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!

Here is my favorite excerpt of the panel on getting PR. I was dying to find out: “does PR 2.0 really work?”. Listen to the panel answer. I’m hearing a strong “NO”.

The panelists (from left to right):

• Anthony Ha, VentureBeat
• Ryan Singel, Wired
• Chris O’Brien, San Jose Mercury News
• Hooman Khalili, Alice FM

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

I’ll give you the conclusion first: FaceBook rocks. Google was completely useless, managing to generate a grand total of one click in two weeks.

How can this be? For my purpose, FaceBook ads had two killer features:

• The allowed text is long enough to put the key benefits of the conference. With Google AdWords, I just couldn’t find a way to make a compelling case with its meager two lines.
• Targeting is laser-focused, when Google is keyword-based (as in, 20th century technology). On Facebook, you can put an ad that will only be displayed if someone is a current Grad student at Stanford, less than 30 years old and likes Techcrunch. On Google AdWords, you can specify that your ad runs for the US. After looking around a lot, I finally discovered that you can target a city or region by using one of the advanced and unintuitive features.

So here I am: with Google AdWords, no matter how much budget I specify, I can’t get any clicks. FaceBook brings me a steady stream of people who are nicely targeted and often register for the conference. Exactly what I wanted.

Privacy concerns? Sure. But very impressive.

When I put together the Founder Conference (August 17th in Silicon Valley, in case you haven’t heard yet), securing a line-up of great speakers was very important. I am trying to help as many aspiring entrepreneurs build the best startups possible. If you are like most entrepreneurs, you’ll be focused on what is being said on stage. There is great insight to learn that way.

Waiting in line at WWDC

However, you almost certainly make a very common mistake: you’ll ignore the other people in the room, asusming that they are not as interesting as the famous speakers on stage.

You’d be wrong. If I told you Steve Jobs was sitting next to you, I bet you’d have a heart attack. Transport yourself back to 1980 (virtually of course). Steve Jobs was around. He just wasn’t famous yet. But I’m sure he was just as smart as he is today.

Conferences for entrepeneurs self-select their attendance: everyone in the room has the passion and the ambition to build something great. 5 years from now, the newbies of today will be the stars. Why wait? Get to know them today, genuinely, for who they are, before they become famous. You will learn just as much as watching the stage.

I have met many people like this, who at the time I liked, and were nobodies. It’s not about gaming the system and networking for the sake of networking. You should genuinely be interested in the other attendees: after all, they share your passion.

It works because they force you to use YCombinator’s standard terms, just as if this was Ron Conway investing. So the investors know they are dealing with professional startups and receive all their usual protections: a board seat, preferred shares and so on. But since everything is codified and standardized, we avoid the exhorbitant legal fees (often north of $25K), which really hurt when raising small chunks of money.

Being able to use this service allowed us to continuously raise money. In effect, it’s as if we could IPO for free every time we needed more cash for operations. The need to go through VCs as gatekeeper pretty much disappeared.

It’s pretty cool!

And it’s also a fantasy. Such a site doesn’t exist yet. Partly because it would be illegal in the US of course (you can’t offer equity for sale to the public, and reporting requirements when you have a large number of shareholders are prohibitive). Partly because building a healthy market, where both sellers (the startups) and buyers (the angels) behave properly, free of scams, is not so easy.

Do you know a way to make StartupIPOs.com? If so, please do it, for all startups’ sakes!