A Letter to Entrepreneurs

Dear Entrepreneur:

It has recently come to my attention that you are making some rookie mistakes raising capital. I’m told some of these have been expensive mistakes, sucking hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of dollars out of your moth-eaten pockets. As it is in the best interest of the entrepreneurial ecosystem for all parties to be educated, I am writing to you today to address one error you are committing.

That error is the sin of paying to pitch to investors. Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, just stop doing it. It rewards shitty behavior. It props up lame investors. It makes you look like a fool. It propagates bad behavior throughout the ecosystem.

If you really have something cool to pitch, I promise you that investors really really want to hear from you. Trust me. Pick up the phone and make some calls. Talk to your mentors and co-workers and professors and friends and family and make some connections. Do your research. Get in touch with the right investors. You don’t have to pay to get a meeting.

In fact, if you walk up to an investor and tell them “Hi, my name is Bob and I just paid thousands of dollars to pitch to you!” I promise you the investor is going to think: “Wow. Bob’s a moron. I’m sure as shit never gonna fund Bob.”

If you want to pitch investors, make a connection to them. In the world of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more (and don’t forget the old standby: the telephone!) anybody with a pulse and useful brain cells should be able to make connections to meaningful investment groups. A few emails and calls are a LOT cheaper than some of the whack things I see going on out there. Let’s stop the insanity.

Of course it is a free country. If you must flush your money down the toilet, then that is absolutely your prerogative. Just don’t expect caviar and wine to spew out when the toilet backs up.

Sincerely,
YT

Open Office Hours – Tuesday 02/09 1300-1500

If anybody would like to sync up with me to talk startups, entrepreneurship, or anything else semi-related, please sign up for a slot at my open office hours happening at Andala Cafe on Tuesday February 9th from 1300 to 1500 ET.

I’m using Meetlie to manage the process: http://www.meetlie.com/?id=164

Hope to see you there!!

< 12 Hours to Apply to TechStars

We are in the final stretch for TechStars applications. Less than twelve hours remain until the deadline (at 23:59:59 ET tonight).

I’ve heard lots of folks make lots of excuses as to why they haven’t applied yet. Most of the reasons are crud.

Here’s the thing. The application is dead-simple. You can put a decent one together in 15 minutes if that’s all the time you’ve got. Nobody gets selected ‘cuz of their application – they get selected because of what comes after the application:  demos, emails, phone calls, progress, meetings, et. al.

What’s particularly cool about submitting an application is that it infinitely increases your chances of getting in!!!

Over the last three years, we’ve seen well into four figures of applications. Yours won’t likely be the best one we’ve seen and neither will it likely be the worst. We’ve selected all sorts of weird companies with weird ideas that have done stellarly. Your start-up though just might be the one we think can knock the ball out of the park this time! But we won’t know unless you apply.

In the words of Nike, just do it!   http://www.techstars.org/apply/

Bye Bye BCM :-(

I learned via the New Englad Ducati Owners Club forum that BCM Motorsports in Laconia NH is going to be closing its doors in mid-February. What a bummer!

I purchased my Ducati 999 there in 2007 (a new 2006, leftover) and have never had a motorized-vehicle purchasing process that was as easy, reasonable, or fun – before or since. Superb people on the sales floor and in the shop. Fun customers to hang with. It’s an institution that will be sorely missed.

Apparently they’re doing some big deals to clear out the inventory, so if you’re looking for a new or used Ducati, now might be the time.

Good luck with your new venture in PA, guys. We’re saddened to see you go.

Blue Ginger Revisited

Since we moved out of the city in 2000, the boss and I have eaten once or twice at Chef Ming Tsai’s Blue Ginger in (S)Wellesley MA. While the meals certainly were not horrible, they weren’t wildly memorable either. It’s been years since we’ve been.

Last night we snuck out to celebrate the boss’s 29th birthday (yes, she’s 29 again!). The wait at OGA’s was too long. The wait at Alta Strada was twice that of OGA’s. So we thought we’d take a stab at Blue Ginger, where we were seated right away. We are told by friends they don’t reserve every table in advance so they can often seat walk-ins.

Net-net, we had a stellar meal. Blue Ginger is officially on my list of fine dining outside the Boston/Cambridge city limits. It’s an unfortunately small list, so I’m happy to be able to add to it!

We started off with:

Crispy Fried Calamari with Thai Dipping Sauce which was tasty, but not exceptional. Apparently it’s a signature dish. The batter was on the thick side. The dipping sauce was wildly distinctive, but you had to consume it in units of millileters due to how strong the flavors were.

Foie Gras-Shiitake Shumai in Sauternes-Shallot Broth which was quite impressive. The shumai were ethereal (the best word we could come up with) in that they weren’t smack-you-in-the-face flavorful, but they were incredibly savory and subtle with a superb texture. You kinda wished you could just chew ‘em forever . The broth was exceptional, and many of the calamari were dipped into it rather than the Thai dipping sauce they came with.

Creamless Roasted Parsnip Soup with Wild Mushroom-Truffle Ragout and Beet Syrup which was stupendous. The perfect soup for a cold night. A wonderful mix of flavors. Just enough beet to kick it into high gear. Bravo!

For her main course, the boss ordered the Crispy Skin Salmon in an Aromatic Corn Broth with Shiso-Chile Oil. The crisped-up skin was to-die-for. I assume they crisp it with a torch or something, but whatever they do, it was delectable. The Salmon was perfectly cooked.

For my main course, I ordered a house specialty, the Garlic-Black Pepper Lobster with Lemongrass Fried Rice (pictured below). It was the best lobster I’ve had in recent memory – probably since a lobster dish I had at The Blue Room in the first half of the 90s.

[For those of you with greying hair, the plating of the Lobster gave me a total flashback to the "Fighting Prawns" dish that was a staple at Stan Frankenthaler's original Salamander (in the Thinking Machines building in East Cambridge). Two huge prawns were cooked whole and assembled standing on the plate with their legs intertwined - as if they were fighting. Customers would invariably lose their cool when the dish arrived!]

To finish off the meal, we shared the Palm Sugar Cranberry Tart and Ming’s Maitake Coffee.

It was a super duper birthday dinner, and we’ll head back to Blue Ginger again, now that we know they’re playing an A game. Yes, Chef Tsai was there – hopping from table to table all evening playing the gracious host. We got to say hi.

Cultural Revolutionaries

The inimitable Scott Kirsner put together a fun group of twenty Boston area innovation troublemakers for a dinner last night at MS NERD to talk about what we can all do to maintain and accelerate innovation in MA. I was honored to be invited and thrilled to spend a few hours eatin’ BBQ, downin’Dew, and kickin’ ideas around with these great folks.

Here’s a manual photo stitch from a bunch of phone snaps – you can click on it to see a bigger version:

From left to right, we had Bijan Sabet, Nabeel Hyatt – leaning back, behind Scott Kirsner, Jon Pierce, Tim Rowe, Jason Schupbach, Jason Evanish, Bill Warner, Gus Weber, Shawn Broderick (YT), Bobbie Carlton, Kate Imbach, Doug Levin, Cort Johnson, David Beisel (hiding behind Cort), Jeffrey Bussgang, Brian Halligan, and last but not least, Joost Bonsen. Tim Hwang and Mike Hirshland were too busy being revolutionary to join us for dinner last night .

Bobbie and Jason both did nice write-ups on what was discussed, so I’ll happily let them tell that part of the story!

Amazing Amazing Graces

On a whim this evening, I typed “Amazing Grace” into the search field on the web page for my Squeezebox Server – and gave a listen to the five songs that came back. Eclectic doesn’t even start to cover it!

Dropkick Murphys from Live on St. Patrick’s Day from Boston MA

From the seminal DM recording, well into the evening’s live performance, we can only assume that much alcohol had already been consumed by the time this track came up on the hand-scrawled, beer-smudged playlist. The audio is horrible. The crowd is in a frenzy. The musicians – each and every one – are in craptastic form. It’s quite frankly a complete bloody mess of a performance! It’s perfect Dropkick Murphys!

Brian Torff from Union

The album is credited to Laurence Hobgood (on piano, plus Paul Wertico on drums), but this piece is a solo bass performance by Torff. It’s really quite impressive. You can catch a piece of the performance via the album link.

Marcus Printup from Unveiled

Trumpet blazing – as if Gabriel himself were blowin’ the horn – Printup and pianist extraordinaire Marcus Roberts put forth a truly worthy rendition of the old tune.

The Lemonheads from Hate Your Friends

Only a few months out of his teens, on the band’s debut LP, Evan Dando makes an effort to rip out a Hüsker’d version of Amazing Grace. It certainly qualifies as ‘amusing’, but perhaps nothing more than that .

Ladysmith Black Mambazo from Long Walk to Freedom

Emmylou Harris joins Joseph Shabalala’s crew in layering two (or three) musical styles – effectively, if not oddly – onto an 18th century hymn. Absolutely distinctive.

O.N.C.E. In Hell — A Culinary Adventure

For those of you who have been living in a cave of late this week marks the premiere (three shows only) of O.N.C.E. In Hell. From JJ’s blog post:

This is a dinner with a full performance. The menu and the script were written together, as a play, by a really amazingly creative group of women, three of whom are cooking- as Cuisine en Locale. It’s not going to be a goth night, it is going to be an art-for-arts-sake literary interpretation of the text.

Jennifer, the show’s Assistant Head Chef, assures us this is not about spicy food. It’s ten courses of haute cuisine plus Dante – damn – what could be cooler than that?!?!?

The show goes on on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights this week in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theater’s Oberon theatrical club space. Apparently the Thursday show is just about sold out, but there are still some tix available for Tuesday and Wednesday, so have at ‘em!

The boss and I are counting the hours ourselves!!!

The Importance of Co-Founders

Although some folks are renaissance guys or gals who can do everything, the statistical rates of success for sole founders of tech companies are not attractive. TechStars has been helping fledgling tech companies for over three years now, and we’ve found that the magic number of founders seems to be 2.6 or so. Yeah, it sucks to be the .6 guy .

Finding co-founders however is tough. Really tough. These relationships are more like marriages than work relationships. I’ve certainly spent more hours with at least one of my repeat-offender co-founders than I have with my wife!

Recently, a program called Founder Dating emerged in CA. A group of smart folks here in Boston decided we needed something like that in our local ecosystem, and are making it happen. The first event is behing held next week Wednesday 12/16 at 1800 ET at MS N.E.R.D. You can learn more and sign up here.

So if you have a great startup you’re working on and you need a technical co-founder, or a marketing co-founder or a bizdev co-founder, sign up! If you’re co-founder material and are looking for a new startup to sink your teeth into, we want to hear from you!

http://founderdating4techstars.eventbrite.com/

Hugh MacLeod FTW!