Entrepreneurial

The entrepreneur’s equivalent of “10,000 hours”

Mark Suster

Aug 26, 2011 11:41 EDT

– Mark Suster is a former serial entrepreneur and a partner at Los Angeles-based GRP Partners. This article originally appeared on his blog “Both Sides of the Table”. The views expressed are his own. –

50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of “10,000 hours.”

Anybody who has spent any time with me in person will be tired of this advice because I give it so frequently. It’s a piece of actionable advice that if you put into practice starting next week, will start paying dividends in the near future. There’s a direct correlation to your future success.

5 meetings/week = 250/year.

Imagine the human progress you could make with 250 short, relationship-focused meetings.

Here’s why it’s critical:

1. Recruiting. Are you looking for great engineers? Talented brand sales people? A smart young marketing exec? If you wait until you need to fill somebody in a roll, you’re losing valuable time as an entrepreneur. You should always have a steady stream of “friend of the firm” hanging around your company. You invite them to cocktail parties. You send them update emails. You don’t have a budget for them – not yet. But when you do, you’re ready to go.

10 marketing lessons for early stage tech startups

Mark Suster

Jun 29, 2011 07:00 EDT

– Mark Suster is a former serial entrepreneur and a partner at Los Angeles-based venture capital firm GRP Partners. This article originally appeared on Suster’s blog “Both Sides of the Table”. The views expressed are his own. –

I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.” We need to learn from doing, by trial and error.

If I can help you avoid some of my first-time mistakes it would be a victory. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.).

1. Where Stealth is Good – There’s a lot of discussions on the Web about whether startups should be stealthy before they launch or not. The truth is there isn’t a “right” answer for your company. You need some guidelines to make decisions. My general rule is that it’s good to be stealth in the early days while you’re building your product and testing your market. Stealth does not mean constipated, paranoid and totally untrusting of others. It does mean not telling more people your future plans than is necessary. It means avoiding drinking too much at cocktail parties with other tech people and bragging about your plans. It means not over-sharing your deal with VCs or other investors.

The truth is that we work in a very small, tight-knit industry and news and plans spread fast. In the early days you don’t really want three extra teams hearing your ideas and gearing up to compete before you feel you’ve got a solid head start. Most people totally advise against stealth. They think that only by being open and testing your ideas in an open marketplace can you be successful. Be careful about this advice.

Also be careful about VCs. Most ones that I know have very high ethical standards, so I’m not concerned about that. But once a VC has heard your idea he can’t “un-think” it. And these ideas have ways of seeping into board discussions with portfolio companies as in, “have you ever thought about trying A, B or C?” It’s mostly unintentional, but tacit knowledge about ideas spreads quickly amongst the chattering elite.

I actually like finding entrepreneurs who are more circumspect, less braggadocios and generally more planned about their actions.

Invest in lines, not dots

Mark Suster

Nov 18, 2010 10:46 EST

– Mark Suster is a former serial entrepreneur and a partner at Los Angeles-based venture capital firm GRP Partners. This article originally appeared on his blog “Both Sides of the Table”. The views expressed are his own. –

Everyone seems to be in such a rush to get shacked up these days.

In normal times investors will look for “traction” before investing. We want to make sure we’re in love. This sometimes frustrates entrepreneurs who just want to “get back to running the business.” But if you understand it you’ll see that it’s perfectly rational and it should also influence how you form relationships with investors. And remember, if we get married you’re stuck with us, too.

The first time I meet you, you are a single data point. A dot. I have no reference point from which to judge whether you were higher on the y-axis three months ago, or lower. Because I have no observation points from the past, I have no sense for where you will be in the future. Thus, it’s very hard to make a commitment to fund you.

For this reason I tell entrepreneurs the following: meet your potential investors early. Tell them you’re not raising money yet, but that you will be in the next six months or so. Tell them you really like them so you want them to have an early view (which is what all investor’s want). When you’re with them lower the bar by telling them, “we haven’t shipped product yet, we have lots of decisions still to make, but we’d like to show you our prototype” or obviously if you’re more advanced, show what you have and what your roadmap looks like.

Most importantly tell them what you plan to achieve by the next time you see them. Hopefully by then you’ve made good progress. You’ll be able to give them an update on key hires, pilot customers, key tech innovations – whatever. Keep these interactions low-key and short. Quick coffees, whatever. Swing by their offices to make it easy for them to say yes and promise not to take up more than 30 minutes for the update (and stick to it).

Small Talk: Elephants and entrepreneurs

Jon Cook

Nov 13, 2009 08:42 EST

Mark Suster’s blog – “Both Sides of the Table” – has become a hotspot for people seeking an insider’s glimpse into the world of venture capital investing.

This week Suster wrote about the things in entrepreneur pitches that give VCs pause when considering whether or not to invest. Suster likens it to the elephant-in-the-room adage, more specifically: “those things that the VC would automatically be thinking about when you’re speaking but he/she may not immediately ask you about either for legal reasons or out of courtesy.”

Suster’s blog goes on to list some real-life examples of pitches he’s heard with Elephant-sized problems, such as the founder is no longer with the company or having Google as a prime competitor. Suster advises entrepreneurs to deal with their issues before they seek funding, as they will inevitably be addressed in their meetings with VCs. Suster says it’s better to be pre-emptive in this regard.

“There is only one way to deal with your Elephants – head on. Don’t pretend it isn’t in the room,” writes Suster. “Know in advance what you’re going to say and don’t wait for the VC to bring it up. When VC’s bring up Elephants they feel like they’re ‘catching you out’ and you’ve lost the high ground.”

REGRETS, I’VE HAD A FEW

If crooner Frank Sinatra was singing about small businesses, he might start off with this Associated Content story by Kevin Hagen that appeared on the Huffington Post about some of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make and advice on how to avoid them. Among the mistakes listed are: lack of planning, borrowing too much, spending too much and insufficient capital. We’re pretty sure most of these mistakes could be avoided by better planning, but the list may serve as a good refresher for would-be small business owners.

A more interesting article is “6 Business Mistakes I Hope You Make”, where author Michael Noker details some of the errors he made as an 18-year-old entrepreneur running his own Web-design company. Noker said he started his business for the wrong reason – to pay his tuition – which was expensive, so instead he ended up getting student loans to pay for it and then “had no real pressure or desire to get started, so I never really did.”

Wanted: investors for online job board

Jon Cook

Aug 25, 2009 12:11 EDT

Ivy Exec, a job posting and recruiting website, targets high-profile professionals by offering exclusivity: job-seekers must first be approved as a member to access the site’s job listings.

“They don’t like to be part of the masses,” explained Ivy Exec founder Elena Bajic (read her entrepreneur journal) about the site’s 25,000 members. “They’re looking for a way to differentiate themselves, an exclusive club and a network of peers. So the fact that they have to get approved to be members of Ivy Exec is very important to them.”

THE PITCH

Initially free to join, Ivy Exec recently started charging a monthly fee that ranges from $22-$42 depending on the package. On the corporate side, Bajic charges an average of $8,000 for her selective recruitment services, which include pre-screening all job applicants to find a better match. In this way Ivy Exec operates more like a dating site for job seekers.

The recession has been both helpful and hurtful for Bajic. It slowed her growth as firms cut back or stopped hiring altogether, but allowed her to take advantage of lower infrastructure costs, like rent, furniture and office supplies, to streamline her business. When the economy picks up and companies start hiring again, Bajic hopes Ivy Exec will be well positioned to cash in on the abundance of over-qualified candidates looking to land high-level jobs.

To facilitate that Bajic is seeking to raise $1.5 million in funding to assist Ivy’s sales and marketing push and to upgrade the website. Bajic said she wants to boost Ivy’s membership to 100,000 by the end of 2010, which would significantly increase revenues.