It’s been a few weeks since the Lean Deck Clinic and Gregarious & I are starting to plan the next ones. But first, we wanted to publish some of the lessons learned from the clinic.
These are notes from the participants themselves of advice given by a variety of different clinicians (see here for the list). So the bullets may at times contradict one another or other advice you may have read or received. I’ve edited some for legibility.
Special thanks to John Maloney from NetworkGrader.com who took some very good notes and sent them in.
You need to hook an investor in 30 second on a human level by finding a shared experience/pain point.
Start your pitch with stories and craft a compelling narrative.
Describe the offering first and why it is important and an opportunity.
note: Feedback on what to start a pitch with often varies tremendously. Often people advise starting with the problem statement.
Avoid ‘TMI’ – Too Much Information.
note: This was mentioned more than once. It is the “Lean Deck” Clinic.
Add screen shots, mock-ups and demonstrations when available.
Be carefully using industry investment quotes because companies often invest for reason other than they say.
Some VCs want to see domain expertise in the team.
The team is important, but startups are a lonely business since Individual founder(s) do virtually all the work.
If you can present without a powerpoint, it’s fantastic, but it’s very very hard.
A good presentation with a small audience (a table of 5) is very different than a good presentation in front of a large audience (a room of >50).
note: Knowing your audience is always key and you should ideally change your presentation to fit your audience. So a larger audience will clearly change your pitch. You may also be targeting a small portion of the audience (investors) at a conference rather than the general audience. So things can get very complicated.
Avoid launching if you’re fundraising.
note: In followup discussions this was very contentious advice since it potentially reduces the amount of learning you can do. However, there is a big difference between a public launch and ongoing customer development.
Clearly elaborate how you will get traction.
note: a.k.a Customer Acquisition. This is the most often overlooked slide or part of a business plan.
Ok…this is less of a lessons learned and more of an outright challenge.
At the last Startup Weekend (#swmobile) the team I joined was called KissMobs. As far as I’m aware, we are the only Startup Weekend team ever to finish the weekend cash flow positive. It could be there are others, I don’t have the stats and I’ll let Franck correct me on this one. We also didn’t pay ourselves any salaries and my dividend totaled enough for a cup of coffee. A bad cup of coffee.
Still, I think every team coming out of Startup Weekend should have this as a goal: A SALE
No Whining Allowed
My challenge relates to some of the snide anonymous comments I saw going across Floughter (I’ll explain later). There were a couple of people griping that the technical demos weren’t cool enough and it ‘looked more like a business plan presentation than a Startup Weekend.’
I half-heartedly agree and you can read some of the ways I flailed on the technical side at our own presentation in my last post. However, I’m am just as unimpressed by a great demo without customer development as I am at a business presentation with no demo. A product with no customers is not a product and it’s not a Minimum Viable Product either (sorry Eric). Regardless of how impressive your 54 hours of hacking were, you have failed.
Get Out of the Building
Steve Blank‘s commandment of “Get Out of Building” is exactly what Katherine Webster from our team did. We had an application designed to promote bars by creating a spontaneous flash mob singles scene. We didn’t have a working product, barely had a landing page with a survey, and no marketing effort. So how could we get a customer? She went over to a local bar and talked them into giving us $50 bucks to promote a Startup Weekend after party on Sunday.
She gave them enough of a pitch that they paid us $20 upfront. After we bought a domain name to put up our basic landing page, we were still up ~$10.
Floughter Wins by a Landslide
I am not saying we should have won the event. We shouldn’t have, we weren’t the best company by far. The company that won the weekend was clearly Floughter. Floughter is basically Twitter but completely anonymous, 70 characters, and local to within 70 meters. (Actually the geo-location didn’t work, but nice fake for the demo anyway.)
While they didn’t get an advertiser to pay for some tweets in their stream, they did rake up about 1500 tweets in the 45 minutes after their presentation. I would argue that those users paid for Floughter with their time, even if they didn’t pay cash. I think 100 of those tweets were Tony, Nick, and myself, but regardless it was very impressive user adoption for 45 minutes of uptime. They weren’t cash flow positive, but they won by demonstrating traction.
It was all the more impressive since the team didn’t have a single engineer among them. They outsourced the entire development to oDesk.
This last week was crazy, mostly because I spent all last weekend coding, marketing, pitching, and navigating the intense and creative atmosphere of Startup Weekend SF (#swmobile). If you haven’t been to Startup Weekend, you should because it’s the best place to get a quick feel of what it takes to run a startup and one of the best places to find a co-founder for your next business.(aside from startupSQUARE of course!)
One of the great things about Startup Weekend is the amount you can learn in a short time. It’s really a lean startup practicum. So I’ll write a few quick notes about what I’ve gotten out of it, starting with the big pitch at the end of the event. My team was called KissMobs and we made a mobile dating app to create a flash mob singles scene.
Pacing
Some people get nervous and talk fast because they’re trying to pack a lot into a five minute presentation. This can be mitigated by a lot of practice and we did so while timing the presentation. It clocked in at 4 minutes, which should have been plenty of time. But there are always kinks.
I started out too fast, then noticed it by my second sentence and regained the pacing I’d rehearsed. Then I went one step further and slowed down another notch to “compensate” for my nervousness. The result? “ONE MINUTE LEFT!” and I wound up rushing the last part of the presentation.
Another tactic is to have convenient hyperlinks interspaced in the presentation so you can skip sections easily if you’re running behind. I used to do this all the time and completely forgot about it for this one.
Button Pushing
This one is simple, we had six people in our group but I wound up advancing the slides myself. This locked me to the podium and more importantly, distracted me instead of allowing me to focus on the audience. If you don’t have a clicker, it’s great to have someone else in your team advance the slides for you. It does take a bit of rehearsal because the timing of slides is a lot like the punchline of a joke. Bad timing can ruin it.
Best is to lead into a slide so that the slide augments what you’re saying. If you advance to the “Problem” slide before the speaker has introduced it, the audience isn’t listening to the speaker, they’re reading the slide. That’s not good.
Have a Plan ‘B’
Everything at Startup Weekend is rushed, so it shouldn’t have been a big surprise that our demo went from “almost done” to “totally screwed” to “it actually works!” within the last two hours. But of course, the presentation had to be modified to account for this and I wasn’t prepared. So I spent the last hour or so creating slides to fill in the blanks for part of the demo and then deleting some.
Better would have been to assume that we’d have no demo at all, then just cut out slides depending on what we actually finished. As is, I could have cut a lot more out but got frazzled at the last minute and didn’t adjust properly.
Get a Second Projector
If you’re doing a demo, odds are that you’ve got admin screens, a mobile client, and a ppt. You can’t fit all that on one screen let along one projector. Flicking back and forth between screens is time consuming and distracting. Have a second projector to show the demo while you reserve one screen for your presentation.
Rehearse the Demo
We did rehearse the presentation, but not the demo. Granted, the demo only got finished a couple of minutes before hand but still…big mistake. The demo is the key part of a Startup Weekend presentation and I definitely wasn’t polished enough. We could have shown a lot more cool stuff and as is, I don’t think we conveyed the awesomeness of what the KissMobs development team was able to accomplish in 54 hours.
Leave Room for Questions
Our presentation was funny (or so we thought) and the laughs in the audience seemed to agree. I was flying high by the end of the presentation. Sure, things could have been better, but I was excited for the Q&A since I could elaborate on some of the points I had to rush through. “Questions from the judges?”
DEAD SILENCE.
Silence is the death knell. It says your presentation wasn’t interesting enough to ask more about. We only got one question which was pretty straightforward and had three minutes left which we had to abandon. In our case I think we failed on two points here.
First, our presentation was perhaps too funny. It had stick figures in inappropriate poses and honestly, our business concept was not exactly trying to solve global warming. It was a mobile dating app. So one thing that could have gone wrong is that people thought we weren’t being serious enough.
Second, we didn’t leave any room for questions. We had a solid business model proven many times over (basically we created a flash mob ladies night with a mobile app). We had a very basic customer problem (people are lonely and looking for a date). There was nothing mysterious about it.
A good tactic to avoid this crushing silence is to leave some details out, or better yet, insert a controversial statement into the presentation. You can have a prepared answer to the presentation and if you’re lucky it’ll distract people from a controversial aspect of your business plan that you haven’t quite worked out yet.
Getting lean is becoming essential to all aspects of running a business and pitching is no exception. Here’s a quick update on our original post to the Lean Deck Clinic on Monday August the 2nd. The event is sold out for participants, but you might be able to score a ticket to the final round of presentations if you’re fast. (There were three left as of this post.)
All of the participants will get great feedback on their pitches from the panel (see below) to help them improve their pitch and their business model, but the big news is that there’s a host of great prizes for the participants including one year of free hosting from Media Temple and one year of analytics from KissMetrics.
Special last minute addition is the big grandaddy prize of a whopping 15 hours (~$5,000) of in legal work courtesy of Antone Johnson at Bottom Line Law Group who is himself a lean startup and focuses on providing “lean startup lawyers for emerging growth companies”. That’s enough legal work to get incorporated, deal with patents, trademarks, privacy policies and more. There may even be some more special treats coming for the other participants.
Have you ever needed feedback on your investor pitch? Are you in the San Francisco Bay Area?
If you answered yes to both, we’re helping to promote the Lean Deck Clinic being put on by The Lean Coffee Meetup and hosted at the new San Francisco startup incubator Kicklabs. It’s a chance to present your pitch in front of a room of peers, 3 VCs and 3 angel investors like:
Gregarious Narin, Rich Colins, and I will be judging the presentation decks submitted to participate. So learn more and submit your application now. Below is a bit more information from Gregarious’ announcement:
Agenda
6:00pm Welcome
6:15pm Deck Clinic
7:00pm Welcome All / Food / Break
7:30pm Key Performance Metrics Panel
8:15pm Deck Presentations
Key Performance Metrics Panel
Lean Startups are deeply focused on measuring progress as part of the learning process. In a vacuum, metrics can get in the way of seeing the bigger picture. Our panel of clinicians will speak on the various KPIs they look for when evaluating a business and give some background on why these data points have historically proven valuable / predictive.
Deck Clinic
The Deck Clinic will present 18 startups with the opportunity to present their deck and receive immediate feedback. Startups will be grouped into sets of 3 and paired with a clinician (an angel, vc, or seasoned entrepreneur who can provide measured feedback). Each presentation will last for 15 minutes:
10 minutes to present your deck
5 minutes for feedback
Deck Presentations
Following the private presentations, the winning decks from each group will have the opportunity to present to the whole group for additional feedback. Each winner must make adjustments to their deck based on the feedback they received during the clinic.
Admittedly, I look like a giraffe. (A handsome giraffe damnit!) So it was inevitable that the universe would take advantage of my gangliness by conspiring to put me into a Parkour class. (Hint: I got a Groupon.)
For those not familiar with it, Parkour is “extreme urban running” as imagined by a crazy Frenchman named David Belle. It’s that thing they do at the beginning of Casino Royale and in those old Nike comercials. Here’s a video if you still don’t know:
Needless to say, I’m feeling tender today. Whole new parts of my body are sore in ways I did not know were possible. And yes…it was damn fun.
Momentum
As I spent the next 24 hours massaging tiger balm into my aching calves, I thought about the class and how much it resembles what we’re trying to do with startupSQUARE.com: Conserve momentum.
Here’s how a typical Parkour vault works. You run as fast as you can towards an object in your way, leap towards it headfirst, then right when you’re about to crash into it, you drop your arms down and push yourself ever so slightly over it. This presents two distinct problems for the novice.
Hurling yourself headfirst towards an object seems inherently unwise.
Using your arms to brake your fall seems inherently smart.
Unfortunately, neither of those insights will get you over the obstacle.
Commitment
Hurling yourself headfirst without thinking things through is a typically entrepreneurial trait. It’ll work. Might be risky, but just do it. I think most entrepreneurs have this part down so I won’t go too much into it. Suffice to say, it is an act of crazy faith, backed up only by a vague understanding of the laws of physics and the belief that the second part of the equation will work. That is…the pivot.
Minor Adjustments
The second part is where you touch your arms down ever so slightly. The trick here is that you’re going to put your arms down after you’re over the object. So you’re actually not pushing down off the object, but more away and behind you. You’re just adding a little extra boost to which pivots you from a painful headfirst collision to a badass monkey style dismount.
If you put your arms down too soon, you’re actually trying to stop your fall with your arms, which is not going to happen. If you don’t believe me, imagine catching a 185 lbs torpedo (my weight) with just your arms. Yeah…doesn’t sound pretty.
This is a typical situation in a startup. You’ve invested a tremendous amount of time trying to build up momentum, calling all friends to try your product, handing out flyers, coding coding coding, and pimping yourself to every VC with a checkbook….then all of a sudden…an obstacle in front of you. What’s to be done?
Sanity
The sane thing would be to stop and go around it. Or pick a different direction.
But we’re entrepreneurs, so let’s get past the sane stuff. We want to conserve momentum. We keep going forward, hurl ourselves violently at the impending doom of a metal barrier, and then make a slight midair pivot and keep going.
This series of minor pivots allows us to keep going and avoid the stop start of a big company. That’s the type of start and stop where projects get cancelled, execs get fired, budgets get swallowed by financial crises,etc. We know that if the company grinds to a halt, it will be incredibly difficult if not impossible to get going again. Our finances will run out, morale will deteriorate, and our financial backers will be unlikely to invest another round in a “new direction”.
What we really need is not to stop. Any obstacle can be overcome and it doesn’t mean the vision is wrong. We need to be lean and nimble, pivoting as we maintain momentum. We need to be graceful. In the spirit of l’art du déplacement We need to…and this is the only time you’ll hear me say this…be a little bit more French.
I was recently reading a book by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk (Yes…I really do read books by Vietnamese Buddhist monks. No, I’m not Buddhist.) when I came across this section that struck me:
When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future…Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. – Thich Nhat Hanh
Granted, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about starting a business and this is out of context. None-the-less, I think some “live in the moment” lessons can be applied to this thing we call the startup.
Abandon Hope All Ye Who Start Things Up
Despite the title (I like provocative titles. You should have seen what I was planning to call this post.), I’m not suggesting permanently abandoning all sense of hope and replacing it with a black béret, a cigarette, and a wistful look of ennui. Hope (and faith) in our entrepreneurial vision is what gets us started on our path to build a new company. It’s also what gets us through some of the rough patches.
But as entrepreneurs searching for a business model, hope can be our enemy. It can tell us “it might get better tomorrow” when our metrics are plummeting. It can tell us every month that next month will be the one where we turn the corner. Hope is always for something just beyond our present reach.
Your Business Exists in the Present
Your business exists in the present tense, not the future. Although we plan for hockey stick growth, startups have to act daily to incrementally pull ourselves up with our bootstraps. This requires a phenomenal amount of focus and dedication on getting things done day by day. Our startup might not last until the end of the week, let alone years and years. If we spend all of our time planning for the future, nothing will get done today.
Moreover, we have to look realistically at the data that is coming in and not shy away from it while thinking blissfully about a tomorrow that may never come. We need to talk to our customers every day and sift through all that qualitative and quantitative data to find out how to provide value to our customers. If we get too wrapped up in the future, we might not realize that reality is telling us to pivot.
If we spend too much time dreaming, we might not realize that our customers have a different dream.
Walk the Line
There is a very fine line between a business model pivot and giving up too soon. The one can feel like the other. It’s important for us to walk the fine line between planning for the future and paying mindful attention to the present.
A good pivot doesn’t mean giving up on your dreams and goals, it just means you are going to achieve them in a slightly different way. Perhaps you’ll solve the same problem, but with a different product. Perhaps you’ll solve a different problem, but for the same customer.
Perhaps, even in business, there is some wisdom in listening to Buddha and living in the present.
Subject: Sale – Entrepreneurs Guide to CustDev- ID:5777670 Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustDev eBook
You have earned an affiliate fee of 3.95 USD for the sale (ID:5777670-686=
2856) of Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustDev eBook on Thu May 27 2010 23:52:3=
9 MST.
Sincerely,
Entrepreneurs Guide to CustDev
startupSQUARE, having not yet progressed to beta testing, now has revenue! Granted, a very small amount of revenue. Why?
Confirm Every Hypothesis
After enjoying the Startup Lessons Learned Conference, we decided to simplify yet again and try and figure out how we could test every hypothesis, no matter how silly. One of those hypotheses was, “We can earn sufficient revenue from affiliate marketing to offset operational expenses.” (Translation: That we’ll make more money than we spend per customer.)
That hypothesis is too complicated to test right now and we actually hadn’t planned on testing anything until September or later. So we tried to pick something simpler we could test today. We settled on, “Entrepreneurs will click on affiliate marketing links.”
Ok… $3.95 isn’t really a huge success story and I’m certainly not going to retire on it. (In fact, split three ways I was only able to buy a bagel with my share.) I’m just happy it only took two clicks to get a sale. Regardless, it does confirm that it is at least possible to make some money off a very specific target market (entrepreneurs) without charging up front.
We’re a long way off from really confirming that we have a viable business model with a revenue per user higher than our customer acquisition costs. However, it was important to us to develop a business model which helps entrepreneurs start their businesses. Charging entrepreneurs up front for the service seems…well…off.
When you’re trying to start a business, you’re short on time, money, and people. Charging $15-20 or more a month to offer a co-founder dating service is not a lot of money and people have largely indicated that they’d be willing to pay it if it works. Still, we’d like to do one better. We’d like to offer a free service to entrepreneurs and get paid by the people already in business.
Adblocker
Clearly we’re don’t want to run a site plastered with Google ads and certainly we’ll work hard to develop our premium model like everyone else. This was just a small test to recommit ourselves to the customer development and lean startup philosophy.
We’re still alpha testing and we’ll keep testing both our product and our hypotheses until we’ve created something that will sustain itself by helping entrepreneurs build businesses. I’m happy that we were able to take that first step towards real revenuenow.
How does customer development differ with regards to products which require a network effect to be useful? Short answer: No one knows.
Companies offering services such as Skype, eBay, Facebook, and others have cannot really test their value proposition without having a critical mass of users. A telephone with only one person on it is pretty useless. Yet these are some of the most lucrative inventions ever. So how do you apply the principles of customer development to these situations?
At the Startup Lessons Learned conference, I asked a panel of people far smarter than myself this question and Sean Ellis‘ response was, “It’s a modified approach that really hasn’t been defined in a structured way as Four Steps to the Epiphany lays out.” He then invited anyone who can figure it out to write a blog post on the subject.
Well, I haven’t figured it out. I will however throw out some suggestions for testing and I’ll let you know if they work later.
Narrow the Market (Sean Ellis)
Sean Ellis did turn around and make at least one good suggestion such as, “The value proposition is a moving target.” He suggests trying to narrow the target market so you can test networking effects with less risk. For example, eBay could have tested auctioning in the pez dispenser market instead of allowing any product to be sold. (His example, not mine) Under Eric Ries‘ terminology, this would be a Zoom-In Pivot and it’s something we’re also trying with startupSQUARE.
We started out letting all sorts of people into our site in alpha state to test it out. However, we found that the level of interaction (people posting ideas and profiles) was very very low. Far lower than our conversion rate and customer interviews would predict. When doing follow up interviews we found that people would look for other users in a very small niche industry (we have an overly large industry list) and find no one there. With no one there, it sent a clear signal that posting a profile wasn’t worth the effort because no one else would read it.
Our solution to this is two fold. First, our industry list is horrendously complicated. Although some users have indicated they would like a more detailed list, we have to start with a simpler list. When the list has broader categories, users will be find more people in each category and thus have a higher level of social proof.
Second, we’re modifying our signup process to collect more information when signing up, including industry interests. This will allow us to let in critical mass groups from each vertical we want to target. We’ll also be able to test the size of the group necessary for the network to have value and better analyze any behavioral difference between users of different industries.
Test Interaction on a Smaller Level (Brant Cooper)
Brant Cooper offered the example of Jeff Smith from Sonicmule who built products to test specific things such as social applications. Behold: the SonicLighter. Without hearing the specifics from Jeff, it’s tough to discuss this. Still, sounds like a great idea. Try to simplify the amount of interaction necessary, potentially in a different context. If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.
Funniest Answer (David Binetti)
David Binetti had the funniest answer. He just shook his head with a grimace when Sean asked if any of the panelists had an answer.
There is Still a Problem
Although no one really has a definitive answer, I would propose that the general customer development thesis can still be tested, even with network effect driven products, for a simple reason: The customer still has a problem.
The telephone allows people to communicate. Ebay allows people to sell things in a marketplace. OkCupid allows people to get laid…err…I mean meet people. All these companies target established customer needs which have clear analogies in the real world. Facebook was based on…well…a facebook of people on campus. In many ways, customer development should have been easier for these companies since the customer problem was really already established. “Who was that hot girl in class today?” (Facebook’s initial customer problem.)
Nothing prevents you from establishing your hypotheses and verifying them with customers outside of the building via a good old fashion customer interview. “Do you have a lot of old junk you want to get rid of? Would you like to sell it? Where have you tried to sell it? What would make it easier to sell it?” Tada! eBay.
Fake It
Another tidbit that I think is valuable is faking data. That sounds bad. Let’s say, “Bootstrapping Data”. When you do your mockups, don’t use “Lorem Ipsum blah blah blah”. But in real names, real text, and real data. Get your friends to post things in your alpha. Post 100 times yourself. Farhad from Atracted.com bootstrapped his first few video personal ads by throwing a party, inviting a lot of cute girls, then sticking them in front of a computer to introduce themselves. Brilliant! Plus he got to have a party with a lot of cute girls!
The Real Video
In case you wanted the full video, here’s the embed starting Cindy Alvarez, Product Manager, KISSMetrics * David Binetti, Founder and CEO, Votizen * Brant Cooper, Principal, Market By Numbers * Matt Johnson, Grockit * Moderator: Sean Ellis. My question appears around 28:00
On April 23rd I was able to go to the Startup Lessons Learned Conference and had my world rocked. I thought I was lean, I could be leaner. I thought I had a minimum viable product, I could have built less. Although Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, David Weekly etc. etc. all have written and spoken prolifically about their methods and thoughts, there is a powerful feeling to being the the same room as a thousand other people drinking the same kool-aid.
Sponsorship Helps
First off, I should mention that I wouldn’t of been able to go at all without the sponsorship of the Microsoft Bizspark program. Usually I’m not one to thank MS except sarcastically for bricking my hard drive, but there’s no way a bootstrapped company like ours could have gone. So special thanks to Adrian Perez, Joel Franusic, and Bizspark!
Top Takeaway
There are a number of great summaries, videos, and more like Steve Blank’s Keynote. I don’t think I can add much to that and plenty of people like Sean Murphy are already on the job so I’ll skip that and talk about teams.
We’re a team of three people. We agree on somethings and disagree on others. Fortunately most of our disagreements are the productive kind where we come up with a third, forth, and fifth solution through discussion and brainstorming. Still it takes us time to get in sync.
We’ve been talking about being a lean startup and customer development for months, reading and talking about Four Steps to the Epiphany. So I thought we were on the same page. Still, I was struck when Marcel turned to me in the middle of the conference and said, “So that’s what you’ve been talking about for months.”
Reasoning via Social Proof
Now, let’s be fair, there is a significant portion of the time where I’d describe myself as unintelligible. That’s my failing. However, I think there is always an element of social proof to reason. No matter how many times you might hear a cogent argument, it’s only when another guy chimes in with “I heard 2+2=4 as well” that we’re prepared to believe it. It’s true with facts and it’s more true with a paradigm shift.
Customer Development is a serious paradigm shift, especially for people who have been slugging away at product development in a big company like Manuel, Marcel, and myself. I may have gotten off the easiest since my last company was largely run like a startup (in the chaotic sense) and it has still taken me months to get into the spirit of lean. It takes a serious amount of un-indoctrination for us to even consider something as radical as questioning our own assumptions.
There is a value to sitting in a room with 1000 of your colleagues and realizing that you’re not the only one nodding in agreement. It’s a powerful reinforcement that is programmed into us by thousands and thousands of years of evolution. That’s a genetic trick that we need to take advantage of.
Of course we have to be careful that we’re not just monkey-see monkey-doing the latest business jargon and saying “out of pocket” like it not an incredibly idiotic phrase. We have to approach these things carefully and with thought. Still, we can take advantage of the great resources like the Startup Lessons Learned Conference and use our wired biology to our advantage.
We’re charged up. We thought of several ways we can chop functionality out of our product. We can test hypotheses that we thought we untouchable. We can explore revenue options months before we even considered it.
I'm an entrepreneur and I slay Jabberwockes in my spare time. (Or at least I did once in a middle school play.) I'm a co-founder of startupSQUARE.com and am strongly committed to the customer development process. I've been involved in a variety of ventures for the past 13 years including IT security, music, real estate, music, marketing, and mentoring young entrepreneurs with BUILD.org. I've lived in the US, Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland, and Vietnam and will gladly play you a game of chess.
Recent Comments