Nibletz Staff - 74/87 - Serious Startups

How Casual is Too Casual for Entrepreneurs?

I love dressing informally, maybe too much. My wife frequently reprimands me for dressing down. I recently met with a US Senator in slacks and a collar shirt (which I thought was being respectfully dressy!) and he wryly cracked that I looked awfully comfortable. I sometime teach my HBS class in jeans (please don’t tell the dean).

But lately, I have been wondering if entrepreneurs have taken informality too far. I don’t mean dress code. I don’t care how they dress. I mean their thinking and approach.

You probably see it all the time – hipster entrepreneurs with the cool affect walking into meetings carrying nothing but their smart phone. When asked to present their story, they ramble informally without a cogent direction. When a substantive discussion ensues, and good ideas and follow-up items are generated, they take no notes. And when the meeting wraps up, there are no action items that are reviewed, no closure regarding next steps.

– See more at: http://bostonvcblog.typepad.com/vc/2014/02/have-entrepreneurs-become-too-informal.html#sthash.Lilw7HsU.dpuf

Entrepreneurship Lessons from the Front Lines

2013 was one of the hardest years of my life. It wasn’t the hardest but it was challenging. The hardest, was 1 year as a kid when my dad got Parkinson’s, my mom got sick, NibzNotes17 my mom’s best friend died, and the grandparent who helped raise me withered away like ash with cancer right in front of my eyes.

That’s a different kind of hard. This year was not hard in that way. I’ve been humbled more times than years I’ll live and I’ve been fortunate just as many times. This image of Forrest Gump seems to incapsulate my life countless times this year.

I meet someone I don’t know. They’re telling me nice things and I’m confused about what I’m doing there and I just have to pee. I realize I drank too much water and then look over and realize that’s a Clinton at the other table and everyone seems to have a story that starts with MIT, Harvard, or Stanford. This is life in 2013. It was a weird one.

How One Phrase Can Change Your Business Completely

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My first job out of college was an inside sales associate position, in which I was tasked with cold-calling busy professionals all day and kindly explaining to them why they

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should spend their company’s money on a service they truly didn’t need.

To say I was unqualified was a gross understatement (and should have been evident in my interview, when I casually mentioned I enjoyed ordering food online because I’m scared of the phone).

For those who don’t know, sales is a sink or swim position. You either hit your quota and keep your job, or you don’t. For me, not even the Coast Guard could have kept me afloat in my first couple months on the job. I sucked. While the cohort I was hired with excelled, I floundered. I couldn’t keep someone on the phone for more than 15 seconds.

Knowing the end was near, I asked (well, begged) our top performing sales guy for help. I probably looked pathetic enough that he said okay. And it was then that he explained to me a secret to business that totally changed my career (not to mention saved my job).

Edison Nation Medical Lets Anyone Test Their Medical Device Idea

EN-Medical_approved_logo[1] Healthcare and medical devices are becoming a big area of growth in the startup world. But, the path to development, testing, and iterating is expensive and difficult. It’s obviously not like software, which requires time but low capital.

Edison Nation Medical is trying to help individuals with great ideas bring their medical device to market. Think Quirky–for healthcare.

Check out our Q&A with Edison Nation Medical below, and head over to their website if you have a great medical device idea.

1. What’s your startup called?

Edison Nation Medical (www.EdisonNationMedical.com)

2. What’s your big idea?

We help people bring their bright healthcare ideas to life! Our mission is to identify and foster innovative healthcare and medical device inventions that improve the quality of care and increase efficiencies across the entire hospital ecosystem. We accomplish this goal by breaking down the barriers that often inhibit individual inventors – the doctor, nurse, patient, caregiver, university tech transfer office, or small company – from getting their ideas commercialized.

3. What’s the story behind your idea?

Edison Nation Medical is a medical device incubator and online community for people interested in changing healthcare. We provide a clear pathway for anyone—physicians, nurses, technicians, entrepreneurs, even patients and caregivers—to submit their product idea for in-depth review and potential commercialization. Our business model is based on trust—trust between a person with a great healthcare invention and a company that gives a thorough and expert read to determine the value of the idea. If an idea has value, we find it, unlock it and get it to market in order to improve care, lower cost and increase access for the patient.

4. Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

Louis Foreman, CEO of prolific consumer product developer Edison Nation, and leaders from Carolinas HealthCare System, one of the nation’s leading public healthcare systems, valued innovation in healthcare. They knew that creating a model whereby open innovation could exist outside the traditional R&D labs would foster new ideas to improve care, lower cost and increase access; ideas that likely wouldn’t have come to fruition as quickly, if at all, within the status quo. They launched Edison Nation Medical in July 2012.

Foreman is a prolific inventor, product developer, innovation enthusiast and small business entrepreneur. In 20 years, Louis has created nine successful startups and has been directly responsible for the creation of more than 20 others. Additional companies in the Edison Nation Medical family include Edison Nation, Enventys and Inventors Digest magazine.

Robert (Bobby) Grajewski joined as Edison Nation Medical’s president to lead the company in building innovative healthcare companies, securing licensing agreements with major medical device manufacturers and increasing the online member community of medical inventors. Grajewski has nearly 10 years of private equity and venture capital investing experience. In addition, he co-founded and launched two web-based start-ups, Heritage Handcrafted and eCollectors.

5. Where are you located?

Charlotte, NC

6. What’s the startup scene like there?

As one of the financial and healthcare capitals of the South, Charlotte has a vibrant and growing scene for highly intelligent and motivated entrepreneurs who are taking risks and pursuing truly groundbreaking ideas.

7. What milestones have you reached?

Edison Nation Medical has already developed and licensed numerous products to medical device companies. Likewise, our member community is rapidly growing. (We now have inventors from over 180 countries around the globe.)

8. What are your next milestones?

To look forward to continuing to expand Edison Nation Medical’s footprint in the healthcare ecosystem and further enable passionate inventors to get their innovative healthcare ideas reviewed and commercialized.

9. Where can people find out more?

On our website, which can be found at www.EdisonNationMedical.com. You’ll be able to learn plenty about us, but you’ll have access to even more information once you become an Edison Nation Medical member. We encourage you to sign up for your free membership today! Even if you don’t have a bright idea to submit yet, we invite you to use us for education and inspiration.

How Long Does it Take to Start Up? 20 Minutes.

What cool new products are you using?

We all ask this question. It’s a common conversation starter, especially in the startup community. I’m particularly fond of this topic—I enjoy geeking out about NibzNotes15 products, writing design deconstructions, and swapping discoveries with smart folks. But these conversations provide more than just entertainment value: They are also a great learning opportunity. Understanding the subtleties of good and bad products is critical for product builders. As Paul Buchheit says, you must “live in the future” to shape it. Playing with early, innovative products can provide a competitive advantage.

This was the basis for Product Hunt. Here’s how we prototyped it.

The Idea in its Simplest Form

The concept was simple: to build a community for product people to share, discover, and discuss new and interesting products. But when I came up with the idea, I lamented the amount of work needed to build a first version of Product Hunt. Even a basic Ruby on Rails app would take me weeks to build. Although confident in my idea, I didn’t really know if anyone else would use a service like this. I wasn’t about to spend dozens of my nights and weekends building something no one cared about. How could I bring it to market sooner to test my hypothesis?

How Relocating Could Help Your Startup.

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When it comes to picking a place to start your company, it can helpful to know a region’s strengths. If you’re working on a political or education startup, DC is a great place to be. Adtech finds a great home in New York, and there are various cities around the country that support healthcare or medical device startups.

Innovation driven relocation

Business mobility is necessary not only for profit maximization, but also for reinventing new philosophies. It’s one reason Silicon Valley became such a hub for startups and technology in the 70s and 80s. With so many smart people in the same field in one place, it’s hard to imagine the area NOT reinventing tech.

The common point between Silicon Valley and other ‘attractants’ is the innovation they bring to the market. In 2013, a number of European companies opted to move to the U.S. to leverage cheaper energy rates as well as policy convenience.

The case of German chemicals giant BASF makes it pretty clear that relocation is necessary if it can improve the profit capacity of the company. The company had been making GM crops and the market within Europe wasn’t being flexible. The U.S., with its regulated GM acceptance structure, allowed BASF to make the move and establish its business in there, taking it to newer heights.

Apart from the BASF, Eurofer, the main steel manufacturer within Europe also made a move to the U.S. to extract benefits from the lower gas and electricity rates. This provided them a competitive advantage versus other companies working in the energy sector in Europe and elsewhere.

And when it comes to the mobility needs of companies expanding overseas, international relocation services facilitate the transfer procedures for the kinds of businesses described above. Successful transfers and relocations are dependent on effective resource usage. Outsourcing the service is a professional measure taken by numerous enterprises. It saves valuable time resources and is highly cost efficient.

Moving isn’t really fun, but finding the right location can help a company find a profitable niche for themselves.

It requires a company to have a holistic strategy in order to generate a higher quality of service/product. The scope of business vision is only realized when the enterprise is able to perform its activities in an unbridled manner.

Do You Have This ONE Thing Every Startup Needs?

From First Round Review

Justin Rosenstein wasn’t sure what had happened. One of his company’s highest performing engineers seemed to have lost his enthusiasm for the work. “He had gone from super dedicated to detached,” says the co-founder of Asana, an app that powers teamwork without email. “Something wasn’t right. He seemed to be in an existential funk.”

So he took him for a walk and asked one simple question: “What’s wrong?” NibzNotes12

At first, the engineer couldn’t pinpoint the source of his malaise. Then he said, “I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I wonder, should I even be writing software?” Rosenstein was struck. Sure, the company had grown, but what had changed?

Instead of reciting a normal pep talk, he started asking questions. “When you go back to your desk, what’s the next line of code you’ll write?” he asked. The engineer explained he was repairing a chunk of old code. “Why?” Rosenstein asked. And with every answer he asked again, “Why?” Finally the engineer said, “It will make the site faster, which will let people communicate with their teammates more quickly.”

This was the breakthrough. “So it will allow more people to accomplish their goals?” Rosenstein asked. “I looked at him, and he looked at me, and it was just like, okay, he was ready to get back to work.”

He had stumbled upon that one, critical missing ingredient — an ingredient that Rosenstein and Asana’s leadership have accepted as key to their success: Clarity.

The Secret to Changing the Future

From Chris Devore

Last week I spoke on a panel at a World Financial Symposium event in Seattle. I arrived a little early and was rewarded with a great talk by Brian David Johnson, a

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“futurist” at Intel.

Johnson had interesting things to say about both the process of “futurecasting” and a few of his specific predictions, but the idea that stuck with me was his closer (I took a photo of the slide to make sure I got it right):

Q: How do we change the future?

A: Change the story people tell themselves about the future they will live in.

This deceptively simple statement captures a fundamental truth about leadership — whether as a parent, as a manager, or as a community advocate:

Consistent, positive actions spring from a coherent sense of identity — a self-reinforcing set of internal narratives about how people like this behave in circumstances like that.

How Long Does It Take–Really–To Know if You MIGHT Succeed?

5 Ways Tech Entrepreneurship is Impacting Politics

From Tawheed Kader

It takes 3 years. NibzNotes14

The end of 2013 marks roughly the three-year mark for my company. As I reflect on where we are today, from initial product, to an advisory round, to seed funding and then to raising our Series A in December 2013, one thing that I’ve always perceived from came true: it takes roughly 3 years for you to truly figure out if what you’re working on can be a business.

Once you hit that 3-year mark, and you’ve figured out a way to stay alive, some magical things do happen. Now, just to be clear, after the first 3, it’ll take you 2 to 7 more years after that to make it a wildly successful business; that is if you want to come along for the ride. But at least you feel just a tad bit like this guy.

Investor Spotlight: Atlanta’s Ashish Mistry

Ashish Mistry is a consummate behind the scenes, make-things-happen guy in the Atlanta technology community.

To describe Mistry as just an entrepreneur would be a gross understatement. Behind the youthful demeanor lies a shrewd operator and tough competitor.

Mistry’s career in the technology sector began in IT services. As a newly minted graduate of Emory University, he co-founded his first startup, Virtex Networks, a remote management network services company, in the late 1990s. The venture-funded company was acquired by Leapfrog Services in 2001…back when Eric Schmidt was still chairman and CEO of Novell.

He joined the AirDefense team thereafter learning from the best: serial entrepreneur and investor Jay Chaudhry. Chaudhry was the company’s CEO and chairman at the time and according to Mistry, he “sat outside the chairman’s door” and “did what it took” which meant building out the company’s inside sales team and sales channel in Asia over several years. AirDefense is now part of Motorola Solutions.

Mistry went on to two tours as Entrepreneur in Residence at ATDC.

Today, he is managing partner of BLH Venture Partners, a private fund that invests in early stage technology companies with a focus on startups in ecommerce, SaaS, digital media and managed services. Portfolio companies include Acumen Brands, Better Cloud, KontrolFreek, Ionic Security, TripLingo and Vocalocity.

The last 12 months have been particularly eventful for the firm. Portfolio companies Acumen Brands, BetterCloud and Ionic Security have all raised significant rounds of funding. The firm’s very first investment Vocalocity announced its acquisition by Vonage for $130 million in October.

Mistry’s characterization of BLH: “We’re not just entrepreneur-friendly, we’re entrepreneurs who happen to run a business that invests in other entrepreneurs.”

When not handling BLH matters, Mistry can be found fulfilling his other professional responsibility as CEO of KontrolFreek, a red-hot ecommerce company that manufactures and sell accessories in the console gaming industry. Despite his already full schedule, Mistry still spends 50 percent of his time with KontrolFreek. According to Mistry: “It keeps me close to the operations and many of the ecommerce investment opportunities come from my role as the CEO of KontrolFreek.”

This post originally appeared on Venture Atlanta.

Aron Schoenfeld to Join KAYWEB Angels as Entrepreneur-in-Residence

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New York-based angel group KAYWEB Angels announced today that it is naming Aron Schoenfeld as an entrepreneur-in-residence for the group. Schoenfeld’s company Do It In Person is a KAYWEB portfolio company that is building a web application for event ticketing. (You can check it out here, and while you’re at it, sign up for #EETN!)

“Aron has been an exemplary CEO of one of our marquee portfolio companies, and we felt bringing him on in the role of Entrepreneur-in-Residence will allow our board, the current portfolio companies, and future portfolio companies to benefit from his expertise and feed off his considerable energy,” said KAYWEB Angels’ CEO Haig Kayserian.

The EIR role means that Schoenfeld will work with Kayserian and KAYWEB General Manager John Buckman, meeting with the board and portfolio companies regularly and representing the group at events around the US.

The KAYWEB Angels already have a strong web and mobile design and development staff, and Schoenfeld’s expertise in building a web company will add to those strengths.

“Since before KAYWEB Angels invested in Do It In Person, I believed in the vision of an investment company offering much-needed development resources to startups, in exchange for equity,” commented Schoenfeld. “I have had a very productive working relationship with KAYWEB Angels, and was honored and delighted to accept a formal role within the organization alongside my full-time duties as CEO of Do It In Person.”

GIVTED Changes the Way We Give Gifts

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It’s the beginning of February. Have you finally returned all those unwanted/unneeded Christmas gifts?

No matter how bad we feel about it, there are so often times when we receive gifts that we just don’t need. You might find yourself guiltily thinking, “Man, I really could’ve used the money they spent on this expensive coffeemaker instead.”

On the flip side, how often do you buy a gift and wonder if it’s really what the recipient needs or wants? You might search a million stores (online or off) and still not be 100% sure that you’ve picked the perfect gift.

That’s where GIVTED comes in. They are building a way for people to give money, instead of potentially unwanted gifts.

Check out our Q&A with cofounder Stephanie de Bodinat below.

1) What’s your startup called?

GIVTED

2) What’s your big idea?

We found a beautiful way to give money as a gift.

3) What’s the story behind your idea?

We felt people are overwhelmed by small gifts they don’t necessarily want, gift cards included. Resulting in a big waste of gifts in general. With Givted, you give money nicely wrapped in a messages from friends and family. Givted enables you to work together with friends to pool funds into one pot, helping you give a larger amount helping you to get a gift that would have been harder to afford on your own.

4) Where are you located?

NYC and Orlando

5) What’s the startup scene like there?

Truly inspiring- Competitive but so energetic!

6) What milestones have you reached?

We raised 1M in Seed Money in 2013 and managed to launch web product and mobile app same year.

7) What are your next milestones?

Getting more people using it.

8) Where can people find out more?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2QAKpMmdBc&feature=youtu.be

How One Little Change Will Solve Your Startup’s Tech Problems

I remember the day very clearly. It was a cold winter day in late ’12; my co-founder and I were having coffee with John Wark, proprietor of the Nashville Software School. John was graciously listening to our plea (begging actually) for my-founder Zach to attend the upcoming 6 month software development training program. The upcoming cohort was already full, actually over booked to be more accurate, and there simply were no available slots.

At that time, our startup GreenPal was building the first version of our product with a local development shop. None of us knew how to code, but we didn’t let that get in the way of attempting to bring our idea to life. Very quickly in the journey of attempting to develop a “shop built” product, we realized that we were naive to think we could build a technology company while relying heavily on outsourced tech talent.

Ultimately, there was a huge gap between what they ended up building and our product vision. Begrudgingly, we launched the shop-built product, which had taken 13 months to build, had come in over budget, and quickly became an embarrassment to show to friends and family. The thing was barely useable. Talking with early adopters of our product, we heard the same major problems over and over again. Although we had a visually pretty product, it was difficult to use, confusing, and bounced users like a basketball.

Our collective backs were against the wall. We had to build an entirely new product, from scratch. No one on our team had ever written a line of code, and the cold, hard reality set in that if we were to pursue our vision, we would have develop ourselves to become a dynamic self-reliant team. Shortly thereafter, Zach stepped up to make the pilgrimage to learn software development. This brings us to where this story began—at Starbucks asking John Wark to create a seat in the training program for Zach.

John was kind enough to hear us out, listen to our story, our vision, and the tight spot we were in. After a two hour discussion, he agreed to grant us the slot if another student dropped out. Luckily, three days later, one did, and Zach was in. Six months later and after going through Hell and back—as well as countless headaches I’m sure—Zach graduated from software school with a junior level understanding of front end and back end development languages. He pushed himself firmly outside of his comfort zone, and the reward was the acquiring of skillsets we desperately needed. His impressive and expedient grasp of the programing languages inspired our fellow co-founder, Ross, to begin learning Java Script for front end development, all self-taught with online courses and trial and error, as we soon realized that we would need specialists in both front end and back end languages.

Up until that point we had been delusional to think that we had a shot at building a successful company with solely outsourced tech talent. For the first time, now our team is actually in the startup game.

Without the in-house skills to quickly make iterations and execute on our product roadmap, our startup had been dead before it ever got started. The ability to move rapidly with agility all while controlling costs are all that matters in a startup. Our newest investment in training ourselves will prove to be invaluable.

So, if your startup needs a tech co-founder, consider becoming one. Does your team want success badly enough to consider life changing decisions like dedicating the hours needed to learn programming? I am lucky my co-founders did; we are now well on our way building version two of our product all in house.

It feels good to have a self-sufficient dynamic team, as we can chart our destiny with our own skill sets.

Bryan Clayton is a serial entrepreneur and cofounder of GreenPal. Follow him on Twitter @bryanmclayton

What Entrepreneurs Miss in Our “Big Plan”

From Justin Jackson

When it comes to building products, the biggest problem technical (and creative) people have is this:

increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales

This surprises us. We get an idea for a thing, think about the technology we’d use to build it, and get excited.

“I could build this on the Twilio API!”

“I could learn that new CSS framework!”

“I could use this new tool I just purchased!”

The problem is that all of this is focused on us, the creator, and not on the customer, the consumer.

Repeat after me:

“We are not normal people.”

Say it again:

“I am not a normal person.”

We’re not. What’s “normal” for us is often alien to our customers. If we’re actually going to sell products, we need to quit thinking about what’s cool to us, and focus on what customers actually need.

Here’s a lesson I learned the hard way: the best way to do this is to listen.

Let me give you an example: