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!

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.

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.

This is what starting a company really means: e-mailing 100 strangers a day, every day. For the foreseeable future.

That’s it. Of course, there will also be coding involved, but as most founders are programmers, you already know what that looks like. It’s the CEO part that sounds mysterious and fun, when really it’s just contacting people you don’t know to ask/beg for favors. Asking the press to cover you. Asking bloggers to link to your new site. Asking middle managers in larger companies to agree to meet with you.

The stressful part for first-time founders is asking strangers. People you don’t know. That’s quite uncomfortable at first. But you get used to it. Quickly, you’ll learn that sending the e-mail doesn’t actually cost you anything. If you don’t ask, for sure you’ll never get what you want. So eventually rather than wondering “should I send an e-mail to XYZ”, you just do it.

Again and again. Hundreds of times a day.

That’s how you earn your CEO wings.

PS: this post stemmed from a discussion with a recent Founder Institute grad.

Then the real fun began: of the 12 startups pitching, there would only be one winner, determined jointly by the audience of 200 and the panel of VC judges, among which Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC and George Zachari of Charles River Venture. The rules: 3 minutes to pitch, then the judges score the presentation on a 1 to 5 scale (1 being very bad, 5 meaning they’d like to invest). Then the audience votes.

In the first round, 6 startups pitched and the first finalist emerged very quickly: Snap Shop(*). They impressed the audience with a strikingly simple demo. Virtual reality on your cell phone finally had a useful (and profitable) use. Buying furniture is now geeky again. Stay tuned as they launch very soon.

After a break, the last 6 startups pitched. The quality was even higher. Breakthrough demoed a very impressive platform for online mental health counseling. Given the stigma associated with mental health issues, going online makes a lot of sense. But it’s eVenues, which lets you book meeting places online, that qualified as the second finalist.

It was now time for the showdown: both finalists answered questions from the judges, which allowed the investors to dig deeper into their business model, how they planned on making money, and details of how the product worked.

By 11pm, it was time for the 4 judges to vote. eVenues got the first two votes, which guaranteed they couldn’t lose anymore. Then Snap Shop got the next vote. And the next. It was a tie (2-2)! That wasn’t planned, so Adeo, the organizer called for a show of hands, which wasn’t conclusive either: the audience was quite divided. Eventually, the judges judged the show of hands, and eVenues was declared the winner.

What an evening! A lot of very smart entrepreneurs and top-notch investors in the same room, very high-quality presentations, and a lot of fun. [Adeo, you get a 9 (out of 10)]. I’ll be attending the next Founder Showcase for sure.

(*) Disclaimer: I hope I have a vested interest in their success through my participation in the Founder Institute.

He finally asked: “why do you put so much emphasis on market size? The team, and surely other aspects must be equally important to a startup success.”

He was right: we are putting a lot of emphasis on the market size. It dawned on me that we hadn’t clearly explained why. Maybe because we took it for granted. So I said it: “VCs can fix your team by injecting more money, but they can’t fix your market”.

“Oh, of course!”. That was all the explanation he needed. When you are a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you think of money as something real hard to get, a very expensive commodity. And you lose sight of the fact that on the other side of the table, VCs see money as the cheap commodity, and good startups as the rare one.

If your technology is not quite as good as you thought, your VCs will put more money on the table and hire a bunch of Ph.Ds to make it work. But if your market turns out to be non-existent, there is nothing the VCs can do to fix it. That’s why despite all the claims about backing teams first, it’s so important to target a huge market.

Ideally, VCs want to back great teams targeting great markets. But given the choice, they’ll settle for a somewhat weaker team.

Not a smaller market.

From the blog post summary:

I stole his idea (bullshit, his service was a mailing list when I built PRManna, and there are tons of sites for this purpose)

They’re demanding that I transfer ownership of PRManna.com to Peter Shankman’s company

I am a HARO user. The first thing this news prompted me to do is register with PRManna. Then I sent an e-mail to HARO asking if this is true (I have no reason to doubt the blog post, but it’s always a good idea to double-check).

This case is htting a nerve with me. People who have seen me speak on the topic (I have covered Intellectual Property at several sessions of the Founder Institute) will recognize this image: it illustrates my view of the US judicial system.

The point: anyone with money can sue anyone else who has less money and put them out of business. It doesn’t matter whether you have a case or not.

The HARO vs. PRManna case is a perfect example of what I say in my class: before you enter any market, check out the existing competitors and understand how threatening you are to them. It seems that HARO was making almost a million dollars a year, so of course offering a competing free service was bound to anger them.

Never mind that ideas can’t be protected on a whim (it takes a patent to protect an idea, in case you forgot, and the idea needs to be novel and non-obvious, among many other requirements).

My support is with the PRManna folks until I see some kind of evidence of wrongdoing on their part. I’m not holding my breath.

Iterate Quickly

Also known as “kill ideas fast”, this advice is saying that your idea is probably not worth the pixels it’s displayed on. Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution matters. You’d be better off with a dumb idea in a large, expanding market!

The advice goes on to recommend that you submit your idea to friends, advisors (maybe VCs). Find people who you trust and are honest enough to tell you that your idea is dumb. Don’t fall in love with your idea, move on, try another one.

Trust Your Guts

Also known as resilience or tenacity: when everyone else tells you to give up, when there is no hope in sight, what separates the successsful entrepreneur from the wanna-be: perseverance. Don’t give up.

Or my favorite quote: Instant success takes years!

Making Sense Of It

The apparent contradiction was especially visible during the latest Founder Institute session in Silicon Valley, since several mentors gave both advice back to back. Some founders couldn’t help but notice.

Here’s my take on the contradiction: both your guts and everyone else are right — partially. It takes a very smart person (you) to figure out the gem that your guts detect and remove the junk that everyone else sees.

So it’s not a contradiction at all. We are just going back to the essence of intelligence: you need to keep thinking about every angle of your idea. If you really believe there is something to it, I’ll believe you. But also listen to feedback because while it may be missing your big picture, it is probably right at least on a tactical level. Your rough idea, as you pitch it, likely has shortcomings and limitations.

It’s your job to figure it out.

This week, the topic was market research.

The discussion included a two-box metric to find out if you have a real market or a niche. At some point, a member of the audience contributed this trick: he used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to perform research, quickly and cheaply.

It’s indeed a great way to capture and measure feedback from thousands of regular users. It complements nicely another tactic, which is to setup Google Ad campaigns for potential products, which is quite smart too.

The only downside of Mechanical Turk is that the demographics is not highly sophisticated. What do you expect from someone who will work for cents? But you can compensate by the sheer amount of data you can extract from those studies.

That’s real market research. Better than what most people go through when they start a project.

If you are smart and have a great idea, you should be able to take it to its full potential.

Today it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. That’s why I decided to support the Founder Institute.

It was created by Adeo Ressi, the “Founding Member” of TheFunded.com. The Institute is for founders, by founders. To me, it makes a lot of sense that we should help each others. I can’t stress enough how many times a fellow entrepreneur gave me great advice or helped in more ways than one.

Apply to the Summer 2009 Bay Area program: it starts in less than a month and applications have been open already for a few days. The deadline: May 10th. but frankly, don’t wait!

PS: I am aware that this current program is restricted to the Bay Area, which doesn’t achieve all the goals I state at the beginning of this post. But Adeo is working on it…