Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

After two days of engaging with excited founders, networking with west coast investors, speaking with passionate entrepreneurs, hash-tagging dozens of #tc50, I’m inspired, curious and frankly bloody tired! I guess I’ll mention a few things in this post, what I thought of the general west coast vibe, my impressions of the conference, and a couple of my favorite demoing companies.

The stereotype of west coast startup founders of being web consumer focused, young and brash, and web consumer focused was definitely evident at TC50. In Boston, I discovered two buckets of entrepreneurs. You have the ones who are truly passionate about a particular pain, who want to dedicate themselves for the greater cause, and for the most part have already identified the specific destination. There is the other bucket who creates for market opportunity, targets it with a broad vision, is flexible and mobile and attacks the ever-changing vertical. At TC50, I discovered another startup founder. The one who did it, just because. There were quite a few sub-27 founders who would be working on several different web app products, with no really desire to solve some deeply felt-pain, had not over-whelming interest to target a niche beach-head and scale with funding. They did it because they enjoyed building web apps with their friends. Check out Lissn, their team falls into that exact description.

First kudos to TC50 for giving away 100 free student volunteer tickets, and as a result of having so many volunteers, ‘work’ for me was assigned to an afternoon of speaking with demoing companies, especially the ones receiving less attention, to boost their spirits. Most enjoyable conversation talking to deeply passionate founders of Vid School, travelling all the way in from Dublin, Ireland. Now that’s pretty cool ‘work’ – speaking with startup founders about their newly launched product, and them desperately seeking feedback because you’re the only one talking to them. We’ve all been there, and it was a lot of fun. The conference itself seemed fairly tame in terms of startups demoing, experts judging and general activity. There lacked a sustained energy level, e.g. it would have been cool for the judges to have more engaging and passionate debate among themselves or the startup founders. It just felt very reserved and never really shifted into the higher gears. Nothing about the conference itself really seemed that news worthy, that TechCrunch worthy, except when big Mike walked off-stage. Even the after-parties seemed really tame. The first night the club had less than 100 people at its peak, and the second night the after party was a burlesque show which received some weird reactions, but the after-after party was cool, with some of the big guns including Jason and Tony Hsieh mingling with the crowd.

What was the coolest demo I saw over the two days? In terms of what I thought was most ‘high-potential’, it actually wasn’t a TC50 company, rather a startup missing that cut-off and being thrown in the demopit. The feedback I hear consistently from venture firms is i) idea has to be strong, ii) market opportunity has to be compelling, iii) team has to be able to bring it to market. Pip.io was all three of those things for me. They describe themselves as a ‘social operating system that aims to give people the ability to share in communicate in real-time’. Now there are a few different aggregators out there, but they really differentiated on their front-end development being super sleek and their AJAX platform had amazing performance. They also were able to maintain a really clean and intuitive user interface on the demo, especially given the collation of features they were trying to propagate. The founders, whose names I actually can no longer remember because they only had promo cards and not personal cards, were also crazy dudes. They were so freakin’ ambitious, and even though at times where over the top, had the craziest vision, and you just had the sense they would be able to pull off something big.

See you next year!