Parveen Kaler

Brad Feld is a venture capitalist from Boulder, Colorado. He is a Managing Director at The Foundry Group and is involved in the startup mentorship group called TechStars that provides seed founding.

The good folks at Bootup Labs brought Brad Feld up to Vancouver last week to riff on entrepreneurship and business.  Brad wrote about his visit at his blog.

The video of the event should be up in the next few days.

I have been going to these types of events for about a year and a half now.  There have been a number of issues that always come at these talks.  I’ll summarize the talk from my point of view and what the major takeaways were.

Silicon Valley Envy

There is this prevailing attitude in Vancouver that we need to be more like Silicon Valley.  Brad seems to encounter this same issue in Colorado.  There is this underlying inferiority complex that there isn’t enough talent in Vancouver or there aren’t enough investment dollars.

This topic annoys the hell out of me.  I swear I will throw a shoe if I hear about this again.

Ideas & Napkins

“That’s not how background processing and push notifications will work in iPhone OS 3.0.”

“Applications lives in a sandbox and can not access external files for security reasons.”

“That market doesn’t have money to spend.  Look at so-and-so business.”

“Your attach rate is overly optimistic.  Here are the numbers for so-and-so product.”

“There is not enough bandwidth on the 3G network for that.  Wifi may work.”

“You could do that.  If the battery was connected to a nuclear reactor.”

Everyone has the best game design idea EVAR!  And everyone also has the best idea EVAR for iPhone Apps.  I have been living, eating, and breathing this platform for over a year.  I’ve been working in the game development industry longer than that.

I get pitched new ideas on a weekly basis.  Unfortunately, I have to spend a chunk of every single day shooting down ideas because there is some inherent technical or business flaw.

There were a number of questions from entrepreneurs that had an idea on the back of a napkin and an NDA and wanted to raise funding and build a team.

At this point, the best thing an entrepreneur can do is build a TODO list of all the features that needs to be built to get a prototype up and going.  If they are not technically inclined they should fire up Photoshop or buy a big stack of index cards from Staples.

Make mockups.  Build a paper prototype.  Execute on the idea in any which way that you can.

Next, build another TODO list of everything that needs to be done to make money.  Businesses are supposed to make money. Remember?

Fear & Failure

I have been running the business for 14 months now.  I still wake up every morning scared out of my mind.  I know exactly how long I have until the business runs out of cash.

I rub the sleep out my eyes and scream “YES! YES! YES! YES!” about 80 times before my feet land on the floor.  There was discussion about the amount of risk taking that happens in Vancouver.  This has actually improved a magnitude over the last year.  With the economy tanking, people have realized that there is no such thing as job security.  There was never such a thing as job security.  People are afraid and are thinking about taking more risk.

Fear is good.  It’s there to let you know that what you are working on is important.

Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance.  Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can bethat that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.  That’s why we feel so much Resistance.  If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.

– Steven Pressfield.  The War of Art

Lead & Do

Brad was emphatic when he brought up this point.  This is what successful entrepreneurs do every single day.

You have to lead in some way.  It may be all about being first to market.  It may be figuring out what customers actually want.  It may be all about building a brand that people care about.

But it is also about building a team and having people follow you on your mission.  You are going to need help.  Wheelbarrows full of help.

Mentorship

There are  facets of the business that I’m still not good at.  This is the point where I bring in outside people to help out.

I am happy to answer technical or business questions that I have real world experience with.  Most people in the community here are happy to answer questions as well.  This was a big point that most of the experienced entrepreneurs raised.  Most are happy to answer question.

I send out emails and do background checks on every single client that I’m thinking about taking a contract.

Twitter

You can follow Brad Feld and myself on Twitter.  The hashtag for the event was #blesfeld.