Posts filed under 'Events'
February 17th, 2010
I blogged last year that a trade show is fundamentally a stag hunt:
(see “cultivating a community” for more on this paradigm) It’s an effort by a collection of firms to create a larger shared opportunity that even when divided yields them a larger benefit than if they prospected separately. Any one hunter or set of hunters can defect from the larger hunt and either hunt on their own or form a smaller hunting party, but if they would have been better off with a smaller share of a larger pie, at some point they will return…
Here is a non-technical definition from the Game Theory Dictionary
The French philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau, presented the following situation. Two hunters can either jointly hunt a stag (an adult deer and rather large meal) or individually hunt a rabbit (tasty, but substantially less filling). Hunting stags is quite challenging and requires mutual cooperation. If either hunts a stag alone, the chance of success is minimal. Hunting stags is most beneficial for society but requires a lot of trust among its members.
So I was very intrigued when I caught an announcement for an interesting new event that is designed to foster collaboration among entrepreneurs. It’s Anuj Singhal’s Game Club
I had a chance to talk to Anuj this afternoon and he was kind enough to drop a short note afterward:
The inaugural Game Club workshop is being held tomorrow in San Francisco from 5:00pm-10:30pm with dinner, register online for $65, full details here: http://www.thegameclub.org/events/ . Along with inspirational entrepreneur stories, the speakers will be sharing their current challenges in their present venture and inviting participants of the workshop to contribute. Topics of discussion will include hiring, fundraising, marketing, personal development and building teams, all areas of importance to bootstrappers.
Anuj hopes develop a framework for entrepreneurs to cooperate to create greater shared value. He is inspired by the “Stag Hunt” paradigm from game theory and techniques developed in the microfinance industry to foster entrepreneurship.
February 16th, 2010
George Grellas has been practicing business law in Cupertino since 1984. He had some brief remarks relating to formation issues at today’s breakfast and then he opened it up for questions. What follows is an edited transcript of his opening remarks.
Startups are interesting. It’s a rather grim time in a macro-economic sense but for early stage startups it’s a pretty amazing time because the infrastructure has been built out. There is a lot of opportunity to launch companies creatively without the capital intensive needs that were there a decade or two ago.
Of course there are many situations where you have capital intensive needs and that occupies the traditional VC realm. But there is a huge and expanding area in the last decade, and the last few years in particular, where with creativity and innovative focus on areas like enterprise people can leverage very interesting business models in ways that used to be unthinkable without a lot of money.
So today is a time of expanded opportunities and many many people are venturing into startup mode. When they do there is always a desire to keep costs low on the legal side–which is a legitimate desire obviously–but I think that sometimes leads teams to ignore some strategic issues that they should focus on.
There are some distinctive elements of startups that set them apart from standard small businesses. Most of them have to do with the fact that most of the value is largely associated with intangibles like intellectual property. So when you form a startup you can have tax issues that arise from intellectual property that standard small businesses won’t see.
You have capital combined with entrepreneurial innovation. If they match at the same time you can have service income attributable to the entrepreneur unless it’s planned right. These are reasons to incorporate earlier rather than later.
Just to illustrate: if you have a new venture that you are launching as an entrepreneur and someone is going to put in 100K for 10% of the company, if you do that at the same time for the same class of stock you can have potential service income attributable to the entrepreneur or founding team, as much as 900K in that hypothetical situation.
The other major attribute of a startup is that you want some “strings” on the stock for the same reason: the value being contributed by each founder is often tied to the services they are providing going forward. So usually instead of outright stock grants you have restricted grants. Meaning that the founders stock is subject to repurchase at the original price if the relationship with the company should terminate.
So, when people do these “insta corps” on-line they will often have a founding team and not factor these issues in as they are trying to save money. They will get the kit and issue stock and then you have a situation where founders can walk away and keep their stock instead of having to earn it.
The other thing that people tend to forget about is capturing intellectual property (IP) properly. They are working together as a founding team, they haven’t formed the company yet, and they are not focused on the fact that everyone working on the venture, in so far as they are doing things that may be generating IP, that IP does not belong to the venture it belongs to the individuals. They don’t factor in the need for an IP assignment agreement in exchange for stock in a corporation.
Related Links:
February 4th, 2010
Join us on Tuesday, February 16, in Sunnyvale where George Grellas will present a short legal guide for entrepreneurs (Register at https://www.123signup.com/register?id=jnjns).
George is a veteran Silicon Valley startup business lawyer who heads a boutique firm that specializes in early-stage technology startups. Since 1984, as a founders’ lawyer, George has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs in helping them with their strategic planning, entity formation, IP protection, funding, acquisitions, and the whole range of their startup legal needs involving both deals and disputes. He is the author of the Startup Law 101 Series of tutorials for founders and entrepreneurs.
George’s style is practical, direct, and down-to-earth, emphasizing a strong working knowledge of technical issues (including tax) explained in a manner that is made understandable and helpful for those new to startups as well as for seasoned entrepreneurs.
Bring your questions for George and the other entrepreneurs around the table. There will be time for your general questions and concerns as always.
January 2nd, 2010
| Palo Alto (1st Friday at 7:30am) |
Hobee’s Restaurant Map
4224 El Camino Real
Palo Alto, 94306
(650) 856-6124
| Mountain View (4th Friday at 9:00am) |
Red Rock Coffee Map
201 Castro Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
| Milpitas (2nd Friday at 7:30am) |
Omega Restaurant Map
90 South Park Victoria Dr
Milpitas, CA 95035
| Sunnyvale (2nd Tuesday at 7:30am) |
Coco’s Restaurant Map
1206 Oakmead Parkway
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
(408) 736-289
November 30th, 2009
GigaOM and PEER 1 are sponsoring a outstanding free panel on “Future of Web Infrastructure for Startups” Thursday December 3 at GigaOM HQ, 217 2nd Street, Floor 4, San Francisco, CA 94105
For a startup, the infrastructure choices made in the early days have a lasting impact. Do you go for a hosting platform where you give up creative control but gain the promise of super-scalability? Or do you ensure you know your platform in detail by rolling out and maintaining your own hardware and software stacks? With the advent of cloud computing and recent trends toward hybrid hosting models, the choices and questions are growing each day.
We will discuss future trends of platforms and new options for startups as the concepts behind hosting evolve into more niche infrastructure-on-demand services. This session is for entrepreneurs, technologists and developers in the web arena who want to know which direction web infrastructure is taking next.
It’s an outstanding panel:
- Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent
- Byron Sebastian, CEO, Heroku
- Sebastian Stadil, founder, Scalr
- Robert Miggins, SVP, Serverbeach
- Tom Mornini, CTO and Co-Founder, Engine Yard
When: Dec. 3, 2009 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. (Breakfast at 9 a.m.)
Free Registration: http://infrastructure.eventbrite.com
November 11th, 2009
Kevin Rochowski e-mailed us that there will be a Startup Weekend Fri-Nov-20 at 6pm through Sun-Nov-22 at 10pm at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.
Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.
Several bootstrappers have attended earlier Startup Weekend events and found them to be energizing and educational. Register with the code “meetupdiscount” to save 30%
October 4th, 2009
We have over 100 members in the LinkedIn group for Bootstrappers Breakfast! Anyone who has attended a breakfast is welcome to join.
September 7th, 2009
Mark your calendars on Friday Oct. 9, 2009, Lenny Greenberg, a serial entrepreneur and frequent Bootstrappers Breakfast attendee will lead our morning discussion about taking a long term view in business. All too often high-tech companies don’t take a long term view of their product. In the initial rush to get something to someone, companies may make tactical product choices that may hurt their long term viability. Lenny will provide a strategic framework for making decisions about product direction. Lenny is currently CEO at Assistyx.
Leonard (Lenny) Greenberg is Founder and CTO of Assistyx LLC, a software company specializing in products for non-verbal autistic children. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CTO of Pathlore Software Corporation. Lenny led technology direction and development at a variety of enterprise software start ups including HxManagement, Sigma Imaging Systems, Document Automation Corporation and Instinet. He started his career in the Cleveland, OH office of Accenture with a specialty in banking and law firm Automation.
Event: Friday Oct. 9, 2009 7:30 am, Milpitas, CA
Click to Register
August 13th, 2009
Startup Weekend– Friday, August 28, 2009 at 6:00 PM - Sunday, August 30, 2009 at 6:00 PM
Startup Weekend is a conference focusing on learning by creating
Sponsors provide the space and brain fuel — attendees bring the energy and innovation to build something big over the weekend. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking, unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success worldwide.
The participants who attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing the same desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.
How this Startup Weekend works:
After initial panel discussion from speakers, teams form early with a self-selection process around ideas that they think are interesting and would like to work on for the weekend. Ideally, you’d like a group between 5 and 10 people — but groups of 2 or as large as 20 are acceptable. (Teams are not limited to working on web only applications. Generally, these make the most sense given the nature of the weekend and those who register. But if you really feel like working on that new cupcake business, go for it!)
Concepts are discussed and developed – prototypes are built — Special guest drop-ins (generally generally angel investors, VCs, or sponsoring companies) hear pitches and business plans from the teams.
Weekend ends with a presentation from each company. Talk about what worked, what didn’t, what could go better. – There will be “cool” giveaways and prize money to the wining team. Perhaps your winning team will be continue to work together. For more information http://startupweekend.com/
REGISTRATION and official agenda and more information: http://w2sf.startupweekend.org/
Limited number of Bootstrapper Breakfast Members 20% discounts. Contact us for code.
August 12th, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO, Sean Murphy, CEO of SKMurphy, Inc., will speak at Bootstrapper’s Breakfast(R) August 21, 2009 in San Francisco. ‘Join other entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast’ on August 21, 2009 at Boudin Bakery, 4 Embarcadero Center at 7:30 a.m. Please register as seating is limited.
Sean will lead a roundtable discussion on Early Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make when starting their business. Attendees are invited to share their own mistakes and participate in this lessons-learned topic.
Sean Murphy has taken an entrepreneurial approach to life since he could drive. He has served as an advisor to dozens of startups, helping them explore new options and bring their businesses to new levels. His firm, SKMurphy, Inc., focuses on early customers and early revenue for software startups, helping engineers to understand business development. His clients have offerings in electronic design automation, artificial intelligence, web-enabled collaboration, proteomics, text analytics, legal services automation, and medical services workflow.
“At a Bootstrappers Breakfast we have serious conversations about growing a technology business based on internal cash flow and organic profit. You will find this group to include a seasoned venue of serial entrepreneurs, C-level execs and passionate innovation people for coffee and good conversation. The format starts with introductions and a roundtable discussion about business issues the group brings up. Think of it as sort of an ‘informal board’ to run ideas off of and get insight on a variety of topics. We have been offering the breakfasts for years in Silicon Valley and now offer two in San Francisco,” said Brandon Farrell, facilitator of San Francisco’s Bootstrapper’s Breakfast.
Please register at https://www.123signup.com/register?id=jqdbn as seating is limited.
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