I just saw my dental hygenest this morning and am feeling a bit numb. Below are some photos to commemorate my visit.
I think Susan Carlson -- the woman behind the mask is a a great dental hygienest. I hate to see her....and love it. She takes good care of my teeth. I recommend her highly.
I had an entrepreneur in my office that I've been working with for a few years. He's took a small angel round that I'm an investor in. The business has taken longer to get off the ground and in the last 6 months they're really starting to make strides. That said, the company is running out of cash and is about 10 to 15K per month from breakeven. Yesterday, he was in my office talking about raising 50K to get him to breakeven. I told him he should try to raise 200K so he can play for success. The terms of the 200K are going to be tough to the company and existing investors. The entrepreneur is doing all the right emotional things to make the company a success. He could easily throw in the towel and call it a "lesson learned". Instead, he wants to plow ahead. In the meeting, he told me he was committed to seeing this company through to success. In that moment, without knowing the terms of the deal, I told him that if he was in -- then I am committed to participating in this next round (personally and not as a fund). It was the right thing to do. And fortunately, I'm in a position to be able to do that. In that moment -- money equaled relationship and support. And fortunately for me -- I didn't miss the moment. There have been plenty of times where other friends I've worked with in the past have asked me to invest and support their ventures financially and for whatever reason -- I missed the moment when money equals relationship. This is a rare and important moment when even a little money gives the right emotional support and solidarity to help an entrepreneur. I suspect that this applies to famliy matters as well -- but tomorrow -- time willing, I'll write about instances where I have missed this opportunity...and how it bums out the asker as well as me.
In the spirit of not writing....
Just kidding. We put on these fashionable techstars headbands on at the TechStars managing directors offsite. Having fun.
strange day.
I'm on a diet and have lost about 10 pounds. It's been a gradual weight loss. The diet is simple.
Superbowl weekend was a bad diet weekend. I had all three of the above. Ate some pizza, spaghetti, corn chips with salsa, and some chocolate at 9PM. Both days were lost.
Then it occured to me -- dieting is about the present and future, not the past. Woke up yesterday and got back on the routine. Feel on it today.
And that's where the metaphor of entrepreneurship begins. Entrepreneurship starts with 3 simple rules. You make them. Stick to them. When you fall down and feel like shit -- start over. It's that easy. That's an Andy Sack line :-)
Why is dieting so hard?
If you can't tell, I'm posting a lot of pictures a test of the saying -- a photo is worth a thousand words. Here's a photo of Randall with a Cheshire grin -- working hard at RevenueLoan. The last few months both Randall, John Roper, (whose photo I'll try and post this week because he looks like such a hippie developer) Christian Jacobsen and I have been working to make this business really move. Stay tuned for some interesting developments.
Simply Measured is a great story. The company started just over a year ago and was known as Untitled Startup (truly www.untitledstartup.com was the URL). Damon Cortesi and Aviel Ginzburg were the original co-founders. The company attempted to crowdsource their way to a business in the social media space. In the process of doing so, they created row feeder over a weekend. RowFeeder gained instant traction because of it's simple message and implementation -- the site was known for tracking tweets in a spreadsheet. But it wasn't until Adam Schoenfeld, the third co-founder, joined the company in April that the company really started to make sales and realize that it was in the business of taking data and giving the data back to customers so that they can manipulate it, play with it, and analyze it -- usually in a spreadsheet. Their customer list is friggin impressive -- Major PR companies, Fortune 500 companies, and social media elite all use the product. They have over thousands of customers relationships in less than a year! Check out the products rowfeeder and exportly. Guess what -- simplicity sells -- when executed well. This is going to be a big company one day soon -- you should check them out now!
Yes. I am back on my blog. And for those of you who are wondering, yes, I will write posts that actually contain a thought or two. I want to provide you all with a bit of context to my last few photo posts:
i) I purchased an iphone and am discovering the wonders of mobile photography
ii) I want to make my blog more visual
iii) I meet with lots of investors and entrepreneurs in Seattle and thought that having their photos on a blog would be helpful and fun
iv) I struggled with coming back from 3 months of not blogging and found the act of photoblogging a nice incremental step.
Make sense? Does that help?
Sometimes you work with great people and you know they're great. Those people have a harder time surprising and impressing you because of the high expectations you already have.
Well, I want you all to know that I am blown away by the work David Cohen (and to a lesser extent Brad Feld) have been doing with TechStars. In the past six months, they published a great book (that I wrote a chapter in) -- Do More Faster. And today, David Cohen and TechStars were part of the launch of StartupAmerica. What's so awesome about TechStars -- and fundamentally different than Y-Combinator is that TechStars isn't about David Cohen or Brad Feld -- it's about supporting innovation in the cities across America. It's about job creation. It's specifically not about Silicon Valley. TechStars focuses relentlessly on getting great entrepreneurs to help other aspiring entrepreneurs to reach for their dreams and in so doing, to get funded, build great companies and create jobs. TechStar's community approach is super effective! I say all this...and I say it as a point of differentiation but in no way is it intended to detract from the power of what Paul Graham is doing with Y-Combinator. They're great and Paul is doing a great job. In fact, Y combinator had some super interesting news this past week too and I hope to comment on that in a post later this week. The purpose of this post is to acknowledge that David Cohen has been kicking some serious ass and making great stuff happen. I want him and others to know how impressed and proud I am of him. Well done Cohen!
If you want to learn more and understand why I am so impressed....read on.... below is David Cohen's post today --worth reading if you want to know about StartUp America...and why I think David is so impressive.
I'm at the White House today and we're just kicking off the announcement event for Startup America, a White House campaign to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. This coordinated public/private effort brings together an alliance of the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other leaders, working in concert with a wide range of federal agencies to dramatically increase the prevalence and success of America’s entrepreneurs. One of the key factors is access to mentorship.
We are incredibly honored to be launching the TechStars Network today as a featured partner of the White House Startup America campaign. We've had tremendous results with TechStars, and now we're formally helping other programs to have the same impact.
The new TechStars Network launches with 17 independently owned and operated seed accelerators that replicate the mentorship-driven startup acceleration model pioneered by TechStars. The TechStars Network provides opportunities for networking, sharing best practices, training and ongoing support for members of this regionally diverse network, and includes members from Miami to Seattle and from Nashville to New Orleans, and beyond.
We've been contacted by around one hundred organizations from around the world that wanted to replicate our mentorship-driven model. It would have been easy to shut them out, and not speak to them. Instead, we asked: "How can we help?" We've spent countless hours actively helping these other communities to replicate our model. The reason is simple: It's good for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial communities. We don't need any other reason to help.
Through our experiences with TechStars, we have seen what happens when an entire community comes together to support entrepreneurs. We're more than flattered by the activity of other programs that have leveraged our mentorship-driven model and have improved or tweaked the design. In the end, we believe that developing strong relationships and strong communities creates amazing results. Taking this up a level and building a global network of like-minded accelerator programs is what the TechStars Network is all about. To say the least, we’re full of excitement to see what we’re able to build together as a connected community of credible accelerator programs around the world.
Over the last 6 months, we've fully documented our process and are now making it available to members of the TechStars Network. We're taking the lead on making sure we're driving best practices into the seed accelerator model so that it best serves entrepreneurs everywhere. We'll be organizing an annual conference both for the innovative leaders of these programs and also for the founders who attend these programs. Through the TechStars Network, we're sharing our legal documents, ensuring that mentors who contribute their time are recognized and rewarded, streamlining access to investors, ensuring that entrepreneurs have easier access to these programs, sharing deals and resources, and more. What this means for aspiring entrepreneurs is that there will be more high quality seed accelerators in more places, with more mentors, and more support for them.
At TechStars, we've always been focused on quality over quantity. We've vetted all of the members of the TechStars Network, and will make sure that the bar remains high for future members of the network. We're thrilled to be working in partnership with these other great programs and expect the TechStars Network to grow over the coming years.
We are very excited to announce that Jenny Boyd, who helped build the Kiva organization, will manage the TechStars Network.
Here's a video introducing the TechStars Network that is currently being featured on the White House site for Startup America.
On Friday, I had a long planned breakfast with Bill McAleer. I've known Bill for a number of years in Seattle. We talked about TechStars, RevenueLoan, fund raising for a venture firm (i.e. Voyager and Founder's Co-op) amongst other things. There wasn't a particular agenda, point or lesson to the breakfast -- really just a desire to stay in touch and break bread in person. This informal get together over food is something that I've found a very important element to my job and to accomplishing my professional objectives.
I had my standard goto breakfast -- egg whites with bacon and he had their gluten free pancakes. Gotta love Portage Bay Cafe....and breakfast with Bill McAleer. :-)
I just answered this question on quora -- please vote it up here.
I absolutely think that royalty and revenue based finance should be considered by angels and funds. Ok -- I'm biased. I'm so convinced that revenue based finance is important that I started a company called RevenueLoan in addition to my equity orient Seattle based angel fund Founder's Co-op to pursue this model. Why? Because I think that there are lots of instances and lots of companies where this model is preferable for the entrepreneur than straight equity. Let me explain, revenue based investments have the following benefits when compared to straight equity:
In short, in my opinion, royalty and revenue based investments are a great tool for angels to have in their tool chest.
A picture or two should help you interpret the post title.
I had coffee and juice with Steve Hall yesterday. Super fun. Steve is a really smart guy who understands where technology and business intersect. He convinced me to try evernote. It's the third software product for the week I'm going to give a trial month to -- Quora, Evernote, and The Shared Web.
In my opinion, the rate of change of the web seems to be increasing. I can't keep up with all the new ways to post, share, and consume. Can you?
The following is a question and answer I found on Quora in the first 2 minutes of using the site. I am blown away by the quality of content and community on the site. I am reposting but must attribute the content to Quora and Isaac Hall, Founder of Recurly.
Question: Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality?
"As a co-founder of Syncplicity, a service that competes with Dropbox, this question has been on my mind for years. We launched within a few weeks of Dropbox, we had multi-folder synchronization & read-only sync, and we were a few years older than the Dropbox kids. I'm very proud of the service we put together and am happy to see the service shift towards businesses, yet Dropbox kicked butt. Here's why:
Before launching their service, Dropbox created a video that had tons of geeky references. It showed off a product that wasn't finished and had a few flaws. It showed a binary diff sync of an image... binary diff is great, but it only works if the file isn't compressed. So, it only works on bitmaps and who the heck is sync'ing bitmaps? The video spread quickly and got their name out before anyone heard of our company. Instead of making our own video, we were upset that binary diff wouldn't do anything for JPEGs or other compressed formats that consumers tended to use. Who the heck is sync'ing images saved from Microsoft Paint?
Next, we had issues getting the press excited at launch. We built a fantastic Windows client. 3 years ago, everyone was running Windows*. We were so excited to show the press, yet they *all* had Macs. Walt Mossberg wouldn't write about our product because it was PC only. Months after we hired our PR agency, we found out that they had never even used our product... because they too only had Macs. It's pretty hard to pitch a service when you haven't used it.
* Actually, I had a Mac and wrote all my code in a Parallels VM on my Mac. It always made me a little sad that we didn't have a native Mac client for a long time. Thankfully, the company has a Mac client today.
For a while, we couldn't believe Dropbox was so viral while we weren't. We opened our beta so anyone could sign up while people had to beg for a Dropbox invite. The closed beta worked incredibly well for Dropbox. We opened up our beta at the insistence of our PR agency -- "No way the New York Times will write about you if you have a closed beta". (It turned out that the NYT also doesn't write about you if you're PC only.) If your service is really popular, having a closed beta helps you create pent up demand and control the number of users joining on a regular basis so you can scale the backend appropriately.
In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues -- it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:Windows for dozens of users -- doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn't innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.
After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked him my burning question: "Why don't you support multi-folder synchronization?" His answer was classic Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did limited beta testing with it, but they couldn't get the UI right. It confused people and created too many questions. It was too hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.
If you're starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. My philosophy is that they're right if their feature request is right only if it works for 80% of your customers. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.
The best part about having a simple product is that it's easy to sell & easy to support. If your product is too complicated, you'll spend all day on customer support & bug fixing. I've been there -- it's no fun.
In closing, I want to give props to my previous Syncplicity co-workers. They worked their butts off competing against Dropbox. They're crazy smart and we built a great service together. They're still working on it and they've got a great business solution. As for Dropbox... Drew, Arash and the rest of the team are absolutely brilliant. Their success is no accident. File synchronization is incredibly difficult. Building a product that millions of consumers can easily understand without RTFM is even more challenging. They're my inspiration for my current company.
If you want to understand more, read everything you can about the lean startup movement. And have at least one seriously amazing product person on your staff if that's not you."
If you're mind isn't blown yet -- I don't know what will blow your mind in terms of first experiences. Go logon now to Quora
Reaching the limit of my gmail account. I feel like I've reached a major milestone....when in fact all I've done is not delete my mail. Need to purchase some more storage or delete some files.
I don't even know how to respond to this. Are they serious? MySpace is the united airlines of the web.
Had lunch today with Greg Gottesman of Madrona. We ate at Portage Bay Cafe and I had a great cheeseburger. We debriefed on the past class of TechStars in Seattle as well as Founder's Co-op and RevenueLoan. We also chatted about PHPfog a deal that both founder's co-op and Madrona participated. Thanks to Greg for his help with TechStars and for paying for lunch.
Hi, I'm Andy Sack!
This is my bag o' thoughts about entrepreneur-ship, venture capital, parenthood, and the world in general.
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
Executive Director, Seattle
Chairman
