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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Girl, You Got it All Wrong
I sat staring at the TV in complete shock last week as Deleware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell made a wicked, sad fool of herself. I wanted to leap through the television and shut her up — not for her clear lack of knowledge of law and current events or even for her politics — but moreover, for her gross embarrassment to me as a woman. For that dishonor alone, I’m sure my high school Women’s Studies professor is cringing with distain.
I am a woman with a bias. I vote for women if I can. It’s just the way I roll. I don’t really know why. Maybe it’s my history attending an extraordinarily feminist school; maybe it is me in the footsteps of my entrepreneur mother; maybe for my love of the underdog or the passion I have to raise my daughter with an equal balance of femininity and balls-out strength. My first inclination during election season is to seek out the female candidates and support them if I can. It might not be right, but it’s what I do. The only problem is, it’s hard to stand behind female candidates that are neither feminine nor brilliant. Christine, Meg, Carly, even you, Barbara: you are letting me down.
Somehow I expect that women will conduct themselves better in business and politics than men. I expect to see issues discussed cleanly, clearly and honestly. I expect a strong debate, filled with valid inflammatory topics and solid political banter. I want a good battle, an honest fight and die-hard representation of the things that make each candidate passionate about their role in the political theater. With the exception of being pro choice, I am willing to accept almost every political view, but I am not willing to accept unladylike conduct.
Meg Whitman, one of our local female CEOs has a wildly different position on politics than I do, but that’s not why I’m disappointed. It’s the wretched thievery of content, the nasty, dirty advertising smears, the red-faced head-shaking fury of a woman on the brink of leadership. A leader doesn’t mistreat employees, whether they are execs at eBay or illegal house keepers. Leadership for women is the opposite of that — using the cortisol in our brains to our distinct advantage, not disadvantage to others. I don’t want PollyAnna for a politician, but at the same I’ve known insiders who say Whitman is a true witch — and not the good corporate kind that all of us female entrepreneurs secretly want to be. Oh Meg, you leave me no choice but to vote for the liberal, bald-headed Jerry Garcia wanna be. You let me down.
The national political stage for women has been set for this year’s election and it’s ugly. Our women in leadership seem to have lost their ability to woo an audience as women. Even Sarah Palin has lost her ladylike manner, replacing it with texting lingo “Pls” for “please”, making up words like ‘refudiate’ and finishing everything with an exclamation point or two!! Fading to the background are ladies in politics including the formidable Condoleezza Rice whose grace never, ever tarnished, despite the trepidatious environment of international unrest, war and the endless hinting at being gay. I am not a fan of Rice’s politics, but female politicians can take note: Dress appropriately, behave like a lady, speak intelligently or do not speak, fight like hell for what you believe in.
What is a woman wanting to support women in politics to do? I will not spend my vote or even so much as slow down my Tivo fastforward on women who play dirty politics. I expect more from women. I expect civility, respect and, most of all, I expect you to represent me as both a woman, an executive and a voter with dignity.
I am left, sadly, candidateless this election term, reminded again of the great importance of The WhiteHouse Project and Girls Rock the House.
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If I… Were a First-Time Female Entrepreneur
I wish I could go back in time. Not to tell my first boyfriend that his teeth really did bug me; not to revisit the moment my children were born; not even to undo all the terrible things I did to my parents as a kid. If I could go back in time, I’d approach my work life a lot differently from the get-go. If I were a first-time female entrepreneur, I would:
1. Go to email writing bootcamp. Learning to communicate comes with the territory of learning to do business. Women in business today misinterpret friendly communication with friend communication. Your colleagues are not your pals, and even if they are, email is not meant to be the grounds for planning happy hour while asking for an .xls report. I’m not sure how drawing hearts over an “i” or smiley faces after our names somehow translated to appropriate communication tactics for women in business, but if you are guilty of it, you need to stop.
Here are my tips for proper female email communication (a) Get rid of any exclamation points in your email. Unless Chicken Little was right and the sky is falling, you do not need exclamation points to communicate your urgency or excitement over work issues (b) Forget any icons, shorthand, webspeak. Using TTYL in a work email is not only lazy, it’s disrespectful. Same goes for smiley faces. If you want a work colleague to know you are happy :), cheeky ;) or pissed-off :(, then you need to walk over to them and let them read your body language. More on body language later… (c) Never cross business and personal communication. Although it’s really cool that your workmate’s wife is in your spin class, work email is not a place to address such things. Refrain from finishing or opening your email with “Robyn said you had a great weekend…” — not unless of course, you want your email recipient to get mixed messages on the purpose of your communication. (d) Never say “much” or “love” unless you’re emailing with your mom. Blow off the “thanks so much,” and “I’d love the opportunity.” Never, and I mean never position yourself as weak or desperate. The next time you to go sign an email, “Thanks so much!” think of me. And then, delete.
2. Using body language will generally work — but is it what you really want? I made a huge mistake during the funding of our first company. There was an investor who had the hots for @la_gringa and, as it were, he was a likely investor, a Silicon Valley insider and hot entrepreneur. We knew he liked blondes, we knew he was married, but during a investment pitch dinner, we intentionally flanked him with the two blondes in our company, dressed hot as you can imagine and ready to do business. In the end, we got what we wanted from him — a commitment to look at our company as an investment and a promise to introduce us to others who could too. And then, he stood up from the table and led @la_gringa outside to invite her to his hotel alone for a drink. And there it was. The pickle that we caused by using our female assets to gain traction in business. It took all three of us to get her out of that nightmare and, in the end, it made an uncomfortable situation an unbearable one. The business was strong enough to be funded without trolling in high heels up Sand Hill road. In the end, we didn’t get the investment. Learn from me on this one: you can woo an investor with your body language, but chances are, it’s not what’s best for your start-up.
3. Be a Social Light, not Socialite. The work that you do outside of your business to network both online and offline can truly help make or break you in entrepreneurship. Think about a few things before you engage: what are your goals for attending? What’s your elevator pitch? Who is your buddy? What social media tools are you going to use? Are you selling yourself as a brand or your company as a brand? Are you out for a drink and to get picked up? Don’t even lie to me, I know this one way too well. No matter how you cut it, you are being sized-up in social scenarios. I always attend the Silicon Valley Tweetups. Why? Because some of my friends are there and I want to see them. I can go have a couple glasses of wine and chat in the corner with my friends. But you, you, little Miss-Hot-To -Trot-First-Time-Entrepreneur, you can’t.
Here’s how to be a Social Light First Time Entrepreneur, in no particular order: Look good * Take a work colleague with you, preferably a man * Sip on a single drink * Practice a casual elevator pitch * Have business cards with you (NO PINK BUSINESS CARDS) * Target three people to meet during the event * Ask questions about the said target’s work * Find anyone with the letters VC in their job title and watch how they operate * Make an introduction or two, it’s good for positioning * Leave before the crowd dies down * Send follow-up emails the next morning to your new contacts, add them to your database.
Here’s what you should gain from being a Social Light: A clean, crisp communication of your business, a brand association between you and your business to others in the industry, potential contacts, some learning on other companies and — if only slightly — better understanding on how to approach VCs. Social. Light. Female.
4. Find your tribe. The truth is, female entrepreneurs doing it right are rare. It’s helpful to find others who share your value system in business. It’s also highly valuable to find male entrepreneurs who you can take a lead from too. A recent deal required me to be working in the baggage claim area of SFO. I sat on the floor madly typing, searching for WiFi, using two phones and my computer, looking like a complete freak working a deal for a client. It hit me rather suddenly: There is no man on earth that would do this. I started saying outloud to a colleague: “What would a MAN do right now?” I sent a text message saying that I’d be available in an hour. I shut my computer and I walked out. My phone rang off the hook. I ignored it. Male entrepreneurs do things differently than females — learning the subtleties and taking a cue when to apply them is key to business strategy. Find a tribe of executives like you and you’ll find the resources and learnings are endless.
I’ve noticed over the past decade that women in entrepreneurship tend to emasculate their roles, and with reason: Silicon Valley is still very much a boys club. It’s an extraordinary challenge, but one that can be navigated with grace. Managing businesses with restraint and femininity can win both clients and respect. Lest we forget, ladies: You are your brand.
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