From the category archives:

Entrepreneurship

I’ve Joined the LAVA BOD! Wanna Meet VC’s? Come to LAVA’s Annual VC Breakfast Tomorrow (Tues)

by Ryan on August 8, 2011

Photobucket

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors of LAVA, the Los Angeles Venture Association.  Given my past opinions (err…rants) on Los Angeles Venture Capital, I decided that instead of sitting on the sidelines playing Monday morning quarterback, I ought to get more involved and so something to help the startup community around LA.  If you’re a startup in the LA area, I encourage you to get more involved in LAVA.  Here’s just a few reasons:

1.  We first met and connected with VC firm DFJ Frontier, the first investors in AudioMicro, Inc. at a LAVA event (the  LAVA 2008 Investment Capital Conference 2008 to be exact).  You can actually get funded through your involvement with LAVA  – I’m living proof!

2.  There are a myriad of opportunities to connect with VC’s and mentors at LAVA events.  Yes – there are a lot of service providers in attendance but if you stay focussed and hunt for the right connections – you’ll come away with great additions to your personal network.

3.  Many of the events are breakfasts from 7am to 9am which don’t eat into your work day or evenings (if you like to work late or have a spouse / family events in the evenings)

4.  Did I mention I’m on the board of directors?  Along with myself, LAVA has a brand new president, Randy Churchill, along with another “young gun” on the BOD – Sam Jones of Formation Media.  And despite my lack of event planning experience, I do have experience starting, funding, operating, and investing in startups so I’m hopeful I can help make the LAVA events more focussed on early stage startups.  If you’ve got any suggestions for future events and topics, please shoot me an note or leave them in the comments below.

If you’ve never been to a LAVA event, tomorrow’s VC breakfast would be a great one to start out with.  You’ll get exposure to the following local VC’s:

Dana Settle of Greycroft Partners

Leo Spiegel of Mission Ventures

Jim Andelman of Rincon Venture Partners (one of my personal faves!)

Neal Hansch of Rustic Canyon Partners, and

Monica Dodi of the Women’s Venture Capital Fund

If you’re not yet registered to attend tomorrow’s breakfast, you can do so by clicking here.  Or simply show up at 7am to 9am at the Skirball center tomorrow, Tues Aug 9th.

*Please note there is a small fee to attend the breakfast which helps to pay for the venue and the food.

{ 0 comments }

FREE Stock Photo Subscriptions for Startups & Bloggers – Courtesy of Fotolia

by Ryan on July 8, 2011

Photo montage

Attention startups and bloggers, our good friends at Fotolia have reached out with a special offer to all my startup and blogger friends. It’s a 14-day stock photo subscription (3 downloads / day) at Fotolia.com.

Here are the codes (first come, first serve):

U4NP3OQ4
S48KFOS3
DWZ58NCX
WTQ98KOP
CXXA83OQ

***If you’ve gotten here late and the codes have been used up, feel free to comment on this post or contact me and I’ll see if I can get some more codes.

Directions on using the codes:

1. You must register on Fotolia for a NEW account here –>

https://www.fotolia.com/stock-photos-for-bloggers

The codes must be used with a NEW account, and not an existing account. The codes only work with NEW accounts which are registered via the link above.

2. Locate images you like and place them into your cart. When images are in the cart, ready for download, make sure you check the option XXL subscription (not credits, as you’re not buying w/ credits).

3. Please note that once you entered the code and it works, you should not have to enter it again so if you log in the next day, no need to enter it again, just login to your account w/ username and pwd.

4. Please DO NOT create multiple accounts just to game the system.

5. Send me your feedback on the product and if you like your experience, consider upgrading your account to a premium, paying subscription.

Lastly, Don’t forget to thank the good folks at Fotolia for the credits.  Perhaps send them a thank you tweet @fotolia or be a fan on Facebook.  Fotolia’s a big supporter of startups and their CEO, Oleg Tscheltzoff is a serial entrepreneur and investor in many North American and European startups including Beyond the Rack (Guilt Group / Hautelook of Canada), Status.net, and Producteev (crazy traffic), among many others.  Thanks to Fotolia for the stock photos and to Oleg personally for being such a big supporter of the startup / blogger ecosystem.

Cheers!

UPDATE:  The codes are all used up but there are 5 more codes here (first come, first serve) –>

http://imagecollect.com/blog/2011/fotolia-promo-code/

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

{ 13 comments }

7 DO’s and 5 DONT’s for Entrepreneurs (LA VC Revisited)

by Ryan on June 14, 2011

to do list photo

Ever since my post on Los Angeles venture capital, I’ve been getting a lot of email and phone inquiries from local entrepreneurs seeking advice.  It’s not surprising because the post presently shows up #3 on Google when you search “los angeles venture capital” and the 100+ re-tweets and 20+ FB likes certainly helped solidify this position.

Typically the entrepreneurs that reach out want to meet in person and ask for advice.  I try to disclaim everything in that I OFFER OPINIONS, NOT ADVICE.  I’ve been compiling these opinions and figured I’d jot down the cliff note version here.  Without further adieu, here are some strong opinions on various topics that have come up in my recent correspondences with local entrepreneurs.

7 DO’s:

1. Choose a freaking huge market.  Don’t play around in a small market.  If you can’t quantify the size of your market, that means it’s too small, especially for VC.  Go big.

2. Quit your day job – sooner rather than later.  If you want to build a business, it takes 110% commitment.   You’re never going to get anywhere if you relegate your dream to a side project for nights and weekends.  Quit now, not later or you’re only proving that you’re not as committed as you should be.

3. Learn to use an RSS reader.  If you’re in tech but don’t use RSS, I fear for you.

4. Have founder vesting.  There’s nothing worse than founders not having 4 year founder vesting in place, with or without outside investors.

5. Tell anyone and everyone about your idea.  Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything and you’ll learn far more than you could ever possibly lose by sharing your ideas with all.

6. Fire people as fast as possible. The second you think things are not working out.  Fire away.  You’ll never regret firing, you’ll only regret having not done it sooner.  Everyone is replaceable.

7. Read Mark Suster’s blog.  Pretty much every single question I get asked has an answer on BSOTT – “Both Sides of The Table”.  The answer is already out there.  Do your friggin homework.

5 DONT’s

1. Don’t raise money from non-millionaries.  Raise from deep pocketed institutions and corporations.

2. Regardless of what the lawyers tell you, do not form an LLC.  Lawyers love LLC’s.  You know why?  Because lawyers are not entrepreneurs.

3. Don’t have a 50 / 50 co-founder (or 33 / 33 / 33 for that matter).  One of you needs to be in charge and be in control and if you’re the leader…the real entrepreneurial one bringing this thing to life, then it should be you.  Founder shares must have vesting (i.e. be restricted) and be subject to a buy-sell agreement (aka pre-nup).

4. Don’t get caught up in all the press and attention your competition gets.  It’s truly meaningless and in no way indicative of financial success.

5. Don’t raise a round of convertible debt (exception:  if the terms are so Y-combinator style crazy in your favor that you’d be a dumb-ass not to take the cash).  If someone wants to invest, they should set a price and take an equity stake.  If you want a loan, you’d be asking for one or you’d go to a bank / credit card company.

Now each of these points could be a blog post of their own backed up with experiences and circumstances to help you understand why I’ve formed these opinions.  Maybe I’ll get around to doing a deep dive on each item but for now, the cliff notes will have to do.

Now it’s time to get back to what matters most – executing.

Related articles:

p.s. I use stock photos from Photoxpress.

Enhanced by Zemanta

{ 5 comments }

Welcome Sean Percival

by Ryan on April 29, 2011

Sean Percival

We’re pleased to announce that today we’ve added Sean Percival as an advisor at AudioMicro, Inc. For a little background on Sean, he’s been an integral part of some of the most successful LA internet companies including Mahalo, DocStoc, Tsavo & lalawag and today he’s the VP of Online Marketing for MySpace.

Sean and I re-connected recently at The Launch Conference, where we (AudioMicro)  released our new sites.  Being an extremely talented graphic designer and artist, Sean’s took a natural interest in our new content marketplaces – ChooseTattoos (tattoo designs), ImageCollect (celebrity pictures), and Cartoonsy (cartoons).  He’s been offering such valuable advice that we decided to make it official and bring him onto the team as an advisor (stock options and all).

Sean was once asked about giving advice to people starting out in the online marketing world, to which he responded…”Know two things, SEO and Photoshop.”  Having gotten to work with Sean a bit over the recent weeks, he knows SEO, Photoshop, and a heck of a lot more and we’re excited and humbled to have him assist.  Welcome to the team Sean!  We’re very grateful to have you on board and look forward to continuing to build AudioMicro with you.

{ 0 comments }

Every Day I Try and Get Rejected

by Ryan on April 12, 2011

Jack Welch and Suzy Welch Photo

Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy.  You get rejected a lot.  Whether it’s trying to chase down a new customer, pitching investors, recruiting new content providers, sending cold emails / cold calls to partners, journalists, and colleagues, there are just so many times when you’ll be rejected.  Rejection itself can take many forms.  A more polite rejection would be a terse “No thank you” response or the more frequent no reply.  Sometimes it takes on the more harsh form of  “Go f@ck yourself” or some variation thereof.

It’s certainly common to take a rejection as an indication of failure, and it’s the fear of failure that serves one of the primary reasons that people shun away from starting a business, engaging in a new relationship, or otherwise “hanging out their shingle”.  It’s this exact fear of failure that so that often prevents good people from being entrepreneurial.  They’re afraid of the daily moments of rejection that come along with creating something new and / or working for oneself.

To make it as an entrepreneur, YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO EMBRACE REJECTION.

I’m lucky in that somewhere along the road I developed thick skin.  Perhaps it was growing up with an older brother or maybe it’s something I just picked up along the road.  Wherever I got it from, I learned to embrace and welcome rejection.  Rejection started happening to me so often that instead of letting it get to me, I decided that I should use it as a motivator.  Allow me to give an example…

Back in late 2004 I wanted to be a photographer.  At the time I was working for the world’s largest celebrity photo agency, WireImage, as Controller.  But I wanted to do more than just crunch numbers, I wanted to shoot celebrity events.  Because I’m a CPA, it’s often overlooked that I’m creative.  Somehow the CPA designation (which took me just 2 years to get) overshadows the fact that I majored in Art History in college (w/ a minor in Studio Art) and that I’ve been studying and creating art (oil paintings, sculpture) since I was 10, and have received a number of awards and displayed in national museums. Nevertheless, when I asked the assignment desk at WireImage if I could shoot, they rejected me.

Instead of letting this rejection get to me, I used it as a motivator. I went out and found events that the desk wasn’t already covering.  At the time, no one was shooting book signings.  My first book signing was with Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE.  I went to Borders on Wall St, just down the block from my apartment in NYC.  I bought Jack’s new book and got in line for an autograph.  When I got to the front of the line not only did Jack sign the book for me, but he also let me take a few quick photos of him and his wife Suzy. Following the event, I showed the pics to the assignment desk that had rejected me, and they agreed that because I was the exclusive photographer at the event, I could load them to WireImage.

The images were quickly picked up by 60 Minutes who was in the process of doing an interview with Jack.  It’s the image you see at the beginning of this post.  I went on to photograph hundreds of events over a 3.5 year period and it got to the point where I’d routinely be requested by publicists to cover and in certain circumstances I even had better access than WireImage’s own staffers.

It’s in these moments of rejection that you can truly learn and grow.  That’s why EVERY DAY I TRY AND GET REJECTED.  I push the limits as much as I can and do things that have a high likelihood of rejection.  I enjoy the challenge of a rejection and I use rejection as a motivator.  When I get rejected, instead of feeling sorry for myself, I actually feel sorry for the person that rejected me and I yearn to change their opinion or otherwise win over their business.

Related Articles:

This post from Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) on CEO psychology

{ 20 comments }

← Older Entries

Newer Entries →