Triblr.com by Vlad Stan

10 Tips For Successful Networking

Mon, 23 May 2011 04:33:00 -0700

Networking Know-How may be essential for your business. Practically, you can find a team, new partners and grow your business through connections. Here are 10 tips that I consider to be essential when networking.

1. Be yourself

Don’t try to be someone you’re not, it may do more harm than you imagine. Just go there thinking that you are who you are, good or bad, and just be yourself. 100% you.

2. Ask yourself what the objective is

When you attend an event, have a clear objective in mind. For example: “I want to discover new things” or “I want to learn new things.”

3. Look for groups of people that interest you

Analyze the group’s tone and attitude. Are they willing to help? Is their leadership qualified?

4. Recruit volunteers for your team

It’s a great opportunity to give something back and stay connected with your group.

5. Know what you are doing and who you are doing it for

You have to make yourself clear when you say you are helping students or entrepreneurs and you have to clearly state what you are doing to help them. Ideally, you should say it in under 30 seconds. For example: “I am helping students become entrepreneurs.”

6. Give back to the community

There are things you’re an expert at, or want to become an expert at. Make a habit out of sharing new and valuable knowledge with others.

7. Introduce friends to each other without having a hidden agenda

If you know someone who can solve your interlocutor’s problem, introduce him to that person without expecting to get something out of it.

8. Everyone’s selfish, so think about what you have to offer first

Nobody wants to listen to your problems, so see if you can help the person in front of you. Ask them questions to find out what truly interests them and think of how you can help them. Only after that can you talk about your problem.

9. Think of the people in front of you as your friends

I don’t classify people into acquaintances, pals and friends. I think of all people as my best friends and when you are talking to a friend, you don’t think about asking them for something, you want to know how you can help them. And this helps me build extraordinary relationships. Friendship is when my interlocutor thinks of me as being their best friend as well. My door is always open.

10. Don’t be afraid to say what you’re looking for

Many people don’t know what their problem is and begin endless discussions. If you’re looking for something for your business, you should say it in the shortest and most coherent way possible. For example: If you’re not happy with your design team and your budget is very low, just say: “I’m looking for a team of brilliant designers that can work on my super-cool project, but you should know that I don’t have a big budget.” You will be surprised by the results.

2010 Internet Predictions

Thu, 06 May 2010 06:39:30 -0700

It’s true we are already in the second quarter of 2010, but there are still three ahead and things move fast in the internet industry. So a little prediction report published on a VC’s blog would be interesting for any online entrepreneur, I guess.
The author of the report, Jeremy Liew, also makes some resolutions about the predictions he had for 2009.

Here’s a list of those for 2010:

1. Social games overflow out of Facebook.

2. Brand advertising starts to move online, boosting premium display, video and social media

3. Direct Response Advertising becomes ever more efficient

4. Finding Money and Saving Money online

5. Real time web usage outpaces business models

Read the entire post for more interesting details.

Case study: My four steps to the epiphany: Lessons learned from creating a minimally viable research product, by Amir Khella

Tue, 04 May 2010 08:44:23 -0700

If you read the previous post, you have seen Steven Blank’s amazing presentation from Startup Lessons Learned Conference in San Francisco. You have also seen some case studies on how this methodology was applied on developing startups.

This time, I would like to share with you how Amir Khella used the same methodology in developing a minimally viable research product during his PhD. Amir is a user experience consultant based in the Bay Area, working with companies to plan and design product experiences by integrating design thinking into the product life-cycle.

I would like to thank Amir for agreeing to share his story on Triblr and now, I’ll let you enjoy it:

In the summer of 2004, I had my first entrepreneurship experience in an unlikely place. I was still working on my PhD, when I received an invitation to spend the summer at Microsoft Research. Some of the finest researchers there have been working my topic of interest, and I was eager to see what they’d been working on, and to contribute to it. So I took the blue pill.

After the first day orientation, I went to my mentor’s office to find out which project I’d be working on. When I sat across the desk, he peeked at me through the stacks of research papers and notes, and said with a big smile: “Well, here you are. You’ve got 12 weeks to spend with us, so come up with something useful and exciting!” I looked at him waiting for a specific task, and he proceeded ” You’ve got access to hundreds of researchers and thousands of employees. Make good use of it. Good luck!”. He then introduced me to the rest of the team members, and showed me the way to my office where I would spend the next 12 weeks coming up with the next big thing. Or at least, that’s how I felt back then.

On the following morning, other interns were already printing out research papers, looking at source code, and discussing tasks among their teams. I didn’t even know where to start. I was scared and excited.

I started by browsing through existing tools, and I read previously published papers. That led me to plan B: If I failed to come up with something original in the first couple of weeks, I could improve on an existing project.

I also brainstormed several ideas with my team, but I couldn’t decide on any of them. I spent the first weekend in the office, trying to come up with my “cool and exciting” idea in the stereotypical lone scientist way: a whiteboard full of ideas and papers scattered all over my new desk. But that didn’t seem to go anywhere, since I had no criteria to judge on which idea is better than the other. That was when my first realization hit me: I’ve been too focused on ideas and I forgot about the most valuable resource: people. My research was about programmers productivity, and I had access to tens of thousands of programmers at Microsoft.

I erased the whiteboard. And with all the ideas gone, I was free to focus on finding out, instead of guessing, the real pain points that developers go through every day.

Lessons learned: Great ideas are seldom found behind office walls.

Step 1: Listen

The following Monday, I prepared a list of interview questions, bought a voice recorder, and prepared a list of developers to interview. That week, I spent close to six hours each day asking them about about their projects, their environment, and their teams. I didn’t know what I was looking for, so I listened to everything they had to say. And they talked as long as I was willing to listen. Every day, I would refine my interview questions based on interesting patterns or triggers I was getting from the day before. Having voice recording helped me go back and confirm a point that someone made earlier.

At the end of the week, I met with my mentor to analyze the results. It became clear to us that there was a common pattern among all interviewees: The most painful and time consuming part of the development process wasn’t writing new code, but understanding existing one. In a large organization like Microsoft, source code moves across several developers, and sometimes they need to go back to what someone wrote few years ago to comprehend it and add a new feature. Without access to the person who originally wrote that code, it was a pain task.

Lesson learned: Be willing to listen without judgment.

Step 2: Validate

I’d found a good pain point, and I needed to know what people did to solve it. I thought about writing another set of questions and go interview more developers. But I wanted to get deeper insights; I wanted to know what they did when faced with the pain point. So I instrumented Visual Studio, the development tool of choice at Microsoft, to record all navigation and editing activities. Then I designed an experiment where users were given an existing project (A Tetris game written in C#) , and they were asked to fix a bug and add a feature. To accomplish these tasks, a developer needs to navigate a couple of the 25 classes in the project, and learn the role of few existing functions and variables.

I had two assumptions I wanted to validate: First, experts were faster than novices in program comprehension (easy one). Second, there is something in common about how expert went about understanding code, that’s less experienced developers don’t do. So, I invited 5 senior and 5 junior developers to help with the experiment. I recorded time, success rate, and frequently asked them to think aloud about what they were trying to accomplish and what they would imagine the solution to be. While they were working their way through the code, their activities were being saved to log files.

Later that week, I wrote some Excel macros that aggregated all the “activity streams” inside visual studio and created charts that summarized the various code areas that developers navigated, and the various paths they took.

To my delight, both assumptions were true: experts were faster than novices in understanding source code, and they took common paths to understand it.

Lesson learned: Don’t just listen to what users say, watch what they do.

Step 3: Collaborate

At that point, I knew I had a problem that was worth solving, and I had some ideas about how to solve it. But I wanted to do more than just get in a meeting room with my team and brainstorm more ideas; I wanted users to be involved. So I scheduled more interviews with developers, told them about what I am trying to accomplish, and brainstormed solutions with them. And because these users were suffering the pain point I was trying to solve, they came up with some of the most creative ideas! That was new to me, as I’ve always thought that good ideas will come from the team creating them, not people who’d be using them. Once again, I was realizing how abundant this resource was, and how little it was being used.

At the end of the week, I had gathered enough ideas to keep the whole team busy for the following couple of years. We met to discuss those ideas, we agreed that some of them had good potential and were worth prototyping and testing.

Lesson learned: Customers may have problems, but they also have solutions.

Step 4: Prototype and test

During one of the brainstorming sessions, a user asked an intriguing question: “What would it be like for me to browse source code like I browse books on Amazon? you know? with all the social recommendation goodies!” That question inspired us to create the first prototype: the FAN (Frequently Accessed Next) – a social recommendation panel that provided users with a list of places to which previous users navigated after leaving the current location. It carried the same spirit of Amazon’s recommendation language: “People who debugged this variable also looked at the following functions”.

Another prototype was inspired by the recorded log files: users typically worked with a small subset of classes for each task, which required them to repeatedly find it through a long list of all classes. To address this, we created a customizable working set of classes that is automatically filtered to provide users with the classes they need for a specific task. Finally, we wanted to provide users with a gestalt view of their source code, so we created a heat-map UML diagram that provided users with the “hottest” areas in the in the project.

We were curious to know if these prototypes delivered on their premise, so we ran a series of experiments with seven programmers, and measured their performance with and without the prototypes. The results were significantly better.

Lesson learned: Small changes can lead to big improvements.

The prototype has since evolved into a much larger project, with several full time researchers working on it. It has also been internally deployed to help multiple product teams at Microsoft.

I feel that I can take very little credit for what’s been created: users told me about their problems, they helped me with the solution, and they showed me how well the solution performed. They deserved most of the credit!

If you are interested in reading more about the experiment and prototype, you can read the paper published at InfoVis’05 .

If you find this post useful, I highly recommend Steve Blank’s book on customer development, and Eric Ries’ blog on Lean startups.

Startup Lessons Learned Conference Notes – Fri, April 23, 2010

Mon, 03 May 2010 09:43:50 -0700

In the previous post, I’ve made an introduction in what Lean Startup means. About a week ago, Eric Ries has organized, in San Francisco, the first conference which aimed to bring together those who conceived the methodologies that make up the Lean Startup, and entrepreneurs who use these methodologies in order to build successful startups.

If you missed the conference or the simulcast, you can find here the notes including links to the speakers’ presentations, available through the kindness of a group of people at Bootup Labs, in Vancouver.

I watched the simulcast at Bucharest Hubb, in Romania and I believe that the knowledge and experiences shared during this conference are a truly valuable resource for all entrepreneurs. So, even if you attended either the conference or the simulcast, keep these notes close and take a look at them from time to time.

The Lean Startup and its promise

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:18:39 -0700

One of the most recent and very fashionable concepts in the field of online entrepreneurship, especially in such important hubs like Silicon Valley, New York and London, is Lean Startup.

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms.

Bellow is his speech about what the promise of this methodology is:

“The overwhelming majority of start-ups totally fail. Not because they are taking too much risk, but actually because when they finally build the technology, when it finally works, nobody wants to buy the product. A few years ago I started writing this blog called Startup Lessons Learned, trying to answer this question of what is the difference between the successful startups and the non-succesful startups.
The lean startup is an entrepreneurship methodology, that takes ideas from agile development, customer development, lean manufactory and applies them to the process of innovation. There is a number of practices of the lean startup: Continuous Deployment, where we can put code into production up to 50 times per day; rapid Split Testing - incorporating A/B hypothesis testing directly into the product development; the concept of Minimum Viable Product - launching at the smallest version of the product we can, to start the process of learning. Those techniques only make sense in the context of entrepreneurship. It is the attempt to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Progress is learning about what customers will want. We call it Validated Learning about Customers. When we validate what we’ve learned, we have proof that we are not just crazy, that we are in fact on the right track, that our assumptions that underly our business model make sense. That’s the promise of the lean startup.”

I believe it is a very well structured and comprehensible methodology, and I highly recommend it to all entrepreneurs, no matter their experience.
More posts analyzing separate aspects of it are to come, so stay tuned.

Are you speaking VC? (III)

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:22:53 -0700

Today, I’m presenting the last part of the series of articles about the legal VC terms.

Restriction on Sales
This term sheet provision states that the company has a right of first refusal on all transfers of common stock, which if not exercised by the company will be transferred to the investors.

Proprietary Information and Inventions Agreement
Refers to the fact that every founder, employer and consultant should sign an intellectual property transfer agreement with the company trying to get VC funding.

Co-Sale Agreement
It means that the founders may not sell, transfer or exchange their shares unless each Investor has an opportunity to participate in the sale on a pro-rata basis. This only matters until the IPO.

Founders Activities
This means your funding VC wants you to be spending 100% (actually 120%) of your time and attention on the company. If you are working on other companies, but not disclosing this, you have violated the terms of the agreement and you don’t want that before even starting. There are some exceptions to this previsions, but they are very rare.

No Shop Agreement (also Unilateral or Serial Monogamy)
It is a provision that commits the entrepreneur not to look for other VCs while negotiating with another. In Brad Feld’s words, “At some level, the no shop agreement reinforces the handshake that says “ok – let’s get a deal done – no more fooling around looking for a better/different one.”

Indemnification
It is a provision that states that the company will indemnify board members and investors for any claims brought against them by any third party (including any other shareholder of the Company) as a result of the financing.

Assignment
The assignment provision allows venture funds to transfer shares between funds and make distributions to their investors.

Read, also, the first and the second part of the article.

Are you speaking VC? (II)

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 07:45:00 -0700

Let’s continue with our second lesson of VC language. Today, we’ll explore some more of the frequently used terms of the VC term sheets. Following the links provided upon each definition, you’ll find broader explanations for the terms.

Redemption Rights
Rights to force the company to purchase shares (a “put”) and more infrequently the company’s right to force investor to sell their shares (a “call”). A Put allows one to liquidate an investment in the event an IPO or public merger becomes unlikely.

Conversion
Refers to the fact that preferred stock is convertible into common stock. This allows the buyer of preferred to convert to common stock should he determine on a liquidation that he is better off getting paid on a pro rata common basis rather than accepting the liquidation preference. It can also be used in certain extreme circumstances whereby the preferred wants to control a vote of the common on a certain issue.

Conditions Precedent to Financing
It is a paragraph in the term sheet that you should definitely pay great attention to, as you could not have a deal at all, even if you signed the term sheet, if your company doesn’t meet these conditions.

Vesting
Typically, stock and options will vest over four years – which means that you have to be around for four years to own all of your stock or options. If you leave the company earlier than the four year period, the vesting formula applies and you only get a percentage of your stock. As a result, many entrepreneurs view vesting as a way for VCs to “control them, their involvement, and their ownership in a company”.

Information Rights
It means that the company will have to deliver regularly to the investors, until the IPO, such documents like Company’s annual budget, audited annual and unaudited quarterly financial statements.

Registration Rights

These are provisions that allow investors to sell stock via the public market (IPO). On the other hand, registration rights are often the only exit vehicle that, as a practical matter, the minority shareholders can compel. Read also on registration rights.

Right of First Refusal
The right of first refusal gives the major investor, in this case, which can be clearly defined in terms of number of purchased shares, the right to buy particular shares before any other proposed buyer is accepted.

Voting Rights
Refers to the fact that preferred stockholders vote like the common stockholders in the affairs of the company, with some exceptions. Anyway, all the heavy rights are contained in other sections, such as the protective provisions, you have to pay special attention to.

Employee Pool
The employee pool section clarifies the capital structure and specifically call out the percentage of the company that will be allocated to the option pool, allocated to directors, officers, employees and consultants financing.

Read, also, the first part and the next part of the article.

Are you speaking VC? (I)

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:45:00 -0700

It is a simple, well known rule: in order to have a relationship with someone, no matter the type, one have to understand what one say to each other. Basically, you have to speak the same language. So, before hoping that an investor would become your investor, you have to learn to understand and speak his language. That means not only being able to read the lines, but also between them. The between the lines reading comes with practice, but what you can do is start learning the meaning of the words on the lines.

While surfing the web in order to provide a glossary of the venture financing words, I stumbled upon Brad Feld’s blog, managing director at Foundry Group. He published a series of posts that treat separately each of these words. As the author states, this series have been used as the base for a number of college courses.

I will enumerate them here and I will give a short definition for each of them, but of course I encourage you to read the entire posts for a deeper understanding:

Term Sheet

An outline of the terms of a proposed investment deal, typically set up to be a non-binding precursor to the actual financing agreements that will fully document a funding transaction. Term sheets serve the same purpose as letters of intent and are used frequently by venture capitalists to fix the terms of a deal before they complete their due diligence. While generally unenforceable, term sheets, like letters of intent, often contain binding agreements to prevent management from shopping the deal spelled out in the term sheet. Term sheets vary in their level of formality and in the obligations they spell out for the company and the investors. A term sheet is proposed by investors, signed and accepted by the company, and is the precursor to a due diligence effort before the actual investment or plan is made.

Due Diligence

Usually undertaken by investors, but also customers, due diligence refers to the process of making sure that someone is what they say they are and can do what they claim.

Price

This is the form in which the Price is provided in a VC term sheet: The Original Purchase Price represents a fully-diluted (the total number of shares issued by the company on the assumption that all warrants, options and preferred stocks are exercised) pre-money valuation of $ X and a fully-diluted post money valuation of $ Y. The pre-money valuation is what the investor is valuing the company today, before investment, while the post-money valuation is the pre-money valuation plus the contemplated aggregate investment amount.

Liquidation Preference

The liquidation preference determines how the money a company gets are shared on a liquidity event, a liquidity event being not only bankruptcy, but also mergers, acquisitions, or a change of control of the company. In an accurate definition, the term liquidation preference pertains only to money returned to a particular series of the company’s stock ahead of other series of stock, the preferred stock. But the term describes how the money are returned to participating stocks owners, as well.

Protective Provisions

Protective provisions are veto rights that investors have on certain actions by the company. These provisions protect the VC.

Drag Along

A right that allows majority shareholders to force minority shareholders to accept an agreement. In a typical drag-along agreement, if a majority of shareholders agree to sell or liquidate a company then the remaining shareholders must consent and not raise objections.

Anti-Dilution

The anti-dilution provision is used to protect investors in the event a company issues equity at a lower valuation then in previous financing rounds.
Anti-dilution provisions are almost always part of a financing, so understanding the nuances and knowing which aspects to negotiate is an important part of the entrepreneur’s toolkit.

Pay-to-Play

An investor must keep “paying” (participating pro ratably in future financings) in order to keep “playing”(not have his preferred stock converted to common stock) in the company.

Continue with Are you speaking VC? (II)

Raising Angel Money: priced deal or convertible debt?

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:34:40 -0700

I’ve been talking lately about the financing stages of a start-up. We know angel financing is one of the early stages, but what are its ins and outs? While wondering, I stumbled upon Mark Suster’s post which I found very useful and comprehensive, and I decided to share with you some of his key points.

I’ll start with defining the terms. Then we’ll see some of Mark Suster’s interesting arguments about which of these two is better, and finally I’ll tell you which one I prefer best.

A priced deal is when the value of your company at which the angels would buy stock has been set at the recommendation of the angel investors.
A convertible debt is when the price at which the angel buys stock in your company is set in the future when you would raise your first round of venture capital money.

Why do angels choose priced deals over convertible debts? When offering money at a very early stage, they take a lot more risks than VCs. And besides money, they offer their knowledge, connections, credibility to the funded start-ups without which they might even not get to the first round of VC funding.

On the other side there is the situation when an angel wants to invest in a hot deal, a deal everybody wants. Then, he would probably prefer a convertible debt than anything at all.

And here are Mark Suster’s opinion on the matter:

- In general, angels should make priced deals.
- Most convertible debt deals are done by angels who are not professional investors, but wealthy ex tech executives, lawyers, doctors, real estate professionals, or others who fear that they would loose deals if not agreeing this structure, or they simply don’t know better.
- As an entrepreneur you should raise money from the most experienced people possible, even if you can do only a priced deal,
- If you’re struggling to raise money at all then you should obviously take the money from wherever you can get it and many times that is reality.

As of me, I did only priced deals, but I am looking forward to meet that company that would be able to convince me to accept also convertible debts.

Top 10 countries to do business

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:10:00 -0700

In today’s global world, you have many choices of places where to incorporate your company. If you are in the online industry, take a look and see which one suites you best.
If you plan to raise money from VCs, you should incorporate in their geographical area, but if you plan to make money from online services and yo want to avoid paying to many taxes, you should consider to incorporate your company in one of these countries.

More details about this index here

6 steps to find your market size

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:55:00 -0800

This is the algorithm I want to apply when bringing to the market any future projects I will be involved in.

Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Usually, I start a business when I accidentally discover a problem and I want to solve it. That is why I consider these steps to be very important in order to figure out if my new venture has the potential to grow into a successful business.

Define the persona - I describe the behavior and concerns of the person whose problem I want to solve. For example, if I want to improve the way mothers communicate with each other, the persona is mothers with kids between 0-7 years old.

Defining the problem - I validate the problem discovering whether it is generic for my type of persona. In order to do this, I have to speak with at least 20 mothers who should agree that they have the problem I’m trying to solve. And it’s awesome, because you can do this even before actually starting the project.

How many people with this problem live in my country or in the world? - Usually, I am doing a lot of research to find out the number of those I identified as my persona, which I intend to target initially.

What is the solution they are using today? - At this stage, I discover how my persona solves the problem today. It’s important to see, as well, how much does my target spend to solve it.

What is my solution to this problem? - So, I have to come with a totally different solution to the problem, something disruptive. Also, I have to ask the target how much would they pay for the solution I’m proposing. If they are not willing to pay, it means my product is only a nice to have and it doesn’t solve a real problem they have.

The market size - Now, I can define the market size, that is the total number of people that I target multiplied with the amount they are willing to pay for the product or service I’m providing.When you do your calculations you have to be aware of the fact that even if you have no competition, you’ll probably get only 25% of the market in case your solution is really innovative and hard to reproduce.

Of course nothing is sure, but at least I can say more confidently after having gone through these 6 steps if it is a business that I can take into consideration or not. Same time you can take into consideration Imagine a Bigger Market and You’ll See a Bigger Market

How to make a great Pitch

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:00:52 -0800

Last week I had the chance to attend a workshop during the Stanford Entrepreneurship Week. It was about designing and delivering great pitches. There were two extraordinary presentations, which I will try to summarize here, because they are related to the article about how to pitch an angel investor I wrote a few days ago.

Photo by Pawel

How to make your story compelling:

Bait them
Hook them
Reel them in

Every pitch should use the Why/What/How framework.

Why = why is there a problem
What = they must do about it
How = you solved the problem uniquely

Here are two examples of pitches that keep you interested until the end, sentence with sentence:

InchairTV
Jamie Oliver at TED

Once you have a message you should create your presentation. Preparing your presentation consists of three primary sections:

Distill your content
Start in the analog (ie pen & paper, whiteboard, sketchbook, post-it notes).
- find inspiration
- develop analogies
- brainstorm with others
- develop your concepts
- group ideas to organize
- integrate personal stories
- consider the data you need to convey
- always remember to consider your audience
Design your visuals
Think like a designer. Simplify to amplify. Use 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki
Deliver
Keep it short. No longer than 20 min. Connect and engage with your audience. Consider variation across your presentation to keep it interesting.

More resources:

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
Presentation Zen

How to pitch an angel investor

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:01:56 -0800

There’s a lot of resources on how to pitch VCs, available out there, but perhaps you are asking yourself what should your pitch for angel investors contain.

Photo by Cest

Based on my experience and on tons of materials that I read, this is the structure I choose:

1. The team - It’s about you and your team, about your experience and motivation to do the project.

2. The problem - What is the problem you want to solve? How big it is (the market) and how this problem is solved today.

3. The solution - Do you have a disrupting solution to solve the problem? If you have some traction and some user feedback it’s awesome.

4. Persona - Who is your customer and how do you plan to tackle him. What are the acquisition channels? Think about scalability here.

5. The market - By reach (no of personas) or by transactions (amount of money spent on that market)

6. Revenue and economics - Even if it’s not so clear yet, list some ideas how to make money that you want to test with your potential customers.

7. Funding plan and milestones - How much money do you need and at what valuation? What do you need the money for? Define some metrics and goals for success.

8. Exit plan - What do you want to do with your company? Do you want to sell it to a strategic investor or IPO? Define the persona for the strategic investor if we choose this path.

If you want to read more about this subject you should read this book:

Pitching Hacks: How to pitch startups to investors

These days I will post a new post about how to get an intro to an investor.

How to get an introduction to an investor

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:08:59 -0800

Because we are also looking for introductions to angel investors or VCs, this is the strategy I decided to follow:

Get referred by an entrepreneur who already got an investment;
Get referred by a market or product specialist who believes in our product;
Get referred by lawyers and accountants.

I am using Linkedin to get the introductions. I am simply searching for founders’, specialists’ and angels’ names and looking for those who can introduce me to them.

Ideas that make successful people successful

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:18:08 -0800

Ideas that make successful people successful:

Inspiring ideas for those who want to make a difference in their life. I have just realized there is a lot of space to improve myself. What about you?

5 pitches to get funded

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:02:00 -0800

If you are an online entrepreneur you may be probably asking yourself how many pitches you need in order to get funded for the first time.

Here is how it usually works:

The Friends and Family Pitch
Once you have an idea about your product pitch your friends and family about it. Listen to them and feel how excited they are about your idea.
The Elevator Pitch
If your friends and family are willing to support you and your new idea, make a very short pitch that describes the problem, the persona and your solution.
The Public Pitch
If you have some good feedback about your elevator pitch you can make it public. Find events where you can present yourpitch and get feedback.
Coffee Shop Investor Pitch
If you have good results with your public pitching, you can pitch investors in a friendly environment.
The Partners Pitch
If they liked it, they will send you their term sheet and they will invite you to pitch their partners as well.

If you can convince all the partners, you’re done.

"I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one..."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:01:54 -0800

“I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…”

- Dalai Lama

Good News and Bad News

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:59:53 -0800

Observing the communication strategy of the majority of the companies in today business world, I realized that they tend to tell to their stakeholders, including customers, mostly good news. Only unexpected events are treated in a different way.

Photo by Potobeseno

Studies show that people react much better to a sum of small good news delivered often, than to big good news, but delivered more rarely. Also, they react better to a big stream of bad news delivered rarely, than to small often streams of bad news.

Based on this, I plan to communicate with my stakeholders this way:

- Tell them all the good news as often as possible, no matter how small they are.
- Send them a report once in 3, 6 or 12 months with all the mistakes that I’ve made and what I’ve learned from them.

If you like the concept, feel free to use it

Top 7 books for online entrepreneurs

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:55:00 -0800

A lot of people ask me about my favorite online entrepreneurship books. So I decided to share my top 7 favorite with you.

1. The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded
2. The Cluetrain Manifesto
3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4. Made to Stick
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany
6. The Black Swan
7. Karaoke Capitalism

Enjoy!

I am always looking for new and interesting books to read. So, what’s your favorite one?

Work in a very creative environment

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:38:00 -0800

In Silicon Valley there are so many places (hubs) where you can work with other creative entrepreneurs. I want to encourage all Romanian entrepreneurs to join Bucharesthubb so they can have the same great experience.