trendpreneur

In the past, I may have lamented the slightly smaller worldview that’s a natural side-effect of starting a business outside the Silicon Valley bubble. (Balanced, of course, by a heightened awareness of how the world works outside California and the US, in places without early adopters and device penetration and AT&T.)

However, idly musing on my longer term ambitions and ideas, a thought crystallised. While thinking big is definitely the path to changing the world, thinking too big can stop you even getting off the ground in the first place. Businesses evolve and rewrite their raison d’être on a constant basis – start with something safe, something that will a) work, b) get built, c) launch, d) have customers and e) get bigger. I’ve seen startups with grandiose dreams stuck at all stages of this iterative cycle without the rocket fuel to propel themselves around again.

In other words: execute! But to execute you need to pick something executable in the first place.

On a more individual level this thinking leads me to the conclusion: there’s no shame or harm in creating a small, successful business and then doing your Big Idea. In fact, while a lot of the media successes are focused on first-time college kids, there are plenty of serial entrepreneurs who aren’t learning everything for the first time, and doing jolly well as a result.

‘Safe’ is a curse word in a world where risk is everything, and I don’t advocate starting a franchise of Subway or anything like that. Even things like starting up a coding or design consultancy, selling handmade jewellery on Etsy, or becoming a paid blogger all – to me – count as baby steps on the entrepreneurial ladder. Course, I’ve done two of the three so maybe I’m biased. (I had an eBay shop, not Etsy.) Depending on your day job, a lot of the relevant experience might already be yours – but don’t underestimate the differences between flying solo and with a harness.

If you’re burning with a big idea, the time and team are right, and you have money to play with, by all means go for the gold. If not, think of how many of today’s successes started as small, experimental, safe side projects – “let’s build a website to scratch that itch” rather than “great idea, let’s raise $5mm” – and just get out there trying stuff that can give you a winning formula to base your future efforts on, or fail quickly enough that it doesn’t matter.

I’m personally going to try out idea iteration – spending two week cycles on each idea in my ideas book, long enough to build a prototype and do some acid testing, short enough to avoid tunnel vision. The test? If after two weeks I don’t want to change tracks, I’m on to something ;)

Yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to Reid Hoffman address a room of A-level students on entrepreneurship. The context was a NESTA event designed to get young people thinking about their career pathways and talents — as a Starter for 6 alum I was along for the ride. (Note, Starter for 6 is, er, starting back up — if you’re a young creative business in Scotland, definitely check it out.)

As founder of LinkedIn — described by a student in the room thus: “It’s more professional than like Facebook and stuff” — Reid’s had an interesting journey. Here are some of the key points he made to the teenage audience:

Know what you don’t know. On leaving academia, Reid realised he needed to learn how to ship stuff. Figuring the best place to do that would be in a large company, he joined Apple — but lesson number two, there’s more than one way to ship a product. In big companies, you have three types of product design cycle: version 0 to version 1, 1 to 1.1, and 1 to 2. Creating something from nothing, iteratively improving something, and redesigning something.

In a startup, you run through all three design stages, but the first is the most important — in a big company, you’re far more likely to skip this stage entirely. So if you’re trying to pick up a ’startup skillset’, don’t join a big company and learn how to do version 1.1 — join a startup.

Another reason to join a startup: brand matters. There are tons of smart guys in Silicon Valley. Smart guys with a proven track record are much rarer. Joining a startup that flops? No change. Joining one that succeeds? Suddenly you’re not Joe any more, you’re “Joe who was part of Facebook’s success”, or similar. Personal brand is paramount — even brand by proxy. Get networking. Know your options. Know your routes.

Doing a startup is like jumping off a cliff and trying to assemble an aeroplane on the way down. I love this simile. Don’t look down.

A few words of wisdom that need little explanation: Fail fast. Make decisions quickly — decisions can always be remade. Plan for both good and bad luck. Of course, if both your Plan Bs succeed, you end up very busy.

Finally, an audience member asked “What’s the best route, becoming an investor or an entrepreneur?” — Reid’s answer being that they required different skillsets. Entrepreneurs need total dedication and passion to their cause or it won’t happen. Investors need to be good partners, rather than good drivers. And which will make you richer, faster? That’s all a matter of risk versus reward. Investment (as a career) isn’t going to give you the biggest payoffs, but it’s safer; with entrepreneurship, you could lose it all, or win big.

Probably says far too much about me that I didn’t understand the question itself. “You mean, there’s an option to not be an entrepreneur?” :)

The idea of spending a week divided equally between Silicon Valley, London and various international airports might not sound exotic to some people, but for me the last seven days have been quite an adventure.

This time last week was April’s NESTA session, including exercises on blueprint planning (how to visualise/mindmap the path from where you are now to a specific goal), product positioning (are you unique or mass-market? are you cheap or premium?) and a little on cashflow, with a delightfully complicated spreadsheet to complete in our own time.

I then spent Thursday travelling to Palo Alto — despite having visited San Francisco before, this was my first trip to The Valley. Immediately enmeshed in startup culture due to staying at Hacker House, kind of like a frat house for coders (well, not really, but that’s the best one-line description I could come up with) it was already a far cry from Edinburgh’s misty morns.

Friday saw me fulfilling a wonderful stereotype and coding away in a coffee house in Mountain View — which has to be my favourite place ever due to the ubiquitous wifi — as well as discovering that even in the US I have freakish feet. Apparently size 10.5 isn’t something many places stock. Tsk. With cofounder in tow, we got ready for our YC interview the following lunchtime, surrounded by others who had been through it or were about to face it as well.

After the interview (which I’ll write about separately) I had a great time at the Computer History Museum. It’s weird to see stuff in my parents’ attic enshrined in a museum, but nostalgia is fun. We even saw a working PDP-1 with an amazing story behind it; a MIT undergrad, hacking on the machine at night, created a music synthesiser. When restoring the PDP-1 at the museum, they unearthed a box of tapes which turned out to be the music input for this program, but the program itself was long gone… fortunately, the original programmer was involved in the project! 40 years later, he rewrote it and we saw the machine play music. The creator of Spacewar! was also there demonstrating the game. Amazing stuff.

The last big event in the Valley for me was the HN/YC BBQ where a ton of local entrepreneurs, hackers, coders and assorted miscellany turned up and partied the night away. It was pretty nerve-wracking for those of us waiting on a decision from YC, but definitely a great atmosphere in which to be.

I would say that it was a novel, unique type of social event, one where the first question wasn’t “So, what do you do?” but “What does your startup do?”, but let’s fastforward through planes, trains, taxis, shuttles and the Tube to yesterday and Geek’n'Rolla, which had very much the same feel to it.

(We got a no from YC, by the way; but an incredibly valuable experience nonetheless.)

Geek’n'Rolla was an amazing event – both a celebration of startups and a quick-fire crash course in various aspects of making them successful, from user experience to tools to funding. Having just come back from the US, it was also interesting to see the various comments on whether one should launch in the US, how best to do so, etc.

I spoke to at least one young entrepreneur who planned to jump over to Silicon Valley and start a business there, and while I entirely sympathise with the — perhaps somewhat romanticised — notion that going to a place where everyone lives and breathes tech startups is a good idea, I also wouldn’t discount the UK just yet. Events like yesterday’s really give me the same feeling of camaraderie and startup spirit that I got the other side of the pond, and I’ll cheerfully point out programmes like EPIS and the various Governmental initiatives that try to make it easier to get started over here. (Even with all their flaws, at least they exist.)

As of this morning I’m back in Edinburgh, collecting my thoughts, preparing to write more about Geek’n'Rolla — especially a few thoughts on the women panel! — the YC experience and so forth, as well as getting ready to pitch at the Guy Kawasaki event next week. Thanks to everyone who offered comments on my pitch yesterday; I met some fantastic people and it’s definitely made me realise I need to spend more time in London.

Oh joy. More planes.

Will be updating this until I run out of wifi or battery, either of which will likely happen before lunchtime…

The first half of the morning’s been interesting. Three big hitters on stage — Microsoft, Google and MySpace. If you’re following the twitterverse, you’ll learn quickly that the Myspace Toolbar announcement was pretty flat, that Microsoft is attempting to be vaguely fluffy and that Google… is. The most interesting part so far’s been David Weinberger’s talk, basically saying that the age of the lonely, heroic leader is over and crowdsourcing is the way things will go. The vision of an Obama govt where the US is connected via a social network & community leaders engage directly with government over key issues was pretty appealing.

A theme of optimism despite the downturn and a general sense of ‘wow, so many entrepreneurs are here despite the climate’ which is meant to be cheerful but really only adds to the general feeling that everything must be pretty bad if people keep telling us how good things are ‘despite’ it. Sure, I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for TechCrunch so I’m amazed there are plenty of companies apparently paying over 1000 euros for a 2-day event. I can see why the price was so high – very professional production quality, reminds me of American events I’ve been to far more than anything else. But I still maintain it’s silly.

On another note the Twitter backchannel is so, so noisy. Sitting in the audience nearly every laptop screen I squinted at (nosy, moi?) had Twitter open and some people were literally live-tweeting the talks. Giving me some pause for thought about how to implement Project X for an event like this where you want to filter out a ton of this realtime information. It’s great to follow as it happens but when I’m just catching up during a coffee break, I’m overwhelmed and mostly only read the latest tweets. How do I filter out the interesting ones that were tweeted during the talks? Well, watch this space.

While the concept of teaching entrepreneurship may seem contradictory, School for Startups has at its core an admirable goal: effectively, to help fledgling businesses learn the stuff that they’ll wish they had known if they hadn’t learnt it beforehand. Don’t worry, that makes perfect sense.

The one-day workshop managed to efficiently condense a lot of the principles around starting a new business into six clear questions, focusing on the large and small aspects of three broader dimensions:

• Markets: How attractive is my product to my customer? How attractive is the market to me?
• Industries: Can I sustain my competitive advantage? How attractive is my industry?
• People: Do we have the skills and experience? How connected are we?

Some of the things picked up from the workshop include, on the market side, a focus on customer benefits not product features. You don’t really know what your customers care about until you have a customer, and you might find that their definition of your products’ benefits might vary wildly from what’s on your business plan. (Interesting to see that Doug Richard seems to subcribe to Yossi Vardi’s “business plans are science fiction” view!)
[...]