Extracting Talent from Large Companies to Work in Startups

April 27, 2012 Leave a comment

There’s a serious talent shortage right now for strong analytical and technical people. It’s a shortage for startups and established companies alike. Startups, inventing the future, are a much better place for the talent but it’s difficult to convince people that there’s a better, more exciting opportunity when things are good enough. People are generally averse to change.

Startups, as a community, need a more concerted effort to extract talent from large companies. Here are a few ideas to start extracting more talent:

  • Work harder to target and invite developers to meetups around certain technologies or programming languages — one of the best ways to convince someone to change jobs is to talk to them in person about some common bond
  • Additional content marketing around tech talks, best places to work, and more so that people will be exposed to other corporate cultures that get them excited
  • Better articulation of the value of startups having more autonomy, mastery, and purpose
  • More highlighting that large companies aren’t as safe as people believe, with the recent Google office closing and Yahoo layoffs as prime examples

Extracting more talent from large companies to work in startups will be hard. Very hard. For startup communities to thrive, especially in markets that are still aren’t mature, extracting more talent from large companies is one of the best things they can do.

What else? What are some other ways to extract talent from large companies to work in startups?

Filed under Entrepreneurship

Billboards and Startups

April 27, 2012 2 Comments

Driving up and down the 101 in Silicon Valley you’ll see a highway littered with billboards for startups and established technology companies. Some of these billboards are advertising products and some are advertising job openings (“you could be at work now and commute less…”). With all the talk of moving off-line spending online, billboards in my city seem to be doing fine as there is no shortage of advertisers for them.

Last week RippleIT put up a new billboard in a prime part of town to increase brand awareness in an area dense with attorneys and creative types. The goal isn’t necessarily to directly produce leads, although that would be nice, but rather to educate people on the brand so that they’re more likely to respond to an outbound call or referral.

Interestingly, very few billboards have unique web addresses on them to track how many times people typed in the value.  Yes, some have QR codes, which is even crazier, but I would think short web addresses would be common by now. Perhaps billboard advertisers are less savvy or they know more than I do and don’t bother with unique URLs since no one types them in anyway.

With the talent war and talent shortage in certain areas I suspect that we’ll start seeing more billboards for startups outside of Silicon Valley. Startups need to make a more concerted effort to extract smart people out of large companies so that they have the opportunity to be a part of something much more exciting. Billboards aren’t the only answer but they can be part of a comprehensive solution.

What else? What are your thoughts on billboards and startups?

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Sales and Marketing

Business Idea: Career Fairs at Trade Shows and Industry Events

April 25, 2012 Leave a comment

Hiring A+ team members that fit your corporate culture is a serious challenge. In fact, talent is the most pressing challenge for almost all successful startups I know. Earlier today I was talking to an economic development person brainstorming ideas to help with the talent shortage and came up with a simple one:

Business idea – A service that runs career fairs outside trade shows and industry events.

Since the trade show and industry event attendees are already in the physical city for a specific event, it’s much easier for a local employer to try and sell them on the area and the position in person. Now, some interaction would need to be discrete as people that are gainfully employed don’t want to have their co-workers seeing them talk about a new job. The economics are easy based on the fees paid to recruiters to fill positions, especially specialized skills in high demand.

Economic development agencies should be supportive as well since it’s much better for a company to employee someone locally instead of a in a different area so that all the taxes paid and money spent by the person go into the local economy. Yes, economic development is a zero sum game but it’s a game that’s still played on a regular basis.

Trade shows and industry events have a unique, captive audience that should be tapped for talent by local firms. It isn’t the easiest or most direct form of recruiting but getting great talent is never easy.

What else? What are your thoughts on the idea of a business that runs career fairs at trade shows and industry events for markets with sought-after talent?

Filed under Entrepreneurship

Gathering User Feedback For An Established Product

April 24, 2012 Leave a comment

User feedback is critical for building a successful software product. As the product matures and becomes established, user feedback is easier to get, but can also become overwhelming with requests from so many different constituents. Here are some ideas for gathering user feedback for an established product:

  • Quarterly check-in calls by a client advocate or account manager to find out how things are going
  • Idea exchange with single sign-on so that customers can post ideas and vote on other ideas
  • In-app net promoter score where you ask once per quarter how likely they are to recommend the product
  • Regional user groups with a company team member facilitating
  • Annual users conference with significant customer interaction
  • Customer advisory board that does a quarterly conference call with the VP of Product Management

Gathering user feedback with these methods is the easy part. The real challenge is organizing the information and combining it with your own vision and opinion for the product. Then, clearly communicating the direction and future functionality with the key stakeholders.

What else? What are some other ways to gather user feedback for an established product?

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Product Mgmt, SaaS

Thoughts on Pardot as AJC #1 Best Place to Work

April 23, 2012 4 Comments

Yesterday the Atlanta Journal Constitution named Pardot as the #1 place to work in the small business category (50 – 149 employees) — we couldn’t be more honored, humbled, and thrilled by the recognition. It truly is our greatest accomplishment as an organization and is also external validation of our goal to be the best place to work and the best place to be a customer. Our guiding purpose is to be a platform for good work, good people, and good pay with the people side being the most important. Good people to us are ones that are positive, self-starting, and supportive. Yes, it’s really that simple.

Are we perfect? No, not in the slightest. We still have significant work to do around team member alignment, clarity of career paths, and leadership development. We do know some of our weaknesses and we’re working hard to make them better.

Here are some of the things that we do well and that contributed to us being named the best place to work in Atlanta:

  • Amazing people that fit our culture (most important!) — we hire people that already fit our style and recognize that the way we operate isn’t for everyone
  • Great benefits — we pay full health, dental, short term disability, long term disability, and 401k with match for all employees combined with catered breakfasts daily, catered lunches on Fridays, all you can eat and drink snacks throughout the week, and free massage therapists on Fridays
  • Encourage work/life balance — we work standard 40 hour weeks, in fact, most people work from home a couple days a week to avoid traffic, run errands, etc
  • Constant communication — we aren’t afraid of meetings, but we do them with a purpose and consistent rhythm between daily check-ins, weekly tacticals, monthly strategics, and quarterly off-sites
  • Celebrate success — every quarter we have a big company-wide off-site event where we celebrate as a team
  • One page strategic plan — a simple one-sided document has everything

One of the hardest things about this approach is that it limits our growth. We’re confident we could grow revenue much faster but we’d have to sacrifice our hiring standards and we’re not going to do it. Our long term bet is to build the best company, not the largest company. We’re going to do everything in our power to achieve that goal.

The amazing people on our team deserve all the credit and I’m extremely proud of what we’ve built. We’re just getting started.

P.S. We’re hiring!

Filed under Community, Corp Culture, Entrepreneurship

Atlanta Startup Weekend 2012 Notes

April 22, 2012 4 Comments

Tonight I had the opportunity to hear the final pitches at Atlanta Startup Weekend 2012 at Georgia Tech’s ATDC. The teams did a great job, especially considering they only had a weekend. With over 120 people, Atlanta Startup Weekend continues to be one of the largest annual startup events in town.

Here’s a summary of the different projects:

Wink (overall winner)
- winkandlink.co
- Meet friends of friends
- Dating site
- $2.1 billion industry, 1,500 dating sites
- Use Facebook social graph
- Matching through mutual friends
- Target U.S. young-to-middle age
- Freemium model
- Daily deal affiliates sales to make money

SceneFlow
- Way to turn an idea into a fleshed out screen play for movie
- Don’t worry about scripting formatting — it’s automated
- Subscription service on a per-user basis
- Collaborate with multiple people on the screen play
- Script, scenes with description, list of scenes, WYSIWYG editor for the scene, multiple people can work in editor at same time from different browsers
- Give me the script button generates a fully formatted Word Doc
- API already available

LoveBug
- Mobile app for couples to communicate in a romantic and fun way
- Communication is number one reason for breakup and divorce
- Pair launched and quickly reached 100,000 downloads
- Competitors: Facebook, Path, Pair
- Fun games like quizes, voice notes, recommendations for products based on pins/likes

SayRoom
- Social space for people to capture 10 second audio bites
- Serves the casual user as well as businesses to help share their short messages
- Audio is stronger than text
- iPhone app to record and broadcast audio
- Emotion driven alternative to texting and Twitter

Tuxedo
- Weddings are $40B annually
- Avg wedding is $25k
- Making weddings easy, fun, social, and memorable
- Text, images, audio
- iOS initially
- Stream view of the wedding

ServicePunch
- Manage your services and products
- Avg household has 26 products that need regular maintenance
- Car servicing, oil changing, home A/C filter, etc
- Reminders by email, text, and voice

FinishBig
- Track, log, compare, and share your official race results
- Target is the running enthusiast = 2 million runners
- Runners want to track results plus more like weather, location, satisfaction, etc
- Data is super valuable
- Deliver recommendations for your own personal awesome sauce
- @finishbigapp on Twitter

OnSlyde
- Real time audience interaction
- @onslyde
- Presenter performance, audience engagement, detailed analytics on presentation
- Users include public speakers, sales professionals, professors

BeanStock
- Children’s educational game that teaches about money and financial management
- $300M market for education apps and kids games
- Gap in the market for kids learning about money
- 60% of children ages 4-8 use apps
- Targeting ages 5-9
- Freemium — free app with $.99 per additional stage

RealVision (came in 2nd place)
- Commercial real estate software to analyze cash flow and value of properties
- Argus is industry standard – $4,700/yr/computer – $90M revenue
- Argus is out-dated and Windows 3.1 like
- Idea is a cloud-based app with smart phone component for brokers, owners, and lenders
- Test cash flow assumptions, sensitivity analysis, etc
- www.getrealvision.co

Real Time Today
- Improve skills to get a better job
- Find best candidate in the market
- Current online recruitment sites have several issues
- Settings to better match candidates

Leave.im
- Developers occasionally have to put on IT hat and help people
- Fastest way to share files locally over WiFi
- Browsers can geo locate so you know where the file is left
- iOS mobile app ready
- Can share photos and or any type of file
- Files expire after an hour
- Paid accounts to have the files last longer

Splitango
- Splitting costs is difficult
- Trust is the main issue for co-ownership of property
- Splitango handles the legal side of sharing ownership of property
- People are interested in owning things with their friends
- Meetup meets Kickstarter

QuitFor
- Mobile app to help people quit smoking
- No comprehensive digital tools out there to help quit smoking
- Key learnings: ready to commit, anonymity required, physical and mental distraction needed
- Buttons: I smoked | I beat a craving

Trustable.com
- eBay reputation is a brilliant idea but it’s only on eBay
- Single site to get reputation from all your sites and centralize it
- Allows you to prove you say what you do
- People are worried others will cheat the system

Again, great job to the presenting teams.

Filed under Community, Entrepreneurship

Notes from SaaS Growth and the Cost of Capital

April 21, 2012 Leave a comment

SaaS Capital has some great resources for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies with one of them being a white paper titled SaaS Growth and the Cost of Capital. ExactTarget in the 8x revenue club is a great example of the SaaS business model, which is one of my favorites. Here are some notes from SaaS Growth and the Cost of Capital:

  • 13 public SaaS companies tracked by Pacific Crest Securities have increased 40% in value from the beginning of 2008 to the beginning of 2011
  • Best valuations come from SaaS companies growing more than 25% annually in a large market
  • Main driver for valuations comes from revenue growth rate (not profit growth)
  • Three of the four fastest growing SaaS companies are spending more than 40% of revenue on sales and marketing
  • When today’s market leading SaaS companies were in expansion stage before going public they spent 60 – 70% of revenue of sales and marketing and took on outside investment
  • Cloud technologies are contributing to higher incremental gross margin for SaaS companies (along with Moore’s Law)
  • High-growth SaaS businesses are worth three to five times more than slow growth ones

The author of the white paper really drives home the point that growth for SaaS companies results in a huge premium and should be seriously pursued.

What else? What are your thoughts on SaaS growth and thd cost of capital?

Filed under Entrepreneurship, SaaS

Networking Advice for Entrepreneurs

April 20, 2012 1 Comment

At the EO Nerve Atlanta 2012 event there were a number of breakout sessions. One of them was on networking and how to be a better networker, but not in the cheesy, low-value way. The main premise is that networking should always be about helping the other person and paying it forward, without asking for anything in return. Once some level of value has been provided inevitably the favor will get returned.

When networking with someone it’s important to do the standard chit chat and then get to a comfort level where you can safely ask what’s the biggest challenge or opportunity they’re working through right now in their personal, family, or business. Once you have something concrete that they care about, there are two general recommendations:

  • Offer free help in an area that’s relevant to that issue, assuming you have legitimate expertise
  • Make an introduction to someone you know that can help the person with their challenge or opportunity

So, it’s pretty simple: either help them directly with no strings attached or introduce them to someone else that can help them. It’s common sense but still really good advice to keep in mind.

What else? What are some additional networking recommendations for entrepreneurs?

Filed under Entrepreneurship

Notes from Mike McQuary at EO Nerve Atlanta 2012

April 19, 2012 Leave a comment

EO Nerve Atlanta 2012 kicked off today and was a big success. The theme is Dream | Challenge | Lead and the events to support it have been excellent. First thing this morning we were inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in video and live re-enactment form. After that we heard from the CEO of a NYSE company followed by Mike McQuary, the co-founder of Mindspring/Earthlink as well as Wheego, one of only three companies in the United States to have a completely electric car on the market today.

Here are some notes from Mike McQuary’s talk at EO Nerve Atlanta 2012:

  • Mike was sleeping on the floor of the studio apartment of Charles Brewer when Charles quit his job and said he wanted to start a company based on a strong culture of people that he liked, and the business idea didn’t matter
  • Mike was the operations guy and Charles was the visionary for Earthlink, which grew to thousands of employees in only a few years
  • Org charts should be flipped upside down whereby the leaders are serving the employees
  • Don’t have offices or reserved parking spots as that creates unnecessary hierarchy
  • Mike personally interviewed the first 1,000 Mindspring employees for corporate culture fit
  • Earthlink hired people who were passionate about helping other people, and then trained them on the skills
  • Integrating Earthlink and Mindspring into one company was the hardest thing because the cultures were very different
  • Mike walked away from Earthlink when he realized he’d regret not spending time with his four little kids
  • As leader be careful what you say because it’s taken differently
  • Make sure you have hard metrics to measure success
  • Wheego was started after Mike saw the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car and heard the sound of the voice of customers who were passionate about the product, just like his customers at Earthlink

Mike did a great job sharing anecdotes and advice from his entrepreneurial experiences. Mingspring was a massive success and I hope Wheego turns out the same way.

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Email is Your #1 Security Weakness

April 18, 2012 4 Comments

When people think of cyber security and identity theft one’s email account doesn’t come up nearly as often as it should. An email account is the number one security weakness for 99% of the startups out there. Just think about the “Reset Password” option for the sites you use on a regular basis — online banking, QuickBooks Online, Amazon.com, Google AdWords (a savvy bad guy can run up your bill driving traffic to an affiliate program in China), etc.

Jeff Atwood’s recent post Make Your Email Hacker Proof recommends the same solution I recommend and use personally.

All startups should use Gmail with two-factor authentication enabled for personal and business email. Yes, it makes it more annoying to sign into Gmail from a random laptop but it’s totally worth it. The idea is that you sign in like you normally would with a standard password and then you use a separate program on your smart phone (or get a number texted to you) that has a random second password. This second password is the key since it is much harder to steal as it changes every 60 seconds and is created on the fly.

If your email account contains important information or is connected to another account that’s important, and has a “Password Reset” function, Gmail with two-factor authentication is the way to go.

What else? Do you agree that email is your #1 security weakness?

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Tech

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