Posts tagged HomeField

4 Years Ago Today…

I was standing in my parents’ basement a.k.a. my bedroom with Dan and Joe and we were huddled around my laptop trying to figure out if we should incorporate as a C-corp or an LLC, if our corporate entity should be Overtime Media Inc. or just Overtime Media… if we needed a registered agent or a… ? Wait… what is a registered agent anyway?

We’d been toying around with our idea for months… years, really, but that was the official start… totally unsexy. Totally anti-climactic. Just the click of a mouse and we were “a company.”

I started crashing with Dan and Joe on their couch in NYC. Joe and I took a trip to a customer convention and started pitching our product… of course, we didn’t have a product. Hell, we didn’t even have a single line of code written. We just told everyone about it and did what we now know as “customer development.” A month later I was living in NYC, Dan and Joe quit their jobs and a year later we had real users and paying customers. 

Fast forward through the hardships of boot-strapping in NYC, tons of learning and lots of laughs and our first business is still growing today. It’s not our day to day focus as Dan and I have moved onto Shelby while Joe takes Overtime Media in a new direction, but I think we’re all very grateful for the experience of our first business. It wasn’t always easy, but we had each other and that made all the difference.

Together, we learned. We grew. We met amazing people. We got more hands-on experience in a couple years than we would have anywhere else. Dan, Joe - thanks for that experience. 

And, thank you Overtime Media, Inc., for employing me, for teaching me, for bringing me into this crazy world of entrepreneurship. I’m hooked for life and I’m ruined for any other “job.”

And I’m pretty happy about that. 

P.S. - For old time’s sake… here’s some comic gold from a couple years ago.

Null’s Idea

We’ve been doing a ton of brainstorming as a team lately - whether on product ideas, feature sets or marketing strategies, we love letting ideas flow.

A natural tendency when brainstorming is to label a given idea with the name of whomever said it. ex: “Reece’s idea.”

The problem with that tactic is that it personalizes the idea and naturally creates possession and/or defensiveness around it. After all, if it’s your idea, you want it to “win,” right?

We believe in team first, so at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whose idea it was. And really, chances are the idea generator never would have gotten to their idea had it not been for the 100 other ideas thrown around first (after all, “chance favors the connected mind”).

So now when we brainstorm, any idea is immediately chalked up to “null” - our imaginary collective brainstorming partner. It’s a great way to let ideas exist without personal attachment, which truly lets them evolve for the best.

Caveat - don’t give me credit for this idea, it belongs to null.

Repetitions

Last night this morning at 3AM, Joe and I wrapped up a whiteboard session on the HomeField user experience with our new startup friends Quinten and Andres. With the help of Andres, we distilled the functional experience of each of our user types down to 3 (disciplined) steps [probably more on this topic later].

Quinten was with us earlier in the week when we were whiteboarding some crazy ideas that were really scattered in terms of functionality, but as we wrapped up this time, he noted how much progress we had made in the past 4 days.

Just like sports, it all comes down to repetitions.

While bootstrapping, we’d been working remotely and thus the team wasn’t together all the time. When we were together, we didn’t have hours to spend ‘ideating.’

But finally, this week, we’ve been hammering on our ideas so frequently that we’re in a great place to start building.

If you have an idea, I really encourage you to aim for as many iterations as possible, get as far and wide as possible, then challenge yourself with some limitations and continue the cycle until you have that one, brilliant, epiphany.

“Relationship building is a cumulative process”

Yesterday I was very fortunate to see Howard Morgan, Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg give insightful tips to a room full of hungry entrepreneurs.

The key takeaway - “relationship building is a cumulative process.”

All three agreed that their best deals are always with great people that they’d built a relationship with prior to making an investment decision.

I think a lot of young entrepreneurs - this one anyway - get fearful of their use of an investor’s time and try to get right to the pot of gold at the end of their startup rainbow. 

I remember early meetings with angels - one with Roger himself actually - when I evangelized my cofounders and I as the best team on the face of the planet, showed our market as the biggest industry ripe for disruption, and I had a bulletproof plan for how to make it all happen.

All good right? 

Sure… if Roger had known me for more than 10 minutes.

But even if he did there’s an issue - if we’ve got it all figured out, what’s the point of connecting with Roger? He’s not an ATM, so why make it transactional?

Sure, we’ve all heard of startups that pitch at an event and close investors over one drink, but I guarantee they don’t get nearly the kind of advice and support that the best entrepreneurs receive from these truly supportive investors. Howard Lindzon made two excellent points on this.

1. “Money is a commodity, so don’t take money from people who don’t add value”
2. ‘Integrity is really important. Expose your faults to show where an investor can add value.’

Investors want to invest in lines, not dots, which means you need to get to know them early and build a real relationship so they can draw a line from dot to dot that is trending high and to the right.

It takes time and it can sometimes feel distracting, but I guarantee it’s worth it. Howard L. summed it up nicely, “Make deposits everyday.”

The Kinetic Energy of Startup People

I’ve been pretty busy lately - work, travel for work, moving to a new apartment, meetings, maybe a few beers with buddies, too - and I really felt like it was going to catch up with me yesterday after we moved into our new office and I settled down at my desk or sat in a long meeting .

But to my surprise, I have been entirely energized without stop and I think I figured it out…

It’s not coffee. It’s not Red Bull.

It’s not even 5 Hour Energy.

It’s people… High. Energy. People.

Today was the same. I didn’t sleep much or anything, but man oh man, I was just on the move all day - meeting awesome new people, catching up with some old contacts - connecting with startup people left and right and I swear every handshake is like a shot of adrenaline for me.

We may all work online, but at the end of the day, business is about people and the kinetic energy in the air around the best ones makes life a lot of fun.

I’m super lucky. Gotta love it.

TechStars For A Day

Last Saturday, I was really lucky to attend TechStars For A Day in NYC with one of my teammates. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. I mean… HomeField has applied, we’ve met David, David and Brad. We’ve read Do More Faster (you should, too). We went to TechStars happy hour. We’ve talked to some of the mentors. We’ve talked to some of the alumni. We get it… what the hell could TechStars possibly have left to show us, right?

Wrong.

 [Gary V. killin’ it on stage. Photo by awesome TechStars alum @mg.]

The list of mentors for NYC is stacked. Hands down. But as most of us startup-hustlers know, people like Gary Vaynerchuck, Mike Yavonditte, and Chris Dixon are really busy dudes. And yet, there they were, spending their Saturday with us, spittin’ startup advice, and hearing pitch after pitch. That’s impressive and it’s a testament to the work that TechStars has done to get amazing people really involved.

If it’s any indication of how the TechStars NYC program will be, then the 10 companies that are accepted are going to have a great experience in 2011.

And I’ll tell you what, there are some cool companies in the applicant pool (579!). Best of luck to all the other applicants - but as Gary said, “I want to beat the fuck out of everybody in this room!”  ;)

In the spirit of doing more faster, I’ve just got a few highlights from the day below, but it was really great to also hear Hilary Mason, Ben Lerer and Tim Shey speak as well. Thanks all for sharing…

1. Gary Vaynerchuck

 I know… I know. We’ve all seen Gary’s intensity, but it’s seriously too good and it gets better each time. Gary had the entire audience in stitches as he rattled off lines like, ‘Where’s that kid with the good idea I talked to earlier? … yeah, I want to fucking beat the shit out of you, bro!’  

His competitive fire is just awesome, but it’s heartfelt, too. When he retold the story of his childhood, the hardship his family dealt with, you really get to understand what makes him tick. Thanks for sharing, Gary.

2. Chris Dixon

Again, Chris is a star in the NYC tech scene, but this was my first time seeing him speak in person, so I was psyched. While his Twitter stream constantly pokes the bear that is ‘Big VC,’ there was clarity in his opinion while speaking live that I hadn’t gleaned from his blog.

And while Chris has openly knocked sports (my startup’s current focus), he’s exactly the type of entrepreneurial mind I’d love to have think through our business. 

3. Avner Ronen

I’ve been a fan of Avner’s for a while. Sure, Boxee itself is awesome, but it’s Avner’s story that is inspiring for me…

As he told the audience at TechStars For A Day, when Boxee was raising money they wanted specific investors on board. While their approach to the market changed a few times (from hardware device, to software, and back to hardware again), Avner was simply committed to “turning no’s into yeses.” That led to USV as a lead investor. Badass.

Thanks again to TechStars for having us. Awesome day all around.