Finding Free WiFi

If You Offer Free WiFi, Steal This

We were in the bay area last week, and after a meeting near Berkeley we stopped at a coffee shop to get some work done.  Actually...we planted outside of a Teriyaki joint.  Quickly.  See the image below.  This is what popped up when I logged into their wifi network.  They asked for my email, warned me that it the network wasn't safe to send important data, told me about their restaurant, ran some ads.  Etc.  Etc.  Etc.  Very cool, I learned how Quickly started.  Stuck with me enough to post it, and if I'm ever in that area again you can bet that's the restaurant I'll remember.

Dear every coffee shop in the nation...why don't you do this?

Write That Down

"Nothing kills a great idea like sitting down and thinking about it"
---Brent Lamphier, July 2008.

Had a conversation with a budding entrepreneur the other day, and this was the advice I ended up giving.  He'd been incubating his idea off and on for a number of years.  Eventually, you have to stop thinking about it and just try to make the dang thing work.  Good luck to him and good luck to you.

How to Bootstrap Silicon Valley

Last month, after the UW Business Plan Competition, we were selected to pitch at the DFJ Venture Challenge in the valley.  When I found out we'd been selected by the partners as the 'wild card,'  I was in Ohio for my grandparents 65th wedding anniversary. 

Thus began our adventure in spending as little money as possible in the valley while meeting with as many people as possible.  The adventure:

Day 0 -Find out we're selected.  Rapidly change plane ticket to get back to Seattle.
Day 1- UW pays to fly us down there.  Awesome- Travel Cost- $0.
Fly into Oakland so that our VP of Marketing, a Berkely undergrad, can steal a car from his brother.  His brother picks us up, we drop him off, and head across the bay to Palo Alto.
Sleep in the Sheraton...1 night compliments of UW.  Awesome. 
Day 2- Head to Sand Hill Road for the DFJ Challenge.  Intense day.  16 Competing teams, all winners of the Big California Schools (UW was invited for the first year) business plan competition and two wild cards (including us).  Everyone gave a 5 minute pitch with 5 minutes Q&A in the morning.  6 companies selected for the finals, a 15 minute pitch with 15 Q&A in the afternoon.  We were honored to be in the finals.

At this point most teams headed home, including the other team from UW.  We, however, with our free plane ticket to Silicon Valley, didn't want to waste it.  So began the boostrapping adventure.

Step 1:  Get dropped off at a Mountain View Coffee Shop around 6:00.  In Suits and carrying our luggage.  We get back to work.  Below us a hippie rock band plays (we look quite out of place in suits).

 Sit at coffee shop for 4 hours.  Until they close.  Waiting for Mountain View couch we're sleeping on to get back from downtown San Fran.  Get kicked out of coffee shop for closing.  Sit on outside table of a closed restaurant for 1 hour, waiting.  Buy beer from local corner store.

Mountain View friend happens to be moving, so there is one small couch and a little bit of floor space.  I get the floor.  Awesome.

Next day, invited back to DFJ to demo our product.  Take CalTrain from Mountain View to Palo Alto.  Don't pay for ticket. In our Silicon Valley nievity, we think we'll be ok without a car (returned to brother) to get across Stanford's campus to Sand Hill road in two hours.  Wow.  Bad idea.  Take pictures with phone of campus so we don't get lost (it seems much, much bigger than UW).  This is only one picture.  In the next picture you can see Sand Hill road to the FAR right.

An hour or so after getting off the CalTrain, after hiking through a ditch, we find Sand Hill Road.

Only we weren't far from the bottom of Sand Hill Road.  DFJ is at the end of it.  And it's up hill.  Arrive for delicious free lunch meeting sweaty.  Very sweaty.

The next day, we woke up to hear that a meeting we were trying to schedule could, in fact, happen...at 10:30 am.  Downtown.  We we're still in Mountain View.  Luckily have the brother's car for the day, and book it downtown.
Meet with firm, then walk...and walk...and walk...around the city to get to next meeting

Meet with guy at Google...get awesome Google lunch (you wonder why they get top talent).  Book it to Union Square.  Meet with a VC EIR on 36th floor of Hyatt for a drink (great place for a meeting for future reference)

Then drive back to Mountain View for meeting with former Yahoo exec.  Lots of driving.  THEN drive to Berkeley, where we have 2 couches to sleep on.

Crazy 3 days.  Absolutley Crazy.  Now we're going back this week, if you have a couch to sleep on let me know.

Quotes for Entrepreneurs

Quotes circulated the Seattle Tech Startup (STS) mailing list last Friday.  A few of them:

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit.  Genius hits a target no one else can see."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

"Do twice as much, twice as well, in half the time, with half the resources."

--Seattle's own Kelly Smith

"It's never the wrong time to do the right thing"

--Seattle's own Bill Bryant

"To be an entrepreneur, you need a little self-delusion and to have the ability to inflict mass delusion because most people can't see past tomorrow"

--David Billstron

"Striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible"

--Mikhail Bakunin

"We can't solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them"

--Albert Einstein

"The best part about being a founder is you get to decide which 20 hours of the day you want to work....or....the great thing about being an entrepreneur is that it's a part-time job, and you get to decide which 12 hours a day you want to work."

--Unknown

Pearls of Wisdom from Blue Nile CEO

BlueNile.com Founder Mark Vadon served as the keynote speaker at the UW Biz Plan Competition awards ceremony last week...some pearls...or golden nuggets... of wisdom from his speech (which was one of the best I'd heard in a log time, Keynote speakers should follow his example of short, sweet, inspiring, and funny).

"Keep banging your head against the wall until the wall falls down."

"Don't be afraid of failure."

"I built my business around men having no clue."

"Steal good ideas from other entrepreneurs."

"Entrepreneurship is running out of a closed jewlery store near an airport with the windows boarded over and you have to fix the fax machine."

A Nail Problem

Watching the Daily Show tonight, and the guest author said 'To a man who has a hammer, every problem is a nail problem,"
Quoting (though a bit off) Mark Twain.

Makes more and more sense every time you read it.

Be Confident, Not Arrogant

On Alyssa Royse's entrepreneurship blog at the Seattle PI, she interviewed some local bigwigs asking pitching tips...good timing after my post the other day.

My favorite line:

From Janis Machala, startup guru:
"Be confident, not arrogant."
Most people haven't learned the art of walking that line...granted I probably haven't either...but advice worth thinking about in everything you say about your business.

Some Things I've Learned

A year or so into this whole 'starting a company' thing, some stuff I've learned, in no order what so ever (they may be obvious, but we sure didn't learn them in business school):

• No matter how basic you think something is, you have blinders on, and it will still confuse some of your users/customers.

• Nothing is better in a business than a great, random, unsolicited testimonial from a user.  Well, maybe cash is better.

• When someone pays for something, they have much higher expectations of the product than someone who uses something for free.  Those expectations take a lot of time to manage.  It's worth considering if your product is ready to  be purchased yet...even if you have customers who will pay.

• People use your product in ways you never imagined, and don't do things the way you want them to.  Fighting them or trying to force them to use it the way you want them to is a waste of time and effort.  Letting your users define your product makes much more sense.

• Treating every user, even the ones who want to remove their account, like the most important thing on your schedule is good business.  They should be the most important thing on your schedule.

• Everyone in your company at a startup is first and foremost a salesman followed closely by a customer service representative.  Their third job title is CEO or CFO or VP of whatever.  Sales and customer service are your first job.

• It's easy to forget about HR requirements in a startup...including your own.  Sometimes taking 30 minutes to drink a beer away from the computer is good for the bottom line.

• The easiest way to not overspend is to not have any money. 

• Never hire someone who can't do something better than you can...even better if you only hire people smarter than you.

• For all the stress and heartache and late nights and financial forecasting spreadheets and Ramen noodles, there's nothing like watching an idea come to fruition.  Except for maybe cash.

Kidding.

Go build a startup.  You won't regret it.

Having a Conversation with Powerpoint, or, 5 Do's and Dont's of Pitching

We've given a bunch of presentations, demos, and pitches this past week...a few new rules for myself that I learned listening to myself and others.
My new Do's and Dont's for presentations:
1.  Don't open with an audience question, especially if you're not sure that the VAST majority of people are going to raise their hand.
2. Don't laugh at your own joke...life doesn't give you a TV show laugh track...either the audience thinks its funny, or it isn't funny  (or they're sleeping).
3.  Don't use the word empower.  Please.  I'm begging you.
4.  Don't name drop.  If they aren't a part of the story, then the name you just threw out, unless it's your CEO who just so happened to make a billion dollars selling ice to eskimos, is useless, and confusing.  Either cut them out..or rewrite the story.
5.  Don't follow the script.  Yes your pitch has to hit the 10 key points... but nobody ever said you have to do all 10 in order.  Our pitch became significantly stronger when we rearranged the marketing, team, financials, solution etc etc slides to fit the story we were telling.  Don't jump from your marketing to your team to your financials to your competitive advantage just because the slide prompt had them in that order.

Creative Commons- CogDogBlog

1.  Do watch Steve Jobs.  Read Presentation Zen.  Stop looking at your slides.  Bring a human brain.
2.  Do have a conversation with your powerpoint slides, and with the audience.  Jobs and others do so well because they aren't pitching or preaching or yelling or stumbling...they're just talking.  Your slide deck is like your friend that's hanging out behind you, integrate it into the conversation you're having with your audience.  Introduce them.  Make them friends.  It sounds weird but speaking
with ease between your .ppt file, your audience, and your brain just makes everything work.
3. Do seed the crowd.  I gave a speech a few months back to a room of over a hundred.  My teammates and girlfriend were there...and it was quite a pickup to see her being the first to laugh at my bad jokes.  If you're in a smaller room, find the object that you can focus on when the room's smiles fade...or, if you're able, place someone there to smile the whole time so that you can come back to them for a pickup in the middle no matter what the tone of the room is.
4. Do be present.  If you don't know what I'm talking about in #3, then you aren't looking at the people you're talking to.  Don't go into your own little talking world; understand the room, what's happening, and either feed off the positive energy or figure out how to draw them back if you lost them somewhere in the financials.
5. Do have stuff.  Humans like stuff.  Our physical representation of our customers pain point tend to be far more memorable than any slide.  Props work.

Why the Little Things Matter

The 5th grade basketball team I coach probably shoots 33% from the free-throw line.  I continue to try and explain to them that a 'free throw' means 'free points.'  You're fouled, and while they don't just GIVE you the points, you simply take a shot from a spot that's exactly the same no matter where in the world you are.  Still, for a 5th grader hitting one out of 3 isn't bad.  We don't really practice free-throws much.

I'm not sure the Washington Husky basketball team practice free throws much either.  They've lost 4 games this year by less than three points.

Lost to Stanford (the number 5 team in the country) by 3...shot 44% from the line.
Lost to Pitt (then in the top 20) by 1...shot 44% from the line.
Lost to hated Wazzu (then ranked 7th) by 1...shot 39% from the line.

Tell me free-throws aren't important.

In a previous life I kicked some field goals in both football and rugby.  Tom Brady and the Patriots would just be another team had Adam Vinatieri not hit two last second field goals in Super Bowls.  Instead they're a dynasty (yes they still are).
How bout this year?  Would New York have been in the Super Bowl without Tynes hitting an overtime field goal after missing two chip shots?

Tell me field goals aren't important.

Two of the least practiced things win games in my two favorite sports.  Two little things, the difference between Washington being a ranked team, and the Patriots as just another single Super Bowl winner.

Little things matter.  In life, in business, in sports.

That's my rant.  Go practice your version of free throws.