I'm going to be live blogging NWEN Entrepreneur University. Just talked to John Cook and he is doing the same.
The morning keynote was from Peter van Oppen on reaching high altitude. It was very interesting his view on hiring people to your company. He define the "3 Es" that you should look when hiring people.
In order of importance:
Energy: People that have drive and are bouncing off the walls
Excellence: People that know how to channel that energy
Experience: People that have the experience to where you want to be (not where you are)
Second presentation for me was from Mike Mathieu. Ex-Microsoft guy, left and build All Star Directories.
He didn't talk much about ASD, but about his personal ups and downs with building a company, and learning when and how to let it go.
A very experience entrepreneur and investor once told me that founders give themselves too much credit for the value they have on their company, i.e., assuming they are irreplaceable.
I have a good understand of what I do and my worth value. I never believe people cannot be replaced. Some people might be harder to replace because of the perfect unusual fit into the company, but companies have their blood flow, and when people leave that doesn't stop. In certain cases, even if the last person leaves the blood flow continues!
It's official: I have PDD (patience deficiency disorder). Round Table or Panel formats are too slow and that is very annoying.
I'm here watching Bob Tassone moderate three speakers talking about "financing strategies" (although they are being quite off topic talking about everything from recruiting to selling). The panel include Mike Stull (Pacific Bioscience Lab), Doug Gorder (Gorder Consulting) and Diane Renihan (Bag Borrow or Steal).
One people have to give their presentation alone, up there with a PPT, they prepare for it. They come knowing exactly what they are going to say. On Panels, they are there without any supporting material (visuals) and they have this sad Q&A format where a moderator throws a question and waits for two or three to respond. They respond very slowly, without passion and that triggers my PDD enzymes.
I left for a few minutes to watch Robbie Cape from Cozi to talk about "Preparing for Take-Off". I couldn't listen much longer because I felt his advices were not applicable to a wide audience. The jewel was "you must spend 4 to 6 hours a day recruiting, if you are not doing that you are probably doing the wrong thing". Really? Well, it works well if you have a pot of gold under your desk. My advise to entrepreneurs is to spend 4-6 hours of their day building the product, and the rest raising money. On your spare time you network.
I listened to the same panel talk about how expensive IPO is, the problems with IPO, current IPOs....
Question: How many CEOs of companies about to go public are attending this event?
My widely uninformed guess is: zero. I'll go one step further and say that there are no one here that has raised a VC round for their current company. So, even talking about a Series B is a waste of time.
Entrepreneurs have too much to learn, they can't learn everything so the limited space on their brain needs to be wisely filled with things that *mater*.
Oh God, now they are talking about Earnings per Share...
Just finished watch Craig Kinzer talk about taking your product/service to market. Don't you know him? Have you heard about Scene It, the game? That's his product.
First of all, it is great to hear somebody that has so much experience. Everything they say is super valuable. He failed and succeeded multiple times and that is the kind of experience you can't get in books or in school.
I won't write about details of his talk because it was too broad and too much information for this blog.
At the end of his talk, each person that made good questions during the Q&A got a copy of Scene It. One woman got two copies because her question was so good according to him.
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January, 2008
