Christian Renaud's Blog

Stealing a page or two

I have a confession, I used to be a habitual 'tuner'.  

A tuner is a person who incessantly tinkers with their schedule, productivity tools and reads volumes of blogs and books on how to be more productive.  About six months ago, I finally stopped all the tuning and set a 'no fly zone' on my schedule tinkering and productivity tools to see what would happen.  Lo and behold, the time I recovered from not constantly learning new tools and adapting to new schedule formulas was a time windfall. I was able to get more done and spend more time with my family.

I recently read a publisher draft of Brad Feld's excellent book Startup Communities (the actual book is out in October, so you should go to Amazon right now and pre-order it)(also, Tej did a great review of it that I heartily agree with and won't rewrite my own gushing review of.)  Of the tens of things that I took away from the book about building long-term startup communities like Boulder or Des Moines, there were two in particular that caused me to rethink violating my own no-fly zone.

The first was something that Brad implemented to cope with the growing bulk of meetings on his calendar, which was setting office hours like our college professors did.  This allowed him time each week to meet with all of the people he was struggling to squeeze in to an ever-busy schedule while still leaving time to tackle the projects he needed to tackle.  I looked over the last three months on my schedule and I am averaging about six hours per week of 'informational meetings', plus at least an additional 2-3 hours of random drop-in meetings.  All of these meetings are good and useful, don't get me wrong, but an unlimited schedule of those is unsustainable.

The second item was actually something observed from swapping rapid-fire Q&A emails with Brad in the subsequent days that I recalled from Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero, which is that 'less is more':

"I used to think one-line email responses were the height of rudeness. If someone took the time to type me a 20-paragraph email, I always felt I had to respond in kind. It's like that horrible feeling at the holiday gift exchange when you realize that the present you brought cost a tenth of what your colleague spent. Well, get over it, because it ain't the same thing." - Merlin Mann

Takeway: If you can say it in 1-5 words, then do that.  Making three paragraphs out of it won't create any more meat, just textual fat.

There were a couple more items that were more important and not workflow related from the book that I will cover in follow up posts.

As far as the first two are concerned, here we go.  Starting next week, I'm blocking out Thursday mornings for 'Office Hours'.  Requests to meet that aren't explicitly part of one of my existing companies or StartupCity residents will be scheduled for Thursday mornings.  This should help everyone involved as it keeps a consistent window for follow ups and also won't suffer from the other meeting-runs-late vagaries of my schedule.  It also aligns well with the open-office hours at StartupCity every Thursday, so people can mix and mingle to everyone's benefit.

Second, expect a lot more one-line emails.  Social graces are important, but not so much that they should add minutes or hours to inbound and outbound emails.  Right now, I regularly skip my morning workout (not good) to triage my inbox, and that's just not sustainable in the long term.  I'm going to trade efficiency for prose for a while and probably piss everyone off, but the meaning will be conveyed as efficiently as possible.

That's it.  Speaking of efficiency, no pretty summary and wrap. 

A coaching moment

Back in my corporate days, we used to call situations like this 'coaching moments', or 'teachable moments'.  

I need your help.

As I have mentioned previously, at the beginning of June, we announced Plains Angels, an angel group of Midwest investors who were interested in seeing and potentially investing in more Midwest startups in information technology, biotechnology, and manufacturing (as well as rare 'other' opportunities as decided by a subset of the group affectionally named 'the screening committee' which determines if applications are in/out of scope of the group's interest).  The group has grown from 50 to over 90 accredited investors since June, and now meets monthly to review startup applications that have been passed by the screening committee.  Of the four applicants who have presented, one received investment within nine days, and the other three are in some form of (potentially pre-investment) diligence.  

It is customary for me to send out a note to companies that have begun the application process but not yet completed it to remind them that they need to get their application in by a certain date, to give the screening committee time to do a high level review, and then us to work with them to make sure they have the proper information prepared for the group in the right formats (what we call 'pre-diligence').  After last night's second successful startup-presentation meeting, I sent a message out to the 'in progress' applicants at 9:31am this morning to let them know about the deadline the group has to give them appropriate time to review the inbound applications.

What follows is a redacted and anonymized exchange from 9:31 this morning to around 6:30p this evening.  If you all have some feedback on how I could have handled it better, please please please comment on the blogpost as I would love to hear of ways I can refine my feedback.

Dawn of the Bricoleurs

"Man, as creator of Culture, is like a bricoleur, ...who makes constructions for the fun of the thing out of anything that is lying around." - American Anthopologist

The world is changing.  In his classic work 'The Hedgehog and the Fox',  Isaiah Berlin contrasted individuals who viewed the world through a single lens and specialty (hedgehogs) with those who drew on multiple disciplines and experiences (foxes). I see this in the startup ideas I review daily in that they are often interdisciplinary in scope, incorporating not only information technology, but also frequently biotechnology or advanced manufacturing.  

Increasingly, we are seeing technology bricolage, as Kevin Kelly once called it, with entrepreneurs repurposing existing technology from across the spectrum for new and novel uses.   It's this recombination and remixing that I think of as the constant innovation heartbeat of civilization.  We are all so intertwined with one another that we cannot avoid drawing on multiple adjacent fields in anything we do.

This is one fundamental problem I have with traditional University education.  In order to draw boundaries for curriculum and scope, they had to put up walls between disciplines (who else could separate math and physics into separate buildings?).  These boundaries of convenience got systemized when people started optimizing within them to the detriment of the greater innovations that are gained by intermingling them. Universities stopped being a mirror of human knowledge institutionalized, but rather speciated hedgerows.

If you go to one of these Universities today, they seldom point at the robotics building, or the graphics art building, but rather the great accomplishments coming out of the few spaces dedicated to multiple groups (i.e. The MIT Media Lab and Stanford MediaX). There are the complexity theory oases like the Santa Fe Institute, where Nobel laureates and authors and historians intermingle across the entire knowledge spectrum for the express purpose of discovering previously unknown intersections.

The Eureka, or 'Aha', effect of interdisciplinary insights lights up the brain's right hemisphere (specifically, the anterior superior temporal gyrus).  The right hemisphere is where we get music, visual imagery and spatial intelligence.  It makes sense that these intuitive, artistic abilities form the foundation of our interdisciplinary insights, because they eschew process, logic and math.  These are not logic-driven associations, they are remixed and remastered eureka moments.

In this world today, we need more Eurekas.  We need more Ahas.  We have done an excellent job endlessly researching the hedgerows of the hedgehogs.  You can earn your Doctor of Philosophy in any single discipline without ever leaving your university building and coming in to contact with the broader world.  What we need now more than ever is to burrow some foxholes between these hedgerows, and open up opportunities for the bricoleurs who are poised to build new products and industries at the intersections between them. 

Free Range Entrepreneurs

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the Des Moines session of IdeaMensch, a traveling series that is currently touring the lower 48 states featuring local entrepreneurial speakers.  Among the indigenous entrepreneurs were Tej Dhawan, Andy Stoll, Carl Blake, Ben Milne and Jason Lampe. 

One of many points consistent among the speakers was that entrepreneurs are irrational, non-linear people who thrive in ambiguous and potentially dangerous situations.  Andy Stoll said “uncomfortable is the new normal”, and while this is true, I would append to Andy’s quote that ‘uncomfortable was the normal’ before we began confining and domesticating people in the industrial age.

Think about life a few thousand years ago. We were constantly looking for game to kill, and gathering berries and root vegetables. We didn’t know where our next meal was going to come from and if the baby would have enough food to thrive.  Stress.

Think about life two thousand or even two hundred years ago.  In addition to the constant fear of being killed by wandering bands of ruffians, dying of smallpox, or not having enough feed for your oxen, you pretty much lived in a state of low-grade stress that stemmed from your sustenance-farming lifestyle.  

A hundred or so years ago (in the United States) we settled in to a more industrial-age model of compartmentalized, predictable work that originated the ‘9 to 5’ mindset, lifelong employment, career ladders, cubicle farms, pensions, and so forth. Look ma, no stress.  At least compared to the fear of dying of smallpox or starving to death.

This was a mistake. 

Champions

Yesterday afternoon I was suprised by a congratulatory tweet from Lynn Hicks at the Des Moines Register letting me know that I had been nominatated for a Silicon Prairie Community Champion award at the inaugural Silicon Prairie Awards late this month.  I am humbled to be nominated for the award and included in such a group with Joni, Thad and Dusty.

As usual, I have mixed feelings.  I think the rapid progress across the Prairie is the result of not one, or four, or forty individuals, but the entire community rowing in the same direction.  Publications such as Silicon Prairie News, the Des Moines Business Record, and the Des Moines Register continually highlight the multiple accomplishments across the region by entrepreneurs of every species.  It is the aggregate of all of these  accomplishments that deserve 99.999% of the credit for the renaissance in entrepreneurialism we are experiencing.

That said, I cannot emphasize enough the outstanding accomplishments of my co-nominees.  I met Dusty two years ago at my first BigOmaha and he has been relentless in his regional collaboration and open-door attitude so seldom found in traditional economic development organizations.  He is cut from a different cloth, and I use him often as an example to his Iowa peers as the personification of a 'abundance, not scarcity' mindset that is going to get us from where we are to where we need to go.

Joni and I met at this last BigOmaha via an introduction by the indefatigable Bart Dillashaw.  She immediately impressed me by having a fiercely entrepreneur-centric compass by which she steers Pipeline, an excellent program for mid-stage startup CEOs to work with one another to share learnings and collaborate.  She showed more of this same zeal at a recent three-state collaboration event hosted by Gallup in Omaha that we attended where she brought in CEOs from Kansas City and Omaha and discussed cross-border ecosystem building.

Thad was also at the Gallup event and immediately distinguished himself to the group by having the pragmatic, no-nonsense attitude of a serial entrepreneur.  I had not met Thad prior to the event, but was quick to grab his business card as it is obvious that he is going to go through the (somewhat labrinthine by Iowa standards) Kansas City entreprenurial ecosystem like a tornado through a trailer park.

Finally, Iowa.  The considerable progress we've had in Iowa has been the direct result of the entire tribe leaning in and taking an ownership role in the future of the community.  StartupCity would not exist without Tej Dhawan shouldering an ever-increasing amount of weight.  The guy puts circus strongmen to shame.  Ditto for Mike Colwell at the BIZ who has 4-5 meetings per day with wantrepreneurs across the entire spectrum of ideas, and who created (the desperately-needed) Plains Angels out of thin air in June.  The entrepreneurs and mentors of StartupCity, like Brian Hemesath (who is both a mentor and entrepreneur), who selflessly give their time and energy to help one another along the bumpy entrepreneural journey.  StartupIowa missionaries like Amanda Styron of SeedHere,  Joel Bennett of Veel Hoeden, Josh Cramer of CramerDev, Ben Milne of Dwolla, John Schnipkoweit, Levi Rosol, Andrew Kirpilani, Tom Chapman (who is selflessly advancing the Iowa cause from Nebraska regularly), Dan Shipton,  Andy Stoll, Alexander Grgurich, and about a million more that I will kick myself repeatedly in the ass today for not including in this short pre-caffeine list. All of these people deserve an award for their constant exertions to make Iowa a better place for startups and entrepreneurship in general.

Collectively, everyone above, and everyone they work with and everyone THEY work with (and so on, ad infinitum) deserve the real credit for being the champions of the Prairie.  Don't vote for me.

What I learned in Boulder

This week Tej Dhawan, Andy Stoll, Amanda Styron, and I trekked to Boulder Colorado for the StartupAmerica Partnership Regional Leaders Summit to represent StartupIowa.  Over the two days, the SUAP team and our peer regions (states) were relentless in sharing best practices and programs that they have developed to build their entrepreneurial ecosystems. 

The Summit has had me thinking deeply about where we are in the gestation of StartupIowa and the overall ecosystem within the state.  Iowa has had a long history of innovation and entrepreneurialism, and we are in the middle of a transition from the prior model of economic-development-driven scarcity-silos to one of open-innovation, regional sharing and the recognition that abundance comes from collaboration and not the zero-sum-game of competition.

From the beginning of this journey, I’ve considered it a multi-phase process to fully develop a culture of big risks, continual innovation, and the resultant successes that are the hallmark of any thriving entrepreneurial hub.  I will call Phase One our ‘Enlightenment’ phase, and is/was as simple as getting the tribe together, meeting each other, networking, and building a sense of self as a community.  The community moves from one of isolated individuals to a sense of pride of being part of the startup tribe.

We are here.

Hunters and Farmers revisited

If you've been reading my blog for a while, a recurring metaphor you'll see that I come back to over and over again is that of Hunters vs. Farmers.  'Hunters' in this case are the innovators and entrepreneurs that start a company and create the vision.  'Farmers', by contrast, are the individuals who go execute on that vision and, more often than not, scale the initial vision far beyond the Hunters who created it.

Both are necessary, and there needs to be a balance of the two of them in any organization in order for it to succeed.  When I see companies that are too heavy in either Hunters or Farmers, it's often a source of trouble as there is either a deficiency of focus and execution (too little Farming), or a deficiency of vision (too little Hunting).

Don't get me wrong, everyone should be executing relentlessly in a startup, not just a chosen few, however both roles require dedicated attention and finesse.  I have seen more than a few startups that were created by Farmers who had a small spark of vision, only to have them obsess on the execution to the exclusion of everything else.  This is often fatal, as 'vision and strategy creation' is not a discrete event that happens at an annual 'Strategic Offsite', then put on a shelf next to all the other folders of years past.  It is a constantly evolving and adaptive strategy that best reflects the continually-changing world and marketplace we live in. 

Contain the Crazy

Last week's festivities and this week's already-harried activities have really driven home a point for me when it comes to being an entrepreneur: You have to 'contain the crazy'. 

One of my favorite quotes is that "all people are crazy, but that we gradually learn how to behave sane in public".  Entrepreneurs constantly walk that line between crazy and genius, and sometimes the crazy squeaks out a little too much and alienates potential investors or customers.

By crazy, I don't necessarily mean mental-instability, although the startup community is rife with that issue as well, but more the million different balls up in the air for most startups.  If you are running a company, you know what I mean.  Any given day is a melee of activity, and when you are consumed with it, it's hard not to speak on that level in every conversation you have with people. People who, most probably, confuse your ability to multitask with borderline insanity.

One positive example to use as an archetype for this is a gourmet restaurant.  If you've ever worked in food service, you can attest that the experience on the kitchen side of the door and the customer side of the door are polar opposites.

Consider the finest restaurant in the United States, The French Laundry, in Yountville California.  They have a lovely garden that you can retreat to between the multitude of delicious courses that affords you a glimpse of these poles in stark contrast. 

Through the window on your left is the dining room, a haven of zen-like calmness and simple elegance where the waitstaff are omnipresent yet unobtrusive.  You dine in serene simplicity that amplifies the amazing dishes being placed in front of you.

Through the window on your right is the kitchen which is akin to watching a well-choreographed fight sequence from an epic war movie. People and implements are flying around, seemingly at random, but actually in a symphony of movement with complex logic and synchrony behind every motion. 

Never once does the constrained-chaos of the kitchen bleed into the haven of the dining room.  Not once.  As far as you know, these delicacies sprung forth fully-formed from Chef Thomas Keller's toque like Athena from Zeus' forehead, and not from a legion of perfectionist culinary ninjas.  They keep that complexity obscured so as not to draw the focus away from their product, their message, their experience.

As entrepreneurs, we need to do the same with customers and investors.  We need to make their experience with us a zen-like interaction with our brands, products and services, never aware of the complexity just on the other side of the door.  It's not going to add to their experience to know that you had to pull an all-nighter to fix the bugs, it's going to raise concern about product stability.  You don't want to lay bare all the nuances of your business to a prospective investor until they have expressed determined interest in investing and you have shifted to due diligence. 

It's up to you to behave in public, on the dining room side of the door, and contain the crazy.  That's yours alone to savor.

Administrative Attention Deficit Disorder

Administrations cycle every 4-8 years in State Government.  Venture firms cycle every 8-12 years before any single fund is complete.  This presents a problem.

Each administration has a different philosophical approach to how involved the State needs to be in venture investing.  Some are interventionist, statist, controlling, while others are laissez faire. 

In Iowa, we have the Iowa Fund of Funds, instituted under prior administrations, which entails the investment of private and public dollars into regional venture capital firms that are professionally managed, that review regional deal flow, and occasionally (see Village Ventures participation in the most recent Dwolla round) invest in Iowa.  With Iowa being a small percentage of the MidWest population, and the need to produce excellent returns to the fund's Limited Partners, it is understandable that they invest more often outside of the state than inside Iowa.  The Fund of Funds didn't fund 100% of these venture funds, so they can't dictate the terms of the investments.

Also in Iowa, we have the new Iowa Innovation Corporation and it's proposed fund that they are currently lobbying to have modified from 20% to 100% tax credit.  This will raise somewhere between $20-60M to invest solely in Iowa companies as a public/private partnership.  They are still working out who exactly will be managing the fund and deploying the investments, but it is not the Fund of Funds model where they utilize existing venture capital firms.

Both of these ideas have their merits and drawbacks.  As the recent Atlantic article referenced, the vast majority of these State-driven venture incentive programs fail, with the exception of Israel, who turned it over entirely to the private sector.  These hybrids of public/private often serve two masters, one being the social objectives of the State, the other being the return for the limited partners of the fund.

There are a number of problems with this, when it comes to managing funds this large, but the larger long-term problem is one of credibility.  We signed up to pursue the Fund of Funds approach for 10-12 years (the life of a typical venture fund) and make sure it was capitalized enough for future 'cap calls' when subsequent funds were required.  The current administration has since kneecapped the FoF and put them in grave danger of defaulting on our prior obligations. I have no judgement as to the 'why', but you have to understand that this doesn't reflect well on our credibility and fortitude for public/private partnerships.

At the same time, the new Seed Fund being raised by the Iowa Innovation Corporation is going out to try to raise venture capital and secure partners for the very same purpose, often from the very same regional players who tried to partner with us on the FoF.

Lets see.  Say I am Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and I nationalize your company's private oil refinery for the State.  The following week/month/year, I come back to you and encourage you to invest in Venezuela.  What do you think the outcome of that conversation would be? 

We need to do one of two things:  1) Get out of the venture business entirely at a State level and let the private sector work through it's own issues.  Keep one set of legislation in place for longer than four years (read: "Angel Tax Credits").  Calm down and stop pissing off the private sector venture community so they do come back gradually to Iowa and deploy capital, or 2) Tell private sector to go away, nationalize it all, and centrally manage it (as horrible a concept as this is).  This will tell the private sector where we land on the ideological spectrum, and let them make their own decisions about partnering in Iowa.  Otherwise, all we are doing Iowa a grave disservice by constantly undermining our long term reputation with the private capital community.

In Praise of Tej Dhawan

Photo Credit to Anna Jones.  Of course.  Who else?

I know it's Martin Luther King Jr's observed b'day and all, but It's actually Tej Dhawan's real birthday today.  Feel free to smack me around for not being mono-topical.

I first met Tej thanks to Mike Colwell at the BIZ, shortly after I left Palisade and was considering building an incubator.  Tej had just self-emancipated from his last venture and was also considering something similar.  From these three-way conversations between Tej, Mike and I, StartupCity Des Moines was born.

Tej is the main driving force behind StartupCity. 

I have some vision and execution skills, but Tej makes the magic happen.  If this were a superhero team, Tej would be the hero and I would be the sidekick.  No question.  Unfortunately, I have an annoying habit of spewing bon mots and other soundbites that put me in the press more frequently than he, so Tej is often overlooked for the credit for SCDSM and his role as a driver of the local entrepreneurial zeitgeist.  Ditto on the Iowa Startup Alliance.  Ditto on StartupIowa.  Ditto on 'Silicon Sixth'. Ditto on the Iowa Startup Fair.

He makes it rain.

Des Moines, and all of Iowa and the Silicon Prairie owe Tej a big 'Thank You' for his reasoned, educated, insightful and hilarious guidance.  I am honored to be his colleague, friend and sidekick.