Part 2 of our interview with Jon Bradford where he talks about major shifts in the startup accelerator world and how to gain traction.
Jon is Managing Director of TechStars London and has previously founded and worked on startup accelerators around the globe. He’s co-founder of F6S.com which has grown into one of the most important startup program platforms in the world, and has recently cofounded tech.eu to feature startup and tech news across Europe.
Jon is Managing Director of TechStars London and has previously founded and worked on startup accelerators around the globe. He’s co-founder of F6S.com which has grown into one of the most important startup program platforms in the world, and has recently cofoundedtech.eu to feature startup and tech news across Europe.
Our interview had so much great content we decided it was worth 2 episodes rather than cut out such valuable knowledge. In part 1, Jon explains:
Jon shares with us how he went from being a “bored accountant” at a major firm to launching his first startup (made a ton of money) becoming a VC, joining Techstars and being part of the growth of the tech startup world.
We then dive into his opinion on the changes in how startups can get off the ground, how to get into accelerators, and what people like him (the decision maker) are looking for when making those decisions.
Don’t miss Part 2! You can contact Jon at jon at techstars dot com
Mark Schaefer is a globally-recognized blogger, speaker, educator, business consultant, and author who blogs at {grow} – one of the top marketing blogs in the world. He teaches graduate marketing classes at Rutgers University and has written three best-selling books including The Tao of Twitter (the best-selling book on Twitter in the world) and Return On Influence,which was named one of the top business titles of the year by the American Library Association.
Part 2 of our interview with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, and successful entrepreneur best known for being of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).
In this episode, we really dive into growing your company, disruption, growth hacking and leveraging social networking to determine influencers and connect with them. Towards the end we also talk about building startup teams and how to leverage relationship building to find the right investors for your startup.
Jon tells great stories about how he has grown multiple companies, gain investors and clients that are truly inspiring. Beyond just anacedotes, he shares how to build systems which enable entrepreneurs to organize and deal with the pressure of owning a business.
“Follow up and follow through. Not following up is the biggest cause of failure in business”. Jon Ferrara
Twitter: @Jon_Ferrara
Jon Ferrara is an American entrepreneur and the founder of Nimble LLC, his most recent venture. Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).
Our conversation with Jon covered so much great insight into success we turned decided to create two episodes. In part one, he talks about:
Jon had lots of great quotes but one that epitomized importance of social selling and relationship building came from Mae West: “Out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of money honey!”
Just like so many entrepreneurs Jon got frustrated with sales options in his early days, decided to jump ship and get started on his own with Goldmine which revolutionized the CRM concept. Built, grew, sold and is now on to doing the same with Nimble.
John and Ledge hear this story in every interview. The urge to start is so overwhelming that we just can’t help chasing down that idea and starting a company! Leave us a comment if you’ve ever felt that way and followed it. If you haven’t followed the feeling, why not?
Jon explains the growth of the internet and its use in sales and business development over the past 20 years, with amazing insight into how social selling has become the new way to grow companies, build relationships and achieve success as an entrepreneur. We also discuss how social media is becoming common place and will likely begin to fade into a standard business practice from today’s “hype”.
Make sure you follow Jon on Twitter and check out Nimble, a fantastic platform that enables you to manage all your social platforms in one place from a business perspective.
In this packed episode with David Meerman Scott we covered such a broad list of topics that we had to cut it into two episodes. Start with the first one and then jump in here.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we discuss throughout the two episodes:
David Meerman Scott is an internationally acclaimed strategist whose books and blog are must-reads for professionals seeking to generate attention in ways that grow their business. David speaks on Real-Time Marketing & PR Strategy, Agile Selling, Spreading Ideas, Generating Attention, Growing Business, New Communications Strategies, Entrepreneurism, and Social Media. He’s spoken to business audiences on every continent, including recently in Antarctica. He is an advisor to several marketing and sales SaaS companies including Hubspot.
David was so gracious with his time that we got two episodes out of this interview, which covers these topics:
“I wouldn’t have made any large changes at all. I love the place I’m in right now. All of the big changes I wouldn’t have done differently. There are some little things like the stupid name of my blog [WebInkNow.com]. I should have chosen a better name. I still have this stupid name 10 years later. The big decisions I wouldn’t change at all. I’d tell myself to have fun, enjoy it, and don’t stress so much.”
Eric Dobson is the CEO of Angel Capital Group. Since growing two companies to more than $4M in investment as an entrepreneur, he now manages the portfolio of 25 companies in which ACG has already invested. Eric plans to increase ACG’s investments to one per month in 2014 as ACG activates its crowd funding initiatives.
We talked to Eric for so long that we had to make two episodes (here’s part 2). You don’t want to miss the incredible information Eric shared with us, including:
Specifically regarding working with investors, Eric tells us:
Eric says, “Wisdom should be hard won and freely given.” These two episodes are chock full!
Eric jumps right in by explaining to us how he, “got fed up with watching great commercial opportunities cross my desk [in academia.] I wanted to do something, so I started a company to follow some of those ideas.” That company turned into two companies, and two exits.
John and Ledge hear this story in every interview. The urge to start is so overwhelming that we just can’t help chasing down that idea and starting a company! Leave us a comment if you’ve ever felt that way and followed it. If you haven’t followed the feeling, why not?
As CEO of Angel Capital Group, Eric has made a full move from “the begging side of the table to the giving side.” He thinks “it’s much more fun on this side of the table.”
“I definitely would have done at least a business minor [in college]. Computer science was a leg up in everything I have done in life and I believe a business minor would have done the same thing.”
Also…
“I over-valued my first company very badly [while raising money]. You can’t back track fast enough if you do that.” Doing so makes working with investors very difficult.
Don’t miss Part 2! You can contact Eric at eric at angelcapitalgr dot com or apply for funding today.
Why would someone want to buy my company?
There’s a new school of thought in startup financing based upon a book called Ultimate Exits by Dr. Tom McKaskill. You can download the Ultimate Exits e-book and it’s accompanying workbook for free from Dr. McKasKill’s website. (He’s also got a ton of really great e-books on Amazon.)
Eric Dobson summarizes the book’s key themes for us:
“[Entrepreneurs have] been taught our goal is to create shareholder value and [to the contrary] the book says in the short run you need to create acquirer value. The reality is if you create certain products that fill a known obvious niche for a big player you may get a speculative bump on your valuation that may far exceed anything you can drive in revenue.”
Filling an obvious niche is very much like listening to your customers to learn what they want to buy.
Eric thinks this viewpoint is full of great lessons for founders.
“If you are going to build something, build something with a need in mind. Understand who the acquirers are. Be able to names names. [For example, approach an investor and say,] ‘Here are three companies that need what I do and they would be interested in me because I’m going to do this [specific plan] and I plan to liquidate in 3-5 years.’ Just have a solid plan to [take that approach].”
Most importantly:
“You can always change your plan, but do it out of opportunity not out of duress.”
For most companies, the days of giving every employee a company BlackBerry are over. Nowadays, most people would rather work on a device of their choosing, usually an Android smartphone or an iPhone.
This new BYOD culture has its advantages. Namely, it saves the company money on tech (about $1,300 per mobile user), it saves time negotiating and managing bulk contracts, and in many cases, it means the company only pays for a portion of the user’s phone plan. Employees who bring their own devices to work also tend to be happier and more productive, saving about 81 minutes of time per week.
But with these advantages also come new security headaches. BYOD means you’re entrusting your company’s data to your employees and their devices. And with all the recent data breaches that have compromised millions of customers’ personal data, your company can’t afford to take any chances with its devices.
BYOD doesn’t just apply to your employees’ phones. Many companies are also allowing their employees to use their own tablets and laptops for work. This means there’s a much broader range of devices and brands that IT has to worry about.
While Active Directory security will cover the majority of Windows laptops and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers will still be useful for a few tactile keyboard–loving phone users, these leave out other brands your employees might be using, most notably Apple.
There is a myth about Apple products that has persisted for over a decade: that Apple products are inherently more secure than Windows products. The typical argument is that, while Windows is fighting new viruses every day, Apple computers have seen almost no viruses since their inception.
While this is true, it’s not because Apple computers are more secure, but rather because Apple holds a smaller share of the PC market. Macs comprise only about 5 percent of the global market share of personal computers. Hackers usually go after the bigger target, which for years has been Windows.
What this means for companies is that employees who own Apple devices are just as vulnerable as everyone else and should be subject to similar security measures. It’s not just viruses that you need to worry about, though.
In 2011, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield potentially compromised the information of nearly 840,000 customers when two MacBook Pros were stolen. Phishing expeditions, device theft, and user error are just as likely to leave you vulnerable as a virus.
While the cost of purchasing devices may go down with a BYOD policy, it can be intimidating to consider the cost of securing all these new devices. For instance, Apple provides excellent encryption for individual computers with its FileVault 2, but managing it on a company-wide level is not as easy.
However, along with the increase in BYOD comes an uptick in cloud-based security management solutions. You no longer have to spend upwards of $30,000 deploying an in-house security solution. There are options that make it possible to manage data encryption for less than $100 per user per year.
Allowing employees to bring their own devices can still be a money saver, but your company needs to rethink how it’s handling data security. Big data breaches are constantly in the news these days, which means security is top of mind for your customers. Implementing an airtight business-wide security solution instills confidence in your customers when entrusting your company with their personal information. And when handled correctly, good security might actually make you money in the long run.
Tim Maliyil is the CEO and Data Security Architect for AlertBoot. AlertBoot protects customers from data breaches that damage their credibility, reputation, and business. The company’s managed full disk encryption, email encryption services, and mobile security services deploy within minutes to customers’ PCs, smartphones, and tablets, providing tremendous insight, visibility, and control.
Recently, my startup Speek closed our Series A funding round. It was a lot of hard work, and I am incredibly proud of our team for making it through with our sanity (mostly) intact.
But now it’s time to add to that team. We’ll be leveraging our Series A capital to bring two or three new people on board every month. This means that my thoughts have returned to hiring, and I must say, I feel a lot better about the prospect than I used to.
When we first started building our company, I was relatively new to the hiring process, and it was daunting. This time, however, I feel a little more seasoned, and am actually looking forward to putting what we learned a couple of years ago into practice. Here are some tips about hiring that we learned along the way.
What are you looking to get out of each new hire? Before getting started building a pipeline of qualified candidates, write down some traits that you are looking for. This also gives you an opportunity to reflect upon your company culture (both where it is today and what you would like it to be going forward). Each new hire will have an impact on this culture, so you want to think hard about what you want that impact to be.
Diversity is an active good in and of itself. It will lend resiliency to your company, limit groupthink and help contribute different perspectives every step of the way. This is not touchy-feely; this is Darwinian. Hiring a diverse team will give your startup a little evolutionary edge known as “hybrid vigor.”
When we started building Speek, we wasted a lot of time posting to job boards and trying to leverage our social networks. This was almost entirely unhelpful. Instead, here are some places where we did find great talent:
I wish we had known all of the above before we began our initial hiring process, but I’m definitely glad we know now.
What would you add to this list?
Danny Boice is the Co-Founder & President of Speek. Speek lets users do conference calls with a simple link (speek.com/YourName) rather than using phone numbers and PINs. Danny attended Harvard, is a Forbes columnist, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown and was recently named a Tech Titan by Washingtonian Magazine. You can find Danny on Twitter @DannyBoice or LinkedIn here.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
“Set extremely clear expectations. Don’t tell friends or family that you are the next Google or Facebook. Even if it’s possible, it’s unlikely. Convey to them the company vision as well as the risks, but highlight the risks so they understand what they are signing up for. Show them the long-term potential of your idea, and make sure they understand they are not investing in a savings account.”
Ben Rubenstein, Yodle
“Some entrepreneurs think they don’t need a contract with a loved one since it’s a close relationship. That is all wrong! The closer the relationship, the more important it becomes to protect the relationship. That’s why it’s important to have a contract when raising money from family and friends, ensuring you both have a clear understanding of the arrangement and exit plan if something goes wrong.”
Rachel Rodgers, Rachel Rodgers Law Office
“Just don’t do it. If your idea has merit, you can find investors who don’t come with the baggage of a personal relationship.”
Robert J. Moore, RJMetrics
“If you’re going to take money from family and friends, make sure that it is money they are willing to lose — and that losing this investment will not have a negative impact on their lives. Make sure that those close to you understand the real risks involved in investing in a startup. It’s your responsibility to make sure the risks are understood before taking any money.”
David Ehrenerg, Early Growth Financial Services
“Outline the specifics of the funding, such as whether any interest will be charged, whether the money needs to be paid back and, if so, within what time frame. Make the written agreement comprehensive, and include all relevant details so both parties know the exact nature of the agreement.”
Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance
“Here’s a script you can use: “While I believe the opportunity is worth pursuing despite the business risks, the risks are large. Since our relationship is more important to me than your investment, I only want to move forward if we share the following definition of failure: ‘a crisis of integrity or effort.’ The last thing I want is awkwardness between us if the startup does not work out.”
Kevon Saber, Fig
“Never ask or allow your family and friends to take on a risk that an experienced venture capitalist won’t take on himself. VCs and angels view businesses on their merits and choose with their heads — not their hearts. If you can earn VC support, then it’s okay to open the doors to allow family and friends to support you monetarily and potentially benefit financially from your eventual growth.”
Manpreet Singh, Seva Call
“Your friends and family care about you, possibly to the point where they might risk their well-being to help you reach your goals. Before you even start talking about an investment, you need to know for sure whether your friends and family can afford to help you. If they can’t, don’t even ask.”
Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
One of our earliest team members, who left to start his own company, sent us an email recently. I’ll paraphrase here, but the gist of it was that despite his being one of the first people to join the team at Ampush, nothing could have prepared him for starting his own company from the ground up.
I’m not surprised. Startup founders are often portrayed as “living the dream”: Young, bright, usually C-level executives of their companies, working on “cool stuff;” running “The Show.” It must seem like an incredibly attractive career option. You don’t have to work up the corporate ladder at BigCo, or even be employed by the startup itself. But reality looks a little different. While there are great articles that give advice for working at a startup and that outline the startup social contract, very few give an open and honest view of what it’s actually like to be a founder/startup executive. (Though Quora offers some solid opinions.)
I thought I’d share my own view. Below is a list of 10 things a startup founder often thinks, but will rarely admit out loud:
Jesse Pujji (@jspujji) is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ampush (@ampush), an advertising technology company that helps advertisers achieve measurable business results on mobile-first native platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Ampush is a top Facebook Ads Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer (sPMD) powering fully-managed solutions for brands and direct response advertisers across travel, e-commerce, financial services, entertainment, and CPG.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
However, after raising millions of dollars and selling services to countless Fortune 500 companies, I have come to grips with the fact that not only am I a salesperson, but I am also pretty good at it. These are a few tips that have helped me embrace selling:
While there are many other technical and tactical steps to being a strong salesperson, these four have made it a noble profession for me. So the next time my friends call me Faceman, I’ll just smile and happily play the part.
Tynesia Boyea Robinson is the CEO of Reliance Methods, which puts Americans to work by providing human capital strategy and placement solutions for clients like Walmart, the Carlyle Group, and the federal government. Tynesia serves on numerous boards and has published several articles, which have been featured in the Washington Post and in Leap of Reason. Education: Harvard MBA, Duke University EE & Comp Sci.
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
John Maddox
David Ledgerwood
Nibletz Staff
YEC