The greatest thing about being a part of Momentum Venture Management is the opportunity to meet and interact with entrepreneurs. Their passion is contagious and the sheer fact that they are building out their dream is inspirational. That is why this past Tuesday’s Entrepreneur Only event put together by Momentum and held at the Wilshire Grand Hotel was such an incredible experience. Over 60 entrepreneurs came to share their visions, meet each other, and have a couple of drinks.
Entrepreneurs were out in full force, with businesses ranging from nanotechnology to internet media. It was an amazing display of the exploding startup scene in Southern California and a testament to the innovation happening in Los Angeles.
At one point towards the end of the evening I looked around and took in the scene; a room full of amazingly talented people helping each other build out the next wave of businesses. I couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds.
Based on the success of this past Tuesday, we are planning on having several more of these events. So if you are an entrepreneur who is interested in meeting other likeminded people, getting free advice from the Momentum partners, and enjoying a relaxed evening of interesting conversation, then please leave a comment below and we will make sure to email you details about our next event.
We ran across this blog that profiles different types of people involved in start-ups. It may be helpful as you think about how to build a team that works well together….
Some of you may be attending the upcoming Harvard Business School Entrepreneurs Conference on Monday May 19th in Anaheim, CA. As these things go it is definitely one of the better early stage events. While it does attract its share of service providers, it also seems to attract a nice cross section of entrepreneurs. I think this will be the 6th year that I have attended. This year one of my other Momentum partners, Matt Ridenour, and I will be speaking on the panels. I am particularly excited about the topic that my panel (first panel of the day at 9AM) addresses: Do You Have the Right Stuff? Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs.Continue Reading »
A few weeks ago, I was a speaker in a session hosted by TechBizConnection, a southern California networking group for technology entrepreneurs. There were some great quotes by the other speakers in the event on the challenges of building a new company. I want to apologize in advance for not recalling who offered which quotes! Following are some of the best quotes I heard in this meeting and other places along the way.
“It’s like taking off in an airplane that hasn’t been built”: This refers to the challenge of creating a new company (constantly learning and changing plans) while at the same time trying to land first customers and sell new products. By the way, this reminds me of a topic dear to me - “Why You Shouldn’t Write a Business Plan“. Continue Reading »
Noam Wasserman, a professor at Harvard Business School, came up with a core concept about startup founder motivations:
Rich versus King?
Academics are long known for coming up with interesting, but relatively impracticable concepts. This is not one of them. Founders need to understand their motivation for starting the company. By taking time out in the early stages to understand why you are building the company, you can avoid a lot of heartache and headache down the road. Continue Reading »
In 2005, I followed in the footsteps of many other Los Angeles-based entrepreneurs. I moved our internet startup, Insider Pages, from Southern California to Silicon Valley. While we knew it would be a huge disruption to a fledgling company, we did it for some good reasons – access to capital, engineering talent, and a bubbling ecosystem of ideas, energy and innovation. It was the right move — Silicon Valley turned out to be everything we’d hoped for and more. In a few months, we’d built a top tier engineering team, attracted successful product and marketing people from other Silicon Valley companies, and had started building a network of business development relationships with other Silicon Valley firms. Continue Reading »
As we all know, creating a successful start up is much more of an art than science. While classic business disciplines may be helpful, there is a tremendous amount of intuition that distinguishes truly great entrepreneurs from the rest of the pack. While I could discuss many of these dimensions, I’d like to focus on one in particular: when and how to systematize your product development process. One venture capitalist friend coined a terrific phrase that is the title of this post: “From Cowboy to Machine.” Continue Reading »
Take a step back 20 years, and pretend you’re the owner of a neighborhood bookstore. Being there everyday, you can count how many people came into the store day, how many picked up a book and looked through it, and most importantly, how many people actually bought a book. You can easily determine the demographics of shoppers and observe which books they peruse and which they neglect, how much you spent on advertising to pull each customer into the store, and analyze the data to increase your bottom line.
Fast forward 10 years to the days of the dot-com bubble. Companies were raising tens of millions and spent obscene amounts of money on acquiring eyeballs (bringing customers into the store aka customer acquisition). Cookies and user tracking were in their infancy. More importantly, tools which informed webmasters of who was coming to their site and what they were doing were very basic. Continue Reading »
For many founders to be, the thought of starting a company is fairly daunting. Founders often come from one function like development or marketing and must figure out how to deal with all of them – with limited resources to boot. The good news is that the right philosophy will enable you to make good, quick decisions in business functions you have little experience. The right philosophy is based on “how to think” as opposed to “what to think.” “What to think” answers only specific questions. “How to think” provides you a guiding philosophy to make good decisions. Remember, you don’t have time to learn everything or make the same mistakes most people do.
I was playing around on GoDaddy the other day w/ my hosting account and ran across the “16 Rules” by GoDaddy’s enigmatic founder and CEO. I think they are pretty interesting:
1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone.
I believe that not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.” Continue Reading »
