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  • Alexa Lee 6:01 pm on December 20, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: Educational, , Media, , PR, ,   

    Meet the Press, PR – Media Education for StartX Startups 

    Tech reporters and StartX startups in small group Q&A. Photo by PaulSakuma.com

    While startups do some pretty cool things, they’re often not very savvy about sharing their stories with the media. Good writers are always looking for leads and story inspiration. To connect tech journalists and StartX founders, we launched our first ever, “Meet the Press” educational media event last week, sponsored by law firm Fenwick & West. The results? A better understanding of the technology media and how to pitch a story as well as many new entrepreneur-reporter connections formed.

    “I love it when great, symbiotic communities come together to help each other! The press participation was awesome and I learned a lot,” said Mark Brenneman, founder of Pico, an app that makes event planning as “easy as sending a text.”

    Media Advisors Contribute
    The evening’s “headliners” included more than a dozen technology reporters who shared their media experience with our StartX community of entrepreneurs. As a non-profit, education-focused entity, such community-based help is critical and sincerely appreciated!

    Media educators at StartX share tips on pitching. Photo by PaulSakuma.com

    Part I – Panel Discussion
    Part I of the event was easy. In some ways, it was like reverse Demo Day. Instead of sitting in the audience, attending media were front and center. Each gave a quick introduction. The entrepreneurs took notes and tried to differentiate the writers and their outlets. With a good understanding of what each reporter focuses on, it becomes easier to know who to contact when you have news to share. Listen for yourself by playing the audio below.

    As memories of poor PR outreach started to resurface, the reporters became even more motivated to talk. They seemed to agree that email contact was the most common and usually most efficient way to communicate a company pitch. To be effective, Liza Boyd, a magazine writer for Fast Company and San Francisco, strongly recommended good preparation.

    “Do your research. Know what they cover. Know what angles they’re interested in. Because when we get that generic email, please be assured that is the fastest way to get into the trash bin,” she said.

    CNET columnist and #Dominatefund manager Ben Parr, added that having a personal introduction via email or an attention-grabbing subject line can help.

    “Try to get an introduction from someone the writer might know or put something in the title that will get their attention, even if it is just ‘Stanford,’” he said.

    Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Jon Xavier advised the entrepreneurs to diligently follow up.

    “Some reporters get hundreds of emails a day, he noted. “Don’t just send an email and forget about it.” He suggested trying other channels, including social media.

    (Left to right) Boonsri Dickinson, Anthony Ha, Jon Xavier, and Angela Hey. Photo by PaulSakuma.com

    While TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha is very active on social media, he advised the group to pay attention to details. His LinkedIn profile says, “Do not contact me via LinkedIn,” but people still try to contact him about stories there. For pitch content via email, he told the audience to think of the inverted pyramid style that traditional newspapers use, where the key facts and points are presented, first.

    “Every single paragraph has to have the most important information. Assume a reader can jump off and stop at any time. Every single piece is an essential piece,” he explained.

    Boonsri Dickinson, a writer for Byte, shared a simple tip, “Write like a human!” She said jargon-filled emails just end up being hard to read.

    To figure out what to highlight in a pitch, VentureBeat’s Christina Farr, recommended using the elements in your story that usually get people excited.

    “Think about – what’s the story that when I talk about my startup, it makes them go, ‘OMG, that’s so cool!’ That’s what we want to hear about too,” she explained.

    Mountain View Voice tech columnist Angela Hey said she’s only interested in Mountain View companies and clarity is key.

    “I need a very clear description. I like software and mobile. I like to look at where the future trends are. I like to do my own investigation and meet with the company,” Hey told the entrepreneurs.

    Rafe Needleman, a veteran journalist who recently launched Opportunity Notes for Evernote, told the audience not to excessively self-edit, which can sometimes stifle good content.

    “Let the story flow. Every person has a story and in many cases, it is not always the story that you think it is,” he explained.

    Producing a well-written story is how MIT Technology Review’s Rachel Metz pleases her editors. We asked, “What makes the boss happy?” For Metz, a magazine writer, publishing a thoroughly researched piece is highly valued. It usually begins with a good interview.

    “A startup being really willing to share information about how they’re doing and some personal details as well. That is what will make up a really good story,” she said.

    Sensing that the audience might be feeling intimidated about the challenge of getting press attention from the “wall of journalists in the room,” Wade Roush, West Coast editor for Xconomy, told entrepreneurs to think beyond conventional publications. He advised them to develop other channels for getting their message out, such as posting on a blog.

    “Don’t obsess over this. We are gatekeepers for a very specific kind of communication and it is not the only communication on earth,” he said.

    Michael Chiu, co-founder of Medigram, who also participated in the event, could not agree more. His own company, featured by Roush earlier this year, develops HIPAA-compliant messaging apps for medical communications and just launched its own “Mediblog.” As CEO of a seed-stage company, Chiu does all his own PR work. Most panelists felt that early stage company founders should be doing the same until their business demands a more complex communications strategy.

    “For me it is almost about avoiding PR for as long as possible. I would love to hear from you, especially at an early stage. I’d love for you to reach out to me and see if we can start a conversation,” said Farr.

    While that might be a preference for some writers, Shelly Gordon, a PR professional with G2 Communications who attended the event said, “I wasn’t surprised by the somewhat negative comments about PR professionals. Science & health journalists can be even tougher. We face the challenge of serving two masters: our clients and the press.  But I agreed with Wade/Xconomy that we’re all just trying to do a decent job in our respective fields.”

    Wade Roush, Xconomy talking to StartX founders. Photo by PaulSakuma.com

    Part II – Breakout Groups
    For the second half of the evening, founders, writers, and PR folks formed small groups to make introductions and engage in more intimate Q&A. Initially, this was the awkward part. Many tech founders are not natural self-promoters and some tech writers are self-proclaimed, shy “geeks.” Regardless, they eventually got talking. The groups covered a wide range of topics. Some founders wanted to learn how to make sure your story is told correctly. Others asked for tips on executing a good press launch. One group talked about “best and worst ways to get attention on a budget.” Jeff Kostermans, co-founder of Insynctive, a cloud based HR HelpDesk solution, said the interaction was a unique, appreciated opportunity.

    “StartX Rocks! This enabled Insynctive to get invaluable face time and have conversations with local media,” he said.

    Event and Dinner Sponsor – Fenwick & West

    The discussions continued as attendees nibbled on a Korean bulgogi and kimbap dinner. MindSumo intern Aaron Weiss also got the chance to mix and mingle for his first-ever StartX community event.

    “It was great to learn from individual panel members during the informal dinner!” he said. MindSumo, a StartX company that was covered by Needleman at the Fall 2011 Demo Day, is a platform that connects students and employers by hosting companies’ real-world challenges.

    The next challenge for these StartX founders and media experts will be to put ideas and introductions into action. Good luck and thank you to everyone who participated and helped organize!

    Event Photographer: Paul Sakuma

    Xconomy — Wade Roush, @wroush
    Byte – Boonsri Dickinson, @boonspoon
    TechCrunch – Anthony Ha, @anthonyha
    San Jose Business Journal – Jon Xavier, @svbizjon
    Mountain View Voice – Angela Hey, @techviser
    Technology Review- Rachel Metz, @rachelmetz
    Evernote Opportunity Notes – Rafe Needleman, @rafe
    VentureBeat – Christina Farr, @chrissyfarr
    Fast Company & San Francisco – Liza Boyd, @ebboyd
    CNET – Ben Parr, @benparr
    DishDaily – Chuck Stern, @thedishdaily
    DishDaily - Sebastain Gould, @thedishdaily
    AllThingsD – Camira Powell, @allthingsD
    NBC11/Press Here     – Scott McGrew – VIDEO CONTRIBUTION, @ScottMcGrew
    Stanford Daily – Billy Gallagher – VIDEO CONTRIBUTION, @GallagherBilly

     

  • StartX Staff 3:06 pm on May 15, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: Educational, ,   

    Interview with VipeCloud Founder – Adam Peterson 

    We’re pleased to announce that VipeCloud recently joined StartX as one of our Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, and we’re glad that Adam Peterson, the founder and CEO of VipeCloud is sharing his story with us.

     

    What inspired the idea of VipeCloud?

    When operating VipePower, a niche business in the video space for the past few years, we observed that a lot more people view videos than create videos for use in business. Also, for the most part, the only people inside an organization who manage video players like YouTube and Brightcove are marketers and IT professionals. There was a large group of people who lived between the creators and the viewers who were not being targeted by any existing platform, and were actively looking for engaging content to distribute. A great example of this is a sales person looking to engage a customer. There is also no way for a marketer to measure the impact of their video.

    Based on these findings we identified a large opportunity: to create an offering that caters to sales people through a bottom-up approach, and to wrap the use of video into a business process that helps sales people discover, share, and measure the impact of their videos. It turns out that helping sales people discover relevant videos is a win-win for all involved – the creator of the business-relevant video whose video was discovered, the sales person, and the end-viewer who was provided the relevant video.

    How did you build your founding team and what criteria did you use?

    The VipeCloud founding team is the same team that got the niche business, VipePower, off the ground. We knew we worked well together, we all had experience in the video space, and each person brought something unique and valuable to the team. As a young entrepreneur trying to build a video application targeting a niche industry of staffing & recruiting I desperately needed three things: a software developer, credibility, and cash to make it all happen. I then worked to get as specific as possible about the details of what I needed, and basically told the world what I was looking for. As a result, I relatively quickly had an advisor, Robin, with a career’s worth of experience in the industry I was targeting, and a developer, Eli, who could work the entire stack and was willing to put together a deferred payment agreement. Working my network again, I was able to pull together some friend and family money from angels – angels who I realize today as we evolved the business, invested in me and not the business.

    My advisor introduced me to Amalia whom he had worked with before at multiple different companies. She became a key asset for shaping the product, getting customers up and running, and providing feedback from the customers into our roadmap.

    I needed someone from the enterprise software world to help truly scale the business so I set out to find an enterprise software guru. It happened that I ran into a family friend who has 35+ years of experience in enterprise software, was formerly the Director of the Direct Marketing Division at Oracle and had experience with 20 or so different startups in one capacity or another.. Byron started as an advisor but proved to be helpful in so many areas that we gave him a title, a bigger chunk of the company, and brought on him full time. With that, the founding team was ready to change the world of business video.

    How did you finance VipeCloud?

    Every company seems to have a unique financing story when you dig into the details. VipeCloud is proving to have its own special story that dates back to VipePower. VipePower was funded with convertible notes and warrants from friends and family angel-investors. While the business was self-sufficient, it proved not scalable enough to either attract institutional investment or satisfy the drive of the founding team.

    As a result, when the idea for VipeCloud was conceived, we decided to use the revenue from VipePower to build VipeCloud rather than continue to develop VipePower. As we near the launch of VipeCloud, we are attracting additional financing from existing investors, new angel investors, and also building relationships with institutional investors to build on as we reach future milestones.

    What were the biggest challenges you’ve faced in generating interest in your company?

    Bringing a product to market successfully is the single biggest challenge of software companies today as few question your ability to actually develop the application. A major challenge I faced in generating interest in my company stemmed from my ability to understand and evaluate the size of the market in which I was operating – and as a result, get a large universe of people excited about what I was up to.

    When I first launched VipePower, I had just come out of investment banking, had little to no experience working in my target industry, and was building a software application for a relatively new technology – online video – to bring to a target audience not known for being first adopters. I did what I could to build my credibility by pulling a team with industry experience together and diving headfirst into the industry itself. That meant getting involved with industry associations at the board level. I generated a LOT of interest in my company and many would say VipePower is the best known video brand in the staffing and recruiting industry.

    That said, the industry itself was holding me back. My business simply never would be large enough if we limited ourselves to staffing and recruiting alone. So we had to broaden our reach. But how do we do that if the product and team I built revolved around this industry? It turned out luck was on our side. While we built our little niche business, we witnessed a lot of video companies try and fail. We watched as online video evolved from an early adopter technology into a utility. And we were tuned into the broader needs for video across all businesses – enough to start to see a major opportunity before us.

    The team came together and leveraged our experiences with VipePower and our perspectives unique to our skillsets. VipeCloud was born. Furthermore, credibility was now a strength as I proved I could lead a team through a bad recession, never let our cash balance drop below zero, and required no additional investment along the way – all while living and breathing business video.

    That brings us to today, a whirlwind as momentum builds for us. We are in the last mile of product development. I joined StartX – Stanford’s Student Startup Accelerator as an EIR. And we are getting the attention of existing and potential investors. By and large, a much broader audience than VipePower ever attracted is beginning to show interest in VipeCloud. We invite your readers who want to learn more about using video in the sales business process to sign up for our free private beta at http://www.vipecloud.com.

     

  • Soumya Santhanakrishnan 3:53 pm on April 23, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: Educational,   

    Interview with 6dot Innovations Founder – Karina Pikhart 

     

    Karina Pikhart is the founder of 6dot Innovations, which designs innovative assistive technology products for people with disabilities, most notably a Braille label printer for the blind. She is a StartX Fellow, having gone through the StartX program in October 2010, and is one of our most dedicated and involved founders.

     

    How did you get people involved in your idea? How did you sell it to them?

    We started out as a school project for a senior design class at MIT. That semester, we had a team of 15 people. Since then, we’ve been a team of 3-6 people. But I’m the only one of the original 15 still working on 6dot.

    I’ve done a lot of recruiting, but I’ve always felt like there is something lost in the process. I was sold on the idea behind 6dot by talking to customers: to schools for the blind and to printing presses for Braille materials. The new teammates I recruited were also sold on the idea, but only by talking to me. There’s a big difference. In February, we opened for sales, and my team started talking to customers directly who called in to order their Braille labeler. Finally, they got to see for themselves the real potential impact of 6dot.

    How did you finance your company?

    Our company has gone through a very interesting journey in financing. We were fortunate to raise a lot of non-dilutive funding, by winning the BASES product showcase and a couple of other awards. We also raised over $50,000 through Kickstarter.

    How do you think you have grown as an entrepreneur?

    When you are someone else’s employee, you’re just focused on what you personally, your team, and your department are working on. In a startup, you and your team are controlling the whole company, and the experience forces you to really understand the whole process, the whole fabric of a company that is made up of marketing, product design, business model development, finance and more, all woven together. There are really interesting dynamics between these areas that are crucial to understand. On the other hand I don’t get to specialize in anything as much.

    One very important thing I learned was sales. In a startup, from the moment you find your cofounder, you’re selling. In fact, finding your cofounder is your first sale.

    I was terrible at it to start with, because in engineering, you’re taught to speak very scientifically. So now the point is to be conscious about that, learn from it, and use it as an opportunity to grow.

    How do you balance 6dot with school?

    For 2 out of the 3 years I’ve been working on 6dot, I’ve been a full time student. There really is no such thing as balance when you’re dealing with two big commitments. School definitely suffered, and so has 6dot. It’s almost like being married to two people. It’s definitely not true for everyone, but for me, school and work were very different, and were competing for my time and loyalty.

    What has been helpful is having a team that understands. The positive side of being a student was that I wasn’t a financial burden on the company, since I was funded as a graduate student.

    What do you look for when you are recruiting?

    I’m still learning about how to find the right team. The most important thing to look for is hunger – someone who’s got that spark in their eye when they talk about 6dot and is hungry to do whatever it takes. We need someone who is going to jump out of bed and hurry to work every single day. The company is going to be your family in the early days, and the process is definitely easier when everyone is hungry for the same things. My feelings for my company are so strong that there is a real devotion to the company. When you bring someone new in, three years into the process, it’s like they’re suddenly a stepmom to a kid who is 3 years old. We need to give them the opportunity to cultivate the same desire to succeed that we have.

    How do you keep tabs on everything you’re working on?

    My digital life sometimes gets disorganized. I try a lot of different organizational systems, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. The trick is to work on one thing at a time, and to never sacrifice doing the things that will help keep you organized because you are “too busy.” Funny, I do this well around my house (no piles of clothes anywhere! Bed made! Dishes washed!), but terribly on my desktop (where the heck did I put that file? What was it even called?). As a team, it is important to make expectations clear on who is responsible for what.  Don’t fragment but assign responsibility.

    Something else that is important to do, is putting systems in place to keep track of each other’s progress. We keep a to do list of open issues with our manufacturing partner, and keep the document up-to-date with daily action items that we’re working on, while also paying attention to our longer-term goals. We also keep track of when we say things will get done, and when they actually get done. We then look at the delta between those two numbers and try to understand why that happened, and then improve on that.

    The crux of getting things done well is understanding how long things take, putting in buffers for unexpected delays, and then rapidly learning and improving on future deadlines that you set up for yourself. We learned a lot about this from our contract-manufacturing partner. The hour that we spend doing this exercise twice a week is so worth it. In the end, it’s all about forming good habits, because habits will always overpower willpower.

     

     

  • Alexa Lee 12:55 pm on April 2, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: , Educational, ,   

    The Customer Speaks – StartX Fellows on Mentors, Company Building, Co-founders, and Funding 

    The Customer Says..

    At StartX, our core “business” is helping startup founders develop.

    They’re the “customers.” We provide the product and service.

    In support of Entrepreneurship Week 2012 at Stanford, some of our fellows served as panelists for two different speaking events. One panel focused on issues related to medical technology entrepreneurship. The other panel featured StartX fellows working on a variety of industries, including social media, enterprise, medtech, consumer internet, and social gaming.

    As a StartX staffer in the audience, the speaking engagements were an interesting opportunity to hear our “customer-founders” talk about the program and review their experiences in public. We’re big on feedback, so a lot of this was not new, but seeing them on stage explaining to students what they’ve learned was pretty rewarding. It was also rather novel to see some newly minted founders, embracing the job of inspiring entrepreneurship through their own stories. For the attendees, consisting primarily of aspiring Stanford student entrepreneurs, the talks offered some solid advice as well as stories about what it’s like to accelerate with StartX.

    E-Week StartX Panelists: General Session (left), Medtech Session (right). Photo: Alexa Lee + Arti Patel

    Here’s a list of the StartX companies and participating founders:

    AgeTak, Dr. Pratik Verma
    Bell Biosystems, Dr. Caleb Bell
    Carbon Lighthouse, Brenden Millstein
    Game Closure, Michael Carter and Martin Hunt
    Gauss Surgical, Milt McColl
    Jetlore, Montse Medina
    MindSumo, Rohan Puranik
    Stem Cell Theranostics, Divya Nag and Andrew Lee
    Clear Ear, Lily Truong

    Mentors Get an A+

    On stage at Cubberley auditorium, MindSumo (Winter 2011) co-founder Rohan Puranik, kicked off a StartX mentor “love fest” by calling out some of his company’s advisors, “Our two leads Anthony Soohoo and Dave Hodson. If you guys end up in StartX, you should actually fight people to get them. Actually fight for it,“ he said with a totally straight face.

    MindSumo meets Anthony SooHoo at Mentor Mixer Night, Winter 2011. Photo: Alexa Lee

    Puranik’s startup enables companies to post corporate challenges for students to solve. Since they launched their alpha product at Stanford about two months ago, they’ve onboarded more than 500 student solvers and have signed up a few major corporations. MindSumo, which has some big news to share in the coming weeks, pivoted a few weeks after the session started. Puranik described how their mentors helped them recognize the need to pivot, evaluate the decision, and guide them with executing the new idea.

    Other mentor/advisor shoutouts from the panel went to Jay Borenstein, John Lily, George Zachary, and the mentoring team for Stem Cell Theranostics.

    Community Matters, Start Building Now

    Game Closure co-founder and CEO Michael Carter told his audience you should “build a community around your company.” For anyone familiar with GC culture, the statement needed no clarification. Word about Game Closure parties, weekly game nights, art shows, dinners, and other events is quickly spreading around the valley. It has become a cultural and recruiting powerhouse. The company, which produces a cross-platform javascript game engine for mobile phones, began as a two-person team working from a Palo Alto basement.

    Game Closure game nights - Thursdays in Mountain View. Photo: Alexa Lee

    When they joined StartX for the Spring 2011 session, “Things got real,” said co-founder and CTO Martin Hunt, who coded round-the-clock with Carter in the very beginning. “It was kind of a transition for us. We went from a basement office that didn’t look anything like a company to being completely emerged in a startup experience (at StartX). Just being around a lot of other startups made the whole experience a lot less foreign and a lot more part of our lives,” said Hunt.

    Once acclimated to StartX, Game Closure really started to take off. The company has since raised a large funding round, hired close to 30 employees, and now frequently sponsors StartX social events.

    OTL and FDA

    The FDA and Stanford’s Office of Technology and Licensing, which creates licensing strategy for technology developed at Stanford, got mixed commentary from the panel discussion held at Thorton Center featuring medtech companies.

    Milt McColl, a two-time Superbowl champ who has been involved in five medical startups, including his latest – Gauss Surgical, told the audience, “If you’re coming into the medtech space you really need to understand the FDA regulations around it,” he said. McColl’s company, which closed a round of seed financing earlier this year, develops a blood management platform. His team works out of StartX headquarters at the AOL building in Palo Alto, where he advises startups as a StartX Entrepreneur-In-Residence.

    While discussion about the OTL took up a significant portion of the panel time, some founders asked that their statements not be unpublished. Others were more open. Dr. Caleb Bell, co-founder of Bell Biosystems, which has introduced a technology that creates an inheritable magnetic signature in eukaryote cells, told the audience, “We made a conscious decision not to use Stanford resources to develop our company. This is a double edged sword,” he said. “We own all our IP, but have struggled very hard to get to where we are today.” Bell, who took part in StartX’s 2nd class – Fall 2010, founded and bootstrapped his company while finishing his Ph.D in Biophysical Chemistry at Stanford. Since presenting at the StartX Demo Day for investors earlier this year, Bell has fielded tons of inquiries from investors interested in learning how their technology will impact diagnostics, cancer treatment, regenerative medicine, and cell therapies.

    Get Credit and Learn On The Job

    Several StartX founders from both panels started working on their companies while in school. Some recommended that student entrepreneurs leverage project classes and independent study options for earning academic credits and building their companies.

    “The more you can get Stanford to give you time, the better,” said Brenden Millstein, co-founder of Carbon Lighthouse, which makes it profitable for businesses and entities to eliminate their carbon footprint. Millstein, who received a master’s degree in Renewable Energy Engineering and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business, said he took four classes that enabled him to fulfill academic requirements while working on his startup.

    Cameron Teitelman, who founded StartX in 2009 while a student at Stanford, shared an example of how he used a decision analysis class to work on a real world issue that involved his first startup, the Essential Card. “It’s a way to hack into Stanford to really get value out of the classes as a founder…I know a lot of student entrepreneurs who effectively used project classes to work on their projects, which then turned into companies,” he said.

    Jetlore founder Montse Medina, who is on leave from the Ph.D program in Computational and Mathematical Engineering, says due to the nature of her course load, she never actually took any classes related to business or entrepreneurship. “There’s nothing like learning on the job,” she explained. Medina has adapted to her chosen role and now leads an impressive, highly technical startup with a mission to give social content more meaning. Earlier this year, Jetlore released an alpha version of its first consumer facing product, Qwhisper, and won a prestigious industry award for its technology and API.

    Stanford Is a Great Place To Find a Co-founder

    StartX founders said that when it comes to co-founder “prospecting,” the Farm is resource rich. Even so, they warned, student entrepreneurs should still do very thorough vetting. Actually finding and committing to “the One” (or anyone on the founding team) should not be done in haste. McColl, with deep experience as both a VC and a entrepreneur, has seen many startups crippled by co-founder issues. “I’ve seen companies implode and mostly it’s because internally they can’t find a way to work together,” said McColl.

    StartX founders face the same co-founder issues. When they do, Teitelman is usually one of the first to be consulted. He recommends that students take classes they’re passionate about and to get to know potential co-founder classmates through shared interests, projects or assignments. If a team decides to do a startup, he advises them to set expectations early on and to take that task very seriously.

    Cleantech company Carbon Lighthouse founders Brenden Millstein and Raphael Rose. Photo: Alexa Lee

    Millstein, who started Carbon Lighthouse with his childhood best friend Raphael Rosen, told the audience that they wrote out an extensive a contract prior to founding their company. The agreement outlined their expectations and ran through an exhaustive list of “what if’s” about their business relationship. They’re convinced this exercise put them on the right path. In the past year, their relationship has grown stronger. The company, which is moving its main operations to San Francisco, has tripled in headcount and has completed over 70 projects helping businesses and entities become carbon neutral.

    Various Funding Options – Get Creative

    With the topic of funding, StartX panelists had a lot to say and their experiences were all quite different. This comes as no surprise, as StartX, a non-profit, education-focused entity, works with Stanford founders who have expertise in various industries: consumer internet, biotech, medtech, mobile, edtech, enterprise, social gaming, social entrepreneurship, and hardware.

    Take the case of StartX fellow Pratik Verma, co-founder of AgeTak, a big data startup that enables companies to merge large databases while preserving customer privacy. Last year, AgeTak brought in ~$ 4 million in revenue, without ever taking any VC money. In looking back, Verma says that bringing in outside investment probably would have enabled them to move faster. He estimates that five years of work could have been two. “We’ve done it all through grants. If I had to do it all over, I would have pushed for VC money after a certain point,” said Verma. The 28-year old was completing his Ph.D in Computational Chemistry at Stanford while also developing AgeTak on the side. After graduating, he came to StartX on recommendation from his friend, Bell (of Bell Biosystems). Verma’s Demo Day valley debut generated significant buzz for the company and shed light on its corporate mission: to reduce the nearly $3 trillion spent on healthcare and to accelerate research to find cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s and ALS. Verma’s father and co-founder passed away from ALS, which currently has no cure.

    Agetak co-founder Pratik Verma bootstrapped to profitability. Photo: Alexa Lee

    Last Fall, Stem Cell Theranostics founders received a prestigious, no-equity, National Science Foundation SBIR grant of $150k. Co-founder Divya Nag, an undergraduate studying Human Biology, told the panel audience that their team applied 6 months in advance. “While it was extremely competitive, it has opened many doors.” The StartX company, which includes five scientists, uses stem cell based technologies to screen pharmaceutical drugs for toxicity. It recently validated that their technology is more accurate at predicting cardiac toxicity than any other model on the market.

    And finally, there’s the big raise for Game Closure. At the time he spoke on the panel, Carter, who was wrapping up the details of his $12 million funding round, did not leave a clue about his imminent announcement. A few weeks later, they were making headlines. While Carter didn’t have much funding advice to share with the audience (the topic was not discussed in depth), at private StartX speaking events, he will talk at length and quite candidly. Always eager to help out other entrepreneurs, he encouraged the audience to connect with the speakers. “Everyone here should be like a potential mentor. You can find mentors anywhere,” said Carter. Unsurprisingly, he had a crowd of advice seekers waiting for him when the panel ended.

    With the closing of both events, students quickly swarmed the speakers, peppering them with even more questions. The interaction seemed to serve as solid proof that having role models within easy reach can make the thought of starting a new venture a little less daunting. This made me proud of our founders’ progress and eager to see who from the audiences may show up in our office someday!

    For more information about StartX and our upcoming summer session, attend our info session on April 3rd 7pm at the Nitery, 209 on campus. The application deadline for the session is April 12th.

    Application details

     

  • Soumya Santhanakrishnan 8:28 pm on March 19, 2012 Permalink
    Tags: Educational,   

    Interview with Lark founder – Julia Hu 

    Julia Hu is the CEO and founder of Lark Technologies Inc., which manufactures sleep devices that help you develop better sleeping patterns and tap into your true potential. Julia is a StartX Fellow and an outstanding entrepreneur, and she talked to us about her entrepreneurial journey and what she learnt along the way. 

     

    What inspired the idea of Lark?

    I think it was inspired by having a big problem myself, which I couldn’t fix with any existing device. I actually started the company because I moved in with my fiancé when we started the MIT Sloan program and my sleep went downhill, since he’d wake me up every single morning at 5:30 am. I ended up losing a lot of sleep over it, and that on top of his disbelief that I needed so much sleep! I wasn’t as sharp, confident, creative or happy! One Saturday, I woke up at 5 am to the alarm and thought, “Oh my God, this is going to happen for the rest of my life, so I better do something about it”.

    What were the first steps you took towards realizing your dream?

    I’m an engineer, but definitely not with an electrical or mechanical background. The first thing I did was I found a team. I talked to every single person I knew, to try to see if people would be interested in working on this project.

    But even before finding a team, it is important to find out if “the inspiration” deserves to be a company. I needed to answer the question, “Is this something that could help more than just me; a market of 1?” I realized it was when I did an elevator pitch in front of a bunch of MIT students. The market validation I obtained made me feel convinced that I should build a product.

    I also focused on a lot on need finding. Need finding is actually much more important than the design of the product. In the beginning, the best thing you can do is talk to as many potential users and potential naysayers as possible. You need to observe a bunch of people in what they actually do, rather than what they say they would do, and from that, draw out the essential needs of what you’re building for, rather than just focusing on how your product looks.

    How did you deal with the simple problem of needing money to build your business?

    We created the product from money we won in Business Plan competitions, which is a great way to find smaller amounts of money in the beginning.  It wasn’t until June 2010 that we decided to try Lark out as full timers and won a fellowship from Lightspeed Ventures to be a part of their incubator program. We raised a seed round at the end of 2010.

    Who did you talk to when you were thinking about fundraising?

    Not having an advisor prepping me on how to fundraise was a big mistake. I went into it with a little bit of experience, just from what I learnt through the Business Plan competitions and from my experience in running a Clean-tech incubator.

    While that experience helped me in terms of learning how to work with venture capitalists, I underestimated the need for knowledge in understanding how the VC community really works. Understanding what they’re looking for before you start fundraising is incredibly important.

    I was not prepared to expect a lot of things. When I realized this, I talked to a great few mentors, one of them being the previous Entrepreneurship Director of MIT Sloan. He would prep me and help me get into the fundraising mindset, where you show real conviction in your team and your vision, and display a real understanding of the market, as well as why it’s the right time to believe in your product.

    What were some of the other mistakes you made early on that you learnt from?

    Everyone always tells you that the team is important, and you don’t realize how true that is in the beginning, or how it is the most important factor for an early startup. I totally faltered there in the beginning, even though the people I chose were smart…no wait, brilliant. I actually struggled to find my real team that we launched Lark internationally with, until late 2010. The hardest part of a startup is convincing the best people to join, when you have the least amount of resources. The first thing I learnt was that firing is necessary. It’s always a hard choice, and firing before trying to find the right people is important.

    The philosophical way to find the right team is that you have to find people who share your values. You really have to articulate and be very judgmental about your own values, make sure you prioritize some values over others, and be able to make hard decisions. We look for people who are confrontational and want to resolve things, we don’t look for people who are pushovers or who are overpowering.

    I probably also struggled a lot with focus. In the beginning, we were talking to a lot of great mentors. I think that for a startup, what a founder really needs to do is understand and process all the external inputs they’re getting and really make strong clear decisions, because there is going to be a lot of advice that you get from great people, that is sometimes contradictory or telling you to focus somewhere else. One of the key things is prioritizing how you synthesize peoples’ helpful comments and feedback into something that is meaningful. It has a lot to do with processing and rising above all of the noise.

    How would you process tough feedback?

    The best thing to do is to listen to what they’re trying to say. Repeat back what you think you heard and state out some assumptions that you believe they have. A lot of people have certain assumptions, and as long as you can hear what they’re saying and understand what led them to the assumption, you can understand what portions are valid and what is based on an assumption that they’re making. I also like to sit back and say, “Let me think about it some more”, and then think about it when I don’t face that instant pressure.

    Which resources would you recommend for budding entrepreneurs?

    I would encourage finding a community like StartX. A community is really important because you want to know you’re not alone. Otherwise, I would look for mentors, and the top people in your field who might be interested in mentoring you.

    A lot of people who are so high up don’t actually get asked to be mentors. It’s an assumption that they do. I’d actually say that if you truly understand why they would be really meaningful to you as a mentor for your personal growth or for the growth of your company, you should find a warm introduction to that person, or even cold call them. It’s also important to be well prepared, with the reasons ready for why they’d be wonderful mentors, and show your passion and excitement.

    The biggest thing I learnt is that when you want something and want it to happen you have to go straight to the top. If they can’t help you they will find someone who can, and it will trickle down to the relevant person. If you start at the bottom you will just meet a lot of gatekeepers who won’t push you to the top because it isn’t in their interest to do so.

     

  • Soumya Santhanakrishnan 4:37 pm on January 25, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Educational,   

    Interview with WiFiSlam founder – Joseph Huang 

    Joseph Huang is the founder of WiFiSlam, a startup that develops enabling technologies for indoor location-based services. Joseph went through a session with StartX last summer and has been an alumnus of the program. Most StartX alumni return to provide continuing mentorship to each new batch of entrepreneurs in a number of ways, and Joseph is now an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR). Our EIRs help the current founders with different issues, and draw from their own experience to help the founders get the most out of StartX.

    Armed with a spiked haircut and a disarming smile, Joseph shared with us his learnings about pivots and fundraising.

    What was the biggest pivot WifiSlam had to deal with?

    When WiFiSlam first started out, we saw the company as one that possessed great technology and assumed we would find the people who wanted the service and would create value for them. But you can’t build a company that’s just technology. You need to create a product that is a solution to a problem in the market. Embracing the idea that we had to create a whole solution for a market was our biggest pivot. It’s important to go out there and actually interact with the market, and do your market research to understand the various factors affecting adoption.

    What are your key learnings about fundraising?

    Fundraising is very team specific, but of course there are some general wisdoms.

    No matter what, you need to understand your market better than anyone else, and sometimes one of the fastest ways to learn about your market is to go through the fundraising process yourself.

    There’s also a big difference between being a strong candidate for investment and an urgent one. The worst case you can make is when you’re strong but not urgent. When you make such a case you’re giving investors no reason to make a decision. Every investor will say, “That’s great and we will watch your trajectory. But you don’t need my money and I have more urgent things to tend to now”. The best case for fundraising is when you’re making the decision to invest imperative. For example, “We’ve already exceeded our target round size, we’re a retail startup, black Friday is in three weeks, and we need to be 100% focused on the product at that time, so we’ll be closing the round at that point regardless.”

     

     

  • Soumya Santhanakrishnan 9:16 pm on December 11, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Educational,   

    Interview with LinkedIn co-founder – Konstantin Guericke 

    Konstantin Guericke is a StartX mentor who is serving on the board of a number of startups, and has great insights about entrepreneurship and how you should leverage your network of contacts effectively. He is a popular Silicon Valley figure, especially known for co-founding LinkedIn. It is perhaps apt then that we refer you to his LinkedIn profile to learn more about all the awesome things he has done, so here it is.

    We had the chance to catch up with him recently, and would love to share his insights with the rest of the entrepreneurial community, so here goes!

    What are the questions that founders don’t ask at the beginning that they should?

    A mistake that I see happen frequently is people focusing too much on their product and not enough on the distribution. Most products fail not because they weren’t useful to somebody but because the customers don’t find out that they existed in the first place. At LinkedIn when we started out, we didn’t have much of a product. We focused more on the distribution channel, because for us, when more people are involved in the network, the more useful it becomes.

    Another thing I don’t see entrepreneurs ask enough is “why has it not been done already?”. If you’re working on a problem for which a solution already exists, is your solution ten times better? And if your idea is new, why hasn’t it been done before?

    Founders don’t always want to face that question, but it is important to do solid research on past attempts to fix the problem. Of course, there are some products that are viable now because of the ecosystem that exists which can support them. Most of the time however, you’ll end up finding out that your idea has been attempted before, usually in 1999 when everyone was trying something. Entrepreneurs ought to find those founders and get those learnings from them. I would be shocked at this point if you could not find them on LinkedIn. Ask them why their business didn’t work. They would know more than anyone else to help propel your business forward. I would definitely rethink my product if they give me good reasons for why the product won’t work and if I don’t have good answers for them.

    How do you make those connections with those founders?

    As a founder, you have to learn how to be the chief salesperson of your team. You’re going to be constantly selling to recruit people, to convince them of your vision for investment. You need to be good at sales to be a founder and to be successful.

    When you’re a student, you tend to think you don’t have that much to offer a domain expert in exchange for their advice. That’s actually quite far from the truth. You always have something to offer, so take a step back and think about the resources you have at hand. Sometimes, just doing some research and making a $10 contribution to a cause close to the mentors heart can make a difference, since it shows that you care enough to do your homework.

    Don’t you need to have a product in hand when you’re raising funding?

    At LinkedIn, we were in the fortunate situation of having a co-founder who had enough money to get the product launched. That is actually becoming a more typical model nowadays, especially since it is less expensive to build a product when you’re talking about software.

    There is also a question you need to ask yourself about whether you need funding or not. Rather than just figuring out what you need to do to get funding, you should take a step back and think about the size of what you’re building and whether it targets a large market, in which case you probably need funding, or if you’re filling a niche and you’re not sure how big it is going to be, in which case you might want to try bootstrapping the company directly to revenue.

    What advice do you have for founders when they’re forming a team?

    Having a vesting schedule is important. If you don’t put yourself in a vesting schedule and the priorities of founders change over the years, you might need to convince a founder to give up their equity later on when they’re not dedicating as much of their time to the project. It can get complicated when founders have a share in the equity and are not contributing. A vesting schedule makes the system clean and fair.

    A lot of founders waste too much time looking for advisors. Often, this is just to stuff the startup with a Board of Advisors of well-known industry figures. But I think many investors see right through that, so I would not waste my time and equity on that. In an advisory role, people are rarely dedicated enough to make the kind of contribution you are typically looking for. Often, you can get advice for free if you ask the right way. And if you really like someone a lot, then invite them to join your Board of Directors. This will be much more meaningful for potential investors since industry veterans are very selective about board memberships due to the responsibility involved. And once investment comes in, they simply join a board that already exists.

    When investors are looking at a company, what are the factors they consider?

    One of the first things they’d consider is who is referring you. The first way to get through the clutter is to get introduced by a person that the investor trusts. More often than not, you’re not going to get a meeting with the right person at the firm. Meetings are often “busy work”, and a lot of investors take meetings just to learn about a certain area. You could end up spending your time educating them rather than getting investment, so it’s important to reach someone who has clout in the firm.

    The second factor investors consider is whether you remind them of other entrepreneurs that they’ve seen be successful. It is quite important, and not something investors consciously process. Most might not even admit to it, but it is a pretty key aspect. When they learn about your company, it helps if you remind them of another company they wished they had invested in. Essentially they’re coming down the stairs to smell the cookies you’re baking.

     


     

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