Tag Archives: San Francisco

Reflections on start-up life: Week 24

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I don’t know if I left my heart in San Francisco, but my inner geek found its spiritual home.

In our two and a half weeks we met many amazing people doing many amazing things.  The quality of the start-ups, the engineers and the networking is phenomenal. 

Perhaps the most inspiring thing is that when you meet some of these startups you realise it can be done.  A small dedicated team with a dream can pull it together and make things happen.  It gives us confidence we can do it too.

While it seemed a little slow heading into the final week, we ended up with a large number of meetings which kept us busy and out of mischief.

I went on a wine tour of the Sonoma district courtesy of Tina Lui who I met the week before.  It was great to get out and see the countryside, but also to meet and network with some tech AND non-tech people.  This lead to a meeting with Chuck on Monday who put us in touch with his Angels from the East Coast – we follow up with another meeting this week.

Tuesday we were back at OATV for a second round meeting via a web conference.  Difficult to judge where this is at as OATV is very focussed on closing their next fund at the moment, so it’s probably not the best time to pitch to them.

Wednesday we had a full on day – we were on the CalTrain early for a breakfast meeting in Palo Alto (feedback – “analytics is like Crack cocaine – addictive but it’s downhill after that – where do you go with it?”).  

Then to Sand Hill Road (the heart of VC land) for another pitch – this was a really productive meeting which went well and hopefully leads to a second round (have to follow up on this).  

Finally back into the city to meet with SXVP a joint AU / US fund who indicated they were happy to explore co-investing but they don’t typically lead.  We also had good feedback on areas to focus on improving our pitch.

Thursday I went out to Oakland for a social meetup, then Alex and I went meet with Klout (a Twitter influence ranking startup).  Klout are on the first floor of the same building Twitter are in.  This was excellent – really educational and a great sharing of ideas between us both.  Klout have just sealed a 1.5M seed round.  

While we were there we also sat down with LiveIntent, another Twitter focussed app.  The great outcome here is that the VC we met on Wednesday who might lead to a second round meeting is also an investor in LiveIntent and they seemed happy to make an intro for us – this is pure gold in the start-up space.  Investors trust the opinions of people they invest in.

Finally Thursday afternoon it was our much awaited meeting with Twitter.  We had some great conversations and were pleased to confirm that we aren’t treading on any toes from their perspective as well as learn a bit about how they thought we might fit in the eco-system.  It was a strong highlight for me, although the investor meetings are more important, it was nice to know that Twitter now know what we are up to.

Late Thursday it was a meeting with a friend of a friend from Melbourne, then Thursday night I saw on Twitter that Samantha Bell, who I know in Melbourne was in San Francisco too.  So it was running around to meet up with her and we all went out to dinner.  Who says Twitter isn’t useful!  I missed Ross Hill who landed at SFO only because we weren’t close enough together to actually meet in person.

Friday it was the MongoDB San Francisco conference – this was also cool.  It’s interesting that my background in Enterprise has well prepared me for a lot of scaling challenges and issues – this is at least in part because several servers (or virtual servers) for global projects at PwC was relatively easier than in a startup where every server counts.  It’s given me a good head start in understanding the architectures and configuration possibilities for scaling out our own systems now.  The big highlight at the MongoDB conference was a live demo of a 25 server cluster running at over 800M+ transactions per second.  Pretty mind blowing stuff.

Then I waved goodbye to Alex and headed home.  We could of accomplished more in San Francisco if we’d stayed, but it was time to go.  This week we’ve got plenty of emails and meetings to follow up on and we’ll see where we get to.  It’s also good to be able to focus on some coding again, although the capital raising continues to tick along in the background now.

Highlights

  • Good range of VC and investors meetings.
  • Winery tour was awesome.
  • Meeting other startups and meeting with Twitter.
  • Great social catch ups with various people including Chuck Baker and Samantha Bell.
  • Meeting with Twitter
  • Going home
  • Learning my favourite new joke – “Renes Descartes walks into a bar, the bar tender says to him ‘Hey Renes, do you want a beer’.  Renes says ‘I think not’ then disappears.”
Lowlights
  • The fact the visit has had to come to an end – although I wanted to go home to the family, there’s little doubt in my mind if we could spend a few months there we’d lock away the money. 
Goal(s) this week
  • Back to coding and some critical things to be done (for me getting the pipeline live).
  • Follow ups with the meetings from San Francisco.

Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 23

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The time in San Francisco is winding quickly to a close.  We now have only four days left to make the most of this particular opportunity.  I thought in this post it would be good to summarise what we've learnt to date about investor meetings and introductions.

I guess the first reflection is that it's a lot like running a hurdle race with only a very high level knowledge on how many hurdles there are, or how high they are.  Some of them we know, some we didn't expect, and most of them we have little idea how hard they are to leap.  While there is a nice fuzzy theory about having everything ready to go, the reality is this isn't practical in a bootstrapped start-up that's trying to work on the most pressing priority of the day.  Sometimes you just have to roll your sleeves up and get pitching.  As we've gone along, we've needed to produce the following:

  1. Elevator Pitch – 15 – 30 seconds on what you do that bites someones interest, with 1 – 1.5 minutes explaining it.
  2. E-mail introduction – 4 – 5 paragraph e-mail covering key points on who you are and what you do that will convince someone to meet with you.
  3. Executive summary – 2 – 3 page summary of business plan, team and ask that provides more detail. NB The right introduction will skip this requirement.
  4. Pitch – Your slide deck and pitch.
  5. Term Sheets – What you want, what they want…
While I say produce, we've always been in a position where we generally know the answers, but it's the act of putting them to paper we haven't always got around to until it's become critical.

If you're interested in pitching in the valley then the best advice I can give is this is know your 3T'S (I think I just made this acronym up, although there are lots of other discussions on these elements).

Team, Technology, Traction and Social Proof. (3T'S)

I mentioned last week the valley runs on relationships (and is powered by opinions). The Social Proof is the entry fee to talk about your Team, Technology and Traction.

The meetings we have progressed the fastest and furtherest in our time here have all had strong Social Proof – we've known someone (or met someone at a conference) who has liked what we are doing and validated us to a further round of meetings.  Without the Social Proof, you can email people, but you won't get far fast.  The social proof can come from strange places.  The key is to network, network and network.  Get out, socialise and chat, build relationships and people from all sorts of unlikely meetups will help you get introductions to others.  Don't forget that Social Proof also includes a great advisor – if you've signed on someone who believes in you that is respected and has a great reputation that also counts for a lot.

Once the social proof is down, the 3T's are critical.  You don't have to have all of them (although of course it's better that you do), if you don't have all three, you need to kick arse in at least two of them.

Team
Why would an investor sink their cash into you and your co-founders?  What have you done.  This is why serial entrepreneurs can raise cash more easily.  Yes they have social proof, but more importantly, they have the team credentials.  In my opinion Team is the most critical of the three.

Technology
Why is your technology better, more defensible, patentable etc. than anyone else's? If you have fantastic technology this helps.  It's often here that you'll build the barriers to entry as well.

Traction
Show me the money! Traction counts for a lot – if you've got revenue, then you've got the proof someone will pay for it.  If it's not revenue, it's customer sign ups, freemium traffic etc. – whatever; there must be some indication that this is something people want to use.

In the spirit of sharing, our Social Proof is improving, we've been networking hard and building on it.  This is one of the key reasons we need more time here, you can't rush it, but I think given the time so far we are growing this and we are managing to get introductions.

Our Team is good – we get excellent feedback on this.  Yes, we haven't turned a multi million dollar exit on some other startup, but my background at PwC and Alex's role as co-founder at Haokanbu count for a fair amount.  We've got business and entrepreneurial experience and that counts for a lot.

Technology is very strong.  We would improve this with patents (although we do believe two component of what we are doing are patentable).  People can see and understand how there is a significant technical challenge to what we are attempting and that pulling it off would be a significant barrier to entry.

Traction – This is weak.  It's compensated for by Team and Technology.  We do have some traction, but at the end of the day, nothing beats money coming in the door.

Of course these all then lead you to the next hurdle, but before you start the race, think hard about these 3T'S and what you have in place.

Highlights

  • First real pitch and securing a second round meeting.
  • Lining up more pitches this week.
  • Great community here in San Francisco and the networking.

Lowlights
  • Probably the money.  Burnt way more cash than I intended on the socialising aspect, but it is leading to introductions which is a good thing I guess.
Goal this week
  • Pitch, pitch, pitch, pack up, go home!

Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 22

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A little out of sync this week but I blame the time difference!

We continue to have a very interesting time here in San Francisco.  It's ranged from the stunning (hearing Opera singers serenade each other at a birthday party in local restaurants) to the slightly off putting (seeing the crack addicts shooting up, the rush for public toilets when the library opens and the general homelessness that is in the Tenderloin district).

Given I've covered Chirp in the last post, I'll move on to the value of a pitch.  It's increasingly apparent that the first 30 seconds is critical. You need to do two things, 1) get the message you want across and 2) more critically NOT get the wrong message across.  This second part is generally under emphasised by people, but it's brutal.  You might think you're saying the right things, but if there is any ambiguity, then the rest of your pitch is spent correcting the things they thought they heard.

People have also said start-up life is brutal and that your the only one that believes in your idea.  In the valley that's a triple dose.  Everyone here has a) seen it before b) heard it before, c) is so caught up in what THEY want to say and pitch to you that you'll find people slamming your idea from pillar to post.  It has its upside – which is you get resilient, you refine and you thrive, but you also begin to get cagey.

That's not just small start-ups.  Everyone is also ready to say why x, y, or z company has it all wrong.  The valley runs on relationships, but it's fueled by opinions!

Highlights

  • Networking
  • Relationships
  • Slowly working our way to pitches
Lowlights

  • None really, just the need to be resilient and keep self belief.
Goal this week

  • Pitch, pitch and pitch.

Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 21.5 – San Francisco Edition

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Since arriving in San Francisco there is more happening than I can cram into a weekly post, hence this special edition.  It’s been a really exhausting few days and I’ve never been as tired as I was last night in my life.

After arriving Tuesday AM after around 20 hours of travel there was a preChirp party which of course I went to to network and meet people.  That was great, but of course tiring, although the timezone worked in my favour.

Wednesday morning Alex and I headed to Chirp, the first day was all conference and pretty straight forward – lots of talking at us and announcements.  It was held at the Palace of Fine Arts, which is a strangely renaissance or italian style building that feels our of place in the US.  The evening and second day was at Fort Mason centre which is a huge old army warehouse and was a lot more informal.

Wednesday evening we were bussed to Fort Mason for some dinner and drinks and some more informal community presentations, then the hack day started and ran all night for those who wanted to do it (you could hack all night or just rock up on the Thursday for the informal talks).

Alex and I had an idea which was to make a chirp specific version of Tribalytic that looked at all the attendees and analysed them in 5 minute intervals mapped against the presentations.

We realised pretty quickly that with 1000 other developers clamouring for attention, it was going to be really hard to cut through and get noticed so we needed to do something special.  The Twitter guy (@dougw) organising the demo slots was impossibly busy and we felt we weren’t going to make the show case, so we needed a new approach.

We committed to the all nighter to make this happen.

Come Thursday morning, we were wrecked.  After another brush off trying to secure a pitch spot, we were close tossing it in and heading back to the Hotel and sleep but we egged each other on and hung in there.  We were feeling down though.

Then things started to happen! Someone saw me and I demo’d the application, we got some nice feedback.  Then Alex met someone he knew from O’Reilly media, we did a demo to him, he called someone else over and by the end of Thursday we had an email in our inbox from the first investors inviting us to come visit them on Tuesday next week.

There was a meet the co-founders session in the afternoon, so we queued for our 3 minutes with them, but time ran short so we ended up with 1 minute.  In that 1 minute we pitched hard, showed them the app on the laptop and then got invited to come to Twitter HQ next week to share with them our analysis of Chirp and Tribalytic.  We are really excited about this and just trying to set the meetings up now.

Then there was a meet the investors session – basically investors milling around and all the developers pitching.  You met the investor and you got to “shoot the shit” (as it was attractively called).  We pitched to 4 and got 3 invites to follow them up for meetings.

Turns out that analytics is a hot area and we are right here at the perfect moment.  Everyone wants some skin in the game in the analytics space.

The other great thing that happened was one of the people recording the event for Twitter saw us, liked the story of a 24 hour hack and the fact we’d travelled from overseas so I did an interview and a demo of the application, now we’ve got a great video to share around that shows me tired and unwashed, but still does a good job I hope.

If you’re wondering what we are up to, check out the video.  http://www.twitvid.com/SU2P0

We then also met a couple of other Twitter guys who were interested so we’ve really made some progress.

Have to get back to some work now! Plenty to do to be ready for all these pitches and demos next week.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 19

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Two weeks now until we head off to San Francisco so the pressure is rapidly increasing with every day we spend working on getting the prototype "out the door".

The challenge is that we perhaps underestimated just how complex the actual web interface would be.  It's not just rendering back-end content, but delivers a fully cached local data store with many elements to make it a dynamic client experience.  It's not a web site, it's a web application.  That said, it's now partially complete and working, with some more elements to go.

On the very positive front, we are really pleased to welcome Doris Spielthenner as our first formal advisor.  Doris was a managing partner at FAS.research in the US and has her own data analytics company here in Melbourne, http://www.idu-consult.com.  She's described as "one of the world's leading experts and practitioners in applying social network analysis to real-world problems" by former colleagues and with her extensive list of publications and research papers along with her experience in the field of data and social analytics she's a great person for us to have on board and to keep us on the straight and narrow!

Not everything was highly beneficial – I attended a talk on the Commercialisation Australia Grant which was very dull.  I did enjoy catching up with Mark Mansour for a coffee afterwards though.

Thursday was very entertaining. First a good mornings work, then off to lunch with Fenn from Adioso and chatting about AMQP / RabbitMQ / Celery implementations followed by a "super secret" developers workshop in the afternoon (can't yet tell you what for, it's under NDA but no doubt it will come up later).

On Friday I met with John Barratt who developed http://www.trendmaps.com and is off to the Twitter conference in San Francisco as well.  It was great to meet up with a local twitter developer and share thoughts (well, me pick his brains really) on geo-locating tweets.

Finally the processing pipeline finally went live which was great.  It's needed a few tweaks, but generally is working really well.  I'm now cranking up the various components to make it much more aggressive about refreshing and location users for us.

We are now at around 17,000 Australian Twitter users fully indexed and up to date – I want to grow this to around 50,000 by next Monday.

Highlights?

  • Doris agreeing to come on board as our first advisor.
  • A partial prototype.
  • The processing pipeline fired up and working.  Very impressed with the quality and robustness of AMQP, RabbitMQ and Celery in combination.
  • Getting the pipeline up and running in production.

Lowlights?

  • Too easy – Commercialisation Australia Talk.  Shoot me before I agree to any more government talks.
  • Too much to do, too little time.

Goal this week?

  • Complete to a point that we can start showing the prototype to people.
  • Index, index and index more Australian Twitter users.