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.

Q: I just met someone who looks like a potential co-founder for me. What should I ask to tell if he is the right co-founder for me?

A: It’s actually quite simple. Good co-founders are all about doing, not talking. So here’s the one-month plan to find out.

Week 1

Meet for coffee and pitch your idea in more details. Does the other person want to meet again that same week? That’s a good sign. At coffee meeting #2, expect the other person to contribute some ideas. If he just shows up but offers no twist on your project, something is wrong. It means he hasn’t obsessed about it.

Week 2

By week 2, you should be brainstorming and exchanging random thoughts on instant messenger. That’s when you settle on a first goal together.

Week 3 & 4

The rest of the first month, you actually work on accomplishing whatever milestone you came up with.

At the end of the first month, you know if you have a co-founder or not. If you do, bring them on board with equity (don’t forget vesting).

Decision Point

Common mistakes I have seen too often: at the end of the first month, no work was done, but you heard plenty of very convincing excuses. It’s so tempting to be nice and give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

Don’t.

You’ll become more and more miserable over many months before you eventually pull the trigger, and it will be very painful for everyone. Just don’t.

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

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!

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…

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.

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.