Sarah Austin has made it her goal to expose the world of tech startups to the rest of America through Internet and television. That was one of the major motivations that drove her to create her own D7TV series, Party Crashers.
However, after crashing countless Silicon Valley parties, Austin decided to go one step further. Her blog, Pop17, features headline interviews with business owners and Internet personalities at tech events and parties.
So, it was no surprise when she took an interest in the Downtown Project. Austin has seen urban renewal from multiple perspectives through her personal urban renewal work as well as watching her father's government engineering work. In her experience, there is typically some friction between developers and communities as urban renewal gets underway. However, in Downtown Vegas, Austin finds the opposite to be true; developers have integrated a deep level of care for the community as they build and renew – with a lot of positive change to show for it.
In the interview below, Austin shares her thoughts on the Downtown Project and her stint on the reality show Start-Ups: Silicon Valley. Here is the video.
If I see one more startup job ad for a rockstar programmer or ninja developer, I'll scream.
We're all searching for the same talent in what feels like the same pool. Then we bring in candidates to interview and they're not what we expected. Or we find someone great and they decline our offer for a bigger paycheck or a popular startup brand. It's not a lost cause. For better recruiting, try these five strategies on for size.
1. Share what sucks about your company
When we're trying to hire the best talent, we often focus solely on what's so amazing about the company. Stop selling jobs like first dates. Instead, be open and honest about what's fantastic and what's terrible. You want great talent to see the strengths and the warts. It filters out those who just want to be associated with your brand or with a founder. And it's much better for long-term retention.
2. Define a balance of skills and behaviors
It's important you don't simply hire the best Ruby developer you've ever seen. You also have to balance skills and behaviors. When writing a job description, work with your team to define what perfect balance looks like. What do they have to be able to do really well (the actual, physical skills) and how do they have to do it? Think about how you'd want that developer to behave in a meeting, under pressure, or in a crisis.
3. Chronicle a day in the life of the job
It's hard to make typical startup jobs stand out. From programmers to sales, so many startup jobs sound the same. But they're not. Try crafting a timeline or sharing an inside look (without revealing confidential info of course) into a day in the life of that job. Include meetings and events specific to your culture. Share snippets of email communication, Yammer posts, and team meetings. Show everything from where the employee will sit to what the office looks like at 9 am and 10 pm on a typical day. This brings both the culture and the job to life.
4. Create an actual sourcing strategy
Save your money on staffing agencies and outside recruiters. You can learn to source talent on your own. Once you know the balance of skills and behaviors, determine the sources you'll focus on. Go for depth instead of breadth and get creative – you can use tools like RemarkableHire to proactively source talent or create a contest, puzzle, or promotional strategy in line with your culture. (Hint: use journalist George Anders's book The Rare Find for major inspiration.) Require employees to help source their colleagues – giving each team member a goal for bringing in a specific number of candidates.
It's easy to think of recruiting as just a process – most startups do. There's a big gap between those who say they value talent and those who actually spend business time creating a strategy to make that value come alive. Get in that latter camp now to avoid the painful effects later.
Guest author Susan Strayer LaMotte is the founder of exaqueo. She helps startup and high-growth companies develop cultures, build employer brands, and create strategies for talent recruitment and retention. Follow her @SusanLaMotte.
The Kiev, Ukraine-based iblazr kicked off their Kickstarter campaign on July 23 to raise $58,000 for their attachable, LED phone-camera flash. After only three days, they are already at $28,700, and the remaining 39 days bode well for their success.
Starting at $39, iblazr connects externally via 3.5mm headphone jack and uses four high output CREE LED lights to give you a massive boost to illumination in a very small piece of hardware. The battery on the iblazr is fully rechargeable and can be juiced up through a flexible USB cable.
The only other add-on you need is the free app for iOS and Android platforms. It provides some augmented features for your camera like constant light mode and changeable brightness settings while syncing perfectly with your device's camera shutter.
The connectivity side is just as exciting. Since it is going to hit the market for both platforms and only requires a headphone jack to work, almost every device out there can utilize iblazr. Smartphones are prime targets obviously, but tablets and laptops, mediums that rarely feature flash options, can also take advantage of iblazr.
If you really examine it, a big portion of that high sticker price for your smartphone is the camera. It is one of the major selling points, and that little piece of hardware is capable of snagging some amazing photos. So if the only thing standing in your way of smartphone photography glory is the lighting, why not get past that speed bump?
Is working 24/7 key to becoming a successful entrepreneur?
Not if you listen to the folks below. Entrepreneurs like Matt Galligan and Dina Kaplan have discovered the great danger that is the burnout, and they don't want themselves – or their teams – to succumb to it.
What do you plan to do this weekend? If you check out these three videos, you'll get some great startup advice plus the encouragement to take time to relax.
The Circa cofounder talks about accepting failure and why weekends are off-limits – namely, "[Startups are] a serious recipe for burning out." On the weekend, Galligan himself enjoys beer brewing.
The cofounder of Blip urges entrepreneurs to keep making decisions, not overthink, and take time to relax. "We're in for the marathon, not the sprint," she says.
Gilani's life philosophy centers around doing what's easy – and he thinks startups should, too. Startups with some unfair advantage are the ones that tend to do well; watch the video to find out examples. If you can identify your unfair advantage, maybe you can breathe a little easier and take the weekend off.
Many of the startups in our 50,000+ membership roll have asked our team for some advice on social media marketing. Many of the founders ask, “How can I get more visibility for my startup?” and, ”What are some tricks for rapid social media or viral marketing?”
There is actually a simple process for this, but two things need to be understood when starting to use it:
1. Marketing in social is not the same as marketing anywhere else.
2. This requires work — social media does not equal automation.
Stephen Bech, founder of Wantr (and a guy who made a great pitch) is really good at explaining what his company does, and telling a story about its growth and its beginnings.
The genesis for revealing the method that I use came from a conversation that happened today on my Facebook profile with several startup founders. I had noticed that so many startup founders practice the pitch, and they believe that the pitch is actually the most important thing in their tool kit. I don’t think this is true, though it was probably true at some time. The pitch was most useful, I said, when the network that people needed to get funding and development was narrow, small, and geographically located/isolated. Investors liked it that way. Keeping things “small” meant that investors could keep the gate closed when they needed to, and then they could rely on their own intake systems to look through the business plans — and listen to the pitches — that would signal a future success.
But now, investment inroads are everywhere, and the route to your network is much more multi-path. Look at the rise of companies like Angel List, or any of the hundreds of new platforms where you can create crowdfunding opportunities, or network opportunities.
The signal routes have multiplied, meaning there is no signal in your signal anymore. What investors — and investor networks — rely on now is intimacy and storytelling. So, I asked people, what would be the most important way to create this network and storytelling?
The answer is very simple, and it involves three real actions — Setting a goal, listening, and telling a story. The rest happens organically on social networks, or (should you be bold and funded), on social network platforms you create yourself.
Here is the methodology. If you want to know more, leave a comment here, or tweet @BizSpark and we can keep the conversation going.
1. Have a business goal in mind, and the values and themes that align internally with those goals 2. Listen outwardly for signs of alliance with said goals 3. Approach and create conversation socially about those common goals 4. Ask questions that create new understanding or new information about areas that are aligned with common goals, to find new values or new goals 5. Include others in the creation of content that aligns with values and brings them internally 6. Distribute and spread and listen again, repeat cycle and then increase audience by doing so. Recursive relationship marketing.
If you would like more information on how Microsoft can help you with marketing your startup, or if you enjoy getting professional tips about how to bootstrap for success, consider joining Microsoft BizSpark, a community of 50,000+ companies in 154 countries, that drives you toward completing your goals. More here: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark
Last night was Tech Cocktail's Chicago Mixer and Startup Showcase and Cars.com Speaker Series. As always, we held our Hottest Showcasing Startup series, including the pre-event Reader's Choice online poll, as well as the Best Pitch award, as determined by the Live SMS poll.
CHICAGO'S HOTTEST SHOWCASING STARTUPS
Reader's Choice
Project Travel - Project Travel is a peer-funding platform that makes educational travel possible. Meaningful travel takes money, but too many students skip this formative experience because of some perceived financial limitation. Project Travel sparks future travelers to ask for money with confidence while making it easier than ever to activate their communities to give
Best Pitch
WeDeliver - Commonly referred to as "Uber for deliveries," WeDeliver believes the best part about what they do is the crowdsourcing component. Through mobile technologies, they power a capable workforce of local residents, who have free time, and connect communities to facilitate deliveries. They also have a strong focus on a superior level of customer experience, which they achieve through a proactive onboarding process and continual investment in their team.
Congratulations to Project Traveland WeDeliver! As part of their victory, they receive recognition in Tech Cocktail's Weekly newsletter, get an invitation to a future Tech Cocktail Week, and move onto the next round with the chance to qualify for Tech Cocktail Celebrate, our national startup showcase event.
“Slow and steady wins the race.” A platitude, for sure, but one with a lesson that continues to be applicable in many aspects of our lives. In my own life, I apply such a philosophy when putting on pants. Sure, it may take me a while to put them on – because 1) I loathe the social requirement of having to wear them (like seriously WHY?) and 2) I’ve gained a few pounds since a flirting attempt on my trainer went awry – but it pays off, in the end, since I never forget to zip my fly. For Jimmy Odom, this value statement serves as the foundation for WeDeliver, a company which can attribute its conception to exemplars of taking things slow: zombies.
Odom is the cofounder of WeDeliver, a same-day delivery service for merchants that crowdsources the delivery work to local residents who have the time and desire to do so. He came up with the idea for the service during an episode of The Walking Dead or, rather, after being interrupted by his mother requesting that he pick up her medication from the pharmacy. Having previously owned and operated a pizza business, he wondered if a local delivery service could somehow work for other kinds of brick-and-mortar stores; hence, the idea for WeDeliver was born.
Before a company launches a product or a service on the market, it’s important to do the appropriate market research and product or service testing on the targeted population. Indeed, for the founders of WeDeliver, these were some of the main motivations for not rushing the service to market.
“From the very beginning, we established [what] we wanted to be as a company…and [part of] that value was not to rush things,” says Odom.
After winning first place at Chicago’s Startup Weekend, last November, Odom – along with his cofounders Kirk Lashley and Daniela Bolzmann – did not rush into developing WeDeliver. Rather, the team took some time to think about the core values of their group and the principles on which to build the company.
“As an entrepreneur, it’s important to take things slow so that you don’t miss out on anything important. [Especially] for those building tech companies, [we] need to slow down and remember that there are humans behind the data before [we decide on the final product or service].”
On top of collecting quantitative data to support their business venture, the founders of WeDeliver took time to speak with delivery personnel and local merchants to understand what they’d want out of the service. During trial runs, they themselves even made the deliveries for local merchants to truly get a sense of merchant needs.
“It’s important for [companies] to find the best solution, rather than the fastest solution.”
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
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