Luke Beatty Exits Position As Managing Director Of Techstars Boulder

Techstars flagship Boulder program had some news on Monday that may have been troubling to some at first. Luke Beatty, the program’s Managing Director, has stepped down.

Beatty began his career at Techstars as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence before he moved up to his current role as Managing Director. He took on that role as predecessor Nicole Glarros segued to a similar position at Techstars New York program. That was to fill the void from Techstars NY’s Dave Tisch stepping down to start Box Group.

Beatty is being tight lipped about why he is stepping down but did tell the Boulder County Business Report that “I have a once-in-a-lifetime chance (to be announced later), that I just can’t pass up – one that wouldn’t allow me to live up to the TechStars promise if I were to try to juggle.”

“Luke is staying very close to the Boulder program, and Nicole is taking it back over,” TechStars co-founder and chief executive David Cohen said in an email Monday,

Beatty is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, one of those guys that preaches the startup and entrepreneur lifestyle. He also takes pride in being annoying and hyperactive. “I will remain annoyingly (hyper) active and will forever be engaged with the 11 companies that were in this summer’s cohort in Boulder.” he said on his blog.

Beatty was the founder of Associated Content which was acquired by Yahoo in the pre-Mayer era. After the acquisition he stayed on at Yahoo as a Vice President before leaving for Techstars.

Glaros will move back to Boulder and take over as Managing Director.

Beatty oversaw the most recent graduating class at Techstars Boulder which included GoodApril, a tax planning startup that was actually acquired before completing the program.

Of course you can find out more at techstars.com

You gotta see the startup accelerator panels at this huge startup conference.

Why You Shouldn’t Learn To Code For Your Startup

I get emails like this one all the time:

I am wondering if I could ask for help for a friend. Mike, a good friend of mine, has been working on a startup idea. …He is looking for really great co-founding developers who can help him build out the product in a short period of time. I am wondering if you could tap into your network for leads. Many thanks in advance!

I wish I could help. It can be very difficult for a non-technical entrepreneur to find a technical co-founder if he/she doesn’t already have friends who code. And these days, just about everyone would tell Mike to skip the talent search and learn how to code himself.

Journalists in TechCrunch, Business Insider, Fast Company and dozens of other publications, including VentureBeat, write frequently about how you, as a non-technical founder, are up a creek if you don’t learn how to code. Even Harvard Business School students are learning how to code – despite paying very good money to learn business skills. In short, if you’re starting an Internet company, you can’t go anywhere without hearing about how important it is to know how to code.

Silicon Valley has followed suit. In the last two years alone, online education companies have developed a variety of courses to teach programming skills. Companies like Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, Treehouse, Codecademy, EdX, and Lynda, are just a handful of the many companies serving the programming education market. For those who prefer to learn in person, there are now a wealth of choices in developer training camps too, including Hack Reactor, Coder Camps, Dev Bootcamp, and the Hackbright Academy. These camps hold class every day for several weeks, teaching basic front-end and back-end skills.

The real reason startups fail (hint: it’s not bad code)

On the surface, it would seem the solution for finding a technical co-founder is to become one yourself.

But you have to question whether turning non-technical entrepreneurs into developers is really the best solution for starting a company. Startups become successful when they have users and customers — and they die when they don’t. Tech startups don’t fail because they have poorly written code. If you look at TechCrunch’s deadpool of startups, almost all listed companies failed because they ran out of money. They didn’t have enough users to make their business model work.

I started my first company, Beat the GMAT, without knowing how to program at all. Didn’t matter: I built a loyal following of prospective MBA students for my blog first, which was focused on solving GMAT problems. Later, this audience became active participants in my first forums. Finally, I hired developers to build the most recent version of my site before selling it to Hobson’s. Had I focused on building the site first, I’m not sure that’s how things would have panned out.

Don’t get me wrong: Increasing the opportunities for people to learn is great, and those who want to learn how to program definitely should. But if you’re learning how to code merely to launch a startup, you’re wasting valuable time.

The economic tenet of comparative advantage suggests that people should become really good at their core skills, use them effectively to make money, and then hire others to complement their skills. So, if you are mediocre at acquiring customers and know nothing about programming, shouldn’t you work to become awesome at customer acquisition rather than become a bad developer? I would’ve expected Harvard Business School to understand this better than anyone.

Paying it forward

In the Valley, entrepreneurs and investors often talk about how so many seed startups fail because they can’t get enough customers to become profitable. But we shouldn’t just talk — we should do something. That’s why Elizabeth Yin and I started Hustle Con: to teach non-technical entrepreneurs tactical tips in acquiring customers to build a sustainable business. Others, such as Noah Kagan, have done the same in creating his course called “How to make your first dollar.” And, there are a smattering of meetup groups trying to teach marketing and sales for startups.

But we can do better. If you know something about lead generation, sales, and marketing, I encourage you to pay it forward and teach other entrepreneurs to improve their customer acquisition skills. And finally, to the would-be founders out there: Stop talking about learning how to code, and instead, start hustling.

Eric Bahn is the co-founder of Hustle Con, a one-day conference on July 9, 2013 in Mountain View, CA. Hustle Con features successful entrepreneurs who will talk about how they grew their companies from $0 to $5M in just a couple of years, how they raised money, and how they grew an audience before releasing a product. Join us with this special code to get 25% off: yec-hustler

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Sequoia’s Aaref Hilaly believes everyone should know how to code.

Track Job Applicants Easier With London Startup Pleekant INTERVIEW

There are a ton of startups these days entering the hiring and recruitment space. Most of them have to do with the actual hiring and recruitment process. There are startups like Houston Texas’s Job Plotter which helps applicants plot jobs on a map to know if they are close enough to their homes to apply. Another great startup in the job’s space is PitchPick an Austin based company that helps the pre-screening process with a video platform.

Pleekant is equally as useful to HR folks and recruiters. The London based startup provides a platform to better track job applicants. If you are running a good sized HR department you may have 20 positions open and hundreds of applicants to track. That’s where Pleekant comes in.

With Pleekant, companies can keep tabs on applicants,resumes, applications, notes and what position the applicant is applying for. Pleekant also makes it easier for recruiters within an organization to collaborate with each other. If your company has a multi interview process Pleekant makes it easy for each interviewer to keep their notes and records from the interview in one easy to find record, accessible to everyone in the hiring chain.

Pleekant’s founder Ramario Depass describes his startup as “A content management system for hiring employees, making life easier for recruiters. He’s identified Resumator as one of his key competitors but feels that Resumator is clunky, and has an early 2000s feel to it.

Depass’ description of Pleekant is rather fitting. It feels like a content management system where the assets are the job applicants.

We got a chance to interview Pleekant. Check out the interview below:

Ohio Startup: Whotever, A New Social Website To Discover Whotever You Want

After South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this year, the last thing people want to hear about is a new “discovery” app or platform. It seems everyday another startup is launching to help discover people socially. Well this startup, based in Ohio, called Whotever is hoping to fix that problem.

As more and more social discovery sites pop up, actually using the web or your mobile to discover information on the things you actually want to know about gets harder in harder. Even with basic search engines like Google, the results you get today are much more polluted than the results of say a 2005 Google search.

That problem became evident to Timi Azeez and the other co-founders of Ohio based startup Whotever, 8 years ago. Azeez told nibletz.com:

“About 8 years ago, the three of us were in a heated debate and it prompted us to confirm our facts/findings on the internet. During the research online, we discovered that we could not find exactly the information we needed for our debate. Instead, we spent hours sifting through the data page by page defeating the purpose of the discussion. We realized the internet experience was more hectic than fun and this precluded us to start Whotever.com. It was the first step to improving the users’ experience on the internet.”

That’s the foundation for this new startup that they hope to launch later this year. We got a chance to talk a little more in-depth with Azeez about whatever.

More after the break
Read More…