I was tired of people saying “how come the co-founders meetup is only in Silicon Valley”. “We need one where I live.”

Fine!

If you live in Austin, just sign up on the Meetup website. Locally, Ricardo is graciously helping me organize it.

How does the Meetup work?

It’s a great evening of fun, where 10 founders have 3 minutes each to pitch the audience of 100+ to find a co-founder. Before and after the pitches, we provide food and drinks so people can network freely and meet other entrepreneurs.

Mostly, it’s a lot of fun.

What are the rules to present?

You have 3 minutes to cover what you are looking for, what your project or skills are.

But more importantly, you should also cover one of your passions that is not directly related to the rest of your speech. Listening to 10 pitches back to back is tough on the audience: if you sound like any other business, soon your message will be lost. You need to communicate what your are passionate about. Better yet, reveal something personal, so people get a feel for who you really are.

Otherwise, you’ll sound like a business robot with yet another boring business plan. And no co-founder will call you back.

If you need inspiration for the passion part, think of these questions from the Y-Combinator application:

Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some system to your advantage

Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that you have built or achieved

Surprise us!

Please, no more than 3 slides to help you support your presentation. Your contact info must be on the last slide, because that’s when people will pay attention, assuming you did a good job during your 3 minutes.

Make sure that one of your slides clearly indicates the skills you are looking for and whether full-time or part-time/moonlighting are acceptable. This is critical info for the audience.

How Can a Business Person Convince a Developer?

You can’t ask a “rockstar” iPhone developer to work for you for free, just because you have a “great idea.” Understand your audience. The best hint I can give is copied directly from a great post on Hacker News:

1. Become a domain expert – know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry.

2. Find Customers – Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject.

3. Bring a design – Actually mock up a set of flows for an MVP. Show it to 20 people, and iterate on their feedback. Find out what is important so when you do start building you build traction right away.

Logistics

Please send me a draft of the slides, in Powerpoint format so I can merge everything into one presentation (and don’t call your file “co-founders meetup.ppt”: I have hundreds of these – use your name or your company’s name instead). Do not plan on bringing your laptop to present, we can’t switch laptops or give live demos.

Once all the materials have been received, I’ll send you an e-mail to tell you whether your pitch was selected and also give you feedback on the content to make it as compelling as possible.

One last thing. You should assume that the content of the slides is public, so do not put down confidential information – keep it for the pitch.

UPDATE (12/9/2011): you may want to read this advice on how to give the best pitch.

A frequent topic of conversation came up: the misunderstood entrepreneur. When you start a startup, even your own family doesn’t understand why you didn’t keep a “real job.”

It is extremely frustrating.

Entrepreneurs try to reason with the rest of the clueless world. They use logical arguments, explain the upside of stock-options, or how the freedom they now enjoy is worth more than the salary they gave up.

It doesn’t work.

Your mother still doesn’t get it. After one more long argument, she sheepishly asks if maybe you need money.

One day I found how to settle the discussion: “I’m OK, Mon. I bought a Porsche.”

That worked like a charm. No more concerns for my future. True story(*).

(*) minor details have been modified to protect the innocent

First on Monday, VentureBeat published my guest column on the winning pitch at the Founder Conference. It’s worth watching the video and reading the analysis, if you ever wondered why no one calls you back after you pitch your idea.

Then this morning TechCrunch Europe published the write-up of my Founder Institute Paris graduation speech. I received very positive feedback from European entrepreneurs about the points I raise. If you want to help spread entrepreneurship to the old continent, read this and do something about it.

Finally, FrenchWeb became the media partner for the Founder Conference Paris and also did a write-up today (in French).

That’s it!

The rules are simple: you give your best elevator pitch, in less than 1 minute, as if you were pitching an angel investor or a VC. You think you did a pretty good job. You are proud of yourself. And then Adeo tells you what an investor really hears, and how bad your pitch really is. It’s tough, but that’s the best way to learn.

Adeo’s strength is in being able to analyze and deconstruct a pitch instantaneously. Believe me, investors think the same way. The difference is that they don’t tell you what they think. Instead, consider yourself lucky if all you get is an “Hum, interesting…”.

But enough talking, judge for yourself and watch the video!

Should you join an incubator such as Y-Combinator, the Founder Institute or TechStars? Or just go out on your own and raise money like Brian Wong (Kiip) just did at the sweet age of 19? That was the topic of the Incubator panel at the Founder Conference, with Ivan Kirigin of TipJoy (YCombinator Alumni), Lecole Cole of Skydera (Founder Institute Graduate) and Emily Olson of Foodzie (TechStars Alumni).

Beyond discussing underage drinking and how good the food is, we covered more serious topics such as: is giving away equity worth the experience, what you are really gaining in return, and more.

Enjoy the 45 minutes of open discussion.

More videos of the Founder Conference coming soon.

But if you need a co-founder, or feedback on your idea, this is the right place. There will be 250+ startup enthusiasts. It’s up to you to convey your passion. Forget about NDAs: good things happen to those who share.

In practice, you will have 3 minutes and 3 slides on stage to pitch in front of the whole audience. Don’t forget to include your contact info on the last slide, so people can follow-up with you afterward. Be clear about what you need from the audience.

To apply, send a draft of your 3-slide presentation to alain.at.fairsoftware.net.

At the end, the audience will determine the two best pitches:

• “Most Likely To Succeed” Award
• “I Want It” Award

Your resume can tell.

I know, it sounds weird. Resumes are for corporate jobs. They are a boring list of previous employers and university degrees. A lot of great entrepreneurs don’t even finish college or get a first corporate job before starting their first company.

Still, their resume can tell.

How? The key is to understand what makes a great entrepreneur:

Entrepreneurs are the ones who do when everyone else is talking about what should be done.

Really, it’s that simple. Most of us are smart enough to notice when something should be done, when something is not quite right, or when there is an opportunity. However, inexplicably, only a handful of people actually do something about it.

The few who take action are the future great entrepreneurs.

Back to your resume. Extracurricular activities are the key. Did you contribute to an open source project on the side while in college? Did you run the student organization? Did you do some crazy stuff that no one asked you to do? See, that’s the trick. As long as your resume only shows accomplishments that others asked you to do, you are not showing signs of an entrepreneur.

Those of us who went the extra mile and did cool stuff without asking for permission or without being told to do so, that’s a major sign.

By the way, starting a company as part of an entrepreneurial class is not entrepreneurial. Why? Again, because you were told to innovate. You just followed orders. Stepping out of this comfort zone (the classroom) and going beyond what was expected, now that would be the sign of a great entrepreneur.

PS: after reading this, there is no need to revisit and tweak your resume. Either you had what it takes, you had great side projects and were proud of them already, in which case you already had them on your resume, or you haven’t really done anything extra, so there is no point in pretending.

The twist is that all projects must build a hardware prototype (I guess because it’s linked to the Mechanical Engineering department). For me, it was a welcome change to hearing pitch after pitch of web and software startups. When you actually build hardware, your horizons expand.

There were good projects.

A dual-screen tablet to communicate with your grandma (there is a definite need here, I just think having two screens doubles the cost of the tablet beyond what people can afford, without adding enough value).

A very impressive demo of a telepresence table that goes beyond video to provide real document interactivity using gestures.

But my favorite one was TRUSTcard. It looks like a credit card (but a little bit thicker) with a tiny keyboard and LCD screen. It’s meant to make casual borrowing mainstream. Can I borrow your $100 textbook for the weekend? Although you don’t really know me, you hand me the textbook, because I hand you this card where I just punched the borrowing information. The card will serve as a reminder that the item is out there, and in the worst case, it can be used through insurance to get your money back.

Their vision is that will save the world because objects will now be reused much more, so we’ll have less junk being manufactured.

I like it.

Of course, it reminds me of crowdfunding and topics close to my startup (for instance, creating an instantaneous contract on the fly is quite similar to the vision behind FairSoftware, except one is for IP, the other for physical goods).

While there are iPhone apps that pretty much do the same thing today (minus the insurance bit, which I think is critical), the students were adamant that the physical trade, the fact of exchanging the card for the object, was hugely important.

How would I fund such a company? I would pitch it to an insurance company that wants to break into the student market. By selling those cards, they would instantly acquire a huge number of customers, that they could upsell eventually when they need car insurance of whatever else college students need nowdays. Kind of like freemium for insurance.

It’s a great idea. Unfortunately, it was designed by students for a class. So it remains to be seen whether someone will actually push this further.

UPDATED: I just had coffee with a member of the TRUSTcard team to discuss the concept further, and try to understand what features are core, and which ones are not necessary. By removing all the fluff, you can typically launch a product in weeks rather than in months, and find out quickly what works and what doesn’t. Stay tuned…

Here’s how you do it in one tweet:

@joe I expect this co-founder position to be worth ~30% equity. My goal is to incorporate in about a month, let’s see how it goes by then.

Really, that’s all there is to it. Now if you are curious to know why this is the right way to do it, read on.

You must commit to a number upfront

You need to make the potential co-founder a promise. Something tangible that clearly spells out how much of the company they’ll be getting. You can’t avoid a discussion with a specific number. Am I getting 30% or 5%? That makes a huge difference. By putting it in “writing” (a tweet), you are giving enough rope for the co-founder to sue you if you completely abuse the situation.

You’d be amazed by how many startups I coach that tell me they haven’t discussed equity split yet, although they have been coding along for 6 months or more… The longer you wait to have that discussion, the worse it gets. Be upfront.

You need a way out

Frankly, you should not sign a definitive co-founder agreement with someone you haven’t work with yet. In my experience (confirmed by talking to many entrepreneurs facing the same situation), it takes about a month to know whether it’s going to work out or not. So work together informally for a month, and decide then. Follow your instincts. If after one month, the only contribution of the co-founder are excuses and delay, just stop, don’t try to save the situation and hope that it will get better. It doesn’t.

You need to be fair

While you committed in writing to an equity split, a tweet is clearly not as strong as a legal contract, so in case where the relationship doesn’t work out, there is no additional paperwork needed.

But if you ripped-off the co-founder, the tweet gives them a (small) basis for a lawsuit. So it forces you to do the right thing. It’s a good trade-off, fair for both sides, without getting all lawyerly.

After the one month, if everyone is happy and super-excited about the startup, incorporate. That will make the tweet official. That’s it!

PS: did I mention that if you construe this post as legal advice, you deserve the mess you’ll get into? Of course you should talk to a real lawyer. Just do your own research as well.

I’ll happily take comments from lawyers and others about whether this approach is sound or not.

As I remind all the presenters beforehand, your personality is just as important as your Powerpoint. Finding co-founders has been compared to dating or marriage many times, and it’s true. So you need to show a little bit of your personal side, to attract people who will enjoy working long hours with you and stick with you during the ups and downs of your startup adventure.

And the presenter who stole the show last night is Beto, with FiestasMariachi. I knew something was up when he checked in with a guitar in hand. And he didn’t disappoint the audience!

To get back to business, he probably has found a great niche and he is probably one of a handful of people who can pull it off. I followed up with him after the MeetUp with more questions.

1. Tell us about FiestasMariachi,where the idea came from, or why you think this is important.

Beto: Like a good amount of business idea anecdotes I’ve heard, mine came from the realization that there was a pain point in a certain market. My girlfriend was trying to spend $600 on a mariachi to come to an event in San Francisco – which has a significant Mexican American population – and could not find anything online. She ended up having to go through my old mariachi teacher, two groups removed, to find someone in SF. This is a clear market inefficiency that needs to be addressed. As my roommate @JoshConstine pointed out yesterday, if someone ever has to work to spend money, there’s an opportunity there.

2. What stage are you at (do you have code, specs, etc.)?

I have what most idea people have – a great business plan, executive summary, job description for a technical co-founder, and some basic mock-ups. I’ve tried the code. I’m so bad at it. I just feel like I go round in circles reading tutorials online instead of being productive. Few things bother me more than not feeling productive.

3. What help do you need now? Did you get interesting feedback from the MeetUp?

Now I need one of two things – a technical co-founder that can do a quick build on my idea (less than four weeks should do it) or partner with an existing technology that can be white-labeled and tweeked.

I did have a lot of great feedback at the MeetUp. It’s amazing how much people are willing to engage with your idea and provide feedback; I suppose that’s the lifeblood of entrepreneurs these days: constant feedback. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t find my technical co-founder right then and there, but it was still a great launching pad for my search (i.e., the networking was excellent).

4. Tell us about yourself, your background

I’m a dreamer from San Antonio, TX. I got into the tech game a little late while doing my undergrad at Stanford. Before then, it was all International Relations and Mariachi. But once the Silicon Valley bug gets in you, it never leaves. Follow me @betoiii to get a little better idea of where my mind is:)

5. What else will you need to succeed, or is there anything else that would make a difference for you?

The name of the game right now is perseverance. I’m extremely boot-strapped, but still committed to a successful business. In the mariachi world, I’m confident I have exactly what I need to build a viable site and marketing campaign. All I need right now is someone who shares that passion to partner with me on the build. Victory is close!