Starting Your Start Up: Tech Stars Boulder Circa 2007

Starting Your Start Up: Tech Stars Boulder Circa 1997

Here are my notes from the Tech Stars 2007 panel:

1) Get started. Don’t work for perfect before talking to your market.
2) Look to history of other companies in your vertical or similar verticals
3) Emmerse yourself in the vertical market. (Listen to market + potential competitors)
4) Don’t invent a problem
5) You have to gamble on what your customer will need tomorrow (listen to “this sucks, this sucks, this sucks.” Put all that data together and
6) Vision and road map. Where people need to go next.
7) Predictive ability on your team. Ahead of where you (and your market) is now. Anticipate so you lead.
Feld: “Scratch someone elses itch” or “scratch your own itch.”
Adaptive Blue. Solving your own problem like founding of Delicious
9) When do know when to step on the gas?
10) Do it for 18 months and maybe get crushed by a big dog? Wait too long = market opportunity pass you buy. Or get too much $ and lose control.
11) Brad Feld on the lessons My Blog Log story. Had 24 hours to make a decision. Take the money or not?
12) Brad Feld: My favorite entrepreneurs are one success and one
failure. (this could be an existential failure). You don’t know you have to follow your gut.
13) Consumer internet product vs. B 2 B.
14) “Consumer stuff was really hard” Newsgator for $5. Bloglines built quicker. But I couldn’t afford it–good reasons at the time. As soon as you start charging a penny. Just getting them to type in credit card = very difficult. Three orders of magnitude less.
15) Consumer oriented = trendy. I don’t think about it that way. Lots of audiences. How are you extracting money long term from the people that are using the product the most? (ie Newgator fits in both categories) Always keep an eye on how you are getting money from your users. Putting advertising on the page is not a good default answer. What is the unique characteristic of the business you are creating. (extracting money is also an engineering problem–different layers of the business and how you want them to work). The pinpoint story (?)
16) Selling to big businesses as a startup can be tough. What kind of capital intensity are you going to need? What kind of support are you going to need?
17) Your intuition is right some of the time–its going to be wrong some of the time.
18) Beyond what are the product and features–how is it going to work??? You can transcend consumer internet. Keep your minds open. 19) What looks like this in the real world? How do I provide analogous service to how people do this in the real world? How do I share mind share from other people that are doing it?
20) Scaling to 15 million–Give it some thought.
21) Don’t recreate something. You can intellectually borrow. (Microsoft–tounge in cheek). So much stuff you can borrow. Open source. Why create another log in screen.
22) If you work in Ruby, find some people that have scaled Ruby.
23) Database, my sql??? Scaling microsoft stuff. They will take care of you.
(37:00)
24) Brad Feld: When you show something to the world–your design aesthetic really matters. My fitness and weigh story with Traineo. Created an account in 30 seconds. Facebook vs. Myspace. Get that right.
25) Catster and Dogster. Very simple. A bad experience with Ning via Open Coffee Club.
26) Brad Feld: Be obsessive about your aesthetic. Dogster isn’t sleak. The user experience is flawless. Its a culture of difference. Obsessed with how people use the site. They measure it like crazy–they build it into the architechture from day one. Pay attention to performance. Think about how you interact with things.
27) Incremental changes on Basecamp vs. Facebook. It gets harder to make incremental changes with big user base. 2 week is a comfortable release cycle. Pretty good tempo. But if you do that with a million users–you can’t change it every two weeks. Google is doing big bang changes–but uses some incremental changes.
(46:00)
28) Attention to detail is important in your first engineers. Make sure they share that view. Its really key.
29) What kills most start ups? Team problems. Personal issues. Human beings.
30) Don’t be afraid of failure. Founding team. Don’t be afraid to vote someone off the island.
31) Team dysfunction vs. Poor performance killing teams. Get in a toilet bowl.
32) Intellectual honesty is really hard. Use your network (we’ve got problems) No money coming in. They psychology of the start up–the passion starts to dull.
33) Money. Started first company with $10. I started with a couple thousand. (the scare resource is not money/capital. Its not 2001)
34) Consulting business helped me out.
35) Will any of you need funding at the end of the summer? We don’t have a plan B. We’ll need developers and servers.

My takeaways from the Tech Stars start up panel:
TBA if I remember and find the time…

You can check out David Cohens “Starting Your Startup” video from Techstars Boulder 2007.

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