Roundtable Recap: August 11 – Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance
During this week’s roundtable, we started off by discussing the pre-incubation procedure we are recommending with audience
members from different parts of the world.
This week, I’ve had several meetings with venture funds, incubators, corporate accelerators and other significant players in the startup eco-system. One theme seems to come up over and again, especially from geographies outside Silicon Valley: lack of a reliable pipeline of deals. In many of these cases, the funds or the accelerators want to put in $100,000 to $500,000 in select ventures but are having a hard time finding mature entrepreneurs to support. To those in our eco-system who are facing this problem around the globe, I have the following suggestion: Instead of giving $100,000 to one startup, give $1,000 each to 100 startups, and put a larger number of entrepreneurs in your community through 1M/1M. Announce one or two $100,000 prizes that only those entrepreneurs who have gone through and completed at least 60 hours of 1M/1M curriculum would be eligible for. I am pretty sure that the pipeline in your community will be of a significantly higher quality within six months.
Tom from Omaha, Nebraska, shared an update about what is going on in that part of the world, as did other audience members from New York City, Israel, and Columbus, Ohio.
Wha’ the…?
In fact, Spencer Bardsley from Columbus, Ohio, pitched Wha’ the…? – an innovative concept for capturing stray conversations heard in random places and sharing those on Facebook and Twitter.
On the topic of business models, Spencer proposed building traffic and then selling the company, which I pushed back on. We spent considerable time exploring ways to verticalize the app and create an ad-supported business model instead, which would also broaden his exit options considerably.
The challenges of bootstrapping a venture that is dependent on ad-revenue is, however, also quite significant. You have to finance the period of traffic building that is pretty much red-ink financing. Spencer needs to think through a strategy for bootstrapping that phase.
For those of you who with whom the ideas presented in my Silicon Valley Renaissance piece resonated, we (myself, Dominique Trempont, and architect Bernardo Urquieta) have since opened a dialog with the Menlo Park City Council, and they are interested in incorporating them into the city’s revival plans. As many of you are aware, Facebook is about to move to a large campus in Menlo Park, and plans to house 9,000 employees in it. Add to that the impact of their upcoming IPO – lots of angel investors and spin-off entrepreneurs are in the making. The question we have asked the city council is how does Menlo Park play a role in harnessing this energy and momentum and turn the city into a hotbed of exciting incubators, startups, great restaurants, cafes, boutiques, nightclubs and designers, while still maintaining what is lovely about the ‘village’ ambiance. Please email me if you wish to participate in this effort. You can also use my blog to brainstorm. We discussed this at today’s roundtable as well.
Also, on the topic of renaissance ideas, here’s a fun piece of summer reading amidst the upsetting gyrations of the market: The Future of the Harry Potter Franchise.
And if you are experimenting with cooking, 1M/1M premium company iFood.tv could be your companion. This 1M/1M premium company is a popular destination for food- and recipe-related video content. The company has been generating revenues for the past three years and is profitable. In the past 12 months, there have been an average of three million monthly unique visitors and close to 125,000 daily video streams. There is a growing display ad network (currently more than 70 sites) using iFood.tv for their monetization needs. This year, they expect to grow more than 100% and be well over $1 million in revenue. More details on my Incubation Radar.
The recording of today’s roundtable can be found here. Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here.
I would very much like to hear about your business, so let me invite you to come and pitch at one of our free 1M/1M public roundtables. We will be holding future roundtables at 8:00 a.m. PDT on the following dates:
Thursday, August 25, Register Here.
Thursday, September 1, Register Here.
Thursday, September 8, Register Here.
Thursday, September 15, Register Here.
Thursday, September 22, Register Here.
Thursday, September 29, Register Here.
We will be holding our 100th roundtable on Thursday, October 6, and are planning a special event for that day. You can register to attend here.
If you want a deeper relationship with me, you are very welcome to join the 1M/1M premium program. If you have any questions about the program, please, first study the website, especially What to expect from the 1M/1M premium program and the FAQs. You can also take the 1M/1M self-assessment test here. If you have additional questions, please email me, and I would be very happy to respond. Please note, that I work exclusively with 1M/1M entrepreneurs.
I also invite you to join the 1M/1M mailing list for the ease and convenience of getting updates. This way we can stay in touch and it will help you to decide if 1M/1M is a program for you.
This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships