36|86 Entrepreneurship Festival

Wednesday and Thursday of last week I had the opportunity to attend the 36|86 Entrepreneur Festival by Launch Tennessee here in downtown Nashville. I attended several panels and met with a few Angel & VC investors. It was overall a great event and a wonderful per experience.

Dooley Tombras mentioned his agency's successful MoonPie/Eclipse campaign and how that worked because of long term pre-planning for the brand, and how important it is to plan out advertising ahead of time. I had enjoyed watching this campaign in real time so to hear about it a year later was fascinating.

Stacey Epstein talked about how small companies brands should match your personality. Don't plan for a bold brand if you, the founder, are not bold. She used a very entertaining story about a former founder with whom she worked dressing and being in the character of Elvis for an industry contest.

Everyone agreed that a few things were important when building your brand:

• Building sales today while building the brand for the future, don't risk your future brand for "right now" sales
• Get your "what we do" message in front of people (on your website) as soon as possible without industry jargon speak
• Keep things simple regarding your brand from the start
• Know your buyers so you can sell to your buyers

They also all agreed on a few "biggest mistakes"

• Over Complicating your concept
• Not knowing your Company/Yourself
• Not knowing your buyer
• Doing the same things as everyone else

The panel ended up being more focused on the CEO's, but I still learned a lot with several things reiterated by people with more experience than myself. I had already learned while in the fire of the early startup C-Suite with Katie at AuctionLook that everyone does everything when there are only a few of you. The panel absolutely agreed with that and talked about early ways to lessen your burdens by finding people who compliment your strengths and weaknesses. Katie and I have worked well together for more than 10 years for that very reason - we compliment wonderfully. The things that drain her, build me up and vise versa.

What I found most interesting was the Evolution of the CEO section of the panel. AuctionLook is on the cusp of our next phase and as CTO, I know my role will be evolving along with Katie's as CEO. It will be our job to find the right people to support us and to build a team with the culture we want.

In our upcoming transition, I plan to implement several of the panels recommendations:

• Hire people who fit our culture, but think differently than we do
• Avoid GroupThink with diversity
• Drive myself to learn from my biggest mistakes
• Be transparent regarding the framework for our decision making
• Remember that not everyone will grow with the organization

I also plan to work hard to avoid the biggest mistakes they warned against:

• Not moving people out of roles they've outgrown
• Not investing in futures & putting fuel on the fire fast enough
• Remember that VC's are wrong 67% of the time.

This panel covered a lot of early development planning and the psychology of getting users to pay for products that had been free. Concerning who has done free-to-paid right, Eventbrite and Dropbox were heavily discussed. Each of those examples had:

• An early plan for moving to a paid model
• Solid Acquisition Loops (every user brought in more users)
• Solid Retention Loops (people keep using the product)

In the early days and when in need of a boost outside the acquisition loops, you might need to look at linear channels of growth like emails, social media advertising, etc.

During the question and answer phase I asked the best way to launch new paid add-on features. The panel informed me that the best way to release paid betas are slowly to smaller audiences for testing first.

Overall it was a very interesting and informative panel.

This was one of the most informative panels I went to that I knew very little about beforehand. Before this conference I didn't really understand the difference between Angel and Venture Capitalist Investors. Now, not only do I understand the difference, but I have a personal preference. When should you get Venture Capitalist Funding?

• When being #1 in the market is 10x better than being #2.
• Winner-take-all markets
• If you are ready to go hard & fast  - doubling size/revenue/etc yearly (or better) is expected

When to not get investors?

• When you're nearly profitable without
• When you don't want to give up control, or be pushed to move/profit faster
• If you're okay with growing slowly (MailChimp & Spanx have no investors - it is possible)

When should you do an ICO (Indigogo, Kickstarter)?

• If you can stay out of jail
• If it would help you market your product
• If you can use it as marketing or market research

What everyone should try?

• SVIR Grants
• Student Entreprenuers should apply for DormRoom Funding
• Remember that VC's are wrong 67% of the time

If you decide to go with Venture Capitalist or Angel Funding what should you look for?

• More than cash, VC's should also be advisers
• VC's are part of the team, you want to be sure you can work with them long term
• Interview successful and failed past investments of the VCs to see how they will support you in good & bad times.
• VCs should provide you a network of what you need.

Having a virtual workforce is getting easier with modern technologies and the attitudes of Generation X and Millennial employees. That does not mean a virtual workforce is easy. One of the biggest issues in a virtual workforce is the lack of face-to-face interaction that can build walls of blame and make employees very insular. This is not good for the company culture or work-relationships. With a virtual work force, you have to build-in "face-to-face" interactions into the plan. There are a few ways to do this:

• Ideally virtual teams would travel to work together for a week every 6-8 weeks.
• Integrate technologies like Donut, Zoom, and Slack into your daily company life to build in virtual "face-to-face" communication channels
• Set up online gaming nights where everyone plays online together to bond
• Use technologies like Screenhero to pair program/work regularly
• Assign mentors (with a mentor schedule) for new hires

As a manager of a virtual workforce, how does my management style need to reflect that?

• I need to have a goals-and-outcomes approach to management. It doesn't matter how many hours you clock as long as you get your stuff done
• I need to set milestones for projects and professional development for employees
• I need to set measurable results for my employees

Technologies that make a virtual workforce easier:

• Zoom Video Conferencing - Zoom can be opened all the time in two different offices making a virtual bridge between them
• Donut for building relationships & empathy in the organization
• Slack for communication
• Screenhero for paired work through Slack

This is the point of the conference in which I realized I was too tired (and informationally overloaded) to absorb the full value from panels. My mind kept wandering and I found it hard to focus.

The biggest things are:

• Beta shouldn't always be free
• You should use it to gain buzz about your upcoming product. Think of the invites to Google's Inbox, or other "exclusive" invite-only products.