Tagged: Founders RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• StartX Staff 3:06 pm on May 15, 2012 Permalink
  Tags: Educational ( 7 ), Founders, StartX News ( 11 )   

  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 ( 7 ), Founders   

  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 7:36 pm on April 16, 2012 Permalink
  Tags: Community ( 2 ), Founders, StartX News ( 11 )   

  StartX Welcomes Spring 2012 Founders 

  

  StartX Spring 2012 Community. Photo: Alexa Lee

  Our Spring 2012 class, the largest StartX session to date, has settled in and the office is bursting with people, dogs, equipment, and energy like never before!  After a series of introductory events such as our Welcoming Party and Office Warming Breakfast, the 16 startups have acclimated to StartX life. Their schedules quickly filled with mentor meetings, workshops, speaking events, product development, fundraising talks, and community events.

  

  StartX party by Game Closure, Jetlore, & MindSumo. Breakfast by Medigram, Wyatt. Photos: Alexa Lee

  At all hours, we now have founders coding up a variety of mobile and internet applications. In our same office space, you’ll find rows of workbenches. Yes, a few teams are building tangible products in our headquarters to be used in the real, physical world. In one workstation, you’ll find the tools of educational toy designers. In another, you see an array of eyewear prototypes and can hear the hum of 3D printouts in progress. It’s an awe-inspiring sight to see and we feel really lucky to be working with these very talented founders.

  Below is a brief look at our 6th class. While many of our Stanford-affiliated founding teams have chosen to stay out of the spotlight for most of the session, you’ll be hearing about a handful of them over the next few months. One company, Vergence Labs, just launched their Kickstarter for computing enabled eyewear and was prominently featured on the cover of Singularity Hub. Check them out!

  Spring 2012, StartX

  Founders at a glance:

  • 41 founders
  • 70% are completing or have attained advanced academic degrees
  • 10% are completing or working towards Computer Science degrees
  • Founder who is a wind turbine designer
  • Founder who programmed a six-legged robot in 8th grade
  • Founder who built a successful computer animation and visual effect studio
  • Founder who is a professional musical recording artist and DJ
  • Innovator in Residence – 18 years old
  • Academic majors represented: Education, Business, Computer Science, Linguistics, Physics, Human Biology, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace, Sustainable Design & Construction, Chemical Engineering

  Companies at a glance:

  • 16 companies
  • (2) Early childhood learning technology startups
  • (2) Cleantech companies
  • (3) Healthtech companies
  • (4) Consumer web (1) enterprise web
  • Industry focus: edtech, cleantech, hardware, enterprise, consumer web, mobile, finance
  • 35% received previous funding
  • Team of rocket scientists (aeroastro physicists)
  • Team of toymakers with combined mechanical, electrical, and industrial engineering expertise
  • Team of musicians
  • Team of Dads
  • Company working to increase # of women in technology
  • Company aiming to bring the world closer through language
   

• Soumya Santhanakrishnan 8:28 pm on March 19, 2012 Permalink
  Tags: Educational ( 7 ), Founders   

  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 11:50 am on February 9, 2012 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Founders   

  Pratik Verma from AgeTak is featured on GigaOm!

  http://gigaom.com/cloud/can-big-data-help-a-family-business-compete-in-big-medicine/

   

  Reply Cancel reply

  Name

  Email

  Website

  

  

  
  

  CAPTCHA Code *

  

• Soumya Santhanakrishnan 9:55 pm on February 5, 2012 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Founders   

  Brendan Marshall from Kitchit talks about democratizing private dining. Check him out on Huffington Post!

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/brendan-marshall-kitchit-interview_n_1251345.html?ref=san-francisco

   

• Soumya Santhanakrishnan 4:37 pm on January 25, 2012 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Educational ( 7 ), Founders   

  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 12:33 pm on January 6, 2012 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Founders   

  MindSumo adds a new dimension to hiring college students. Check them out on Business Insider!

  http://www.businessinsider.com/mindsumo-wants-to-give-companies-a-way-to-quiz-potential-candidates-2012-1

   

• Soumya Santhanakrishnan 9:41 pm on December 29, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Founders   

  Carbon Lighthouse is out to make saving the planet profitable. Check them out on Palo Alto Patch!

  http://paloalto.patch.com/articles/carbon-lighthouse

   

• Soumya Santhanakrishnan 7:01 pm on December 20, 2011 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Founders   

  We’re excited for Kitchit and our StartX alumnus Brendan Marshall who’s made it on Forbes 30 under 30! Kudos Brendan!

  http://www.forbes.com/pictures/ekeg45fe/brendan-marshall-ceo-kitchit-28/