-goodybag-2013-05#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 21:00:54 +0000 Tom Krulikowski http://tech.co/?p=71264


You are out to eat. Since you don’t get to go out very often, it’s somewhat of a special occasion. You are feeling adventurous, even. You do not just want to order your “usual” or something you could whip up at home if you were so inclined. But after looking over the menu, the entree descriptions fail...

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You are out to eat. Since you don’t get to go out very often, it’s somewhat of a special occasion. You are feeling adventurous, even. You do not just want to order your “usual” or something you could whip up at home if you were so inclined. But after looking over the menu, the entree descriptions fail to excite your bold taste buds. Instead, you stick to something safe, your usual.

I am the same way. Reading off the menu, dishes don’t have the same flare that I expect if I am going to “go off board” and try something new. That is, until I flip on an episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.

Forget Guy Fieri – the real star of the show is the food. Every dish that Fieri introduces in the show is far from the “usual.” I hear Fieri describe the dish and think to myself, “I don’t think I would ever try that!” But lo and behold, when the final product is served to the TV cameras, my mouth waters. Words can’t describe a succulent entree like your eyes can.

Goodybag gets that. That is why they have changed the way foodies in Austin, Texas, dine.

Goodybag is a mobile application that lets users discover and explore full menus of Austin restaurants. Their digital menu features high-quality photos of every offering on the menu, so your taste buds can stop reading between the lines of dish descriptions and, instead, visualize the first bite.

Goodybag hopes by using their application, it won’t just leave your taste buds and eyes thanking you. With a built-in reward system, Goodybag gives users’ wallets a break as well. TapIn with your Goodybag keycard to earn rewards.

In similar fashion to the punch-per-purchase system that restaurants have traditionally used through paper punchcards, Goodybag creates a digital rewards system that syncs directly to your Goodybag profile. The digital punchcards allow users to easily store and easily redeem their rewards.

Goodybag knows what our tastebuds have always known: you need to see it to believe it. With digital, high-quality picture menus on Goodybag, users can see the dish before they order it. Making their mouth water in a way that menu descriptions fail to do.

Be warned of possible side effects of Goodybag. Users have reported experiencing eyes being bigger than their stomachs.

Goodybag was a showcased startup at our Tech Cocktail Austin mixer.

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]]> http://tech.co/see-high-quality-pictures-of-local-restaurants-and-earn-rewards-with-goodybag-2013-05/feed 0 http://tech.co/see-high-quality-pictures-of-local-restaurants-and-earn-rewards-with-goodybag-2013-05 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechCocktail/~3/1cjHZZlQzbE/netcamps-streamlining-camp-administration-to-help-coaches-2013-05 http://tech.co/netcamps-streamlining-camp-administration-to-help-coaches-2013-05#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 19:00:33 +0000 Malcolm Hong http://tech.co/?p=71207


Through his experience as a staff member at an NCAA Division 1 University, Chris Chattin saw the challenges from dealing with thousands of pieces of paperwork, scattered payments, and complicated records. He felt there was a better way to manage camp administration, which is why he founded NetCamps. Clients who sign up for NetCamps are...

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Through his experience as a staff member at an NCAA Division 1 University, Chris Chattin saw the challenges from dealing with thousands of pieces of paperwork, scattered payments, and complicated records. He felt there was a better way to manage camp administration, which is why he founded NetCamps.

Clients who sign up for NetCamps are given a free website with hosting and domain registration included at no charge. Clients are able to customize their website with logos, colors, and other branded materials. To help clients promote their website, NetCamps integrates with social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If the client already has an existing website, NetCamps integrates its registration forms seamlessly with the existing website.



NetCamps manages the entire registration process online, including sign up forms, payments, and liability waivers. Personal information is kept private, encrypted and backed up daily. NetCamps can track registration in real time, send reminder emails, and allow clients to easily export registration data to a spreadsheet. The website also provides secure payment processing and covers the cost of security scans, merchant account setup, and monthly fees.

What differentiates NetCamps from its competitors is that the system is less expensive, money flows directly to the coach, and it allows camp organizers to easily make changes to their custom website. Also, no long-term contracts are required for coaches who sign up for NetCamps. Finally, if your camp is free, NetCamps provides its services at no cost.

Through streamlining the administrative tasks of organizing a camp, NetCamps ultimately allows coaches and event organizers to spend more time running the camp and improving their program. Their list of clients – or rather, list of “happy campers” – includes Axiom, Boise State University and NFL camps Gridiron Dreams and PatrickPeterson’s Skills Camp.

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]]> http://tech.co/netcamps-streamlining-camp-administration-to-help-coaches-2013-05/feed 0 http://tech.co/netcamps-streamlining-camp-administration-to-help-coaches-2013-05 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechCocktail/~3/Of8J-uRNCsY/aumanil-social-gaming-data-2013-05 http://tech.co/aumanil-social-gaming-data-2013-05#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 18:00:40 +0000 Will Schmidt http://tech.co/?p=71147


Bart Bohn founded AuManil to assist the $40 billion online games market by collecting social gaming data to reduce whale churn, increase whale conversion, improve whale acquisition, and managing whales across a portfolio of games. In the gaming world, “whales” are big money spenders and fanatical users. However, the specific social gaming data regarding these...

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Bart Bohn founded AuManil to assist the $40 billion online games market by collecting social gaming data to reduce whale churn, increase whale conversion, improve whale acquisition, and managing whales across a portfolio of games.

In the gaming world, “whales” are big money spenders and fanatical users. However, the specific social gaming data regarding these whales about churn, conversion, and acquisition – players leaving, benefiting, and joining a game, respectively – are subjective per company and game.

AuManil uses advanced analytics and predictive models to identify top customers at risk of attrition, customers who are likely to buy more in game products, and behavioral profiles for your customers.

Below, Bohn explains why this is all so critical.

Tech Cocktail: What exactly does AuManil do for companies?

Barth Bohn: We have data scientists that analyze an individual player’s social gaming data, the play and financial behavior, in order to predict lifetime value, churn risk, and life cycle patterns.

Mobile, MMO, social, browser, casual, and desktop games are increasingly using the free-to-play revenue model. This leads to extreme revenue concentration: less than one percent of players generating 50+ percent of revenue.

Marketing teams lack the data and analytics infrastructure to monitor the game population and proactively engage financially and socially valued players. This is important because they need this data in order to improve lifetime value and the average revenue per user.

AuManil provides a vertically integrated solution by abstracting the underlying big data stack and machine learning capabilities while integrating with marketing workflows and tools.

Tech Cocktail: Specifically, who uses your service?

Bohn: In-game community managers, mostly. They use AuManil to collect large portions of data so that they may send targeted, personalized incentives to at-risk players. That is, players who are on the cusp of leaving the game world.

For example, one community manager decided to send a seven-day Energy Boost to one thousand of their whales identified as critical risks for churning. Put another way, they gave special in-game privileges to a large amount of power users, the ones who pay the most, but are considering leaving.

The players that were targeted ended up with a 30 percent higher retention rate and a 70 percent higher spend rate when compared to non-targeted players over a four-week period.

Tech Cocktail: Is this all part of a larger trend?

Bohn: Yes, most definitely. This is a big step in personal, one-on-one marketing and customer engagement. Historically, customers have been driven by macro, demographic criteria, but we are now able to begin to understand individual customers.

We can proactively engage each player at precisely the right moment, through the proper channels, and with the right message.

AuManil was featured at Tech Cocktail’s Austin Mixer & Startup Showcase this past April.

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]]> http://tech.co/aumanil-social-gaming-data-2013-05/feed 0 http://tech.co/aumanil-social-gaming-data-2013-05 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechCocktail/~3/FVeffjS9aoQ/skip-the-resumes-with-unrabble-2013-05 http://tech.co/skip-the-resumes-with-unrabble-2013-05#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 17:00:03 +0000 Heather Huhman http://tech.co/?p=71189


If you’re a small- or mid-sized business, you how daunting it can be to search through hundreds of resumes for an open position. There’s not enough time to devote to the hiring process with so many other responsibilities. After a while, everything starts to look the same, and it gets more difficult to tell who...

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If you’re a small- or mid-sized business, you how daunting it can be to search through hundreds of resumes for an open position. There’s not enough time to devote to the hiring process with so many other responsibilities. After a while, everything starts to look the same, and it gets more difficult to tell who is right for the job.

Unrabble is a site designed to make hiring decisions easier for the business with limited staff, time, or background in human resources. It allows you to “find the gems amongst the rabble,” quickly and effectively.

Unrabble isn’t regimented HR software or a modified version of a job board. It is a new take on hiring that saves time by automating core hiring tasks. The site improves your ability to make decisions by replacing endless resumes with measurable criteria.

It’s easy to get started. You can set up an account and start posting in just a few minutes. All you need to do is fill out a basic company profile, write a job description, and paste your unique Unrabble URL on any job board.

Once candidates begin applying for your position, their application is converted on Unrabble’s Candidate Profiles, providing you with objective, measurable information. It scans resumes for you and ranks candidates based on the skills you assign as most valuable, bringing top candidates right to your attention. The site also verifies candidates’ honesty through social networks.

After your candidates are ranked, Unrabble allows you to easily collaborate with your colleagues in the decision process. It also highlights candidates you’re connected to on LinkedIn.

In a small- or mid-sized business, hiring cannot take up all of your time. Unrabble simplifies the process by eliminating resumes and allows you to make decisions easier.

To get started now, try Unrabble free for one month with no commitment. After that, the service starts at $29/month.

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]]> http://tech.co/skip-the-resumes-with-unrabble-2013-05/feed 0 http://tech.co/skip-the-resumes-with-unrabble-2013-05 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechCocktail/~3/bGYmqOZs2L8/mark-sisson-interview-2013-05 http://tech.co/mark-sisson-interview-2013-05#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 15:00:51 +0000 Zach Davis http://tech.co/?p=70679


This post is part of Tech Cocktail’s “Healthy Entrepreneur” series, bringing you insights on food, exercise, and sleep on Mondays and Wednesdays throughout May. The series is presented by Coromega (more info and a giveaway at the bottom). Although the meaning of health may vary person to person, there would likely be consensus of good health around...

The post How Going Primal Will Make You a Better Entrepreneur: An Interview with Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple appeared first on Tech Cocktail

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This post is part of Tech Cocktail’s “Healthy Entrepreneur” series, bringing you insights on food, exercise, and sleep on Mondays and Wednesdays throughout May. The series is presented by Coromega (more info and a giveaway at the bottom).

Although the meaning of health may vary person to person, there would likely be consensus of good health around anyone capable of finishing in the top 5 at a U.S. National Marathon Championship.  Not only is this person lean (appeasing the aesthetic of good health) but so too are they spry enough to engage in an elite level of athletic performance (clearly the motor works).  But for Mark Sisson, elite fitness didn’t translate to what he considered good health.



Sisson, at the Boston Marathon in 1974.

After battling various running-related injuries, Sisson retired from running at an elite level, transitioned to triathlons- eventually giving that up as well. “I developed debilitating osteoarthritis in my ankles…at age 28. This was soon coupled with chronic hip tendonitis and nagging recurrent upper respiratory tract infections,” says Sisson in his “Case Against Cardio“.  Sisson knew he needed a new approach.

In addition to eliminating endurance sports, Sisson began eliminating certain foods once considered staples of his diet (he explains in depth in our interview below), which he credits to being “life changing”.  Not only did Sisson’s arthritis and tendonitis clear up, so too did a host of other issues including a lifelong battle with IBS and heart burn.  A new lifestyle based on old (or “Primal”) behaviors was born.

Today Sisson runs an immensely popular health website, Mark’s Daily Apple (top 3,000 website in the US), and is the author of several books including the best selling The Primal Blueprint, based on knowledge gleaned from evolutionary biology and supplemented with recent scientific findings on exercise and nutrition.

I caught up with Sisson to learn more about this Primal way of life and how it can benefit entrepreneurs.  Our conversation is below, with the transcript highlights beneath.

3 Weeks Primal

“We talk about a lot about how our ability to access good health comes as a result of our recognition that we can affect gene expression.  We can turn on genes that build muscle.  We can increase the amount of stored body fat that we burn.  We turn off the genes that cause inflammation.  We do that through some alterations in the diet.  Much of that happens through what we call ancestral eating patterns that would be emulating kind of what the hunter-gatherers for two and a half million years of evolution ate.

Clearly there’s some adaptations that our food systems, the delivery systems of produce in our daily life are slightly different than having to go out and hunt and gather this stuff.  Nevertheless, there are ways we can eliminate some foods that we used to eat and add in other foods.  Typically, in order to affect this gene expression, it takes about 21 days for the body to get the signals right and to start to up-regulate certain enzymes systems that are involved metabolizing and burning body fat and down-regulate those systems that are involved in creating inflammation or trending toward type 2 diabetes.  So we suggest that anybody take a 21 day approach.  If you’ve read the research we’ve provided and you’re of the opinion that this is potentially a great way to regain control of your own health, you can  get a lot accomplished in 21 days, hence the 21 day total body transformation challenge.”

Which Foods to Eliminate

“You should get rid of as much sugar as possible.  Not just the candy, the cookies, and the treats, but also people tend to drink a lot of sugar in the form of beverages.  Get rid of the sodas, pops, and sweet beverages – even the sweetened teas.

We’re pretty big on eliminating grains.  Grains are a very cheap source of calories that convert to glucose pretty readily in your blood stream.  They convert to sugar pretty easily.  They contain a fair number of what we call anti-nutrients, things that interfere with health.  Whether it’s the gluten that so many people are familiar with that cause sensitivities.  Or the phytates that bind up the minerals that we otherwise want to be absorbing.  Other lectins that might be causing gut inflammation and gut issues.  Getting rid of the grains is a big one.

Finally, it’s getting rid of the industrial seed oils.  The soybean oils, corn oils, sunflower, safflower, all the pressed oils that people 20 years ago were touting as heart healthy.  In fact, it turns out it was the exact opposite.”

…Foods to Favor

“Start adding back in healthy fats.  Butter is a great fat.  Avocado, macadamia nuts, extra virgin olive oil are great fats.  Fish and grass-fed beef and meats, pastured animals.  Eggs, meat, fish, and fowl.  We’re a big fan of eating vegetables as well.  We’re in alignment with a lot of other eating strategies.  It’s the elimination of the grains that is one of the big issues.”

On Adding Butter and Coconut Oil to Coffee



Mark Sisson

“Dave’s (Dave Asprey) a biohacker.  He hacks the body.  Anyway you say that, it just doesn’t sound right, does it?  He’s always looking for shortcuts that actually get even deeper into the modern science.  His Bulletproof Coffee concept which is loading coffee up with fat, there’s some research behind that that would suggest he’s not crazy.  In particular, with my coffee, I just like coffee.  I don’t want load it up with a bunch of other macronutrients when I would probably enjoy those macronutrients one bite at a time, 20 chews a piece, because I really enjoy my food.  I don’t see that necessarily as a way that I would choose to start my day off but the science does not suggest that he’s crazy.  The point is that we’re trying to train our bodies to burn fat.  Loading up coffee with fat is one way to do that, it’s one way to start your day with an ergogenic boost from a caffeine and start to stimulate the processing of free fatty acids throughout the body.  On the other hand, I like to start my day with a cup of coffee that doesn’t have that much in the way of calories.  And then I don’t eat until 1pm in the afternoon.  I do what we call a compressed eating window.  I become so good at accessing my stored body fat that I don’t need breakfast.  I don’t wake up hungry for breakfast.  My blood sugar hasn’t dropped.  My mental capacity and functioning doesn’t suffer as a result of my not eating breakfast.  One of the things that we do  with my strategy which is called the Primal Blueprint is to say “when you’re hungry, eat.  When you’re not hungry, don’t force yourself to eat.”  You’re good at accessing your own body fat stores, and that’s a good thing.”

Tips for Those Who Don’t Have Time To Cook or Extensive Budget

“On a bet I could go into just about any restaurant in any city in this country and put together a meal that would satisfy me and satisfy certain basic requirements of what would be paleo or primal.  A good example would be Chipotle to go get a primal meal for not a lot of money.   It’s not a question of when I’m on the road all bets are off.  It’s a question of becoming a mindful eater and a modern forager, learning how to forage off a menu.  It starts at home, so when you’re home you can prepare those meals. The beef need not be grass-fed, it’s not a deal breaker.  A cut of meat that you buy at Costco that is hormone and anti-biotic free is still a much better choice than a bowl of spaghetti, for instance.

Which gets to this issue that it’s really the choices we’re making are on a spectrum of best to worst.  What I try to do with Mark’s Daily Apple is kind of nudge people in the direction of better choices.  There’s no right or wrong here, but you’re probably going to have a better outcome.  You’re probably going to trend toward your ideal body composition and better even level of energy throughout the day.

For a lot of road warriors and entrepreneurs that energy level is huge.  You don’t want to show up in a meeting and drag ass.  You want to be fresh, ready to go, on, alert and responsive.  One of the benefits of this eating strategy is that you can have access to that mental faculties all the time regardless of whether or not you’ve just eaten.

You can fly across country and they don’t serve a meal on the plane, your choice is to down eight bags of crappy pretzels or just be confident that I’m able to access my stored body fat and it won’t affect my temperament, mood, productivity, I’m good to go.  That’s one of the great benefits of this is it gives you this great sense of confidence.

On Gender Differences

“There are tweaks I would make based on sex.  It’s a fair analysis to suggest that it works quicker and more obviously a greater number of men than women.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s not working on for women.  One of the first things people use as an evaluation is “okay did I lose a lot of weight that I was trying to lose on this paleo/primal eating strategy?”.  Typically what we see is that men respond incrementally faster and maybe better- half of our success stories on our site are before and after pictures of women who’ve lost 50, 75, or 100 lbs. so it’s not like it doesn’t happen, but on balance women and men have hormonal differences.

Women, if they’re trying a primal strategy and they’re stuck at a particular weight, they have to recognize that their bodies decide what the ideal body composition, not your looking at the cover of Victoria’s Secret and says, “okay that’s what.”  Ideal body composition is where your body is healthy, it doesn’t get sick, it has all the energy it needs, it doesn’t take a lot to maintain that weight, and in many cases that may be a few percentage points of body fat higher than the particular woman would like to see.  That’s gotta be okay because we do this first for health.  As an entrepreneur, or mother, or wife, I want  first and foremost to be healthy.  The looking good naked part comes later as an added benefit.  Once you’ve got your health dialed in, and you can say your health is great, and your IBS cleared up or polycystic ovarian syndrome went away, or my type two diabetes is gone.  Whatever it is.  Maybe the next step is okay, “now maybe I do want to drop a couple extra percentage points of body fat”.  That’s the point at which we say okay, now we have to start looking at caloric intake, energy usage, the types of workouts you’re doing.  Those are the kind of tweaks we can make and they’re completely doable.  It does speak to the fact that at some point the distinction between men and women and their response to this paleo eating probably is somewhat dependent on the hormal system that define maleness and femaleness.”

On the Primal Lifestyle

“The most profound initial changes in health come from changing a crappy diet into a primal diet.  Beyond that, if you don’t get enough sleep, for instance, you will negatively impact your progress toward getting healthy, and potentially negatively impact your  ability to lose unwanted stored body fat.  If you  don’t get enough sun exposure you won’t produce vitamin D in the appropriate quantities that will assist you in overcoming exposure on a daily basis to germs and foreign invaders.  Vitamin D is critical to your immune system.

I talk in The Primal Connection about the irony that we’ve built ourselves such a sterile world, that everything is sanitized and washed and overly scrutinized for its germ content, when in fact our the DNA recipes that we each hold expect us to come in  contact with germs on a daily basis to train the immune system to be good at what it does so when a true pathological onslaught happens the immune system knows how to handle it.

Ironically, up until a few hundred years ago, every bite we of food we ate contained dirt, which we populated our guts with healthy bacteria – and unhealthy bacteria, but mostly healthy – 50 trillion bacteria that reside as tenants in our bodies are working on our behalf to make sure that we stay healthy and combat disease and help us digest food.  I suggest that people take some form of probiotic or cultured food on a daily basis to help us repopulate the gut with healthy bacteria which are otherwise becoming sterile.  With a lack of healthy bacteria, we have a plethora of unhealthy bacteria in our guts that are taking over and causing disease.

I also talk in the book that the brain is wired to hear nature.  There’s certain wavelengths and decibel levels and frequencies of sounds of birds chirping and water crashing on the waves or babbling brook, that our brains are wired to hear and create a sense of calm.  Yet here we are walking down a busy street with jackhammers and cranes overhead, and taxi cabs honking, and sirens going off, and it creates this very stressful environment that we’ve created for ourselves, but we have to simply acknowledge that it exists and take steps to mitigate the damage from this disconnect.

Tips for Entrepreneurs to Live Primal

“You can install certain programs (F.lux) on your computer so when the sun goes down naturally around you, the computer turns from the typical blue light to more of a yellow light, which still allows you to work on the computer, but doesn’t interfere with the onset of melatonin, which is the hormone that allows you to go to sleep  at night.  If you’re pulling all nighters, you may not want that.  For people that work late into the night, say 8, 9 , 10 o’clock, that’s a way  to continue some work and when you do retire it doesn’t take that long for your system to adapt and for the melatonin to do its job and put you to sleep in a timely fashion.

Have a bunch of healthy, high-fat snacks around – macadamia nuts, beef jerky, cold chicken leg.  There are ways to orchestrate this and be smart about that don’t take a lot of time, thought, or money that will lead you in a direction of better health.  Even something as simple as taking a vitamin D supplement if you can’t get out because your work situation or living in Chicago in the winter.  Take a vitamin D supplement, take a fish oil supplement, probiotic, and get some of the benefits of modern technology to offset some of the detriments of modern technology.  That are now causing you to stay up late and work in a stressful situation.”

On Supplements

“I think that probiotics is the number one thing.

You’re going see in the next few years gut health is going to take a huge leap in terms of its acknowledgement and its involvement in overall physical health.  Gut health in my estimation begins with making sure that you have a health gut biome, which involves typically some type of probiotic supplementation.  It could be from healthy high-fat yogurt, kefir, kombucha, and other fermented drinks, but it could also come from a simple daily probiotic capsule.”

On Selling Primal Lifestyle to Others

“I don’t try to convince anybody.  I offer a number of well thought opinions, well researched studies and approaches to this, but I’m long past the prosthelytizing or trying to convince anybody.  I have people come up and say, “hey my friend’s a vegan, convince him to eat your way,”.  I’m not interested, it’s like trying to convince someone to change religions.  People are very caught up in their eating and that part of their lifestyle and they’re sometimes militant about it.  If you are currently otherwise fit and healthy, who am I to convince you to my way.  If you’re interested, there’s all kinds of great advice over here, but it’s not my job to convince you to do otherwise.

I will say one thing in that regard which is I’ve been doing research on this for thirty years, and I’ve changed most of my diet to reflect the research.  I’ve increased the amount of fat, decreased the amount of sugar, I’ve gotten rid of the oils.  One thing I’ve kept in my diet far too long was grains.  The whole grain was something I fought for a long time.  I read a lot of research about how devastating grains were to health.  I thought, “well geeze I’ve been doing this for 45 years, I think I’m a grain eater.  I don’t have Celiac, so why I should I give up grains, it doesn’t make any sense.”  My wife had given up grains the year prior and suggested that I do a 30 day experiment and give up grains.  Well I did and it was life changing.  The IBS I had my entire life, which ran my life and I thought was due to stress, that went away.  The arthritis I had in my fingers at the age of 45 I thought was a normal artifact of being an aged athlete- that went away.  The simple heartburn I used to get- that went away.  Sinus headaches that continued after a URT infection went away.  I got fewer upper respiratory tract infections.  Instead of two or three times a year, now it was maybe once every two or three years….It wasn’t until I gave up the grains that I understood what true health looked like.  You might feel good now, but what if you could feel better.  What if you could go from good to great.

On Alcohol

“The concept of alcohol is sort of in a grey area.  The research shows that people who drink one or two glasses of red wine a night, a couple of nights a week, tend to live longer than people who don’t drink any alcohol at all.  I use that as a way of saying, “maybe there’s room for a little red wine in the Primal Blueprint, or maybe some gluten free beer.”  Bear in mind that ethanol is still a toxin, and the body probably doesn’t respond as well to ethanol as we think it does.  It’s probably better on whole that you not consume any alcohol.  But the Primal Blueprint is always about finding a lifestyle that is sustainable.  If somebody is going to tell me to give up alcohol for the rest of my life and I enjoy a glass of wine once in a while, that doesn’t appeal to me.  If somebody says that you can never have any dairy again, on principle that cavemen didn’t have access to it, that’s going to turn me off.  The Primal Blueprint is very inclusive…That doesn’t mean kill a bottle of wine every night.  That the fact that tequila has no carbs means that it’s appropriate.  It just means that in moderation these all fit into a lifestyle that we call the Primal Blueprint.”

On “Paleofantasy”

“Zuk’s book, “Paleofantasy” is based on an erroneous set of assumptions out of the block.  One of the things she says in there as rebuttals is true, but we never said them as a platform in the first place.  It’s kind of a ridiculous book.  I did a post on it on my site, debunking it…

This is not a fad diet, this is the way humans ate for two and half million years until the advent of agriculture.  This is how our bodies, our genetic recipes, expect us to eat this way to manifest the positive gene expression to create a lean, strong, fit, happy, healthy, productive human.  It’s ironic to call it a fad diet when it’s already been going on for two and a half million years.”

Coromega is offering Tech Cocktail readers a special 25 percent discount on supplements (with the coupon code TECH). Also, the first five people who sign up here will get a free omega-3 test (valued at $150) and a 90-day supply of Coromega.

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