Dorrian Porter is founder of Northern Imagination.

On January 1, 1999, I immigrated to Silicon Valley from Canada to work as a corporate attorney for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. I watched in amazement as 400 companies went public that year (about a quarter of them through my law firm), and in March 2000 I felt compelled to leave the firm and start a company called HigherMarkets. It was around the same day that the Nasdaq peaked at 5132.52.

The experience and timing of my departure — and the name of my first company — sadly signified a tight connection for me between money and entrepreneurship.

Money has a nasty habit of invading the definition of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, where we tend to measure success by funding rounds, valuations, and liquidity events. I often run with a definition of an entrepreneur defined by money: People who don’t know your financial situation think you’re rich, and people who do think you’re crazy. An entrepreneur can be a person spending $10,000 to open a shop or $100 million to build a new kind of car.

Long before the car company, there was an inventor named Nikola Tesla who navigated choices of money and entrepreneurship as we all do in the Silicon Valley. Tesla immigrated to the east coast of the United States in 1884, initially to work alongside Thomas Edison. That relationship didn’t last, but Tesla is credited with the inventions that fueled the rise of electric company Westinghouse and made alternating current the standard of electricity we rely on today.

Larry Page of Google, who mentioned Nikola Tesla on a recent earnings call and describes him as one of the greatest inventors ever, has said you might want to be more like Edison than Tesla. In fact that comparison may only be true in textbooks.

A closer study of the events of the 1890s, for example, reveals that Edison faced similar entrepreneurial challenges to Tesla: Edison was kicked aside from General Electric, the successor company to his own, leading him to swear off the same financial backers for the next 30 years. Tesla, on the other hand, generously allowed Westinghouse to renegotiate a patent deal that enabled the financially strapped company to establish the electricity standard we rely on today.

Tesla made it clear that being a great entrepreneur — one who commercialized a critical standard that powers innovation 125 years later — isn’t necessarily about the money.

Despite the fact that I couldn’t live without two famous early inventions of Edison’s — photography and film — Tesla’s contributions are the ones that can spark Silicon Valley’s imagination on an even bigger scale now. Tesla made a commitment to the study of wireless energy and wireless information transmission beginning in the 1880s that led him to explore communication with other planets, to evaluate ways to transmit energy wirelessly around earth, and to care about taking advantage of the sun’s radiation and earth’s vibrations to prevent the squandering of natural resources that was occurring rapidly around him.

Sound useful today?

I love Instagram as much as anyone, but my nine-year-old daughter points out that less time on my iPhone can equal more time on things that really matter. Tesla focused on discovery in areas that really mattered, and he faced a great deal of ridicule — and no doubt financial impact — for it.

As the need to invite more immigrants to the Silicon Valley only increases, we need to send the message more than ever that our love for creative invention and a focus on the biggest challenges are more valued than money. There are some outstanding financial backers in the Silicon Valley, but the majority of venture capitalists face their own short-term problems that don’t always allow them to live up to the long-term horizons mentioned on their websites.

Whether you’ve just helped fund a startup or raised money for one, or whether you’re running a big company or working at one, we all need to be looking for ways to hail the inventors around us regardless of financial outcome. We don’t necessarily need to shift our models of capital allocation or stock grants to do it, but we do need to change where we spend our time celebrating. I’ve heard a lot of lip service paid to words like innovation and creativity in the Silicon Valley. It’s up to each of us to defend those words in a way that means something more than the next acquisition.

The free exchange of information and affordable access to sustainable energy — both issues worked on by Nikola Tesla in his time — have the potential to solve critical issues of poverty and education, and inspire peace, around the world. Wireless information transmission and energy remain two of the Silicon Valley’s biggest opportunities.

Hail to the inventors who are working on those challenges today without regard to financial outcomes. Hail to Nikola Tesla.

Dorrian Porter organized Northern Imagination in 2013, a company that seeks to positively impact the wellbeing and happiness of people via creative projects, ideas, and inventions.  He just launched a Kickstarter campaign to build a statue of Nikola Tesla in the Silicon Valley to fuel creativity on the big issues of energy and wireless. You can watch a short video and participate in the campaign here:  http://kck.st/ZWLzgG.

photo credit: Recuerdos de Pandora via photopin cc

I’m in Ontario, Canada, on a press junket put on by the government to highlight the startup scene in Canada’s most populous province.

40-50 percent of venture capital in Canada is put to work in Ontario, which is pushing past traditional industries and looking for investment and jobs in high-growth technology-focused companies. Those traditional industries include automotive — more cars are built in Ontario than anywhere in North America, including Michigan — and financial services, which employs more people in Ontario than anywhere else in the Americas besides New York.

But the most interesting stat is about the burgeoning startup scene, particularly in Waterloo, Ontario. Toronto is the big kahuna in southern Ontario, with a population of over 2.6 million. But Waterloo is where Google, Oracle, EA, and Intel have set up offices, where BlackBerry grew from nothing to leading the smartphone industry, and where startups are popping up incredibly fast.

BlackBerry, of course, is quickly returning to nothing, but as often happens in the tech industry, the cycle of creative destruction is resulting in a whole new cohort of hot young startups.

“Waterloo and the culture of startups there is because of RIM,” John Marshall, the president and CEO of the Ontario Capital Growth Corporation says. “You’ve got kids coming up who saw their parents do it.”

While it’s a little early to call BlackBerry dead, the fact is that former Research in Motion is indeed in motion, downwards. Apple, Google, Android, and Samsung have taken over market leadership in mobile phones, and Microsoft looks to be passing BlackBerry with Windows Phone.

But the result has been a two-track acceleration of southern Ontario’s entrepreneurship engine. First, as Marshall says, new blood sees that global success is possible. And second, the high-tech workforce shed by a downsizing BlackBerry feeds the founding and growth of small startups.

That’s music to the ears of Ontario officials like Bill Mantel, the assistant deputy minister of the Ministry of Research and Development, which has invested $3.6 billion over the past decade in the startup ecosystem: R&D, seed funding, and ecosystem improvement.

“We want the world’s next biggest tech company to be built in Ontario,” Mantel says. “It’s about job growth … about half of all job growth is provided by the 3-4 percent of high-growth companies.”

That includes companies like Desire2Learn, located about 12 minutes away in Kitchener, Ontario. Desire2Learn has gone from 400 employees to 800 in a matter of months as it took the largest VC investment into a single company in Canada — $80 million — just last September, after bootstrapping for almost a decade.

The results are also visible elsewhere.

“In the StartUp Genome report from last year, Ontario had two cities in the top 20,” Mantel says. “Toronto was eighth, Waterloo was 16th, and we think Ottawa should have made the list too.”

There hasn’t really been the emergence of a BlackBerry mafia, in the sense that the PayPal mafia has kickstarted whole waves of startups in Silicon Valley. But perhaps, in a backwards sense, BlackBerry has had a similar effect in southern Ontario.

photo credit: miggslives via photopin cc

Disclosure: Ontario’s ministry of economic development paid VentureBeat’s costs to send me on this tour of Ontario companies and the venture capital scene. My coverage, however, is my own.

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The Ontario ministry of economic development has invited VentureBeat to check out the center of the universe, AKA, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. And I’m the lucky guinea pig.

We’ll be in Toronto from Monday to Friday this week, checking out startups like Hubba, WattPad, and Fixmo, and talking to local venture capitalists as well as angel investors. In addition, we’ll be getting an intro to quantum computing at the University of Waterloo and taking a tour of Google’s Waterloo facility, where Googlers work on Android and Chrome technology.

I’ll also be at Extreme Startups, an accelerator in Toronto that has a cohort of startups just in the middle of their program.

In between, however, it’d be great to meet a few other founders for coffee, dinner, or drinks. Or just to say hello and put a face to an email address.

Best place to get in touch with me is Twitter: @johnkoetsier.

Let’s chat!

photo credit: wvs via photopin cc

When I co-founded InMobi in 2007, we took a novel “east-to-west” approach to our growth, starting in India before moving into other developing markets, then finally into more traditional “Western” markets as well.

Because this method of expansion didn’t have any precursors, and mobile advertising was at the time still a very new field, we had to chart our own course and set our own example. And as a corollary, we would have to deal with a number of challenges as we discovered that the mobile landscape was different in each geography we entered, and learn to quickly recover from mistakes.

I’d like to talk about some of the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them, as I believe it will be of relevance to other businesses that are trying to build a global footprint:

Learning while doing

Because we were experimenting with a new business model, we often had to rely on intuition as we calculated our next moves. When you are trying to expand across multiple geographies at a rapid pace, you are bound to slip, and we were no exception. For example, our first forays out of India into other geographies, starting with Indonesia and South Africa, did not yield initial success, and we could not gain a strong foothold in the market. Our lack of understanding of the ways in which brands, advertisers, and consumers communicated and interacted in these markets, and incorrect hypotheses about the overall advertising ecosystem, led to delayed revenue streams. But we learned how the ecosystem worked and began expanding our reach in these emerging markets.

Likewise, when we had to extend the capabilities of our platform to serve multiple regions/countries, we almost ran the risk of jeopardizing existing business in India by shifting focus away from it.

We learned quickly from such wrong moves, and this helped us templatize our forays into new countries, and that is the key takeaway:

An experiential learning approach works well if you can recover from your mistakes quickly and identify patterns and models from within a few iterations.

Recalibrating world view frequently

Working with an evolving technology and business model, and one that had numerous dependencies on the moves of key players in the mobile device and platform platform markets, brought with it another set of challenges: frequently making informed decisions on the roadmap of our technology platform, which was the pivot of our business.

In addition, our geographic expansion plan also compelled us to be agile and flexible.  Once we had tasted initial success, we laid out a plan to simultaneously expand in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore), Western Europe and Japan. Each of these markets had its own characteristics and was very different from one another. Western Europe was developed, and so was Japan, but the latter is a contained market with little in common with the European market. The emerging markets, on the other hand, were evolving and needed a totally different approach.

Clearly, we had to tailor our approach to suit each market, and this meant that we literally had to revisit our assumptions and plans every quarter.

In all of the above, our overall commitment to speed — in thinking and in action — helped, and our approach of trying out and making course corrections, rather than waiting and watching, stood out. To me, the key takeaway from this experience is staying committed to a strategy for the future, while adapting the tactics to the present.

Shaping Management Mindset

While the first two sets of challenges emanated from the market, the third was more internal and had to do with adopting the right mindset.

As a startup with global ambitions, we had several mental hurdles to cross. Learning to think big while being small was one of them. Some of us had a tendency to want to do one thing very well as opposed to developing broader competencies and skills, which is a prerequisite to build scale. Another issue was balancing our short-term needs with our long-term goals. Nowhere was it a bigger challenge than when we opened offices in new geographies and set out to hire the regional anchors. How much to pay, how long to wait for the right candidate, what profile should we opt for?  These were real questions we had to find answers for. We made a few errors of judgment here as well, like hiring candidates about whom we were not completely convinced, before we made the tough call to wait for the right candidates and pay them the right compensation.

The last thing we had to do, of course, was to transform our thinking, speaking and actions to reflect those of a truly global organization, and make the transition from being part of an “Indian” team to a cross-cultural one. This entailed creating a consistent corporate culture with frequent interactions between teams based in India and those in the other markets. By encouraging two-way travel, we ensured that teams from India understood market and cross-cultural nuances early on.

In sum, we learned to be open, introspective and aware of the consequences of your behavior and actions.

Thinking back, what allowed us to surmount the challenges we faced and mold our thinking and actions to suit the purpose was our total commitment to our vision and the excitement of creating an innovative and valuable business model.

That is the overarching message I’d like to leave you with: clarity of vision and purpose is the glue that binds a team together and acts as a lubricant to mitigate the friction caused by obstacles along the way.

For more information on InMobi’s East-to-West strategy, see Naveen Tewari’s first post, here.

Naveen Tewari is InMobi’s CEO and founder. He graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey & Company before starting InMobi. InMobi, based in Bangalore with offices in Singapore and San Francisco, currently employs more than 900 people and has taken $216 million to date in venture funding.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

“I think it’s a first … I’m not sure anyone has ever done this before,” FounderFuel’s Ian Jeffery told me yesterday when we chatted about the big demo day.

The three organizers include FounderFuel, an accelerator based in Montréal whose last demo day had a massive 800-strong audience; Seedcamp, which runs Europe’s most prolific seed funding program out of Google’s London campus; and Startmate, which helps startups grow in Sydney. Together, they’re doing something a little unprecedented: showcasing their best 15 startups on one day at one time, right in the heart of global startup central: San Francisco.

The event is on Wednesday, May 1 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., and registration is limited to AngelList members: Sign-up and investor authentication is all being done via AngelList.

“The best startups, while sometimes ending up in Silicon Valley, are increasingly formed outside of the Bay Area, and FounderFuel, Seedcamp, and Startmate each play pivotal roles at the epicenters of startup communities outside of the US.,” the group said in a statement.

Here are the participating startups, with brief bios provided by the accelerators:

FounderFuel Companies

Epilogger: The Center of Attention http://epilogger.com
Find photos, videos, blogs, and conversations from any event. Epilogger is the entire event collected from everyone automatically into one place. It claims it’s the web platform and app to experience the event before, during, and after. Epilogger is a growing community and the central destination for all content from any event big or small in your city and around the globe. Whether it’s that great conference, that inspiring movement or humankind’s next giant leap, it claims it’ll be there: “We are the event.”

InfoActive: Bring life to data http://infoactive.co
InfoActive makes it easy to create mobile-friendly, interactive infographics with live data. Drop live data streams into interactive infographics that scale to any device and double your engagement metrics with interactive, data-driven content. It won “Best Bootstrap Company” at SXSW 2013.

MyCustomizer: Empowering the Customization Revolution http://mycustomizer.com
MyCustomizer empowers brands and retailers to offer outstanding product customization experiences with a ready-to-use SaaS platform. Market leading brands sparked the customization revolution by investing massively in “design-your-own” online experiences. Whether they offer sports equipment, shoes,  suits and ties, chocolate, or even cars, MyCustomizer empowers businesses to join the revolution by seamlessly connecting brands, retailers, and consumers through a unique customization SaaS platform.

Also see: MyCustomizer: If mass customization is the future, here’s the tool to create it

OOHLALA: Energize your Campus experience! http://gotoohlala.com
The Mobile platform that connects post-secondary students with their campus.

Seedcamp Companies

Maily: Your kids first email http://maily.com
Maily is e-mail reinvented for kids. Children can create email using five tools adapted to their needs: pencils, brushes, photos, backgrounds, stamps, and their own words. Maily accounts are created and supervised by you, the parents. You decide who your children can communicate with. More than 50,000 kids are using Maily, and more than 600,000 Mailys have been sent so far.

Crowdprocess: Web-based supercomputing http://crowdprocess.com
CrowdProcess is an online market for supercomputing. It enables developers to process data on the web browsers of people who are visiting websites. CrowdProcess sells this processing power as a service, and it pays the websites’ owners. In summary, CrowdProcess does distributed computing on web browsers via websites.

QAMINE: Code analysis platform for the cloud http://qamine.com
QAMINE is an “automated software testing as a service” platform that analyzes developers’ commits without disruption to their workflow and with a one-click installation solution. With over 12,000 registered repositories (acquired in less than two weeks) and a concrete/revolutionary roadmap and vision for the future, it wants to become the world’s best code analysis tool for the cloud.

Blossom: Lean product management http://blossom.io
Blossom is a project management tool for building modern web and mobile applications. Unlike other project management tools that focus on managing vast amounts of tickets in the backlog, Blossom helps you to focus on the current iteration, who’s doing what, and what they can ship next. It introduces just-in-time production concepts from lean manufacturing to the world of software development. The ideal project management tool for agile companies that ship early and often.

Campalyst: Cutting edge social media ROI analytics suite http://campalyst.com/
Campalyst’s enterprise-level social media management suite empowers brands with the unique ability to connect monetary ROI to their social media efforts and fully understand how and why social media contributes to their bottom line revenue. No more buzzwords, no more guesswork, it promises; it provides actionable financial performance analytics built for the age of social media marketing.

Startmate Companies

BugCrowd: Crowdsourced security vulnerability testing http://bugcrowd.com
Bugcrowd is crowdsourced security for web and mobile apps. It runs managed bug bounties as a service for our customers. A bug bounty is where a group of friendly security researchers are invited to compete to find security flaws. If they’re the first to report a new bug, they receive a reward of cash and Bugcrowd Kudos points.

Edrolo: Great education = great teachers http://edrolo.com
Edrolo delivers high school students great grades when it counts. It has more than 2,000 paying customers in the U.S. and Australia, and its team members have left jobs at Google, Goldman Sach, and a successful startup because they believe great teachers should impact hundreds of thousands of students not hundreds. It finds the rock star educator for each subject, curriculum, and exam and partners with them to build on-demand video, quizzes, study notes, and more.

Goodcall.io: Convert and retail customers with a phone call http://goodcall.io
Good Call helps online businesses convert and retain customers with outbound phone calls. It’s a long proven practice that it has redesigned for web applications. Its customers create events in their web app that trigger outbound calls. An agent is notified, and an outbound call is made through the platform. Customers can use their own internal agents, or choose from our marketplace of outbound professionals. All calls and metrics are recorded and presented to its customers.

Kinderloop: Bringing the simplicity of Instagram to the lives of child care providers http://kinderloop.com
A web and mobile application that brings the simplicity of instagram to the lives of child carer providers worldwide. Care providers use the app to quickly and securely post video, photos, and news. Parents receive immediate updates.

Shiftr: Simply swap work shifts http://shiftrapp.com
Shiftr is an employee-facing mobile app for hospitality and retail enterprises. Its mobile app gives employees flexibility and involvement in the scheduling process while giving managers the information to make the right decisions quickly. Shiftr has traction in fast-food franchises and retail enterprises.

photo credits: davidyuweb via photopin cc, Eva Blue via photopin cc

Today, I’m wondering if Sarah Hanson really exists.

When I originally contacted Hanson to chat about the auction, her startup, and why she’s skipping college to go straight into the tech startup world, she didn’t want to talk on the phone. Instead, she asked me to conduct the interview via email. That happens from time to time, so I said OK.

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson, according to the 32 Auctions site

But then a TV network reporter called VentureBeat, telling us that Hanson asked to be interviewed via email for a segment she was planning to do. Not only that, the reporter said, Hanson absolutely refused to do a phone interview. A VentureBeat reader contacted me and questioned whether Hanson was too good to be true. And when a journalist at another publication asked me if she was real or existed, I had to dig a little deeper.

My story began when Sarah Hanson, or someone purporting to be a 19-year-old girl named Sarah Hanson, contacted VentureBeat via email about how she funded her startup:

Hi, I wanted to follow up and let you know the auction ended at $125,000

http://www.32auctions.com/organizations/7349/auctions/8138/auction_items/167988

It’s the result I hoped for but I’m still a bit stunned.

A couple week ago, I was sitting at my desk trying to come up with an idea that would enable me to work on Senior Living Map full-time.

Today, I have someone willing to invest $125,000 in me. The beauty and power of the internet. It’s amazing.

Sarah

An email conversation ensued, and after she asked to be interviewed via email, I sent her a list of questions. I also checked for a LinkedIn account or a Twitter account, but didn’t find one, and put that down to her age. At that point, perhaps I should have been more suspicious.

Her answers, as you can see in the story, are superb and reveal a precocious teen (or someone) with insightful answers such as “my definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity,” which she credited to Aaron Levie, the founder and CEO of Box. But there’s also a lack of specificity to her answers that some people find suspicious: no mention of which college she’s attending, no city or location, and no name for the angel investor who won the auction by bidding $125,000.

The website itself, Senior Living Map, is light on details about the company, organization, or people behind it. It lists no address, no location, and no phone number. There is an email address, feedback@seniorlivingmap.org, but no other contact information. One clue, however, can be found in the sites terms of service, the legal framework under which it can be accessed:

Governing Law

Any claim relating to Senior Living Map’s website shall be governed by the laws of the State of Washington without regard to its conflict of law provisions.

A search of the Washington State corporation records turns up no company called Senior Living Map. Neither does a search of Nevada or Delaware corporations, other tax and investor-friendly places where many companies incorporate.

That doesn’t necessarily prove anything: The company could be listed elsewhere, or it could be listed under a different name.

But pair that with the fact that I can’t find a Twitter account for a Sarah Hanson who is running a startup, or a LinkedIn account, or a Facebook account for a Sarah Hanson who seems to match the profile, and there’s a massive lack of corroborating evidence. In short, I have no idea whether the Sarah Hanson I thought I was dealing with actually exists, is who she says she is, built Senior Living Map, or even took a $125,000 investment.

I contacted Madison, Wis.-based 32 Auctions to see if I could learn more. The answers I got were less than satisfactory, mostly due to the auction sites’ design:

I’m including a general response which we are providing to reporters in regards to this particular auction.  This should answer most of your questions.

We built 32auctions in a way that makes it very easy for anyone to host a silent auction online without needing to work directly with us.

In regards to this particular auction…

We have had no contact with the auction administrator.  We first saw mention of this auction on April 14th through Twitter.  From what we’ve seen, the auction looks legitimate.  However, only the parties involved will really know.

The majority of auctions hosted on 32auctions are fundraisers for non-profits, schools, churches, friends/family with a significant life event, and businesses looking to help their communities.  This is the first time we’ve seen someone auctioning off their future earnings to fund a start-up.

Anyone who complies with our terms of use can host a silent auction on 32auctions.  Auction administrators are responsible for the content of their auction.  It’s also up to the auction administrators and winning parties to finalize the transaction.

In response to further requests to speak on the phone, the 32 Auctions contact apologized and said that “we only offer support through email.” I hate to say that this is starting to sound familiar, but frankly, it is.

I have also attempted to contact Sarah Hanson multiple times via email. I told her I would like to give her a chance to set the record straight and prove that she is who she says she is.

I have received no response yet.

So here we are. I can’t guarantee that the woman I wrote a story about exists. And I can’t disprove it at the moment, either. All I can do is lay out what I have learned so far, and keep digging to learn more. If I have written about a fake, constructed persona, and have been the victim of an elaborate hoax, either for publicity or kicks or some as-yet-unknown reason, I apologize to VentureBeat readers.

One additional note: My original Sarah Hanson story has  been picked up by a massive number of publications, with Huffington Post, CBC, Yahoo, GeekWire, and AOL writing about Sarah Hanson and Senior Living Map.

If this was an attempt to gain publicity, it was massively successful: There are no less than 242,000 Google results for “sarah hanson senior living map,” many of them stories about how she crowdsourced her startup funding.

So if the original story is accurate, I ask Sarah Hanson to please stand up … and take off the mask. As you said in your first email to me, the beauty and power of the Internet is amazing.

Just not always the way we hope it would be.

photo credit: gato-gato-gato via photopin cc

You guessed it: startups.

U.S. immigration rules are extremely challenging for foreign-born engineers and founders to navigate, with many spending years and thousand of dollars working through the byzantine maze of rules and regulations … all while their businesses potentially languish and cofounders, employees, and customers suffer the consequences. Silicon Valley has been prominent in the fight – particularly around the Startup Act – to admit immigrants who want to start businesses and create jobs.

The precisely what Engine is working toward as well, with the backing of technorati like Google, SV Angels, 500 Startups, and many other technology-focused startups and organizations, such as Mozilla, Yelp, and the Startup Genome.

The problem, Engine’s Michael McGeary says, is that the startup community is typically underrepresented in government. Today’s speech is just the first step in redressing that imbalance and putting immigration — as well as startups’ other major concern, software patents — on the top of the government priority list.

Here’s the full text of McGeary’s presentation:

REMARKS, AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY MR. MICHAEL MCGEARY and ENGINE ADVOCACY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESS

Chairman Rice, Ranking Member Chu, Members of the Committee, thank you for having me here with you this morning.

I want to spend my time talking about issues that will impact the true engine of economic growth in this country: our startup community. Startups promise the rebirth – - and rejuvenation — of the American economy. Far from the idea held by many about startup life — of bespectacled youths in ironic t-shirts gallivanting around Downtown Palo Alto or the Flatiron in New York, spending their days writing code for the next great game about unicorns which we can all play on the subway on our way to work — the startup community in America reflects the best of American business. It’s dedicated men and women, working in coffee shops, and co-working spaces, office parks, and garages in Kansas City and Austin, and Nashville, and yes, San Francisco and New York, creating economic growth and multiplicative effects not seen in any other industry, helping power not just their own business, but in many cases countless others across the country.

These men and women have created all of the net new job growth in this country for the last quarter century, and according to our recent study, Technology Works, are projected to create 4.3 jobs in local communities for every job created in a technology concern.

It’s for these reasons, and so many others, that a few of us got together to form Engine Advocacy. For those unfamiliar with Engine, we got started about a year and a half ago with the intention of connecting the startup community with government at the federal, state and local level. We did so with an eye towards turning some of the workarounds, good ideas and innovative solutions to common problems faced by the startup community, into new legislation or government programs that can help make it just a little easier to start and run those businesses here in America.

We do that in a number of ways for a community that has largely been under represented in the halls of government. Our work is balanced between direct advocacy, convening our members from all over the country with leaders in government, and educating all of the players by arming them with good stories and strong data that point to the impact that startups can have in driving economic growth.

And that’s why I came here today. If you took a survey of startup founders and entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, developers, engineers, and the myriad others working in startups today, they would tell you that two issues more than any others threaten the promise and progress of their companies. These issues — immigration reform and software patent reform — are Engine’s immediate priorities and will form the basis of our advocacy work this year.

First, immigration: despite our historical competitive edge, we in the United States are facing a growing gap between the jobs we can create and the skills and employees needed to fill them.

In the long term, we need to continue to work to evolve our American education system to help power that growth and give young people the skills they need to compete in a global marketplace. But in the short term, we must also realize that our most valuable resource, talent, is already on our shores attending the University of Wisconsin, or Kansas University, or Stanford, and that, unfortunately, we seem to be looking for ways in the current system to send these smart, talented, entrepreneurial individuals either back to their countries of origin, or to places like Canada, Chile and South Korea where they have hung out the welcome sign to these promising minds, as we did for so long at Ellis Island and Angel Island. It’s imperative that we find a way to keep knowledge here, working and building business in America so that our economy can continue to grow and our businesses continue to thrive.

Second, for those who do stay and others who start business, another spectre is lurking, threatening to choke off innovation nearly at its source — the danger of patent trolling. According to recent findings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, patent trolls, forgive me, “Non-Practicing Entities” account for 56 percent of all lawsuits filed against innovators. This environment creates a legal and regulatory thicket which many young companies of two and three people find incredibly hard and costly to navigate.

We must find smart ways to protect innovative intellectual property, and as the constitution says, to promote science and the useful arts. The current system in place does no such thing — in fact, it even threatens to chill innovation as young companies find fewer and fewer avenues for capital as the prospect of patent troll lawsuits grow.

In the end, what’s good for startups is good for small business on the whole, because startups power small business. Consider the single mom making jewelry in Boise who is able to sell to consumers all over the world thanks to Etsy. Or the rural doctor in Kansas who is better and more readily able to diagnose cardiovascular problems in a patient because of increased computing power, and new data culled from existing MRI scans paired with three-dimensional flow visualization — a technology being pioneered in our own office in San Francisco by Morpheus Medical. And the bakery in my neighborhood in San Francisco’s Sunset District that accepts credit card payments via Square on their iPad rather than having to buy a costly point-of-sale system. The promise and potential of America’s entrepreneurial future is also so much more — we can create gaming apps that distract and delight, but also technologies that save lives, bring people closer together, and allow us to see our world, and ourselves, from a reframed perspective.

Startups can power the next generation of growth in the American economy if we let them, and it will be in working with this committee and other allies in Congress which can allow for that future, our future, to be prosperous.

Thank you.

photo credit: laverrue via photopin cc

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That’s one of the questions that Sarah Hanson, a 19-year-old developer and entrepreneur, asked herself. Especially since she knows exactly what she wants to do with her life already.

Last year, Hanson helped her grandmother find a assisted living home. It was time-consuming, tedious, and a horrible experience — exactly the kind of problem that an aspiring entrepreneur loves to find.

Because, of course, solving problems is the core of any business.

UPDATE: Sarah Hanson may not exist, may be a hoax

Source: 32auctions

Sarah Hanson

So she funded a startup to make finding care homes for the elderly easier and better. She built a functioning first version of the product, and she’s looking for funding in an innovative source: her own future income. This past week she successfully raised $125,000 in seed money by auctioning off 10 percent of her future income for 10 years.

Hanson talks about her experience, why she auctioned off her future income, and how she plans to build the business:

VentureBeat: You sold 10 percent of your future earnings for 10 years. Does that make you feel free? Or burdened?

Sarah Hanson: I’ll say this. Is this the most ideal path? No but it’s a path that gives me freedom of time, and that’s the most valuable asset I have.

VentureBeat: What made you decide to do this?

Hanson: The idea of sitting in classes, taking tests, writing papers, et cetera, for the next three years, learning a lot of things that won’t be applicable to my career, seems pointless to me. A lot of people go to college to figure out what they want to do. I know. I started playing around with code when I was 12. So for me, it doesn’t make sense to spend the time and money that it would take to get a degree.

Everything I need to learn to be the best I can be is available online at no cost. Some people need the structure of a class to learn. I learn best through doing, through creating which I can do for free.

When you want something you get creative. I want to fully devoted to Senior Living Map to see what I can make up it.

This money is my runway. It gives me a 1-2 year window of time to put all my effort behind growing Senior Living Map into hopefully something that can provide income for me for the indefinite future.

It’s an opportunity to never be an employee, never work a job I hate, never have a boss. It’s an opportunity to invest all my time in something I love, creating something hopefully other people love.

All reasons that will keep me highly motivated.

VentureBeat: Who bought your 10 percent of your future income?

Hanson: I’ve exchanged a couple emails with the winning bidder. She’s asked that I keep her name confidential.

She lives in San Francisco. I’ll be flying down there next week to meet with her.

She’s a pretty accomplished person in the tech world. I’m not sure if there’s any point in mentioning that. I’m sorry; I can’t get more specific. The last thing I want to do is piss her off

VentureBeat: You only got three bids, but it turned out to be enough. How many requests or inquiries did you make?

Hanson: I emailed 1,000 investors I found on angel.co to make them aware of the auction. It was quite a tedious process, but I figured I’ve got one shot at this, I’ve got to try my best to get myself the best shot of getting bids.

VentureBeat: You’re planning to start a company, Senior Living Map. Is this an underserved market?

Hanson: It’s started; the site exists at www.seniorlivingmap.org.

Is it an underserved market? Based on my experience of going through the process of finding a senior living home for my grandmother, I would definitely say yes.

My definition of being an underserved market is the lack of a solution that provides the maximum amount of value with the minimum amount of complexity … a line that I have to give credit to Aaron Levie for. …

Currently, the dominant model for finding a senior home for your parent, relative, or other loved one is to use a “Care Adviser,” who would take into account the type of home and care you are seeking and then provide some recommended options at no cost to you.

Sounds great, right?

But how does the Care Adviser make money if they are not charging you for their services? Well, when you choose one of the locations they recommend, that facility will pay them a “placement fee,” which is often thousands of dollars.

Hmmm … is it just me or does that seem like a conflict of interest? Are people really getting recommendations for the best matches, or rather the homes that the Care Adviser stands to profit from the most?

There may be a home that is a perfect match for your parent or relative; however, if your Care Adviser doesn’t have a contract with them, there’s no motivation for them to even mention it to you.

That’s why I created Senior Living Map. I wanted to create a resource that lists all senior and assisted living facilities available so that people can be equipped with information to determine what senior homes are the best match.

I view Care Advisers like travel agents. Before Expedia,  you had to book travel through a travel agent. They controlled all the information. Travel sites like Expedia came along and gave all the power to people and made travel agents irrelevant. They provided people will all the information they needed to make travel decisions on their own.

That’s what I want to do with senior housing. I want to provide a super-simple resource for people that provides them with a robust amount of information so that they can make a decision on their own without the need to go through a third party.

It’s really shocking to me that no site exists that does that but I’m excited that I have the chance to be that site. It’s probably because senior homes aren’t a very sexy or glamorous thing so it doesn’t get much attention

VentureBeat: What’s your monetization plan for the site?

Hanson: That’s something that’s to be determined. There aren’t any ads or anything on the site currently to generate money.

I feel like the site will evolve over the next year, and I feel like if I make a decision on how the site will make money today it will steer me away from creating the best user experience because it may conflict with how the site will generate money.

It’s like companies that are being disrupted by the Internet. They are so use to making money a certain way that they have a hard time going away from what made them as powerful as they are.

The problem with that is you’re fighting against an inevitable force that will slowly take the company to its grave.

My number one focus is on creating the best experience possible for users. Once I feel like I’ve reached that point, I’ll figure out a way to layer some business model over that experience that makes the most sense.

VentureBeat: Does the 10 percent of future earnings include anything you make from Senior Living Map?

Hanson: Yeah. The 10 percent includes any income I receive from any source for the next 10 years.

VentureBeat: Are you a developer or programmer?

I coded the site myself. I’m an army of one.

VentureBeat: What kind of features do you want to add to the Senior Living Map? Reviews? Testimonials? Inside camera shots?

Hanson: The site is pretty bare-bones right now. Long term, I’d like to make it much more robust with all the things you mentioned and more. Also, additional filters so that just like booking a hotel or flight on a travel site, you can narrow down your options to something very specific. Like a home that only accepts women or a home that speaks a certain language.

It’s quite an undertaking to collect all that data but that’s the long term goal of the site.

VentureBeat: Why’d you choose 32auctions to run the sale?

Hanson: 32auctions doesn’t have any closing fees like eBay and other auctions site do.

VentureBeat: And how is your grandmother doing in her home?

Hanson: She’s doing good It was a bit of a process, but we ended up finding a great place for her where she seems to be happy.

She says they take good care of her

Image credit: ShutterStock/Sold at auction

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Roey Brecher is co-founder and CTO of pricing intelligence startup WisePricer.

As I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in an apartment that our business development guy is renting in Oakland. I’m practically homeless at the moment but I couldn’t care less.

If there’s anything the past year had taught me, is that owning less stuff keeps me happy. I (partly) own one big ‘thing’ that I’m most proud of, and that is WisePricer. The clothes I wear are either startup t-shirts (x3 @olark, so thanks @ben) or Uniqlo whites. I take next to nothing from the business account but I’m positive better days will come. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.

We launched WisePricer in 3 months.

It was a dirty alpha version with core functionality missing, but we got a few paying customers right off the bat. There was (and is) a real need for what we came up with, even in its barely functional state. That proved to be the first lesson which is something most entrepreneurs know these days but as I came from the corporate world, I had no clue.

Moving forward and getting early traction while trying to raise seed money was another eye opener. It wasn’t before long that we realized that our product was suffering from the time we spent talking to investors. We did raise a small amount but made a mental note to focus on generating revenue. It worked.

Scaling efficiently was our next big challenge. We learned not to solve any problem before it was real and actually hurting us. You only begin to understand your true power to persevere when your server crashes 40 minutes before an important demo. If you can keep yourself from tending to tasks that are fun but you are not entirely sure will be fruitful (like developing that awesome feature your team considers really cool), pat yourself on the back, that’s how it’s done.

Spending money is another big thing. As we soon decided that we would try to minimize our dilution by growing slowly through earnings rather than investments, we started to take our cash flow seriously. We spent December’s holidays in a cheaper country (rent, food, booze and whatnot). We relied on some good friends and set up office in their conference room (they have kicked us out since, all on good terms).

I won’t tell you how three of us shared a two-bedroom apartment … but let’s just say my co founder knows my snoring pattern pretty damn well.

We were also hustling. When attending demo days or conferences, asking for discounted admission tickets is nothing to be ashamed of. Paying for a booth? Not in our budget. You will be amazed how many people you can meet when you are actually waiting around a conference hall premises and engaging in conversations.

There’s another truth I learned: Always ask for discounts. And if you are getting something for free, ask for an extension (Yuval from our team will say, ask for two). In one five minute phone call my cofounder saved us $12,000 in hosting fees.

Are we making enough money to live long and prosper? We soon had to face that question when we wanted to bring more people on board. More people means more expenses, but our time was devoted to onboarding new customers. And the B2B world is different in that you need to have a solid sales funnel.

We went back to Israel only to realize we needed to be in Mountain View two weeks later for a YCombinator interview. That interview didn’t go as expected (unless you are expecting to not get picked which I can honestly say we didn’t). It did however gave us the push we needed to pivot into the enterprise world. Think big and you shall receive.

I learned some things about working while spending your spare time with your co-workers. In a normal world, you rarely see your co workers outside of work. Heck, you rarely think about work outside of work. In a startup world, you are spending so much time with your team you sometime want to drive a fork through their hearts and twist it, but you don’t, because that’s illegal, and you need them.

Jokes aside, it can be most stressful. Learning to push aside differences and keeping non-work issues where they belong (outside of work) is how you grow.

It all comes down to Ego. The more you have of it, the less you will be willing to compromise.

Quasar’s mission is to establish groundbreaking and successful technology companies in Latin America. It is taking an approach dubbed “parallel entrepreneurship”- Quasar comes up with ideas and business models, and then finds entrepreneurs to execute them. The fund supports the companies with seed financing, mentorship, and a professional network.

“It is because of these distinctive traits that Quasar is neither an investment fund nor an incubator,” said founder and CEO Pablo Simón Casarino. “We are an experienced group of entrepreneurs with the mission of building groundbreaking and successful technology companies by bringing together robust business models and talented entrepreneur teams.”

The goal is launch ten tech companies over the next four years. The three founders Casarino, Andy Freire, and Santiago Bilinkis formerly worked as executives at Officenet. They will apply their entrepreneurial expertise to finding promising leaders capable of building successful companies.

“Because human capital is a fundamental pillar, the ideal Quasar entrepreneur must have a cluster of unique personal and professional skills: he/she must be intellectually brilliant, ambitious, creative and an extraordinary leader,” the company said in a statement. “Quasar plans to find entrepreneurs with an edge who are able to produce a dramatic global impact as leaders of the ten companies that will be built in partnership with the firm in the coming years.”

Silicon Valley venture firm Emergence Capital Partners helped fund Quasar, as well as a series of Latin American angel investors and strategic partners. Read the press release.

Photo Credit: alextorrenegra/Flickr

This is a guest post by Eran Laniado, the managing director of BMN!

This is heartbreaking: An entrepreneur puts mind, time, and energy into founding and running a new venture, and then recklessly sabotages the startup’s chances to succeed.

The Enthusiasticus Founder syndrome (not to be confused with the entirely different Founderitis) occurs when novice founders, convinced that their garage gig is the next Google or Amazon, make critical mistakes due to the dangerous cocktail of inexperience and over-optimism. Unfortunately, it causes potentially great ventures to die prematurely and founders to forgo future entrepreneurial efforts.

Here are some of the common signs and symptoms.

Betting the house (especially yours)

Undoubtedly, entrepreneurial success depends on commitment. However, despite the appealing stories about students leaving Harvard or Stanford to launch great startups (you know who we’re talking about!), one should acknowledge the long, risky and painful path to success.

As Paul Graham advises: ‘don’t get your hopes up.’

True, successful entrepreneurs take risks and, as Brad Feld says, ignore the naysayers; however, entrepreneurs should also estimate the odds realistically and support decisions with external and tangible data.

Therefore, a startup founder with no more than an idea – one who has neither a minimum viable product, nor traction and real customer insights – should take caution. Before taking large personal bank loans, risking your home, or spending all your family’s savings, acknowledge the possibility that you suffer from the entrepreneurial optimism bias.

Underestimating timeframes

When pitched with presentations and financial forecasts, VCs and angel investors may claim that the startup’s forecasted revenues should be cut by half and costs should be doubled. These professional investors know that business processes – assembling a strong team, building a product, getting first customers or setting a pilot – are all difficult, and often iterative.

Entrepreneurs should carefully check the realism of their assumptions.

Delays happen unexpectedly, and it may not be wise to devote 100 percent of your time to the venture while consuming personal savings. Scott Adams maintained his day job for 6 years while working nights, mornings, and weekends on creating Dilbert. Numerous founders have been running their startups while keeping their day jobs.

(Tony Wright wrote a nice post about his experience with two part-time, turning to full-time, startups.)

Wasting your cash

Some founders engage in costly, premature, or simply unnecessary activities, while the startup’s resources should be focused, as Steve Blank argues, on customer development and on the search for a viable business model.

So expensive patent applications may not be ideal for some startups, at least early on. Similarly, premature investments in the preparation of detailed business plans, complex financial forecasts, and fancy presentations may not only shorten the runway, but also prove futile, as all of these change dramatically over time.

Most importantly, entrepreneurs should not pay cash upfront to middlemen for leads to potential investors. If you must use intermediaries, choose to pay an acceptable finders’ fee if the deal materializes.

Allocating too much equity

Some entrepreneurs are not cautious enough with their equity and stock options and don’t realize that these should correlate to commitments and milestones.

Of course, sharing some of the pie in order to increase its size makes sense. But think ahead, even before setting capitalization tables, about how much equity to keep for the future. Some ventures may require several rounds of financing. For them, premature dilution has two risks: First, too little equity will be left for future investors. Second, as Paul Graham explains, later-stage investors prefer not to invest in a venture whose founders do not have enough equity left to motivate them. Graham gives an example of a VC who turned down a strong startup simply because investors already owned more than half of it.

Avoiding the Enthusiaticus Founder syndrome

Though the measures are simple and commonly known, overly eager or naive founders skip them. So here is a reminder:

1. Create a board of experienced people.
A ‘mastermind’ (a think tank of trustworthy people) or a board of advisors will do until the time for nominating a board of directors arrives. It’s especially important to get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs before making key decisions about partnerships, investments, and major changes.

2. Consult with professionals.
Some actions may be legally binding, so talk with a lawyer about the dos and don’ts before making seemingly innocent actions (such as sending an email that details future equity allocations). Similarly, consult with accountants or tax advisors before registering a company, and meet with patent attorneys when relevant.

3. Always remember the odds.
Only a few startups make it big, so in order to succeed, you need to minimize your mistakes. Before making decisions, ask yourself: If a friend of mine were running this startup, how would I advise her?

4. Think long term before taking expensive or irreversible actions.
Will the short-term gain of hiring a service now compensate for the negative impact on the longer-term startup’s runway?

Eran Laniado advises multinational firms and mentors entrepreneurs. He gained corporate experience as VP of Business Development & Strategy of a NYSE traded firm and as a member on boards of directors. He writes about strategy, business models, and innovation on his blog on bmnow.com and can be followed at @EranLan.

photo credit: skippyjon via photopin cc

This is a guest post by Mucker Lab’s Will Hsu.

Raising money from venture capitalists can be a lot like dating. Certain topics are simply off-limits — like talking about why your ex left you. Venture capitalists are also expert pattern-matchers. They need to know a little about a lot of things. And because they see so many potential investment opportunities, it’s almost impossible for them to have the time and energy to conduct detailed market and customer due diligence to determine the viability of an idea.

Instead, they rely on how you explain your idea and match that to their past experiences to create a complete picture of the potential investment potential. As a result, an innocent sentence you throw in at the end of your presentation could trigger either great memories of their last successful investment or nightmares of their last $10 million down the drain. So sometimes, it’s the things you don’t say that are the most important.

While you might understand the basic topic points, such as revenue potential, market opportunity, and so on, it’s important to know what not to say on the periphery as well. Here are some of the things you definitely should not mention to a venture capitalist if you don’t want to trigger bad nightmares.

10. “Daily deals”: It may seem unfair given that consumers are still lapping up deals and businesses are issuing coupons like never before. But VCs have all moved on. The reality is that it just takes too much effort, time, and tongue-twisting for a VC to tell his buddies how his latest investment is better than all the other daily deal companies that came before. And it will take too much effort for you too.

9. “Big shots like A,B,C,D,E,F,G are advisers”: Simple rule. Being able to say “adviser and investor” is 10 times better than just having an adviser. It doesn’t mean you don’t want lots of advisers and mentors, because you obviously do. You want lots of helpful and passionate advisers, but just be careful thinking that all VCs will give a damn. As a VC, I care about your ability to convince important and influential people to help you build your business (and invest); I don’t really care who they are and how many there are. It’s not about who, it’s about you.

8. “… Uncapped Note … ”: If you’re a YC company, go for it. For the rest of us mortals, let’s get real and understand the point of investors is to have smart people with money on your side.

7. “I’m pretty sure my product will sell itself, and I’m not worried about customer acquisition”: Saying that you’re not worried about customer acquisition is like saying you’re not worried about driving a thousand miles and not running out of gas. If you are not concerned now, you will be eventually. Either have a really detailed customer acquisition plan or show some metrics that allay the fears that acquisition would be too expensive or will never scale. Even product purists care about acquisition.

6. “… SoLoMo … ”: Pick two out of three. Any two. And if you must, at least jumble up the sequence (“MoLoSo?” or “LoMoSo?”). Just don’t say “SoLoMo.” Every time I hear it, a tingle goes up my spine (not in a good way), and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

5. “I don’t need to do market research because consumers are incapable of envisioning the future, you just have to give it to them”: An experienced VC could only respond, “I served with Steve Jobs. I knew Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Steve Jobs.”

4. “My product is naturally viral”: Every entrepreneur claims to have a “naturally viral” product. It’s like everyone believing they are an above-average driver. The fact remains that average CTR on Facebook news feed links are around 0.2 percent, which are about the same as banner ads, and certainly no one has ever claimed that banner ads are viral. Until a product has gone viral, it’s not viral.

3. “I’m Pinterest for X”: I cannot figure this one out. Apparently it is perfectly fine to be “AirBnB for X,” “ShoeDazzle for Z,” and “Dropbox for Y” … but the moment someone utters the word “Pinterest for … ,” everyone’s eyes just glaze over.

2. “I want to build a great user experience, I don’t care about monetization and revenue”: Only a handful of guys can say this: Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Page, Brin. The only reason they can say it is because they have proven abilities to build a large audience and eventually figure out a way to make lots of money. Unless your last name happens to be one of those, you need a plausible business model.

1. “My addressable market is $XXX billion”: Any market sizing higher than $100 billion (actually, I would really be careful starting around $50 billion) is simply not credible. It either means the entrepreneur has no idea how to analyze the market to find the initial target customer segment (and thus a smaller addressable market), or the entrepreneur has no idea how to tie his business model to a market-sizing calculation. For instance, if you are selling food trucks, you can’t say your addressable market is the total dollars for food sold by food trucks. Neither one builds confidence.

Will Hsu is a cofounder and managing partner of MuckerLab, a mentorship-driven startup accelerator focused on serving Internet software, services and media entrepreneurs in Los Angeles and broader Southern California.

Prior to MuckerLab, William was the SVP and Chief Product Officer of AT&T Interactive.

Top image via Jorge Salcedo // Shutterstock 

Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures.

In case you haven’t been reading technology news, 2013 is being heralded as the year of the enterprise renaissance.

And while I believe that to be true, the trend begs a bigger question of exactly what it means to be “enterprise” today. The lines between enterprise and consumer are increasingly blurred, and only becoming more so.

The conventional wisdom is that the innovative forces in the consumer market are now being redirected to the enterprise and “consumerizing” it. There is even a Harvard Business School class on the topic.

When people talk about the blurring lines, they typically think about things like ubiquity of consumer platforms (amplified by the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon) and consumerization of enterprise software’s user experience. But there’s something more fundamental going on here.

What we’re seeing today is not a swingback to the enterprise with the add-on of consumer models. What we’re seeing today is a swingback to more diversified revenue models and a refreshing change to the traditional go-to-market approaches … a head fake if I ever saw one.

Many of us have the inclination to track what investments are winning each year, pitting consumer against enterprise tech. But we’d be wrong to do that today. Over the last few years these two categories have become non-exclusive and less correlated, as once believed. To say, if one is projected to do well, it doesn’t necessarily mean the other will do poorly. So why is enterprise so appealing to investors right now?

First, this is all happening after 2012 investment levels dropped from 2011, and VC’s are being a lot more discriminating with where they’re placing their bets. That was more than confirmed according to the most recent report from Moneytree.

There’s less appetite for risk in the market.  Yet the traditionally risky investment in enterprise is, all of a sudden, the safer bet.

Here are my reasons why VC’s and entrepreneurs are flocking (for good reason) towards enterprise in 2013.

Consumer (and prosumer) first models have been fully validated

Consumer-first and prosumer-first models have shown to be very successful entries into the enterprise market over the last few years.

Prosumer success stories like Dropbox, for example, first started out as a consumer app that then later became widely adopted in the enterprise and were one of the first startups to show how you can get into the enterprise without employing a huge salesforce.

Other companies like Basecamp and Evernote have both lived very similar lives. And the list of examples goes on with Google Apps, Box, and more.

What investors are looking for is the next Evernote or Dropbox, where an app gains bottom-up traction in the enterprise and spreads quickly amongst professionals.  Most investors don’t like laying their money out for businesses that need to enlist a big salesforce. But taking the leap to the consumer-first enterprise model five years ago was even more frightening than a salesforce, so things have definitely evolved.

Now that the model has enjoyed so much success, it’s clear that investors and entrepreneurs alike have gotten over their fears, and in truth, are starting to look at enterprise as the next great, golden calf.

Consumer-first reduces risk and increases odds of disruption

While some of the assumed downsides of the consumer-first model have been disproven, there is an emerging understanding of the upsides of this new approach and why we’re all reading more headlines with the words “mobile-first, consumer-driven enterprise” in them.

The consumer-first approach creates two revenue models within one startup (over several phases in the lifecycle of the company) and allows companies to naturally expand their revenue streams when the time is right.

On one hand, you aren’t excluding yourself from the potential of hockey-stick growth and viral adoption with a consumer product. And on the enterprise side, you’re creating a direct path to near-term revenue and major long-term growth (enterprises are still spending way more money on IT than consumers).

Even more importantly, the startup can parlay early consumer traction into the enterprise offering, which is an advantage that most incumbent vendors have traditionally struggled to achieve. These startups can iterate on the product with real end-users long before they demo it to an enterprise. The time between MVP and a mature enterprise product is shrinking by the day. The new paradigm replaces a long lead time for an enterprise-level product with an early consumer product that evolves to a mature enterprise product with the help of early consumer adoption.

The consumer-first approach also increases the odds of enterprise disruption.

Typically enterprise software sales has required you to go through the CIO, which is a hard won process for even the savviest salesperson. With a consumer-first approach you immediately throw the formal processes out the window and enter the enterprise through the back door.

Every CIO on the planet struggles with consumerization, but the decision to buy back control when 60 percent of your employees are already using the free version of a SaaS application is a no brainer. Add security and BYOD to the mix, and the CIO almost has no other choice but to formally adopt a SaaS application that becomes popular.

In essence, you have a better chance of disrupting incumbent vendors by changing the rules of the game.

While they’re going door-to-door glad-handing CIO’s to get a pilot going, the savvy startup has skipped straight to end-user adoption. Hence, what seems like a shift from consumer to enterprise is just the result of a smart go-to-market decision by enterprise companies.

Lastly, barriers to entry are plummeting

Creating software, hosting it and deploying it is easier today than it ever has been in the history of technology. The inevitable merging of cloud, SaaS and mobile over the past year has caught the IT market by storm, and most importantly, lowered the barriers to entry not only for the startups but for investors too.

Ten years ago an enterprise Series A was a hefty round of funding by any measure.  Today, you can start that company for a fraction of the price.  Enterprise is finally becoming as lean as consumer.

More importantly, IT buying habits are changing rapidly.  The enterprise is getting more comfortable with SaaS and cloud technology, and the spending priorities have shifted. Even traditional and heavily regulated industries are joining the party.

Furthermore, the IT department isn’t the only group with IT buying power.

Historically, whenever the marketing or customer support department of a big business needed a piece of software, they had to literally walk to the IT department and make their case to the CIO.

Today, however, the marketing department has quickly become one of the fastest growing buyers of IT and are increasingly Chief Marketing Officers are buying the technology they need directly from enterprise service providers. In this 2013 IT spending report, it’s obvious that every budget has become an IT budget. All of a sudden, the enterprise startup is selling to a market that’s the same size as their consumer counterparts.

How this will continue to evolve is uncertain. All we know for sure is that the lines between the two will continue to blur, giving way to never-before-seen opportunities in the enterprise as walls continue fall and rules continue to get broken.

Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures, leading venture efforts from raw business concepts through to value proposition and the creation of a stand-alone companies.

Andrew Gazdecki is the founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, a do-it-yourself mobile app & mobile website platform for small businesses, and Bizness CRM, a CRM platform designed to make selling to small businesses easy.

With all the buzz these days about how sexy and cool the enterprise has become, there is a segment of business customers that startups are overlooking: small businesses. Small businesses tend to have far less capital than large enterprises, but as customers, they offer startups a number of advantages that make them ideal customers to focus on.

Below are some of the advantages that make small businesses such desirable customers to have:

1. The market is massive

In the U.S. alone, there are over 5 million businesses with fewer than 100 employees. For startups looking for a global reach, the worldwide number of small businesses is far greater than the number of big companies.
The number of big companies in the U.S. with over 1,000 employees is around 10,000, and the worldwide number is correspondingly small. Accordingly, chasing the small business market enables a startup to address an audience that is orders of magnitude larger than the enterprise audience.

2. It’s rewarding

Small businesses are generally one-person shops run by someone chasing a dream. Helping them succeed can be extremely rewarding, and along the way you can meet some very interesting people.

When serving the enterprise, it can be hard to make the connection between your work and the end product. But when you serve small businesses, you can often see a direct impact on the lives of others. Building your startup can be daunting, but this model can help motivate you in your day to day.

The folks over at 37signals, makers of Basecamp, have demonstrated this point pretty well.  They serve the “Fortune 5,000,000,” a term they use to refer to all of their small business customers.  In an insightful post, they highlight the fact that, when you serve small businesses, your buyers and your end users are the same people.  They interact regularly with their end users, and the effort to keep them happy is, in the words of 37signals co-founder Jason Fried, “An absolute pleasure.” Sounds pretty rewarding, right?  Compare this to selling to the enterprise, where the software buyers are not necessarily the company’s end users, and a painful disconnect can arise that makes development a sad affair.

3. Small businesses may be “sexier” than enterprises

You may take part in your share of exciting, high profile projects when working with enterprise-level clients, but small businesses can offer the exact same thing. Indeed, the “common wisdom” says that large businesses, due to bureaucratic slowdown, may be less likely to innovate and work on “sexy” projects. Whether this is a myth or not is up for debate. It has been suggested, however, that likelihood to innovate is controlled by culture and policies, not size.

If this is the case, you’ll find interesting, forward-looking projects when working with small businesses. In my experience, small businesses are more likely to adopt a strategy of innovation in order to break into the market, as opposed to adopting a strategy of trying to marginally improve on current offerings. This is because differentiation and taking market share from the market leader are often too difficult without some kind of advancement to promote.

If you’re looking for “sexy” projects, small businesses are more open to approach things in new ways and take big risks as they fight for a place in the market.

Take SquareSpace, for example.  If anything needs to be beautified and sexied up, it’s small business websites.  When websites are done hastily by someone who has their mind on a thousand other things (hello, small business owners!), they can actually wind up hurting a business more than helping it.  SquareSpace has clearly decided to bring sexy back, and they didn’t have to target massive enterprises to do it.

4. The path can be easier

It doesn’t take a year to complete a sale to a small business. Many deals can be completed with a few phone calls. This means you don’t need an enterprise-level sales team to get a deal done. Selling to a small business also means you can keep your first products or services simple. There aren’t complex systems that you have to integrate into, there aren’t multi-layered policies to comply with, and there aren’t a bunch of departments that all need to approve the deal.

Small business deals are very streamlined – you can simply find a need and meet it. This simplicity can be a huge help when the tasks involved in getting a startup off the ground demand a lot of attention and are distracting you from attending to your main mission.

5. Product opportunities are endless

Small businesses, by definition, have a small staff and many gaps in their operation that they need help with. That is, almost every aspect of their business has room for development. There are opportunities to help small businesses with mobile strategy, social marketing, web technology, communications, transaction processing, and more. Want examples? Here’s a small sampling of successful companies that have addressed small business needs.

Save small businesses time, money, or both, and you’ve got a startup with a ton of potential!

Another take on this point comes from Bigcommerce, a company that helps small businesses create online stores with enterprise-level features and functionality.  What’s interesting here is that small business had a gap to fill once upon a time – selling online – and it was filled, by companies like eBay and Amazon … but at a price.  Bigcommerce is able to disrupt this setup, or perhaps offer a supplemental solution, which tells us that even where solutions already exist, there tends to be room for variation.

6. You can serve a greater purpose

What makes technology startups so special is that you have the opportunity to help people and businesses of every size at an unimaginable scale. If your product or service is useful to small businesses in your area, it may be useful to others around the world. And since the percentage of businesses that are small may be quite high in certain developing countries, your company can be a major force for the global good.

At the end of the day, small businesses offer many, many advantages to startups looking to develop their first customers. Compared to enterprises, it’s easier to design a quality offering, reach a decision maker, make a sale, and administer a working relationship going forward. Small businesses let you be flexible, obtain immediate success, and provide learning and development opportunities that are virtually endless.

Essentially, my point is this: When you chase the biggest game, you may spend a ton of time, money, and effort, and still go home with nothing. If you go after small game, on the other hand, and you’ll almost always come home with something.

And for a startup, obtaining “something” is cause for celebration.

photo credit: Robert Scoble via photopin cc

So Graham’s doing something about it.

From now on, Y Combinator companies will use a four-step protocol before assuming they have a handshake deal with an investor:

1. The investor indicates a desire to be in on a funding round at a certain valuation.
2. The startup agrees and verbally commits.
3. The startup sends the investor an email or text message asking for confirmation.
4. The investor replies and confirms.

The problem, Graham says, is that too many “handshake deals” are not really deals at all. Either an investor isn’t communicating clearly, or a founder is over-eager and reading too much into a very polite no, or something worse is happening. Investors who are new to the game — or simply dishonest — can cause startups huge issues:

The problem is compounded by the fact that some investors deliberately mislead startups about how interested they are in investing. Startups’ prospects can change rapidly. If investors say no in a way that sounds like yes, they can essentially take a free option to invest. They haven’t actually committed, so it costs them nothing, but if the startup turns out to be a hot one, they can retroactively claim that their almost-yes was an actual yes, and that the startup is morally obliged to let them invest.

The process that Graham outlines seems long and excessive, but he argues that with mobile phones, it can and should all happen in person, right away. The difference is that now there is a digital track that confirms what the founder hoped he or she heard and what the investor actually committed to.

But Graham didn’t just make these comments off-the-cuff. He checked with Valley super-angels and VCs Ron Conway, Ben Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Marc Andreesen, among others, before publishing.

photo credit: Leonard John Matthews via photopin cc

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital.

As a general partner at XSeed Capital, I was recently asked by one of our portfolio company CEOs my opinion on a potential strategic investor into his firm.

This is not an uncommon question that arises – what are the plusses and minuses of taking in money from a corporation versus a financial investor? Does it align incentives in a partnership between a large and small company? Can a startup get a higher valuation from a strategic investor vs. a pure financial investor?

Having been a strategic investor while at Intel, a CEO who took in strategic investment capital, and also as a VC who has co-invested with large corporations into startups, my key learnings on this situation are four-fold:

The strategic investor will always do what is in their selfish self-interest

One hypothesis is that if a strategic investor owns stock in a startup, the large firm will have its incentives aligned with management and the other financial investors. This is simply not true.

The broader economic interest of the larger corporation will always outweigh the small financial interest it has in the startup. It is not necessarily bad, per se, that a strategic investor owns stock in a startup, but don’t be mislead into the belief that this will “align incentives.”

A large corporate partner will act in whatever way it believes is in its financial interest, and they will not care about the consequences of getting what they want — including killing a startup in which it has made an investment — if it believes that this is the right thing for it to do.

Not all strategic investors are the same

Certain companies have a substantively more progressive POV towards investments. They see startups as not only sources of product innovation, but also partners and potential acquisition targets (for both products and people).

This is not the case with all large firms, however.

I will posit that many (most?) Silicon Valley large companies have a more “enlightened” approach in these relationships as there is an ecosystem that encourages acquisitions and collaborations between large and small firms. Outside of Silicon Valley this is not always true — in fact, oftentimes there is no history of such strategic relationships in an industry.

As such, a CEO should consider if there is a history of positive interactions in an industry between large and small companies when considering taking on a strategic investor. If there isn’t, be cautious.

Separate the commercial agreement from the investment

At times large companies like to tie development agreements or commercial arrangements to investments. This becomes a convenient way to put cash into a company that needs it, while getting some extra value via stock.

This is almost always a bad idea for a startup.

If a commercial arrangement makes sense for two companies, a structure can be found that is non-dilutive and works for both sides. If a large firm wants to make a strategic investment alongside a commercial arrangement, that can be fine as long as there is no correlation between the two agreements.

In other words, if the commercial arrangement no longer makes sense for one or both parties, the strategic investor should not be able to cause unnatural acts to the shareholders (including both employees and financial investors) or exert undue influence through its stock ownership.

Later is better than earlier

In the earliest days of a company, a startup is at its most fragile state. As such, a strategic investor has the ability to have disproportionate influence to encourage a young entity to do things that may not be in the long-term best interest of the startup (but might be good for the strategic investor).

As a young company gets more established, it has the ability both to survive changes in the status in a relationship with a large strategic partner, and also to push back with alternative choices if incentives end up not being aligned with the strategic investor.

. . .

While the above four pieces of conventional wisdom aren’t always true, I have found them to be consistent guidelines that help describe some key learnings of whether a startup should take an investment from a strategic investor.

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital, bringing extensive innovative leadership in strategy definition, operational execution, and international sales and marketing for companies large and small. This post originally appeared on his blog.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

By Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, 

When scaling a company, it’s the easy things that become most difficult. Whether you’re bringing on new employees, organizing team workloads, or simply trying to keep open lines of communication, bigger teams often mean bigger headaches.

In five years, Xtreme Labs has grown from an office of eight to a staff of 250.

While many companies stumble at this point, our business goals for 2013 require us to bring on 100 more people by year’s end. How did we reach this point and what will allow us to meet the growth required for 2013, you ask?

Here are three tips that every growing software company needs to consider in order to grow consistently, efficiently and effectively.

Hire fast, fire faster

This mantra comes from entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster.

Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance. Candidates often test as false positives and false negatives. For example, a candidate could have the ideal skill-set for the position, but may not have put her best foot forward in a two-hour interview. When software companies ask coding questions, expect answers on whiteboards, and disqualify for giving the wrong answer, they are forgetting that most people don’t write code on whiteboards.

This scenario sets the candidate up to fail because it forces her to use a method that few engineers use in their regular workday.

The opposite may also happen: she may have mastered the interview, but is an incompatible fit in skills or culture. How do you counteract these scenarios?

Don’t drop the concept of a defined interview process altogether. Instead, recognize that interviews aren’t perfect. Ask challenging questions that try to establish how the candidate thinks, and don’t disqualify someone for giving the wrong answer.

Organize your work environment to be a good indicator of whether or not an individual is a good fit relatively quickly. This is a better predictor of performance because it uses real in-work data instead of interview data. Instead of trying to create questions that elicit a symptom of fit, build performance indicators directly into the culture and work experience. A lot of companies follow a “hire slow, fire fast” mentality, which involves an extremely rigorous interview process but often results in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Instead of using the interview as the proxy for performance, use an internship or a few months of work experience, for valid, real-world data. Recognize that “the map is not the territory;” a great interviewee is not equivalent to a great employee.

Monotasking = efficiency

Over the past few years, it has become normal for people to do many things at the same time. Now, we’re starting to go overboard with it.

In multitasking, the time it takes to switch between tasks, also known as the context switch, becomes extremely expensive as more and more tasks are attempted simultaneously. When you examine context switching costs in aggregate, it’s clear that multitasking wastes a lot of time.

People often think the end-goal is to be the most efficient multitasker possible. They take joy and relief, in catching up on their e-mails during a meeting. However, multitasking often leads to messing two things up simultaneously. Should we be rewarding employees for this behavior?

Emphasize the idea of monotasking—doing one thing at a time.

Implement processes like pair programming that allow your engineers to monotask. Teams of two that are accountable to each other are less likely to get distracted by e-mail, the Internet and social networks. Consider organizing an open, agile team room where everyone can see what others are up to.

Don’t let the calendar dictate when to meet

It’s extremely difficult to have an effective one-on-one meeting.

People are busy and often don’t prepare properly. An effective one-on-one requires both sides to be in the right mindset and to queue up topics, requiring regular bookkeeping. However, these necessities usually don’t coincide in the real world, and the reason why is simple: A career reflection moment is unlikely to happen during a scheduled one-on-one.

When an issue arises, come together and fix it right away. Being available to host an impromptu meeting allows employees to grab you for a chat while the topic and context are fresh. It’s also possible to combine the merits of an unscheduled one-on-one with a 15 or 20-minute lag time in order for both sides to prepare properly.

As companies grow in size, coordination costs increase. As headcount increases so does the overall communication. A potential alternative to unscheduled one-on-ones is to host scheduled meetings, and cancel them if neither side needs it. At the end of the day, everyone has their own management style, and it important for managers to remain flexible when communicating with their team.

Filtering out candidates post-hire, monotasking, and impromptu meetings, are just a few of the principles we’ve used at Xtreme Labs to guide our growth while protecting our company culture.

If you’re managing a fast-growing company, we hope they come in handy for you too.

She and her 8-year-old daughter, Kylee, are building a program that teaches entrepreneurial skills to kids between the ages of six and ten, and encourages them to execute real-world projects.

“I started this because of what I witnessed in school with my children,” Antico said in an interview with VentureBeat. “It is hard for today’s public schools to go outside of the core curriculum because the test scores in reading and math or so low. But I wanted my kids to think outside of the box and be creative. I don’t really care if they ever start their own business. I want to focus work on letting a child’s mind be what a child’s mind is. They are full of spirit and creativity, and when you apply it into the real world, who knows what can happen?”

Little Ladies Inventing Fun Through Entrepreneurship

Antico began by inviting a small group of friends and neighbors over to her home in suburban Virginia for informal meetings. She has a doctorate in social entrepreneurship and founded Practica Partners, a Washington D.C. consulting firm that focuses on entrepreneurial innovation. She applied her professional expertise to break down a business plan into a format elementary schoolers could understand.

During the weekly sessions, the girls learned about how to create and sustain business ideas, iterate quickly, adapt and adjust through teamwork, and communicate effectively with coworkers, customers, and adults. They work on their own projects and present to others in the group. The informal gathering grew into lLifte, which stands for “little ladies inventing fun through entrepreneurship.” It now involves a core curriculum, a “badging” system similar to the Girl Scouts, and a revenue model.

“Selling something is simple,” Kylee said during the interview. “You go up to house in a wagon, ask if they want cookies, and of course they do, so they give you the money, and you give them the cookies. I wanted to work on real problems and ideas. I’ve got a little chest and a lot to get off it!”

The pilot program only involved 10 girls, but like true entrepreneurs, Antico and Kylee saw opportunities for expansion and growth. Kylee wanted to include boys in the program, and Antico wanted to create a scaleable model that could be replicated around the country. They sat down (over juice and cookies) to create Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand.

Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand

Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand is the online version of lLifte. It is a kid-run virtual lemonade stand that teaches entrepreneurship. It is an online community of “mini-preneurs” who work together to set out and achieve business goals. On the site, kids can customize their stand and test out ideas on their peers. Antico said it has a “LinkedIn for kids” component, where kids can network and find friends with similar interests. It also has educational lessons on financial literacy, planning, organization etc…

Right now, lLifte and Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand are in the early stages. lLifte’s club program is starting in its first school this spring and will then open up to schools, communities, and after-school programs in the Washington, D.C., and New York metropolitan areas. After that, Antico intends to expand nationwide.

For the online version, the roadmap includes building a series of online episodic games where kids can complete projects and receive awards. The games will be available as an annual subscription.

Plenty of programs across the country seek to develop kids creatively and prepare them for “the real world.” lLifte, however, falls at the interesting intersection between the need for female entrepreneurs and national discussions about entrepreneurship as a way to address America’s economic woes. Ultimately, Antico said her goal is to “teach creativity, help kids find their passion at an early age, and teach them how to take a risk.”

Kylee’s goal, on the other hand, is a little simpler.

“If you are an entrepreneur, you get to design your dreams and make your own rules,” she said. “You are your own boss. If you are your own boss, you have a pretty stinking cool life.”

Check out Kylee’s Declaration of Minipreneurship:

Photo Credit: lLifte and Tomorrow’s Lemonade Stand

And ePACT co-founder Christine Summers says such a network has a fairly impressive viral component.

Summers calls the company, which graduated from the GrowLab accelerator in Vancouver tonight, the “LinkedIn of emergencies,” because it’s a cloud connector of individuals’ emergency notification information that also functions as an alert system for organizations like schools, clubs, daycares, and youth sports teams.

“The vast majority of organizations put their emergency [contact] information on paper,” Summers says. “This is an opportunity to leverage networking technology for safety.”

The second co-founder, Kirsten Telford, saw that need firsthand. She was living in Japan when the massive tsunami of 2011 wreaked havoc on the coast, killing 15,000, and devastating the country’s infrastructure. And based on what she saw there, Telford recognized that we’re completely unprepared for a similar-size emergency in the US.

ePACT works by operating as a single source of emergency contact information. Everyone puts their data in, including allergies and medications, and organizations and people that need to access it request your permission. You grant permission to authorized organizations, like schools your children attend, or companies you work for, and they now know what to do and who to contact in case of emergency.

“If there’s an emergency, they can blast messages to the whole network,” Summers says. “Schools, for instance, can communicate out to families through text messages, a mobile app, email, and the web, and families can communicate with their network.”

That sounds like a prototypical good thing, but hard to monetize. But in fact, according to Summers, many types of organizations are federally mandated to maintain emergency contact lists. Schools head the list, but community organizations, sports teams, some clubs, fitness centers, and other organizations also need emergency contact information. According to ePACT, organizations in North America alone ask for emergency contact information 900 million times a year.

And it’s all on paper right now. Which means the emergency contact “industry” is ripe for disruption.

“The Toronto School Board, which we’re talking to right now, would save $1.75 million using our system,” Summers says. “Right now it costs them $10 per student to manage via a paper process.”

The co-founders had already raised $800,000 from angel investors before entering GrowLab. The company has five full-time employees, and Summers says it’s on track for 2,500,000 users within its very first year. And each user who joins, spreads the message.

“For every family that joins, we get another three families joining,” Summers told me.

So why join an accelerator?

“GrowLab held our feet to the fire,” she says. “It upped the ante for us … they made us think big and pushed the message: go hard or go home.”

photo credit: selva via photopin cc

Cuban cash is a badge of honor even though he’s almost as promiscuous an investor as Yuri Milner, who, with others, gives every YCombinator graduate $80,000 in seed money. With personal investments like a one-man cat-drawing startup and an offer of $1,000,000 for a face-painting company, Mark Cuban might not be Draper Fisher Jurvetson or Andreessen Horowitz.

But he certainly attracts a lot of attention.

Which is exactly what a tiny startup attacking the massive business-to-business marketplace needs. Procurify aims to give small businesses all the procurement, and supplier-buyer communication goodies that big enterprises have, and it has millions of potential clients scattered all over North America.

Today, the company is graduating from GrowLab’s accelerator bootcamp, and part of the pitch is Mark Cuban. But only part.

Source: John Koetsier

Aman Mann, center, with his cofounders

“The core of it is that enterprise companies have many solutions available in ERP, enterprise resource planning software,” Mann, Procurify’s founder, told me. “But it takes major resources that small to medium-sized businesses can’t afford.”

So Procurify moves ERP to the cloud, taking out the endless install and training cycles, the huge costs, and the Byzantine processes, regulations, and workflows that big companies love to hate but can’t seem to ditch. It replaces them with a simple installs-in-a-day, $15/month/user solution to manage, track, and automate all the common processes that small businesses currently “manage” via paper, email, and the owner’s forebrain.

Over the last four months, the company has been deployed all over North America, Mann says, in industries as diverse as manufacturing, health care, gaming, and food-processing. Mann is planning to specifically target manufacturing as the company moves out of a public beta and into commercialization mode, and the money he raises today at GrowLab’s demo day will go a long way to accelerating that.

Which brings us back to Mark Cuban.

Mann cold-emailed Cuban and kept at it until Cuban responded. A conversation, a meeting with his “people,” and a lot more back and forthing after, he’s in the process of securing an investment. The ink’s not dry, but it looks pretty solid. Which is a nice thing to be able to say to investors as you graduate from an accelerator.

“We need more investment sluts,” GrowLab’s executive director Mike Edwards told me as we chatted about this just before Procurify went on stage.

photo credit: jdlasica via photopin cc

Julie Fredrickson is a three-time founder whose current startup is PlayAPI.

I have a confession to make. I’ve recently become obsessed with being liked by a certain crowd: “Tech.”

As a woman generally unconcerned with being palatable to others, making this admission is really painful for me.

I’ve always been contrarian, sometimes deliberately, even going so far as naming my first blog after the premise that I was always “almost” appropriate for a given situation. But the truth is that I have always been a profoundly non normative person.

But for some reason over the last 6 months or so I started caring about being liked.  Liked by the Silicon Valley set. Liked by venture capitalists. Liked by the kind of men that determine who is or is not “one of us” in tech.  I’d say women but there aren’t enough to warrant being concerned about.  I wanted to be one of those founders, you know, the type that gets silly valuations and love from the name brand ventures firms, the type that gets written up by the tech press, the sort that powerful angels vouch for and send around glowing intros for as being “the next big thing,” and the sort that jets around to conferences.  In other words, I got wrapped up in the idea of having myself and my business being hyped instead being a genuinely successful business.

Source: LinkedIn

Julie Fredrickson

I was making justifications to myself at night about how they “should” love my startup. We had all the pattern matching basics down pat. We are second time founders that have worked together for the better part of a decade. We had a successful exit. We are solving a major problem for a growing market. We’ve experienced the problem personally and are building for the pain points we know. We have A-list clients. Celebrity (well in tech at least) advisors. We are even in the “hot” enterprise space. We have a female co-founder! Don’t you want to show that you aren’t biased? LIKE US GOD DAMN IT.

Now as someone who has manufactured desire and cool for a living let me tell you the first thing you can do to kill being “it” is by trying to get the people who set those standards to apply and judge you by them. Being cool has never been about begging to be liked. But I started doing all the things that a “poser” does. We did the functional equivalent of changing our hair, our wardrobe and even our personalities to be liked.

And of course it didn’t work. We weren’t being ourselves. But I kept taking advice on how to be more appealing. And then I wondered why I was miserable. I was floundering in the tech world’s Mean Girl clique and like Lindsay Lohan I was starting to hate myself for it.

I got caught up in the perception market and lost sight of the fact that I’m supposed to be serving an actual market.  And I was doing pretty well at it.  Because ironically, while we were floundering at being liked by tech, our business was great. All the objective signs of a successful business abounded. It turns out I’ve got a startup that happens to be a business. You know what that means?  We make money.  In the reality markets people pay us. And they pay us more for the product than it costs to create it.  By a great margin. And more and more people are going to have a need for this product in the future, aiding our margins even further. I have real clients that believe my product is serving a genuine need and are willing to pay to have us solve their problem. Maybe it isn’t the glamor that the men in tech seek but not for nothing I’m a Weberian Protestant and I’m happy to serve with an unwavering work ethic. I actually like my clients. I believe in my product. Serving our market makes me happy. You know what doesn’t make me happy?

Serving tech’s capricious standards does not make me happy. 

Because as it turns out the market for being an “it” founder and a flavor of the week startup isn’t the reality market. It is the perception market. Plenty of successes in the perception market fail at being real businesses which is ostensibly what all of us are trying to achieve. Hell, the jury is even out on whether venture capital itself is even a decent asset class.

So you know what? Fuck you guys. I don’t really bear you any malice but since this is a personal exorcism of a ridiculous ego driven emotional burden I hope you don’t mind if I curse you a little bit. I need to get you off my mind, you see. So, I don’t need your approval. I don’t need your hype. And I have no idea why I was even seeking it. I need the approval of the markets. I need the approval of my clients. And so far I’ve got it. But if I spend too much time changing who I am (aka our product) to please you then I might lose that. So I’m going to stop caring and go back to working. And I will be patient and diligent. And if the “IT” crowd ever comes calling I’ll wait a few days to return their calls.

photo credit: zalouk webdesign via photopin cc

Winning a startup competitions is a great way for an entrepreneur to take an idea from concept to reality, to get attention, and to obtain initial funding, which can be one of the most difficult hurdles.

I’ve won two startup competitions and have learned some lessons along the way.

There are hundreds of startup competitions ranging from Arch Grants to MassChallenge, TechStars, Y-Combinator and Startup Chile. Here are three things you should consider when applying to a startup competition:

1. How you get the money you win
2. Location and the cost of living
3. The startup network

How you get the money you win

Most competitions ask for equity in a company. Arch Grants, MassChallenge and Start-Up Chile do not. They award equity free grants of $50,000, $100,000 or $40,000, respectively. However, the realities of how you actually get the money are quite different.

The most important difference is how the money makes it to your bank account. MassChallenge distributes money once your accelerator program ends. Arch Grants writes you a $20,000 check on your first day and then $10,000 checks each of the following three quarters. Start-Up Chile will “reimburse” up to $40,000 dollars over a six month period. This means every 4-6 weeks you meet with your account executive and justify the things you’ve spent money on, hoping they approve everything. They also actually only reimburse 90% of your expenses. If they don’t approve an item, too bad, you’ve already spent money on it. This can be an incredibly frustrating experience for everyone involved.

The goal of the grant is to help you create a growing business, not fill out paperwork.

When submitting to a foreign competition, another thing to note is currency conversion. While a competition may advertise they are awarding so much money in US dollars, they may actually award the money in non-U.S. currency. With fluctuations in currency rates, the award amount can end up being more or much less than you were expecting to win.

Location and the cost of living

The issue here really comes down to what kind of startup you are building. If there is a significant international component to your mission, being based abroad could be advantageous. However, for the majority of startups, being stateside is usually the best option. The USA is still far and away the best place to start a company. The USA has an infrastructure to support the growth of a small business and easy access to resources that may not be readily available in other countries.

The lower cost of living you may experience in a foreign city vs. a US city can be overshadowed by the cost of moving to a foreign country. Buying plane tickets and visas really adds up.

Another overlooked piece of the equation are the costs and frustrations that come with needing to buy things not offered in that country, like iPhones and iPads. When looking into a foreign country as a place of business, it is important to check to see what resources they have. Will you have easy access to purchasing computers and other technology needed to conduct business? Many of the things that Americans take for granted are not readily available in other countries.

The cost of living in various cities in the U.S. can also vary greatly. Most competitions require you to move to the host city, and it’s important to know what additional costs this may involve that could offset your funding award. Living in St. Louis, I can spend more money on my business and less on rent.

The startup network

Aside from money, connections and mentoring are the best benefits a startup competition can provide. You should consider who will be in the program with you (fellow startups) and the people the program executives can introduce to you. A contest like Start-Up Chile is BIG. They bring in roughly 100 companies, three times a year. This means you’re surrounded by roughly 700 entrepreneurs at any given time. You’re either going to feel lost in a sea of entrepreneurs, or uber connected to like-minded individuals from around the world. It’s what you make of it.

Other competitions like St. Louis-based Arch Grants are much smaller. For my round, they only accepted 15 companies (20 will be accepted in the next round). Because of this, it’s much easier to stand out. St. Louis is an amazing place that is going through a revival. They’re quite eager to pump you up. If you let them, everyone will want to help you in any way they can.

Overall, one competition may turn out to be the better deal for entrepreneurs. If you don’t mind giving up equity in your company, the network that TechStars and Y-Combinator provide could be worth it. If you’re a non-profit, your best bet is probably a bigger and broader competition like MassChallenge. For me, Arch Grants has come out the winner, primarily because the money is really a grant, and the city is affordable and has a dedicated support network.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to complain about free funding. However, researching the finer details of any program you apply to is essential. Sometimes clauses can be crippling.

Marshall Haas, 23, is the co-founder of Obsorb. His other works include 18th.me, Connected Bedding, and AllRendered. You can follow him on Twitter @MarshallHaas. Marshall and his co-founder are the only people to have been accepted into both Start-Up Chile and Arch Grants. Marshall started Obsorb when he was accepted into Start-Up Chile’s first round. Obsorb is currently in Arch Grants’ first round. Between the two programs, the company has been given a total of $90,000 in equity free grants, in addition to other funding.

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This post was written by entrepreneur and startup coach Rahul Varshneya.

You know that you want to quit your job and that you want to start a startup. You’ve had this desire for quite sometime now and you really must begin.

But you don’t.

You don’t because you’ve got responsibilities. You don’t because you’ve not got the perfect time. You don’t because you don’t have enough cash. You don’t because you procrastinate.

The bottom line is, you don’t because you’re afraid. The rest are all excuses.

The problem is that there is a gap between knowing it and doing it. This gap is what differentiates the entrepreneurs from the rest, though. You can remain an aspiring entrepreneur forever, or you can take the plunge today.

Sometimes, the gap just remains and you never start. My intention here it to bridge this gap for you by making you dig to the bottom of the gap, identify the issue, and help you nip it. Nip it so that you can take the first step towards a long journey of entrepreneurship.

The only reason why people do not take the plunge into entrepreneurship is fear. That is at the root of all excuses. So how do you overcome fear? Here’s a plan.

#1 – Just Do It

There’s nothing like squashing or overcoming fear by staring straight into its face. Take the plunge for whatever be your reason not to. What’s the worst that will happen to you? You’d fail? But that’s going to happen anyway!

If you’re going to do a startup, you are going to fail. But the best part is that if you embrace failure, you will succeed.

I’ve learnt through my experiences that the best way to do something is to simply get started. Do not worry about the outcome for that is not in your hands. What you control is your karma, the result is something you have no control over, so why worry about something you can’t even control?

#2 – What’s Your Fear?

Identifying what you’re afraid of is a crucial step. You can’t just be afraid of failure; it’s got to be far deeper and intrinsic. Failure is an integral part of life and is deep rooted in everything we do.

The smaller things we don’t notice sometimes. So the task is to identify what is it really deep down that is bothering you from starting up. Write down factual things. Like the fear of not making any money after ‘x’ months/year. Fear of survival for the next ‘x’ months/years. You’ve got to be precise and write these down.

Also pen down what’s the worst that could happen if you come across these situations.

What you’ve just done is remove the clutter and fear from your mind onto real issues that you have down on paper.

#3 – Identify Resources

Once you’ve identified your fears, now begin to identify what you would do in case you come across these problems. Who you would/could go to for help? What resources can you dig into if you face these challenges?

You need to do an exercise in contingency planning, detailing everything that you will do in case you fail or face your worst fears.

Now you have a plan. A well-defined plan on what you will do when you fail. Instead of these issues cluttering your mind, now you’ve got an action plan. But failure can come in many ways and at the most unlikely instances. That is where you need to break your moves into smaller bits.

#4 – Get Started

Now that you’re prepared to get started, there are two things that you need to take care of. Make sure that whatever you’ve chalked out in your contingency plan, you’ve taken care of that. By taken care of I mean that you know you will have access to those resources when you go down that route.

Having laid down your fears at rest, you are now totally prepared to take your first steps. Don’t aim for a record-breaking long jump in the first step that you take. Break down your tasks that are required to get you started into smaller bits; smaller bits of achievable tasks that you can complete in 2-3 days.

If the first step to starting your venture is to put out a website, start identifying vendors. Start speaking to people who can introduce you to them. Most aspiring entrepreneurs don’t even get started with this because of the overriding fear of failure.

You may keep telling yourself all this while that getting website designed and developed is expensive, or how will you ever find the right partner who can understand your perspective and get things done. And then you just don’t get started.

The trick is simple. Just do it. Start finding out vendors. Start speaking to everyone you know about it. You will be surprised with the results. And this will boost your confidence to get on to the next step.

Once you successfully complete the first step, move on to the second. And so on and so forth.

#5 – By All Means, Please Fail

You really must fail. Even superman fails, learns a lesson, and then strikes back. The point I’m trying to make is that no one is immune to failure. And when you take smaller steps and strides, your fall will also be less hurtful.

But fall you must. Fail you must. Because only then will you discover the better path or journey. Only when you tread on the path with thorns will you realize the other better path and understand the value of what it means to be on it.

Failure is great because it teaches you many things. It’s an opportunity because only by failing will you come to understand your true potential. Because if you fail, you will relentlessly pursue till you get it right. Now, it is far easier to relentlessly pursue something when that task is much smaller at hand.

You get the point of breaking them down into smaller bits now?

The bridge between knowing and doing is very very small. All you need is a little bit of focus, a lot of passion, and Nike’s popular slogan imprinted in your head – Just do it. For when you’ve got focus, passion and true love, the universe truly conspires to make it happen for you.

If this article inspired you to get started, please write to me. I’d be happy to hear from you.

Rahul Varshneya has spent his entire career either working for startups or starting businesses. He now spends time between coaching aspiring entrepreneurs in launching their ventures, apps and websites, and building Arkenea Technologies, a service partner for entrepreneurs helping them develop their mobile applications and websites.

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Bernard Moon

An important factor for new entrepreneurs is the ability and willingness to change your business model or product mid-stream. Most successful startups have pivoted, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

It’s a humbling experience to admit your original vision and product was off or something went wrong. An entrepreneur might reflect on how they spent their investors’ money or their life’s savings into a black hole and revisit the highs and lows of their journey. Some entrepreneurs don’t reach this point because they are blinded by the same fierce determination that brought them there or have a hope that things will turn around.

Related: Check out Steve Blank’s suggestions for when to pivot, and when to hold the line

As a reference, here are some successful startups that pivoted:

• Burbn, a location-based HTML5 app –> Instagram.
• Game Neverending, an online video game (MMORPG) –> Flickr.
• Tune In Hook Up, a video dating site –> YouTube.
• PDA payments (Palm) –> Paypal’s web payments.
• Odeo, a podcasting platform –> Twitter.
• Animation tools–> Pixar’s animation studio.
• Memory chips –> Intel’s microprocessors.

It is difficult to decide whether your company should pivot or not. How do you know when’s the right time? I’m assuming a company is beyond the testing and tweaking stages and fully committed down a specific product strategy and design for over six months — or even longer.  There isn’t an algorithm or some magic formula for you to use, but it is important to keep an open mind and watch for these four signs:

1. You are constantly educating the market

During my last startup, GoingOn Networks, we were constantly educating potential clients on the benefits of social networking and open communications with customers. It was a B2B, white-label social networking and publishing platform that was a few years too early. I became burned out after three years of evangelizing (2004-2007) about the coming days of social media and two-way communications. GoingOn eventually focused on the education market and gained traction within this space.

There is a fuzzy line between being a first mover and capturing a new market and being chum for sharks in the ocean depths. If you’re constantly educating your target users and trying to create a market, then you’re probably too early. This is a long and arduous process that should lead you to pivot.

2. Your beta users don’t like your product

Listening to your potential users is good thing.  Ninety-nine point nine percent of us are not Steve Jobs, so you can’t say, “Focus Groups? Feedback? Who needs user feedback when I know what people want?!”

Being passionate about your product is one thing, but being hard of hearing and fiercely stubborn can lead you to the startup deadpool. If a vast majority of your users don’t like your product or don’t find value in it or just don’t get it, then pivot.

3. Investors you meet aren’t buying it

After dozens and dozens of investor meetings and dozens of rejections, if the feedback is negative on the product or target market, you should consider a pivot. The story might be different if they say you need to get traction first, that you’re missing a key team member, or that they don’t invest in that space, but if it is repeated feedback that your product isn’t compelling enough or the market is too small, then consider pivoting.

There are outlier stories of incredible perseverance, such as Pandora’s Tim Westergren, who was rejected by over 300 venture capitalists and suffered through two-and-a-half years of being broke, but for most people, the outcome will not be pretty. As my father once said, “”Bernard, business is like poker. You have to know when to fold.”

4. You’re being everything to everyone

This not so much a sign for your company, but more of a forewarning. Most startups that try to be everything to everyone fail because they are burning their engineering resources on developing products that are bigger than they should be. Focus is a good thing. Pick one target market and user base.

Going after everyone or almost everyone might confuse your users. Do they want me? Do they like me? Is this product for me? I learned this the hard way during my second startup, HeyAnita Korea. We created a voice portal service that tried to be a voice-guided information service for everyone (weather, news, stock information, sports, and so on). After some soul-searching, the company pivoted on entertainment news targeted towards teens, and this new focus led HeyAnita to profitability.

Passion, excellent execution, and a strong vision should be balanced with the ability to listen well, the flexibility to recognize better opportunities, and the willingness to pivot your company onto a more successful path.

Bernard Moon is the co-founder and CEO of web conferencing and sales platform Vidquik and co-founder of SparkLabs, a recently launched startup accelerator in Seoul, Korea.

[Top image credit: olly/Shutterstock]

Launch This Year opened up today, and VentureBeat has 2,000 special invite codes to give away. More on that at the bottom of this post.

Ooomf is an online app discovery platform that also helps app developers make and find users for their apps. Now the company is taking the next logical step: a social step-by-step guide to helping budding entrepreneurs make their mobile development dreams a reality.

“There’s a big problem in mobile,” Ooomf CEO Mikael Cho told me last week. “4,000 new apps are launched every single day. Our goal is to empower the next generation of creators who are interested in building mobile apps … and help them make a sustainable mobile business.”

So Ooomf, which graduated from the FounderFuel accelerator in May 2012 and raised $500,000 in seed funding last year, is planning on providing all the tools developers need not just to build their apps, but also to make money from them.

Launch This Year is a guide and resource kit that includes a launch website, a sign-up page, a press kit, and tools to manage your first users and testers. The site will also put you in a cohort of developers, so you’ve got a virtual team to turn to for help and encouragement. And the site will help with the app store submission process and give you analytics for your app.

“It’s like a personal trainer for the app store,” Cho says. “You pick a day that you want to launch, and we’ll give you a guaranteed step-by-step guide to launching. And if you’re falling behind, we’ll let you know.

In a way, it’s like Codecademy, except that instead of learning to code, you’re learning to build a mobile business. Cho says there are many developers who have built three to four apps that can then sustain a living for them, but there are many more who are capable of building apps and have not yet.

In addition, Launch This Year allows developers to build a community of users who participate in the development of the app — a core Ooomf competency. Not sure which icon to use? Ask the user community you’ve built with Ooomf’s tools. Wondering if the user interface should include custom gestures? See what actual users think.

Perhaps the best part is positive peer pressure:

“You’ll see other people moving along and see things that they’ve achieved,” Cho says. “Which will make you think that other people are doing this and that and oh, I should catch up!”

Invite code for early access:

The site is open for initial users right now, but you’ll need an invite code. Use “venturebeat” to get immediate access.

Image credit: Ooomf

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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He’s also the author of a chart-topping Amazon book that sold 40,000 copies in its first eight weeks of publication — and shot to the top spot in Amazon’s science fiction charts — by following a very strategic publishing and publicity model, which he shared with me when we chatted a few weeks ago.

This is a hot topic right now. Well-known entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki just published APE (Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur), which gives step-by-step instructions on how to self-publish. And an astonishing 27 of the top 100 books on Kindle are self-published.

Here’s how Mather did it.

“I have a background as an entrepreneur and as I was writing the Kindle came out and I wanted to try it,” Mather said. “Traditional publishers have the connections into the bookshops, and pay for printing … but now creators can access the market directly.”

Mather had started writing his novel in 2010, and by 2012 had 150,000 words and 600 pages of The Atopia Chronicles. But he didn’t just throw the novel into the massive Amazon ocean of titles and hope for the best. Using his background in startups and his savvy as an entrepreneur, he created an 11-step program to market and launch the book.

“If you go the self-publishing route, it’s definitely the year to get started,” he told me. “But you need to start with good reviews and get early sales … if you start to become popular, you get into the recommendation system, and the system feeds itself.”

So Mather created the Shakespeare system, an 11-step process to get to number one. Briefly, it outlines the key tips to getting attention, getting reviews, and getting sales:

1. Serialize
   Attention spans are short and readers don’t necessarily trust a new author. Consider breaking your novel into smaller, bit-sized chunks
2. Hook
   The first part of your story needs to be punchy and leave the reader wanting more.
3. Amazon only
   Focus only on Amazon first, because it’s the biggest and sells the most. By focusing, you can promote better, and you can move up rankings quicker. After some success you can consider other platforms.
4. Key networks
   Promote the book in your personal networks. Ask people to re-post your free book offers. Email people. Share it on LinkedIn. Email top-selling authors, and ask them to review your book or even share it with their audiences.
5. Empathy
   You must create a character that people can connect with
6. Select Program on Amazon
   Choose the Amazon Select Program because you can offer your book for free for 5 days in every three months. Then promote it on the free books websites.
7. Perceived value
   Create perceived value by offering a deal … for instance by pricing six serialized parts at $0.99 each, and the entire book at $2.99
8. Editing
   You will get killed in reviews if your book is not well edited. Go on Craigslist, find some unemployed English major, and pay a few bucks to get it edited. Use a real editor if you have the cash, but it’ll be expensive.
9. All free posting sites
   Get feedback on your book from 20 or so people by paying the $10-20 for reading your book. Bonus: they’ll probably become your biggest promoters and will be happy to write reviews for you later. And use the free press release sites when you release your book.
10. Reviews
    It’s critical to get reviews as these have a direct impact on Amazon ranking and recommendations. Don’t do fake reviews — you’ll get caught. Do ask friends and relatives and contacts to review the book.
11. Engage
    Engage with readers via a video blog, or any blog (here’s Mather’s). Show progress on future books. Get them engaged somehow.

By using this system — and by working a 14-hour day when his book was released — Mather ensured that his book launch didn’t disappear into the vast Amazon machine without a ripple. (If you’re wondering why it’s called the Shakespeare system, check the first letters of each step.)

“You need to prepare beforehand and do it all at once, at launch day,” he told me. “I started at three AM, sent out three to four press releases, ran through the whole marketing program in 14 hours, and by the next day I was number one in science fiction.”

One thing that is critical, Mather says, is pricing.

“I talked to a lot of science fiction readers, and it’s sort of like the music industry,” he told me. “A book from a big publisher is $10-15  … so people will pirate them. But if you price it at $2-3, they won’t. And, since you’re getting 70% of the purchase price from Amazon versus maybe 20% from a regular publishing deal … you’re better off in the end.”

The results are pretty obvious: a book that went to first in Amazon’s science fiction list in a day is still on three different top-ten lists and is currently ranked 1,813 on the overall Amazon’s best-sellers list. Not bad for a first-time author.

Of course, it’s not all about the system. One thing that Mather did add when we chatted: it helps if the book is good.

Zappos faced that existential crisis soon after its founding in 1999.

Originally, the online shoe retailer (that now has arguably the best customer service available anywhere online) was a dropship company: sell a product, tell a factory to ship it, and pocket the cash.

“On paper, that was a great idea,” founder Tony Hsieh says in a new video from A Total Disruption. “But we couldn’t control the customer experience.”

So the fledging company made a tough decision: no more dropshipping. Immediately, revenues dropped 25 percent. Zappos wasn’t profitable at the time, couldn’t get funding, and the U.S. had just been attacked — Sept. 11, 2001 — was in recession, and was about to start a war.

But Hsieh, whose parents had wanted him to become a lawyer or doctor, persisted. And over time, Zappos found more and more customers — by word of mouth, and by repeat business.

Here’s the story of the pivot:

“We take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service,” Hsieh says.

The result?

Hsieh sold the company to Amazon for $1.2 billion in stock, and it now sells in excess of $2 billion worth of product annually. But that’s not quite enough to satisfy his parents, says Hsieh.

“My parents say it’s not too late for me to become a doctor!”

photo credit: mandiberg via photopin cc

Advisory note: The excuses enumerated below work best when used sparingly. Excessive use may result in raised eyebrows or demotions.

The age-old “my dog ate my homework” excuse may not fly in this paperless startup age, but there are plenty of other excuses you can use when didn’t finish all your work. Especially if you’ve earned your MBA.

There’s an endless number of to-dos at a startup, but I am a big proponent of that elusive work-life balance, AKA sometimes skipping out of the office before 8PM to go get an acupuncture or meet friends for a Grouper.

The key to getting away with not getting everything done is to talk like a businessperson. MBA degrees are optional, but helpful. Pull out those banal MBA one-liners and you can circumnavigate your way through any missed deadline or incomplete spreadsheet. Whether you’re too busy or just a little lazy, here are ten surefire lines that will cover your butt and earn you some corporate cred to boot:

1. I didn’t have the bandwidth this week
2. We were trying to boil the ocean
3. I had to prioritize other deliverables
4. It wasn’t the right high-level strategy
5. It fell below the line this week
6. It’s really a time and distance problem
7. There were other low-hanging fruit to attend to
8. It’s just not quite in my wheelhouse
9. It didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel
10. The problem was that we were working in silos
11. It’s an issue of scalability

OK, that’s eleven. Bonus!

As my startup has grown from a team of five to one of 30, we’ve introduced a bit of a corporate structure and the corresponding vocabulary.

And while I’m still learning how to function in this bizarre managerial environment, I’ve already nailed the lingo. It seems talking the talk is most of the battle. A B-school grad even told me that a lot of what you learn in business school is how to speak with people across sectors. Sometimes a little hot air goes a long way.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a startup in San Francisco.

photo credit: robives via photopin cc

Who knew, for example, that Sydney, Australia, is global capital of “data-driven startups?” Or that the top nine startups of the last 15 years have generated nearly a trillion dollars in value, helped along by the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon? And while everyone would likely have guessed that Silicon Valley is the top hub of entrepreneurship on the planet, with Tel Aviv high on the list (if not exactly second), Los Angeles coming in third is a bit of a surprise.

The conclusions are based on data from startups that use the Startup Compass, a tool that helps founders make better  decisions through data. Startup Genome analyzed factors such as startup incidence, funding availability, business performance, founder mindset, technology trends, support networks, and talent availability to find the hottest locations to start and grow a company.

Here are the top 20 technology hubs, as defined by the Startup Genome:

1. Silicon Valley
2. Tel Aviv
3. Los Angeles
4. Seattle
5. New York City
6. Boston
7. London
8. Toronto
9. Vancouver
10. Chicago
11. Paris
12. Sydney
13. Sao Paulo
14. Moscow
15. Berlin
16. Waterloo (Canada)
17. Singapore
18. Melbourne
19. Bangalore
20. Santiago

More valuable than the ranking, Startup Genome provided the ranking data for each technology hub on eight key criteria. Using these criteria you can see, for example, that while Vancouver ranks 14th in the support index, probably due to being a relatively young ecosystem, it ranks second in the mindset index (indicating that it has plenty of eager and driving founders) and fourth in the talent index.

Tel Aviv, on the other hand, ranks second in startup output and equivalent to Silicon Valley in funding, but only 12th in performance, perhaps due to Israeli startups’ sometimes-wondered-at predilection for building smaller companies, outfits that don’t turn into enormous enterprises.

The report is rich in data and many more details — you can get your own copy right here.

Image credits: Startup Genome

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Is there more to your bacteria then meets the eye?

The still-in-stealth-mode Ubiome is developing a technology to sequence human bacterial DNA. The hope is that this will yield new discoveries in the prevention and treatment of disease.

In a unique twist, funding for this research has not come from a grant or academic institution — the team has decided to ask stranger’s to contribute to the project on IndieGoGo. The goal is to raise $1 million.

This is the first crowd-funded citizen science project to map the human microbiome.

Backers will have the opportunity to be tested before UBiome hits the mainstream market. If the idea of having your bacteria analyzed doesn’t make you squeamish, here’s how it will work. Users receive a swab-kit for five sites: nose, ear, mouth, gastrointestinal tract, and genitalia. Each site has a unique microbiome that is home to a specific balance of bacterial flora.

The team will use cutting-edge DNA sequencing to analyze your samples and send custom bioinformatics back to you. Over time, they will store and process the data to make predictions about your health.

“It’s 23andme for the human microbiome,” Richman said. 23andme is a site that has popularized the field of genomics, and it analyzes relevant genetic data to determine your risk-profile for certain diseases.

“We believe the biological information era is going to follow the same trend that the internet did,” said Richman. “When citizens became empowered to explore the internet via search engines like Google, usage skyrocketed. With uBiome, people can explore their personal metagenome from home.”

Related: Read our in-depth review of the genomic startups that can help you live longer

Ubiome’s founding team

The core behind the project includes Richman, a serial entrepreneur who started her first company after high school; Dr. Zachary Apte, a biophycisist with expertise in cell biology; and Dr. William Ludington, a Bowes Fellow in the molecular cell biology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Advisers to the project include Dr. Pablo Valenzuela, a pioneer in the field of industrial biotechnology who has filed a total of 44 research patents.

The crowd-funded research is just the beginning– the team of scientists see vast potential for medical discoveries. To date, the sequencing of the human genome has offered few medical solutions short of gene therapy. However, our microbiome can become healthy through the right mix of probiotic cultures.

Furthermore, these microbial genes outnumber human genes 360 to 1, and scores of research has linked them to diseases like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, anxiety, and other conditions. Richman draws a comparison to the tropical rainforest in Brazil, which depends upon biodiversity — likewise, she explained, “our own health benefits from microbial ecosystems that perform vital functions for our health.”

Image via Shutterstock

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