Startup Lessons Learned

Drafting your first investment round.

andreasklinger — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:36:00 +0100

The topic of investing is omnipresent in our startup world. Sooner or later most startup founders look for external funding. And it’s great that there is already a lot of great advice on this topic out there.

The advice I want to focus on is a bit more fundamental.

It’s about getting to your very first investment round.

Disclaimer: Like any advice, this advice here is just personal opinion based on subjective experiences put into some half-baked context. I would like to encourage you to peer-review this post and send me your change suggestions using this link on Draft or simply comment in this thread in Hacker News.

“Looking for angel investors”

The most common mistake I notice is that startups often begin looking for “angel investors”. They go to networking events, local media, ask other entrepreneurs in their area . They ask around and try to see who in their direct or indirect network fits the criteria of an “angel investor” - people who have a track record or reputation of investing into startups.

Out of this shortlist they pick their favorites based on public success stories and reputation, and quickly start approaching/pitching them. If this doesn’t work they lower their expectations and look for other wealthy people they know or at least know indirectly.

I acknowledge the tricky situation every fundraising entrepreneur is in, but the truth is that this approach values proximity and availability over quality and purpose. You need to be aware of that when walking down that path.

All of a sudden mobile-health startups have CEO’s of marketing agencies as investors who - even if they are highly skilled business people - cannot create provide the most meaningful input possible apart of supplying cash in exchange for (very valuable!) control.

The method above also enforces a behaviour where the local “super angel” of your city gets approached by nearly everyone. Again, for the wrong reason.

A lot of people have money. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best possible investors for your startup.

That being said it is advisable for the entrepreneur to go the extra mile and bang those doors, he knows he needs to get in, even harder.

I got the following advice from an investor in our last startup, and I have been sharing it ever since:

Draft your round

When you start raising your round, before you reach out to investors - sit down, and do the following to find the profiles of the best possible people to join you as angel investors:

First of all, split your company into its main aspects.

I usually take a pen and paper and draw a rectangle made out of 4 boxes. In each of the boxes write one of the core fundaments of the business.

Let’s imagine you run a P2P yacht rental Airbnb-like startup. Rich people rent their yachts to other rich people

I am making this up on the fly. Sorry if it is either complete bollocks or, by accident, your startup ;)

Or let’s imagine you are a “private cloud” hardware business and sell ready-to-go servers that provide Dropbox for local networks.

Your 4 core boxes would be:

Or imagine you run a mobile health business that measures your blood-pressure using the iPhone vibration sensor while you sit. (again… making this up the fly. But wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Singularity University is already working on this.)

Fill the boxes:

At least one of the boxes should reflect a old-economy (or older internet generation) version of your business.

E.g. Car rental if you do uber. Ebay if you do mobile ebay.

One of the boxes should be related to your engine of growth. Think Community, Sales, SEM, etc - What is the core aspect of your growth.

I usually prefer to have one of the boxes to be a “startup experience”. The person filling this slot will be someone who has done a few successful investments and can help the other investors with guidance and also back you up if the other angels, who are not so experienced with startups, are turned off by your strategies. Also this person will be very useful for your follow-up rounds, assuming you get to that stage.

Digging deeper

Let’s define each of the fields in a bit more detail.

What characteristics do the perfect people have in those boxes? What kind of business person are they? What’s their background, what kind of tasks did they achieve. Did they build the company? …or the mobile product? Did they do the Europe expansion or the R&D of the core product?

Sometimes you need innovators sometimes executors. Sometimes you want the old-school business guy, sometimes the crazy new product guy. But be specific about what characteristics the role needs.

Who would be the best people for your boxes? We are looking for the right people - globally.

Think TED talks, think universities, think nobel prize winners, think household brands, think old-school businesses that kinda did that one aspect but offline, look for established startups that are similar in that very aspect.

Hint: Look for companies that reflect the boxes you just named above without being potential competitors. People run into conflict of interest if your startup’s product is too close to their own affiliations.

Advisory board

If you think that this is very close to a board of advisors than you are right. Your perfect first round of angels are people you would actually want to have as advisors.

Be careful with Strategic Partners

It is very tempting to get a very strong potential long-term growth partner as an angel. But usually this turns out to be a too strong commitment in a too early stage. Most properly you will pivot and no longer need that channel. Look for people and skills, not single ressources.

The goal of the angel is not to provide their distribution network, but to give you the insight and help needed to create your own.

Shortlist

Now start shortlisting the top10 people in each of those boxes. Look for people you would be honored to work with. Even if - in the end - you cannot reach those people, they provide a great mental picture, a benchmark of what you look for.

Reaching out

There is a the common saying:

If you ask for money you get advice. If you ask for advice you get money.

Therefore your first step is to meet them for skype or coffee. They are expert and feedback is all you can ask for.

After some time a mentor or advisor relationship might establish.

But even if it stays within this relationship of “just advice” - that’s great.

Think that way: Even if they in the end don’t invest money, their feedback and introductions will be worth a lot.

Look for people who help from Day 1

In my experience: If someone is overly protective about his skill/network or support he might not have enough of it to offer.

The right people provide value from Day 1. The right people help and network you from Day 1. The right people know they have enough value to provide and are very open with their support.

The round

In a perfect world you have a few weeks or month you work with those people before you open a round with a “lower” valuation, where they can participate.

The perfect round is with advisors willing and capable to help your business and have a downside if they don’t (their investment).

Unfortunately we do not live always in a perfect world. But try to keep this as a guidance. Your goal is to close a advisory round, which benefits everyone.

Hint: Traction and scarcity closes rounds.

As with everything in startups, funding rounds are also defined by their traction. Try to have several of the alpha investors already committed before you open up the round to everyone else.

Hint: Valuations

Every experienced founder will tell you the same. In case of doubt pick the right people over the right valuation.

people > valuation.

Accelerators

In general I would recommend every first time founder to participate in an accelerator. They help avoid the most common mistakes and introduce you to an already built network of the great people.

Remember: Your goal as first-time founder is not to optimise potential. It is to optimise probability of success.

As with everything in the startup world, try to go with the best - ignore the rest. I dare to say that, in this power-law driven game: non-focused B,C,D or F-level accelerators can hardly provide any of the value they promise.

What about VCs?

Personally i would not recommend working with Venture Capital before you are getting closer to product/market fit. But opinions differ here.

There are two kinds of money

Money for proof (to find product market fit)
Money for scaling (to repeat customer acq.)

Venture Capital by tradition is the second kind of money. I would actually even go further…

I tend to think of VC capital as rocket fuel.

If you are ready the help you reaching the skies. If you are not it might as well blow up your company.

When you are not ready, they cannot play their strongest cards and their misaligned power and expectations can become straight forward destructive for your startup.

If you want to take VCs into your round, make sure that they also fit one of your boxes mentioned above. Look especially at the background of the partner working with you - VCs are people too. Additionally take a look at their other portfolio companies and make sure that there are synergies in experiences and competences needed.

Be careful with new funds. They are startups themselves, but don’t know it.

Hint: Be careful with miss-understanding VC interest.

VCs want to invest as early (low valuation) as possible. Which from their point of view means as late (last possible moment, lowest possible risk).

A VCs needs to see you performing over time to make a real commitment.

The first time I meet you, you are a single data point. I invest in lines. — Mark Suster

Summary

Never put proximity and availability over quality or purpose. Find the optimal people for your startup. Or approximate them as closely as possible. If you get people in just for the money no-one will profit in the end.

I hope this article is useful to you. If you have any questions please contact me via twitter. Also as mentioned this is article meant to be a peer-reviewed source for early stage founders. Therefore I would highly appreciate your change-suggestions via Draft or comment in this Hacker News thread.

Until then, all the best. @andreasklinger

PS: Thanks to @tamaslocher, @lfittl and countless others for adding their feedback!

Why the future needs a brandname.

andreasklinger — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:07:00 +0000

There is a disenchantment in our generation. We are still sitting on our lonely planet without space travel nor flying cars or at least hover boards. We are locked to the ground of technological advancement.

Although the Internet is a generation defining technological advancement, it feels like it’s stalled, to some even boring. Trapped in constant mental incest some say it became a bit repetitive, driven by an ecosystem flawed by it’s own survivor bias.

But the Internet aside I feel that the problem is even bigger, if you zoom out from the last years to the last decades. There is something fundamentally wrong with our society’s attitude towards science and innovation.

Reasons for Disenchantment: The illusion of progress

Our present day doesn’t feel futuristic and our future does not feel on its verge to come.

Looking past at the cultural artifacts left by earlier generations it feels like that the 50s, 60s and even the 70s had a different approach to their future. They believed in technologic advancements and even more they believed that they could actively invent it themselves.

“We have discarded a century of can-do ambition built on rapid advances in technology and replaced it with a cautiousness far too satisfied with incremental improvements.” ~Garry Kasparov in ft.com

Highly recommend to watch: ARTE “Into the night” w/ Garry Kasparow & Peter Thiel

According to Garry Kasparow we slowed down. We lost ourselves in incremental improvements and wars of efficiencies, instead looking for disruptive developments and ambitious new projects.

I personally do not agree with that view to the extreme Thiel and Kasparow put it. But i do believe that judging technologic advancement by the resulted IPO-size and not by social-impact leads to short-term thinking and repetitive patterns based on survivor bias.

But the problem might be bigger than that…

Reasons for Disenchantment: The role of science

I believe our excitement for science is at an all-time low.

Watch popular media of the last decades and you will see the public sentiment/portrait towards people pushing technological development. If development is celebrated it is in form of “quirky science stuff” or “high techie-techie”. It is ok for talk-show-moderators to shout into the camera that they have no idea about math or science.

The public media presents characters – may they be fictionally or images of real people – which are either dorky scientists waiting for the ex-quarterback to solve everything with a witty common-knowledge-solution or the inventors are approximated to rock-stars or artists, the next best thing of a visionary persona our society wants to understand.

Our society has no big craving to invent radical innovation. We need to unravel a new interest in science and innovation – a new love for visionary/crazy projects tackling 20-year projects.

To make the future happen we need inspire ourselves as well as the next generations of creators. We need to communicate with the public and change this fundamentally wrong sentiment.

Science needs to become cool.

We need a utopic view of the future - once again.

Terra forming? Colonies on Mars? Flying cars? Prolonging life? Bio-mechanical robots? Mining Asteroids? We had all of this visions – as early as in the 60s! But our approach to the future changed.

Today our future is left to the weaves of time, and we became passive beholders no longer capable of believing we could change more than just a small incremental part of it. We believe today in in-deterministic models of a future too complex and too chaotic to interfere. Judged and understood only when you look back afterwards.

Peter Thiel explains this very well in his first class of his Startup Class.

In the 60s strong leaders were an example we were willing to follow.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade […], not because it is easy, but because it is hard […]

~President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962, at Rice University, Houston, Texas

Would this be enough to set the public in the right sentiment? What about Obama stepping on stage and proclaiming a new age of pioneering. Let’s be honest. It would be ridicolous. We wouldn’t care. People do no longer believe in strong leaders.

To get back into deterministic thinking about the future we need to play the game of media.

Creating a hype, establishing band-names, creating characters.

I believe it’s today important to establish a brand-name around a movement. It’s important to create strong characters. It’s important to create a dull hype that mass media can pick up.

We need to create a marketing buzzwords, which – correctly used – can be a positive thing. They create easily packaged concept and framework, curate an easy-to-consume approach to a complex topic. They create external authority useable in superficial discussions.

We need to create hype around brands people want to attach, give space to share ownership, identify with, to communicate and to believe in.

We need movements as curators.
We need brands around movements to attach to.
We need characters celebrated as stars and role models.
We need story telling and celebration of the most exciting innovations
We need to play the media right

The media played irght can be used as an accelerator in an re-enforcing loop.

Curators (brands/movements) promote creators (inventors) to communicater (journalists/socialmedia) who transport to a large group of consumers (the public). Out of which ultimately more support and more creators will come.

A brand-name for our future

To simplify communication we need brand-names around movements. I believe to give a brand today credibility we need more than strong leaders, good claims and a bold vision. Especially when it comes to science related topics we need models behind it.

The good thing… We have all those brand-names and models since years.

Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil’s arguments in his model of Accelerating Change that technological development is - like biological - an exponential pattern of evolution.

Simply put that you create more giants by “standing on the shoulders of giants” and thus exponentially create more giants shoulders to stand on.

Example: Moore’s law extended to other technologies.

Of course to any good model there are countless examples when it does not work and there are dozens of points of criticism.

But to create hypes we do not need flawless models. We need good enough solutions people can affiliate to, people can believe in.

Something simple enough to communicate, something complex enough to believe in it. Combine a model like this with a strong brand-name and you got a winner.

A Brand-name: The Singularity

“Singularity, the wet dream of IT geeks” ~anon Internet Commenter

Singularity as a brand is about to break to mass-market in 2013. I believe this is a good thing. And we should use this.

For those who don’t know it yet: the concept of technological singularity (as an event in technical evolution) is based on a paper by Math Professor and Sci-Fi author Vernor Vinge from ‘93. The concept defines the idea of technological development until we are able to invent AI technology that will be capable to take over the job of innovation from there on. Ultimately this concept leads to a potential destruction of all of humanity.

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” ~Vernor Vinge

It a lovely concept to think about it - isn’t it? An AI clever enough to outpace human intelligence and compete with us. Still stupid enough to fall into the same anti-logical patterns of false reason, short-term efficiency thinking and eagerness for destruction.

Ray Kurzweil calculates the time of the Singularity based on his model of exponential technological advancement around 2045.

Singularity as brand-name for the future.

But more there is more to this term apart of absolute destruction of humanity. This aspect is just a by-product, a good opener to approach the topic. Singularity became a buzzword for a new movement popularising science. And it’s about to break-through to mass-market

When people use it in this context they don’t speak of an event of total destruction, they speak about generation defining future technology. Technology that has the potential to affect people in the count of billions.

They speak about a new age of pioneering.

Used as a brand-name, movements formed around it, organizations start, universities launch.

And yes, of course, some will commercially exploit this brand better than others. But why not. Commercial interest is the fastest driver for optimizing efficiency and speeding up developments.

Yet another Hype…

The most fascinating aspect about the Singularity movement is that it’s critics come as well from technological fields. And I truly understand it.

When I put my craftsman-hat on, I see a disproportional hype creeping towards mass-media in the last few years. A hype used by half-baked professional speakers to affiliate themselves to world-thinkers and thus double their keynote-salary.

Yet another hype, trashed in public media, portrayed by half-witted bloggers like myself.

But when I put my marketeer-hat on I see more. I see a brand-name to use. I see a way to communicate big ideas to the public. A way to inspire a new generation.

I hate hypes and cargo-cults around topics like everyone else. But if we need this to inject a new sentiment into the public - let’s do it. If we need over-hype and over-cheering - let’s go for it. And if a brand-name is needed to market the future - i am in.

Rather than to fight this brand-name I encourage using it and creating more brand-names.

Commercial Break: Pioneers Festival

A short commercial break: Watch the space around Pioneers Festival - They blew me away with their event in 2012 and now again with their concept for 2013. They are the only large scale event format I know that approaches technological pioneering as a whole and doesn’t overly focus only on the web technology of today.

We need to inspire the future.

While I am sure that the brand Singularity will hit mass-market this year 2013. I believe we will need a lot more brand-names like this.

I want that a founder can proclaim that his company is on Mars in 10 years.

Where people can speak about radical life span extension. People my grandfather would have – in best case – sent off his lawn.

A future where people can dream about mining asteroids.

Our generation got a huge challenge. We living in a new age of pioneering. And to facilitate this we need to set a new tone towards technological development, a new approach in thinking in our society, a new proud awareness of science.

If playing the game of media is what we need. Let it be so. If we need characters, brand-names and storytelling - I am in. If we need to attach to hypes around over-used buzzwords. Why not.

I honestly believe and I am willing to scream this to the world: We are on the verge of a new age of pioneering. We live in the most exciting generation that has ever been.

We need excitement and communication as much as we need technical advancement and science itself.

Let’s inspire and communicate the Future – now.

Let me know your thoughts on the far future. Your attitude towards the hype around the brand Singularity. As usual you can reach me via twitter or join the discussion on HackerNews

Until then,

The sky is only the limit if you are too afraid to build rocket ships

~ @andreasklinger

Startup Mentoring Sessions: How to be a decent, maybe even good startup mentor.

andreasklinger — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:40:00 +0000

How to be the perfect startup mentor? I don’t know. But following the best practices mentioned in this article I got personally at least to the “not-so-shitty” level. I am happy to share my notes and hope there are some take-aways within for you as well.

This blogpost is about mentoring session formats as you see in most incubators, startup weekends or acceleration events. Startups own a table, mentors circle in groups from startup to startup. This post is part of a two-blog series about this topic. This time I am focusing on the mentor’s side of the table. But good Mentoring is about both sides of the table. And while both sides are equally as likely to fck it up – wrong mentor’s advice can easily result in long-term damage for the startups.*

Checklist for First-Time Mentors…

1. Attitude

You are an industry veteran. Damn… all the things you have seen, the stories you can tell. You did startups before it was cool. You have been up and down the startup roller-coaster several times, you are experienced. You have been picked by all the best - mentored at Seedcamp and Ycombinator… The kids nowadays have it so easy and still they are so arrogant… Don’t recognise your experience… You have been to the field…… You are like the rambo of startups, battle-scared to the bone, loaded with a machine gun of advice, ready for destruction…… Cut that crap.

The true A-players in the world are humble and open.You don’t have to proof yourself to no-one and you know that there is always someone better out there. Be a true A-player, don’t play one.

Even if startups don’t respect your experience or disregard your advice, stay positive. Ignore their ignorance and take is as a sign of their potential – good founders are often stubborn idiots in their early days. Keep the good spirit and stay kind and helpful, all the time.

2. Pick your weapon of choice.

You are experienced in several things, that’s good, but don’t try to be jack of all trades. Nobody needs your 0,2cents about everything, they need the big-buck stuff. Focus on your strengths and be the experts for these topics.

If you are not an expert for a given topic and you have nothing to add that helps 10x - just keep silent or refer to people that might be able to help and let them move on to the next question. If they insist to get your advice make sure they are aware that this is just an opinion not based on own experience. You are not there to answer all questions, you are there to answer a few questions really well.

Pro-tip: Have links ready to the ressources you anyway mention all the time. Be ready to give these links (or search term) right at the venue.

3. Listen & Understand it from their point of view.

The number one thing startups complain about their mentors is that many are incapable to listen (thus truly comprehend). Sometimes a mentor believes to have a better idea about what they startup should do, no matter what they want to do. They complain that many mentors just try to force a conversation to their topic or opinion. Very often mentors rush into answers after hearing half the problem, because they want to get an idea or story that just came to mind of their chest. Don’t be that kind of mentor.

Never rush into answering
Listen patiently
Write your thoughts down
Give them one focused answer
Walk them through and catch them where they are
Show empathy and understand their point of view.

Empathy requires something extremely difficult: accepting the fact that we are not and never will be in the other person’s shoes. There’s no rational, universal course because individuals have different goals, different worldviews and different experiences. – Seth Godin

4. Do ask, don’t tell.

Don’t push your knowledge on the founders, instead focus on asking the “right” (slow) questions and help them to get their thoughts forward.

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn” – Benjamin Franklin

I highly agree with Fred Destin, who advocates using the socratic way for startup mentoring.

Additionally there is one book i would like to highly recommend everyone to read. And when I say everyone I mean everyone who interacts with other human people. For me personally (as a half-social geek) it is one of the most important books I ever read.

How to Win Friends And Influence People – Dale Carnegie

5. It’s not You VS Them, It’s You AND Them

There is a tendency of mentors trying to “ask the really hard questions” or “roasting” or “judging” them. That’s not what it is about.

“So… what is your revenue model and how are you going to scale it?” - other mentor

“Really…? Really? Of all the problems they have right now, this is your question?” - Stiar Tali

Focus on topics that are actually providing value to the startups right now.

Be aware of their current stage of company/concept maturity and adjust accordingly.
Focus on stuff that’s problematic and actionable for them right now.
Be as honest as you can about problems you see, no need to fluff it.
Help them see upcoming challenges and risks.
Help them to see common mistakes in their approach/structure/patterns.
Look for analogs or antilogs of other companies (eg ask about failed companies or competitors in their space) and see what they can learn from them.
Never get them defensive that’s when they stop learning.
Very important: Don’t share opinions, share experiences.

I highly recommend @destraynor’s post as a starting point on how to find great questions.

6. Learn to let go.

Some founders are just very early in their personal progress. They are “visionary” first-time founders, all over the place, ignorant and super cocky about it.

No matter how spot on your advice is - if the team doesn’t pick it up, there is no way you can make them.
No matter how big their potential startup idea is - if the team is not “ready” they won’t get nowhere.
Sometimes your advice is just plain wrong, but don’t know it yet.

Just accept it and move on. It’s not your obligation to force-feed anyone to success.

7. Always leave on a positive note.

Mentoring sessions tend to focus on the negatives, the things that don’t work, the stuff take will kill the business. And believe me speaking for hours about the problems of your company makes you regret ever starting that damn thing.

Always try to mention the things you like throughout the session, but especially leave on a positive note. Finish the session by saying what you really like about their business/startup. It will leave the whole mentoring session in a positive light.

Exchange contact details and offer direct actionable help. Always offer to send intros if you think you know people that can help them.

Startup Mentoring Sessions: How to get the most out of it.

andreasklinger — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:56:00 +0000

Everyone is doing pitch training. Almost no-one does training for the mentoring session, but this is where most startups get the majority of their value. — Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures.

In the last 4 years I have been to countless mentoring sessions. I have been on both sides of the table and noticed a lot of mistakes done on both sides, often by myself. I wanted to share a few of my lessons i have made during those sessions. I hope it helps you getting more out of your mentoring sessions.

This blogpost is about mentoring session formats as you see in most incubators, startup weekends or acceleration events. Startups own a table, mentors circle in groups from startup to startup. This post is part of a two-blog series about this topic. This time I am focusing on the startup’s side of the table. Good Mentoring is about both sides of the table.

Dear Startups…

1. Work on your Attitude

I know you were just picked to join Seedcamp or Ycombinator or Techstars. You are right now in this extreme hype phase, this phase where things start to move, you want to meet all of Silicon Valley, right now. In the morning you were pitching in front of investors, now they put you down with worldly mentors… to talk… you don’t need words… you got words, loads of them… You want cash, need cash… want to get big… rush off… sky-rocket hockeystick! And you are an experienced entrepreneur anyway, you already build an successful agency, you are not like this other kids here, you have experience, more experience than whoever this guy is who is mentoring right now, you should have never applied to that b-level event……… And also you had really a long week preparing the talk next to all the normal crazy work, you traveled all night, you pitched all morning, you have office stress right now, you are tired……… Seriously cut that crap.

I have seen startups where some of the founders started fiddling on their phone, walked away to get themselves coffee, checked their emails, skype-chatted, looked bored into the corner, started side-talks. Honestly… don’t!… Pay attention or you just waste a big opportunity and look like an ignorant ass. Be present and use that opportunity to every extend possible.

2. Prepare! Know what you need

Prepare questions about each aspect of your company. Don’t try to come up with clever long-term questions about your international growth or optimizing your Series C. Focus on short-term problems you actually really face (or face in near future). Whenever you can focus on concerns that fundamentally question your startup.

Know whom – worldwide – you would love to have intros to. Who is the guru in your domain? Who would be the perfect advisors that could become angels ? Someone at that event might know that person.

Don’t come to just “get feedback”. Do your homework before or otherwise you are just going to waste everyone’s time.

Pro-Tip: Prepare a one-pager explaining your startup, your founders, what challenges you currently face and what kind of ressources or introductions you are looking for.

3. It’s YOUR table - take the lead

Own the table. Lead the conversation. It’s not the job of the mentors to judge you, roast you or take you apart. It’s their job to give you the knowhow you request. If you don’t take the initiative, a mentor will take it.

Avoid repeating the same topics Especially when you are in an early stage with your startup many problems you have are big and friggin obvious. Every mentor will tend to ask about the same problems, press into the same open wound. Stop them. Admit the problem, thank for the feedback but ensure you discussed it with several mentors before and ask a specific different question. Get them to move on. Retake the lead.

If a mentor is disturbing your table - ask him politely to leave. It’s your time, your table, your rules.

4. How to start a session

Typical mentoring sessions are 15-30 minutes. That’s almost nothing - it will be quicker over than expected. Use the time and get as quickly as possible to the “value bits”.

Process:

Ask everybody on the table to introduce themselves and name their field of speciality. If someone joins late they should do that as soon as they sat down.

Explain the product in a nutshell. Don’t expect people to remember, there will be someone on the table happy about getting up to speed again. Also they are tired and for sure anyway confuse you with the social loyalty startup that has a similar name, and trust me there is one.

Agree together with the mentors what topic you want to focus on and what you want to get out of the session. Mentoring teams are usually mixed. Don’t worry if you want to focus just on (e.g.) PR because there is one great PR mentor on the table. It’s about you and your needs. The other mentors do understand it and are happy to learn from the PR person.

Pro-Tip: Have an ipad ready to show your product. Keep screenshots of the product on the iPad well… Most probably the WIFI won’t work at the venue. Additionally have the same screenshots on your iPhone for the discussions in the breaks.

Jakub Krzych of Adtaily wrote a very good and detailed summary about the optimal session process on the seedcamp blog, be sure to read it.

5. Shut up

You are not there to hear yourself talk. Keep your answers to the point, in most cases mentors don’t care about the details of your answer - if they do they will ask deeper anyway. They only want to know if you thought about it. Yes you do? Ok, let’s move on.

Important for strong co-founders: Don’t reiterate your co-founder’s answer just to add the missing 10% of the explaination. Don’t top-up your own knowhow to everything said. You are not there to learn from yourself – that’s just mental incest.

Shut up as often as you can. Every minute spent talking by you guys is a lost minute.

6. Learn to accept negative feedback

Startup-founders need to be stubborn and naive, otherwise they couldn’t start a startup in first place. But learn to take feedback and be ready to question your core-assumptions.

If you know a mentor is wrong - learn to let go. You are not there to convince mentors, you are there to learn from them. There might be millions of reasons why you and a mentor don’t agree with each other – but in any case it will eat up a lot of valuable time… Accept the other point of view, try to understand it, take notes, try to learn from it, move on.

It’s feedback, take it or leave it.

In many cases experienced people are right about their concerns – in some they are wrong.

In many cases you have a problem with your startup – in some cases the actual problem is how you currently communicate it.

7. Take notes

Too often I see founders going through 4-5 x 30 min mentoring sessions, with the assumption that they’ll just magically remember it. Some of the most valuable advice will be dropped in mere half-sentences, some of the best reasons for follow-ups will occur somewhere in the middle of a really really long day. Please have a piece of paper, and a pen at hand (no, your ipad isn’t sufficiently quick to record, and it’s disturbing).

Have the same person, writing stuff down, the same way for each session. Sort “applicable” vs “non-applicable” the next day.

(Thanks to @CsabaSol for pointing out this one)

8. Opinions – Loads of them

Very often people want to give you opinions… Always filter opinions from personal experiences and personal experiences from market facts.

“Well, opinions are like assholes, honey. Everybody’s got one and everybody thinks everybody else’s stinks.” – Henry Larson / Home for Holidays

Instead talking about opinions get them to talk about a real experiences they had. If they try to avoid it or talk about “normal people”, “real world” or “the average customer” file it as opinion and add it to the suggestion bin (as pictured below).

9. Applying advice

No mentor knows as much about your business as you do, but they still advice you. That’s neither good or bad, that’s just normal. Advice is not meant to be followed. Advice is meant to be understood and incorporated.

Never follow advice. Apply advice. – @nivi of angel.co

Sometimes given advice is just not suitable for the phase of your startup or it might just assume a bit too much of “a perfect world”.

Rob Fitzpatrick recommends in that very moment to simply ask “Would you recommend us to drop everything else right now and follow that advice?” - The usual answer goes along the lines of “… well not right now… but in a few months …after your series B round” Be careful how actionable the advice is meant to be.

10. Contradicting Feedback

During the time of your startup you will hear a lot of contradicting advice. Very clever, rich and experienced people will advice you to do completely opposite things.

The reason is simple: The judgement of EVERYBODY is limited to their subjective context.

The world-view, the values, the core beliefs of someone running an VC might be completely different from yours. Neither is wrong or right - it’s just differently biased. Try to decrypt the feedback given the background of the person.

Example: VCs always tend to focus on growth concerns like scaling customer acquisition for your “too-little-market” startup or want to dive into numbers about your made-up revenue model and push your product to be b2b as this would be better in the current market. Product people tend to freak out about the fact that your product is too visionary and not a real customer’s job.

Both will give you completely contradicting advice what to do next. And both are right from their point of view. Value their feedback, but understand in the context of their background.

11. Keep them working for you.

Exchange business cards after (or beginning of a session). Write down the reasons for followup. And do the follow up the very same (latest next day). Mention something they said or how they helped you. Ask very precisely for introductions or any other favour you might need at that moment.

Pro-Tip: I have seen several founders doing this very successfully: Create a newsletter of mentors and supporters willing to help you and keep them updated similar you would keep your advisory board updated. Ask pro-actively for support. I personally prefer newsletters (bcc-emails) over facebook groups as facebook groups live and die with critical mass and no-one wants to step into public posing with all the great contacts he has.

Update: Bonus - Learn from the best!

One of the best go-to people in London for advice and buttkicking - @geoffwatts, CEO of EDITD - allowed me to publish his presentation he does to new seedcamp recruits. It is a 15 minutes preparation for one of the toughest weeks in their startup career. He covers several parts here mentioned - but also several good extra details.

Download it here

More to come

As mentioned above this a two-post series. If you are interested to know how to be the perfect mentor i would recommend you to read the follow up post, coming very soon.

Please let me know if I forgot to mention any aspects via twitter. I would love to see this document becoming a living summary of best-practices. If you run an accelerator/incubator or events, let me know what I am missing that would help your startups. If you can send it to your teams, get them to feedback their experiences. I appreciate their input highly!

Until then, yours truly @andreasklinger

The Founder's Lie About Comfort Zones

andreasklinger — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:24:00 +0000

There is a lot of talk going on about the endurance and struggle that startup founders go through. How long the hours are, we all pull through and how we are constantly out of our comfort zone.

We run startups – we are constantly at the border of our comfort zone. Aren’t we?

No we are not. We are just better in lying - especially to ourselves

I see founders…

I see founders, super busy, super buzzed, some even close to burnout, working to their death…

The visionary founder rushing to one international conference to the next
The visual designer reworking the startpage ten minutes before launch
The coder that has no time to do customer interviews because the s3 integration took longer than expected.
The biz guy who constantly meeting potential strategic partners for long term bizdev or fundraising or “sparring”.
The guy who worked in a marketing agency who hustles like crazy to get this media cooperation/competition to scale the business, knowing exactly what kind of “persona” he targets, but has never met more than 5 of them.
The dev guy taking extra meetings with this aws scaling expert
The geeks who start a fashion startup and work their asses off on their tech space problems than on their fashion space problems.

All of them super busy… …doing what they like most.

All of them worried about stuff they are anyway best in.

I am super busy and I do uncomfortable things…

Speaking on a stage in front of a lot of people, pitching that big name VCs, getting ripped apart by feedback, approaching grumpy journalists at conferences, all-nighters coding to get the mvp ready, fly-overs to different continents last minute organized. That’s keeping us super busy but actually we love that shit.

Worrying abut the tech stack, the investment strategy and long term problems - Awesome. Talking about stuff we love disguised as getting feedback - Genius!

We even believe that we are doing the important stuff, the hard stuff, the stuff outside of our comfort zone.

Everything looks like a hammer

I chose to do [stuff], because I like doing [stuff]. And in general if you are in the position to do what you love on a daily basis you are fortunate and should appreciate that.

The problem is that very often we change our strategy based on what we like to do. Sometimes we are aware of it, sometimes not.

We are the best liars

Founders are naturally aligned to be super passionate and highly convincing. A first-time founder will either convince you that his product is awesome or he will talk you to death until you declare defeat and accept its awesomeness.

Founders are the best in shaping reality, focusing only on aspects, talking about future stuff like it has already happend. Founders are the best in lying. We are so good in lying we even lie to ourselves. Aware or not.

We are often unaware of it because our reality is subjective and skewed.

I - as a coder - strongly believe that integrating A/B testing on our landing page is the best thing to do for the company - right now - i know it with all my heart! This is valuable work! And i can explain you why!

We benchmark against things we subjectively value highly – and are not aware that our benchmark is based on our subject perception of reality.

Also nature works against us…

If we pick stuff we are good in - we have little moments of success - little positive feedback loops - telling us we are “doing a thing right” - which we confuse with “doing the right thing”.

How to detect

Simple example: If you are a tech-centric founder-team and you are trying to solve your current problem with acquiring customers by tech - e.g. Growth Hacks - your spider senses should go off. Riiiinnninnnng

In general whenever a X-guy enforces solving a problem with X everyone should step back and try to analyse it objectively. It might feel like intense stressy work but it’s actually more comfortable.

Especially we should be careful when it comes to small decisions/daily routines. Too often we drag ourselves into being busy - all day, every day - but actually just do stuff we prefer doing - often we enjoy them aware or unaware (remember the dull tax report that was boring to make but felt like a safe harbour of routine work while you should have actually worried about the fact that your product f*cking doesn’t sell?)

The two hats and your startup’s muscles

As a founder of a startup you have (among many other) two hats. The management hat and the execution hat. The execution hat is defined by your skillset and willingness to acquire new skills. The management hat comes by the fact that you need to make strategic decisions on behalf of the company. Too often people are not aware which hat they currently have to put on.

Fact is that most probably you won’t have a perfect distribution of all needed execution hats in your company. And with a lot of people with red hats at a table an argument that red is a great color might happen quite fast. Don’t trick yourself into that.

With your strategic hat on you need to try to make objective assessments about your company’s need. Also be aware of your founding teams weaknesses. Think of your founding team as one body and skills as muscles.

Muscles need to build and they need training. Any training the required muscles in the beginning is always painful and dull. We quickly believe that we can just attach that part - remember the PR agency or the Sales team you had in your business plan? Even hiring is attachment. If you body misses certain muscle regions completely you can get someone to join and help with that part. But the new guy can only show the training program needed. It’s still the whole body (founding team) that needs to move. E.g. if customer acquisition (esp. sales) is a muscle your body lacks, the whole body needs to train it until it’s an routine.

EOR - End of Rant

I see this pattern in many founder-teams: Picking daily work and making strategic decisions based on personal preference not on how critical they are to the startup. Being super busy, all day all night, doing stuff they anyway prefer doing - even if they are not aware of it and whine about how hard their work-day is.

Maybe I am a bit hyper-senstive on this? Maybe I am just crazy?

My rant is done - let yours come in! Have you experienced this pattern as well? Is this off-limits bullshit - am i hiding myself writing blogposts instead of working on my own future - frack, let me know! - via twitter or via HackerNews

Until then, yours truly, @andreasklinger

About the "other" Startup Hubs.

andreasklinger — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 14:59:00 +0000

There is an energetic discussion going on in the Web-Tech Startup World. Each city wants to know - “Can we become the next Silicon Valley”.

It’s a cliché of a question that’s getting incredible boring, boring but still needed. Entrepreneurship and Innovation still needs fostering in our society. Ecosystems are a strong aspect of that.

In most discussions people focus on the missing spots in their local ecosystem. They try to replicate the currently best working system, ignoring their potential Survivor Bias. They focus on what’s missing: VC capital, exits, the will of entrepreneurs or angels to take more risk.

Ranking of Startup Hubs

Björn and Max of Startup Genome came (based on quantitive analysis) just released their yearly update to their Startup Ecosystem report and thus creating a update top10 list of international Startups Ecosystems:

The accurancy of this list does not really matter in my opinion. It’s more about a rough feeling where you city resides in the Startup World.

If you are not in this list, you are most probably nowhere.

So if your city is not in this list. What to do? According to Brad Feld it can easily take up to 20 years to establish oneself into this list.

So… Well… F*ck.

Start Hubs as platforms

Startup Hubs tend to compare themselves with the status-quo of their competitors. They try to emulate e.g. Silicon Valley and beat them in their own game by doing what they do.

But Startup Hubs - like Startups - have phases of maturity.

If Startups follow the patterns of later stages Competitors they usually run out of ressources and die. I tend to believe that Startup Hubs have similar problems.

The most common approach of Startup Hubs is to tackle all missing aspects at once and improve them step by step. All of a sudden you end up with more problems than time and energy you have got. You scream for state support to get more ressources. You are competing on all fronts, while your traction is benchmarked with leading startup cities. People tend to compare speed and not acceleration. You are pretty much in a loosing position.

Gabriel Weinbergs compares these approaches to leaky buckets. Systems with more holes to fill than you got time.

Niche to win?

Fact is Startup Hubs can’t compete on all angles at once and especially not all in the same way.

This would just maximise game dynamics and enforce the (power law) distribution among themselves in the ranking. Startup Hubs need to disrupt the system.

Since Silicon Valley is the #1 ecosystem it is assumed that other ecosystems will perform better if they differentiate themselves from Silicon Valley and establish their own strengths. — Björn Lasse Herrman Startup Genome Project

If you think of Startup Hubs as platforms the most common best-practice is to niche on your strongest qualities in the beginning to get initial traction. Focus on something small where you have talent in, create critical mass on demand / supply for this focus, create network effects and use this initial traction to move forward.

The number one job of a Startup Ecosystem

The reason for the typical over-stretching of ambition might be rooted in a very simple miss-understanding the Job of a Startup Ecosystem.

It is NOT the job of a Startup Ecosystem to make sure founders get everything they need along their companies lifetime, that’s the damn job of the founders themselves.

The job of an ecosystem is to catch, inspire and accelerate talent. Get the idea-makers while they are still energetic, provide them knowledge, uplink and acceleration. Especially in early phases I would not rate Startup Ecosystems based on their output in exits or funding. That are indicators that come by later, when the hub is by far more mature. I would rate early stage hubs based on the fact how wide and talented the can get the base of their ecosystem to be.

Basically start ground up. Go as low-level as possible.

“But what will they do if their ideas are starting to grow and need more money” - Import money, go to accelerators, do whatever you need to do and be successful. People who sit and wait and blame the system around them are not entrepreneurs, they are lurkers.

Entrepreneurs are the leaders. Everyone else is a feeder. — Brad Feld

I would highly recommend to read Steve Blank’s blog-post on Bred Feld’s latest Book. It covers several lessons learned building Startup Ecosystems.

Send your entrepreneurs away.

One predominate factor in many countries and ecosystems is the fear of entrepreneurs leaving the country to start or grow their business somewhere else. While I understand this on a macro level - local tax systems supporting national growth - i cannot understand it on an micro level.

To me it sounds like a later-stage problem which people try to solve too early. If a startup hub is yet in early phases many good people will leave - no matter what - the goal is not to stop that by wrong-aligned incentives, throw cash at them or bind them with laws or contracts. The goal is too keep the backchannel as good as possible, get their learnings and keep them active in the community.

People leave cities not communities.

People leave cities but reimport learnings, knowhow, network and ultimately money.

The role of the government

Some people believe it’s the job of the government to create Startup Hubs. The dangerous part. In many cases the people, who believe this nonsense are working for the government. Brrrr.

The job of the government is to support a Startup Hub. A good start would be to minimize their own blockage - make it easier to form companies, simplify law and tax systems, minimize laws that put entrepreneurs under personal risk, make it desirable to invest in companies.

I don’t mean this in disrepect to the important role and huge success of state support systems. But I personally believe that state money as investment is the purest form dump money. I can mostly speak of Austria, but the absurdity of having an “expert panels” who should cover 4-6 industries and decide at whom to throw 200-800k is ludicrous, if not dangerous.

Large scale investments by the state in a few early stage startups creates an imbalanced market where founders align to the state instead to the private market (customers or angels). Ultimately leading to an army of zombie startups with wrong validation and too much runway to die and too little to live, lurching half-dead in the search for more state-funding. F*ck that, get me a gun.

Investments by the government shouldn’t be in the startups but in the infrastructure.

I’d personally recommend looking for where the community really is and try to support their multiplying activities (e.g. in Europe projects - AMONG MANY OTHERs - like Starteurope, Railsgirls and StartupWeekend) and focus on them.

Any state investments for early stage should be spray-and-pray - the best practice here is http://startupchile.org/ - they additionally focus on important international talent.

As said I mean above suggestions without any disrespect to the important work of state funds, it’s just inside-out amateur view coming straight from the field.

Summary

Startup hubs need to know the phase they are in and try to act accordingly. Governments can’t lead and need to support scene activities and focus on proven multipliers. Instead of locking entrepreneurs in and trying to recreate and biotope before there is enough nutrition for it, appreciate people leaving to learn and try to keep them strongly tied to the local community as a source for international knowhow, network and ultimately money.

I am pretty sure I am missing millions of aspects. Please let me know your thoughts via twitter @andreasklinger.

Until then. Have fun. Creating startup communities is awesome - Andreas

Why i am leaving my own company.

andreasklinger — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:54:00 +0100

Fortunately I was able to tell this already to many people in person. But a quick public blog post might help to clarify and simplify things a bit.

TL;DR: After 4 years of working on LOOKK i decided it’s time to move on and leave LOOKK. I will take a month off and than (most likely) head to Berlin. It’s bittersweet leaving, because it’s the beginnings of an exciting major restructure of LOOKK.

The bigger picture a.k.a. Ambition

The main thing I learnt was that our ambition as founders was too huge and that we kicked off too many moving parts, who then in return constantly came into our way.

Though i still believe in the opportunity in this space, most of those moving parts where based on the assumptions that didn’t work on the level needed like production, prototyping, logistics, ecommerce backend, marketplaces, sketches, social curation, etc.

These moving parts stopped us from getting forward with the things that actually worked very well - e.g. connecting designers with fans, attracting fashion designers, engaging users, communitybuilding.

We needed to focus.

We wanted a radical change.

My co-founder Gilbert stepped up with a new vision and drafted a plan for a new product and company. The first phase of this new vision can be already seen on www.lookk.com.

We wanted the strategy to change together with the product. Therefore we moved away from aggressive scaling to a bootstrap attitude with focused iterations. We went as far as temporary slimming down the company to its bare minimum needed - 3 people: Gil (CEO + Product owner), Simone (Designer Acq + Marketing) and Rado (Development). The goal of this move is to focus on iterating on the core of the new product and then grow again to a larger team.

With me several other people are stepping off the payroll - Tamas, Stefan, Veselin, etc – as said we wanted to use this moment as a opportunity for radical change. Naturally all of us stay as a support network for LOOKK and be available to support Gil and the team whenever and wherever we can.

As I am one of the original co-founders of LOOKK, leaving it was - as you can guess - a hard decision to make.

Leaving your own company is a bit crazy.

As said we needed radical steps - For me it meant swallowing my own pride and accepting that my part of the business’ lifecycle failed, that perhaps I wasn’t the best guy for my job anymore and that other people in the team have better ideas and should take over the evolution of the company. Thus we turned the internal management up-side down so that the people at the top are the ones that can actually pivot the strategy.

We got enough money on the bank to sustain the company for quite some time, so these changes are not about money. It’s more about using it the best way.

In this “startup world”, when people face the fact that things don’t work out and that they are personally completely out of new ideas, they usually follow one of two options:

Run the startup against the wall or cling onto it until it’s completely dead.

For paradox reasons these options, that are easier to explain, are seen more respectable than other solutions like switching teams or returning the money. This “startup world” is a strange world sometimes, but internally we wanted to do something that felt right for the team, the opportunity and the company and not something that is easy to explain.

Me, Myself & Life

With a new strategy and management in place i had to rethink my own role…

Personally, as many of you realise, being the nerdy tech guy in the crazy fashion scene was exciting, but was always slight askew for me.

It was a great opportunity to learn and to be outside of my personal comfort zone (which is always a good thing). And also to work with very talented people with very different backgrounds, who I must thank for their constant extreme patience with me. ;)

But ultimately, my interest in fashion waned over time, though. I realised in the last months that my natural fit is more with things like media, innovation, mobile, music, realtime and rethinking how we use digital devices.

I firmly believe that the refocus at LOOK by Gil is the best thing that can happen to LOOKK, though I couldn’t see myself adding more value than I have up until now.

Even if I were to stay, I couldn’t contribute as well as a fresh new hire, given that my focus is dampened by my personal excitement for fashion waning, the fact that I’ve already used all my best ideas and simply the reason that my skills wouldn’t make me the best guy for the new upcoming job-roles in first place. The second I felt that, was a clear sign for me to move on.

What’s next…

I will leave London end of august.
I will take a timeout and try to reset my brain. If my budgets kinda keeps stable i am off to Costa Rica for a backpack trip in September.
Then i will move somewhere else - i consider moving to Berlin - let me know what you think about that
I will work on technology in web and innovation.

After many years working on Garmz and LOOKK, I will now step aside to become a keen supporter instead of a having a leading role for LOOKK 2.0 – and this feels right.

I am looking back to 4 great and exciting years.

Hit me up if you have any questions: @andreasklinger - Feel free to leave any questions on my facebook thread.

How global media communication changes in a transparent world

andreasklinger — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:06:33 +0100

These are crowdaggregated pictures from Syria (across basically all social media channels). No media publisher inbetween. Authentic pictures from within Aleppo.

The tool is done by Teleportd (a fellow seedcamp company) and shows how big event based news are.

I wrote a blogpost about this topic a while ago and it’s impressive to see the little steps changing our perception of worldwide media and global (soon realtime) news.

See the full capsule here

Peter Thiel's Startup Class Notes as PDF

andreasklinger — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:42:00 +0100

@bgmasters created an awesome series of blog posts covering his notes of Peter Thiel’s startup class CS183. Personally i try to read more on the kindle (in the park) and less in front of my laptop screen. Therefore i took the liberty to copy-paste them to word and convert them to a kindle-ready pdf.

It’s a bit messy - i didn’t know word is SO… well let’s not talk about it. I discovered in the end i could also done an have html for calibre to convert. I know… this would have been by far better, but well it’s already done :)

A few friends asked me to send them the link. To speed this up. Here is a public blogpost.

It would be great if you could follow @bgmasters as a quick thank you for his extra efforts to create those notes. To put the size of this lecture and @bgmasters effort into context: The PDF has 688 pages!

Here is the download to the PDF.

Edit: It seems unfortunately like @bgmasters does not want his content to be re-distributed. That’s very sad but understandable from his point of view.

If you are still interested you in a pdf/kindle version you can ad-hoc create one by using readlists. (thanks to mwsherman for noting!)

best wishes @andreasklinger

My Addressbook? Keep it. Telephone numbers are a disgrace to our generation.

andreasklinger — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:02:00 +0000

There is all this talk going on about Path uploading address books and privacy here privacy there. I understand the fact that Startups push too far from time to time and Silicon Valley believes to have the right to shoot first ask later. But to be honest… there might be something wrong in my head… But I am by far more xkcd-like enraged about a more fundamental thing. Telephone numbers and address books suck as a system.

Telephone numbers are a disgrace to our generation.

Image Source

Addressbooks show what happens when technology providers start to make money too quickly and to easily. They get lazy and stop fixing underlying problems in their concepts.

If you think about it telephone numbers are IP addresses and Address books are your local /etc/hosts. You spend ages to type any potential IP address you might want to use into this textfile and whenever you get a new IP from your friends you go like “oh giggily i need to add this like right now”. It feels like the early days of dialup hackers all over again doesn’t it?

But you don’t stop there - you invent this whole infrastructure of software, cables and tools to synchronise this /etc/hosts file over all your devices. You have all this magic going on just to simplify this. Like seriously? What’s wrong with us that we even do that.

Telephone numbers are a disgrace. They are a system that never bothered to evolve.

Of course they tried to fix it. Damn they even killed trees for it.

Telephone numbers need a DNS system!

I have friends that have three numbers in their signature. US, UK, local-european-country-no-one-knows. This whole system assumes I want to call their cellphones. Which is not true - I want to call them. The people behind that numbers, simcards and devices…

The real traveling salesman problem is not to find the quickest route between points. Thank you cheapairlines for fixing that. The biggest problem is being contactable when you are reach these points. Or for the office to contact the traveling salesman.

The first thing when my plane lands ? SIM cards juggle. You want to call me? It’s my UK number. No wait it’s my european numbers. A no wait you couldn’t know but I am in NY. Who cares you can contact me via twitter at anytime.

It’s not that it is not possible to handle this useless system of having to store random numbers in abstract databases to connect to remote devices when i actually just want to speak to an human person. It’s possible to handle this. Millions of people do. Every goddamn second.

I am angry on a system view point of view. It pisses me off deeply when I look at it from an abstract view. I am a developer I want products give sense to things bigger than just the mere ok-its-working-use-case.

Addressbooks need a distributed system (like facebook has)

We need a change. We need a player to step in an introduce a new system. Telecom providers can be happy about it. They are infrastructure providers that confused themselves to be customer service providers. And they never really where that - yes i am looking at you British Telecom. They provide the cables and the technical infrastructure. You pay your internet cables, you pay to get IPs but pay different people to get your Domain name. Did you ever bother to update a DNS record of a site you wanted to visit to its new IP ? No? Why not? Because it would be brain dead wouldn’t it. Telecom providers get out of the way. Please.

Update/Edit: to clarify what i want:

Unique IDs that are callable no matter where the other person is… (like email addresses - happy to use e.g. http://facebook.com/andreasklinger for that or any other host + name system to avoid nickname clashes)
Dynamic updates to the address book. Similar to facebook (if not even done by facebook).

Who can save my sanity?

Your Social Address Book Startup ?

Bring it on. So far I only saw fixes to the faults no redesigns of a to-me broken system. And I am serious. Send me the startups you know that fix my pain via twitter and I will add it to this blog article.

Skype?

Ok now seriously for 10 seconds. This might be even possible because of the windows phones. But let’s be realistic for another 5 seconds. A big clumsy company got acquired by a bigger clumsy company. Done.

Image Source

Google?

Google introduced Google Voice. It’s simplifing the system Instead of 5 numbers per human entity I only need to store one. And jokes aside thats by far better. The problem? International people who want to call me will have to call a remote number and pay my overheads. But Google come on you can solve that.

Facebook?

Facebook can solve that problem. They got telecom providers to implement 0.facebook.com which is basically saying let’s screw your big data deals. They got facebook apps in every half smart phone. They can get the current number from the device and update the facebook phone number automatically for the user. People can already call their friends today by clicking on the phone icon in the friends list. Many hardware/software providers automatically sync the facebook friends phone numbers to the normal address book. What facebook needs to do (imho) is to split that telephone part of facebook like the messaging part and see if they can accelerate adoption by that. Get traction and take over the world.

Commerical Break: Vox.io?

There is a crazy silicon valley/silicon slovenia company that basically does Skype in a browser. They are a fellow seedcamp company. They are called vox.io.

When you start using it you realise how outdated Skype actually is. “You want me to… download a client?… and store my contacts… to call pinky2000?” But their current strategy is not to kill Skype. It’s to replace phone numbers with URLs by putting real phones on the other end. Tomaz the founder of Vox.io said in his good-as-if-it-was-paid wired article “Before youtube we used to send each others videos via email and people opened it in real time player or quicktime and nobody questioned it. Then youtube came.” If you apply the same logic to phonenumbers it makes complete sense.

Similar to facebook where people still have to have me in friendslist to access my phone number hidden behind the URL www.facebook.com/andreasklinger they provide a simple url where you can call people with one click. The real fun with flags starts when you think about alternative use cases like “One-Click-link-to-join-phone-conference-emails” or “Ok-bro-pitch-me-but-only-once-i-am-dave-mcclure-throw-away” URLs.

Can they do it? Who the hell knows. It’s a global problem of decades of epicness. They might have the potential but not the power. I bet that Google or Facebook looks close to acquire them.

Btw: Facebook you did a coop with skype? Seriously? I tried it.

I WAS DOWNLOADING A JAR FILE, IN 2012, BECAUSE OF YOU. I HATE YOU FOR THAT. And even as I managed to get it working, my other end of the line didn’t.

Anyway

I get this really aggressive passion when I see stuff that makes no sense to me. I hope someone in the world understands me for going mental on this. If yes please let me know. I feel crazy.

Send me suggestions. This is fixable and I am pretty sure a lot of people already fixed it but I am too blind with rage to see. Please post your suggestions to the HackerNews comments or send them via twitter.

PS: I am sorry for my rage. I am pre-coffee.

Until then. Go play and get mental. – Andreas

Sh*t! Twitter is exciting - again!

andreasklinger — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:35:00 +0000

Every epoch in the history of humanity had a raw resource that became the key to commercial success that time. Similar to companies that once sourced and refined silk to textiles, energy to electricity, or ore to steel, we now have companies that sourced and refined data to something useful. In the information age, data is the new steel and to find new forms to refine or apply it generates new opportunities for the whole market.

It is common knowledge that the next big opportunity is not in refining information in general but the manipulation of it in real-time. I first misunderstood this shift as just the “faster” version of working with information. But it is – at least in my humble opinion – far more than that. It is something new - it is a new phase of the information age - The real time information age.

About twitter…

This week I spoke with the brilliant @isasun - Twitter’s Germany employee #1. During the discussion I realized that Twitter has fundamentally changed its base. She basically smiled and watched me while I stumbled from “how is it to be at… you know… twitter” to “OMG this is awesome”. Because something happened I didn’t expect to happen ever again: I am excited about twitter.

At this year’s DLD @Jack didn’t use the word social – he merely spoke about conversations. Twitter is about real time data and its distilling to real time editorial content.

This is the reason why they want to control the presentation to end consumers and this is the reason why they de-emphasise on the social aspect of it.

Robin Waters made a great interview with @Jack. But he missed what Jack tried to make him excited about. It’s not the “working business model” of ads, it’s not that he works double shift and Twitter and Square. Hell seriously nobody cares for ads and he wouldn’t go back if he wouldn’t see something big.

Our goal is delivering relevant content to people, instantly. This sounds simple but is in fact extremely complicated to pull off in real-time. We want to bring you closer to what’s happening in the world, and we have a lot of work to do…

Source

From real-time delivery to real-time editorialization…

With the relaunch twitter moved from the focus on real time distribution and interaction to real time “content editorializing” the activity of processing data into understandable context. This purified real time data will be a highly valuable asset in the next 5 years. In this space twitter is in the best position to be.

In the real time information age twitter might be bigger than google!

Their content source – their ore/their tweets - is highly socially curated, highly contextualized, summarized and location-aware content – it’s perfectly prepared.

Their final product – the “Discover” area - is the perfect playground to find out how far you can automatically (via social curation) prepare content for editorial consume. Their communication tools are still the only transparent global channel in social media, connecting the people around a topic and therefore contextualising and verifying topics.

The new section “Discover” moves twitter from being the place where news are discussed and distributed to the place where news are consumed and it pushes twitter to be the first real time press agency worldwide. Within the next 5 years they will supply all media houses. In the real time information age twitter might have the purest steel, the finest silk cloth, they have the purest real time content.

Shit… Twitter is exciting… again.

Commercial Break - Teleportd.com

As a sidenote: Maybe i am so excited about real time news because i have seen first hand how interesting these can be. A fellow seedcamp company called teleportd works hard to become something like reuters for real time images. They categorizes photos based on social and location in realtime and watch for stuff happening outside of the signal to noise baseline. And trust me: If something is happening right now in front of your eyes and you only see the relevant signals not the blurry noise - it is interesting! - trust me.

The next (possible) steps:

Twitter already started to launch “hotspot“ pages for every current topic which summarizes the topic, includes all forms of media and provides an introduction into this news based on relevance.

Twitter will introduce twitter alerts that inform media houses automatically if events are happening right now. They will provide them with the information in a structured and qualified form. They will use social annotation and social proof to provide verifications of sources to the media houses.

Twitter will provide media houses with easy to use tools to moderate the realtime content. By that they minimize the time media houses need until they can monetize the news. Media houses will get tools that (By social and semantic context) will pre-moderate real time content to safe and verified information bytes they can show their users.

The Old Press Agencies and the Future Media Houses

Classical press agencies will focus on what they focused on anyway lately – being copywriters for publishers that can’t cover all topics with their own resources. Only the few press agencies that can better beat twitters speed with quality will survive in the sourcing game. Media houses will do what they always focused on. Gather, qualify and contextualize sources of information and bring them into bigger pictures. But twitter will become their number one source for content.

It’s 2012 – We have moved from the information age into the real time information age. And in the real time information age Twitter might be bigger than Google. Twitter is no longer the forever-second in social media. The game is changing. Right now.

Thanks to @lifftl for reviewing this article and helping me to get my brain-dump-overload into order.
Please let me know know what you are thinking by contacting me via twitter or commenting in the hackernews discussions.

Until then go play. The Internet is awesome. — Andreas

Ps: I bet a full case of beer that Twitter acquires Teleportd this year, unless google beats them to it. These guys fit perfectly in Twitter’s current strategy. I am pretty sure they will teleport into the blue bird’s nest quite soon.

The things first time founders do…

andreasklinger — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:06:00 +0000

Last week @robfitz asked me on short notice to join a panel at #foundersexchange about what first time founders shouldn’t do. I quickly took a moment to write down some suggestions into my moleskine to prepare myself. Things I witnessed in our company and things I noticed in other startups.

That “some suggestions” became a full page and that full page became a monster that had almost no free white space left. It was so full of stuff we did, it was ludicrous. It was dark like the night and microscribbled as if I hated that poor moleskine page.

My message at the panel was simple: “Don’t be a first time founder…” – or at least not the kind of first time founder I used to be ;)

After a gentle push by Rob and Sal I decided to share those first time founder mistakes we did publicly. I hope you can learn a thing or or two (to avoid) from this. If you have been through your first startup maybe you see yourself in some of them as well :)

Don’t be a first time founder…

Been there, done that…

I have to admit that some of the items are a little bit more specific to what I did wrong. So maybe you didn’t see yourself in all of them. Although several of those mistakes contradicted my instincts even back then - I still did them. And this simple fact shows me how much I fundamentally needed to learn.

We have been working on our Startup for 3 years now and there were more reasons that it should have collapsed than I can think of. But we have survived and have (hopefully) grown a lot since then. Maybe that is why it feels like I work already in my second company. But maybe I am just still very naive…

Commercial Break: A new event format for London

I strongly advocate speaking openly about things I did wrong - and I advise you to do the same. Maybe it’s because I am better in seeing my mistakes than the things I did right. And maybe it’s therefore easier for me to share at least the things you shouldn’t do instead of things you should do. But learning from failure is imho always worth sharing.

If you want to share you own failures or want to learn how to avoid those, join the upcoming meetup of London’s new event format Failboat. It’s no VC, no Press, no bullshit. Just founders talking straight honest.

You?

I am pretty sure you did some of the things I mentioned above. And I am quite certain you did some other ones as well…

I am happy to extend the list - What’s your list of “sh*t first time founders” do. Let me know via twitter or in the Hackernews comments .

Until then. Go play. It’s only failure if you don’t stand up ;)

— Andreas

Edit: Thanks to @lfittl, @pmoe, @hailpixel and @deanfankhauser for sending me several gold nuggets I was missing :)

Edit2: Until now I had only two kinds of feedback: “I did a lot of these…” and “Those things are obvious aren’t they…” guess which feedback was by first-time founders ;)

The unannounced updates to Facebook's Social Plugins and how to use them!

andreasklinger — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:38:00 +0000

Since the launch of platform, Facebook has the approach of shipping features early, very early. They ship first, ask later and document even further later. And I, personally, love them for that. Back in the days you used to find half or non documented features in their API or libraries on a daily basis. Every time you find one of those little gems your product owner brain goes all sparkly and happy, it jumps for joy and you see the future of the web unfolding in front of you. And done right - given facebook’s leverage in size and fast distribution - those little new possibilities usually open huge possibilities for your product. This is the fun part about being on the bloody edge of web innovation.

Move fast, break things and look stupid.

The Open Graph

Facebook is building the graph for the social web, the social layer that explains interactions beyond Network, Presentation or Application but People. All technology of the last year leads to new achievements in society – like being able to see who listens to Justin Bieber. This is beautiful.

Tamas insists that someone was using his laptop during that time.

If you are new to this topic - the Facebook Developer Documentation explains the new actions in the Social Graph very well.

The New Plugins

Disclaimer: I tried the plugins, they were not yet fully working. So please take everything with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that the job of the product owner is to think forward and to have everything ready – so that your product will be one of the first to implement.

The new Activity Feed, Facepile and Recommendation Box.

Showing human faces show to a new visitor generic social proof and therefore increases the confidence in your service. If you can show friends you are adding trust and peer pressure into this mix.

Previously you were able to show to new visitors of your site which of your content objects have been liked by their friends. This is great. But to truly leverage this in your product you needed to have the like button as a central part of the product UX. Apart of media services, like newspapers and galleries, the like button never truly got part of a product’s core user flow. Therefore, in most cases, it was just reduced to a (very powerful) friction less version of the share button.

With the Version 2 of the activity feed, facepile and recommendation box you are now able to show the actions that happend within your app. It enables you to show which of the visitors friends actually USED your product or even better specific features of it. Without you actually needing to know anything (especially no register or login) of the visitor.

Facepile - How to use this in Lean Startups.

The old usecase: Call to action for register (or core action of your app).

Example

“Hey you, register on Examplify now! 50 of your friends are already using Examplify”

This is nothing new and is easy possible by using the APP ID as parameter for facepile:

Code:

Main New Usecase:

With the new facepile you can provide the actual content element and the action the user did.

Examples

Soundcloud: This song has been listened 200 times and among others these friends listened to that song.
Kickstarter: 400 people pleged, among other these friends.

Why is this useful? If you app is done right, it is highly likely that more people actually use the core of your app than just like it. Eg. More people will listen to a song than “like” one specific song.

This usecase is nice but not ground breaking.

Code:

Bigger Better Alternate Usecase #1: Campaigns

Example

Make a marketing campaign where you have to XYZ (e.g. post something on facebook, or spend money for fresh water, play a game, join a activity group, etc).
Create a verb for that action.
Create your own landing page for that marketing campaign.
Show the friends who already did this specific action on that campaign page.
Bonus points: You can show the friends that started the campaign and the friends that completed the campaign! (Think:“Level 1: Anton Berta Carla, Level 2: Anton Berta, Level 3: Berta - Can you beat them?”)

I am pretty sure for many apps there is something big in here worthy to explore.

Bigger Better Alternate Usecase #2: Upgrades and Pricing for Saas

Imagine you are Kissmetrics (or any other SaaS).
Your integration of FB connect is usually limited to fb:login and you want to keep it that way. You cannot be bothered with thumbnails or any other friendgraph information within you MVP - Your focus is not social, but social proof will always help conversions.
You have people using your test-mode, lowest or free plan.
You want them to upgrade.
You want to optimize your conversion on those upgrade pages.
Show the friends that upgraded to that price stage. If you really want to move the needle - why not just show them on your pricing page below the packages you offer?
Run it A/B. If it doesn’t increase your upgrade conversion I owe you a beer.

Bigger Better Alternate Usecase #3: Build your own like button - extend your widgets.

Imagine you are bufferapp.
When you are done thinking about how awesome that would be think about how to extend your button-widget.
Not only show the “use-count” also show faces of the friends of the visitor using that app. Add that to your iframe widget and distribute that through the web.

Or:

Imagine you are Soundcloud (yes… that would be awesome i know…).
Now extend your player widget by showing who of the visitor’s friends actually played that song.

Or:

If you are somebody like pinterest.
You could you can even build your very own like (“pin”) button with the same functionality (towards your platform not towards facebook).

Let’s be honest - this done right - is damn exciting!

Activity feed & Recommendation Box

This is big. Actually bigger than the updates to facepile

Example Usecase: Music pages

Imagine you stumble upon an online radio because a friend shared a link– Eg. Mixcloud.com.
The player is very minimalistic.
You are here the first time.
You listen to this new song the first time.
The webproduct knows nothing about you (you are just a visitor).
But it is able to show you more music your friends have been listening to.
Music that you might care about. Even if not. It makes deep content accessible in a (basic but) qualitative way.

And remember: This is happening without you registering. You will continue to engage with that service. And the more you engage the more likely you are to stay sticky to the webservice.

And the big upside: If you do not have friends actually using that website. Recommendation and Activitiy feed have fallbacks and just show you which content elements of the website have been used the most.

More about the new Activity and Recommendations

Add this to timeline

‘Add this to timeline’ is (edit: should be) the new share button.

Since the roll-out of the like-button the sharebutton got less and less focus. Fun fact: Until now (in my experiments) sharebuttons drive more first-time traffic than any like button. Only the upside of the like button of less friction and an open backchannel keeps me using it.

Facebook introduced adding content to the timeline through their JS library at the last f8. If i understand it correctly: The Button is “just” a simple way for content publishers to integrate the same functionality without going mental in understanding what onclick means. And you do not have to authorise the app for that action upfront.

You will still have to add all values to your App settings, but i am pretty sure step-to-step guide will popup within the next 30 days.

But in general the effects as a sum are bigger. It means even small blogs will add customised content to your timeline. The can annotate edges and they can basically very cheaply enrich facebook timelines. Recipe websites can create little timeline gallery of dishes you cooked. From a product view this is beautiful.

Run an A/B – replace your share buttons with Add-to-timeline buttons. Test if people actually get it. If they do, they will create beautiful embeddings in their timeline without actually registering on your site. And more important: by that you can define those edges which you are afterwards are able to reuse with the plugins mentioned above.

Edit

I got some feedback by Simon Cross from Facebook about this part:

We don’t see add-to-timeline as a replacement Share button - add to timeline is technically similar to the login button, in that it shows the auth dialog and lets a user auth the app.

But once a user has added your app to timeline (authd/logged in) then you can publish actions when a user clicks your own native buttons in your site - you can make your native actions social.

If I was designing, I’d put add-to-timeline in the right column and retain a share or like button next to my main content objects. Then I’d wire up Open Graph actions to my site’s native actions too.

I will leave this here for now. I personally disagree with this approach to think about it, but well i guess they know their stuff better ;)

Recommandation Bar

The Recommendations Bar is always docked to the lower right (or left) of the screen. When the page loads the Recommendations bar will be collapsed and the user will have the option to ‘like’ your page.As the user nears the end of your page, the plugin will expand. The expanded view will show the user a social recommendation of the next article to read on your site.

I wasn’t able to get the plugin running but to me it sounds like all those wordpress plugins about sharing. Might be nice but to be honest i am already sick about the dominance in design of the current social plugins. Facebook should rather work access to APIs for anonymous visitors instead of forcing their design patterns like with fb:comments or now with fb:recommendation-bar. But let’s see.

Why is this big for Lean Startups?

The new plugins help you focus on the core of your product. The core you actually want to iterate on.

But still - very cheaply - by using this plugins you are able to provide qualified deep content discovery and can easily offer social proof.

What is missing from facebook

Until now every creation within the Social Graph is meant to generate a visual content in facebook. Or simply put: You “post stuff on facebook” when you want to define edges within the open graph, between (people and) objects.

That’s good from a distribution point of view. That’s bad if your goal is to annotate your namespace of the Social Graph as good as possible. Example if you want to go into details.

I am pretty sure facebook will offer the possibility to create edges without actually posting something to facebook in 4-6 months. For now the usecase isn’t very obvious.

Summary

Facebook completes the circle with those social plugins and proves that they take their approach to the social web serious.

You as a product owner can optimize your product. You can define niches/features. You can personalize your website a step further very cheaply for non-registered visitors while actually focusing on the core of your lean startup.

You can keep users engaged and (hopefully) ultimately convert them.

How would you use those plugins? What obvious usecase am I missing? Let me know! Eager to learn. Please send me your thoughts on twitter or in the comments of HackerNews.

Until then: The web is fun, go play.

— Andreas

Startup Lessons Learned

Drafting your first investment round.

“Looking for angel investors”

Draft your round

Fill the boxes:

Digging deeper

Advisory board

Be careful with Strategic Partners

Shortlist

Reaching out

Look for people who help from Day 1

The round

Hint: Traction and scarcity closes rounds.

Hint: Valuations

Accelerators

What about VCs?

Hint: Be careful with miss-understanding VC interest.

Summary

Why the future needs a brandname.

Reasons for Disenchantment: The illusion of progress

Reasons for Disenchantment: The role of science

We need a utopic view of the future - once again.

Creating a hype, establishing band-names, creating characters.

A brand-name for our future

Accelerating Change

A Brand-name: The Singularity

Singularity as brand-name for the future.

Yet another Hype…

Commercial Break: Pioneers Festival

We need to inspire the future.

Startup Mentoring Sessions: How to be a decent, maybe even good startup mentor.

Checklist for First-Time Mentors…

1. Attitude

2. Pick your weapon of choice.

3. Listen & Understand it from their point of view.

4. Do ask, don’t tell.

5. It’s not You VS Them, It’s You AND Them

6. Learn to let go.

7. Always leave on a positive note.

More to read

Startup Mentoring Sessions: How to get the most out of it.

Dear Startups…

1. Work on your Attitude

2. Prepare! Know what you need

3. It’s YOUR table - take the lead

4. How to start a session

5. Shut up

6. Learn to accept negative feedback

7. Take notes

8. Opinions – Loads of them

9. Applying advice

10. Contradicting Feedback

11. Keep them working for you.

Update: Bonus - Learn from the best!

More to come

The Founder's Lie About Comfort Zones

I see founders…

I am super busy and I do uncomfortable things…

Everything looks like a hammer

We are the best liars

We are often unaware of it because our reality is subjective and skewed.

Also nature works against us…

How to detect

The two hats and your startup’s muscles

EOR - End of Rant

About the "other" Startup Hubs.

Ranking of Startup Hubs

Start Hubs as platforms

Niche to win?

The number one job of a Startup Ecosystem

Send your entrepreneurs away.

The role of the government

Summary

Why i am leaving my own company.

The bigger picture a.k.a. Ambition

We wanted a radical change.

Leaving your own company is a bit crazy.

Me, Myself & Life

What’s next…

How global media communication changes in a transparent world