Startup Leadership Program

Beijing Entrepreneurs and SLP

2011-07-03T09:29:00.000-04:00

It was a terrific evening in Beijing, thanks to hosts Eric and Olivia of China Entrepreneurs, and an enthusiastic and passionate team lead by Tony An. Wayne Shaiyong of Bertelesmann Investments Asia, and a Core Advisor to SLP also attended, as did interestingly, several women investment bankers with technical degrees. There were entrepreneurs and hackers from leading multinationals. Didn't see anyone in lifesciences or cleantech, but I know they're out there.

This is an interesting time to bring SLP to China since nothing like this exists, and the program will connect Chinese entrepreneurs to the rest of the world. I am keen to see what sort of collaborations and new startups these relationships create, especially along the Bangalore-Beijing and Silicon Valley-Beijing corridors. The Beijing consumer internet scene is very vibrant, but from my conversations, they seem to be following US innovation, rather than the other way around.

The Beijing program will run in Chinese, though there is a requirement that everyone in the program understand English. Its the only way to keep the network global and vibrant. Since SLP runs on google assets, and most of these assets are blocked in China (though there is a way some of them can get around it), the program is impacted by Google leaving China. We're having to recreate everything in a parallel universe that is acceptable to China. That's twice the work and half the fun, but its worth the trouble.

Its going to be a lot of fun seeing the Program develop in Beijing.

Resolving conflict with Founders, Advisors and Boards

2011-03-12T11:40:00.001-05:00

Panel guests include: Joe Caruso (moderator - bio) , Jim Lucchese (bio), Hooman Hodjat (bio), David Diamond (bio) and Mark Haddad (bio)

Hooman Hodjat is the founder of PickupZone, a company that provides alternative delivery locations for people who are not around when their packages are delivered. Soon after starting the company, Hooman brought in a CEO to add some experience to his team and help bring in high caliber strategic partnerships. Hooman’s CEO was also the first investor in his company. Although Hooman’s experience with his CEO was excellent initially, the relationship degraded quickly and he left the company he started after nine months due to significant conflicts.

“Bringing in a CEO is almost like a marriage” Joe Caruso started off. “Before you bring in a CEO, make sure you understand what their objectives are, and be certain they are aligned with your own”. Hooman nods his head in response, he said that he and his CEO “could never come to an agreement”. Not only that, they had not formally allocated equity to the company. Mark Haddad has seen this before during his tenure as a business attorney. He provided an anecdote regarding a company he worked with when he first started working at the firm Foley Hoag. “I always worked with the CEO” he said and the founders never wanted to assign restricted stock. Soon after they formed the company, two of the founders decided to fire the CEO. When the CEO left, he walked away with his stock and still has it today.

Just because someone has been successful in a company before, said David Diamon doesn’t mean he or she will be able to take over and be successful. In Hooman’s case, he said he needed another CEO. But Joe said that Hooman was fully capable of handling the duties done by the CEO. If you are a founder and bring in a CEO, “don’t just give him the reigns right away, give it gradually and observe” commented Joe. He’s encountered this issue many times before. “The first time you have an instinct to fire someone, FIRE them immediately” interjected Jim Lucchese of Echo Nest. “You can wait too long and waste time.

According to Joe Caruso a study analyzed employees contributions to a company in a number of different categories. When the employees total their contribution in each category it’s always greater than 100% and is usually above 150%. “We all overestimate our contribution to the company” chuckled Joe. A way to manage this is open communication so everyone knows what other people are contributing to the team as well. Joe continued, “It’s imperative to set common expectations up front”.

To avoid problems like Hooman’s, the panel stressed that communication is key. If you have an issue with a CEO, have conversations as peers, and provide feedback about performance so people can have actionable advice. Joe told the audience about his philosophy “We are perfectly allowed to call each other assholes as long as we do it in a respectful manner”.

What resources do you need to build your team?

2011-03-12T11:39:00.001-05:00

Steve Maxwell (bio) is managing director of J. Robert Scott, an executive search firm. He met with SLP Boston for our weekend workshop to answer question on startup development. Our primary focus surrounded the question of, what resources do you need to build your team?

On the interview process:
Nearly 50% of all new hires are mistakes according to Steve. An “A” team can turn around a “B” idea, but a “B” team can kill an “A” idea. Success in building a team starts at the interview, you need to have a good process that can accurately assess the individuals. A few key takeaways for the interview process:
• Identify the key competencies you want and develop metrics to evaluate each candidate during the interview.
• A few categories may include: intellect, track record, personal traits, interpersonal skills, management style, leadership, motivation, and domain knowledge.
• The interview should be split into two aspects, one that focuses on background to assess if the candidate did what he or she claims on his or her resume. The other is to have the candidate provide examples of successes and failures.
• A final interview should be detailed, and last about two hours. This part of the interview should focus on the key accomplishments of the individual.
• References are extremely important to making hiring decisions. Each candidate should provide four to six references.
• Keep questions open ended so the candidate is not cornered into one response.
• Encourage internal referrals with monetary compensation to employees if needed.

On employees:
Employees should be encouraged to take part in the recruiting process. Everyone at the company should be able to give an elevator pitch that explains what the company does. When a new employee is hired, be ready for his or her arrival on the start date and do office introductions. Also, share feedback from the interview process to the candidate. Make sure the new employee understands the style and culture that you are trying to build. When you make a mistake with a new hire, observe the three Ds:

Deal with it: talk to employee
Document: write down everything you discussed.
Decide: stick to a timeline and take action.

On being a CEO:`
Being a CEO is a tough job! Steve has sourced CEO’s for many startups. CEOs know that they have a lonely job because within your company you have no peers. Steve suggests leveraging outside relationships with other CEOs as a resource. He also encourages building strong relationships with board members and encourages a formal review process with the board. Finally, know when the right time to replace yourself, if the job becomes too much to bear, you may find a replacement will bring you relief to concentrate on other things!

J. Robert Scott’s compstudy about compensation. 2 weeks of unlimited access to its thorough database is offered to readers of the SLP blog. Use the login information below:

Compstudy.com/user/register
Code: Mexwell2011

Boston Business Planning & Pitching Workshop

2011-02-01T14:28:00.005-05:00

Workshop #2 for the Boston SLP fellows was this past Saturday, January 29. We were lucky to have a dedicated cohort led by Matt Volpi put together this fantastic day on Business Plans & Pitching.

After a quick breakfast and some catching up, we quickly launched into startup pitches to a diverse panel with a current VC, a former VC, and Angel, and an entrepreneur. Our panel was:

Victoria Song, Flybridge Venture Capital
Vinit Nijhawan, Boston University/TiE
Chris Sheehan, Common Angels
Jennifer Fremont-Smith, CEO Smarterer

Three fellows presented to the panel:

The three fellows did an amazing job and you could tell they were well practiced. Without calling out specific fellows, there were some recurring themes in the pitches that the panel kept calling out. The most interesting commentary was about the performance aspect of the pitches. It is something we probably don't think about enough, but you have to remember that you need to connect with the VC, look the in the eye, engage them, and never forget that you are selling. The slides should only reinforce what you are saying. Some other key themes:

When you are asked a question, answer it. Do not beat around the bush or add flowery language. Just answer it.
Don't add too many words to your pitch deck. Use imagery to illustrate your presentation. Keep the details in the appendix.
It is critically important to have a very clear financial slide. It doesn't need to be extremely detailed, it just needs to give the VC's a sense of the economics of your business.
For software, if you are showing user numbers, it is very important that you show user retention and activity, not just user counts.
Don't take too long to get to the "what our company does" part of your pitch. Hopefully, you will do this in the first 2 minutes.

After the pitch feedback session, the panel opened up for questions. Most of the questions & answers elaborated on their feedback during the sessions, but there were a couple of funny parts. Every VC had a story about their worst pitch they have ever seen, and most of them involved a VC sleeping during the pitch or an argument breaking out in the meeting. Note to self: do not fight with a VC. Not a good thing to do!

After a quick lunch and some more networking, we had an open pitch session where any fellow could pitch a portion of their pitch deck and get feedback. It seemed like we all fell into the same pitfalls as many of the comments were similar to the morning sessions. One area we dug into was competitors. It is critically important to have a clear competition slide and to pick one main competitor. Any more than that and they can think you are unfocused.

To round out the day, Sri Krishnamurthy led a business canvas exercise. Many of the fellows hadn't seen this format before and it seemed to be helpful to them. It allows for an entrepreneur to break down their business model into digestible parts so they can clearly and concisely articulate their revenue opportunities and costs of doing business.

After the all-day session, some of the fellows went out for a few "adult beverages" across the street to wind down. All in all, it was a great session with practical advice from all.

Human Capital Learnings in San Diego

2011-02-01T00:06:00.003-05:00

We had a fantastic Human Capital workshop this Saturday. There were some great takeaways from the workshop on Saturday. I am sure we each have our own, specific to our individual situations. Some of the comments and concepts that resonated most with me I thought I would share here:

• "Be true to yourself" - Polly Murphy
• "Don't be risk averse, be open to opportunities" – Polly Murphy
• "Don't worry if you are a little odd" – Greg Horowitt
• "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them" – Greg Horowitt
• "Entrepreneurs have the genetic predisposition to moderate the Amygdala Hijack response (when fear response takes over brain). They also never here 'No' as defeat" – Greg Horowitt
• "Show up – Amazing things can happen when you show up with a humble attitude and willingness to ask questions" – Dave Karlman
• "I really wish I would have opened the underwear drawer" – Michelle Youngers (emphasizing importance of due diligence in employee/employer selection)
• "Make sure everyone understands and is aligned; conflicts often come from assumption" – Chip Breitenkamp (in reference to mitigating team conflict)
• "Do not skip the reference check. Always Google your candidates" – Robin Toft

Human Capital and Leadership, SLP Bangalore

2011-01-22T03:17:00.000-05:00

Human capital and leadership are intertwined and our session at SLP Bangalore on Leadership and Human Capital had amazing leaders to share their story and guide us along the way.

In the morning session we had Freeman Murray, Harold D'souza, Jagadish Kini, andVaibhav Tewari. Each of the guests walked us through their experiences of building teams. Some of the key ideas from each of the speakers were:

Vaibhav introduced us to the analogy between a building and a company. The founders form the foundation, the core team-the pillars, the first team-the first floor and so on. One other thing that came across in his talk and stressed by all other guests is the importance of values. Balancing conflicts in the teams, regular communication with advisers/investors/employees were couple of points from Freeman.

Harold introduced us to a "Must", presenting oneself. He talked on importance of being clear about compensation, maintaining a clean image of the company etc. Jagadish Kini talked about 5C's Character, Consistence, Collaboration, Commitment and Communication. He elaborated on each of the 'C's and tied it back to how they all are necessary for companies success.

The following panel discussion brought out many points on:

How to figure out the value system of the person you are hiring?
What kind of questions to put while interviewing to get the best possible person on board.

Post lunch we had Ramanand Mundukur, Muthukrishnan Chinnasamy, Vivek Madappa. Ramanand talked about the three important relationships in a start-up and how to manage them: Employess, Co Founders and Self. Muthukrishnan stressed on unrelenting focus on execution, customer focus and commitment. Vive Madappa was stimulative, his talk was hard hitting and provoked us to think out of the comfort zones. The following statement from his slide stands out:

Your Worth = Demand for what you do * Your ability to do it * the difficulty of replacing it.

We had an extended discussion on various aspects of managing people and self. Over the course of the discussions there were some books referred which I mention here:

Twenty two immutable laws of Marketing: Al Ries, Jack Trout

Blue Ocean Strategy: Chan Kim, Renee Mouborgne

Think and Grow Rich: Napolean Hill

Extraordinary Leadership: Robin Sharma

Cross posted on: sodidi.ramjeeganti.com

Negotiating Terms, Protecting your IP, and Getting Inspired To Start

2011-01-12T16:27:00.006-05:00

In the SLP Boston January 10, 2011 class, we had a three part class with three distinct sessions. After an interesting pitch by fellow Harpreet Singh on his company AcademicRoom, we launched into the sessions.

Session I - Term Sheets with Richard Kimball, partner EAPD
Richard walked us through negotiating an investment and specifically into what each term meant. He spoke in detail about some terms that look benign on the surface but instead can really hurt the valuation down the line, such as:

Keep the option pool small, because when it gets near 15% it can really dilute the rest of the founders stock in the event of an exit.

Watch out for the liquidation preferences. In general, you would prefer that the A-Round investor takes convertible preferred, which basically means that they can choose whether they want their initial investment + interest or convert their investment into stock. Something to watch out for is participating preferred where they get to do both (aka double dipping)

Watch out when an investor asks for anti-dilution. If you ever have to raise money at a lower valuation, this investor can get most of the outstanding shares.

When negotiating board seats, do not give the founder's seat away to an incoming CEO. This person will be someone the board hires, not you.

When receiving stock, you should ensure you get restricted stock and your contract includes buyback agreements for the stock, instead of getting common shares.

Session II - Intellectual Property with Melissa Hunter-Ensor, Ph.D., EAPD
Melissa spent most of her session speaking about patents, since many of the fellows are in clean tech, medical devices, and biotech. She spoke about applying for patents, filing provisional patents, and being careful to not disclose your invention before you have filed. The key takeaway for me was that in internet and mobile startups, by the time you get your patent reviewed (~3 years), technology has changed so much that it may not be worth anything. The good news is that the US gives a 1-year grace period so if you have a unique invention that does very well in the market, you still have time to patent it.

Session III - Wayne Chang, Entrepreneur
Wayne is a serial entrepreneur, best known for founding i2hub, a college file sharing/social network founded around the same time as Facebook. Wayne gave the fellows a tour of his life and career in internet startups. He had some fascinating stories about everything from hacking games in early youth to partnering with the famous Winklevoss twins on their ConnectU project. Overall, it was an interesting and remarkable journey for a young entrepreneur. (check out his Wikipedia article)

Boston Product Day Workshop

2010-12-15T08:40:00.010-05:00

This past Saturday (12/11), the Boston chapter had its first full-day workshop and it was a doozy. Who says you can’t spend a great Saturday in a law firm conference room? Cohort #1 (Christian, Kevin, Ali, Pedro, and Sameer) put together a great series of panels covering all aspects of product commercialization including design, sales, development, and marketing. Overall, the sessions were very engrossing and provided the fellows with several different lenses with which to view product development punctuated by anecdotes to drive home key takeaways.

Product Design
First up was Jeremy Pitts, the current VP of Product Development for OsComp Systems - a startup led by Pedro Santos, one of our fellows. Jeremy drew on his previous experience developing solar panel arrays for a venture-backed startup to discuss different product development processes. In addition to lessons learned from that specific venture, such as the importance of keeping your initial prototyping local before you outsource, he passed along several useful rules-of-thumb:

Nothing is a simple as it seems
Prototype early and often
Build the product – research can only take you so far
Focus on customer needs
Don’t lose sight of competitors

Finally, Jeremy discussed how his appreciation for the project manager position had grown as he recognized the importance of the role for aligning engineering objectives with management’s strategy.

Sales Panel
We were very fortunate to have Brian Cusack (Display Advertising Team Leader, Google) Kirsten Knipp (Director of Product Evangelism, HubSpot), and Taariq Lewis (Director of Sales and Marketing, HiveFire) bombard us with nuggets of wisdom from their experiences on the front lines of their organizations. They touched on a number of important topics the key points of which are summarized below:

Different ways to pick your first customer. Brian discussed getting to potential customers who can initially bring more than just their checkbooks to the table. The overall goal is to get your initial customers to collaborate with you so that both parties get value as the product is being refined or scaled. Kirsten, an inbound marketing guru, discussed drawing in initial customers by becoming a source of data for members of your target customer population who can then find you.
Initial pricing. “Free” was a four letter word for this panel. While certain elements of your product can be given away as marketing tools, you should charge even your initial customers. The panel did, however, support the idea of introductory pricing, but pricing nonetheless.
Selecting Sales Managers vs. Salespeople. There are distinct differences between a salesperson and a sales manager. For Brian, a salesperson is a closer who asks for business, while a sales manager can express vision, remove roadblocks, and provide discipline and training. For Taariq, selling is about psychology and an effective sales manager understands the psychology of salepeople and selling in general.
Managing a sales pipeline. It is important to understand your sales cycle and keep prospects moving through your pipeline. Also, to quote Taariq, “there are no dead prospects”. After cycling thorough the sales pipeline, unconverted leads are thrown back into marketing.
Best advice for managing a sales team. 1) If a salesperson is not pulling his or her weight, get rid of them immediately – they become toxic to the rest of the team; and 2) use intermediate milestones to keep the sales team motivated during rough times.

BREAK…After a nice traditional TiE lunch and some impressive “bio-pitches” from several fellows we continued with the afternoon sessions…

Lean Startup
Vineet Sinha (Founder, President, and CTO of Architexa) spoke with the group about agile development and building flexible companies. Key points of his talk included:

Write down and verify all of your assumptions
Don’t take too much ownership of an idea --> sharing = refinement
Test ideas before spending a lot of time building
Test your product in small pieces
You can’t “out-develop” your competitors but you can “out-listen” to your customers

Market Development and Marketing
Our next panel included Bob LaRoche, an expert in medical device marketing and sales, and Michelle Looney, who does product marketing for Best Doctors. They each gave a short presentation explaining how companies think and position themselves relative to their specific market and target customers.

Bob outlined a series of stakeholders, such as key opinion leaders, early adopters, potential advisors, and competitors, whose position in the market and, if possible, thinking about your product should be understood before you launch. He also passed along the following points to keep in mind as you undertake market development:

Primary goal of market development: listen and learn. You should ask 1) what’s the unmet need? and 2) what will be required for your product to become "the solution"?
Don’t rely on what you think you know
Recognize the need to interact with customers and prospects
Identify internal and external expertise and develop a plan to get/use those resources

Michelle focused her talk on marketing in the social media era and the implications of an increasingly blurry line between B2B and B2C. Key takeaways included:

If you enter the social media space, have a well-thought through strategy including understanding what to do if you are panned
Understand your customer at all costs
Make sure to measure cost per lead or cost per sale

Product Overview
For our final panel of the day, we were very privileged to have Marc Meyer come in and kick the session into overdrive. Marc’s list of credentials is almost too long for the page. He is the Matthews Distinguished Professor and Director of the High Technology MBA program at Northeastern University, has consulted to Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, HP, P&G, and Mars Incorporated in the area of new product strategy, has co-founded three technology startups, is a very active angel investor in start-ups across industries, and is an accomplished author. Basically, when it comes to product development on any scale or in any industry, Marc has pretty much see it or done it.

Despite being the end of a long day, Marc’s engaging presentation-style and engrossing anecdotes held the fellows’ rapt attention. He regaled us with stories from his experiences at a few large companies such as Honda, Mars Corporation, and IBM, and experiences with startup companies such as an antibiotics discovery company, an agricultural software company, and a company building online infrastructure for train ticket purchasing in Europe. A few key points stood out:

Companies should only be started to address a latent need (as opposed to a recognized need) for a specific customer population.
Startups should expend significant effort performing a “reality check” of their industry, customer, and solution before launching their product.
Good company pitches tell three stories simultaneously: the user story, the team story, and the business story.

After Marc’s talk, the workshop ended and several fellows went out for drinks at the nearby Atlantic Beer Garden. All in all, as Will Farrell would say, “A nice little Saturday…”

The Nuts and Bolts of Starting Up - Open Event @ MIT

2010-12-13T17:13:00.008-05:00

Come and join us, we’re open.

And come they did. Droves of enthusiastic MIT students and entrepreneurs alike were welcomed to our first ever ‘open’ Startup Leadership class at MIT”s Boynton Hall. The feedback and accolades were many, but none described the core value of SLP program quite as much as a quote from graduating student, “Thanks for hosting the awesome event this evening...”. The evening would not have been a success if it were not for the flawless execution from Adam and Camile and their facilitation of the evening’s agenda.

The night began with general introductions and acknowledgements to our friends, sponsors, partner and hosts, MIT SASE and TIE Boston.

Have an idea? Business plan is ready? Cash in the bank?

Next up, the facilitators introduced our expert panel of guests who represent some of Boston’s best in practices of Incorporation, Real Estate, Insurance and Accounting, all of which are crucial in building the foundation of your new company. Each panelist provided the class with fifteen engaging minutes of advice from within each of their areas of practice.

Ty Janney, Principal Partner, Landmark Real Estate Advisors, LLC
Is your garage getting cramped? Need more space for your team. Ty provided the group with the “basics for expanding your workspace, including the following words of wisdom:

Best Practices

Establish a budget for people, furniture, parking, etc.
Develop a timeline and exit strategy for when your head count may exceed the square footage of the space.
Allow extra time for negotiation for LOI and have an alternative option.
Understand the costs, i.e. cost per square foot per employee and security deposit

Common Mistakes

Under estimating the moving timeline. It typically requires 10-14 weeks.
Failure to account for LC/Security deposit
Choosing the right team, a Buyers Agent.

Sean Coady Senior Partner, EBS Capstone Insurance
Don’t take any chances. Protect your company and yourself. Sean explained the benefits of Insuring your startup, highlighting the following:

Traps for the Weary

Make sure you understand your liabilities
Understand what is available
Know your client liabilities

Most common mistakes

Using the wrong broker
Signing contracts before understanding the insurance requirements
Underestimating the timing for the process

Paul Sweeney, Partner, Foley Hoag LLP
Your idea is great. Your team is in place. Your business plan is solid. You have a strategy. Now you’re ready to take you company to the next level. Paul discussed the advantages and challenges to incorporating as follows:

Top Issues

Waiting too long to form your entity (incorporating, L.L.C., etc), limits your liability
Establishing Ownership
Issuing equity and tax benefits
Equity incentives for employees

Key Notes

Don’t over complicate things
Don’t be too casual with equity
Only take money from people who can add value to the company

Scott Goodwin, Certified Public Accountant, Wolf & Company
Just because your uncle help you with your taxes, doesn’t mean he should help you with your company’s accounting. Scott outlined how he guides entrepreneurs from startup to entrepreneurship as follows:

Top Do’s

Get your books on the right foot form the beginning
Outsource your payroll
Make sure you have the right accounting plan

Top Don’ts

Co-mingle personal finances with business finances
Don’t over promise equity
Treat employees as independent contractors

In summary to a great evening, taking your company from startup to success requires building the right team. Our guest speakers would be more than happy to help you get there.

Pitches and Business Plans

2010-12-12T13:00:00.003-05:00

On 12/11/2010, the SLP Silicon Valley Chapter got together for an all day session. We threw away the no laptop rule so folks in the group could blog, take notes and make effective use of the time.

The day began with group members presenting their company. Each person was given 7 minutes to present with 10 minutes of general question & answer. The first company (name confidential) is trying to use various filters to help you find the right social information, at the right time. Renil came up and presented geetnet.com, a company that is building a social platform to where people can sing record and publish Bollywood music. Bindiya presented Resilinc, which can be best described as “supply chain resiliency”. Fourth, Adam presented the only bio-tech company of the day. His company, Nano Precision Metal, is working on revolutionizing implantable drug delivery. Finally, Kunal presented Jozo, a universal rewards and promotions platform.

Each presenter had to face tough questions from the audience; anything from financials, to market size, to team composition, to product specs, was fair game. The presenters handled themselves with style and overall gave pretty good answers. After taking a short break, Adam came back and presented once more to Fred Wang from Trinity Ventures and Carol Sands from The Angels Forum. A few minutes later, Vikrant from Future Today presented to the investors, also including Vish Mishra from Clearstone Venture Partners. Future Today operates a website called ifood.tv with over 30,000 videos, 150,000 text based recipes and has hundreds of partners. The investors came back with some carefully worded feedback.

Next up on the agenda: lunch!

The entire class broke into groups to help the various startups identify key partnerships, activities, costs, revenues, with support from the two mentors, AKG and Ramesh Singh. As a class, we then collected around Geetnet.com and had a group discussion.

Lastly, we posed two questions to the mentors. 1) What has helped you most while making your business plans and 2) What area you feel the entrepreneur needs most help with?

AGK said: you need to do figure out the best path to validate your business model as soon as possible. Just having one customer is not enough. You need to have your product sellable to multiple customers.

Ramesh Singh: Do not give up on your ideas too quickly. Quickly find the barriers and work through it. When you are raising money think of it as your own money. If you are willing to take that risk, then the passion comes out to make it happen. Do not assume it is going to be a quick success. My last two startups have been 14 years of my life. Put people around you who are just as passionate. Have an open team that can have discussions, otherwise it will be really tough. Be truthful. Other things will come through and the team is the most important thing.

-Written by Ankit Agarwal

SLP SV sales and biz dev day

2010-12-09T22:06:00.004-05:00

Had an insightful and exciting weeknight session on sales and business development processes.

The 1st speaker, Siddhartha Agarwal, talked at length about the science behind the sales process. How sales forecasting is done and how much value to assign to each stage in the sales cycle.

The 2nd speaker, Sandip Gupta, spent time explaining how business development happens and its difference wrt marketing/sales. The importance of business development and typical size and composition of a biz dev team at startups and bigger companies.

Anupendra was visiting from Boston and talked about the value of branding and SLP is progressing/has progressed since it was started

Lastly our very own fellows Carenina and Krish talked about the tactical aspects of every day sales basics and biz development.

Leadership

2010-11-30T11:03:00.003-05:00

This was no humdrum panel discussion on what it means to be a leader in your organization. It was a candid conversation with 4 CEOs from tech, life science and non-profit sectors who found themselves opting out of their corporate jobs to start their own ventures. These CEOs--Steve Delity (Rapid Micro Biosystems), Anderew Paradise (AisleBuyer LLC), Brad Rosen (Drync LLC), and Vishal Talreja (Dream a Dream) each had unique paths to entrepreneurship but all seemed to take notice of a problem or an injustice and invest themselves in the solution. Whether dissatisfaction with big company aversion to change, an unwillingness to accept entrenched poverty and social economic class divides or inefficiencies in everyday life like the long checkout line at the grocery store, each of these CEOs had defining moments in their lives that lead them to start companies that would solve real world problems. In an interview style discussion, Anu kept the conversation moving, touching on every area of starting a new venture while encouraging the panel getting to the heart of the issues, which in some cases meant going off the record… But for the record, some key advice:
• Seek out and cultivate relationships with mentors, getting advice on a regular basis is critical, even once a month. Different mentors with different expertise will be import in each phases of the company.
• Early on, don’t focus on too many things, just one: when, where and how are you are going to compete, and then execute around that differentiating quality or factor (it’s 1% idea, 99% execution).
• On hiring, wait and hire the best. Don’t hire anyone who doesn’t get excited about the vision. (can you trust them with your baby?)
The evening ended with a question: how effective are you as a leader? The answer came in the form of a question that seemed universal no matter what you do—mobile app, med device, profit or non-profit—has it made a difference in someone’s life?

SLP Bangalore - Product and Customer day

2010-11-17T03:41:00.004-05:00

It was Product Development and Customer Day at SLP Bangalore. We met on Saturday 13th of November for what was a very productive day.

"You are not your User", was the gist of the talk by Shyam Narayan from dig designstudio. Shyam walked us through his experience of designing for various customers, he discussed the approach they typically follow at their design studio while designing products. The four stages of Absorb,Ideate,Prototype and Validate set the tone for the rest of the day.

Other key highlights from his talk were:

Check Assumptions
Don't jump for the first solution, try to think of different possible solutions (then come back choose the first ;) ).
Identify at least 20 issues and 5 solutions in your product.
Be an idiot while gathering feedback from users.
Hear what was unsaid, users typically don't say negative things about the product.

Following his talk we had a panel discussion with Shyam (dig Design Studio) and Naveen Krishnaswamy (redbus) moderated by Gautam (SLP Bangalore Fellow). It was a very interesting and insightful discussion on various aspects of Product Development. There were many useful points made by the panelists and other SLP Fellows during the course of the discussion.

We then had a SLP Bangalore fellow John (Duron) present the product they are selling in India. It was interesting to here his story on how, driven by passion to solve the energy problems, he and his batch mates at college started Duron. Theirs is classic story of identifying a pain point and trying to solve it. One of the books that John recommended that everybody should read was Steven Blank's The Four Steps to Ephiphany.

Following John was another SLP Bangalore Fellow Deb(Sparsha). Higher education in India for a majority is learning by rote. Deb and his team set out to remedy this with an innovative approach to teaching, learning and evaluating. If you are in academia recommend you to have a look at their offerings.

We had Mr.Navneeth Bhushan (Crafitti Consulting) speak on "Customer Value The Unknown Fundamental". He started with challenging the existing methods of valuing customer relationship as defined by various tool vendors and went on to introduce us to Customer Value framework, the concept value net etc. A major take away was in today's world "Competitive advantage is collaboration". He also introduced us to the six different truth filters one encounters and why "science" as truth filter is more important to entrepreneurs than others.

It was turn for another panel discussion with Naveneeth, Saumil Majumdar(EduSports), Gaurav (Chakpak) moderated by SLP Bangalore Fellow Milind Naik. The discussion revolved around sales and the strategy associated. Some of the points which I recollect were:

Difficult customers tell you what your product sucks at.
Customers value longevity, build thought leadership.
In the initial stages of the company you need people who can sell concept. Once the product gains traction you need people who can sell the product. Both are different skill sets.
Big customers typically try to squeeze, however keep in mind, the overall value they give your business and not just the transactional value of the deal.

We had an amazing product demo by Narendra (Pebble Talk). Pebble Talk is an awesome awesome enterprise collaboration tool. There was discussion on various concerns that Narendra wanted the fellows to address, and being the ever helping folks that we are, all of us pitched in with a few suggestions and contacts. For your information Pebble Talk was one of the 2010 Red Herring 100 Asia, they also won the India's most promising startup at Proto.in.

At the end of the long day we broke for drinks. Gaurav(Chakpak), was kind enough to drop me and Amit back home and we had some amazing discussion surrounding Mobiles and Indian market.

Cross posted on: sodidi.ramjeeganti.com

Silicon valley SLP 1st full day workshop

2010-11-12T23:54:00.000-05:00

SLP silicon valley had its first full day workshop on nov 6 with a number of talks and financial modeling exercise.

Day started of early in the morning with talk on startup strategy. The speaker, Mr Jagadish Bandhole, CEO of fonemine is a serial entrepeur. Key points in his talk related to what entrepreurs look at in starting their companies and how vcs see it in terms of risk mitigation. This was followed with a team exercise on strategy - product, channels, financing of a new hypothetical search company.

Next talk given by Dr. M. (Ken) Kengatharan. Dr. Ken has extensive experience in pharmacy industry. He talked at length about practical experiences in starting and a new venture eg importance of timing, secrecy needs etc. This was followed by a spirited Q&A.

Finally Prem Uppaluru, CEO of Transera, gave a talk on strategy and vision needs of a stratup. Intervowen in this was fundamental points related to needs vs wants and importance of targetting.

Needless to say we overshot all our schedules because of the great learnings we were getting exposed to.

Second half was set aside for financial modeling. Our own Rama Sekhar, fellow SLP, gave a talk on the vc funding process and took the mystery out of their financial due diligence process. He told us about VC 'haircuts' on proposed valuations, drivers and financial models and gave the class a good idea of what is important in the VC slide deck.

Rama was followed by Sendur Sellakumar, a VP at Morgan Stanley. He detailed the financial modeling process for a company about to file for an IPO and how it differed from early financial modeling. It was great to see a curriculum that was tailored for companies at all stages in the process.

We ended the day with an exercise created by our Program Lead and SLP's founder in which each cohort got a financial model for a fictitious web services company and had to explain what drivers or model parameters seemed wrong -- i.e. do what VCs would do to examine a startup's model. Since each cohort's model was slightly different, the class was able to learn about a lot of different potential mistakes / holes.

Great day with some very engaging speakers.

Innoz & Voicetap in Nasscom Top 8 Emerging Companies in India.

2010-11-07T01:24:00.001-04:00

Innoz & Voicetap started by Two SLP Delhi 2010 Fellows Deepak Ravindran & Mrigrank Tripathi are shortlisted inside the NASSCOM list for companies that are likely to define the market in future.

They were chosen to showcase/present the success stories at the CIO Session at the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2010.

Deepak Ravindran
Deepak is the co-founder & Chief Executive Officer of Innoz Technologies (Pvt) Ltd, a leading mobile VAS company based in India. He started Swades Solutions, an offshore Web design/SEO firm in 2005 when he was still at college, and then launched Innoz Technologies,a privately incorporated firm located at Technopark,Kerala. He represented India in the finals of DFJ-CISCO Global Business Plan Competition 2009, and was chosen for iAccelerator'09 at IIM Ahmedabad. Deepak also recently received the Star Entrepreneurship Award'09 at the third Indira Innovation Summit, the Dell Idea League Challenge'09, has been short-listed for Red Herring Companies in Asia, as well as Nasscom Top 8 Emerging Companies for 2010. He holds a degree in Computer Science.

Mrigrank Tripathi
An ex strategy consultant, Mrigank has over 13 years of experience in consulting, operations and sales. He holds an MBA from INSEAD and has over 8 years of experience in the telecom field - having worked with Mercer Management Consulting, Swisscom and Reliance Infocomm. He founded Voicetap in 2009 and has led it to many national and international awards and recognitions including the Global and Asia 100 Red Herring Awards. Under his leadership, the company has operationally broken even after starting commercial operations in the same year.

Executions, Visions and Revolutions

2010-11-03T02:42:00.002-04:00

The second session of the Silicon Valley Startup Leadership Program took place on Wedneday (10/27). R. Paul Singh was the speaker. During his career he has been the Founder & CEO of 4 high-tech startups (security, VoIP, mobile) with three successful exits. His talk was about his experiences in Silicon Valley, about the technology business in general, and about entrepreneurship. There were three major takeaways for me (they are obvious, but worth re-iterating). Here's my take on them.

"There are no $B ideas. There are only $B Executions"
We all are entrepreneurs at heart. We dream, we discuss, we detail. But few of us do. That's what takes some of us from being entrepreneurs at heart to being the real deal. The difference between a $100M company and $15B company is the team and it's execution. When money is put in front of an entrepreneur with a brilliant company, he or she has to have the courage to say no and keep it growing. An example of this is Mark Zuckerberg who rejected many acquisition attempts when Facebook was worth around $1B and has grown it to its current value of close to $20B. At the same time, it is important to know your business' strengths and weaknesses and take an exit if chances of it growing more without outside help are, honestly, not high. To some, an exit is an exit. Make whatever money there is to be made on this deal and let the next one be sweeter -- don't let greed be the winner. And remember, that there is more to life than money.

"Vision has to be Huge, but Execution has to be Focused"
When pitching investors, friends, family, potential employees, and a team, a CEO needs to have huge visions of changing the world and its sweeping impacts. In reality, though, CEOs have to focus the energies of their teams and achieve measurable, meaningful targets and move one stone at a time. Getting overwhelmed by moving a mountain is the single most common way for companies to fail. It is important to sell everyone on the big picture but achieve it through smaller steps.

"Markets like Evolutions not Revolutions"
If we think about the successful Apple consumer products over the last couple of decades they all have one thing in common -- they evolved what was available. They never tried to change what the consumer was used to in a revolutionary way. The iPod took MP3 players (first made popular by Creative) and presented it in a more intuitive interface. The iPhone innovated upon the iPod's interface and the iPad built on the iPhone. The iPhone and iPad wouldnt have succeeded if the iPod hadn't done so. Microsoft had touch screen Windows Mobile phone much before the iPhone and HP had touch screen tablets much before the iPad but neither succeeded in the same way that Apple did. Why? Because the market wasn't ready for it. While skill and quality of product is important, the success of products and entrepreneurs has an element of luck and timing to it as well. When thinking about ideas, it is often easy to think about something that "hasn't ever been tried before". Why not think of something that has been done before, but not so well... Why not use breakthroughs in technology to improve the life of a consumer so that he or she will want to use your product or service. In effect, this goes back to how a consumer offering has to somehow fit into the consumer's 24 hours in order to be successful. And what better way of fitting in than to replace something that already exists... It just makes sense that the barrier to entry in the consumer's mind will be lower!

I know I said three takeaways but there was a fourth one that I think is true for any person - entrepreneur or not - so here goes!

Bonus: "Sell, Sell, Sell"
An entrepreneur's, and specifically a CEO's, job is to sell. He or she must sell to their family on why not taking a paycheck to develop an idea into a company is a good idea. Then the CEO has to sell the idea to some crazy friend to join the venture and give up their paycheck as well. Next, the CEO must convince some friends, family, angels, VCs that the idea (and/or prototype) is worth real money. Then the CEO has to convince the market that the idea is worth more than just some words and the offering actually delivers on the promise. I've always believed that selling a vision is easier if someone else vouches for you. Over the last couple of years I've noticed companies like Twitter, Ad.ly, Posterous, TweetDeck, etc 'sold' to Silicon Valley, not just by the CEO and employees but by their investors. If a reputable investor will not only invest in a company, but also go on record at conferences, to the medi, and wherever they can to talk good things about a startup and its offerings, a consumer and the media is more likely to give it a fair chance. And for many startups, getting that chance is a make or break. So, CEOs, go out and sell your visions. Do it in a way that doesn't oversell, but sells enough to make salesman out of everyone you interact with. The power of many, especially influential many, can get you places that your own pitching won't get you. But to get there, you need to master the pitch!

Ben McKean named a finalist in Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2010 America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs

2010-10-31T15:39:00.001-04:00

Ben McKean (SLP NYC Class of 2011) and his cofounder, Dan Leahy, were recently named as finalists in Bloomgberg Businessweek's 2010 America's Best Young Entrepreneurs and to the Silicon Alley 100, an annual list of New York's top movers and shakers in the technology sector. Their startup VillagesVines helps upscale restaurants sell excess inventory.

Excerpt from Business Insider SAI's earlier article on VillageVines:

New York Startup That Saves You Money At Top Restaurants, VillageVines, Expands To New Cities, Partners With MenuPages

VillageVines, a New York based startup, that offers users discounts at high end restaurants is set to expand its reach.

The company, which had been focused solely on New York, is opening its deals offers to Washington D.C. starting this morning. In the weeks to come it will be operating in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well.

SLP New York Kicks Off!

2010-10-31T13:22:00.001-04:00

With two 2 SLP alums (Kanchan Koya and Ajay Kulkarni) and SLP NYC's mentor (Somak Chattopadhyay of Greenhill Ventures) leading the way, the 2010 - 2011 SLP NYC fellows gathered at the offices of Cooley LLP to kick of SLP NYC's inaugural program. After a delicious dinner (thanks to Cooley!), Kanchan introduced us to the founding principles of SLP and expectations for the year. Our mentor Somak also graciously shared his entrepreneurial and VC journey, highlighting key learnings along the way. Then, it came time for each of the us fellows to present our 3 minute introductions using picture-only slides that we prepared earlier. Laughter soon filled the room as we bonded over hilarious past experiences and common interests. Finally, Kanchan and Ajay spoke about of their own experiences in SLP and how the program impacted them, encouraging us to fully leverage the power of the SLP network.

The room was energized and the enthusiasm palpable. The festivities and sharing continued at a bar after class for which no one had to be coaxed to stay on! An absolutely brilliant and high energy beginning to what promises to be a fantastic year ahead for the NYC chapter.

SLP Boston - How I got funded event

2010-10-21T18:36:00.009-04:00

SLP’s first public event, a panel discussion entitled ‘How I got funded’ was a resounding success! On Monday night, Michael Mullins, SLP Boston Program Leader, welcomed a packed crowd of over 70 to Polaris Venture Partner’s Dogpatch Labs. As a participating Boston Region Entrepreneurship Week (BREW) event, BREW-founder Joe Caruso stopped by to offer support and talk about advocating Boston-based innovation and entrepreneurship. Panel moderator Shawn Broderick, managing director of TechStars Boston, then kicked off the evening’s main event by polling the audience for key discussion themes. He asked our panel of 4 founder/CEOs, who had recently raised between $250K-$1MM each, to introduce themselves and walk us through their funding journeys, focusing on lessons learned, while emphasizing the themes established by the audience. This was followed by a lively Q&A session. The panel comprised 3 SLP-fellows, Sidd Goyal of Assured Labor (MIT-founded online marketplace that connects employers and workers in emerging markets via web and SMS), Bennett Fisher of Retroficiency (lowers building operating costs by identifying and analyzing their energy use and emissions), Leon Noel of Social Sci (a survey platform to connect researchers and participants for scientific studies), together with Dogpatch-based Raj Aggarwal of Localytics (a real-time mobile analytics solution).

Although each of the panelists achieved funding in a variety of different ways, all of them emphasized the importance of ‘making the right choices for your start-up’, i.e. there is no one-size-fits-all plan for success. Their differing pathways included pivoting the business model, re-negotiating initial terms and utilizing the friends and family network. The panelists also discussed the language of funding, funding sources, fund-raising timing, valuations and key milestones, in response to questions from the audience. Despite their differing paths, the panelists emphasized a number of overarching themes, which I’ll summarize as the take-home points.

1) When raising first money, seek funding at a key inflection point in growth. The slide-deck is not enough. Lock-down IP, have prototypes for investors to play with, provide user data and partnering information if you have it.

2) Think carefully about the financials, how much you need and what for. This shows initiative and that you have thought how you plan to build your business, while demonstrating to potential investors, the investor-profile you fit into.

3) Engage your friends and family network and target key investors specific to your space, rather than general investors, since they have better subject matter expertise.

Summarizing the discussion and the predicament of the early stage startup seeking first money, Shawn emphasized that in lieu of a customer base, early-stage startups should instead leverage their passion, vision and opportunistic smarts to differentiate from the pack. In closing, Michael highlighted SLP’s encouragement of candid engagement and knowledge sharing among the Boston-based entrepreneurial community as a key to success. SLP-Boston plans to continue this dialog with the community through a number of future events, so stay posted!

SLP Boston Class of 2011 !

2010-10-18T23:53:00.009-04:00

Adam Compain, Google
Adam Rein, Altaeros Energies
Ali Munawar, Novira Therapeutics
Alison Williams, Hibergenica
April Effort, Boston University
Camille Delebecque, Harvard Medical School
Carolina Salvador-Morales, Kaleidoscope
Casey Gibbons, Commonwealth Capital Ventures
Craig Daniel, Visible Gains
David Tischler, Venzyme Venture Catalyst & Massachusetts Medical Angels
Harpreet Singh, Academic Room
Kevin Mullins, Summit Partners
Krishna Ramachandran, 11 Under LLC
Marc MacIntosh, Roundarch
Matt Volpi, Modiv Media
Michael Galbo, wigo technologies
Pedro Santos, OsComp Systems
Punit Shah, Zazu
Rahul Bose, Semprus BioSciences
Sanjeev Jain, Idea First Technologies
Sidi Gomes, ParallelCities
Sri Krishnamurthy, Mathworks / Adaptive Algo

Program Leaders
Mike Mullins, ReachEverywhere.com
Kevin Mullins, Summit Partners

Chief Advisor
Scott Yaphe

SLP San Diego Class of 2011 !

2010-10-18T23:46:00.008-04:00

Joshua Ansell-McKinnon, Founder of NewHaf LLC
Manisha Aswani, Intuit Inc
Luke Barrington, UCSD ECE
Galen Beers, VAVi
Kathy Pyle, Life Technologies
Abhijit Bhat, Pfizer
Kurt Breitenkamp, The Scripps Research Institute
Andrew Dennis, AgileNano, Inc.
Baback Elmieh, Founder and President, Human Engines Inc.
Kathryn Olson, Medical Device Start-up
Rashim Gupta, Cricket Communications
Srinath Kotte, CareFusion
Stephen Larson, UC San Diego
John Lin, Moore Venture Partners
David Matthews, University of California San DIego
Philip Meier, Reinagel Laboratory for Computational Vision Research
Adele Noon, Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves & Savitch
Joseph Young, PixelActive and Founder of Syte Shirts
Soren Solari, Stealth-mode Startup
Abby Rothwell, Life Technolgies

Program Leader
Rebecca Breitenkamp

SLP Bangalore Class of 2011 !

2010-10-18T23:41:00.005-04:00

Sadiq Ahamed, Incture Technologies

Debabrata Bagchi, Sparsha Learning Technologies

Naresh Bharadwaj, Meeva Technologies

Karthick C S, Knowise Learning Academy

Ramjee Ganti, Nabler Web Solutions

John Howard, Duron Energy

Gautam Khot, Arrisma Labs

Dilip Kumar, Inolysst

Narendra Narayana, ThinkCore Technologies

Abhishek Parolkar, whol.ly

Ayush Rastogi, Fidelity Investments

Himanshu Sahani, Cheese Corporate Care

Amit Sharma, Go Untucked

Gaurav Singhal, Siemens

Ashwin Sivakumar, Jugular Social Media

Program Leaders

Sudip Dutta, Apurv

Vinodh Nandakumar, Cleartrip.com

Bill Warner's Outstanding Unconference, 8 Fellows and three Ferraris

2010-10-14T22:10:00.002-04:00

It was great to attend my first Unconference today. Every influential and committed individual in the Boston ecosystem was there. Over 500 people. If you haven't been to an Unconference, attend one. The agenda is set in the morning - people simply write on pieces of paper issues they have questions about, then post them on the board, and people end up in rooms talking about the issues. Its a very interesting format. The buzz lasts all day, and the partying continued afterwards. I cannot do justice to the event; guys like Scott Kirsner and Galen Moore will do a far better job covering the highlights tomorrow. But I liked the concept of giving out Ferraris by raffle for day-long and overnight drives. Sadly I didn't win one, but at least I had the best ever odds of getting one today.

Its always great to see familiar faces, SLP Fellows were out there hustling, networking, meeting, and mentoring. Folks I ran into (we almost did an SLP Session....) included

Ariel Assaf, Wishclipper / Founders Institute
Antonio Faillace, FAuthors Globe
Vishy Vishwanathan, Lamhe / Longworth Venture Partners
Punit Shah, Zazu
Krishna Ramachandran, 11 Under
Chase Gabardino, Pinyadda/BostInno
Sidi Gomes, ParallelCities
Vineet Sinha, Architexa

Also ran into Mark Haddad of Foley Hoag, our long-time supporter and counsel, and Shawn Broderick, who'll be moderating "How I got funded" on October 19. I am sure there were others...do let us know if you came. Great conversations, lots of discussion, and a lot of excitement around SLP from several VCs and Serial Entrepreneurs. There is definitely a lot of differing opinions, changing theories and business models up for discusssion today around mobile, healthcare, tech, cleantech and enterprise software

Separately, congrats to a couple of our Fellows - you know who you are. More to come.

Mango-Walas and Money

2010-10-06T02:41:00.010-04:00

Silicon Valley, SLP Chapter kicked off the 2010-2011 year with Raj Parekh as its first guest speaker. Before breaking into the meat of Raj’s talk, I would like to paint a picture of this year’s chapter and show how diverse a group of 26 can truly be.

There are members working on their own startups in the fields varying from technology to pharmaceuticals and members that had been part of national initiatives such as the Indian Unique ID Project. Some have taken a step into the world of Venture Capital and them some who are using and learning from the experiences of their peers to figure out their next career step. At this first meeting, we exchanged stories about our backgrounds and the paths we have taken to lead us to where we are now.

Hearing the stories behind people’s lives (who will ever forget the way in which Vikrant sold duplicated CDs to pay for college and international editions of textbooks to pay for his masters) helped introduce bonds that will only get stronger as the year goes on. When so many people from different backgrounds come together and discuss how the world can be made better, only good things can come out of it!

My Three Takeaways From Raj Parekh's Talk:

1. Good CEOs respond within 24 hours. The more awkward you feel when you read a message (instinct says, push it back, & ignore), the sooner you need to respond. However, make sure it is a rational response, not an emotional one.
2. Remember the mango-wala analogy: You don't need need to make money on the mangoes, you can make the same margin by re-selling the box while killing competition on the mango price!
3. You can never have too much money: When someone offers you money, take it. If they want more equity, give it. Why? Because the more money they give you the more they want you to be incentivized to succeed. Their success is dependent on your success. They will make the adjustments to incentivize you and your team. So take the money when it's being offered.

What a solid start to a promising year.

Sidd Goyal's Assured Labor Covered in FastCompany

2010-10-05T12:47:00.010-04:00

Sidd Goyal's (SLP Boston Class of 2010) startup, Assured Labor, was recently covered in Fast Company. Assured Labor, aka EmpleoListo, is an SMS platform that helps wage-earners find jobs via their mobile phones. Sidd is one of four founders of Assured Labor, which raised Angel money this year while Sidd was in SLP. Assured labor has since deployed its service in Nicaragua and Mexico via partnerships with major mobile operators in those countries.

Yesterday, Assured Labor won Omidyar Network's Mobile Fast Pitch Competition at the Social Capital Markets 2010 conference in San Francisco. The company will be showcased for the rest of the conference, which continues today and tomorrow.

Sidd will be one of four entrepreneurs featured in an upcoming Startup Leadership Event called, "How I got Funded", which will take place on October 19th, 2010 at Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge. Early registration is now open to friends of SLP at our Eventbrite Registration Page.

Excerpt from Fast Company's Article on Assured Labor:

Text Here for a New Job

Assured Labor's Founder and CEO, David Reich, thought up his idea for a mobile, text-message-based employment service for low-income individuals while a graduate student at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He got together with fellow students at MIT and Harvard and together they hashed out a plan to launch in Boston, then slowly take over the world. With co-founders from around the U.S. and around the globe, the team launched in Mexico this week. From Mexico City, Reich told Fast Company how the latest launch is going.

Silicon Valley Kicks Off!

2010-09-29T14:05:00.004-04:00

Silicon Valley kicked off last week with a Happy Hour in downtown Palo Alto! 25 fellows from high tech, clean tech and life sciences were selected for this class. Satish Gupta joined the fellows for a fun evening of cocktails and startup talk. We are all very excited about our first class tonight at Wilson Sonsini. Alumni are encouraged to attend.

SLP Bangalore - First Class

2010-09-25T11:01:00.004-04:00

Great start to a great Class. Welcome SLP BLR class of 2011.

Here is what we did. Picture tell a thousand words, so will them talk.

9:45 am Introduction (Sudip)
10:00 am Key note speech (Suhas Gopinath - Youngest India CEO, became the CEO at the age of 14, member of World Economic Forum, etc, see his bio)
10:45 am Tea break
11:00 am Introductions by Shuva Mandal (MD Fox Mandal Little) and Anand Daniel (Accel)
12:00 pm Short presentation by our Sponsor Evoma
2:00 pm - 5pm - Workshop
5:00pm - 7pm - Drinks

SLP Delhi Class of 2011 !

2010-09-23T15:13:00.002-04:00

Fellows
Abhinav Goel, Indiaoffbeat.com
Akhilesh Bali, MithaiMate.Com
Aloke Bajpai, iXiGO.com
Ankur Agarwal, Advait Energy
Ayush Ghai, MindGrep Technologies
Deepak Ravindran, Innoz Technologies
Dipankar Sarkar, stratessence
Himani Mantri, Chicory Chai
Mrigank Tripathi, Voicetap Technologies
Neeraj Jain, MeritRank
Rahul Arora, IT Power
Rahul Batra, Mobile Health Solutions
Rajat Harlalka, Infogile Technologies
Sachin Garg, Futuristic eServices
Sahil Chalana, GetMyForm.in
Sanjeev Agarwal, Impetus
Shwetank Verma, Razi Healthcare
Tarun Bhalla, Building Blocks
Uttiya Bhattacharya, Design Business Collaborative
Vinay Johar, Connoisseur Infotech

Program Leadership
Amit Tiwari, Royal Bank of Scotland
Saurabh Sachan, AquSkills Employability Enhancement
Nikhil Agarwal, McKinsey & Co.

Chief Advisors
Alok Mittal, Canaan Partners
Akshat Rathee, Nodwin Group

SLP Silicon Valley Class of 2011 !

2010-09-23T14:44:00.005-04:00

Fellows
Adam Mendelsohn, Nano Precision Medical, Inc.
Amy Dolin, BuyImpact.com
Andy Pandharikar, Stealth mode startup
Ankit Jain, Cuil Inc
Ankit Agarwal, Micello, Inc.
Ashis Sahu, Stealth Mode Startup
Avi Alimchandani, Alim Capital
Bindiya Vakil, Resilinc Corporation
Carenina G. Motion,
Ketul (Krish) Parikh, Oracle Corporation
Klint Rose, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Kunal Bisla, uJaza
Mark Juravic, Materna Medical
Prashant Pandey, Vdopia Inc.
Rama Sekhar, Norwest Venture Partners
Renil Paramel, Gartner Consulting
rohit kamran, SoorajPower LLC
Salil Prabhakar, Digital Persona
Shilpa Sambashivan, NGM Biopharmaceuticals Inc.
Vani Velamoor, AUTiCURE
Vijit Sabnis, Solar Junction Inc.
Vikrant Mathur, iFood.TV
Vinay Kakade, Yahoo! Research
William DelHagen, Amprius Inc.

Program Leadership
Aanand Krishnan, Dolby Labs
Michael Motion, UC Berkeley

Senior Advisors
Satish Gupta, Serial Entrepreneur
Sandip Gupta, Serial Entrepreneur

SLP San Diego Focuses on the Entrepreneurial Journey

2010-09-23T14:20:00.004-04:00

Why Are We Here? SLP San Diego's 20 fellows, 3 mentors, and 1 program leader spent last evening focused on this question. Following dinner and networking, we kicked off the evening learning about the mission and history of SLP. Our mentors - Mike Krupp, Terry Moore, Tim Rueth - followed with a panel discussion about their incredible entrepreneurial journeys, how they reached where they are today, lessons learned, and their motivations for working with young entrepreneurs. And, then to the discussion of each of our personal journeys...a 3 (well, actually 4) minute picture presentation about us - where we are from, what motivates us, and ultimately, why we chose to be a part of SLP. Informal networking continued after class and over drinks until the last of the bunch left after 11 pm. A fantastic beginning for the inaugural San Diego chapter!

SLP New York Class of 2011 !

2010-09-23T13:55:00.001-04:00

Ajay Kapoor - Fresh Foundry
Alan Carniol - Career Cadence
Bedrick Gadea - Pulse of the Patient
Benjamin McKean - VillageVines
Brian Murray - Elm City Capital
Brittany Laughlin - Gtrot
Gauri Manglik - SpotOn
Giulia Stellari - Agsquared
Haytham Elhawary - Hibergenica
Ji Li - Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University
Jonathan Hefter - Neverware
Joseph Tomitz - OutNest
Lisa Hodges - Joint Leap Technologies
Matthew Shapiro - Tooble
Mingjack Po - Ph.D. Candidate, Columbia University
Phil Kim - Bundle
Prabhdeep Singh - NYCIF
Sarah Lensing - SpotOn
Sebastian Jayaraj - 10Biosystems
Seni Thomas - Last Mile Networks
Sergey Nazarov - FirstMark Capital

Mentor
Somak Chattopadhyay - Greenhill Ventures

Program Leadership
Kanchan Koya - SwitchBiotics
Vipin Goyal – ex-Joost

SLP Delhi Kicks off

2010-09-22T22:59:00.001-04:00

SLP Delhi 2011 kicked off at SPOT lounge and bar on 18^th September. 22 talented and enthusiastic fellows from tech, clean tech and social enterprises who are Founder, Co- Founder, CXOs and Innovators were selected for the program. Fellows started coming in at 6:30 pm and by 7:30 pm, it was a full house. A round of introduction was followed by networking session over drinks and snacks. The party lasted till 11 pm and everybody had a rocking time.

MassTLC Unconference on October 14

2010-09-21T16:44:00.002-04:00

All SLP Fellows have an invitation from Bill Warner to participate in the Unconference on October 14. You will get a chance to meet many entrepreneurs, VCs and angels at the event. Click here.

This is the link to sign up as an entrepreneur

This event has room for 100 entrepreneurs who will get a chance to get advice, and several hundred people who will be in attendance for the other sessions. An unconference is interesting - it starts by deciding the sessions in the morning when you get there.

SLP Boston Kickoff With Bill Warner

2010-09-21T14:09:00.021-04:00

The SLP Boston chapter kicked off their first class on September 21. After some great kickoff presentations from Program Leader Michael Mullins and Director Anupendra Sharma, we were lucky to be joined by Bill Warner, best known as the founder of Avid Technology.

Bill immediately made all of the new fellows feel comfortable. Instead of a lecture format, he sat at the head of the table with more of a fireside chat feel. After introductions, Bill shared some stories on the history on Avid, including how he launched it on $50k and spent about 40% of that money on unique office space in an old factory. "The one thing that friends always remember about the early days of Avid was the office...our visitors sat on the waiting room on my Minivan's back-seat", Bill recalled. Bill didn't make a lot of calculated moves in the early days of Avid that you'd expect for such a successful entrepreneur. He instead relied on instinct and gut feel. He advised the fellows to do the same: do things quickly and if it doesn't work, fix it just as quickly.

Bill contrasted his experience bootstrapping Avid with his launch of Wildfire Communications, which he did on $2MM of VC money. With $2MM, he didn't have financial constraints so he lost his ability to say no. Even with all of his experience growing Avid into the market leader, Bill eventually failed with Wildfire after 8+ years and a lot more VC money.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the session was when Bill spoke about his philosophies on developing new products. He said the #1 thing to focus on is your "intention flow" to "your people". When building a product, ask yourself the following: "I intend to help people _____". In Avid's case, the video editors were his people, and Bill's intention was to make it much easier for editors to do their job. He repeated several times that "your people are not your customers. They don't pay you anything." This was an interesting contrast to the cliche "listen to your customers" philosophy that is in most business literature.

So, if you're only focusing on your users, and they don't pay you, how do you make money? This is where Bill pairs "Co-Flow" with the intention flow. Co-Flow is another flow for the folks who pay money because of what you do in your intention flow. The classic example is Google. Their intention is and always was to have the best search so that "their people" can quickly and easily search the web. Ad Words is their "Co-Flow". Google is paid by advertisers who want access to the users who are simply searching on the web.

It was a great class and we couldn't have kicked SLP Boston off better. Lots of great stories and good advice from Bill. We are already looking forward to the next class on October 25!

SLP Bangalore Kicks off

2010-09-11T11:28:00.005-04:00

And SLP Bangalore kicks off in fashion today at our Sponsor - Evoma. Fellows started coming in at 5pm and the last batch left at 8:00pm. 23 fellows from tech/ clean tech/ social enterprises were selected through a rigorous process over the last 1 month. Founders/ co-founders, CxO's, VC, mentors all gathered to make this a great success. Short intro about SLP, followed by intros by Santosh (FML) and Indus (Morpheus) followed by fun and networking.

Welcome again all 23 fellows.

SLP San Diego Kicks Off

2010-09-09T20:01:00.005-04:00

And so it begins! The inaugural San Diego chapter of the Startup Leadership Program kicked last night with a Sunset Happy Hour downtown! 20 fantastic fellows from life sciences, high tech, and clean tech were selected for this class and are company founders, leaders at tech-based startups, work as venture capitalists, or in innovation-related areas at companies and research institutions. We even have an innovator from Orange County who joined the San Diego chapter...so I guess we are actually the SLP chapter of Southern California. Congrats to the 20 fellows!

Startup Leadership Program - Bangalore

2010-09-09T09:49:00.008-04:00

It all started with a call late evening with Anupendra in May 2010. Couple of mail exchanges, a week of late evening calls later I was selected as the Program leader to start the SLP Bangalore Chapter.

4 months later with 3 rounds of applications review, 1 telephonic conversation with each applicant; 10 reviewers from US, India, Taiwan we have finally selected 23 fellows for the inaugural Bangalore Startup Leadership Program. With excellent candidates and amazing advisors helping us at the same time we all are gung-ho about the program.

Welcome class 2011 - SLP Bangalore.

We will have the mixer session at our Sponsor location, Evoma.

Venue: Evoma Facilities, Old Madras Road, KR Puram, Bangalore, Karnataka 560049

Date: 11th Sep 2011

Time: 5:30pm - 7pm

Tentative Schedule for the Bangalore SLP Class of 2011.

September 11 - Social Mixer (5:30pm - 7pm at Evoma)
September 25 - Class 1 (9am - 5pm at Evoma)
October 16 - Class 2 (9am - 5pm at TBD)
October 30 - Class 3 (9am - 5pm at TBD)
November 20 - Workshop 1 - Business Plan Workshop (9am - 12pm at TBD)
November 20 - Class 4 (1pm - 5pm at TBD)
December 4 - Class 5 (9am - 5pm at TBD)
December 18 - Class 6 - Human Capital (9am - 5pm at TBD)
January 15 - Class 7 (9am - 5pm at TBD)
January 15 - Workshop 2 - Getting Funded (1pm - 5pm at TBD)
February 5 - Class 8 (9am - 12pm at TBD)
February 5 - Workshop 3 - VC Competition (1pm - 5pm at TBD)
February 26 - Class 9 (9am - 12pm at TBD)
February 26 - Workshop 4 - Investor Day 9 (1pm - 5pm at TBD)
March 3 - Graduation Dinner and Party

Evoma and FoxMandalLittle are our location and food sponsors for the Class of 2011.

Do you want an SLP in your city next year ?

2010-09-09T08:47:00.004-04:00

If you would like a Startup Leadership Program in your city next year, please email us at anupendra AT yahoo.com. We're currently targeting major cities around the world where there is a mix of successful entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial activity. There may or may not be a preponderance of investors in your city, but there has to be a critical mass of activity. Certain cities that come to our mind are India (Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai), China (Shanghai), USA (DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Boulder) and Europe (London, Munich, Paris) but we're open to other ideas.

Thanks.

Anupendra

SLP Boston Team gets together

2010-09-06T10:26:00.001-04:00

At Cambridge Brewing Company: Jeff McAuley, Tamara Nazzal, Sidd Goyal, Upma Sharma, Mike Mullins and Anupendra Sharma. Missing - Scott Yaphe, Vikas Goyal, Praveen Yajman and Mangesh Wadegaonkar.

Startup Leadership Admissions Update

2010-08-12T21:51:00.002-04:00

SLP is pleased to report that admissions are moving forward smoothly. Today, Boston, New York, and San Diego are reviewing applications. Initial decisions will be announced on Sunday, August 15 for those chapters.

Silicon Valley, Delhi, Bangalore, and Beijing are still accepting applications at this time. The application deadlines for those chapters are as follows:

Silicon Valley - Sunday, August 15

Bangalore - Sunday, August 15

Delhi - Sunday, August 15

Beijing - Wednesday, September 1

SLP Boston Application Deadline is Tomorrow, July 31!

2010-07-30T17:35:00.003-04:00

There is still time to apply! The deadline for applications for the 2011 Boston class of Startup Leadership is tomorrow, Saturday, July 31. Applications can be submitted here.

The application consists of and online form with several short answer questions and can be completed in less than an hour. You are also required to submit a resume at the bottom of the form, so make sure you have one ready.

After the applications are in the selection process will take two weeks. Acceptance notices will be sent via email on or around August 15. The first meeting of the new class will take place in early September.

For questions, contact:

Michael Mullins

mullins01[at]gmail.com

http://www.twitter.com/mullins01

SLP Boston FINAL Info Session is Tomorrow, July 21

2010-07-20T23:29:00.004-04:00

The deadline for Startup Leadership's 2011 Boston class is coming up. The last day to apply is July 31!

Tomorrow we are holding our last and final information session here in Boston. The event will be at Dillon's, 955 Boylston Street (near Boylston and Mass Ave) from 6:30 to 7:30. This is the best way to learn more about the program, by talking to past Fellows and meeting other prospective applicants.

The plan is to meet in the upper bar area. Grab a drink and come find us in the corner. We'll say a few brief words about the program, the let everyone network. If you haven't been to an event yet, please join us. We've had very lively discussions, with people staying late after both previous events just to talk about startups.

Hope to see you there!

Michael Mullins

SLP Boston 2010

Boston Info Session on Wednesday, June 21, 6:30pm at Dillon's

2010-07-12T12:17:00.006-04:00

Reminder, we have an information session coming up for anyone interested in learning more about SLP, or just hanging out with some great people. We'll be at Dillon's on Boylston Street from 6:30-7:30 on July 21. Grab a drink at the bar and meet us in the lower area. Hope to see you there!

955 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02115-3106
(617) 421-1818

Michael Mullins

SLP Boston 2010

Upcoming Startup Leadership Boston Info Sessions

2010-07-06T23:13:00.011-04:00

The Startup Leadership Program is pleased to announce we are now accepting applications for our 2011 Boston class. The deadline to apply to the program is July 31, 2010. We have two information sessions scheduled for this month where prospective applicants can meet Fellows and learn more about SLP. The application consists of about one page of short answer questions and a resume. The program costs just $300 and consists of 14 classes over a 9 month period.

Upcoming Information Sessions:
Monday, July 12, 6:30-7:30pm at Dillon's, 955 Boylston Street, Boston
Wednesday, July 21, 6:30-7:30pm at Dillon's, 955 Boylston Street, Boston

We will select 18-20 Fellows to enter the program this September in Boston. Admissions is highly competitive. We would love for anyone interested to take a good look at the program and apply if they are looking to be part of a cohort of outstanding leaders and entrepreneurs as they think through their startups and innovations.

Our Fellows have started 40 companies, raised over $3.5 million in angel and $26 million in venture capital funding, and won numerous awards and media attention. Our Fellows are business or technical Founders, work in leadership roles at venture-backed startups, in companies and institutions in innovation-related positions, and in venture capital firms. Here are a few of our recent Fellows in Boston

Founders
Mike Sheeley, Co-Founder, Runkeeper
Jay Meattle, Founder & CEO, Shareaholic.com
Hooman Hodjat, Founder & CEO, PickupZone
Parker Treacy, Founder, First Help Financial and TrickleUp Effect

Innovators & Designers
Angela Chen, President, Harvard Biotech Club and PhD Candidate, Harvard Medical School
Emily Rothschild, Award-winning designer of medical products
Love Sarin, Founder, Banyan Environmental and PhD candidate at Brown University
Ryan Bardsley, Inventor, Robots for Healthcare, and Award-Winning Designer
Vineet Sinha, Founder, Architexa and PhD candidate at MIT

Leaders at venture-backed companies
Amar Kendale, Vice President, Arsenal Medical
Christina Kaldeny, Associate Director, Business Development, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals

Venture Capitalists
Jordan Bettman, Associate, Bain Capital Ventures
Gautam Gupta, Associate, General Catalyst Ventures
Steve Meyer, Associate, Globespan Capital Partners

See all their bios here

Over the past year, we have nearly 50 speakers, mentors and judges come and advise our Fellows. There are more than 100 people in our network in Boston alone, who are helpful to our Fellows and Program. Here are a few mentors, speakers and judges from last year alone.

Dharmesh Shah, Founder, Hubspot and Author: The Inbound Marketing book
Jonathan Lim, Polaris Venture Partners
Dr. Pravin Chaturvedi, Serial Lifescience Entrepreneur
Todd Hixon, Partner, New Atlantic Ventures
Serial Lifescience Entrepreneur
Shikhar Ghosh, Harvard Professor, Serial Entrepreneur
Jim Matheson, Flagship Venture Partners

See the full list here

Michael Mullins, Program Leader for the Startup Leadershp Class of 2011 in Boston says "I can say from experience that being a Fellow at Startup Leadership is a tremendous experience. It's about learning, growth, and networking. When you look at people who get funded or are successful in startups, they don't just have a great idea. They're people who are active in the entrepreneurial community. The Startup Leadership Program is simply the best way to get fully engaged in the entrepreneurial community here in Boston."

About SLP: The Startup Leadership Program (SLP) @ TiE Boston is a not for profit 9-month fellowship. We train and mentor young professionals in their early 20's to mid-30's to be leaders and entrepreneurs in the life science, tech, clean tech, and social enterprise sectors. Our fellows master soft & hard skills, network with venture capitalists, angels, and entrepreneurial thought leaders, and build life-long relationships with SLP alumni around the world in Boston, Silicon Valley, and our newest chapters in New York, San Diego, Beijing, and Bangalore. SLP was founded in Boston in 2006.

For the Startup Leadership Program contact:

Michael Mullins
Boston Program Leader
Startup Leadership Program
M: 781-964-4544
E: mullins01@gmail.com
T: http://www.twitter.com/mullins01

Great Event at Charlesmark Hotel

2010-07-01T00:23:00.005-04:00

Thank you to everyone who came out and made our event a big success on Monday. We had a terrific group of experienced entrepreneurs, scientists, and technologists who were referred to us for our 2011 Boston Class. There were 24 attendees, including several current Kaufmann Fellows, a couple venture capitalists, and a few people from academia. Add to that 6 SLP Fellows and couple very skilled bartenders at Charlesmark, and you have a fun event.

If you feel like you're missing out, please join us at our next event on Monday, July 12 from 6:30 to 7:30pm at Dillon's, 955 Boylston Street in Boston's Back Bay. Grab a drink and join us as the lower bar, where we'll socialize then say a few words about next year's program.

Michael Mullins

SLP Boston 2010

http://twitter.com/mullins01

Entrepreneurs can change the world

2010-06-30T14:40:00.000-04:00

An incredible program in Delhi for first and second ranked girls from poor backgrounds - who now want to be computer engineers

2010-06-28T17:38:00.000-04:00

Lines @ the Apple Store

2010-06-24T14:30:00.000-04:00

4G goes on sale today. What's cool is that the employees handed out umbrellas, sunblock and mint to those in line. Something to learn about being thankful and taking care of your customers.

Wonder if the Immigration and Naturalization Service would ever do that...

Google's 40 angels

2010-06-23T20:01:00.000-04:00

This photo is an interesting map of ex-Google employees who have financed 200 new startups at last count. the most prolific

Aydin Ankut, 40, Founder Felicis Ventures
Chris Sacca, 34, Founder, Lowercase Capital
Paul Buccheit, 33, Entrepreneur
Andrea Zurek, 39, Co-Founder, XG Ventures
Joshua Schachter, 36, Google Engineer

These entrepreneurs have funded Mint.com, Facebook, Foursquare, Tapulous, Bit.ly, Posterous, VentureBeat...and a lot of other companies.

I've failed over and over again in my life...Michael Jordan

2010-06-20T22:40:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Brad Feld for pointing out this commercial

In case you think VC is easy

2010-06-18T13:21:00.000-04:00

http://FunnyOrDie.com/m/7ki

The tough life of a VC - watch more funny videos

15 Reasons to join the Startup Leadership Program

2010-06-16T03:43:00.001-04:00

Photos from the Boston 2010 Graduating Class

2010-06-14T10:39:00.002-04:00

Rishi Shukla get hitched !

2010-06-12T19:34:00.002-04:00

The first dance. Congratulations.

The class of 2010 is graduating

2010-06-06T21:23:00.002-04:00

After an activity and accomplishment-filled year, the Class of 2010 is graduating. Silicon Valley will graduate on June 9, and Boston, two days later on June 11. Congratulations to all.

Boulder, Colorado could be the next Silicon Valley?

2010-05-14T13:41:00.004-04:00

Link to original article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/business/14boulder.html?src=me&ref=homepage

Sixty engineers, entrepreneurs and financiers were sipping yerba mate tea at a coffee shop down the street from a bong-and-lingerie store on a recent sunny Tuesday in Boulder, and discussing how Boulder — usually seen as an enclave of hippies, marijuana dispensaries and rock climbers — has become a hotbed of capitalism.

Experienced tech entrepreneurs and investors sat alongside people who had just moved to Boulder hoping to start a company in this small city, which is breeding tech start-ups at an attention-grabbing rate. In the first three months of the year, 11 Colorado tech start-ups raised $57 million in venture capital, solidifying Boulder’s place among the country’s up-and-coming tech centers.

“In Silicon Valley, you’re a small fish in a huge pond, and it didn’t seem as collaborative and a lot more corporate,” said Chad McGimpsey, who moved to Boulder a month ago and is now a regular at the twice-a-month coffee club. “Here, you’re a big fish in a small pond. Plus, there are the mountains.”

A long list of communities around the country have tried to become “the next Silicon Valley.” But very few have the mix of money, universities, a high-tech talent pool and appealing lifestyle needed to hatch tech start-ups. Boulder, however, has been luring tech industry veterans and young entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and Manhattan with promises of a tech community that allows for lunch-break hikes in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

The town’s big successes include Rally Software, a fast-growing company that makes project management software; Socialthing, a social media service acquired by AOL; and Kerpoof, which makes Web design tools for children and was acquired by the Walt Disney Company.

Venture capital dollars are following the entrepreneurs to Colorado. From 2007 to 2009, venture capitalists invested $1.9 billion in 275 Colorado start-ups, up from $1.6 billion in 247 companies from 2004 to 2006, according to the National Venture Capital Association. The money is coming from Colorado venture firms — including the Foundry Group, a prominent firm in Boulder — as well as from Silicon Valley and New York.

The recipes of other cities for creating the next Silicon Valley usually leave out a few main ingredients. Richard Florida, who wrote “The Rise of the Creative Class” and studies why certain cities foster creativity, cites three crucial factors: talented people and a high quality of life that keeps them around, technological expertise, and an open-mindedness about new ways of doing things, which often comes from a strong counterculture.

“Boulder has reached this beautiful sweet spot, where it has many advantages of a university town — tech and talent and openness — but without many of the costs and traffic and congestion that may disadvantage incumbent centers of innovation,” Mr. Florida said.

This balance did not come about accidentally. Natural foods companies like Wild Oats Markets and Celestial Seasonings started here, and several national labs and big-tech companies like I.B.M. opened outposts. Early on, the biotech, telecom and data storage industries took off in Boulder, bolstered by Sun Microsystems’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technology in 2005.

“That generation of entrepreneurs had their success, and importantly, they don’t leave,” said Brad Bernthal, director of the entrepreneurship initiative at the University of Colorado Silicon Flatirons Center. “Lots of places, you get your money and you go retire somewhere. This place is a destination for people.”

The center makes sure that those veterans cross paths with young entrepreneurs. It hosts meet-ups, a campuswide business plan competition and a law clinic, where entrepreneurs get free legal help on things like intellectual property protection.

TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that has taken place in an old gym in Boulder since 2007, has spurred the start-up community’s growth. Of the first 10 companies that went through the program, eight received venture funding, five were acquired by bigger companies and three are still active. But David Cohen, the founder of TechStars, is equally proud of one of its failures, because he said it showed how supportive Boulder’s tech community is. After EventVue, which built online communities for conferences, shut down, job offers from other tech companies came pouring in.

Almost half of the 30 companies that have gone through the TechStars program have decided to stay in town. Several of them share space — tiny offices and a big common room, kitchen and deck — above Aji, a Latin American restaurant downtown.

One is Everlater, for making travel journals on the Web. Its founders, Nate Abbott and Natty Zola, moved to Boulder to save money by living in their parents’ basements after quitting their jobs on Wall Street. But when they arrived, Mr. Zola said, “We realized it was an incredible place to start a company.”

The Foundry partners, even though they are not investors in the company, routinely give them an hour of their time or have them over for dinner. A relationship with a TechStars mentor led to a partnership with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

The Foundry partners also run the coffee club and hold office hours, where anyone can meet with them for free advice on their business idea.

Still, Boulder depends on Silicon Valley. There are not enough investors in Colorado to finance growing companies. Many entrepreneurs open California offices, including Matt Galligan, who started and sold Socialthing and is now the founder of SimpleGeo, which makes mapping and other location tools for software companies.

“The community here is terrific, but in terms of generating business, there’s no substitute for Silicon Valley,” he said.

Though the University of Colorado has opened to the tech community, it plays nowhere near the pivotal role that Stanford does. “Creating a culture somewhat like M.I.T. or Stanford, where it’s expected in the technical disciplines that you will do a start-up, or at least it’s not looked at askew, is not part of the faculty DNA in most departments yet,” Mr. Bernthal said.

And maintaining such an inviting culture, where top venture capitalists will freely give people an hour of their time, will be difficult if Boulder’s tech scene continues to grow.

Still, many tech types in Boulder move here precisely because they want to escape Silicon Valley and its institutionalized tech scene. “There is a feeling in Silicon Valley that if you win, someone else loses,” said Kimbal Musk, chief executive of OneRiot, a real-time search engine based in Boulder. “It has driven success, but it has also driven people to leave.”

Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy - APPLY NOW

2010-05-09T16:28:00.004-04:00

If you have a green idea, which you want to bring out from an academic lab and bounce it off some entrepreneurs, angles and VCs, then GTEA is the place to be. This is one of the best workshops where you meet many like minded individuals, learn the ropes of entrepreneurship from the very basics in an intense 1 week program and get to meet with several angles and VCs face to face and see it from their perspective. With the sponsorship and the excellent organization they provide, if you are an early stage entrepreneur you can not have a better week working on your idea. So read the information below and apply right away with the simple online application. Get the kick start you need. Good luck!

Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy
June 28 - July 2, 2010 @ the Tahoe Center for Environmental Science
Lake Tahoe, Nevada

Moving Sustainable Technologies Out of the Lab and into the World

The one-week intensive academy is open to science and engineering senior undergraduates, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty working on research in green technologies. The academy combines seminars and networking sessions in an innovative format to help you learn how to commercialize your technology.

Why You Should Attend:

* learn to communicate the broader potential impact of your research
* explore commercial opportunities surrounding your technology
* develop a network of professionals in clean tech who can help mentor and connect you as you move forward with your career or new venture.

Accepted applicants receive fellowships to cover room, board and tuition. Open to applicants from national and international universities.

It is taught by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, faculty, industry executives and angel investors from across the country that serve as mentors as well as guest faculty, providing participants with the knowledge and networks needed for taking the next steps toward commercialization. Previous GTEA mentors and faculty included leaders from DFJ Frontier, Element, Mohr Davidow Ventures, DMC, Nth Power, Sierra Angels, Morrison and Foerster, Pillsbury, NIEHS, USDA, National Instruments, NIREC, Pacific Gas & Electric, Sempra Utilities, Edison International, CalCEF Angel Fund, and Chevron Energy Solutions.

Apply online by May 14, 2010 >> http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green

Sponsored by Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy (NIREC), Chevron, PG&E and Superfund Research Program. Presented by the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship.

Opps in China ! (Sage Partners)

2010-04-27T20:08:00.000-04:00

R&D skyrocketing while FDA approvals drop

2010-04-27T20:01:00.000-04:00

Team Terrific Wins 2010 TLP Venture Capital Competition in Boston

2010-04-25T21:53:00.003-04:00

This past Saturday marked TLP’s annual Venture Capital Competition which was once again filled with the drama and excitement that has come to be expected of a TLP workshop. This competition is one of the program’s marquee events as it turns the table on its entrepreneurial fellows pitting them against each other as teams of venture investors in analyzing and negotiating investment deals with real startups.

The rules of the competition are simple – each team must successfully negotiate a single investment term sheet with one of the four attending companies who can only accept a single deal. As context, the TLP teams are instructed that they only have $10M remaining in their $100M initial venture fund and that their current fund investments have thus far proven unsatisfactory. Upon conclusion of the competition, each team must present and defend their deal to a panel of VC judges in a 7-minute power point presentation followed by 8 minutes of Q&A. The judges then decide which team will be crowned the TLP VCC Champion!

The 2010 competition officially began on Thursday evening when each team was emailed executive summaries for the four startups selected. These companies were then asked to present in person on Saturday morning. The following is a quick synopsis of each company:

eXtendMobility: provides software and services to transform the way retailers and brands engage with consumers by providing a holistic view of the consumer-base across various marketing channels (SMS, Email, Applications, Direct mail, Gift cards).

Nimbo: is an enterprise sustainability software company that offers an innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) package called RAIN, which helps organizations prepare for a carbon constrained, water stricken, clean economic future.

RelayTech: is a web-based analytics company that identifies promising drug candidates from academic research institutions and early-stage biotechnology companies.

7Solar: is developing a turn-key system for buildings that integrates PV/Thermal collectors, solar air-conditioning/heating, and a software control architecture that proactively minimizes a building’s energy cost by converting sunlight into electricity, heating and cooling in a single system.

The competition swung into high gear following the presentations as each TLP team was given 15 minutes to ask additional clarifying questions as part of investment due diligence. The due diligence sessions were followed by Wild-West-like negotiations as each TLP investment team jockeyed for time with the companies that had caught their eye and tried to lock down a signed term sheet before another TLP team could do the same.

As the clock hit 2:30, each team was asked to submit their investment recommendations and the presentations to the VC panel began. The presentations were going as expected until the final one by Team Incredible which was comprised of 2010 TLP fellows Will Adams, Bennett Fisher, Sidd Goyal, and Nitasha Manchanda. Team Incredible was the only team NOT to successfully negotiate a signed deal as they had purposely chosen to focus on 7Solar but were not successful in courting them. Despite their unsuccessful negotiation, Team Incredible did a great job centering their presentation on why they had passed on the other companies and why their particular valuation for 7Solar was in fact the correct one.

In the end, Team Incredible’s controversial strategy was denied by Team Terrific in an outcome narrowly separated by 2 points. Ariel Assaf, Kwa Liou, Jeff McAulay, and Emily Rothschild of Team Terrific chose to invest in RelayTech and did a phenomenal job selecting, negotiating, and supporting their investment decision to the VC judges. This year’s rockstar judging panel consisted of Geoff Mamlet (Principal, New Atlantic Ventures), David Shapiro (Managing Partner, Great Point Capital), Arif Padaria (Managing Director of Investments, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center), Bilal Zuberi (Principal, General Catalyst Partners), and Scott Yaphe (General Partner, ABS Ventures).

All in all, the event was an incredible experience for both the TLP fellows and the participating entrepreneurs. We would like to thank Cohort Awesome for all of their hard work and planning that went into putting together such a great event and our entrepreneurs and VC judges for taking the time to participate.

Congratulations again to this year’s VCC Champion - Team Terrific - for job well done!

Steve Blank, SLP Speaker and Professor of Entrepreneurship

2010-04-25T08:31:00.003-04:00

Why accountants don’t run startups sllc

View more presentations from steve blank.

Fellows ! Ideas for your next campaign

2010-04-25T08:04:00.001-04:00

51 Guerrilla Marketing Advertisements

View more presentations from Rogier van Wagtendonk.

Eric Reis: Lean Startups Welcome

2010-04-24T22:05:00.001-04:00

2010 04 23 Startup Lessons Learned conference welcome slides by Eric Ries #sllconf

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

2010 Silicon Valley Speakers

2010-04-22T09:41:00.002-04:00

Mentors, Speakers & Judges at SLP Silicon Valley 2010

Faculty
Steven Blank, Professor of Entrepreneurship, UC Berkeley & Stanford

Founders & CEOs
Ambal Balakrishnan, Co-Founder, ClickDocuments
Carol Realini, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Obopay & CEO, Chordiant Systems
David Thrower, Chairman & CEO, InSound Medical Inc. / Former Head of Marketing
Eshwar Belani, Serial Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of Sensact Applications
Mohan Uttarwar, Founder and CEO, BioImagene, Founder & CEO, Softplus
Nimish Mehta, Managing Director & CEO, LumenData
Prabhat Dubey, Serial Founder & CEO, TelASIC, Force10 Networks and MMC Networks
Rakesh Mathur, Serial Entrepreneur, Co-founder and CEO of Webaroo, Inc.
Ravi Amble, Chairman & CEO, Rapidigm
Robin Smith, CEO, ArtusLabs
Sandip Gupta, CEO, Netmagic & Founder of several companies
Sanjay Mittal, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Selectica
Satish Gupta, Chairman & CEO, SenSen and Cradle Technologies
Siva Kumar, Founder & CEO, TheFind and seven other venture-backed startups
Venk Shukla, CEO, Nusym Technologies Inc

Experts
Aanand Krishnan, Technology Investment Banking, Morgan Stanley
Dinesh Ramanathan, Executive Vice President, Cypress Semiconductor
Harpal Sandhu, Co-Founder & CEO, Integral and Infinity Financial Technology
Igal Ladabaum, Founder, Sensant and VP of R&D, InSound Medical
Irv Henderson, VP of Connected Life, Yahoo!
Joe Kosakowski, President and Founder, Quest Groups
Michael Griego, President/Founder, MXL Partners
Rosen Sharma, CTO, McAfee Systems
Shari Mordhorst Begun, Cypress Global Account Manager for Apple

Investors
David Hanzel, Partner, Seed Capital Management
Gaurav Aggarwal, Principal, Panorama Capital
JC Simbana, Managing Director, Silicon Valley Bank
Lisa Suennen, Managing Partner, Psilos Ventures
Nancy Kamei, Head of Healthcare, Intel Capital
Rama Sekhar, Senior Associate, Norwest Venture Partners
Sarita Jain, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation
Sean O’Malley, Head of Venrock Incubator
Steve Foster, Founder & Managing Director, TPG Ventures
Vivek Shah, Associate, Globespan Capital Partners

Lawyers
Aaron Basilius, Corporate & Securities Law, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Alex A Andalis J.D., Ph.D., IP Attorney, Morrison Foerster
Asaf Kharal, Corporate & Securities Law, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Curtis Mo, J.D., Senior Partner, Wilmer Hale
Linda W. Seale, Startups & Venture Funds, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Mike Danaher, Partner, Corporate & Securities Law, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Robert A. Saltzberg J.D., IP Attorney, Morrison Foerster

Drinking Water Solutions (Acumen Fund & Kenya)

2010-04-20T07:13:00.002-04:00

The Ripple Effect in Kenya from IDEO & Acumen Fund on Vimeo.

Zahra Kanji (2010 Fellow) is working on drinking water solutions in Ghana. While we don't have a video of her work, here are some interesting approaches in Kenya.

POPSignal Discussion: Is Boston Short Angels, Or Good Companies?

2010-04-19T13:58:00.000-04:00

POPSignal Discussion: Is Boston Short Angels, Or Good Companies?

Boston's Best Angels (Thanks to Jon Pierce)

2010-04-18T19:09:00.000-04:00

Dharmesh Shah
Andy Payne
David Cancel
Brian Shin
Joe Caruso
Lee Hower
John Landry
Bill Warner
Jean Hammond
Rich Miner
Reed Sturtevant
Shikhar Ghosh
Don Dodge
Dave Balter
Will Herman
Angus Davis
Steven Kane

How a movement begins: Great simple learnings about the first followers

2010-04-15T20:58:00.000-04:00

MIT $100K Twitch Contest!

2010-04-15T11:55:00.001-04:00

MIT $100K Twitch Contest! "Twitch" aka "Twitter Pitch" challenges you to convey your business idea in 140 characters or less and get as many re-tweets as possible. The winner will collect $500 cash and will be announced at the Business Plan Contest Finale on May 12th. Details on how to Twitch can be found here.

Coverage of Twitch in today's New York Times .

VentureConnect 2010 on April 23, 4PM @ Microsoft NERD

2010-04-14T21:45:00.004-04:00

20 university startups (including 2 from TLP Fellows) from VentureLab invite you to VentureConnect2010 on April 23, at 4:00 at Microsoft NERD

VentureConnect2010 is a showcase of university tech startups companies engaged in an intensive 2 week program to accelerate their ventures as part of VentureLab, produced by the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance with support from Microsoft New England Research and Development Center.

The twenty teams in VentureLab will demonstrate “IGNITE-Style” their innovations and showcase how they’ve accelerated in the VentureLab program over the past 2 weeks. The ventures created by both graduate and undergraduate startups include such diverse areas including solar, security, software and emerging markets ventures.

VentureConnect2010 emerged as an student driven initiative from VentureLab when the student teams were each asked to create a $100 challenge to test entrepreneurial action and ambition.

VentureConnect2010 takes place at Microsoft NERD (http://microsoftcambridge.com/) One Memorial Drive in Cambridge from 4 PM - 6:45 PM on April 23rd. Light appetizers and refreshments will be served!

REGISTER HERE: http://ventureconnect2010.eventbrite.com/

This is a FREE event but please consider a modest donation which will be directed to the student ventures!

Professional Service Providers interested in displaying their organization, please sign up with your contact information so we can communicate directly.

Expected attendees are investors, attorneys, students, entrepreneurs, and press.

REGISTER HERE: http://ventureconnect2010.eventbrite.com/

TLP Fellow in the news...

2010-04-12T14:10:00.002-04:00

TheFind, whose mission is to make the world a better place to shop, today announced that Shashikant Khandelwal has been appointed as the company's chief technology officer. Khandelwal, an internationally acclaimed computer scientist and author of most of the company's issued and pending patents, has been with TheFind since its founding in 2005.

While earning his masters in computer science from Stanford University, Khandelwal constructed the original prototype for TheFind's award winning search engine, which today puts the world's largest shopping center in the palm of your hand. Available as a website, mobile site and iPhone app, TheFind attracts 17 million unique monthly shoppers, sends quality traffic to 150,000 stores, and boasts an index of more than 400 million products from half-a-million online and local merchants.

"Shashi's vision has already helped TheFind build a technology platform that makes the world a better place to shop," said Siva Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of TheFind. "As technology continues to re-shape the retail landscape, Shashi's leadership will enable TheFind to bring ever more creative and elegant solutions to market."

Khandelwal is the recipient of several awards for technological innovation in his native India, where he received his bachelor's degree in computer science from BITS Pilani. Prior to beginning his post graduate work at Stanford, Khandelwal worked at Microsoft, France's INSEAD Business School, as well as the Bhabha Atomic Research Center.

You can find more details on this press release at:
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/thefind-appoints-stanford-computer-scientist-and-company-veteran-as-cto,1226919.shtml

Parul Singh & Edward Alfano are off to MIT Sloan

2010-04-12T11:32:00.002-04:00

Please join me in congratulating two of our Fellows, who are off to MIT Sloan. They're in great company; Fellows Ajay Kulkarni (2008), Bala Venkatrao (2009) and Bennett Fisher (2010) are Sloanies (hope I didn't miss anyone). Parul is a 2008 Fellow and 2009 Program Coordinator, who currently works at venture-backed Visible Measures. Ed Alfano is a 2008 Fellow, co-founder of LuminaPrep, and a lifesciences consultant working with startups, who's also spent time in venture capital.

Parul Singh
Parul is a product manager at Visible Measures where she builds products that find insight in traffic data for video playing all over the internet. Current customers include MTV and NBC, with more to come. Previously she worked at The New York Times Digital as a product manager focused on multimedia and video\, and for six years worked as a web developer and project manager for Fast Company, Inc. Magazine and the Fund for the City of New York. \n\nShe started her career as an interface developer at Razorfish, and continues to be passionate about usable interface design, product marketing and packaging. She has spent time volunteering for charities in the US, UK and India focused on women, development, and technology. In her spare time, Parul enjoys fiction, running, and yoga. She completed her BA from Harvard University in Government.

Edward Alfano
Ed is a founder of LuminaPrep and Associate at Extera Partners where he advises international life science clients on business development, corporate strategy, and mergers and acquisitions. Previously he worked at Monitor Group, focusing on life science and energy clients. Ed split his time between Monitor's consulting practice and Monitor Ventures where he provided strategic advice to portfolio companies and performed due diligence on deals. During his academic career, Ed worked for two years on innovative gene sequencing technology at the Columbia Genome Center and for a year researching health care patents at Columbia Law. Ed enjoys an active lifestyle of sailing, running, skiing, and dancing. Ed holds a BS in Chemical Engineering magna cum laude with a minor in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University. While at Columbia, he founded CU Swing, an organization of dancers and jazz enthusiasts, and instructed, choreographed, and performed.

Congratulations !

Founders Consulting

2010-04-11T08:36:00.004-04:00

TLP brings together people interested in starting companies, or those already working at a startup. One of the most difficult challenges for these founders is maintaining a source of income while trying to start a company. One of the most common solutions is for founders to work as consultants, but it is challenging for individuals to develop the contacts needed for a steady stream of consulting work. At a recent TLP workshop, a potential solution began to emerge...

What if a group of founders companies combined forces and networks to better distribute and support consulting contracts amongst themselves. This kind of idea might seem impossible if the same activities weren't already happening on an individual basis. I'm amazed with the amount of consulting work that individuals are able to generate. In some cases more than they can handle by themselves. Pulling in well qualified founders can support the consulting effort, broaden the network to pull from and help build a reputable brand that might even help launch the startup companies.

Immediately there are several problems that emerge, and point to reasons why TLP would be the perfect platform to launch such a program.

1) How would you gate the consultants appropriately?

Founders generally get consulting contracts through close personal relationships or past working engagements. There needs to be enough trust between members of such a group such that they would be trusted for referrals. This means that a personal network would work best, or some other form of selection process. The application process for an organization like TLP could perform this selection process.

2) How would you distribute the income?

In the simplest form, each person would share in the revenue according to their contribution. A more complex environment might allow for more senior members to obtain a minimum base payment as they transitioned into more advanced levels of their startups. Advancement within the group must be carefully controlled so that senior members are not payed to continue the pursuit of a failed idea.

3) How do you generate new business?

Personal and professional networks are essential for individual consultants. Each individual can continue to bring in business, but build a brand greater than just themselves.

So are you a founder with enough time for consulting, but not enough time for a full time job? Do you need a source of income? Do you have to turn away consulting opportunities because of a lack of bandwidth? If you're in TLP or thinking of joining, consider this model. We have already had conversations with two groups; one considering taking on energy and materials consulting, another looking at IT and software. There is no reason to limit the technology focus except based on the expertise of the partners.

Certainly there are enough lawyers who sponsor TLP programs to help structure this new company. If you're in TLP and you didn't sleep through the early workshops then you should know whether this should be an LLC, Partnership or C-Corp.

All we need now is a catchy name!

TLP Investor Showcase: An panel and mentoring event with 7 of Boston’s most knowledgeable early-stage investor-mentors

2010-04-10T18:46:00.008-04:00

Credits: Photos by Praveen Yajman

Speakers/Panelists/Advisors
Shawn Broderick, Managing Director, Techstars Boston (Moderator)
Todd Hixon, Managing Director, New Atlantic Ventures
Jonathan Lim, Principal, Polaris Ventures & In-charge, Dogpatch Boston
Elon Boms, Director, Launch Capital
Eric Paley, Managing Director, Founders Collective
Chris Sheehan, Managing Director, CommonAngels
Josh Tolkoff, Ironwood Equity

April 7, 2010 was one of our most engaging and vibrant events in recent memory, primarily because it was our first ever organized showcase of TLP’s product: its Fellows. We brought seven of Boston best known seed and early-stage investors to meet 20 outstanding Founders and CEOs. It wasn’t pitch day. It was a chance for founders and CEOs to give brief overviews of their companies, and then to ask questions about solving specific business problems. It was a standing room only session.

Shawn did a great job moderating a panel and extracting questions out of the panelists. Here is a sample of the points raised at this event, in no logical order.

Teams
The team question came up. Eric reminded everyone that when you look for feedback for being turned down, the real reason may actually be the team itself. But its never something one will hear from investors. They don’t want to hurt any feelings. When you ask us for feedback, there is a difference between asking for genuine feedback and really asking the question about “what does it take to write us a check”. Those are two different questions, and the latter is a far more difficult answer that investors are not likely to give.

Jon is wary of overconfident management teams. He doesn’t like to invest when he thinks “They don’t know what they don’t know”. Elon reiterated that many times his decisions are based on going with his gut feel. There are times when there is no clear reason why he’s uncomfortable. Eric had similar anecdotes. One of his investments had everything going. Everyone liked the market, the product, everything seemed right. His team spent half a dozen meetings, but in the end walked away because they just could not get comfortable with the entrepreneur.

About Changing Your Business Plans
Eric reminded Founders to carefully think about whether the insight and vision they started out with still stood even if the markets were changing. He was looking to see how quickly can these entrepreneurs make these changes needed. Eric was less enthusiastic about this approach, using the term pivoting. He warned about CEOs “pivoting” too much around their original business plans, reminding him that pivoting was dangerous. It wasn’t always a strategy. While there was a desire for tech CEOs to iterate quickly, it is never the preferred alternative to “we have a good plan going in”. Todd reminded the Fellows that every pivot is a swing, and there are just so many swings that one gets, and ended by saying “One definitely doesn’t build a great business by infinitely iterating on bad business cases” which drew some nervous laughs from the audience.

Make Investors lives easy
Jon reminded the Fellows that they should try to make lives easy for the investors. Make a one pager (excel or word) so they can go to the partners meeting. Josh advised entrepreneurs to guide the diligence process. “We’re lazy.” We’ll take the path of least diligence that shows our world. You understand that we’re busy. Get us in front of people who can corroborate your story.”

How long does it take to get funded ?
Josh offered a very important tip based on statistics that reminded us that getting funded is even harder. He said that statistics show that it takes 18 months & 36 meetings to get funded early stage.

Business plans versus Pitch Decks
There was a clear split between people willing to read pitch decks and business plans. Everyone agreed that less is more; no one has the time to read long plans.

Josh advised Fellows to entertain by telling a story that would make it interesting. What’s happening now. What will the future look like. “Tell me a story that gets me interested.”. As a lifesciences investor, he also reminded the crowd never to forget that biology is really hard.

Todd was quick to point out that there was a difference between a pitch deck and a business plan. A pitch deck is a communication tool. Jon and Eric clearly had no interest in anything but pitch decks. Elon pointed out that while its great to write the plan to get everyone on the same page, which drew support from the other investors. However, Jon argued that business plans are static documents, and are not updated, so they quickly become irrelevant. Regarding a question about putting together a list of frequently raised objections, the panel agreed that this was a good idea, but cautioned against giving it out to the investors unless the questions were asked. But the preparation was a good thing.

Elevator Pitches
Todd offered a great tip on elevator pitches. Convey three things:
1. What it is
2. Why is it exciting
3. Why are you credible

Some other feedback
During the event, Todd remarked that the entrepreneurs did a great job giving feedback to each other; at one point he felt that Shawn and he were moderators of the session. Everyone thought that the quality of presentations was very good. Josh sees a lot of plans, but he is astounded to see how few plans are any good, so he was actually quite happy to see the quality from the Fellows. There were several suggestions – to give more flexibility to investors to move around, to give more information before this event next year, to give more time to each investor, and finally, to always send the decks and two pagers in advance.

A remarkable event with a ton of learnings. Thanks to Rich Kimball and his team at Edward Angel Palmer and Dodge for hosting us, to Ariel, Brian, Chase, and Parul for all their hard work organizing this, to Praveen Yajman for taking the pics, for the Panelists and Moderator for their insights, and the Fellows showcasing and listening, for making this a success.

TLP Social Entrepreneurship Event with Pics (April 7, 2010)

2010-04-10T17:31:00.011-04:00

Credits: Photos by Praveen Yajman

We were fortunate to have a very interesting panel moderated by cleantech social entrepreneur, Soren Harrison, who is bringing renewable energy sources to schools, brought in four outstanding speakers and experts who are on the front-lines of social entrepreneurship. Nina is bringing lab equipment to remote corners of the world, Liz is creating containers that can be dropped anywhere to provide an inexpensive, yet world-class clinic, Sidd is bringing job-connectivity to Latin America, and Raj is using his years of expertise in the startup world, to help entrepreneurs learn about the business models and explore them.

[Detailed writeup to come]

Elizabeth Sheehan, Founder and President, Containers2Clinic
Elizabeth has two decades of experience delivering medical care in the US and abroad. She began her career in healthcare working in emergency rooms throughout the US as a Physician’s Assistant. After a year-long journey to 19 developing countries to investigate health care delivery systems, Elizabeth became the medical director of The HALO Trust, an organization committed to village-based mine clearance. With HALO, Elizabeth designed and implemented emergency care protocols for deminers and expatriate staff in Cambodia and Mozambique. After earning her Master’s in public health in London, she worked for USAID on a primary health care reconstruction project in post war Mozambique. Later, she worked as a clinician in the Maputo Central Hospital teaching triage protocols and assisting the delivery of emergency care. After Mozambique, Elizabeth moved to Tanzania, where as part of the British High Commission she volunteered her medical skills and public health knowledge in orphanages, shelters and women’s groups. For the past 15 years, Elizabeth served as director and trustee of a family foundation, for which she designed granting strategies and evaluation tools. To date, the foundation has granted over 12 million dollars.Elizabeth is a graduate of Holy Cross College, Duke University Medical Center’s Physician's Assistant Program and The London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene jointly with the London School of Economics. She founded Containers to Clinics in 2008.

Nina Dudnik, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Seedling Labs
Nina has always tried to combine science and global development. She began the effort to build Seeding Labs as a graduate student in 2003. She was a finalist in the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and was awarded an Echoing Green fellowship in 2007 to formally launch and expand Seeding Labs.Nina worked for the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research in Italy where she provided advice on the integration of molecular genetics techniques into conservation and plant breeding activities. She was a Fulbright scholar in 2000 at the Africa Rice Center in Cote d’Ivoire studying rice introgression using molecular markers. Nina obtained her PhD in molecular biology from Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a BSc in biochemistry from Brown University

Raj Melville Social Entrepreneurship

View more presentations from Anupendra Sharma.

Raj Melville, Ambient
Raj provides marketing and strategy consulting to emerging social entrepreneurs. He founded and chaired the annual Forum for Social Entrepreneurs, organized and moderated numerous panels and workshops on social entrepreneurship, and currently mentors several startups focused on addressing key social issues. Raj has over 25 years of product management, marketing and consulting experience at several start-ups and larger organizations. Some of his previous responsibilities included managing the overall product strategy and features for nTAG Interactive, a spin off from the MIT Media Lab; marketing and product management direction at mobile software vendor Vaultus, another MIT spinoff; directing product management at Be Free Inc. (now Valueclick), a market leading affiliate marketing e-commerce solution; and managing the launch of two high-end Internet server products at Electronic Book Technologies (later acquired by Inso). His early career included stints at Microsoft Corp., Digital Equipment Corporation, and Booz Allen & Hamilton. He is an active member of TiE Boston where he co-founded the Social Entrepreneurship Group. Raj has a doctorate from MIT, a Master’s from MIT’s Sloan School and a Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Sidd Goyal, CoFounder & CTO, AssuredLabor
AssuredLabor is a web-based company that leverages the power of SMS and the Internet to connect employers and workers in emerging markets. Sidd and his co-founders successfully raised funding over the last three months during his fellowship at TLP. Sidd is traveling back and forth to Nicaragua these days supporting the launch of Assured Labor's Latin America job marketplace, Empleolisto!

Soren Harrison , Founder, SolSolution
Soren is is a scientist and entrepreneur with a strong background in engineering and physics, with a passion for energy and the environment. Soren completed his doctoral research at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center in October 2008, where he is now continuing research as a visiting scientist. He founded Arriba Solar in 2006 to perform R&D in the field of nuclear fusion research, develop a thin film measurement technique, and transfer technology from the field of nuclear fusion to mainstream commercial industries. In 2007, Soren founded SolSolution, an innovative nonprofit in the solar and education. Soren is an active member of the MIT entrepreneurial and energy community, a member of the MIT Energy Club, and served on the 2009 MIT Clean Energy Prize Organizing Team as the Industry Mentorship Chair. He was a Fellow in the 2009 TiE Leadership Program, where he is now a program manager. He holds a B.S. Mechanical Engineering, University of California, San Diego, Ph.D. and M.S. Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Soren currently lives in Somerville, MA with his wonderful wife, Christine. His personal interests include surfing, scuba diving, playing music (guitar, drums, bass, vocals), martial arts, entrepreneurship, energy, environment, and education

TLP Investor Showcase: Josh Tolkoff answer fundamental Founder/CEO questions in small sessions

2010-04-10T16:59:00.004-04:00

I sat in on the Lifesciences session, where Josh Tolkoff of Ironwood Equity explored big picture problems that our Founders were facing. Should they sell to big pharma or CROs, when the products they were creating may put CRO reputations on the line ? How to price products ? Should they be sold per seat, or on a success basis ? Was that trackable ? Was one company creating a software product, or was it really a service. The latter had implications for raising money, because no one would back a services company without traction. The conclusion there: get some customers and show you can get the traction. One biotech that has angel backing to test compounds was asked whether this proposition was too risky. Were grants a better path to go down and how so ? A very interesting garage startup in the robotics world came up with an action plan to figure out what it should end up selling – a low-cost but extremely versatile new controller that would go into a large installed base, or a new product that would compete against that installed base.

Information and learnings from other rooms to follow.

TPL Investor Showcase & Mentoring Event: Pics !

2010-04-10T16:46:00.002-04:00

Speakers/Panelists/Advisors
Shawn Broderick, Managing Director, Techstars Boston (Moderator)
Todd Hixon, Managing Director, New Atlantic Ventures
Jonathan Lim, Principal, Polaris Ventures & In-charge, Dogpatch Boston
Elon Boms, Director, Launch Capital
Eric Paley, Managing Director, Founders Collective
Chris Sheehan, Managing Director, CommonAngels
Josh Tolkoff, Ironwood Equity

If you're hiring social media folks, here is the range of costs

2010-04-09T01:06:00.000-04:00

Landing a Social Media Job

View more presentations from Aliza Sherman.

Go with the flow - dynamic online identity

2010-04-08T16:30:00.008-04:00

It's hard not to be inspired by the TLP crowd. On Wednesday the 7th there was a stellar class that brought together past, present and (perhaps) future TLP fellows along with some prominent angel investors. Hanging out with this group is literally like looking into the future of how our lives might be. When you see the world through the eyes of the TLP fellows, common daily practices start to look arcane and outdated

Last night I had this experience. Let me humbly offer a perspective on how some TLP startups might begin to change the notion of personal interests on Facebook.

Right now there isn't alot that is static on facebook. The wall, despite its name, is not a fixed or rigid structure. It is more like a stream that is updated with the flow of ideas. Pictures are the same, with new images tagged regularly. Personal identity is like this - ever changing. Our identity is really a continual flow of events and thoughts. Like a river we can be identified, but are ever changing.

As the famous quote goes "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." - Heraclitus

Go back now and look at the "likes and interests" section of facebook. Look at the painfully static categories for favorite books, movies, tv shows and quotes. It seems hard to imagine that these are sections where you can just list things. They might not be true, or worse- outdated. In our fluid lives of changing tastes these static categories are most certainly ripe for upgrade. Already under contruction are the gerunds reading, watching, doing...

There are a proliferation of sites where people can share what they are actually reading, what shows they are watching and perhaps even tag video clips with their favorite quotes.

Ajay Kulkarni, Chase Garbarino and Keith Bessette are letting users break out of these static categories, and actively highlight the things that users are doing today. Their platforms are taking it one step further and facilitating real discussions around shared favorite content. What does Facebook do if you and your friend list the same TV show as an interest? Nothing. What does it do if you and your friend both post the same news article? Nothing. Your "interests" should not be defined by just what you list, it's the content you explore, what topics you enjoy discussing, and events you attend.

The question the I wonder next is, will facebook be able to stay relevent? or find itself eclipsed as a static relic while our identities flow by.

Jagan Nemani is TLP-SV CEO for April...

2010-04-08T16:03:00.004-04:00

Jagan Nemani will be leading TLP-SV during the month of April.

Jagan Nemani is a Co-Founder CEO of SpeakEnergy LLC, which he started with a vision to improve energy efficiency of US homes. He is passionate about environmental causes and believes that all of us can do our part to save the earth from a catastrophic disaster. His current venture focuses on getting people together to do their part by saving energy and improving energy efficiency at their homes. Prior to venturing on his own, Jagan worked for Deloitte Consulting as a management consultant in their corporate strategy practice. He helped many clients in Semiconductor, Telecom and Software industries devise their strategic and operational plans. Jagan has helped clients identify attractive global markets and devise market entry strategies. He worked as a research fellow with Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation where he researched strategies regarding co-innovation in social communities. Jagan has an MBA (with honors) in Finance, Strategy and Marketing from Chicago Booth School of Business. He was the actively involved in the Chicago Booth community and was the recipient of “KPMG Award” for excellent academic achievement and outstanding contribution to Chicago Booth community.

Website launched by TLP Fellow!

2010-04-07T20:59:00.005-04:00

TLP Fellow-Victor Karkar has launched a beta version of his website: http://www.scrible.com
Scrible is a web browser-based tool that helps you annotate and archive web pages. It stores all the information in the cloud- so you get to access your web research from anywhere.

Victor is co-founder & CEO of a startup that provides a system for online content management. Victor started his career at Trilogy, a maker of ecommerce software for FORTUNE 500 firms, where he worked with the CFO on internal consulting projects. Via an “externship” from
Trilogy, he then served as an Analyst at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of Trilogy’s venture investors. Upon his return to Trilogy,
Victor played a key role in building and spinning off the subsidiary insuranceOrder.com, a pioneering online insurance agency built on an innovative technology platform. Victor also worked in business development at Roche Diagnostics, where he created the business plan and initial market research plan for a new genetic test for drug response to a prevalent cardiovascular condition. He later worked in business development at Maxygen, a maker of next-generation protein therapeutics, where he conducted due diligence supporting licensing deals and reviewed and executed various types of agreements. Victor has an MS in Chemical Engineering (emphasis in Biotechnology/Bioengineering) from Stanford University and a BA in Biology from Brown University.

SLP: Investor Event and Startup Showcase/Advice Session

2010-04-02T13:21:00.004-04:00

April 7 was a very interesting event with a chance for our panel to provide useful advice to 20 TLP startups and a few selected guests in a mentoring environment, and then follow-up with a broader panel session. A remarkable room full of energy and excitement thanks to a panel of Boston's most prolific early-stage investors, and people extremely well connected to the startup scene here.

Speakers/Panelists/Advisors
Shawn Broderick, Managing Director, Techstars Boston (Moderator)
Todd Hixon, Managing Director, New Atlantic Ventures
Jonathan Lim, Principal, Polaris Ventures & In-charge, Dogpatch Boston
Elon Boms, Director, Launch Capital
Eric Paley, Managing Director, Founders Collective
Chris Sheehan, Managing Director, CommonAngels
Josh Tolkoff, Ironwood Equity

Shawn Broderick, Techstars
A successful entrepreneur, Shawn has spent over a dozen years building Internet companies focused on community, security, and privacy. In 2005 he recognized the need for a company to create a reputation layer for the Internet and founded TrustPlus . Shawn has over 20 years experience in technology firms and cut his teeth hacking on TRS-80s in the early 1980s. In 1996, he founded Genetic Anomalies, the first company to commercialize virtual property on the Internet which went on to sell tens of millions of pieces of virtual property. He has also held positions at THQ Inc., international strategy consultancy Monitor Company, and Feld Technologies. Shawn is an early-stage angel investor in various tech startups, and currently serves as an advisor or director to Speranza Systems, Arcadios, xLr8d Brands, RideOnTime, and TradeVine. He has previously served as advisor or director to Red 5 Studios, CoreStreet, iFactory, DigitalShares, Voxx, Govedo, and Troba. He received his BA in Computer Science from Brandeis University.

Elon S. Boms, Managing Director of LaunchCapital LLC, has led LaunchCapital in making 25 investments across a broad range of industries. Since co-founding the company in 2008, Elon has developed LaunchCapital’s presence across the US, opening 3 offices located in Boston, New Haven, and San Francisco.Elon joins the Venture Capital community with significant experience in structuring biotech, consumer products and technology deals. Prior to establishing LaunchCapital, Elon was a Management Consultant at Fidelity Investments where his work focused on strategy initiatives for investments in emerging markets. Elon also worked in Corporate Finance for Citigroup. He began his career as a brand manager at Georgia Pacific Company’s Dixie Foodservice division. In this role, Elon assumed responsibility for a $125M business, orchestrated $25M in capital investments and engineered a complete profit turnaround for the paper cup business. Elon earned his M.B.A from the Yale School of Management where he graduated with distinction in Venture Capital and a concentration in Finance and Strategy. Elon completed his B.A. in Economics from George Washington University. Elon is an avid golfer, skier, and gourmet chef. He lives in Boston with his wife Stephanie and dog Bogey.

Todd Hixon, New Atlantic Ventures
Todd invests broadly in information technology businesses, with emphasis on companies that use “deep” technology to create commercial value. Currently Todd serves on the Board of Directors of GateRocket, MPowerPlayer, Ember, Velox Semiconductor, and EveryScape. Before co-founding New Atlantic Ventures in 2006, Todd was a managing partner of DFJ New England Fund from 2000 to 2006, and previously a Senior Vice President with The Boston Consulting Group, where he managed two venture portfolios, built the Technology and Communications Practice to $100 million of revenue, and managed the firm’s information technology and knowledge management functions. He earned his BA in Physics from Princeton University (summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) and he holds his MBA from HBS, where he was a Baker Scholar. Todd is married to Pam and has two children and two grand-children. Favorite non-work activities include summers in Maine, boating, skiing, travel, photography, cooking, and playing with digital toys.

Jonathan Lim, Polaris Ventures & Dogpatch Boston
Jon Lim is a Principal based in our Boston office. He joined Polaris in 2007 and focuses on early and expansion stage investment opportunities in technology and healthcare. Prior to business school, Jon was an associate with Summit Partners where he was responsible for sourcing and executing various growth equity investments across industries. Jon worked previously at Medtronic in their cardiac rhythm and disease management business. Jon also has prior experience conducting research and co-authoring several published materials at Harvard Business School. Jon was part of the investment teams responsible for Polaris’ investments in Egnyte, KISSmetrics, Ocular Therapeutix, Phytel, SustainX, and 1366 Technologies. Jon is also an active member of the Dogpatch Labs community. Jon is an observer on the boards of Egnyte, Phytel and Ocular Therapeutix. Jon received his MBA from Harvard Business School and his AB, magna cum laude, in East Asian Studies from Harvard College.

Eric Paley, Founders Collective
Eric Paley is a Partner at Founder Collective, an early stage fund started by a team of entrepreneurs that launched companies and led them through successful exits. These founders are focused on helping the next generation of great entrepreneurs build important and lasting businesses.Previously, Eric was the CEO and a co-founder of Brontes, which was acquired in 2006 by 3M Company. Investors in Brontes included David Frankel (Founder Collective), Bain Capital Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Flybridge. Eric is an angel investor in a number of companies including Magazine Radar, Positive Energy, TrialPay and Link Medicine and also served as a senior advisor to Flybridge.Eric was also co-founder and CEO of Abstract Edge, a web application and marketing company in New York. Eric holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard Business School.

Chris Sheehan, CommonAngels
Chris is a managing director of CommonAngels, joining the group in 2005, and is currently either a board member or observer at Carbonite, Outside the Classroom, Most Effective Media, Xconomy and GateRocket. Within CommonAngels, Chris manages deal flow, due diligence and the investment process. He also guides the group's strategic direction and works closely with portfolio companies. He is also a managing director of the group’s two $10M venture funds.Previously, Chris founded Newburyport Partners, a consulting firm that works with investors and their portfolio companies. Chris also served as a venture partner at Industry Ventures where he was actively involved in the acquisition and management of secondary venture investment portfolios. Prior to starting Newburyport Partners, Chris was a Director of Corporate Development for BEA Systems, a leading enterprise software company with over $1B in sales. At BEA, he was a key member of the corporate team responsible for all venture capital investing and M&A activity. He was also part of the executive team for one of the company's product divisions. Prior to BEA, Chris led the private equity practice for the Cambridge based research firm, Stax Inc. Chris also spent six years with the top ranked investment bank in Australia. He started his career as an equity analyst focusing on the oil and gas sector. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Queensland, Australia.

Josh Tolkoff, Ironwood Equity
Josh has thirty-five years of in-depth management experience in research, development, manufacturing, regulatory affairs and general management of medical device companies. He is a member of the equity fund investment committee. Josh started his career as the Vice President of Research and Development for Medi-Tech, which became Boston Scientific, and helped grow that company from 20 to 500 employees. Josh then went on to start two of his own companies. From 2000 to 2003, he served as a partner of Seedling Enterprises, a medical device incubator that developed early stage device concepts to the point of commercialization. Josh is a graduate of Harvard College and holds an M.S. in Biomechanics from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

TheFind appoints Shashikant Khandelwal as CTO

2010-03-30T23:15:00.002-04:00

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/thefind-appoints-stanford-computer-scientist-and-company-veteran-as-cto,1226919.shtml

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 30 /PRNewswire/ -- TheFind, whose mission is to make the world a better place to shop, today announced that Shashikant Khandelwal has been appointed as the company's chief technology officer. Khandelwal, an internationally acclaimed computer scientist and author of most of the company's issued and pending patents, has been with TheFind since its founding in 2005.

While earning his masters in computer science from Stanford University, Khandelwal constructed the original prototype for TheFind's award winning search engine, which today puts the world's largest shopping center in the palm of your hand. Available as a website, mobile site and iPhone app, TheFind attracts 17 million unique monthly shoppers, sends quality traffic to 150,000 stores, and boasts an index of more than 400 million products from half-a-million online and local merchants.

"Shashi's vision has already helped TheFind build a technology platform that makes the world a better place to shop," said Siva Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of TheFind. "As technology continues to re-shape the retail landscape, Shashi's leadership will enable TheFind to bring ever more creative and elegant solutions to market."

Khandelwal is the recipient of several awards for technological innovation in his native India, where he received his bachelor's degree in computer science from BITS Pilani. Prior to beginning his post graduate work at Stanford, Khandelwal worked at Microsoft, France's INSEAD Business School, as well as the Bhabha Atomic Research Center.

Sixth Patent Grant

Separately TheFind today disclosed that the US Patent and Trade Office has awarded the company a sixth patent for its "method for document fingerprinting," a key enabler of TheFind's process for crawling the web in search for products for sale anywhere, online or off. Previously awarded patents cover the company's methods and processes for information extraction, machine learning, and search and retrieval of product information. Along with additional methods and processes in various stages of approval from both the US Patent and Trade Office and European Patent Office, these patents form the basis of TheFind's defensible intellectual property, which has allowed to company to grow rapidly and credibly stake-a-claim to the moniker "World's Largest Shopping Center".

Read more: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/thefind-appoints-stanford-computer-scientist-and-company-veteran-as-cto,1226919.shtml#ixzz0k0GkCeRV

50 Business Cards

2010-03-29T22:41:00.004-04:00

Business cards remain a great way to exchange contact information and give your startup quick legitimacy. With www.overnightprints.com offer of 50 business cards for $1 (including shipping) you can test out creative messaging schemes without the commitment. Be bold and creative with glossy front and back cards. Can't wait to get see some of your eye catching card designs!

Overnight Prints Reddit Offer

NCI SBIR Investor Forum » Technology Development » Boston University

2010-03-25T15:06:00.001-04:00

NCI SBIR Investor Forum » Technology Development » Boston University

Good videos, information on the NCI and and pitches from startups that have received money from NCI's SBIR program.

PopSignal Mixer, HBS high fashion startups, and women entrepreneurs in Boston

2010-03-24T07:54:00.010-04:00

I was at the PopSignal Alumni Mixer last night. Great party and met several interesting people I have been meaning to meet for some time. Scott Friend (Bain and Founder, Profit Logic), Rich Miner (Google Ventures), Sim Simeonov (FastIGNITE and formerly of Polaris), Chris Sheehan (CommonAngels) (who I first met at Techstars last year - didn't realize they have an Angel group and two co-investment funds alongside it). They do 2-5 investments a year. Also met Scott Kirsner (Globe). Rob Go (Spark Ventures) was there, but I didn't get a chance to get introduced to him.

The party was organized by Jay Meattle (2010 Fellow and Founder of Shareaholic). Also met up with two Fellows, Vishy (VC at Longworth Ventures by day and Founder of Lamhe by night) and Siddh Goyal (Founder, Assured Labor), a Founder of a Techstars company from Syracuse, and TJ, founder of FlipKey, which is now controlled by Expedia/Tripadvisor.

Scott / Bain invested in RentTheRunway, an HBS startup that is the netflix for fashion dresses, and doing very well. Its interesting that a similar concept - the netflix for handbags never worked out as well. There were three reasons that that business didn't work out well. Firstly, people kept handbags for a long time, and there was a lot of wear and tear. Secondly, people rented the originals and returned the fakes, and it was hard to figure out one from the other. But dresses are harder to recreate in 4 days, and there's no wear and tear, so this should be a very interesting business. Thirdly, they were buying these purses retail - and these things cost $3-5000.

PopSignal is a great event, and I look forward to attending more in the future. Its amazing - these parties didn't exist four years ago. How long have we come in Boston....

One observation from this event. Not having been to a tech mixer event like this one before, where people simply meet up to talk about startups (though I go to pitches, competitions and talks all the time), I was surprised at how completely male dominated the event was. I think in a party of a 100, there may have been two women who showed up. I hope it was just happenstance. Lifesciences events have a much better gender balance. I wonder if women not interested in tech startups in Boston (this cannot be true), or do they simply not attend these events (and if so, why)? Since we spend so much time and effort at TLP on finding diversity, I found it a little surprising that the Boston tech community didn't reflect my presumed gender diversity in this town.

Imagine Leadership

2010-03-18T20:26:00.002-04:00

This is a short 6-minute video. Its worth watching, since it focusses on the impact that leaders can have, if they focus on the right issues.

Banyan Environmental - Needs your vote NOW

2010-03-16T23:22:00.006-04:00

Banyan Environmental got selected for the March Madness for the Mind 2010, NCIIA's 14th Annual Conference. In this conference Banyan Environmental is also competing with other teams for an online video competition hosted by Inventors Digest on their website. Vote for us by visiting Inventors Digest. Only 3 days remaining. If you have not done so yet, please hurry.. It is very simple, only 2 clicks.

To learn more about Banyan Environmental and how it is trying to save you from mercury pollution, visit www.banyanenvironmental.com

Grant opportunities for student entrepreneurs at NCIIA

2010-03-16T19:39:00.003-04:00

About a month back, I attended a NCIIA workshop called Venture Well East at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge. It was a good overview of what NCIIA does and how there are many grants and programs which can support student teams coming out of universities with some cool ideas. If you are a student team or a budding entrepreneur you should definitely visit their website and check out the resources they have (http://www.venturewell.org/). For the upcoming workshop tracks “Lens of the market” and "Venture Labs" under the Venture Well program at NCIIA the application deadline is March 19^th (http://www.venturewell.org/application.html). A bit short notice, but the application is not that complicated, you can do it. Do check it out.

About the workshop: I missed a little bit of workshop on that day, but there were a couple things I liked a lot. One was a talk by James Barlow on “Pushing the Mental Reset Button” in which he talked about how because of the conditioning our brains undergo, throughout life, influences our decisions by building in prejudices or automated responses. When facts are missing (rarely do you have 100% facts at your disposal), you make decisions based on opinions and guesses. There, you tend to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes but successful people make quick and cheap mistakes. The outcome of an event depends on the response you have, but you need to have a response otherwise you will not have any control on the outcome. He had a few interesting exercises to bring home the point of our conditioned responses, which made the workshop fun.

The other was the keynote from Matt Mason on “The Virtuous Circle: The Art of Powering Feedback Loops”. Matt is the author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma”. In his talk he shared the interesting story about how, to air new music on radio, people in UK went in the unchartered territories of sea where no laws applied on them or the police could not catch them. Those pirate stations became so popular that they gave rise to a new business model, and a direction to the radio industry. The book shares the idea of changing business models with new innovations driven by the youth culture.

The radio example actually reminded me of our first exercise in TLP, where we were supposed to think of some idea to solve a problem in the dental industry. One of the ideas we considered was unknowingly very similar to the above case. We thought about dental care cruises. A cruise on the waters where no law applies and patients in dire needs can get cheaper solutions from good doctors recruited from countries where fees are not high. For some reasons, we did not go ahead with that idea but to find the similarity of using the unlawful waters to genuinely solve a problem amused me.

Overall, it was a nice day with speakers and a couple of panels sharing insights of the startup world. Check out NCIIA and Venture Well website to find what other programs they may have which could interest and help you.

Full Disclosure: As a student team we won an NCIIA E-Team grant, and I have participated in some of their programs which are a good resource for students especially who have no other entrepreneurship background but an idea to do some good work. I have also applied for the upcoming workshops, so if we get in may be I will see you there!!

TLP Fellows Lead Healthcare Clubs @ Business School

2010-03-10T13:53:00.008-05:00

Vikas Goyal & Ed Chan (Wharton), Alok Sathaye (HBS) and Tamara Nazzal (Cornell) lead the healthcare clubs at each of the business schools they're at ! Three of these were Founding Fellows of TLP. Congrats all.

Vikas Goyal: Vikas is an MBA of the Class of 2010 at Wharton and President of the Healthcare Club. Prior to joining Wharton, he was a founding member of Extera Partners (formerly PureTech Development), where he has led and supported the business development, M&A, and corporate strategy efforts of over 40 private and public life science companies. Previously, he was a consultant with McKinsey & Co, where he worked with top-tier pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer health companies around the world. Over his career, Vikas has supported the diligence, negotiations, and post-transaction management of multiple corporate partnerships, from multi-billion dollar M&A events to initial R&D collaborations. Vikas is a graduate of Harvard University, where he studied neurobiology. He has over seven years? bench research experience in electrophysiology, and has worked with top investigators at the Rockefeller University and Boston University's Center for Memory and Brain.

Edward Chan: Ed is an MBA of the class of 2011 at Wharton, and the incoming President of the Healthcare Club. He joined the Boston office of Siemens Venture Capital (SVC) in July 2006 as Analyst for the Medical Solutions Fund. Prior to joining SVC, Edward worked as a Business Analyst at Capital One in Virginia. Edward also had experience in developing medical devices and working with healthcare startups. While at Johns Hopkins University, Edward led a small team in the development of a patent-pending biomedical device in collaboration with Johns Hopkins Medical School. He also worked with the MMT Fund, a Maryland life sciences incubator, where he supported portfolio companies by conducting market research, writing federal grant applications, and filing patents. Edward graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelors in Biomedical Engineering.

Tamara Nazzal: Tamara is in the MBA Class of 2010 at Cornell and Vice President of the Healthcare & Biotechnology Club. She is also a fund manager for BR Ventures, an all student run, seed stage venture capital fund at Cornell University. Tamara interned at Covidien in product management of surgical devices. Prior to business school, she was a Business Development Associate at CIMIT, Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, supporting the Industry Liaison Program. She acted as a liaison between member companies and investigators to catalyze collaborations to impact patient care. Tamara's previous experience includes working as a research analyst in an alternative investment consulting firm, developing fund of hedge fund portfolios and indices for institutional investors. She holds a Bachelors degree from Umass Amherst. Tamara is passionate about novel technology solutions to challenges in the healthcare industry.

Alok Sathaye: Alok is currently in the MBA Class of 2010 at HBS and Co-President of the Healthcare Club. Prior to HBS, Alok Sathaye spent two years as a healthcare strategy consultant at Heath Advances, helping develop strategies to bring early-stage technologies in medical imaging, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals to market. Previously, he was a senior research scientist at Guidant and Boston Scientific, where he helped develop features for new pacemaker and implantable defibrillator devices through preclinical and clinical studies. He has coauthored numerous articles in major cardiology journals, and filed 20+ patents for device-based medical therapies in the United States and Europe. During his summer internship he worked at Genentech on the Avastin brand team, developing market strategies to launch the drug into new indications. Alok is a current MBA student at Harvard Business School and received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering and a graduate degree in cardiac tissue engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Nexting: A new movement ?

2010-02-28T20:02:00.003-05:00

This was a very interesting video about nexting. Chat Roulette has potential to be interesting to the startup world...get people talking about ideas in real time from around the world. If the idea sucks, they dissapear forever...or be the genesis for virtual collaborations with absolute strangers.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

Let's Do A Deal!

2010-02-25T22:04:00.005-05:00

As each successful startup may ultimately find itself making deals with large corporate companies, it is critical that startup CEOs learn the basics of the deal-making process. To that end, TLP Boston held a deal-making competition last Wednesday where a hypothetical medical device startup explored three types of corporate deals: a licensing deal, a commercial distribution agreement, and an acquisition.

The class was split into 8 teams, 4 represented Fortune 500 companies and 4 represented the startup. My team was a Fortune 500 company and we negotiated a licensing deal with the startup. The key deal terms we considered were length of deal (number of years), upfront payment, annual royalty, and minimum annual payment to startup. All these variables impacted the NPV in various ways. Although the startup was interested in maximizing the NPV, it was equally important to find the ideal balance between short-term and long-term payoff, i.e. should one target a higher upfront payment or a higher royalty. Ultimately, the balance is determined by the startup’s confidence in the commercial potential of their technology. One wild card that came up during the negotations was the traunching of the licensing deal based on key milestones. This represents another potential issue a startup has to carefully consider during their deal-making process.

As for commercial distribution agreements, the key variables were the length of deal, margins lost through revenue sharing, and net margins. In these deals, margin distribution is key in NPV determination.

In the acquisition scenario, the key variables are total acquisition price, upfront payment, earnout rate, and escrow rate. Again, an ideal balance between short-term and long-term payoff has to be determined by the startup, which depends on the startup’s confidence in their technology.

WINNERS
Winners were Jay Meattle and Vishy Venugopal (Entrepreneurs from Aloo Techies) for cutting the best deal.
Winning Cohort was Bootstrappers for best overall team performance.

Congratulations to everyone.

Sidd Goyal is March CEO (Boston)

2010-02-25T09:39:00.014-05:00

Congratulations to Sidd Goyal, who is stepping up as March CEO for TLP Boston.

Sidd is CoFounder & CTO of Assured Labor Inc. a web-based company that leverages the power of SMS and the Internet to connect employers and workers in emerging markets. Sidd and his co-founders successfully raised funding over the last three months during his fellowship at TLP. Sidd is traveling back and forth to Nicaragua these days supporting the launch of Assured Labor's Latin America job marketplace, Empleolisto!

Sidd has extensive background in mobile and wireless technologies having worked with the co-inventor of the SyncML specification on an early implementation of the protocol as a college intern, co-founded a startup in the enterprise mobile space out of MIT, and most recently before Assured Labor served as a lead architect on Palm's synchronization team.

Sidd holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from MIT. He's an avid traveler, sports enthusiast, and volunteers his time to various organizations around the Boston area.

Jeff McAulay is February CEO (Boston)

2010-02-20T11:37:00.002-05:00

Congratulations to Jeff McAulay, who served as TLP Boston CEO for the month of February.

Jeff is currently working to start a new cleantech Incubator in collaboration with a major non-profit research lab, Fraunhofer USA. As part of this project he is screening potential clients on both technical and business merits before connecting startups with early stage investors or government grants. In this role, Jeff sits at the interface between energy technology, business development and public policy.

Jeff graduated from MIT in the Technology & Policy Program where he conducted research in the Sloan Automotive Laboratory. While at MIT Jeff was a lead organizer for several student groups including the MIT Energy Club, and the MIT Electric Vehicle Team. Jeff also sat on MIT's Campus Energy Task force to help form MIT's long-term campus greening strategy. Before coming to MIT, Jeff worked as an engineer at Nuvera Fuel Cells where he lead project work and supported the company in reaching several technical milestones for the integrated fuel processor group.

He has a BS in biomedical engineering from Boston University where he won an award for best project presentation for undergrad research on microbial fuel cells, and received the scarlet key for excellence in student leadership.

Upcoming Boston Area Startup Events

2010-02-08T11:13:00.021-05:00

MITEF Start Smart Series for Clean Tech

February 9: First session kicks off 10 week series. Series costs $535. Register here. Topics & Dates:

2/9/2010 Starting David Kopans, Energy Climate Solutions

2/23/2010 Positioning Jim Walker, Ameresco

More...

IGNITE Clean Energy Business Plan Competition Begins this Month

February 11: ICE Meet and Greet @HBS, 8-9pm. ICE Website

February 24: Business Plan Competition Official Start: Register Here

HBS Venture Capital and Private Equity Conference

February 13: 8am-7pm. More info and Register Here

Tech Talk Tuesdays: How Successful Entrepreneurs Do More With Less

February 23, 7:30am-9:30am. More info and Register Here

Panelists include Joe Caruso and Michael Sheeley TLP '09 of Runkeeper

MITEF Software SIG Panel: Lean Startups

February 24, 6-9pm. More info and Register Here

Panelists David Cancel (advisory board of Shareaholic), Palle Pederson, Aaron White (DoInk)

Web Innovators Group 25

March 1, 6:30-9:30. More info and Register Here

Forum for website and mobile innovation startups featuring company demos

Michael Mullins

TLP Boston 2010

Shareholic: Finalist for Best Overall Add-On. Needs your vote

2010-02-04T21:29:00.004-05:00

For the first time, About.com's Computing Channel is running a coordinated Reader's Choice Award program. During January, thousands of nominations were submitted by readers in a wide variety of categories including Best Overall Add-On. Shareaholic has qualified as a finalist in the Best Overall Add-On category!! Now throughout the month of February, folks will vote for a winner. Winners will be announced March 1. If you could take a minute to vote, I'd really
appreciate it!

Vote Here

The Digital Music Industry isn't music to anyone's ears

2010-02-02T01:51:00.011-05:00

I just finished reading an interesting article about web-based models (Daily Deal). Thought I'd post the most important points here and my personal views:

- The global music industry has gone from $31Bn to $18Bn
- Apple sells 25 percent of all US music, Walmart sells 14 percent
- It costs a penny to play a song (you can start your own co today) so the more successful you are, the more cash you burn (remember Netzero!)
- There are 350 digital music cos (good grief!) And $1 billion has been invested
- Pandora, which raised $50MM is profitable with $40 million in revenues but very few paying subscribers
- Spotify (Europe) also raised $50MM
- There have been 2 exits. MySpace acquired Imeem with 16 million listeners for $1 million; CBS paid $250MM for Last.fm but its reportedly not doing well
- Interesting models: Ecast (digiral jukeboxes for clubs and bars), Jamendo (selling rights-cleared music to businesses) and Rhapsody (first-mover streaming subscriber but only has 700,000 subscribers)
- 95 percent of digital music is still illegal.
- Getting label approval is a laborious process; nothing is standardized
- Venture units of both Sony Music and Universal Music have been dismantled

My predictions for the next 3 years

- First the obvious ones. Most of these cos will dissapear and most VCs won't make a dime
- Old musicians may be found bagging groceries as their retirement rapidly dries up. There will be many more tours, videos with product placements and merchandising so bands can milk the few good years (anyone remember Britney) - and more recent bands will play at Yahoo and Google !
- Labels will standardize distribution, even adopting common platforms (e g an Amazon equivalent for distributing all major labels might emerge and anyone will be able to contract from them and stream the music)
- Local radio advertising prices will drop off a cliff
- Cool hardware will have unpredictable success, but there will be a resurgence of cool radios in the home with retro designs but till the big consumer cos like Bose step in, these will be niche businesses with unpredictable sound quality
- Cable will go outside the box. They will l sell hardware that will pick up the Internet based stations from the set-top box and and give us more control. The radio on cable will finally get significantly better with more controls to users (though TV sounds won't hence the need for a wireless-enabled radio)
- The more lawyers a label hires and the longer it takes to strike deals with these 350 startups, the slower will they be to get online, and the less likely they are to survive
- and finally, Pandora's hardware will do well and create profitable revenues for the company

Ironwood Pharma files for IPO !

2010-02-01T11:50:00.003-05:00

Christina Kaldany (TLP 06) left BU Ventures to join Ironwood Pharmaceuticals as Associate Director of Business Development two years ago. The company, which has raised north of $200MM in venture financing has now filed to go public. It is a very exciting time. Good luck !

Early stage pharmaceutical company Ironwood announces IPO terms

1/20/10

Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, which develops innovative medicines targeting therapeutic needs, announced terms for its IPO on Wednesday. The Cambridge, MA-based company plans to raise $250 million by offering 16.7 million class A shares at a price range of $14-$16. At the mid-point of the proposed range, Ironwood will command a market value of $1.6 billion. Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, which was founded in 1998 and booked $32 million in revenue (collaborative arrangements and services) over the last 12 months, plans to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol IRWD. Though the early stage company currently has no commercial products, its candidates include one Phase 3 drug called linaclotide, which treats irritable bowel syndrome, one Phase 1 pain drug, and various preclinical programs. Ironwood's collaborators include Forest Laboratories, Almirall and Astellas Pharma. J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse are the lead underwriters on the deal, which is expected to price during the week of Feb. 1.

View IPO Profile: IRWD
Related Links: Upcoming IPOs
Source: www.RenaissanceCapital.com

Coupons for the Facebook crowd: 2010s hottest startup

2010-01-29T13:44:00.003-05:00

How to Build and Sell Great Products

2010-01-22T08:08:00.010-05:00

Last Wednesday, our TLP session in Boston focused on "Getting Revenues and Building Great Products". Ajay Kulkarni, Founder of Sensobi (TLP '09) which was chosen for Techstars 2009, moderated the IT panel, which featured Rishi Dean (Co-founder/CTO at Visible Measures, a venture-backed startup in social media), Rama Ramakrishna (MIT Sloan Lecturer in Operations Research, Founder, Profit Sciences, CTO, ProfitLogic - which was sold to Oracle for $250MM), and Mike Sheeley (TLP '09, Co-Founder and COO at RunKeeper, the #1 fitness app on the internet).

Each panelist shared valuable tips from the trenches on what they've learned from their good and bad experiences building products.

Here are some of the key lessons/takeaways from our three panelists:

Build off your passions, interests, and market experience when creating a new product

A startup will consume your life. Make sure you pick a space that interests you deeply so that the ride is enjoyable, no matter what the outcome. If you're not 100% committed and excited about your your idea, it will be hard to carry on when things get tough. Build off your expertise - it is much harder to create a truly great product if you aren't intimately familiar with your target market.

What you value in your product and what your customers value will likely not be the same

Talk to your customers as much as you can to understand what features they care about the most. Focus as much time and energy as possible on the biggest value drivers for them, not all the bells and whistles that you think are going to make the product more interesting. Don't assume that you know what they need - your interpretation of what they need won't always be correct. Watch them use the product in their natural habitat to unlock even more insights.

Know your market economics

Understand what people are willing to pay for - if possible, insert yourself in a pre-existing flow of dollars instead of creating a brand new flow. Show a clear, tangible ROI that people can't ignore or argue with. Figure out as early as possible whether what you're building is destined to be a hobby or a real business.

Think big - small ideas require as much work as big ideas

Just because an idea may be more niche-focused and small in scope, doesn't mean that it won't be a lot of work. Developing any product is going to be a significant amount of work, so why cap your upside by focusing on a small problem or small market? Your time is valuable. Spend it developing game changing products if you want to build a truly successful business.

Flexibilty is better than perfection

Avoid the temptation to wait until a product is "perfect" before you launch. Iterate and improve constantly in short development cycles. Get something out the door and be willing to change direction based on market feedback if necessary. The longer you wait, the greater the chance that competitors will steal your thunder. Provide just enough value to keep your customers engaged, and then add more over time.

For more tips, check out Rishi Dean's presentation embedded here:

Building Great Products: tips for non-product executives - Presentation to TiE Leadership Program

View more documents from Rishi Dean.