When I get an email into my inbox, it remains unread until I’m ready to take action on it.  Once I’ve read it, I take action and then forget it.  If I am unable, for whatever reason, to take the appropriate action on the email, I mark it as unread until I can.  Thus when I look at the inbox, the unread messages are tasks, things I need to accomplish. Despite what you may think, this actually puts my mind at ease doing it this way.  When I email you, I am giving you the responsibility of the next step in that conversation.  I don’t have to think about it until you’ve taken that step and given it back to me.  Burning through almost 600 emails daily, it’s the only way to stay sane.  So now my gmail is a masterpiece of multiple inboxes and “is:unread in:inbox” type search queries that keep all my to-do’s in focus.

So ever since I was a kid I’ve worked out of one email address.  I have dozens of email addys, but they all forward to my one main address.  This address is where the ends of the law are answered.  It is the alpha and omega of my communication.  But wearing many hats with multiple projects, companies, endeavors, ideas, relationships, support, growth, research, etc all being conducted at once, my inbox zero vision has not been seen for years.  Literally I’ve been fighting to get things down to 200 or on a great weekend, 100 unreads.  I simply couldn’t get to everything before everything was replied to and came back.  I think I’ve spent at least 8 hours a day in email for over 2 years, and I still couldn’t get ahead, and with such confusion in the inbox, I was missing things. Things that needed attention were getting put off for months without my realizing it.  I was losing the battle.

So I finally figured it out.  Kill the funnel.

This may seem obvious, but it has saved my flailing sanity.  I finally removed the forwards from my multiple email accounts.  My multiple work projects each go to their respective email accounts, my personal to my personal account. Etc.  I don’t see them all in my one big well.  Seems a bit counterintuitive at first eh’, but it’s not, I promise.

What happens is I get going early in the morning with my personal email.  I am able to respond or take action on the things that deal with my personal life.  I quickly get back to inbox zero (or as close as I’ll come to it) and then I leave this running and use google’s multiple account sign (just enable in your google ‘acounts’ section – see figure 1) on feature to sign into my first work email and enter work mode.  I have about a hundred emails in here waiting for me by morning, but once I hit stride with my responses, I am able to burn through these quickly, and leave labels on emails that are awaiting response from someone else.  As soon as I’ve read or labeled everything, I call that inbox zero.  I move on to the next one and repeat, until everything is knocked out by 11am.  I go through this same exercise 2-3 times a day, but after the morning push, the rest are easy.

The key here is I still have my one or two unread messages and a few tagged for followup, but the few in each inbox is manageable and doesn’t overwhelm, whereas in one inbox it would quickly seem insurmountable and I would become discouraged in the quest for zero.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this move alone has shortened my time spent in my email by almost a third.  I get on top of my entire day quicker and am losing fewer conversations.  The moral here, good people, is separate your personal inbox from your work/project inboxes, the quality of life improves.  I promise.

Best idea ever.

Depending on the level of your involvement, you could potentially walk away from this internship with experience in starting 11 companies, going through dozens of pivots, chasing the minimum viable product multiple times in multiple industries, developing pricing models for 11 companies products, the hiring and firing and team building as well as all other nuances related to human resource drama that come in the startup world, drilling through messaging problems multiple times with each company, mastering pitch strategies, walk through financing these companies with VCs and Angels, the multiple stock scenarios that all have to be worked through, and on and on and on.

Seeing that many ideas walk the maze of failure to reach that eventual success has given me more confidence and skill than I could ever have curated on my own one or two projects, assuming I could have made meaningful progress on those one or two projects, working alone in the allotted 90 day time frame.  The way to approach it is to think down the road three months and ask yourself if you’d regret spending a measly three months gaining that much experience? I promise you there is no better way to spend that time.

Not to mention the immense network of mentors, friends, and new best friends that all come from the program which I will lean heavily on for the rest of my career.

Breaking it down it looks like this

Rent — $1800

Chewy chips ahoy — $80

Chocolate milk — $150

Broken arm with no insurance — $3000

The ability to reach into the upper echelons of the technology industry with a network of mentors, supporters, and 40 brilliant new friends who have seen your work ethic and would go to bat for you without reservation — Priceless

Stick that in your Discover commercial.

The newfound family

Such a great summer.

Well fast forward almost a full summer and I’ve spent 20 hours a day working shoulder to shoulder with these teams to build real and meaningful companies, all the while building a network of mentors and friends who have undertaken the same endeavor, and I realized I have learned a few other lessons I had not exactly anticipated.

For whatever reason, these weren’t even on my radar, but now I count them as some of the most valuable lessons of my summer.

Used with permission from Alpine Light Pictures INC

Negotiating

@JasonMendelson gave a session on negotiating a few weeks ago that stood out to me.  Actually, I don’t think the session was on negotiating but that is what I took from it.  I’ve never really paid much attention to the art of negotiation, but after talking about it for an evening, I am observing that there is an art to the strategy and methodology of negotiating that allows you to remove emotion from discussions and arrive to a decision that both parties are happy with, all while relentlessly lobbying for your own interests.  I don’t think I need to explain why this is a skill that holds great potential.

As I’ve gone through these last few weeks I’m realizing more and more where my strengths are in negotiating and what weaknesses I need to beware of and address.

Funding Strategy

@bfeld and @dbrown gave sessions on funding strategies.  Brad talked about taking venture capital or loans to fund your company, how that affects your stock, and in turn your motivation.  He talked about strategy in choosing VC/Angel partners that will back you up and support you in different scenarios, what to be scared of, as well as timing your discussions and expectations.  David talked about his experience bootstrapping Zoll Inc., how bootstrapping changes the dynamic of running a company, the dynamic of a team that has to run a business without outside funding, the good the bad and the ugly.

From these sessions and watching these companies sort it out themselves, I’m realizing that funding your company involves much more than finding someone who wants to hand you a check.  It’s unfortunate that more people fully appreciate this, I think it would alleviate a lot of stress.  That being said, so far as takeaways for the summer go, this one is one of my favorites.

Minimum Viable Product

@ericries flew out to talk about the lean startup movement, which is abstract on the surface, but it is a toolbox with many tools in it.  The one that I had my ‘eureka!’ moment with was Minimum Viable Product (MVP).  I’m a fan of my waterfall methodology from college, where you come up with your product, break it out into accountable phases, then develop each phase in sequence until you have your product, well version one of your product anyway, which I thought was my MVP.  Wrong.  Consider your product, then break it down into the one most attractive function, then break it down further until you have the one very simple thing that is at the core of what you want to build someday.  When you have that, make it, toss it out there as soon as possible, and start letting customers use it, break it, and give you feedback around it.  Don’t give up on the vision, but don’t be consumed by it either, because if no one wants the core amazing functionality, they aren’t going to want a plethora of the accompanying features.

So as I cycle through companies and positions in my career, I’ll focus on MVP and getting customer feedback which will either mold the company early on, or cause it to fail miserably quickly so we don’t waste time on it.  Pretty good takeaway I reckon.

Talk to Everyone

This is something I thought I knew, thought I was good at, and thought I had nailed down.  But over the course of the summer, I’ve gotten much, much better at it.  What I’ve come to realize is smart guys, rich guys, new guys, and veterans all have their own bubble problems.  I don’t think anyone naturally likes being out of their comfort zone and in someone else’s.  It’s just not natural for anyone to be the first to go shake hands with a room full of people, so the only option you have is to quit waiting for someone else to do it and just get in there because it is uncomfortable for everyone.  I’ve watched people come into a room of brilliant minds that could answer their questions, potential money that could help them run a company, or just good people that would be great additions to their personal network, and I’ve seen them be paralyzed by fear and the accompanying hide behind the phone, hang by the walls, just talk to their buddies shenanigans we all turn to.  The benefit of just jumping right in there is that you often only get the one chance to meet somebody, and a quick hello / chit chat can give you a valuable contact where playing coy will get you nothing.

Everyone can be better at this.  Be that guy and just get out there.  You will never regret having another friend/resource to call on when you need it.  I get better at it every time, it just takes some practice.

Not a bad summer, and we’re not even done.

Anyway, one of the business models that have always fascinated me is that of podcasting.  When Leo started his podcast network I instantly fell in love with the weekly update format, and was impressed he could support himself doing what he does.  From casual conversation during the program I’m guessing he does about $1.5 million in revenue each year for his network of podcasts and runs a budget of about $300,000-500,000 to make everything go.  Not a bad business model in my opinion, so I’ve listened (watched when I could) with interest to try and figure out how he does it.  Thus, one of my goals for the year is “Learn more about the podcasting model” and try and figure out where it goes from here.

So I decided I would go and spend a day with Leo and friends.  I emailed him asking if he ever let fans come watch, he replied that he did and then passed me on to his sister for the scheduling.  On my flight home from Hawaii earlier this year, I put a stop into LA on the way back, and my good friend Geoff graciously agreed to make the haj to Petaluma CA, about an 8 hour drive I think.

We got there early, intending to spend a show with him and ended up spending the entire 8 hour broadcasting day with him.  He didn’t have much time to talk, which is understandable, so I observed and asked questions only when I couldn’t piece it together myself.

It was fun to get a bit more of the behind the scenes look at the operation, and I am amazed at what he’s able to do with what is essentially a one man crew.

Leo hard at work in the TWiT Cottage

His operation is really pretty simple when you get down to it – he skypes the calls into a board where it’s mixed then output to a server and recorded.  A couple of mics and some video equipment and Leo has content that costs studios 10x the amount and investment to produce.

I didn’t really need to travel to see that, but I was still pretty surprised that it wasn’t more extravagant or dramatic.  He has built a huge audience and sponsored program with a relatively inexpensive setup.

The video wall

So what makes him successful versus everyone else that is trying podcasting, why is Leo blowing it out of the water?  The answer is expertise and a network of guests with interesting things to say.  You have to have a two edged sword to get people to listen to you anymore.  Leo has an awesome background in technology and progressing media, that’s his one edge, the other is that he can communicate it.

I’ve often noticed people will blog, tweet, or podcast and wonder why no one listens even though they can type and record just as well as he can (it’s all just bits anyway) and the reason is that you have to go develop your expertise in something before you can expect others to value your opinion.  The days of the radio disc jockey are numbered, and we’re moving to people who have the knowledge and background and who are able to convey that knowledge in interesting ways.

Rocking TWiT

That was the magic I picked up at Petaluma, that the future of media is moving away from the pretty faces and fancy makeup crews and shifting towards people who develop niche audiences around topics that they are well versed in.  People will begin to source their news from more strategic sources and the conglomerates will wane in influence as the small networks of great shows with real people will continue to rise.

So in summary, if you want to be a big internet super star, go be great at something before you start talking, and after you do that, the rest is simple.

He gave me his bouncy ball chair

I was not impressed. I think it would have been more applicable if I was in the process of fleshing out an idea and clueless as to where to begin in business, as it goes step by step through the entire process of figuring out if you have a decent idea, to how to structure your elevator pitch, to how to pitch.  It’s such granular detail I got bored about midway through and seriously contemplated not even bothering to finish it.

There is some good material to be found, but it should be used as a reference manual and not as an educational read.  If you aren’t working on a |brand new idea| you are already past a large portion of the material and the book won’t be of much value to you.

If you have an uncle with an idea who doesn’t know where to start, put this in his stocking as it’s right up his alley.  If you’ve tried your hand at the entrepreneurial shtick before, chances are you’ve already observed all the cute witticisms Guy Kawasaki finds in starting a business.

For a take-away, I realized I know more about starting a business than I gave myself credit for.  That’s something I learned.

I give it 2/5 stars only because it’s valuable content, just not at all valuable to me.

One of the things you pick up on really quickly as you observe people who have achieved real / meaningful success is that they can state a question and wait for an answer, and if an answer doesn’t come, they wait longer and at most offer to explain the question if it’s not understood, then wait longer.  They are not afraid of silence.

New entrepreneurs or up and coming professionals out of college (or a lot of other business folk) have a tendency to fear silence.  So in a similar situation, where they ask a question, before they even let people answer it, they’ll explain it again, then one more time, then wait for an answer, and if the answer doesn’t come, they fill that space with more explaining.  Your audience will learn if they just hold out, you’ll give them the answer you want from them.  If you’re afraid of the awkward space where no one is talking you are forfeiting one of the greatest tools in business in my opinion – silence.

The thought here is often your audience may not realize you’re asking a question, particularly in a presentation where the tendency is to zone out, so the pause is imperative to snap people out of that.  Also it exudes confidence in your question, but this only works if you are confident that you are asking good, well thought-out questions.

I’ve also noticed that we are victim to the same insecurities when we are answering questions – we talk too much.  I once ran an exercise where we sat around a table, I would ask a question and then stop people as soon as they reached an answer.  It was funny because often the answer would come in their “warm up”.  Particularly in entrepreneurship, we feel like no one can understand our ideas, so we should answer, then restate the answer, then bring those two answers together, then finish with a cute cliché phrase, then be done.  Imagine stopping after you give the first answer then letting the person asking the question dig deeper and ask more specific questions.  It portrays a confidence in your answer when you only have to state your answer one way, it’s short, concise, and people will love you for it.  The rolling the eyes bit in meetings, I know for me that mostly comes when a simple question is asked –

“What did you have for breakfast?”

And someone answers

“I had lucky charms… you know the ‘magically delicious’ lucky charms…. It’s the cereal with the marshmallows AND the crunchy cereal bits…. It’s from General Mills it think… so lucky charms cereal…  yup, that’s what I had…. I had cereal”

They could have stopped with any one of those iterations of an answer but they went through all of them, sure that to be properly understood, everyone should listen to them talk around the fact that they had cereal.  It changes the tone of the meeting completely when you can answer “I had cereal” or at most “I had lucky charms cereal” then if they want to know more they can ask, and it’s those questions that give you real data about the person asking them.  What are they interested in, how technical do they want to get, etc.  You forfeit all of that data when you fill the space yourself.

So one of the things I do with the companies here at TechStars is I sit in on mentor meetings with them and take notes.  My notes have 3 parts, and the first part is “Questions following your pitch” and I’ll make a list of normally 6-10 questions they answer, with the intent that they can go back and build concise answers to each question that they regularly get from people.  It takes you from excited entrepreneur who maybe has a good idea | to guy who knows his stuff and has already done the research.  Plus here, a mentor can certainly appreciate someone who can give a direct answer and not waste time – because time is a scarce commodity here.

So,

1)      Don’t be afraid of silence.  Think of your questions before you go into a meeting, ask them, and let people answer.  Often we’re just thinking of what we want to say, so give us a minute.

2)      Don’t speak around the answer, just give the answer.  Practice with a partner, have them ask you a question, then let you explain it back and have them stop you once you get to an answer.  Then have your business partner start kicking your leg in meetings when you hit that same point.

If you do this, your meetings will be better, your contacts and network will respect you more, and gosh darnit people will like you.

Yet I often hear people asking about these types of opportunities express their questions to me whether I think this company is going to be a big hit.  It’s clear to me that many people confuse learn with earn.  I will do a simple calculation for them that goes like this.  OK, you would own 0.25% of the stock.  They raised $5 million in their B round.  Let’s assume that the company raised it at a normal VC valuation, which means it gave up 33% of the company and thus $5 million / 33% = $15 million post-money valuation.  If you never raise another round of venture capital (a big if) and if your company is sold for the normal venture exit ($50 million on average for 200 or so annually that get sold) then what is your stake?  $125,000.  Yup.  Simple math would have solved that but people rarely do the calculations or think about it.

And let’s say that it took 4 years to exit – that’s $31,250 / year.  Now … these are stock options and not restricted stock so you’ll likely be taxed at a short-term capital gains rate (see comments section for why).  In California that averages around 42.5% so in my state after tax you’d make an extra $18,000 / year and that’s in a positive scenario!  BTW, this ignores liquidation preferences which actually mean you’ll earn less.

I had a friend get a job offer with a startup recently that had received some funding , they explained that they paid a slightly lower salary but that he got stock options with the company, his question to me was how do I know if it’s a good idea?  I thought about for a minute, and I didn’t exactly know how to decipher the startup charade into an actual number either.  We ended up just asking the CEO directly, but knew there had to be a simpler breakdown of what was actually going on in such a situation.  Mark does a great job of doing just that.  Give it a read, and don’t be intimidated by the intentionally confusing chaos.

Kid with great idea: “Hello mentor sir/madam, how are you, I have a great idea… what do you think?”
Mentor who hears a ton of ideas and needs a filter: “Whelp, put together a business plan and we’ll talk, mmm kay?”
Kid with great idea: “Well okay…”

Page 17 of the business plan the enthusiasm is overwhelmed by the utter confusion and disappointment of trying to pull together a business plan that has to be shnazzy yet professional, functional yet fun. A business plan done ‘the right way’ is the holy grail, there’s no way it can be done. Someone always tells you it’s done wrong. This task turns into a huge obstacle for new ideas and I’ve often seen the ideas scrapped completely following the feelings of frustration the process gives. It’s just not healthy.

Enter the business plan killer … Four One Page Briefs!

Ohnoes! you’re all crying. But calm down and let’s talk about this.
Leading out in TechStars, Cohen (inspired by the book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”) asked each company “who is on the Product Development Team and who is on the Customer Development Team?” (keep in mind he’s talking to companies with 2-3 people). He said that between 2 partners you should have one representing the product, one the customer. He then followed this by giving an assignment to each company with their respective ‘teams’ – Four one pager briefs due in a week –

1. Product Development Brief
2. Customer Brief
3. Pricing / Distribution Brief
4. Market / Competitive Brief

The idea is that they build one page working documents in each of those areas, just from what they understand about their company/industry and the research they’ve done. They will then take these working documents into meeting with mentors where they can run down each page in bullet fashion, getting feedback and critique. They are made to be marked up, red lined all to heck, then redone following each conversation. After 5-6 mentors they should have it tightened up and the result is four very concise documents that speak exactly to the issues and advantages in their company.
Let me breakdown each of the briefs quickly just to give you some direction on where to go with them, then I’ll leave you to your own devices.

1. Product Development Brief
   1. This is your hypothesis created by the Product Dev Team
   2. Think along the lines of features, benefits, dependencies (does another companies product have to be in play for your product to succeed), product milestones, etc.
2. Customer Brief
   1. This is your hypothesis created by the Customer Team
   2. Think along the lines of type of customers (decision makers, economic buyers, users, saboteurs, etc), problems they have, a day in the life of your customer (summary of findings for each customer type), influencers, ROI, etc.
3. Pricing / Distribution Brief
   1. This is your hypothesis created by the Product Dev Team
   2. Think about product cost / pricing, distribution channels, demand generation, etc.
4. Market / Competitive Brief
   1. This is your hypothesis created by the Customer Dev Team
   2. Think market type (entering existing market, resegmenting a market, creating a new market (not likely))
      1. If existing – who’s the market leader, what is the market share you go for, how do you differentiate, are you bucking standards or embracing them, where do you fall in the cost benefit of competitors?
      2. If resegmenting – what’s your segment and how’s it different, what needs are unmet in existing market that will cause them to abandon what they have, who aren’t people already doing this, how do you educate your market?

If new – what markets will your customers come from, what’s the need that will compel them to jump, how do you educate the new market, how do you create demand, why not resegment an existing market?

The conversation now changes from an obstacle that is thrown at the entrepreneur that discourages and frustrates to a few simple drafts that give a starting point and elicit understanding from the entrepreneur. In the end, a collaborative document that represents the whole team is a refreshing change from the mediocrity that is a majority of business plans.

It’s in the mentor’s best interest as well, you don’t care about their business plan, and you just want to see that they’ve done it, but when it’s done what do you do with it? This is called progress people, embrace it.

So please never write a business plan again. Show me your four one pagers and let’s get down to business.

In day 1 David Cohen gave a presentation that lasted for hours… and hours on top of hours… then we had dinner, and he gave another presentation… (I wonder how he feels about the no more than 10 slides rule?) But a couple of gems came out of the discussions, pitch practices, and visiting Tom Keller.  I will now list them in chronological order.

Communicate better.

We talked about sending out a weekly “Friends of the company” email to investors, interested parties, etc.  If you don’t you’re missing out on your earliest audience communication opportunity.  Sending out an email weekly forces you to account for your weeks time (what progress have we made) and offers you the chance to ask some direct help / questions (recommended to be done in red, in clear sentences where one can quickly assess if they can help).  There’s 13 weeks in our summer, we can handle 13 emails.

If you’re not an emailer, there are other options, but the point is that you get in a rhythm of talking about what you’re doing.  Blog or tweet daily, email weekly, conference call, whatever, just something to account for your time.

So if you’re starting a business, or going after a Hard Knock MBA, get used to accounting for your time and work.

Be Concise and Clear

While practicing the 20 second pitches, some teams got up and had a very vague beginning.  5 Why’s (David held up 5 fingers and asked why after each explanation till he was out of fingers) later, we had a very clear, concise pitch that communicated the opportunity, solution, and key differentiator in about a sentence and a half.  The way you can test if you need to use the 5 why-er is by paying attention to people’s first questions.  This is another one of the gems for me, I’m used to listening to people, paying attention, etc, but keep track of people’s first response.  If it’s “Why?” you need to answer that in your pitch the next time and you keep working on it.  If it’s “How are you different from…” or “Have you thought of…” those are good questions, it shows they get it and they are connecting dots in their mind.  So listen and keep track of the first responses, it’s your best indicator of how clear your message is.

Be Bold

Tom Keller gave this thought – “If you ever make a decision based on your data, and it turns out to be the wrong move, did you make the wrong decision?  No.  You won’t ever have the full data, make good decisions based on your current data and move on.”  Often we’ll beat ourselves up over a missed deal, or something not going our way, or making a decision that ultimately turns out to be wrong, big deal.  I will always take someone who can analyze the data and make a decision over a ‘flip flopper’ type who can’t / won’t make up their mind because of all the outstanding variables.  Make the decision and move on.

Then as we were going around giving pitches again, one founder was not the ordained speaker for his company, but the turn came to him and he wasn’t sure what to do, he looked around a bit, explained that it was his partners role to talk, yada yada yada, then Tom gave this commentary “Listen, you don’t have the spotlight on you very often in life, so when you do – don’t make excuses, don’t look at your partner, don’t shy away from it.  You face it and go after it full on.” I liked this thought mainly because I agree with the fact that you don’t get that many moments in life to shine.  No one like to strike out standing, if you’re going to get the opportunity to step in the batter box, you swing at that ball man, even if you don’t have what it takes to hit, you go down swinging (also true in love Look that VC/Customer/Antagonist/Whoever right in the eye and go for it, whatever it is.

Not a bad 1^st day.