Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

how much has changed in the last 365 days …

october 24, 2008

had dinner with a big group of friends at this chill lebanese restaurant in surry hills, this really trendy part of eastern sydney. who was there? a pretty good mix of high school friends, university friends, a girl i was desperately trying to hook up with. there were probably about 20 people or so. many of whom would be some of sydney great future lawyers, management consultants, bankers and doctors. where was my life at? i was still sitting one butt cheek in that world, one butt cheek in the world of startups. i mean, i didn’t really know too much about startups back then (that actually makes it sound like i know anything about startups now). i had read richard branson’s first autobiography, losing my virginity, which was much of the inspiration, and still is to this day. i was half way through guy kawasaki‘s the art of the start. i was already using kawasakisms as a part of my natural vernacular.

i was also much more of a party-goer back in the day. i was living with one jacob list, flatmate, in the suite of sin. on my 21st, it was a big drinking night. even though i used to drunk fairly regularly, without ever being seriously concerned about it, my 21st was one of the few nights i had actually got blackout. i also used to blow money like crazy. i was still on the high of my most recent six months at macquarie bank were i was earning decent bank. that round of a dozen shots i bought for my friends, what was i thinking …

especially considering it lead to this …

i will never forget one james clement forner whose car i vomited in. i passed out in the club, had to be assisted out, stumbled to my friend’s car, and thanked him by vomiting in the gap between the seat and the door, i.e. the hardest place in the car to clean vomit.

october 24, 2009

last night i had dinner with a small group of friends, very low key, just in downtown allston. without any intention, but just because of contextual reasons, all young founders of startups, and i’m proud to say, none in social networking. i had come from a kairos society networking event, met a few interesting mit students working on very cool startups, and a few harvard students wanting to solve the energy crisis with a perpetual motion device or make a lot of money by building a social networking app. that was mean, but kind of true.

i had a wellesley girl come over last night, we’ve seen each other a few times. we hung out and she spent the night. i had an early start with a group meeting with my product design and development class. i wanted to sleep in, but two of the team members are risd industrial designers who’d come up to meet at babson so i couldn’t exactly bar it even thought it was early, and my birthday. we working on a product solution to intersection accidents.

i spent most of the rest of the day working, trying to get ready for the blank label launch in a week’s time. our team’s been punishing themselves pretty intensely doing copy, design and dev work like crazy. i guess one thing that hasn’t really changed in the last year is the amount of time i invest in school. last semester i feel i was a little more serious, but this semester has been an absolute shambles. last week i’m pretty sure i failed my first mid-term since art history in year seven.

where i will be on october 24, 2010?

The combination of events and experiences of the past three days have really typified how much life has started to evolve for me by putting myself in the right environment. The tales of the past three days will live in my memory for some time yet to come.

Friday

12am; My roommate Dinesh and I are working, him on his energy efficient lighting startup, me on Blank Label. We’re joined in our room by Samuel who wants to capture the energy Dinesh and I have.

4am; We get some shuteye as Babson Forum starts early in the morning.

8am; Alarm goes off and I jump out of bed. Strange given I usually snooze quite a few times before actually rolling out of bed. But this is a special weekend. Dinesh and I run to Samuel’s room to wake him up.

9am; I catch the second half of Helen Greiner‘s story on the journey of iRobot. I catch her in the foyer afterward and re-connect (several months previous I had asked a semi-stupid question to a panel she sat on).

10am; Catch Alan Webber, founder of Fast Company magazine, again in the foyer (reaffirming that conversations in the foyer in between talks are the best thing about conferences), talk about young entrepreneurs making moves in Boston, especially about his appearance on Dart Boston the previous evening.

11am; Watch a panel with Gail Goodman, Chairman and CEO of Constant Contact, Kevin Colleran, tenth employee of Facebook, and Gary Vee, social media rockstar, moderated by Barry Libert, Chairman and CEO of Mzinga. Gary Vee, as expected, is a rockstar on the panel, and catching him for a couple of minutes afterward only confirmed this.

12pm; Have lunch on a table with some Babson entrepreneurs, Kevin Colleran from Facebook, and Mark Atkins, Chairman and CEO of Invention Machine Corp, talk about all sorts of crazy things. We then listen in on a keynote talk by Doug Otto, Co-Founder and ex-CEO of Deckers Outdoor Corp (UGG Boots), after which I wait inline patiently to speak with him, pitch him Blank Label, to which he responds he’s totally into mass-customization and that I have to follow up.

2:30pm; Watch a panel talk from three Babson alums, Matt Lauzon, Lin Miao, Francesco DeParis, and one current Babson student, Chris Jacobs, who in the past three years have all been in BusinessWeek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs under 25. Catch up with Matt and Lin afterward. Chris lives in E-Tower with me.

5:00pm; Do a little more networking, catch-up with John Harthorne from MassChallenge, listen to Alan Webber give a keynote, catch-up with him briefly afterward.

6:00pm; Attend a Babson Hall of Fame Dinner which is nice, but I start falling asleep during dinner, even though there are talks given by Carl Schramm, CEO of Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and insanely wealthy alumni, Matt Coffin. Have interesting chats with Babson alumni, especially IdeaPaint founders.

10:00pm; Go to pub with Francesco DeParis who is also at dinner and a few other Babson students. See Jeff Katz, producer of Freddy vs Jason, Snakes on a Plane, X-Men Originals: Wolverine, there drinking at the bar, he comes up to E-Tower, we drink and smoke, and I get inebriated with a young Hollywood producer.

3:00am; Pass the fuck out.

Saturday

10:00am; Wake up to a hangover, check through work emails, feel bad for the team, especially our CTO who was working till early AM.

11:00am; Walk out to E-Tower lounge to an awesome champagne breakfast for Babson Parents Weekend. This helps the hangover.

12:00pm; Go to work to make sure we’re still on target for launch on October 31, reviewing web designs, examining photorealistic rendering of our shirts, touching base with a few prominent bloggers in our space.

5:00pm; Get news from SP, code name for wicked smart, founder of one of Boston’s most exciting, venture-backed startups, that he’ll be hanging out with me for the night, talking about Blank Label, and then partying at one of Olin College’s biggest parties of the year. Clap my hands. Keep working.

8:00pm; SP comes around, we chill and talk, I introduce him to a few E-Tower folk. He gives me a major mind fuck about how I’m running Blank Label, walk away with some really honest and priceless advice. ‘Mistakes are good, just don’t make catastrophic ones’.

10:30pm; SP, a couple of E-Tower crew, and I rock over to Olin. Close friend, Evan, runs up to me and asks, is SP really here. Holy fark! SP is amazed he can have beer in solo cup, and yet still have deep conversation with party goers on why Python is awesome. Welcome to Olin.

2:30am; Many drinks later, me having ‘met’ a really nice Wellesley girl, and the both of us generally having had a really great time, SP and I walk back.

3:30am; After some late night chatter, we both pass out. Yes, SP is crashing at my place. Ridiculous.

Sunday

8:00am; SP wakes up almost in panic. ‘When I woke up to silence, with no humming sound of servers, I thought, holy shit, our servers have crashed. And then I realized I was here. I usually sleep at work in the server room.’

9:30am; A little more chatter later, SP leaves E-Tower after a bit of a whirlwind visit.

10:30am; Weather sucks balls in Boston, but we need to do a photoshoot. Scramble to think of somewhere where we have good lighting. Manage to scrap something together. Models, product and photographer ready to go. Have a great time.

2:00pm; Smash out some work, follow up with contacts I met on Friday, still thinking about the mind fuck SP gave me the night before about how I was running Blank Label.

4:00pm; Spend two hours and three times too long on a six page paper on a ‘Managing a Growing Business’ case for class.

6:00pm; Catch up with Samuel about crazy weekend, and pretty much promise each other that there’s no way we’re going back to Australia. Us ending up here has been fateful and it’s up to us to fulfill our ‘destiny’, coincidentally both our designated religions on Facebook.

8:00pm; Have weekly Sunday evening call with folks at home, typical conversation where Mum and I do most of the talking and Dad just chimes in really matter-of-fact questions.

9:30pm; Great back and tris workout.

11:00pm; Shower up and get ready for long night between work and studying Brand Management mid-term.

having spent most of the past 15 startup months not being lean, when i was introduced to the #leanstartup philosophy by friend, mentor and blank label advisor, dan marques, my entire view of the world changed. dan first introduced me to 37 signal‘s getting real: the smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application, and i was later referred to eric ries‘s startup blog . i used to think that bootstrapping was the most undertaught startup lesson, but i now realize it’s the ability to be lean that will make or break a startup in it’s infancy.

my interpretation of a lean startup philosophy is the ability to identify and differentiate, both strategically and tactically, what is essentially important and what can be deferred to later. one of the most underrated milestones in a startup is the ability to launch. it’s obviously on the mind of all startups, but it should be driving every decision pre-launch. is this task going to help us launch, or is it merely a distraction, and can we do it later? eric ries has this minimum viable product stipulation that helps determine this: the mvp = version of new product which allows startup to collect maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. another way i look at it, within the various components of the startup, what are the 20% effort – 80% reward sweet spots. the very title of getting real is titled, build less: underdo your competition.

how has this helped blank label? the fact that after f***ing around for quite a few months until late last month when we outlined a roadmap for a stripped down, lean launch, and that we’re on target to launch october 31, is an exciting change in company mood. we’re not looking to make a big deal about october 31. it’ll be important to us, but we know the exciting stuff happens after october 31. we’ll be iterating and building every week. we’ve even held back on reaching out to too many relationships in the blogosphere as we’ll have a much better product two weeks into november, and then two weeks after that, and we want to be uniques growth to be stimulated along the way, rather than putting all our eggs in one basket. instead of trying to predict the market, we’re going to keep a close eye on analytics and let the market tell us. people ask about whether we’re going to have this feature, or that idea they think would be great for us. we take it down, and it goes onto the ‘ideas board’.

in such a hot space as ‘mass-customization’ where the barriers to entry are fairly low, we didn’t have the billion dollar idea. like many other ideas, it was spawned from context, and a context that was not unique to me. the money is really to be made in the execution, and execution is really valuable when you’re actually in the marketplace. so this isn’t even about first mover advantage, but rather about making life easier and better for you and your startup. there are too many founders trying to predict exactly what the market will want. it’s all in research reports and opinions and being mostly computed in heads. i have a terrible habit of doing this. now i just say, it’s close enough, let the market tell us. being in the marketplace and making real sales, getting real feedback is the best research you can do. also, the momentum and excitement level your team works at when it can see getting to market, or when it’s in market, is completely different to something that you’re hacking away at with no identifiable time of people ever using it.

this is fundamentally important to most first-time student entrepreneurs. if you’re stagnant and not making much progress, the risk tolerance starts wearing. being young, we may not have patience or experience to do the long-haul kind of deal. i see so many student founded startups fail because they aren’t excited about the progress they’re making, and that’s in large part because they are day one trying to attack something that is so broad. this gets compounded by other school distractions which creep in and the killer of all startups, internship season. the ability to be lean, determine what is important, make traction towards it, get to market, is probably the most critical thing to overcome the first-time risk hurdles.  i keep telling the team, the most important lesson for us to keep in mind is fix time, fix budget, flex scope.

*you’ve probably noticed that i wrote this article exclusively in lower case. i’ve started doing that of late b/c i couldn’t figure out why we still use capitalization.

**listening to pandora radio station ‘i’ve got a feeling’ by black eyed peas

Paul Graham, Founder of Viaweb and Y-Combinator, assimilates the life of startup founder as one who is punched in the face on a daily basis, but being a foreign, student entrepreneur, I’ve got it perhaps even a little bit worse than that. On a day like last Thursday, all those hurdles, all those challenges, they just melt away. I’ve been in a world, Sydney, where thinking differently about creating jobs rather than looking for jobs is looked at with some confusion. Then there are the other international students, not just the ones on exchange, but also on a four-year program, who look at me with bewilderment when I tell them I think I’ve found a home in Boston and I want to create wealth here. The fact that I’m a 21 year old also puts some people off.  But last Thursday, that didn’t matter.

It was taken for granted that if you came through the Sun Microsystem doors, by the Terrafugia car with wings, you were smart, interesting, definitely worth having a conversation with, and probably worth helping. How often do you go to an event where you genuinely feel everyone, experienced/ unexperienced, young/ old, foreign/ local, would be intellectually stimulating, conversationally enjoyable and probably very useful.  The most concise I could put my experience of the day is in a timeline, otherwise I will continue to go on about how good it was in forty other ways.

7:00am – turn up and get registered, deliberate over who I want to sign-up with

7:20am – meet Will Herman (Innoveda and Viewlogic Systems) who reached out to me before the conference (crazy, yes) and chat about Blank Label and basic technology issues

8:00am – sit in on what we’re going to do for the day, and how everything runs

8:30am – try to grab a couple of bites to eat, look at the topic board and frantically trying to plan my day

9:00am – one-on-one with Mike Grandinetti of South Boro Capital (and four previous start ups) to talk about Blank Label and spending time in Canada due to visa restrictions, tells me he’s going up to Toronto for meetings in a few weeks and I should join him

10:00am – short conversations with Scott Friend (Bain Capital Ventures) to give Blank Label update, James Geshwiler (Common Angels and Mass TLC) to talk about student entrepreneurship, finally meet Jer Levine (Star Street) after tweeting many times

11:00am – quick chat with Brad Feld (Foundry Group and Tech Stars) about situation and #startupvisa, try to get the inside scoop

11:30am – check emails, tell Profs that I’m not going to class that day, try and shovel food down

12:00am – one-on-one with George Bell (General Catalyst and awesome dude) about his crazy youth traveling around Australia, my background and how he could help me as an entrepreneur

12:30am – interesting chats with Luda Kopeikina, Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc and Software Garden) and Bill Warner (Avid Technologies and Tech Stars)

1:00pm – attend my first session of the day by Richard Dale (Sigma Partners and Phase Forward) on ‘All the Bad Things VCs Want to Do with You’

1:45pm- one-on-one with David Beisel (another great guy) to talk about mass-customization space and how we’re trying to attack it at Blank Label, wanted to help out, stay tapped in and find a spot for us on Web Inno

2:30pm – short talks with Jon Pierce of Beta House, Wade Roush of Xconomy, James Rienhart of ThredUp, the guys from MassChallenge and the guys from Dart Boston

3:30pm – sit down with Don Dodge of Microsoft (and four previous start ups)

4:00pm – attend Bill Warner’s session on ‘How to Launch Your Idea with No Money’

4:30pm – wrap up, say good-byes, and begin the drive back in preparation for live-stream interview on Dart Boston a couple of hours later

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. SMACK! Alarms goes to snooze. KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK. Door opens. ‘Fan, get out of bed, it’s already 6. We need to go’. I jump out of bed. Sleepy eyed, Samuel and I go down to the zipcar, we pick up Chris, and we begin our day, leaving Babson carpark, sleepy eyed, yet an unbridled enthusiasm as all three of us have printed off an ‘Experts List‘. Chris is a co-founder and CEO of an early-stage on-and offline toy startup, and a sophomore at Olin College of Engineering. Samuel lives with me in E-Tower at Babson College, where he is exploring different startup opportunities whilst being study abroad from his home university, RMIT, in Melbourne, Australia.

We begin the drive up to Sun Mircosystem’s offices in Burlington, bragging who we’re going to track down during the day, whilst all being a little overwhelmed at the caliber of people in attendance. Along the way, we pickup Danny from Bentley, who works with me at Blank Label as the Lead Traffic Controller (SEO, SEM, Copy, Social Media, Social Networking, Affiliates, Direct Marketing). At 19 (Chris), 19 (Danny), 21 (Me) and 23 (Samuel), we’re probably going to be four of the youngest people there, but that gets us excited. We all approach our entrepreneurial ventures as the start of the next 50 years of starting, sustaining and growing companies.

As we walk to the entrance, it’s gatekeeper is the newest model of the Terrafugia car with wings. This is going to be a good day. As I walk in, I see some friends of the Boston events community, Scott Kirsner, Michael Gaiss, Matt Lauzon. But there is something different, they’re not surrounded by three circles of people waiting to ask questions. Amazingly, they’re just standing around, looking at this ‘board’, like everyone else. Like everyone else. But they’re not, ‘just everyone else’. What’s going on. But before thinking about that too much, I’m distracted by this ‘board’ that everyone’s standing in front of.

I quickly find out that I have two stickers for one-on-one meetings with this extraordinary list of ‘Experts‘, and everyone’s fair game. I’m Charlie, Bill is Willy Wonka, and I’m in the most amazing chocolate factory I’ve ever been to. But it’s the paradox of choice, I must use my stickers wisely. I jump for Mike Grandinetti. Not only has the guy got about the same number of LinkedIn recommendations as I do connections, he’s also internationally experienced, definitely something I’m interested in exploring in the next 50 years. One left. I remember reading that George Bell likes to meet ‘scary smart, high-energy people’. Now anyone with an ego gets attracted to that. There are no wrong choices.

But the people weren’t even the most amazing thing about the day. It was the culture Bill was able to create. As soon as you walked in the doors, there was a flat structure, everyone and everything was fair game. In the opening introduction, everyone sat in a circle, there was no, experts on stage and the rest in the audience. Bill made it so passionately clear that it was about doing everything possible to help educate, connect and stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation. And the guy just has such a presence about him that it’s kind of hard not to do exactly as he says.

That’s only part 1, I’ll wrap up part 2 in a couple of days. Stay tuned. It gets so much better.