Up and Running:

Entrepreneur.com quotes the Princeton Review on this list of the top 50 Entrepreneurship schools. I can’t say that it’s my favorite list–I’m sorry, I’m biased, but you don’t leave Stanford and Notre Dame off these lists entirely, for which I guess the only consolation is that Harvard isn’t on it, either. But still, a good list.

I was confused at first because it says 50 schools but only lists 25 . . . but I think that’s because it has two top 25 lists, one for undergrad and one for MBA programs.

What do investors want? This is a common topic for blogs, entrepreneurs and investors. So here’s another view on it, from somebody who knows:

Naval Ravikant, the speaker, has been through the ringer a few times, on both sides of the investment table. I watched one of his ventures, epinions.com, very closely, because my daughter and son-in-law were employees. So now, a few years later, I follow his Venture Hacks blog.

Most of what he says here is pretty standard. And if you’re interested, his fellow blogger transcribed this interview on Venture Hacks. Some highlights:

“I look for two things that are paramount above all:

1. Great team. It’s obvious. It’s a tautology. Everybody says it. You have to be working with some of the best people in the industry you’re in.
2. Huge market. Niche markets just don’t work because the first idea never works. You always have to change the idea, so you need room to maneuver in a big market.

“There are three more factors that I look at. Not all three of them are required, but I prefer a company to have at least two of them:

1. Difficult technology that is compounding over time.
2. A proprietary distribution channel. A clever viral marketing, or SEO, or partnership, or whatever strategy that gives them a leg up over competitors.
3. A direct monetization model. Something more than throwing up 10 cent banner ad CPMs.

Ravikant has more authority on this than I do, but his reference to niche markets bothers me a bit. I like niche markets in a world that is constantly splintering and dividing itself into finer and finer pieces. Some of the biggest markets there are started as niches: Facebook, for example, focused first on a few university campuses. Yahoo was a niche–the Internet–when it started. Starbucks was once a niche (gourmet coffee, affordable luxury) in the Northwest.

How fast the phone environment changes, and how many opportunities.

The news this week is the new Google phone, powered by the Google Android platform. This seems like another open playing field for new opportunities.

This is a TED talk, just released on the TEDblog yesterday, although it was recorded last year. David Rose presents it as 10 things you need to know before you pitch your plan to a venture capitalist. I think it’s more universal than just pitching to venture capitalists; it applies just as well to talking about your business to anybody.

For example, in about the middle of this, he points out how what you might think are silly, easily explainable errors throw off your credibility. And beyond that, this is a good treatment of presentations in general, pitch presentations specifically, and what matters to investors.

So see what you think . . .

[Note: if you have trouble with the embedded video, you can click this link to go to the source and watch it there.]

Yesterday afternoon I watched two very good startup business presentations, for two local companies that will be presenting in a couple of weeks to our new community startup group, called Smartups. The group, which is just a few months old, seems like a good example of what a few interested people can do to build some community amongst local startups.

For example, the next event, on Oct. 14, will get about 100 people together for a couple of hours after work to hear three 12-minute business pitches and several more one-minute pitches from some local startups, including the two I heard this afternoon in a preview and coaching session: Golden Signals, with new technology for linking computers to televisions; and Take Shape, with technology to do a health-and-fitness body scan in a few seconds. Both are interesting companies. It’s a privilege to get to listen to their pitches.

The winners of the Oct. 14 event will compete in November at an angel investor event in Portland.

That’s been done by three or four active organizers and a total of maybe a dozen or so interested sometimes-organizers. They’ve established the organization, built the website, set up a calendar, recruited speakers for some events and presenters for others, rented the location, notified the media and made things happen.

A year ago some of these people were complaining that there were no community peer groups for startups. Those complaints turned into a couple of meetings, which became an organization and then events. The group is now a chapter of the statewide Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, based in Portland, about two hours away.

Eugene is a city of about 150,000 total population, two hours from Portland, but not a suburb. It is the home of the University of Oregon, which has about 20,000 students, so that certainly adds to the community. The university has an entrepreneurship center, but Smartups, ironically, has been mainly the work of a few individuals, some law firms and the local Small Business Development Center.

For the people involved and the people who come to events, what they get is community: peers, service providers, some experts, some potential investors and, generally, an opportunity to talk about starting businesses, being entrepreneurs and getting help from other interested people.

You may already have something like this in your community. If you don’t, then use Smartups as an example. Get going.

This is from Claire Cain Miller in Sunday’s New York Times, a story called A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms. Fred Wilson, New York venture capitalist known for his popular A VC blog, gets a rave review:

Union Square Ventures has built its portfolio making small bets on young companies.

“We say, ‘Let’s go on this ride together,’ and if we do get great traction, we’ll try to invest in a second round as well,” said Brad Burnham, who co-founded the firm with [Fred] Wilson.

As [Rob] Kalin [an entrepreneur whose story starts the piece] soon discovered, the small initial stake was not the only thing that distinguished Union Square from its competitors. Grounded in a philosophy of discipline and openness, the three-partner firm focuses on services that use the Web to change a market rather than simply make it more efficient.

Interesting story. What’s different here (well, among other things) is the idea of calling it venture capital when it’s taking smaller shares of newer companies with less investment in each. It’s credible, though, because it fits with the general profile of Web 2.0 companies taking less from start to validation, which I’ve discussed from time to time on this blog.

You might also enjoy the back story, on Fred Wilson’s blog.

I’ve been a reader for a couple years now. Fred Wilson gets quoted frequently in the media, and usually he makes a lot of sense.

Let’s hope the media attention doesn’t spoil it. We want him to be a role model, not a window that’s going to close from too much attention.

Always the paradox. The best of times, the worst of times. Take a look at this chart: For several days now I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell this story. It would be a great story if it had a happy ending, and it still can. But it hasn’t yet. I really like Mike Glanz and HireaHelper.com, his startup business. That’s Hire a Helper’s ramp-up chart, actual numbers compared to projections showing here. I had a meeting with him in person two weeks ago Monday. I posted last year on his quest for financing through TheFunded.com.

He’s a straight talker, not well connected, hoping to build his business through a combination of taking an idea and implementing it with hard work. He likes programming, he likes his site, and he’s proud of what he’s done and how he and his partner have worked on it. He’s proud of how his wife supports the idea. That’s the taking-off side of the picture.

Then there’s the dark side: costs, particularly some unforeseen legal costs, going way over projections. Not getting financed. Living without enough money. Trying to hold on. Needing a good lawyer, and more company building savvy. One thing I particularly like about Mike, a soft-spoken college grad, is that he knows what he doesn’t know. He knows he wants advice.

That’s the world of startups. Mike and his wife and his partner are looking at it, as in the song written by Joni Mitchell “From Both Sides Now“. Great initial sales, lots of enthusiasm, sudden burst of unexpected costs, really needing to raise money.

This is so cool! The $130 Eye-Fi memory card for your digital camera tags every picture with the exact location. It also connects to your wireless network and uploads photos automatically. I want one now! More important, as it relates to this blog, I can think of a lot of new ideas and applications that this will make possible.

I’ve looked around a bit. I think the best short summary of what I’m referring to is David Pogue’s Geo-Tagging Your Photos Video on The New York Times site. It’s a good, quick summary.

The vendor’s website is at www.eye.fi. (Interesting suffix for a domain name, by the way, fi … that’s a Finland location. I wonder how well that works for the company. I’ve looked, and it’s not clear at all that it’s a Finnish company.)

In my case, I love maps, and I’ve been playing around with this idea since the GPS came out. I worked with an early version on amiglia.com (disclosure: my son’s site) and then newer ones on Flickr and Picasa, and–more recently–the ties between photos and locations available through Google Earth. None of that was ever easy. Painstakingly setting the GPS locations picture by picture was just not practical.

At amiglia.com, we used the geotag idea to track trips and make slide shows and such that followed us around with photos. The problem, though, was that it was a lot of work to locate each photo on a map.

The underlying technology is also interesting. The card uses a quasi-GPS (as-if GPS?) technique developed by Skyhook, which locates photos based on surrounding available wi-fi sites. Amazing. Will GPS become obsolete? It turns out that the new iPhones will have a combination of GPS and Skyhook technology, so they can also locate the iPhone from indoors.

Would you like a cool $100,000? I think you’re too late for this one, this year at least, but file this away . . . particularly if you’re in the Pacific Northwest. This is Christopher Griffin, on his Startup Thinking blog, about the Zino Zillionaire event:

The technology winner was Gogomo, a shopping widget/service that enables consumers to click an ad and purchase the advertised products without leaving the site they are on (as opposed to jumping off the site to Amazon or elsewhere), similar in several ways to Adgregate Markets, who presented at last week’s TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. On the non-technology front, the winner was CHERRish Corp., creator of a cherry-based nutritional beverage claiming anti-inflammatory properties, similar in several ways to pomegranate-based products by POM Wonderful. Each company will receive a $50,000 investment, with CHERRish winning an extra $50,000 for best of show, for a total of $150,000.

I’m very happy about the proliferation of business plan or venture competitions, which started with the University of Texas’ Moot Corp competition in 1984 and include dozens of them now. I’ll be one of the judges at the Forbes.com $100K contest in New York next month. This one, however, seems to be intriguingly different from a lot of them. First of all, most (although not the Forbes.com one) are put on by graduate schools of business. Look at how Griffin describes this one:

Zino is a very interesting blend of social circle built around a love of wine, and an investment forum. I know that sounds odd, but they seem to make it work–the companies they funded last year (END//outdoor and Healionics) reported back today on 12 months of high growth, deals closed and products launched. And I have to say, the environment was pretty fun, too.

And finishing up on those six-figure contests, I got an e-mail yesterday about a much smaller prize, but much easier entry, contest for a $1,000 prize for the best business idea. That’s an offer from Sam Wyly, billionaire entrepreneur, as part of the promotion for his new book, 1,000 Dollars and an Idea.

What you have to do, for that one, is go to the website and fill in the form with name, contact information and an explanation of your idea. You type it in right there, on the Web. You have until Halloween to do it. Good luck with that.

Yesterday’s New York Times says, “First Google Phone Will Be Announced Sept. 23.”

The phone is expected to become a challenger to other high-end phones like Apple’s iPhone and the BlackBerry line of devices made by Research In Motion. Other manufacturers and cell phone carriers are expected to introduce Android-based phones in the coming months.

Google is promoting Android phones as a way to ensure that its services, as well as other services that may use its advertising system, are available on a broad range of mobile phones. But Google also stands to benefit from the popularity of devices like the iPhone, whose PC-like Internet browser has greatly increased the likelihood that its owners will conduct Web searches on their phones.

It also has a piece on trading in iPhone applications and another on Kleinert Perkins, one of the largest, best-known and most influential venture capital firms, starting an iPhone-specific blog.

Meanwhile, banks collapsing, the government rescuing a huge insurance company . . . it’s a good time to be in the new phone business.

And The New York Times gets it . . . today it announced a new column called Phone Smart.

BizEquity on valuation, from the Demo conference. Photo credits on Picasa Web albums. Google Gears for Apple’s Safari browser.

Startup Meme is a good place to look for news, rumors and tips on Internet startups. Yes, I know, there are a lot of others–techmeme, engadget and techcrunch, just to name a few leaders; but I’ve subscribed to this one, and I like its style. It’s focusing on Internet startups, and it gives me a lot of information quickly.

Yesterday it had 10 posts.

I love the title of this post, although it isn’t mine; it’s the work of John Battelle of Searchblog, writing on American Express OPEN Forum.

The worst business meeting I ever suffered through was with a bunch of marketing people who were forced to figure out where and how, and to whom to sell a product that had already been built.

Here it is — so, who do we sell it to? That’s just so hard, like rowing upstream.

Instead, identify the need and the market around the need, and solve it. That’s the right way.

Here is John Battelle on this:

I’ve argued elsewhere that a truly successful business is one that is an ongoing conversation. Those conversations are marketing–if you add value and connect to your customer, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you fail.

It’s easy to know if you’re succeeding while having those conversations–we’re all pretty good at sensing when customers are happy as we directly interact with them. But we often forget a crucial ongoing conversation that usually occurs beyond our personal presence: the conversation between the customer and our products.

Case in point: I’ve worked closely with a well-known software firm that spends millions on marketing programs that do a very good job of convincing consumers to buy their products. Once those products are in the hands of customers, however, that marketing spend ends. But the conversation has just begun–the customer not only installs the software, he or she then interacts with the product again and again, often multiple times a day. And sometimes the customer sees an error message.

And while the software company doesn’t see it that way, that error message is marketing. Unfortunately, that message is written by a programmer, and it fails to do anything but irritate the customer.

OPEN Forum by American Express » Blog Archive Product Development IS Marketing, And Vice Versa