Tony Hsieh: Entrepreneur, Community Builder

Much coverage of Tony Hsieh’s legacy has been, deservedly, about his business success. After all, Tony’s incredible track record in leading Zappos has been hailed by corporate and leadership experts for creating a fanatical company culture passionately committed to teamwork and customer service in a way that powered sustained growth over his 21 year tenure as CEO.

Entrepreneurs everywhere revered Tony for staying true to his vision and values in how he did that. Notably, he was the only example we could point to as a super successful entrepreneur not being Amazon’d after being acquired by Jeff Bezos in 2009 for $1.2 billion.

But the story not being given much attention is how Tony’s vision and values pointed the company, and others, to join him in making a social impact with a private sector driven experiment for rebuilding the dead end Las Vegas neighborhood of Fremont East — resulting in a community movement he spawned known as the Downtown Project (DTP).

Zappos started in the Bay Area, but in 2004 moved headquarters to the Las Vegas suburban community of Henderson. The appeal for Zappos was driven by a lower cost structure to scale up the company’s primary teams of customer service, logistics and support workers needed to fill all those online orders.

As the company grew, employees spread across different buildings in a suburban business park and with even faster growth anticipated following Amazon’s acquisition, the forecasted needs for more space spurred planning for a corporate campus that would be supportive of the company’s quirky and purpose driven culture.

Instead of pursuing the conventional path of another suburban location, Tony chose to head into a decaying urban neighborhood believing that immersing his team on a mission of looking outward to build community around them would strengthen company culture and innovation, eventually leading to redefining Zappos company purpose as “Delivering Happiness” across their 4 C’s of Clothing, Customer Service, Culture, and Community.

Building Community

With that purpose in mind, as Tony explored urban Las Vegas he was struck by the long vacant and deteriorating former City Hall building and its surrounding neighborhood of Fremont East. So began the odyssey to bring about transformational change that his vision, and Zappos values, would drive to be a legacy extending far beyond the company itself.

How does one guy inject purpose, vision and values into a strategy for building community?

Following Zappos’ 2014 move into the awesomely renovated former City Hall building, Tony Hsieh described the strategy as being focused on scaling up efforts behind Downtown Project’s (DTP) own 3 C’s:

  • Collisions: Serendipity that happens when people being in the right place at the right time result in starting of a new relationship that blossoms into downstream impact
  • Co-learning: People in the community teaching each other — including mentoring and helping at a person to person level without necessarily a paid role
  • Connectedness: The number and depth of connected relationships in the neighborhood

With this strategy, Tony and DTP’s private investors invested $200 million in real estate, $50 million in small businesses, $50 million in education, and $50 million in tech startups. The impact today includes 407 ongoing or completed construction projects, 61 small business investments and an estimated 130,000 annual visitors for the Life is Beautiful Festival and DTP-related entities.

More than the numbers, it’s the impact on life in Fremont East that can best be experienced by actually visiting there and talking with residents, many of whom have had their lives change as a direct result of the transformational change DTP had on the community.

Inspiring example for others

I had only been an occasional visitor to Las Vegas, not paying attention to the community. But as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who boomeranged back to my Upstate New York hometown, I was on my own community building journey helping others start and grow companies in the newer industries across the downtrodden Upstate NY region.

Ever on the prowl for following innovators with similar goals, I started tracking news on DTP — particularly Tony’s thinking behind how engineering conditions could get more of the right people bumping into each other resulting in “creative collisions” that would ultimately lead to meaningful relationships entrepreneurs needed to find resources like mentors, investors, team members and customers.

That experience mapped directly to my own startup history beginning in the late 80’s as a rookie entrepreneur with zero relationships in the tech community. After some difficult initial struggles, it was the pivot towards targeting emerging tech that got me plugged into the openness and pay it forward nature of Silicon Valley. Those Silicon Valley creative collisions then led to my growing TriNet to what has evolved to become a NYSE listed company with $4 billion in annual revenues.

Along the course of that journey I relocated my family from Silicon Valley to my hometown in Upstate New York. By 2013, my non profit Upstate Venture Connect was in our third year of building a connected network across the state. We adopted a mantra of scaling up the volume and quality of creative collisions as a core strategy filter for choosing where we would put our energy and resources.

So I was elated to come across an Entrepreneurs’ Organization conference in Las Vegas with Tony keynoting on building community and an optional tour of the Downtown Project. Both were highly impactful for me, culminating with a debriefing in the DTP war room located in Tony’s apartment when he strolled in to chat with us fellow entrepreneurs and shared his personal insights “off stage” that gave us a true measure of the man he was.

In the years since, UVC’s community has grown to more than 16,000 people across our Upstate region, slowly evolving towards the connected community we envision. I recently published More Good Jobs, a book that shares that experience and outlines strategies for those who are trying to retain their city’s top talent. Yet in writing the book, I somehow missed mentioning Tony Hsieh. I’d been using the term creative collision so frequently over the last eight years that I even forgot to give attribution to Tony for both the concept and execution focus to make it work.

There was no bravado about his own role in creating DTP. Tony’s view was that it was all a community effort that he just helped bring together a few of the right people who were now making things happen.

Tony Hsieh’s story of the Downtown Project is rich and deserves to be told. Tony shouldn’t be remembered as just a renowned entrepreneur, but also as a community builder whose leadership continues to shape downtown Las Vegas and individual lives there.

Across America, there are lots of talent exporting cities with leaders looking for options on how they might do better at retaining their city’s top talent instead of watching the next generation move away in search of opportunities in the newer industries.

In hearing Tony’s story, who knows how many more people like me will be inspired to pick up where he left off. Orchestrating high impact creative collisions inside communities is one path Tony pioneered that can help us make a difference in impacting quality of life at scale.

No Internet or Mobile on Big Virtual Day

 

Everything seemed normal as my day began. Residual winds from Hurricane Eta had subsided, the sun was out and I enjoyed a quiet breakfast overlooking the ocean from our Key West terrace.

This was the big day of the year for non profit Upstate Venture Connect with our annual conference Upstate Unleashed. It’s the only event we do and over the last five years UVC built a strong following of bringing leaders together from throughout the entire Upstate New York region – all for the purpose of sharing experience and strengthening relationships aligned with our mission of connecting startup entrepreneurs to the resources they need to launch and grow companies in the newer industries.

Due to Covid restrictions we moved the entire conference format to virtual. For us, this meant putting lots of energy into not just a line-up of speakers, but getting attendees up to speed on taking advantage of a structured program to request virtual meetings with speakers, top entrepreneurs, investors and startup community leaders.

Our registrations blew past 500 people and almost 400 virtual meetings were scheduled through the conference platform – a huge validation of our strategy to get people connected.

My principal conference role was to moderate a discussion with our keynote speaker Brad Feld about his latest book The Startup Community Way. I was totally jazzed about the opportunity as Brad’s themes in building startup community were very much our inspirational roadmap for so much of what we’ve done this last decade in building UVC’s network across the region to now number more than 16,000 people.

In addition to my speaking with Brad and taking in the other conference sessions, I also accepted invites from 10 conference attendees to have a virtual one on one meetings. So this was to be full day of virtual meetings I was really looking forward to.

No Internet No Phone

As I began powering up shortly after 8am, I lost internet service and while starting to troubleshoot my home network, also realized I had no mobile signal. After checking multiple devices on both Verizon and AT&T mobile services, the realization of being cut off on the big day was sinking in fast.

Having no non internet radio available in the house, the next move was to the car where, oddly, only a single radio station was on air. The announcer confirmed all of Key West was cut off from both internet and mobile service but had no information on the cause or expected restoration.

While I knew the conference would still go on without me, I hated the idea of so many people waiting for me and not even knowing that I was cut off from being able to inform anyone.

So began more than an hour searching around the island for an analog phone line – starting with a couple of businesses I had relationships with then scouring shopping and high foot traffic areas for a pay phone.

Have you noticed that pay phones are just about non existent these days?

As I was wrapping up that fruitless search, I actually found one that looked totally intact. As I rushed over to grab it, a deeply tanned and wrinkled older woman sitting a few feet away blew some smoke at me and said “Sonny, that phone hasn’t worked in 5 years now. Though it’s been gettin lots of attention this last hour!”

She followed up with “You know you’re in Key West now. We don’t worry about such things here.”

Search For Connectivity

So back to the car where I hear on the radio that the cause for disruption was a garbage truck hitting a utility pole on the island of Islamorada, 86 miles north of Key West.

With the announcer indicating telecom or internet service was not expected to be restored till 3pm, my next move was to start driving North up Highway One, figuring at some point I would pick up a cell signal.

It took about an hour and as soon as I got a signal was able to send out some texts to the UVC team and a couple of my missed meeting appointments.

I was able to get into the speaker’s green room and chatted with Brad Feld, but decided my signal strength was not stable enough to risk a disrupted session with me moderating.

Fortunately, our advance coordination the UVC team included a Plan B with UVC CEO Nasir Ali fully equipped to step in as an alternate moderator as we reviewed the interview script the day before.

Nasir did a great job and the session unfolded without any sign of my drama behind the scenes. A credit not to just his moderating, but also UVC COO Kathryn Cartini’s capable hands in orchestrating a seamless production effort.

By the time I returned back to Key West, internet service was restored and I was able to complete 5 of my scheduled one on one meetings. I truly missed not being able to converse with Brad at such a penultimate event for UVC. But overall, very pleased on how it worked out as a solid team effort and high impact virtual event for the UVC community.

And yes, that interaction at the pay phone did bring back that realization I was letting the urgency of the moment cause me to lose sight of our mantra here to be “Living on Key West Time”

 

Vote, then find your tribe to drive change that matters

As a newbie author, I am finding lots of exposure opportunities to spread the message of More Good Jobs through the expanding medium of podcasting.

Each podcast interview I’ve been invited to has been interesting and generated great discussion. Enough so that now we’re working on putting show notes on the More Good Jobs press section with the aim of helping our community dive right into the particular themes they’re most interested in.

With today’s election being top of mind for everyone, I’ll highlight last week’s MergeLane podcast with host Elizabeth Kraus. She pressed me on certain issues as no interviewer had done, including on topics that set up an interesting dialog about how we as entrepreneurs, investors and community leaders can do more than just show up at the voting booth if we want to drive systemic change.

The total podcast is about an hour long. The first half hour or so sets up More Good Jobs themes profiled in the book, along with Elizabeth sharing perspective about her view of startup community from being based in Vail, Colorado.

All good stuff, including Elizabeth pushing back a bit on my assertion around the difficulty of attracting VCs to invest outside the Magnet Cities known for being tech hubs.

However, the last third of the interview is where we start diverging from standard MGJ interview themes.

You can access the interview here:

Episode 36: Pre-Election Advice for VCs + The Value of Talent-Exporting Communities, with TriNet Founder Martin Babinec

The following show notes may help in navigating directly to the time in the interview for these political and cause related topics:

43:02 – What led to my deciding to become involved in the political realm, including running as an independent candidate for U.S. Congress in 2016?

46:34 – How can entrepreneurs and investors (who have lots of choices and competing demands) balance their professional ambition with a desire to bring about bigger change for a cause they believe in?

49:40 – What are the structural issues accelerating such polarization between our two parties? What can we do about it?

54:07 – Whatever cause we are passionate about, how do we go about building a tribe of like minded people that might come together to do something about it?

56:10 – What is one non-obvious thing every VC and entrepreneur should do before the election?

Here are some of the organizations and resources mentioned in the podcast:

Upstate Venture Connect – Non profit building startup ecosystem across Upstate NY (profiled in More Good Jobs)

Upstate Jobs Party – Independent body and PAC building voter and political engagement to increase Upstate NY’s talent retention and grow stronger communities

Unite America – Non profit leading advancements in political reform to drive structural changes in the electoral process

Right To Start – Non profit campaign to rebuild the American economy by unleashing entrepreneurial opportunity for everyone

Yes on 2 – ballot measure in Massachusetts for Ranked Choice Voting

Ballot Ready – Company that activates and empowers an informed and engaged electorate.

Many thanks to Elizabeth for an engaging interview that stimulated great discussion. I hope some of what we shared might stimulate more thinking around options we have to help bring about change we believe in, well after we leave the voting booth.

Wartime Leadership: Survival Assumptions

How do we navigate through a period where we know our revenues are going down, but we don’t know yet by how much, or for how long? No one can predict when business will return to the pre-pandemic state. We know we have to cut expenses, but what’s the right reduction target to be aiming for?

As discussed in our Wartime Leadership series opener, we all lack clarity for answering these big questions. This uncertainty in turn drives hard decisions around how deep to take cost reductions – especially when it comes to laying off team members. 

By now, many companies have already taken their first round of cost cutting yet remain more than a little uncertain if they’ve gone deep enough.

This post offers a methodical approach to defining a basis for forecasting the 2 most critical items on a CEO’s list: revenue and cash. The basis behind what gives visibility to revenue and cash drives how deep our cost cutting measures have to be to stay alive – or put another way, our survival assumptions. 

We’ll start with the revenue forecast since that factors into cash flow planning and is also the harder to define through this fog of war. We’ll also presume you’re a B2B company not expecting a quick rebound once stay at home orders are lifted since the pace of restoring revenue depends on a combination of factors you have little control over. 

With so much diversity across industries, business models, company profile etc., it’s not feasible to suggest a universal model that works for everyone. I’ll instead highlight a few process steps that may help steer your forecast towards being realistic and sufficiently fluid so you can guide decisions as circumstances change.

Throw out the peacetime budgeting process 

If you’re running an established business with a history of operating and sales team metrics, you’ve already got a defined process to approach budgeting. In peacetime, this is typically a CFO led exercise beginning with past baseline and trends passed to each operating exec. Execs and their departments add updates without necessarily having company wide guidance on macro trends or big picture external forces to consider.

Since how and when businesses recover from the pandemic will be all over the map (including impact on your customers reeling from pandemic losses themselves), the wartime approach has to take in a lot of non traditional input, gathered in a consistent manner so the findings can be rolled up and examined holistically, as opposed to each department viewed within its own silo. 

Get outside the building to gather new data

Gauging the extent of unknown external forces is what makes for the wartime exercise here. Relying only on what you know from inside the company would be like guessing how many troops you’re dispatching to battle before assessing the size and positioning of your enemy. 

Wartime CEO and serial entrepreneur extraordinaire Steve Blank says “There are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside.” This means dividing the team up with specific missions to go out and grab external findings from customers and prospects. When synthesized, these findings paint a more complete picture of the forces shaping the uncertain world your company is interacting with. 

Sample discussion points might include: 

  • How are different customers and prospects affected by Covid-19? 
  • Which geographies and/or industry segments are they most worried about?  
  • Are they reducing staff? 
  • Do they need to modify their buying plans with you now? 
  • What changes can you make to help them? 
  • Which trigger points or trends is the customer watching as leading indicators for where their revenue is headed? 

With pandemic restrictions precluding in person visits, you won’t get a grasp of what’s happening with your customers by sending out email surveys or expecting them to give you online feedback. In wartime it’s the human contact that matters, now more than ever. Not only to get a response, but also to coax a bit more information out than they would not likely provide other than through one on one real time contact. If they don’t answer your calls and personal outreach, then that itself is a signal worth tracking. 

Orchestrating a tight script with relevant questions is a large, manual task involving a broader portion of your team. A good script that you can deliver increases the number of data points and gives you a better handle on trends and findings.

Making sure everyone gathers input off a similar script increases value. This includes front line account managers, sales team members, and other managers and executives working in a coordinated fashion. Consistency of information capture is also important. This could be a scoring system in which account revenue projections are qualified with relevant comments (+ and -) that are also shared in a group exec team discussion as part of the roll up process leading to a consolidated forecast decided by the CEO and CFO. 

Throughout the customer outreach at all levels, keep pressing for ideas that point to key leading indicators signaling strength of the account’s expected revenue. If you’re able to spot assumptions behind individual account forecasts, a pattern may emerge that can be distilled to a few core measurements for your revised overall company revenue forecast. These measurements will help in articulating the company plan to your board or possibly alternative financing sources. And they will now be supported with quantified assumptions which can be tracked over the coming months so you can update the forecast as the recovery unfolds.

Let the cash forecast drive cost reduction planning

At the same time you and outward facing team members are speaking with customers and prospects, the finance team can be pedaling hard on collecting payments already due, tightening up credit policies that might lead to reducing or eliminate credit, building cash reserves by drawing on available lines of credit and mapping out other debt options in addition to grinding through the process to file for the government sponsored Paycheck Protection Program and Disaster Recovery Loans you might qualify for.

Focused discussions should also be underway to identify an expanded range of cost cutting options. Following the kick off exec team session to generate an initial list of options, individual execs meet for a detailed drill down with the CEO and CFO. These interactions are less about making decisions on the spot as it is to spark and nurture ideas, and also note who is contributing in ways that look beyond protecting their own turf in suggesting creative options that make sense for the entire company. 

While some of the obvious cost cutting might be implemented immediately, finalizing layoffs are best deferred till after you’ve got all the information put together from the updated revenue and cash flow forecasts. It’s only then that you arrive at the stage of showing the projected cash burn compared to your previous budget so you can then hone in on the amount of cost reductions needed.

Layoffs are the most drastic measures and should be undertaken after a great deal of thought. That being said, once the decision is made, it is best to act quickly and do in one single shot rather than creating waves of layoffs. Dribbling out layoffs over time is a sure fire way to damage your leadership credibility, destroy morale/impede productivity and increase the outflow of the very people you want to retain. 

Active leadership matters

Wartime leaders are visible and hands on throughout all these steps.  Everyone in the company is looking upwards to see how involved the CEO is. This is not a time to isolate and speak only with investors and executives. Team members are already aware the virus has severely disrupted the business, so there is a heightened sensitivity about whether their own job is in jeopardy. This is the time to step up interactions at all levels by taking part in team meetings and selectively engaging in 1:1 follow up discussions after the group meetings. 

Asking questions and getting input from the front line team demonstrates through your actions that both assessment and decisions are being approached methodically. Your personal interactions will also prompt chatter through the ranks – which in turn spurs greater cooperation in driving the information flow upward so you can build the right set of survival assumptions that become your instruments for guiding key decisions through the uncertain times ahead. 

Next post in this series goes into the hard decisions around positions, people and process for affecting a layoff. 

Can my business still operate during New York’s COVID-19 restrictions?

In speaking with company leaders, this is one of the first questions that come up.

What follows is how I’m responding when asked – but with the caveat that this is my personal interpretation of regulations in place as of March 23rd and isn’t official guidance from either Upstate Venture Connect or any governmental agency.

Follow links I’ve included in this post to see source documents yourself. And let’s keep dialogue flowing to share our collective insights to help each other mobilize and connect resources – including through UVC’s UNYCEOs email group referenced in our Upstate CEO COVID-19 Pledge.

 

Restrictions are intended to protect your workforce

Since restrictions are intended to protect your workers (including volunteers for non profits), any organization who can have their employees work from home should be allowed, and in fact encouraged, to do so.

The question becomes what happens if a portion of your workforce have roles that are performed either in a company facility or some other location.

No matter where the location is beyond the home, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Executive Order 202.6 requires that each for-profit, non-profit, or government employer shall reduce their in person workforce at company facilities and locations by 100% from pre-state of emergency declaration employment levels – effectively closing the doors to your work locations unless the employer falls into one of these two exception categories:

  1. Employers who are operating within one of NY State’s designated categories of “Essential Services”
  2. Employers who are not in a specifically enumerated category of Essential Services but apply for and are approved by Empire State Development (ESD) for designation as an Essential Business.

 

NY State Designated Categories of Essential Services

The Executive Order presently defines 12 different categories of Essential Services including health care operations, essential infrastructure and selected manufacturing, retail, financial services, transportation, logistics and other services needed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis or sustain basic life functions in a community..

Details on the specifics behind each of the 12 enumerated categories are listed here in ESD’s Guidance for Determining a Business Enterprise is Subject to Workforce Reduction Under Recent Executive Orders.

Keep in mind that the text of Executive Order 202.6 reflects what was approved on the issue date. Government response to COVID-19 seems to move almost hourly and new orders are being given to clarify missed gaps in the original guidance. So bookmark these links and check back as you’re firming up decisions to see the updated guidance.

This link to the Executive Order’s FAQ is also very useful in deciding if your business can fall into one of the enumerated categories – including what to do if one portion of your business provides essential service and another portion does not.

 

What if my business isn’t defined on the official NY State authorized list of Essential Services but I believe our company is providing an essential service that falls within the intent of the Executive Order?

If you’re not already on the enumerated list mentioned above, it’s necessary to fill out this online form to apply for your business to be approved by Empire State Development as an Essential Business. At present, I’m thinking ESD is being flooded with a lot more applications than they are equipped to handle with a fast decision.

Since government is most interested in fast tracking those businesses that have a compelling argument on how their company is providing a product or service fulfilling an emergency response need to fighting COVID-19 or sustain basic life functions, you might consider retaining a copy of your ESD application and asking your mayor, state assemblyman or senator, or regional ESD representative to assist in advocating your application for expedited review.

And if your argument is clear enough to fall within the existing exceptions outlined in the ESD guidance then there may be no need to apply. ESD guidance concludes with the following statement:

  “Requests by businesses to be designated an essential function as described above, should only be made if they are NOT covered by the guidance.”

 

Crossing Boundaries to Build Startup Community

A delegation of a dozen business and professional community leaders from Binghamton took a day out of their already busy schedules to travel to Syracuse. They toured assets in the Syracuse startup community, and interacted with local leaders to learn from their experiences in building startup community.

The delegation included people from Binghamton Chamber of Commerce, City government, Binghamton University and local business leaders. These people are committed leaders with a stake in growing Binghamton’s startup community. They understood the value of getting an inside look at steps a neighboring city went through to build momentum around creating companies and jobs in newer industries. These efforts are now attracting top talent to a revitalized downtown area, and certainly worth paying attention to.

Journeys begin with vision

CenterState CEO’s Rob Simpson welcomed the delegation and provided an overview of some initiatives that started a decade ago. This ingenuity included critical public private partnerships, which set the stage for today’s job creating thrust.

A tour of the Syracuse Technology Garden, undisputed hub of Syracuse’s tech community, featured a recap of programs and entrepreneur supporting activities. Rick Clonan presented, and had John Liddy, Founder and Director of the Syracuse Student Sandbox sharing insights on how the college student accelerator engaged local mentors that were critical to graduating students deciding to put their roots down in Syracuse instead of going elsewhere to start their first company.

The delegation toured the new Syracuse Marriott Downtown (a project CenterState CEO helped lead), and enjoyed a luncheon discussion with Marc Viggiano, a retired business executive who shared his personal experience on how becoming involved with the Seed Capital Fund of CNY, StartFast Venture Accelerator, Genius NY program and Upstate Venture Connect all lead to helping entrepreneurs start companies and create jobs.

Entrepreneurs revitalizing downtown

A tour of Syracuse CoWorks, a nationally prominent co-working/living space, provided an inspiring look at how downtown space can be configured to foster relationships that attracts both millennial entrepreneurs and residents. The “community” also serves as a base for StartFast Code – a coding academy that puts individuals on a career path as professional web developers or helping advance their existing businesses.

Final stop was SpinCar, graduate of StartFast 2013 cohort and now a blossoming company with 40+ employees headquartered in Syracuse. Co-founder Mike Quigley shared the SpinCar story, including how the community helped his team on the path to success. This included connections to key people and resources of which Mike says made all the difference in SpinCar getting to the right customer market, finding investors and talent.

We closed the day with an engaging discussion around elements of a strong startup community. This long-term outlook and willingness to cross geographic and institutional boundaries relies on people working in concert. The result is connecting entrepreneurs to the resources needed to grow companies and create high-paying jobs.

True leaders break new ground

Five or more years ago, we could not have seen a delegation from one of our Upstate cities traveling to another community to learn about building a startup ecosystem like this. Not only would best practices have been harder to identify, but the interest to travel and learn from others just wasn’t getting any traction.

Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time in Binghamton and I’m impressed with the seeds of change that have clearly been planted. There is no doubt that this group of leaders, who are crossing boundaries are leading the way in accelerating change. Working together, we’ll have a meaningful impact in growing companies and creating jobs in Binghamton’s future economy.

Prepping the Pitcher

Tips for pitch event organizers and startup founders from an investor’s perspective

Last week I attended a local pitch event for the Upstate tech community that included four entrepreneurs pitching their startups. Like many other such events, the audience was a mixed group of entrepreneurs, community supporters and a small handful of investors. 

The pitches unfolded in typical fashion. When I saw the most common pitch errors across each of the four presenters, I did wonder about how the event organizers went about setting expectations and guiding the entrepreneurs doing the pitching. 

Entrepreneurs know these opportunities are important. They definitely spent time preparing, yet missed the chance to deliver a compelling case. Most importantly, none of the presenters specified what help they were seeking. 

What follows in this post are a few suggestions aimed at both event organizers and pitching entrepreneurs who seek to avoid the boring pitch syndrome.

Tip #1: Problem and solution are not enough

Entrepreneurs (particularly those with a technical background) fall too easily into the trap of using precious minutes in a pitch to dumb down the science. They hope to compel the audience by spelling out the technical challenges that were overcome, and the uniqueness of the startups’ product design.

If half or more of the pitch is spent defining the scope of the startup’s technology, it comes across like an academic exercise. The presenter is seen as working too hard to impress with his or her technical mastery – shortchanging the opportunity to secure support beyond defining problem and solution.

Tip #2: Pitch to investors, even in mixed groups

Even in situations where there is a mixed audience with diverse backgrounds and interests, I’m a fan of crafting pitches as if the entire audience were investors. 

Everyone wins by taking this approach in the pitch because: 

  • A standard set of guidelines can be provided to all presenters that directs them to a specific outcome
  • The event can run on a consistent track, making it easier for the audience to compare pitches with a lens that helps everyone think about how investors look at who to fund
  • The entrepreneur gets an opportunity to further hone the investor pitch, addressing things like business model, channels of distribution, margins and other critical business issues

Tip #3: Close with telling people what you want

I believe it’s essential to end a pitch with a specific appeal for help. Often times someone in the audience can assist the entrepreneur. They just need to ask!

Requests for help shouldn’t be limited to financing. Telling people what else your startup needs right now gets everyone thinking about how and who they know that can assist.

Whether it’s introductions to a specific type of customer or channel partner, or finding new team members, mentors and service providers, pitching is an opportunity to make a personal appeal. Someone in the audience may know the right resource for your company, but only if you tell them what you need.

Tip #4: Event organizers call the shots

With so many startups clamoring for the opportunity to get more exposure, event organizers have the leverage to set high standards for who they choose to present.

Instead of filling slots with whoever raises their hand first, consider inviting entrepreneurs to apply for the opportunity.

Even better, give them a short set of pitch guidelines on what you would like to see included in the pitch, and ask them to send a sample deck for you to evaluate.

It’s ok to tell applicants that their submission is just a sample. Ideally you and members of your supporting team can guide development of the final pitch so that it meets your target standard.

UNY50 - Experienced Entrepreneurs & Investors Provide Pitch HelpIf you need pitch mentoring support, resources like Upstate Venture Connect’s UNY50 Network or investors in any of our local seed funds can help. These same groups can also help recommend qualified startups to pitch.

Setting a high standard for your pitch events, and helping startup founders deliver compelling pitches will not only satisfy your audience, but reflect well on you as a sponsoring organization.

CatskillsConf: Fun mashup helps build startup community

Just came off a very fun and worthwhile weekend at the inaugural CatskillsConf – a three day affair that brought together an eclectic mix of creatives, tech people, foodies and startup community supporters.

Was cool not only because the organizers were able to successfully pull off marketing to assemble 120+ people that touched on all those themes, but the diversity included an audience nearly evenly split between Upstate and NY metro.

This was the first ever such gathering in the Hudson Valley/Catskills area. It came about after founders of the Hudson Valley Tech Meetup (Dan Stone, Daniel and Sabrina Shutzsmith and Kale Kaposhilin) met Aaron Quint, (web entrepreneur and former Paperless Post CTO/Chief Scientist) who recently transplanted from NYC to the Hudson Valley.

Pooling their combined organizational talents, passion for bringing people together and lists of contacts is what catalyzed CatskillsConf and their joint marketing outreach filled the room.

Leveraging Local Assets

Whether it was musical talent, farm to table culinary, wood crafts and natural settings of the Ashokan Center, this was a thoughtful mashup that brought diverse elements together with common themes that spoke to the millennial target.

On the learning side, my personal favorites were Dennis Crowley’s “put it all out there” story reflecting struggles at different stages in the startup journey, and also an amazing education segment featuring live birds of prey doing their thing.

birds of prey

When you’ve got a group together for more than a day, it gives opportunity to go beyond a large group learning setting to do some things that can be hands on, fun and social – all adding to the potential of building on strong relationships among participants.

The Catskills flavor for small group activities included options like foraging, blacksmithing, cider making, bookbinding, and drone piloting to name just a few.

Institutional ownership not a requirement for success

More than just a well run event, what’s unusual here is that the outcome wasn’t oriented towards benefiting a particular organization – but rather to just grow the relationship networks for participants, while having a fun time and creating many memories.

My boomer generation just isn’t used to seeing grass roots organizing like this without institutional ownership and resources.

New relationships will yield downstream benefit

As I browsed around, a frequent comment from local tech people sounded like “I used to think I was the only person around here like me. As a result of the groups forming and events bringing like minded people together, I’ve now got a growing network of supporters to help me.”

As I try to calculate the number of “creative collisions” that occurred and what happens when like minded people stumble into each other for the first time, there is little doubt that startup formation and growth will include some life changing outcomes sparked by what seemed like chance encounters.

Good things happen when a few people step up to lead

Kudos to the organizers as they took financial risk and put in a ton of hours along with a full supporting team of volunteers.

They set an inspiring standard for others to follow and their leadership adds further fuel to my optimism about why it is the millennials who are making the difference in powering Upstate towards a big jump in the number of new industry companies and jobs that will rise here from humble beginnings as people meeting at an event that then lead to collaborating on a startup.

We pledge our resources at Upstate Venture Connect to support their efforts and look forward to doing the same for all others ready to lead the charge in their own local market.

Recognizing Startup Community Builders

With a twist on the traditional “Entrepreneur of the Year” awards celebration, Upstate Venture Connect has partnered with Upstate Venture Association of NY to do our first ever celebration to recognize people who are making a difference in building our burgeoning startup ecosystem across the Upstate region.

Entrepreneur leaders make things happen by powering the launch and growth of activities and initiatives ranging from Startup Weekends, angel investor funds, accelerator programs, tech meetups and hackathons to name just a few from the diverse range we already see here in Upstate NY.

Who comes to mind in your community that is out front and leading with their actions to help startup entrepreneurs launch and grow companies?

You can nominate them here for one or more categories in our Venture Ecosystem Awards.

All too often, startup community leaders are people motivated by no more than wanting to leverage their time and talent to make things happen. Our goals include putting the spotlight on those making a difference as well as sharing examples that will motivate others to step up and lead.

Don’t delay as nominations close Monday August 31. The nomination format is easy – if you know someone making a difference they will be in good company.

Sign up yourself to attend our October 9th celebration luncheon at Turningstone Resort in Vernon. We anticipate a turnout of 2-300 people who are leaders and supporters from throughout the Upstate startup ecosystem.

Join us in the fun and show support for those that are building Upstate’s startup economy.

See you there!

Ecosystem investment helps propel new startup creation

Yesterday morning I had several unsolicited requests for funding from Mohawk Valley entrepreneurs. It seemed odd, since a bunch came in at the same time from the local area.

Then someone pointed out an article in the Utica OD profiling my donor advisory fund at the Herkimer and Oneida County Community Foundation.

While the article wasn’t inaccurate, I can see now that when people think of entrepreneurs helping startups and the word funding is included, than conclusions gravitate towards this being about investment dollars going directly into startups.

It’s true that I’m one of Upstate’s most active startup investors. I’ve touched more than 70 companies through both direct investments and LP relationships in seed and private equity funds. My portfolio and investing interests are profiled on my UpVentures.com site.

But the High Growth Entrepreneur fund at HOC Community Foundation is different. That fund is not about my investing directly in companies, but instead towards supporting infrastructure that helps build our local and regional startup ecosystem.

Startup Ecosystem Infrastructure

For me, startup ecosystem infrastructure includes things like programs, activities, events, online assets and other resources that help bring the right parties together.

Building such infrastructure is my full time volunteer role as I created and help run Upstate Venture Connect, a 501c3 non profit now in our fifth year of operations. (Visit UVC.org to see some of our program initiatives and resources that bring entrepreneurs into contact with others who can help.)

Among the initiatives brewing locally is the thINCubator – a college student startup accelerator program housed at Baggs Square, the Commercialization Academy at AFRL’s Rome Labs and accelerated curation of a startup ecosystem map and events calendar that will bring more visibility to our local startup resources and activities.

Also being worked on is launch of a Mohawk Valley seed capital fund comprised of high net worth individuals qualifying as accredited investors who work together to invest as a group, as well as help mentor and support the startups they come into contact with.

With the Community Foundation donor advisory fund I’m interested in supporting leaders with similar ecosystem building aims – likely to include some new ideas on what could bring the right people together such as experienced entrepreneurs, technical talent, investors, service providers even academics and community leaders. The common denominator is a personal passion for being committed to help startups.

Who knows? Maybe a Startup Weekend, Tech Meetup group, Hackathon, 1 Million Cups chapter or something else not even on our current menu will percolate up.

I’m looking forward to seeing proposals and helping support leaders who are ready to put themselves out there to get something going that helps entrepreneurs and startups.

Whether you’re a startup seeking investment or you see an opportunity to help contribute to building the ecosystem, you can message me through the Babinec.com web site. And consider commenting right on this post below and/or sharing the link with others you know who might have interest.

This is a fun journey with big time impact in helping our best and brightest talent – join us!