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I am an advisor for the UW Advanced Interactive Marketing program. Its a great new course that is available for professionals to really hone their online marketing chops. There are some solid instructors behind the course. One of my friends, Ben Straley, is an instructor and is super knowledgeable in the social media marketing. If you are located in Seattle, then I highly recommend that you enter into this online marketing dojo.
I rarely blog about product ideas but I was just inspired by a frustrating experience recently. The local
experience is just plain bad. I was recently trying to find an ideal fence contractor and it was a big waste of time.
Sure, citysearch, urbanspoon, and yelp do a great job on restaurants, bars, and lightlife but where are the great services for professional services? In my case, I searched and searched and searched for reviews on fence and deck contractors. Someone should come in and build a great directory of professional service providers. I want this more transparent than Service Magic which is just a straight lead gen play. The other big players just don't have enough user generated content. A big long list of service providers in a directory is just not useful. They are still stuck in the offline world. There are a ton of verticals that could use a great directory say automotive repair or home remodelers.
During my fence contractor search, I actually found some great reviews on Judy's Book. The once deadpool site is rumored to be back. My friend David Niu talked to me about how he and other investors are trying to bring it back last night at dinner. Bring it back. Build the TripAdvisor for local services. I have now spent over 2 hours coalescing a list of providers. See a need fill a need.
Some recent posts have generated a lot of interest around the process of raising money. This post is really around running the fund raising process. For those of you that have sales as a competency or profession, you'll understand that this spreadsheet is a poor man's sales funnel. Raising money is a sales process. Understanding each firm, your pitch, and the details around the process are critical to closing a round of financing. Don’t' act like a first time startup CEO (even if you are one). I cringe when I meet a new startup CEO that is running around like a sailor on leave.
A good tool to have as an entrepreneur to have after you have mapped out your financing strategy, is to map out a plan. A very specific, project-like tactical plan that you follow religiously is a sure fire way to keep your financing process moving. It also ensures that you don't forget critical follow-ups. Here is a simple spreadsheet format that is really helpful (click here: Download sample_venture_tracking.pdf) .
The first column has a list of status codes:
The firm, contact, and sponsor information is very self explanatory. However, an important note is that make sure that you key contact in the partnership is someone senior enough to sell through your business. If not, the Monday partner meeting process will just roll over your idea. The partner in question can't get enough of the partnership excited about the idea nor pulls enough political weight to get the firm behind the idea. There is more emotion behind these decisions than you might think and having the right person behind your business is crucial.
Latency and Last Contact Date are important tools for you. I am very religious about tracking this and flags go up for me personally if I haven't heard from my contact in 4 days. Venture capitalists hate the idea of losing a deal so if you've run your process correctly there is a healthy bit of tension around how hot your investment is. so, if you are getting 4 days out email responses then you need to start to pull in (aka expanding your target list) more firms and analyze what you are doing (or not doing correctly). At this point, if you have several lukewarms right out of the gate then make use of Board members, advisers, and your team. Ask hard questions about how you are pitching, your presentation, and even deeper ones (say around your business).
Full history is fun for you anal retentive types. Its almost at the point where you would want to use a light CRM system. But, I basically jot down little milestones along the way. What I look for in this section are things like what information have I sent, people that I have met with in the firm, and any feedback from those encounters. I also have a column that indicates whether I sent financials. Its good to know who has them.
Good luck. Raising money is tough. Ben Elowitz did a great post on the Startup Whisperer that is helpful and Bill Burnham's post last year was really good to.
Your startup corporate culture is key to getting things done. Corporate culture embodies your common corporate vision, goals, shared values, and beliefs of your company. Its is easy to define
organizational culture from a top-down perspective. You as the CEO can define the management structure, objectives and strategies of the business. But, the corporate culture is the glue that defines how things actually get done. Its one thing to define organizational processes and its another thing to understand how these processes actually happen. If you've done a good job defining what the companies values are and how you expect people to behave, then everything just gets easier. If you reinforce this thru your HR team and your hiring practices then you'll hire people that match how you get things done. The backbone of your company is the people. Having everyone with a shared social norm on how to get things done is super important.
At my current company, we talk a lot about Passion, Leadership, and Trust. We hold individuals accountable to run their roles as standalone leaders. I talk often of having a team of empowered leaders that have a bias towards action. There is no other way that 12 folks have been able to build a billion plus ad network in 8 months. The things that we do on a daily basis reinforce this culture. From the reporting of our metrics, to meetings, to our company events, I am often reminded of how the values dictate the behavior and the behavior dictates the values.
We just had an event this weekend where a bunch of the company participated in a race called the Urban Dare. Its part amazing race meets trivial pursuit. You have a partner and you must rely on an extended team to help you find clues while learning how to prioritize and allocate roles amongst your partner. For our company, we don't have a culture of having a casual BBQ. We'd much rather run for 2-3 hours solving problems. The event was fun and taught us a lot about how to move quickly by being measured and analytical in the way that we approached problems. It turns out that each team figured out who the best backend-operations guy was and used the same researcher to find clues. But, each team prioritized their time differently based on the strengths of their team. Our CTO and developer analyzed the most efficient route before they first started to find clues and took public transportation since they agreed that they were not physically 
ready to run the entire course. Our young marketing guys went for speed and used aggressive tactics to flank competing teams, and my team used multiple researchers while we ran from each clue. All of the approaches actually suited the styles of those team. Winning was important to the teams and there was a side bet on who would finish first (guess who won)? 
This exercise exercised our core beliefs as a company. Without having to "plan" a leadership seminar or to "plan" fun like most companies we naturally build outside and internal structures to reinforce how we get things done. Your company is likely very different and I encourage you to think about how you can reinforce an ethos in your company around reinforcing and building a strong corporate culture. You'll be more efficient, you'll hire better, and inevitably build an organization that feels like a family versus a company.
I am attending the RBC technology, media, and communications conference. The meeting is very well structured and has a fantastic format for both private and public company CEOs. The Of all of the many conversations that I had and the panels that I sat in on today, I most enjoyed the "Lead Generation Comes Of Age" panel.
The panel opened with some interesting data:
The panel included CEOs from the following companies:
Some interesting factoids of each company
All Star Directories
Vantage
Mediawhiz
They just launched a product called, Scribefire. It's been downloaded 1.5M times and they claim 150K publishers. The pitch on this product is that this product enables the long tail to build an ad in 5 clicks.
Some key takeaways from this panel discussion:
Thanks to Grant Gieringer for the invite. Awesome conference.
We all strive to be the best stewards for our businesses. We've talked in this blog the importance of communication to your employees. Communication is extremely important to your Board and investors, too.
Here are some tips for managing your Board.
Board meeting
a. Keep the formal - Startups are fun because they are more casual, fast-paced, and exciting than big companies, but, that gives you no excuse to run an informal meeting. Use Roberts Rules of Order to get things moving along and items approved by the Board.
b. Drive the meeting. I'll talk in future posts about the ideal structure for the meeting. In general, you'll have corporate business in the beginning (employee stock grant approvals, financing discussions, 409a valuations, etc), executive summary on the business, financial overview, etc. You'll want to have already taken care of the corporate business and historical operating data within the first hour. The next 2-3 hours should be open to discussion the strategic stuff. Things like macro economic conditions in your market, the competition, your product direction, etc. You know the strategic stuff.
c. Drive the meeting - I've been in Board meetings where the CEO struts out his team like members of "America's Got Talent". You've got the CTO doing a demo and rattling off about cool new platform improvements, the marketing executive waxing prophetic on direct response campaigns, etc. That's all fine in limited doses but this is really the one driving the meeting. He/she drives the meeting. Your CFO is critical for the financial overviews but you as CEO should be driving the show. You should be talking over the majority of the meeting.
Regular communication
a. Send regular email communications -- either weekly or bi-weekly communication should be sent out. Cover your key KPIs. Articulate how you are trending to your plan,weekly and monthly changes to revenue/gross margin/EBITDA, new sales deals closed, etc.
b. Pre-Board huddle - Its also a good idea to have a pre-Board meeting chat (in-person or phone) with
each Board member. This will give you a chance to add some color commentary concerning what you are about to present. Remember that the battle is won before the war. Don't surprise your Board.
I found an older post from Beyond VC which is a particuarly solid bit of advice. More to come.
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