October 27th, 2011 07:35am
tshafer
Every month Corey Haines and Sarah Gray do a series of free office hours where we give technical advice on your project. We also host a “Dinner with Techies” through Grub With Us. This is modeled on a Bootstrappers Breakfast meeting — a small table of people discussing their technical issues, and getting advice from us and each other. They’re really fun: good food, good advice and meeting new people.
October 17th, 2011 10:24am
skmurphy
On October 18th Rich Pelavin will join us at the Bootstrappers Breakfast in Sunnyvale as our featured guest.
Rich has a long and successful track record developing innovative system management software and has co-founded three software companies.
Currently Rich is co-founder of Reactor8, a company focused on automation and configuration management in agile development and deployment environments. Prior to his work with Reactor8, Rich worked in the area of virtualization system management at his company Replicate Technologies. Rich also brings experience from his position as Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems where he led research and development in network management. He joined Cisco through the acquisition of Netsys Technologies, which he also co-founded and was a key inventor of their intelligent network management product.
Rich started his career in the research center environment after receiving a Ph.D. in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Rochester. He holds a number of patents in networking technologies, and is co-author of a book on AI planning and temporal reasoning.
Today Rich will focus on lessons learned when trying to determine the best functionality and scope of a new software product or service being brought to market. Bring your questions and join us for a lively discussion.
Venue: Coco’s Bakery on Oakmead at Lawrence (1206 Oakmead Parkway Sunnyvale, CA)
Time: 7:30-9:00AM Tue-Oct-18
Cost: $5 in advance, $10 at the door (plus the cost of your breakfast, tax, and tip)
October 16th, 2011 12:04pm
skmurphy
BioCurious is a new co-working space in Silicon Valley for bootstrapping bio entrepreneurs. They offer a complete working laboratory, technical library, co-working space, and a training center on biotechniques. Andy Oram wrote about them today in “BioCurious Opens Lab in Sunnyvale” and observes:
BioCurious is not a substitute for formal training in biochemistry, biology, and genetics. But it is a place for people to get a feel for what biologists do and for real biologists without access to expensive equipment to do research of their dreams.
I thought of my two children, both of whom pursued musical careers. I wondered how they would have felt about music if kids weren’t exposed to music until junior high school, whereupon they were sat down and forced to learn the circle of fifths and first species counterpoint. That’s sort of how we present biology to the public–and then, even those who do show an interest are denied access to affordable equipment. BioCurious is on the cusp of a new scientific revolution.
From http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/7/6/put-your-money-where-your-bio-hackerspace-is-video–2
Science was once a cultural activity, carried out by wealthy “gentlemen scholars” who had the leisure and material resources to experiment. The 20th century saw an unprecedented centralization of science around an industrial model. The plummeting costs of enabling technologies has brought meaningful biological research back within reach of the independent citizen scientist. From Bio-Art to BioFuels, the wave of next generation biotech applications is set to transform our culture and economy. BioCurious will be Ground 0 for this revolution.
Coordinates:
Background reading / Other bio hacker labs
- 2010 Nature article “Life hackers” (PDF version has great pictures/images)
- Genspace is a New York nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting education in molecular biology for both children and adults. We work inside and outside of traditional settings, providing a safe, supportive environment for training and mentoring in biotechnology.
- DIYbio is an organization dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists and biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings
October 14th, 2011 10:50am
skmurphy
Disha Bheda is our coordinator for the San Francisco Breakfasts. She interviewed Carl Ludewig, CEO of Ludewig Multimedia and a frequent moderator at the San Francisco Breakfasts.
Carl Ludewig is CEO of Ludewig Multimedia. Carl wants to change the way applications are developed by empowering designers and business users. In a world where the cloud, mobile and desktop need to fit together, Ludewig Multimedia looks to take a holistic approach with the next generation of software design tools. Carl’s prior venture was the mobile advertising company Ad Infuse, which was sold to Velti in 2009. Carl is a software engineer and musician who believes
that creative talent is the key to success.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your background?
I’m a UC Berkeley computer science graduate whose first job was with the company that invented index funds and evangelized computer-driven passive investment strategies. I watched it grow incredibly fast and saw first hand how technology could create a whole new market. Since then, I have worked with a number of early stage startups, including a mobile advertising company I co-founded called Ad Infuse, which we sold in 2009.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about what led you to found your company, what was the problem that motivated you?
My entire career, it has bothered me that many applications that seem simple are surprisingly hard to build. I believe that there’s a certain class of application that should be as easy to create as using Microsoft Word or Excel, and it should work across platforms and devices.
Q: How did you get started?
Rather than seek angel or VC funding, I decided to leverage consulting opportunities to bootstrap the business. I look for projects that teach me something I need to know and provide experience with the technology we’re using in our products.
Q: Can you give me a brief overview of where the company is today?
We have 3 employees and a technical advisor. Revenue has grown around 50% year over year. Although consulting still accounts for the bulk of the revenue, about half of our customers are subscribers to services rather than consulting clients.
Q: What are the two or three things that you have been able to accomplish that you take the most pride in or satisfaction from?
The number one is team building. The talent and enthusiasm of those who have joined so far is impressive and gives me hope for our future prospects. The other is that bootstrapping and customer development has allowed us to get started without taking on outside investment.
Q: What has been the biggest surprise?
Even after years of experience, I am still surprised at how difficult it is to develop software, which, ironically, is the problem we are trying to solve.
Q: What development, event, or new understanding since you started has had the most impact on your original plan? How has your plan changed in response?
I have needed to learn patience. Given that product development can take time, we’ve adopted a “sell what you have” attitude and offered hosting and related services in order to engage with potential customers sooner rather than later.
Q: Any other remarks or suggestions for entrepreneurs?
Know yourself and why you want to be an entrepreneur. Do you want to start and flip your company quickly? Are you building a business for the long haul? Your goals will guide you to the path you might take to get there.
Carl recently spoke at the “Working For Equity” panel with two other bootstrapping CEO at Silicon Valley 2011. See “
Slides from Working For Equity Panel at SVCC 2011” for his presentation.
October 13th, 2011 07:37pm
skmurphy
Francis Adanza interviewed Geva Solomonovich, an early employee at Fraud Sciences which was acquired by Paypal for 170M.
Francis noted:
Geva joined the company while it was still a startup and played a significant role in helping the company grow. I thought the Bootstrappers Breakfast community might benefit from Geva’s lessons learned. In addition to this Q&A blog post, Geva will be joining the round table discussion as a featured guest speaker on Friday, November 4 at the Palo Alto Bootstrappers Breakfast. Come join us and ask Geva your own questions.
BB: Hi Geva – Thanks for taking the time to share your entrepreneurial insight with the Bootstrappers Breakfast community.
Geva: Hi Francis, glad to be here.
BB: Prior to Fraud Sciences, what were you doing?
Geva: Before Fraud Sciences I worked in several other startups. One was SofaWare which built small office Firewall and VPN appliances. SofaWare was partnered with CheckPoint and the initial code base was derived from CheckPoint’s Firewall code. Another company was Savantis – a pioneer in Database Virtualization systems. Savantis closed down after 2.5 years. I learned a valuable lesson there – it’s almost impossible to sell datacenter critical solutions to large enterprises when you are a small startup. Duh. Even though the startup didn’t succeed, it was a great experience, and I was even able to get an algorithm I built filed for patent.
BB: What did Fraud Sciences do?
Geva: Fraud Sciences did e-commerce credit card fraud analysis. E-commerce merchants would send us the details buyers provided in the checkout page (name, address, credit card number, etc.), we would analyze the transaction information, and reply to the merchant with a green or red light. The interesting part of course was how we were able to make good decisions… this was a combination of outstanding technology and outstanding fraud analysts who understood and defined legitimate and fraud behavioral patterns. Let me give an example of what I mean by outstanding technology: in a typical e-commerce situation, an American credit card is presented at a checkout page of an American commerce site like amazon.com. A quick geo location checkup shows that the buyer’s IP address is actually in Romania. Most fraud systems would automatically decline such a transaction as the IP geo mismatch here is severe. Our technology enabled us to automatically analyze the buyer to see (and confirm) he works in an international corporation which has a branch in Romania. All of a sudden, the story looks completely different and some of the red lights dim.
Overall, our technology was so great we offered 100% fraud chargeback guarantee. If we “approved” a transaction and it was later chargedback, we covered 100% of the item cost. It was that simple. The value prop for merchants was outstanding – they could now sell to new risky markets they were avoiding before. Think about the ability to ship a $10k diamond ring to Russia without having to worry.
BB: How big was the company when you joined?
Geva: I joined the company when we were still sharing half a floor of a small building with 3 other startups. I was the fifth employee at the time with one other developer, an analyst and the two founders. Seeing the company grew from this early stage to being acquired has been really inspirational.
BB: What were some the early sales/marketing challenges you faced during the first couple of years in business?
Geva: The biggest challenge is getting through the first door. Online merchants are pretty busy people and they get a lot of offers from startups to fix/change/improve/solve/expand their business. Then comes the question of trust: who is this small startup that wants us to share our checkout information? How can I trust their recommendations to approve/decline a transaction? “I have my own fraud management system…”
BB: What did the company do to overcome these challenges?
Geva: To overcome these challenges we started selling to very eccentric and non-mainstream merchants – people who really have high-fraud and funky businesses. Some of our initial merchants were selling anonymous web-browsing services. As you can image that attracts a lot of fraudsters who want to be anonymous on the web. We actually saw that fraudsters are using the anonymizer services to fraudulently buy more subscriptions from them! Another genre of merchants we integrated with were e-gold brokers. E-gold is like a virtual currency – where there is money there is always fraud. After we had a proven record with these types of merchants we continuously worked to revisit and improve our offering. We simplified the integration process to a 10 minute exercise. We simplified the feedback to the merchants to a simple Yes/No. We slowly grew to the 100% fraud chargeback guarantee. In parallel, the sales force continued improving their sales pitch, and we worked very hard to get supportive feedback from top-notch merchants (like www.ice.com) that we used in order to reduce new merchants objections.
BB: As the company grew, what were some of the operational challenges you faced as you gained traction?
Geva: One of the biggest challenges we had was scale. For a long time our analysis process was 100% manual human review. Technology played a big role by scanning through 1000s of data sources, scraping the web, running sophisticated algorithms and aggregating data to make the decision process easier for the human analysts. But it was still a human analyst who made the final decision. Hiring these human analysts wasn’t scalable either – these were top notch, super intelligent, high SAT, highly analytical kind of people. There is no standard job posting nor school education that you can look for.
By far, my biggest contribution to the company was in building the automated decision platform. My team and I spent hours interviewing our human analysts to try to quantify and frame their thought process into something we can let a computer do. We studied machine learning algorithms, data mining processes, statistics etc. and then started implementing. In 3 months we had the first version out. This version outperformed most of our human analysts, and of course worked much faster. It was a great success…
BB: How long was the company in business before you raised venture capital?
Geva: The founders worked 3-4 years by themselves without raising venture capital. They then raised a small series A funding before they started recruiting employees.
BB: What risk reducing milestones did the company achieve that merited risk capital investment?
Geva: On the business side, we worked very hard to have a repeatable and predictable sales cycle. That was of uttermost importance. New merchant acquisition had to be streamlined and efficient, while trying to reduce the paperwork as much as possible. On the technology side, we needed to show that we can grow our maximum transaction processing volume by x10, and then by another x10, and then to a point where to scale would only mean buying more servers.
October 9th, 2011 01:05pm
DishaBheda
Bootstrappers won’t like the recently enacted patent reform law. Called the America Invents Act, it was signed by President Obama on September 16. The law takes effect March 16, 2013. It provides for a “first to file” patent system. Currently a patent is awarded to the first person to invent and reduce the invention to practice, even if they file up to a year after invention. With the new law the patent will be awarded to the first person to file for the patent and the one year grace period will be gone.
While this might seem like no big deal to a bootstrapper, it is a serious handicap.
Pete Tormey will talk about ‘The New Patent Law’ and its implications on Bootstrappers.
Venue: Sandbox Suites, Union Square (567 Sutter Street)
Time: 8.30 am
Date: 21st October, 2011
Pete Tormey moderates our Walnut Creek breakfasts; he is also a patent attorney at Antero & Tormey LLP. He offered his analysis of the new patent law update, the America Invents Act (HR 1249 112th Congress), concluding that it is an unfavorable development for bootstrappers.
September 22nd, 2011 09:18am
DishaBheda
You don’t want to miss this one — on Tuesday Sept. 27, Shawn Green will join us to lead the roundtable discussion about your sales process.
Sales Repair Kit
• Pointers to help you avoid common errors in prospecting and selling.
• Practical tips for effective prospecting on a shoestring budget.
• Open forum to tackle the issues you need help with!
Date: Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
Time: 7.30 am
Venue: Bootstrappers Breakfast Walnut Creek, Heavenly Cafe, 3116 Oak Road
About Shawn Greene
Shawn Greene is a sales performance expert and author of, “I’d rather have a root canal than do cold calling!” She’s had a successful sales training business since 1995 and built it using the same tools and methods she’ll share with us.
Shawn is well-known for providing practical, grounded advice in consultative style selling. Her humor and gentle approach will help you dump mindsets that hold you back. You’ll leave feeling energized and truly empowered. You can get a sneak peek at savageandgreene.com. Shawn also invites you to call her in advance of the meeting.
September 13th, 2011 08:53pm
skmurphy
Pete Tormey moderates our Walnut Creek breakfasts; he is also a patent attorney at Antero & Tormey LLP. He offered his analysis of the new patent law update, the America Invents Act (HR 1249 112th Congress), concluding that it is an unfavorable development for bootstrappers.
Bootstrappers won’t like the recently enacted patent reform law. Called the
America Invents Act, it is expected to be signed into law by President Obama soon. The law, which takes effect 18 months after signing, provides for a “
first to file” patent system. Currently a patent is awarded to the first person to invent and reduce the invention to practice, even if they file up to a year after invention. With the new law the patent will be awarded to the first person to file for the patent and the one year grace period will be gone.
While this might seem like no big deal to a bootstrapper, it is a serious handicap. Today when I meet someone with a new idea but no money (i.e. a bootstrapper), I suggest they document their invention well, test market it and if it looks like a winner, file for patent protection. The current law allows me to argue the actual invention date and not the filing date for determining priority over other inventions. The bootstrapper gets a chance to gauge success before spending money on a patent.
Under the new law, if a person conceives an invention they must file soon. If they take the time to test the market, another inventor might file for the invention first. The inventor who takes the time to determine marketability might lose the race to the patent office.
While it is too early to know what the overall affect of a first-to-file system will be, the research indicates that smaller organizations will suffer from this new patent scheme. Bootstrappers will need to understand the risks of waiting to file for a patent and develop patent strategies, such as filing many provisional patent applications before market testing, to protect themselves. Either way the new law is another obstacle to getting a company off the ground.
Update: The America Invents Act was signed by President Obama on September 16 and effect March 16, 2013. Pete Tormey is speaking on “
Minimizing the Impact of the New Patent Law” at the October 21 Bootstrapper Breakfast in San Francisco.
September 13th, 2011 09:08am
DishaBheda
As per the last poll, EventBrite was the most popular service used for online event registration. Which service is your most preferred now?
More polls
August 24th, 2011 01:23pm
gcaprio
The #2 question we get at every breakfast ( after “how do I find more users?” ) is “how can I find developers / technical cofounder / CTO” ? Frequently, I point people to friendly meetups or conferences. WindyCityRails is an example of the latter. It’s put on by a fellow breakfast member, Ray Hightower:
Ruby on Rails is the technology behind robust web ventures like Groupon, Twitter, and Hulu. WindyCityRails (Saturday, September 17, 2011) is Chicago’s conference for all who are passionate about Ruby on Rails. Sharpen your technical skills, network with other professionals, and meet some of the top minds in the Ruby on Rails community. Developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and investors all find value in WindyCityRails. Visit http://windycityrails.org for details.
If you’re non-technical and looking for developers or any sort of technical help, it’s a great place to start. It’s coming up next month. Hope to see you there.
Griffin Caprio – Founder & President, 1530 Technologies, Inc.
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