If I… Was A TechCrunch Disrupt Wannabe
I sat glued to my computer this week, listening to every single tid-bit I could take in from this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt. In years past, I’ve gone rooting for my buddies, cheered-on technologies, and, looked-up phrases I’d never heard of (“Crowd-sourcing” first sounded like some kind of flash mob to me).
This year, the intake was just as intense — big and bold and full of life and technology I could eat-up like a still-warm chocolate chip cookie.
And that’s it. Each of the companies at TechCrunch Disrupt this week had something in common: a solid foundation. A great startup has the makeup of a great chocolate chip cookie, using all kinds of awesomeness to make our lives better and leave us wanting more and more.
Like all great bakers know, flavors can change, textures can vary and bake time can alter density, but all have the same core ingredients.
The foundation of a great startup and a great cookie are the same: a solid base, some grease to make things run smoothly, a leavening agent to make things rise, and, of course, a sweet overtone.
Chocolate Chip Recipe for Startups
2 1/4 c. flour to create a solid foundation for the problem you are solving
1 t. baking soda to make the idea rise and grow with purpose
1 t. salt to take when your idea gets bashed
1/4 c. white sugar for addictiveness
1 c. light brown sugar to give the product some richness
2 sticks butter to grease-up users and make their user experience smooth
2 eggs to bind the concept to the real product
1 1/2 t. vanilla to enhance your product’s feature set
1 12-oz bag chocolate chips for making a product special and rewarding
1 c. rough chop nuts because if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably nuts anyway
1. Preheat your idea to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Knowing the temperature of the environment is so important to your product. Bake an idea on low heat and you’ll miss the window of opportunity; turn up the heat too fast and you’ll burn (or worse, burn through your seed money).
2. Cream the butter and sugars until smooth. One thing people forget is that if you churn butter too long, it will make your cookies flat and shapeless. Make user interactions smooth, but, don’t over-cream. Instead, firmly lead users to the actions you want them to take (a purchase, a comment, social sharing). Drop every barrier to entry, but be sure to not leave them flat and directionless.
3. Add eggs, one-at-a-time. Eggs bind everything together. This is the place I believe that a great marketer is key. Bring all the elements of technology, a great story, and, clean UI together into a cohesive product. Look at the #tcdisrupt finalists including my favorites, CakeHealth, Bitcasa, Trello, they each have the same binding principals, even though their stories and companies are vastly different. Bind the product together by hiring a great marketer to bring it together.
4. Measure vanilla, and then let it drip a bit over the top. Vanilla is one of those secret ingredients. Taste it on its own and your tongue curls, but leave it out of the perfect chocolate chip cookie, and you’re missing the aroma. I always measure one teaspoon, then let it dribble a bit more into the bowl. The same goes for highlighting your feature sets. Throw your capabilities at a customer and they’ll be left bitter. But give them the aroma of what your product can do for them and they’ll be following the aroma all the way into becoming a repeat customer. Otherwise: don’t oversell your features.
5. Add the dry ingredients. People say to sift the dry ingredients to incorporate. I don’t. I like to gently add them in at a really slow rate, watching them fold into a slow-churning stand mixer. The flour comes first, of course. The ultimate stabilizer is your core product, your core technology and your stable financials. Even if it’s in early beta, it’s still got to be stable enough to hold all the other yummy ingredients together.
Next, I put in the salt. I love salt in cookies. A cookie without enough salt means it’s all too sweet — and that’s just not a reality for a startup. Be ready to take a grain of salt with all of your feedback. That means, be ready to iterate, change and be a grownup enough to handle it when it comes. And it will.
Lastly, I add in the baking soda. I measure this so carefully (really the only thing I strictly measure). Your growth plan — whatever it is — needs to be measured very carefully. What is your rate of growth, how do you plan to scale, and, can your flour and butter and eggs handle how much rise you are giving to it? A growth plan is so much more precise than you can imagine when you’re drawing out little PowerPoint charts of hockey stick-looking growth (Oh, and so is accuracy, which I unfortunately learned once when a VC modeled our market expectations and we had ourselves with a user base larger than the population of China within six years).
6. Take a deep breath and look at your batter. Solid, creamy, full of promise. Now, add the magic and dump in those little chocolate chip morsels. It wasn’t a chocolate chip cookie without the chocolate chips, was it? This is your differentiator, your money call, your 12-minute TechCrunch Disrupt finalists pitch. After all that building and binding, make sure that you didn’t forget why you started all this in the first place — and make sure there’s plenty of that morsel of awesomeness that makes a chocolate chip cookie a chocolate chip cookie and what makes your startup yours.
7. Add the nuts. Not sure about this last step? Trust me. Why the nuts? Some people love nuts, others hate them! Some have anaphylactic shock from nuts. You could kill someone if you add this in! I say add the nuts. Because it takes a little bit of crazy to be an entrepreneur who is willing to take the big risk.
8. Scoop a tablespoon of dough onto baking sheets and put into the oven. It’s ready to go-to-market. The temperature is just right. You have a product ready to go. Bake for eight minutes or until you get traction and the product has risen enough to take it out of the incubation. Some folks cool their cookies completely, but I don’t – a warm, baked idea is wildly desirable and everyone wants a hot cookie — get your product to investors while it’s hot.
9. Make sure no one is looking and put your fingers in the leftover dough, and sneak it in your mouth. You made all that yumminess.
So many ideas, so many companies make it to this point and not beyond. And that’s okay. I keep non-baked cookie dough in my fridge at all times, just like I’ve got new business ideas rattling around in my head all the time. There is little that tastes as good as homemade cookie dough. Somehow the magic of bringing everything together can be more rewarding than a fully baked product. Lick your fingers and enjoy — you’ve created something that has all the fundamentals of the perfectly balanced startup.
Nom, nom, nom.
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A Mother’s Company: The Mother Company
You’d think by now I’d be fully BlogHer’d out. I’ve got my rather tattered sparkle skirt from last year, some party pictures from years past. I have stories of bedbugs, memorable stories of late nights, and other stories I wish were not stories from others.
By now most of us know the brands, the drill, the insider’s club scramble, and the indelible thought of otherwise very classy women with bags on their heads at CheeseburgHer. By now we know that P&G does a huge ditty and that Jimmy Dean has the dancing sun man (they couldn’t possibly pay him enough to do that). We’ve done the booths with milk mustaches and supported one-another’s sponsored companies.
By now we know that last year’s HerBadMother’s fight for Tanner was an emotional moment in time for all of us, and this year, there will be a line of women waiting to donate blood in honor of The Queen of Spain. Underneath the hum of the excitement this weekend Susan is on all of our minds. At the end of the day, we’re women and we’ve got some badass compassion under all those Skinny Bitch margaritas.
You’d think by now I’d be completely done with hangovers and high heels, how-to’s for pros and breakout sessions.
But yeah, I’m not. Because of The Mother Company.
A childhood friend of mine is the founder of The Mother Company, a parent-centric, child-focused company that aims to embrace the social and emotional development of kids.
This is little Abbie, for goodness sake! This is the kid I played soccer with and took ski trips with and played dolls with. (Wait, I don’t think either of us played dolls.) This woman and her team that are making a serious run for becoming the next Mr. Rogers. I think they just might do it.
So I swore off BlogHer until Abbie asked me to come and support her for BlogHer11. And then I packed-up and headed down here to San Diego.
I realized that BlogHer is about companies like this: built by mothers, funded by mothers, produced by mothers. I believe completely in my friend and her mother-driven company. I’m here at because I know what kind of people are behind The Mother Company and I know the products to be full of soul, tackling issues and lifestyles on an intimate, but digestible level.
So I’m here. No parties or hoopla this year. No business card swapping. No sponsors to be touting. And it feels good. I’m here to be a friend. I’m here to support and make introductions here and there. But mostly I’m here to watch a female entrepreneur make a run for the big league.
If you’re at #Blogher11, you can find The Mother Company all the way in the back on the left under the big “600″ sign. Their booth looks like a comfy livingroom. They’re serving ice moca lattes and showing clips from their latest production. They’ve got a limited amount of DVDs to hand out too.
Between the chaos and giveaways and pitches at BlogHer, you’ll find these women to be real and ready to talk about the business of emotional learning for kids. You’ll find me there too, because BlogHer, at it’s core is about relationships. This one was worth being here for.
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Every Child Left Behind
I want so badly to write a post about the No Child Left Behind Act that is tearing into schools and communities throughout California. I want to write about angry parents and saddened kids and politics of the whole thing. But in all honesty, it’s just too maddening a subject to write about. I don’t understand how we Americans could have allowed a bill into effect that could cause so much damage to all children.
No Child Left Behind seems to help no one. It doesn’t help the high performers, the midline performers or even the low performers it’s designed to aid. NCLB seems to attack the very notion of Darwinism. Who let this obscene form of standardized hell for children come into our schools?
I want to write what I’ve been hearing statewide for months: Why can’t there just be smart kids and dumb kids and kids in the middle? Why can’t we have support for all of our kids? Why do all of our needs have to go to the children who will never prove to excel academically no matter what kind of services we pour into them Why? Because there are smart kids and dumb kids and most kids who fall somewhere in the middle. It’s not pretty, but this is what’s being said on playgrounds from Sacramento to San Diego.
But I can’t write that.
Somehow I’m encouraged and paid to write about Earth Day, skin care products and diet options. But I can’t write about what matters right now. Right now I can’t write about political decision that affected every child I know. The fallout for NCLB in California is like effects of a tsunami, barreling through our communities and leaving disaster everywhere. Families that can leave public school are leaving in droves for private education, home prices are so out of whack because of the schools that we find ourselves trapped, unable to leave and unable to stay in public schools. It would be unpopular to write about the clear racism that stems from NCLB, where the Hispanic kids in California are seen as the little rodents that our dragging our schools down because they were not raised speaking English and have a higher likelihood of being underprivileged.
I can’t write about how painful No Child Left Behind is for the middle-of-the-road kids, or, how kids with true potential are falling through the cracks right before our very eyes because all of the support services goes to the underperformers. I can’t write about how frustrating it is to see midline children in need of a little boost get no support at all. I can’t write about the high-level performers who also receive no support or learning services of any kind.
What are parents left to do? Fight? Fight whom? Fight for what? And which battle should we fight first?
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April Fool’s Day, Granddad!
Making Mud Cupcakes!
Mud Cupcakes in Bakery Box
Poor Granddad, the Victim
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Religionless Lent
I knew when the kids asked about the meaning of Mardi Gras, that it was all over. Dang inquisitive little people are relentless on a mommy who doesn’t really want to talk about the murder of Christ while running carpool to ballet class. These conversations always happen in the car, and inevitably when I’m running late.
Where to start? Twelfth Night? The Three Kings? Magic? Dark magic Ann Rice-type stuff? Ash Wednesday? Sin? None quite appropriate for two smiley faced 7-year-olds. But again, my kids proved to me, as they always do, that they grasp the meaning of life so much more than I ever will.
I told them about Fat Tuesday and the meaning of the word Mardi Gras, I told them that the next day began a long, quiet time for Catholics who sacrifice something each year to remember Christ’s long, quite time in the desert away from family and friends. I told them when he came back that he was killed for the things he believed in. I told them, as to the best of my recollection from Catholic school, that Easter was not about a bunny, but about Jesus rising from the dead. It’s hard to tell this story, because my own beliefs are more along the Spring Solstice than the death and rising of a man, but I tried to be objective. Yes, Fat Tuesday is a party, but it’s not just for party sake.
“I will give up ice cream for Lent,” my Thing 1 said frankly. “Me too. And guacamole,” my Thing 2 chimed in.
I explained that our family is not a family of religion, but of faith. I told them that this type of sacrifice was not necessary. They nodded at me in complete disagreement:
“I believe in the good of every religion. I believe in the good in every friend. I am going to do Lent with them, because if they are giving up something for what they believe in, they I should do it with them to make it easier.”
And so it was decided. My religionless little children, Christlike without knowing who Christ even is, decided our fate for the next 40 days.
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Side Gigs
