tips

Dopplr's CEO LIsa Sounio recently made an interview that's now published here:

http://www.pestaola.gr/lisa-sounio-dopplr-ceo-interview/

It's an interesting read, and gets into the "entrepreneurial spirit" pretty fast there. She gives some rather good advice:

(quoted from the article:)
Top 3 tips for entrepreneurs

1. Go ahead even though the idea is not fully clear, you learn
2. Figure up your strengths and complete your weaknesses with excellent partners
3. Small can be beautiful and faster than the elephant

Top 3 mistakes you did but never repeated again

1. Always respect people although they would not respect you
2. I was so afraid at the start, for no reason!
3. Don’t worry for competition. Keep your eyes open and help others as much as possible

That's nicely compressed excellent stuff. Having seen Lisa work from up close I can say that she also does practice what she preaches. Also note how the Finland promo sort of leaks through from the article ;) She's really good at that.

Pic: Me and Lisa "Dopplr Posin" at Dopplr offices. Photo by Matt Biddulph.
It's a picture meme imitating the original photo here.

Listening to Lisa and myself speak about entrepreneurship I'm starting to get the feeling that the proper attitude for success is more and more about something that can be described as "faith". Faith in yourself, in your idea, in your team, etc. Being a successful entrepreneur seems to require courage, faith and some level of stubbornness ;)

If you want to keep taps on what's going on in the startup scene with a bit more international focus, here are couple of blogs and websties to check out:

http://www.texasstartupblog.com/

Good stuff about Texas -area (and wider) startups. They often write about going head to head with Silicon Valley and from that perspective are not unlike European or Scandinavian startups also trying to get attention and not being in The Valley.

http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2007/10/24/venture-capital-blog-list/

Texas startup blog also has a list of VC blogs, that is a whopping 103 entries long! If you go through all of that; please tell me what you found.. since that's quite an effort to keep taps on all of those ;) The list originally compiled by Jeffrey Stewart a serial-entrepreneur from New York CIty. Good stuff.

http://startupblog.wordpress.com/

Good blog about startup thinking, attitude, planning, ideas and insights

http://startup.blogscorp.com/

Startup blog that focuses on hardware/chip industry quite a bit, but occasionally shares something that's universally useful.

http://startup.partnerup.com/

They say they are "all about startups, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. All the time" sounds about right ;)

http://onstartups.com/

Blog for entrepreneurs by Dharmesh Shah

http://www.floridastartupblog.com/

A sister-site to the Texas Startup Blog. Also good stuff.

http://www.startupping.com/

Claims to be "one-of-a-kind community resource for Internet entrepreneurs" haven't tried it out myself, yet..

http://startupnewz.com/blog/

Silicon Valley blog, startup coverage.

http://www.startups.co.uk/

UK startup website with a rather broad focus: all small businesses really.

http://blog.timberry.com/

Tim Berry's insights on planning, starting and growing your business

http://www.sampa.com/seattle-blogs/

A long list of blogs and such from the Seattle area - interesting to glance at a totally different scene.

http://www.startupspark.com/

Sparking startups with advice, inspiration and a bit of craziness

http://www.arcticstartup.com/

Naturally: Arctic Startup

http://www.startupbin.com/

Blog about the web and startups from Finland.

.. There's a rather endless list of blogs around, the trick is to filter the gems from the mass. Anything you have discovered as especially useful?

Are you having trouble and running out of ideas on where to find investors to pitch your company to?

In more than one ways the VCs have adapted a policy where they are "hiding" a bit; it is not easy to find out about the deals they have done, and there's no super-clear communication about their exact focus. I have talked about this quite a bit lately and one person commented that: "there isn't anybody working in VC firms that would know anything about marketing".

Here's a couple of tips on where to look for investor & VC names and contact info:

1. http://www.fvca.fi/?pageid=12&parent0=3

The Finnish Venture Capital association. Does not include all the local VCs here in Finland, but many of them are there. A word of advice: many of them are "later stage" so they are very unlikely to invest into companies that are "pre-product" or "pre-revenue".

2. http://www.thefunded.com/

The Funded is a brilliant website that lets founders/entrepreneurs rank and rate VCs and give public feedback on their usefulness, competence etc. The site also lists hundreds of them by investment focus, geography etc.

3. http://www.scandinavianinvestmentnetwork.com/investor

This is a business angel network, supposedly scandinavian wide. Don't know them my self, somebody referred them to me.

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_venture_capital_firms

Wikipedia also lists the most well known and largest VC firms.

5. http://www.nvca.org/members.html

This is the Venture Capital association of the USA. There's a rather massive list of VCs here.

..Than then for something completely different:

6. http://www.isb.edu/WCED/VentureCapitalists.Shtml

Investors with an Indian / non-european base and perhaps focus as well.

It is quite likely that your company is "pre-product" and "pre-revenue", unfortunately this puts you out of the radar screen for almost every VC in the world. Only a tiny minority of them will ever finance pre-seed/seed cases, and in Finland the situation isn't that much rosier.

Who does finance the pre-seed/seed -phase then? You can try talking to these:

i. http://www.lagooncapital.fi/

ii. http://www.veraventure.fi/index.asp?language=2

iii. http://www.brv.com/

iv. http://www.inventure.fi/etusivu.asp

v. http://www.conor.vc/

vi. http://www.nordic.com/

vii. http://www.eng.firstround.fi/

There might be others but those I know either for a fact or through a reliable source have actually invested in pre-seed/seed companies, however for some of them doing just that is pretty rare still.

If you are in the graphics, video, advertising, broadcasting, Web -space, then there's also: http://www.lots.fi/ they are not investors as such, but have a lot of competence and potential to help you out.

And then there's always http://www.tekes.fi/eng/

Who did I miss? Any insights you would want to share on this?

Over the years people have often approached me with questions like "what we need to do in order to be ready for VC investment?" "what's there to prepare?" etc. Often it seems that companies and their founders know more about raising capital than closing the actual deal in the end.

I will be writing more on this topic, perhaps even a series of posts, so I'll start with some rather summarized tips. Feel free to jump into the conversation and agree/disagree with these.

1. It takes time to close. Sometimes up to 6 months. So you need to have time, and you need to have an attitude that you are in no hurry. Never ever plan your business based on any dates when "the money will be there", because often it won't. There are positive surprises, but they are exceptions to the rule.

2. Do your homework very well regarding the Due Diligence process the VC will have to do anyways. Proper DD includes pretty much everything, but focuses especially on: IPR, Legal and Technical. Have those areas covered as well as you can. Some good practical tips are:

A. Maintain an active IPR registry. This can be done in Google Docs or where ever. Can be quite simple and it should be something everybody has access to. A good registry has every IPR, idea, concept, design, component etc (you get the idea) written down in a headline level and a brief summary on how it works. Many of the companies in this space primarily only own IPR (and nothing else of substantial value) so doing this register is quite vital. You can also verify the register as prior art by having it time-stamped officially in the local magistrate. If you need (and can afford) the help in building a registry like this these people are some of the best in the business here locally in Finland. Why is this important? When a professional VC sees a beautiful all-inclusive IPR registry with summaries they will be very happy. Makes their DD job a lot easier and also plays positively in the psychological side: clearly this is a company that knows its stuff! As a benchmark the IPR lists of some of the companies I have run have been about 35 pages with only the headline and 1 row of summary for each IPR. Just saying that if you do this right you will end up listing a whole lot of stuff (which is good).

B. Legal DD is next: have your IPR list time-stamped by the magistrate every once and a while. That way you can prove that the idea/concept/etc existed at some point in history, and if it did enter public domain at that time it will be a lot harder for anybody who might patent the same thing later to stop you from using it, since you can prove you had it already. Have all of your legal documents (employment contracts, SHAs, board meeting minutes, NDAs, agreements, etc) in one place: one directory in digital format with only the final signed copies in there (no drafts), and one folder full of paper. In addition to this most bigger companies maintain a registry/list of all the contracts they have: this can be a similar brief list, listing contract names, dates, person who signed, and the other party's name etc. Having all this in neat order will help you alot when the legal DD hits. Usually VCs use a contracted lawyer or some other professional expert to asses your stuff. When they encounter a neat pile of paper with complete lists etc they will be impressed. Believe me, most startups don't do this part very well and they have to hunt for the papers in the DD, makes you look really unprofessional. Your local lawyers can help you get "DD ready", some law firms I have worked with: AKG, Borenius & Kemppinen, Fennica (or BIrd&Bird nowdays).

C. Tehcanical DD is pretty straightforward: you need to document and maintain your technical stuff in the IPR registry as well. One of the most important things; be sure to write understandable prioritized documentation and functional descriptions on how your stuff works. Use plenty of graphics. Remember: this is primarily a document your are preparing for an outsider to read - so feel free to highlight the really important stuff and to underline the uniqueness of your solutions. Allows them to "grasp it" faster. Think of yourself going through the tech in a random technie company: how would you want to read about it? source code directly? good documentation? What ever it is, prepare it well and have in a neat pile like the rest of the DD stuff. And make sure your top technical people have the competence to talk about the details in a manner that represents you positively.

D. The rest: during a DD process the VCs often i) look through everyones CVs, ii) interview everybody (or almost everybody) in the company. So have your CVs ready, prepare your gang for the interviews. Resolve any and all internal issues and conflicts before the talks: it can get nasty if VCs talk your people in the middle of some internal hickups.

Even great companies can get this stuff "wrong", as highlighted by TechCrunch in this posting about how Google walked away from Digg because of "technical due diligence was to blame" and "Digg's top team just wasn't a fit".

Scandinavia/Finland also must have cases that have failed during the DD phase - do you know of any? People never talk about those..

This is ending up to be a pretty long post, so I'll share one more tip and continue this later in another post then:

3. Pressure the VCs. Don't have just one alternative around, have several. Don't be "begging for financing" but rather "on the market shopping for financial services, as the customer/buyer". VCs are financial services vendors to the startups and the startups ARE the customers. The price you pay is equity, but they need to sell their services to you just as well as you need to prove you are a good "catch". It's not unlike humans pairing up ;-) shares many of the similar concepts on how you finally end up between the sheets together. The best position for a startup is to have several VCs competing on investing to you. At the very least you need to have (and to build) alternatives. I plan to blog about a couple of war stories were this was successfully done.

To be continued..

Is sharing the list of blogs you follow a good idea? I think so. Might result in a few odd discoveries and shared insights on what to use as good sources for relevant events, news and insights.

I follow this entire list through www.newsgator.com and their iPhone app, NetNewsWire. Excellent stuff. When I have everything with me on the go it quite effectively at least doubles up the amount of reading I'll be able to get through in a day. Here's the list:

http://www.avc.com/
http://alwayson.goingon.com/
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
http://www.arcticstartup.com/
http://azeem.typepad.com/
http://www.centernetworks.com/
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture
http://daringfireball.net/
http://digg.com/
http://www.digitoday.fi/
http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/
http://www.energybulletin.net/
http://www.kanai.net/weblog/
http://gigaom.com/
http://www.torstensson.com/weblog/
http://www.imediaconnection.com/
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars
http://joi.ito.com/
http://localglobe.blogspot.com/
http://loiclemeur.com/
http://www.macworld.com/
http://mashable.com/
http://www.micropersuasion.com/
http://radar.oreilly.com/
http://www.playnoevil.com/
http://www.programmableweb.com/
http://www.ranchero.com/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://scobleizer.com/
http://www.screditcrunch.com/
http://www.37signals.com/svn/
http://www.smartmobs.com/
http://jussilaakkonen.wordpress.com/
http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/
http://www.topix.com/business/social-software
http://www.texasstartupblog.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/
http://www.theequitykicker.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
http://vierityspalkki.wordpress.com/
http://web2list.com/
http://news.cnet.com/webware/
http://www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com/
http://www.worldofraids.com/
http://www.ypulse.com/
http://www.zengestrom.com/

Some personal favorites from that list:

The Big Picture = insightful macroeconomic analysis and viewpoints
Whiskey and Gunpowder = very similar to The Big Picture, good stuff
Energy Bulletin = news about the looming energy crisis
Huffington post = high quality opinions straight from the source
Texas Starup Blog = excellent startup stuff
Signal vs Noise = good source for design and attitude

What am I missing? What's on your list?