Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

last tuesday i attended the masschallenge #massaccess speed-networking event, and the evening really epitomized why i love boston so much. first, it was a great event so kudos to john, akhil and david for the great work. the format was really innovative, six 10min slots to meet six new people in an hour. with some 200 people or organize, the event was pretty well organized. there was sushi and open bar afterward which was a really nice treat. what was also really nice was being invited out to dinner by bill warner. a week after winning the masstlc innovation catalyst award, it was no great surprise to me for bill to round up a few youngens and invite us out to dinner, no great surprise but a really nice gesture nevertheless. he spoke of the changing startup scene in boston, and credited the involvement of a lot of young people being proactive within the startup scene. being a young person, in the boston scene, i thought i’d shed a spotlight on a few youngens doing some interesting things.

the best thing about all these guys is they’d genuinely love to help in any way they can …

evan morikawa – twitter and linkedin

someone i’ve openly said that i’d love to co-found a company with one day, evan’s a brilliantly smart engineer, specializing in software. what makes evan’s relatively unique is his understanding and love of design, both raw graphic as well as user design. his team is pushing hard on a saas education startup, alight learning. the alpha is currently being tested by teachers, with hundreds more waiting for the beta.

jeremy levine – twitter and linkedin

i’ve been really impressed with jer’s progress in the last few months on his sports stock market startup, star street. they’ve planning on launching in a few months, and with every guy jer talks to get excited about the opportunity to trade their favorite sports players, i’m excited for him. he’s equally excited about the developing boston startup scene, having moved back to cambridge from syracuse where he went to school.

jason evanish – twitter, blog and linkedin

one of the most active young networkers in boston, the face and brains behind greenhorn connect, an aggregation of boston startup events, and other resources, i think jason’s actually trying to do the impossible and actually make it to all the events on offer, so don’t be surprised if he tweets about multiple events in the same evening. so if you want any advice on how to get the most out of boston, especially as a young startup enthusiast, evanish is totally the guy to connect with.

michael raybman – twitter and linkedin

a startup i personally can’t wait till launch, way savvy is a flexible travel search site that shows me what the best options are if i just wanted to go skiing sometime this winter with a rough budget of $500, i.e. it’s for those without exact dates months in advance, and exact destinations. i mean i just want to go boarding somewhere cheap, don’t really care when or wear. michael is the founder and they’re planning launch late this year/early next year.

danny wong – twitter and linkedin

someone who regularly makes me feel guilty that i’m not working hard enough, not because i’m genuinely not, but rather because this guy’s an absolute beast. someone you’ll be relieved to have on your team, we’re definitely lucky to have danny as blank label’s lead traffic controller. he oversees all our seo/sem, social media and networking, and affiliate marketing. a great networker in his own right, especially in the domain of of online marketing.

chris jacobs – businessweek profile

winner of this year’s businessweek 25 under 25, i can say from living with this guy, he has one of the biggest and craziest personalities of anyone i know, which is really saying something given most of the people i hang around are startup people, and by nature supposed to be a little crazy. he is a partner at emergent energy group, a renewable energy consulting startup with over 30 clients. they’re more excited projects they’re entering into are in urban development, definitely one to look out for.

cort johnson – twitter and linkedin; and jake cacciapaglia – twitter and linkedin

these two are quite attached at the hip, but of the dozens of times i’ve seen them, i think i can honestly say that i’ve never seem them more than 10 feet apart, and have definitely never seen them independent of each other. the guys behind what is becoming a cornerstone of the young boston startup scene, #pokinholes, dart boston has also expanded to #rule53 and #captialize. these guys are both true connectors, they passionate promote youth entrepreneurship in the form of giving the limelight to young boston entrepreneurs actually starting companies

the great thing about these guys is that they’re all 25 or under. i can’t wait to see what they do in the next 25 years. whatever it is, i just hope that it’s in boston.

of course there’s no forgetting matt lauzon and seth priebatsch, the founders of paragon lake and scvngr, respectively. but they’re already well on the way to making it so need to give them more praise then they’ve already received … kudos to highland, the venture backer of both these young rockstars

it’s all about sex appeal, and it seems that the cash-poor, unglamorous, ramen filled world of startups has managed to overtake the steel and glass tall buildings, expense accounts and suit and tie life of investment banking in the eyes of college students. of course the first reaction most people while have is d’oh, financial crisis mr blogger? isn’t it obvious. they’ve probably already clicked out.

for those of you who haven’t, i want to engage in a conversation with you that suggests the fundamentals of why young people are thinking more seriously about getting involved in startups, either by founding one, or joining one early-stage, is more fundamental than the economy and the fewer job opportunities on wall street. When I threw away my aspirations to be an investment banking superstar (check out the loser on the left), I thought I was being some kind of rebel, but as most instance in my life, nothing all that special, just context. If you look around, you see a new breed of college student, people call us Gen Yers, Generation U, Millenials. At Blank Label we call ‘us’ Connected Individuals, and have coined the term #CONNECTEDINDIVIDUALISM. We’re impatient, generally needy, have been brought up fairly entitled, mostly in small families. We associate with independence, we see more young people than ever doing really cool shit. And that really cool shit is not making money off the buying and selling of others. Yes, that was a jibe at bankers.

But if you think about those characteristics as a generation we generally embody, a lot of them are closely correlated with why young people are starting companies these days. We’re giving the finger to the corporate rat race. We’re thankfully irrational enough to think we actually have a decent shot of founding a startup, I’m sure by serious of orders of magnitude if you measured what young founders thought their chance of success was vs what was realistic based on balance of probabilities, the economy would be seriously worried. Thankfully that’s a hard study to do. What the real catalyst driving a lot of this is the actual success of young entrepreneurs.  Much of the reason why I wanted to go into banking is because peers who were a few years older were talking about the six figure salary, the friday night open bar parties, the ass-kicking intensity. This was all incredibly sexy to me. And amazingly, sex appeal is important to a young 20 something year old male. With the growing list of young rockstar entrepreneurs spread around, the attention has turned to being sexy by starting a company. And think about the ego rush of a young person hiring someone older than them. Damn! And the king of them all Zucks is getting a freaking movie made about him!

Entrepreneurs south of 30 will always be a minority in comparison to those who spend time as academics or research experts, those who get corporate gigs, and those who just want to spend their time surfing. Everyone’s different, everyone’s passionate about different things, and I fully respect that. But there’s no doubt in my mind that this generational group of entrepreneurs has been growing over the last 10 years, and will grow at an even quicker rate in the next 10 years. Make no mistake, I am not qualifying necessarily massive hits from young entrepreneurs, only that more young people are founding companies or getting involved in startups. What this really stresses is that there’s an amazing opportunity for schools, government and the investment community to seriously change the impact young people have the future of the world, and it’s amazing how large an impact small tweaks can have.

so there weren’t exactly and only 5 things that i learnt from the futureforward conference i attended on thursday, but one of things i did learn from @chrisbrogan (seated right in the photo); ‘for whatever reason, when you put a number in front of your blog title, it has a higher chance of getting read. if you want to write an article, ‘i hate lebron james’, you should in fact title it, ’5 reasons why i hate lebron james’. so i guess that’s one. credit were credit was due, he was as awesome in person speaking as he is online blogging. a couple of other side tips, he recommends caused based marketing (marketing yourself or your company related to a specific cause) and promote others (either on twitter or your blog, almost like a malcolm gladwell-esq ‘connector’).

staying with social media, lesson two comes from @edwardboches, chief creative officer of mullens (seated left in the photo, the guy in the middle is brian @bhalligan, @hubspot ceo), and that was how to balance the strengths of experienced content creators with digital natives to have maximum impact on consumers. the point was that, sure, young people have been brought up on the internet, we don’t use books and print, we were on facebook first, we know about social networking, we use social media for news, not traditional mass media, but that doesn’t mean we know about strategy. in fact, in many cases we don’t know the meaning of the word. you ask many young, first-time founders, and we’ll tell you about our crazy ideas, and we’re often okay with the short-term tactics, but breaking them down into strategic, high-level thinking is a different challenge. that’s what we have our advisors for at blank label. i don’t have any expertise in anything, but it’d be just down-right stupid of me to think that i know how to think 12 month, 3 year and 5 year strategy for technology, online marketing or fulfillment. again, that’s why we have three advisors in those verticals to help us with that.

lesson three came from one my favorite people in boston, @billwarner; ‘angel investing is a really bad way to make money, but i do it really because i see it as an honor’. now the lesson to me was that if i could ever find an angel investor like that, i’d be pretty stoked. with angel investing moving ‘so professional’, it was just really nice to hear that there are still people like bill, even if he is the exception and not the rule.

being a narcoleptic, my lesson number four was fairly interesting, and it comes from ben rubin, co-founder and cto of zeo. ben calls it a personal sleep coach which tracks your daily sleep patterns, and educates on how to get better sleep. his story was fascinating to me because i haven’t met any young entrepreneurs with his kind of patience. zeo got to market 3 months ago, after six years, starting from junior year at brown. i said one of the most ignorant things of my life over the summer. to one of our advisors, i frustratingly asked, ‘i’ve been working on this for a whole year, why aren’t i successful yet!’. ha! HA! ben’s story of belief, passion, and vision was pretty inspiring, and i wish him the best of luck.

so i go to a lot of events, and sometimes i worry that i go too many. at the conclusion of the day’s events, i was chatting with john landry, angel investor and founder of lead dog ventures, and joe caruso, angel investor and founder of bantam group, comes over, interjects, and says to john, ‘i don’t know if this guy’s a good entrepreneur, but he’s a damn good networker’. now the point of mentioning this was 30% self promotion and 70% passing on a lesson, lesson five, that you really want it to be other way around. i will continue to network because i think it’s fundamentally important to me. i) it’s motivating to meet smart, successful people. ii) you get interesting feedback and perspective. iii) you receive encouragement and validation. but those things only work if you have a startup that is making useful progress.

the last two days have been significant to me because it’s the first time in the 15 month history of blank label that we made revenue on two consecutive days. i should also try and put the 15 months into context. this was a 15 months were i did almost everything wrong. i’m a  guy, who only 24 months ago, was certain that i wanted to spend the rest of his life in the corporate rat race, aspiring to become an investment banking superstar. i knew nothing about technology, knew nothing about supply chain/fulfillment, knew the wrong things about e-commerce. as a ‘business guy’, i was supposed to understand strategy. what strategy? the learning curve is steep, being analytical is useful. i have my parents to thank for a good work ethic, my mother to credit for being somewhat sociable, and my father to blame for the genetic flaw of being in love with risk taking.

now besides the fact that for the last 15 months until yesterday i had no real idea of what i was doing, and today i think i’m even more lost than i was yesterday, the 15 months have to be discounted for ‘school months’. it hasn’t really been ‘serious heart and mind’ until probably a few weeks into the summer where i wasn’t distracted by settling into a new country, meeting new people, being fascinated by a white powder falling from the sky, covering the grounds. since then, i’ve really discovered a new sense of commitment, more profound than anything else i have in my life previously. being closed into a high volume of aspiring student entrepreneurs at babson and olin college, it’s actually interesting to observe the relatively strong reverse correlation between gpa and business traction (especially revenue). both schools have a policy that they teach ‘entrepreneurial thought and action’ which is a nice way to say that it’s okay if they don’t produce entrepreneurs out of college, it’s more important that they teach students how to think ‘entrepreneurially’ for the rest of their lives, i.e. something that’s vague and impossible to track. but this is not the place for such a dialogue. in any case, treading the borderline of passing and failing as never been better for business, and i only wish i had realized this earlier.

so if you haven’t caught on yet that blank label had our lean launch on saturday, yes we were working all day halloween (in fact i was getting text messages around 11pm from our chief interweb builder as i had finally started to relax and thought i could enjoy a couple of hours of my first halloween). of course there are errors, and yes there are bugs, and we know about the glitches, but we’re real, and i can’t tell you how good a feeling that is. wow! i highly recommend it. but being in the real world also brings in real world implications, real world responsibilities. these next few weeks are going to be absolutely crucial for us. the last thing we want to be is the one night fad that didn’t capture any momentum. we have to be smart with our analytics, we have to spread out our publicity traffic, we need to keep building and fixing, we need to make sure fulfillment is executed without any delays. is it strange that all these challenges sound awesome to me?