Sophia Perl of Wisdom

Over at HackerDojo, I attended a womens panel on “Mobile Paradigm” organized by Asian Professional Women in Technology.  There were about 50-60 people in attendance, of which I knew about 4-5 people.  PayPal provided pizza and drinks for the event, Thanks PayPayl!  The panel consisted of a CEO of a travel guide app for the iPad, a bootstrap developer of many iPhone apps and an iPad app, and a marketing person from a Shazam-competitor app.  Ishita Majumdar, Executive In Residence at Plug-N-Play, moderated the panel.  I really enjoyed the networking time after the panel (I missed the pre-panel networking time).   I met some cool, interesting gals (and guys).

Panelists and my take aways:

• Georgi Dagnall, CEO, GeoGad
  • chose a clever name that is related to your app idea
• Bess Ho, ninja mobile developer with 10 apps in the app stores and speaker at Web 2.0
  • get inspiration from shopping, movies, and tv
  • read your competitor app reviews
  • if you don’t know how to program, just start drawing out the screens (aka wireframe)
• Kathleen McMahon, VP of Sales, SoundHound, Inc.
  • innovate, distribute, monetize

I was a bit too tired to ask my questions, but I was interested in knowing what strategies they use to get users?  What worked for them?  What didn’t work for them?  Did they think about the business model at the beginning?  Maybe they will read my blog and tell me by commenting.  Hahaha.

I had a realization about startup ideas.  A good idea is one that you can’t wait to build and share with others.  During my hay day of being an MBA student, I cranked out a bunch of business plans and entered in some competitions.  I guess that I was searching for fame and fortune.  Instead, I spent spending a lot of time thinking about theoretical ideas that never came to fruition.  In general, I wanted experience in vetting out business ideas, presenting ideas, and getting feedback from investors and peers.  I would say that I have a better idea of what will and will not work now.  In addition to my ongoing learning experience, I try to attend to as many tech/women events as I can.  I want to know who’s who, who’s doing what, and what I can learn.  The best place to do networking is in the Silicon Valley area.  We have the best, brightest people around.  Yep, the best hands down.

Here are my observations of people trying to start up:

• Finding co-founders is harder than you think, there’s a reason why there are events just for finding co-founders.
• You don’t have to work at a startup to mingle with the startup elite.  Everyone’s a geek, just speak geek and look chic.  Ta-dah!
• Networking events happen every day of the week and are mostly in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area and San Francisco, sorry San Jose folks, you have to make the trek up north, but it’s worth it!
• Don’t spin your wheels on finding the perfect solution, just build the minimum viable product.  If you can spark interest with your one-line pitch, you may have something good.  If you can get paid customers before your build the product, you definitely have something good.
• If you are unsure about a startup idea, write a brief business plan to help identify gaps in skills/relationships.  It’s a good exercise if you are clueless on how to start.
• A good startup idea makes for a good business plan, not the other way around.  If you have a bad startup idea, it doesn’t matter how good your business plan is on paper, it’s still a bad startup idea.
• First to market is not an advantage, it just means that you are the first to make all the mistakes so that others after you don’t have to make them.

Good luck with your (ad)venture!

What startup would you create in 54 hours if you were thrown into a room with a small group of people?  Last weekend in the heart of San Jose, over 100 people gathered at PayPal for Startup Weekend.  For $100 or less (discounts!), you get to be part of a community that has a common goal of working / creating a startup over a course of the weekend – Friday night, all day Saturday, then all day Sunday.  What more could you ask for?

Before the festivities officially began, Women 2.0 had a pre-Startup Weekend networking event outside.  You know you’re in California if you can hang outside Friday early evening with sun.  It’s funny how small the valley starts to get.  I ran into some women that I met 2-3 years ago at different events and another girl from an event 1.5 months ago.  The Korean Taco truck MoGo BBQ and TreatBot were on hand to sell their scrumptious goodies to attendees.

Now the official Startup Weekend.  Here’s how it usually works.  On Friday night, anyone attending can pitch a startup idea in 60 seconds.  Then you spend about 30 minutes to form groups.  On Saturday and Sunday, you work on your group’s idea and prepare for a demo / presentation.  On Sunday night, you demo and present your startup idea to the rest of the groups.  A winner is announced and they get some prizes.

So let me break down the general stats (give or take a few +/-) from this Startup Weekend – 100 attended, 50 pitched, and 25 ideas were worked on.  If you are one of the lucky 25, then you have convinced a tough crowd (aka hardcore techies and mix of business types) that your idea is promising.  The group sizes ranged from as little as 2 to as high as say 12.

On Sunday, all groups had 5 minutes to present their startup idea.  Most were interesting, some were not so much.  Off the top of my head here are the ideas that I remember (summarized in my own words): Foursquare for music listening, social networking at or before an event, delivery of pre-picked outfits for men, war game of Foursquare mayors, get a map of the parking rules on SF streets, finding the status of a person that you’re waiting for, privacy layer on top of twitter to exchange messages with non-followers, and product recommendation site.  At the end of it, the winner of the evening was EnglEasy, videogames to teach kids English.  The judging criteria consisted of 1) wow factor, 2) investment attractiveness, and 3) team spirit.

Tips to make the most of your Startup Weekend time:

• pitch an idea
  • don’t be afraid to share your ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s the team and execution that makes an idea different
  • worse case you get feedback and get to work on someone else’s idea
  • don’t pitch an existing idea that is far along, less room for creativity
  • during group forming, sell your idea otherwise you won’t recruit anyone to work on your idea
• make the goal to create a prototype by Sunday
  • people like to see things working, figure out what parts of your idea that you want to demo, for the rest, FAKE IT!
  • related, don’t spend too much time on “business-y” topics like market research, etc., it makes for a boring presentation (the math, 25 ideas x 5 mins = one long @ss time)
• make decisions quickly
  • agree on what not to agree on, meaning there are some things that aren’t needed for Sunday’s presentation (aka outside the scope)
  • time is of the essence, pick a path and stick with it
• identify collaboration and development tools ahead of time
  • save time with figuring out logistics, have a proposal of what tools to use
  • go further, get all of your accounts set up and tools ready to go before the weekend
• network like crazy
  • it’s really hard to find like-minded people (e.g., who want to spend a whole weekend on a startup idea instead of relaxing and/or partying)
  • the people who attend are cool, they come from all disciplines…”with diversity brings innovation!”
  • bring plenty of business cards like it’s your birthday, if you don’t have any, use VistaPrint for cheap biz cards
  • tweet it up!  get a twitter account and tweet with the event hashtag, use twitter to find people or skills during the event
• figure out how you can help a startup idea and sell yourself (during group forming time)
  • can you code? do market research? build the business model? create graphics?  figure it out before you get there, what’s your elevator pitch?
  • understand that a group needs all those skills, but probably more development and UI graphic skills

If you missed the event, go to the next one.  They happen every year in the bay area and sometimes twice a year.

[Update 5/21/2010] Here is a good post on Startup Weekend.  It has the complete list of pitches.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my ex-managers, a computer science research executive and Fellow at my company, asked me to attend the “Women of Influence 2010” awards dinner with her and her other guests.  I was delighted to have been invited.  The San Jose Business Journal vetted out nominations down to 100 women in the San Jose area who have influenced other women and their community.  The evening included a networking cocktail reception, dinner, awards of course, then dessert.

I got to the San Jose Fairmont Hotel just at the start of the cocktail reception.  I wondered around a bit by myself, then found a nice cocktail table to camp at.  One girl came up and talked to me about her company where they do voice to text transcribing.  She said that they were working with hospitals and touted about how accurate the software is.  Another lady came up and it so happened that I went to MBA school with her co-worker at Intel.  Small world for sure.  Then lastly, I met a Nordstrom’s salesperson turned tech headhunter.  She has my business card now.     Just kidding!

Before the dinner started, I recognized a woman at the table next to ours.  She was on the panel at the Silicon Valley Young Professionals Speed Mentoring event, President of Mission College.  She was an award recipient too.  I went up to her and said that I saw her the week before on the panel.  I don’t think that she recognized me although I did ask a question.  That’s ok.  I at least wanted to reach out.

Alright, the good stuff.  So imagine 100 women accepting awards and all having 10 words or more for their thank yous.  It went by kind of fast actually because there were some funny thank yous.  One tall blond marketing woman started saying, “Thank you to the Academy for my Oscar…oh wait wrong awards event…”.  It was actually funny.  About 50% thanked their dads and 50% thanked their moms.  Some women thanked their sexy husbands and so forth.

My biggest disappointment was not seeing Marissa Mayer from Google and the Chairman of the Board from Intel accept their awards.  They both sent others to accept on their behalf.  Argh!  Oh, all the recipients received an engraved glass paper weight from Tiffany’s.

All in all, the event was fun because I got to spend time with my old manager and old friends from the research organization.  I wish that there were more folks to meet during the networking hour.  Maybe one day I’ll get a Tiffany’s box for being a woman of influence.

I attended a Silicon Valley Young Professional Women’s Speed Mentoring event.  The first part was at Cantankerous Fish restaurant who provided free drinks and food, yummy!  The second part was the speed mentoring session at a Fenwick & West law firm nearby.  I happen to drag a friend along to the event.  My thought is that if the event is boring, then at least I get to hang out with a friend.  A girl needs a backup plan right?

There was a good mix of women from different backgrounds (VC, life sciences, tech, etc), about 30 or so.  For the second part, I initially thought speed mentoring meant mentoring but in speed dating fashion, but I was wrong or deceived more like it!  Hahahaha.  Instead, speed mentoring meant a panel of three women – a librarian by day business woman by night, a billings operations executive at Adify, and a president of a MIssion community college.  I even asked a question to the panel.

Overall, the event was good.  One of my favorite quotes from the panel, “If you have the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.”

I have this theory.  All websites that have a high percentage of repeat visitors have characteristics of a game.  There was an article in Social Times about the 7 features that should be in every social game.  I am not a Farmville or MafiaWars player, but there are things about Facebook (a website that has social game elements) that keeps me entertained, most importantly real friends, messaging, and customization.  I like to see what’s going on with real friends.  I like to get comments on photos, links, and status update.  I like that I can hide select feeds and personalize my profile page to show certain applications and information.  Maybe I cheated a bit by choosing a social networking site.  But, you should think about what elements of a social game can be used for your website to make it sticky and entertaining for your website visitors.

From the article, 7 features of a social game:

1. Real friends
2. Gifting
3. Leader boards
4. Challenges
5. Messaging
6. Teams
7. Customization

This weekend some friends and I went to P-Camp ’10 (product management camp) at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California (Thanks Yahoo for hosting!).  I am a product manager after all and I do like to perfect my craft.  This is my second time attending and I think its third year in running.  Last year, I had an okay time, maybe it was the sessions that I picked.  I wanted to try P-Camp again this year.  I’m glad that I did.

One rule that P-Camp has is that if a session is not useful to you, feel free to walk out and join another session.  I didn’t follow this rule last year, so this year I am sticking to it.  During the 2:15pm time slot, I left two sessions and finally ended up at a session that I really liked and asked two good questions such that people approached me about the questions.  In any case, I really enjoyed my experience at P-Camp this year.  I met a lot of interesting folks and learned new approaches and new tools.  I recommend that folks go next year because 1) it’s free (let’s hope sponsors keep it free), 2) you’ll learn valuable skills that can be applied to a startup or a large company, and 3) network, network, network.  Go next time!

Here are the sessions that I attended and my key takeaways:

Product management in a startup environment (Adam Birch)

• Leverage POC as a selling technique to get sales, more funding
• tools: jing, inkscape, powerpoint, uservoice

Customer segmentation

• talk to existing customers, ex-customers, potential customers
• find out why customers went to competitors
• look at the roles / job titles of your customer base / decision makers

Creditability and authority in product management (Alan Armstrong from Eigenworks)

• what is your value if people are trying to go around you?
• be good at bringing ideas together so that anyone can understand
• a study that shows it takes 20 minutes to get something started
• consolidate discretionary time
• person who interviews the most buyers wins
• if not able to talk to customers, go to forums/support information to learn what customers are saying, maybe answer some of their questions
• what’s in it for the sales person to let you talk to the customer?
• reach out to an ex-employee of your client
• go after sales deal that went dead
• create a FAQ

Top 10 principles of great sales messaging (Michael Cannon from Silver Bullet Group)

• communicate value in customer context
• make the right comparison: 1) business creation, 2) order creation
• use strong words
• clear compatibility comparisons
• incorporate lots of proof points

Engineering makes the decisions, what do you do? (Phil from 280 group)

• influence the product development space
• work on messages asap to influence product development and roadmap
• go to all meetings
• leverage usability studies to kill/propel ideas

I am embarrassed to admit that of the whole time that I’ve been in the bay area, I have not made it to a single e-week event.  I saw this event called Reverse VC Pitch and thought hey I’ll go to that, it’s free what is there to lose.  It just so happens it was during Stanford Entrepreneurship Week and the organizer Larry wanted to piggy back with the E-Week E-Mixer which was also free (yes!).  I showed up two hours before the Reverse VC Pitch event to attend the E-Mixer.  It was in the lower cafe area of the Graduate School of Business.  Every attendee received a list of attendees with contact info and a short blurb about why they were attending.  No you can’t have my list. 

I met a lot of B-school students – Cal, Stanford, Chicago (yes, Chicago, 3 students took 3 days off to attend Stanford E-week).  The fun part was that folks asked each other to pitch their ideas (if applicable) and then were grilled on their idea.  Ideas that I heard were: an e-commerce platform idea, learning module idea, a packaging solution, a dating website for couples with no much details, mobile and access to licensed text. I did meet this one guy who made me laugh.  When asked if he had a business card, he said with a straight face, “I’m going green, I don’t have a business card.”  Yeah right!  In general, everyone was very nice.  No one judged each other and I would go again next year.   It was a free event worth attending.

Related to startups, I came across this event where 12 people hop on a bus to come up with a business idea or two while driving 48 hours to SXSW in Austin.   Then when in Austin, pitch their ideas to VCs.  It’s called The Startup Bus.  I think that it’s a great idea except that I would get car sick from reading my computer screen.  My other thought is that well the Silicon Valley area is the mecca of technology why leave it to pitch ideas.  I HEART SV!

I want to say first that I went to school down in southern California and I still love it down there however for my industry, technology, I love it up here.

Let’s talk about the cons of San Francisco Bay area:

• Expensive housing
• Besides San Francisco, very spread out, made up of many cities like Mountain View, San Jose, Palo Alto, etc
• For you single men, there are not a lot of women
• No good public transportation for the whole area
• Sometimes it’s really cold and windy in SF city

Now the pros:

• There are a ton of technology companies in the area
• If you love outdoors, this is the place for you
• For you single women, there is hope for you with the high number of men
• BART is convenient for those traveling up to the city
• SF is up to an hour away

Alright, so let’s get down to why I really love living in the Silicon Valley area.

• There is a strong sense of community among technology folks.  People love to exchange ideas.  People are very nice when it comes to meeting strangers.
• On any given night, there is a tech-related event to attend and most often it’s under $20 or free
• There are two major universities nearby (Stanford, Berkeley) and sometimes they host cool women-related and/or tech-related events
• We have well-known tech companies in the area such as Google, Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc
• We have major VC players in the area, just in case you get the itch to start something

For those career-minded, ambitious folks, you should consider living in an area where your industry is bustling with people and companies.  When I did my MBA at UC Davis, I took a class called Technology Innovation taught by Professor Rodney Lacey.  In this class, he talked about the benefits of being in the same area as your peers.  Basically, by interacting with your peers and working for different companies, you build up your own knowledge.  Companies are located in an area like Silicon Valley, even though the real estate is very expensive, is to get access to the wealth of knowledge, the people.  If you are a techie and live in the Silicon Valley area, you are doing yourself a disservice if you are not getting out and networking with your peers.

So what does this mean to you?  Move to an area where things are happening in your industry!  Just kidding.  I suggest that you network with your peers and consider switching companies sometime in your career.

If I wasn’t in the technology industry, I would think twice about living in the Silicon Valley area.

What’s all the fuss about Twitter?  I’ve been wanting to post something about Twitter for a long time, but I didn’t want to talk about something that I just don’t use too much (not an avid user or follower).  So, I like the idea that there’s one place where strangers can “stalk” other people.   I mean Facebook is where friends stalk friends.  Twitter is for the mass stalker.  I think that Twitter’s 140 character limit sucks.  I sometimes don’t like the character limit that Facebook imposes on my status updates.  Maybe I’m just a person that has too much to say.

If we are talking about just branding of companies, celebrities, money making phenomenons, then I can see how Twitter is great.  You have a captive audience who wants to hear what you say.  Not bad.  Twitter for personal reasons, hmm, not sure about that.  No one cares that you’re brushing your teeth!