I’ve been noticing quite a few startup business plan and pitch competitions. I thought that I should pass along. Enjoy and let me know if you end up entering any of them. I’d be curious to hear about your experience.
I always go back and forth about whether stealth mode is good or bad. I guess that I should back up and explain what I mean by stealth. When someone has a business idea, she may choose not to disclose what the idea is about aka stealth mode. Alright with that out of the way, let’s continue.
Almost always I am con-stealth mode, I think people are cheating themselves from getting good feedback from others. How can someone give feedback if they know nothing about the idea? I am not asking these folks to disclose everything, such as implementation and IP, just enough information so that people know what the idea is about. Also, if someone is afraid to share, then maybe that person isn’t bringing anything to the table to make the idea a success.
When I am pro-stealth mode, it’s usually because I know that people just don’t want to share things with folks who they don’t know too well. It’s nothing personal. Also, I can see people not interested in hearing feedback when they have already made the decision to move forward with the idea no matter what someone else says. Been there, done that, I understand. It’s dedication baby! Well perhaps ignorant dedication, but still dedication.
So, yesterday, I was thinking about some advice that I received from an Angel Investor at a Women 2.0 event. I am a trained engineer after all so it is my job to over analyze things. He told me, “Someone can steal your idea, but not your vision and experience”. I didn’t think too much about it until now. Basically, he was saying don’t get hung up with a copycat. You are the person with the vision/roadmap and the person with experience (e.g., knowing the customer pain and how to execute).
Similar to the triangle of cost, content, and time when talking about making a product, I propose a triangle of idea, vision, and experience when talking about starting up.
Back to the idea of stealth mode. Besides the reasons that I discussed earlier about being in stealth mode, I actually think that people go into stealth mode because they lack vision and experience (e.g., missing two sides of the triangle). For vision, people just don’t understand what makes their idea cool and how the product can evolve into that cool product. There are going to be folks who go into an area where they lack experience. Until you start developing and selling the product, you gain no experience. For this very reason alone, people need a head start so that they can get the experience, not for a first mover advantage as some may argue.
When I first heard about Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner (BAGGD), it was when Google hosted the very first one. I unfortunately heard about the event too late to even attend. Rumor has it that there was food galore with plenty of free schwag and sushi! I have longed waited to go to a great Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner party. Last night, may have been it.
Yahoo hosted the 7th(?) Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner at their headquarters in Sunnyvale. It was a class act party. I’ve been to their cafeteria before for previous events like P-Camp, but they transformed the cafeteria into party central. It was unrecognizable to me.
Unlike previous BAGGD events that I’ve attended, the food kept coming out and there was an open bar. The decor was in purple fashion like the BAGGD and Yahoo colors, what a coincidence! There was a computer-themed cake. The music (I think) was from Los Gatos DJ. They played top 40s and some dance. It kept the vibe upbeat. And all attendees received a “Code like a girl” womens t-shirts.
Unfortunately, the party central layout was not optimal for listening to speakers. There were two of them - Hiliary Schneider, Executive VP of Americas, and Cheryl Ainoa, SVP Global Services Engineering. To be honest, I couldn’t hear them too well. All I remember is that Hilary had no slides and was talking about tomatoes at the beginning. Oh and that there are 35% women at Yahoo. Cheryl had slides and was talking about more technical things which were interesting. I did not get all of it, but I know that Hadoop was mentioned. Maybe her slides are posted somewhere?
One thing that I would have loved is a Q&A at the end of their talks. I love Q&A. I had one question brewing that I wanted to ask the keynote speaker. So Hilary or someone else from Yahoo who has authority, here is my question, drum roll please… Sophia: “It’s great that Yahoo opens up its data sources for developers to create applications on top of. I did notice that many of the APIs are for non-commercial use only. What role does this (personal use APIs) play in being competitive with companies like Google, Twitter, or Facebook who offer APIs for commercial use? In what way does this (personal use APIs) encourage innovation?” …end of drum roll.
Of course, one of the reasons that companies sponsor BAGGD events is to share something with a captive audience (girl geeks). Yahoo did a great job of motivating attendees to visit all of their demo booths. Why you might ask? Well, they had a card that they called a passport and you needed to visit at least 6 booths to get 6 stamps. Then, you can enter to win a…..IPAD! As much as I love winning things, each booth was crowded and I heard from a friend that it took 45 minutes to get all the stamps. I was not that motivated.
I wished that Yahoo had a handout about each demo so that I didn’t have to physically visit each demo to learn about it. So of course I know nothing about the demos that they had last night. But, I did ask a friend about one of them. She told me that Yahoo has a FireFox plug-in that you can use to monitor your web performance and it will offer suggestions on where you can optimize your web site such as image caching for a longer time if the image does not change that often.
Not all BAGGD events will be as posh as this one, but you got to give credit to Yahoo for throwing a kick @ss party. I was very impressed. I suggest that you “fan” Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner on Facebook so that you know when the next one is coming up. Companies, I suggest that you host a BAGGD event if you want to share something great about your product to girl geeks. See you at the next one!
Last Friday night, I attended an SF New Tech event for the first time. I don’t normally pay a high ticket price, but I happen to know the owner of the house where the event was taking place. So to kill two birds with one stone, I took the plunge. The nice thing about the event was that food and drinks were included. Photos from others can be found here and here and here.
When I first arrived, the event was not ready yet. Note to self, don’t arrive when the event starts. I wandered around and attacked the Motorola photo booth (I <3 photo booths!). They had a bunch of out of space toy props so naturally I picked the mechanical robot arm. About 30 minutes later, I found out that the same Motorola booth was giving out Droid X phones for free. All that I had to do was do a 30 second video on what interesting thing that I do outside of work. I hunted down the one guy who was recording the videos, did my pitch and voila! Phone! It was the highlight of my night. Thank you Motorola (@motomobile)!
Some other booths that were there include Dorsey & Whitney LLP law firm and CalInnovates.org. The Dorsey booth as far as I could tell was unmanned all evening. I being a sucker for free schwag raided the booth anyways and got some bottom-lit plastic shot glasses and blinking light keychains. Not sure what the correlation is with party gear and a law firm, but the schwag were cute trinkets. The CalInnovates.org gave away free iPhone skins of the California state flag (it’s on my iPhone now) and a free t-shirt, womens if I may add. They asked how I felt about California legislature affecting high-tech companies. I just commented that California government is doing what the housing real estate market is doing. There is a high demand to live in certain areas (e.g, SF, LA, near the beach), so hike up the house price until buyers stop buying aka companies stop coming to California.
The description of the event described it as a mover and shaker type of event with VCs and entrepreneurs and enthusiasts (like me). It was not apparent to me that there were a lot of VCs at the event. I did notice a bunch of entrepreneurs which was fun to hear their war stories. The number of people were on the lower end from what I expected although I did talk to people longer AND met more of the attendees (higher percentage). Not a total lost cause.
In case you were wondering about the food and drinks. They had Cass winery, Magners Irish Cider, Kicks ice cream sandwiches, a Mexican taco truck, and an Indian/Mexican food truck. There were plenty of food and drinks.
Question, would I go again? If the location is cool, then yes otherwise I’ll pass next time.
Things that I learned
when working with potential cofounders: 1) before starting, agree to high level plans of the role that person could play and what contribution translate to what equity %, 2) work on small projects and see if working relationship and quality of work are good before moving forward
you don’t need to be techie to work on a tech idea, in a previous posting, I mentioned the same thing. as a non-techie, you can do mockups (check out MockApps) to show to your potential cofounder or contractors
money can come from your extended network. i met a founder who got some odd millions of dollars (think $5M) from a shared connection with his company’s lawyer
demo like a salesperson. one demo booth was uninteresting. they had 4 youngsters hanging out and when i walked up, asked if i wanted to see a demo instead of just pitching and demoing. amateurs! j/k
don’t eat anything messy because you’ll get dirty and people will talk about “that guy” or “that girl” who spilled all over the place. there was one guy, so I heard, that ate some mexican food and spilled it all over the front of his shirt.
People whom I met:
Director at Silicon Valley Bank
Founder of Appfeeds
Founder of a medical management software system
Director at Woodside Capital
Founder of a digital media company
A lawyer focused on startups
Founder of SF MusicTech
Marketing person at a stealth B2C/B2B payment company
I don’t know about you, but it seems that a lot of my employed and non-employed friends are interviewing like crazy. The job economy is definitely picking up.
To help you with your season’s greetings, here are some tips from my friends with my two cents.
If you’re applying for a technical position, spend some time reviewing relevant topics and coding exercises (e.g., databases, data structures, networking, etc.). You can usually find lists online of commonly asked interview questions for various types of positions. Only a small quantity of information will be of use during the interview (1% 5%?). Get used to it.
What key things do you want the interviewer to remember about you?
In 60 seconds, how would you sell the interviewer that you’re the right person for the job? This is important during the “tell me about yourself” part. Support this with specific examples and evidence from your past experiences.
Pause to answer questions. A thoughtful answer is more important than a quick answer lacking details.
Boost up your confidence. Find at least one person who’s going to make you feel like you’re the best for the job.
Even if you’re not in the market, you should be ready for an interview at any time. Stay up-to-date with skills for your role.
Be nice, friendly, and don’t elude tasks or questions during the interview. Answer questions clearly.
Come prepared with a list of questions to ask at the end.
Be thoughtful and specific to demonstrate a genuine interest in the company.
Be on time (i.e., 5-10 minutes early).
Dress to impress.
Alright, if I get more tips from my friends, I’ll be sure to add to the list. Do you have any tips? Perhaps how to land the interview? How to close the deal?
One of my other favorite organizations in the bay area is Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner (I’ll call it baggd for the sake of laziness). A few weeks ago, I attended baggd #6 at the Computer History Museum hosted by Polyvore, an online fashion dressing room where you create clothing sets and share them. This was my 2nd baggd event. It’s so interesting to see the type of women who attend these events based on the topic du jour (or topic du event?). I can definitely tell you that there were a bunch of stylish women, but not so sure how many of them were geeks. So I am a geek and I love fashion so this event was a perfect match for me.
The evening started off with some nibbles and drinks. Then they had a 4-5 person panel about online fashion. The food was good, but it was gone soon after I arrived. Women love to eat. They also had a fun photo booth with props in the lobby. This is the second time that I’ve seen a photo booth at an event. It’s becoming quite popular.
Now the panel, it was okay. It went a little long and the focus more on fashion than on geeky topics. It would have been good to get a balance of the two topics. The CEO of Polyvore did the moderation with folks from Polyvore (of course), Chictopia, Moxie, and eBay.
I did ask two questions: 1) since this is girl geek dinner, who makes the technical decisions at your company? and 2) are you profitable? I didn’t get a straight answer, but eBay said that a woman (not her) makes the technical decisions. Yeah! For the profitable one, the Polyvore CEO said that they are and commented by saying profitability is not a good measure of success. Not sure why she said that because I did not infer that profitability a success factor or even the only success factor. Hmm… The CEO said that she didn’t want to be profitable so early in the company. If she thinks profitability is a bad thing, then someone should let her investors know to pull the plug. Hahaha.
My notes from the panel discussion:
soft goods like fashion, jewelry is surpassing hard goods like tech, soft goods make up a small percentage of spend (eBay)
users influence what designers they carry (Moxie)
luxury brands want to control messaging like Twitter (Moxie)
brands with prominent face for the brand like DVF (Diane Von Furstenberg) can leverage Twitter a lot better (Polyvore)
luxury brands fear loss of control in the internet space (eBay)
we use Ruby on rails, focus on core set of features/functions, get feedback from influencers to shape the product (Chictopia)
eBay is good at search, need to be sure that users can find items, how can a user find more things to buy, leveraging image search to find products, open up the minds of users, users do 80% search 20% browse (eBay)
start social media in public relations, don’t ignore social media (Moxie)
Aside from the event agenda, I really enjoyed networking with new and old friends. You can count on baggd events to give you that opportunity.
Sophia is a Product Manager at a large software company in Silicon Valley. She has over nine years of software industry experience in the areas of development, research, and management. She has worked in technical areas such as enterprise content management, relational databases, and data warehouses. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Southern California (Go Trojans!) and an MBA from University of California at Davis with emphasis on Technology Management and Marketing. Her interests are in technology and startups.
