The Entrepreneurs Rally II, which was recently held on Tuesday, March, 12 2013 at Aria in downtown Minneapolis, was another big success. Over 170 entrepreneurs and over 60 mentors participated in this year’s event.
Watch the Tech.MN story:
EO Entrepreneurs’ Rally 2013 from TECHdotMN
View photos from the event:
Check out these videos from this year’s event.
Are you a high-flying, amazing B2B startup in the process of still figuring things out?
Of course you are.
So wisen up and talk to some folks that might be able to give you a little guidance and support!
What:
Founders & Funders @CoCo
Jeff Hink, VC of El Dorado Ventures*, Casey Allen of Project Skyway, and YOU. 20 minutes of whatever you want to chat about.
Who it’s for:
Any B2B software startup. Here are some rules to make sure this goes well:
Who it’s not for:
When:
Friday, October 5, 2 pm to 4 pm
Depending on how it goes we’ll consider having these more regularly.
What you do now:
Sign up for a twenty minute slot. Then think wisely about how you can get to the point and extract as much meaningful value out of twenty short minutes. Hint: Talk less. Show more. Ask short questions.
What you do then:
Bring your laptop. Plan on a 90 second demo to start. And think about the two or three (not eight or twelve) biggest questions you want to cover with us. The more direct and clear your question the more value for you. Hint: “What do you think of my product?” is not a good question.
Both Jeff and I (more he) get more email than we can possibly reply to. This is our combined effort at being available and helpful to local entrepreneurs.
Link here to grab a slot. Act fast. First come, first serve.
Look forward to chatting!
- Casey Allen, cofounder Project Skyway
*In the process of renaming themselves Icon Ventures
I’m an entrepreneur, or so I thought after starting my first company, A & D Lakeside services.
Let me tell you my story. I was recruited to be the CTO and co-founder for a very young property management company that had intentions to build software tools to make property management easier. I quit my comfortable, safe, and secure corporate job to join forces with the founders of this company to start from scratch and build a business. I introduced this company and its founders to Minnesota’s tech ecosystem. After extensive talks with some of the gurus in this ecosystem we came to the conclusion that it would be more advantageous to commercialize these software tools. With this business model, we decided to apply to Project Skyway, Minnesota’s first technology accelerator program. While the application window for Project Skyway was open I attended a Project Skyway orientation meeting with Casey Allen. To quote Casey during that meeting “If you’re wondering if you should apply, just go do it, it will only take a half hour of your day.” We started the application process, worked on it, tweaked it, slept on it, created a video, and three days later submitted it!
A few weeks later Project Skyway informed my team that we would be making it into Project Skyway’s Inaugural bootcamp — talk about some excitement! We were young entrepreneurs just getting our start and were chosen as the top 25 companies to take part in Minnesota’s first ever technology accelerator against teams from all over the country and world. The week before boot camp weekend, my team and I worked on perfecting (or what we thought was perfecting) our elevator pitch and executive summaries. We made sure that all three of us were on the same page when it came to pitching our business to the esteemed members of the tech ecosystem that were going to be interacting with us and challenging us at bootcamp.
Bootcamp kicked off with an opening party on Friday night. Cem Erdem gave his welcome speech to the 25 teams chosen and the other members of community that made an appearance. After Cem’s speech, the Project Mavericks presented us with a few challenges to kick off the weekend.
Saturday morning we awoke from our camp we set up in our office in downtown Minneapolis and headed over to St. Paul to kick off the second day of bootcamp. Now you would think that sleeping in your office would not be the best place to sleep if you wanted to be on top of your game in the morning! However, at this point that was not much of an issue because I had already been setting up camp there for a few months to work on the startup. The second day of boot camp was a true entrepreneur’s bootcamp experience. We started the morning by pitching other team’s businesses to the group. We then moved on to round tables occupied with attorneys, marketing experts, head hunters, investors, strategic partnership gurus, and product development pros. All of these people were there to help us and challenge us with hard questions. Talk about getting raked over the coals! We learned a lot about our business and ourselves that day.
We started Sunday with about 4 hours of sleep but ready to kick some ass. We focused on crafting three separate pitches for the pitch session that would conclude bootcamp. We worked with Project Skyway’s pitch doctor, Chris Carlson, to perfect our pitches. The afternoon rolled around and it was time to pitch. Folks from the community were invited to come and watch. Each team gave three quick pitches and were rated by everyone in the audience. After the pitching was completed bootcamp was concluded and off to Alary’s bar we went!
A week or so later Project Skyway announced the eight companies that were chosen to move forward with the program. I started refreshing my phone browser on tech.mn at about 8am that morning and refreshed it once every 15 minutes until the news came out at about 10pm. Our team was included in the top eight!
On August 1st of 2011 Project Skyway’s first session kicked off, my team settled into our new workspace at CoCo and got to work. Cem and Casey hosted our first round table Monday morning meeting with all teams. Each team would discuss their accomplishments from the prior week, make plans for the week ahead, and also discuss personal accomplishments they were proud of with the group. These meetings were a key asset to the program. It empowered all teams to share any challenges that they were having with the group in a confidential atmosphere. It was like having 15 founders on your team that are just as passionate about your business as you are.
During the first week of the program my team and I had a disagreement on the strategic direction we needed to take the company. My business partners decided to change the business model back to a traditional property management company. At this point they were not a good fit for Project Skyway and left the program. I am very passionate about technology and did not have a high level of interest in being an IT guy for a property management company. I decided that I would no longer participate with the founders of that company. Completely unexpected, Cem and Casey gave me the opportunity to move forward with Project Skyway as a founder of a new company. I accepted their offer and started from scratch.
CribFrog was born! This was a very exciting change of direction for me. I lost 2 cofounders but I felt as if I could move faster on things. It was much easier to make decisions and execute. If I needed advice or someone to bounce an idea off I had an entire arsenal of Captains, Gurus, and other Skywalkers. My biggest challenge at this point was limited time needed to execute.
Each Monday after our round table meetings with the other Skywalkers we would meet with Captains as a group. During our meetings, each team would introduce themselves and their business. The Captain would speak about their successes and would then meet each team one on one. During these one on ones each Captain would take a different approach on what needed to be tweaked to make my business model successful in their eyes. Not only did I gain valuable insight for my business, I also learned many valuable things from these people. On many different occasions I would reference my experience during Project Skyway as “Working on my MBA.”
As the session moved forward and the Skywalker teams made progress on their businesses, our Monday morning meetings evolved into a more intimate discussion with the Captains. Each team would give their quick pitch to the group and the Captain(s) would ask questions and provide their feedback for 10 – 15 minutes per company. This was highly effective because each session was a new mix of very sharp minds working on my business model. It was also the perfect environment to craft and practice my quick pitch.
Every Thursday all the Skywalker companies would get together for a family dinner. The dinners were more casual however we would still invite Captains in to chat with us. Dinners were a good way follow up on the week’s progress and chat about any challenges that we were having. I really looked forward to the dinners because it was a good way to get to know the other Skywalkers, Captains, Cem, and Casey on a more personal level.
I’ve written some code but I’m not an experienced developer. Project Skyway provided a development team for each company. This team consisted of two developers and a project manager located in India. It was a bit of a challenge to learn how to effectively leverage these resources. Once I was able to present CribFrog to the development team in such a way that they completely understood the “what” and the “why” the development process took off like a rocket ship. This is the first time I’ve managed a web development project with an intense amount of back end logic. I now know that it takes twice as long and twice as much money to build the product.
It was early October and demo day was fast approaching. Demo Day was scheduled for the end of October and marked the completion of Project Skyway’s first cycle. Up until this point I had focused more on cultivating my business model and developing my product. I had hardly worked on my story for demo day. I was starting to feel the pressure as some of the other teams already had a story crafted and were practicing their pitch. Over the course of the program I was regularly meeting with Chris Carlson to plan the content of my story. Most of our sessions were recorded so I was able to listen to them and begin building an outline for my pitch. Once the outline was created, Chris and I met to clean it up a bit and start working on the content of the story.
I then started practicing, practicing, and practicing my pitch. I practiced by myself, I practiced in front of other Skywalkers, I practiced in front of Chris, I practiced in front of Cem and Casey, and I practiced in front of my friends. I would say that I ran through my pitch about 30 times, each time tweaking and changing things. One of the biggest problems that I struggled with was speed. I tended to run through my presentation very fast, coming off sloppy and sometimes confusing. With Chris’s help I was able to use certain tactics to slow down and better articulate my sentences. With all this help and practice, Demo Day was a success. I was the third Skywalker to pitch and it went extremely well. When the pitches were complete I had the opportunity to network with some known investors in the Twin Cities. You know that awesome feeling that you get when you’ve completed a very important presentation that you’ve been anticipating for a long time? Well I lived off that high for about a week after that presentation!
Project Skyway introduced me to a whole new world. I’ve experienced what it takes to begin the execution of “a good idea.” I now know what it’s like to be a true entrepreneur, it’s not easy but it feels right. I would like to thank everyone from Minnesota’s technology ecosystem for fostering the success of CribFrog and Project Skyway.
I am continuing to work on CribFrog, the private social network for neighbors. I should have a beta product out by the end of this year. If you have any questions or would like to find out more, feel free to reach out to me or sign up for my mailing list.
Party #1 of Many to Come, June, 2011 @ CoCo
CoCo, coworking & collaborative space is just as the name suggests; a place for entrepreneurs and free-lance professionals to get out of their offices and basements to collaborate with like-minded individuals. Founders; Don Ball, Kyle Coolbroth, Jeff Heegaard, and Roger Heegaard offer 3 floors of collaborative space in their converted warehouse for a monthly membership fee, but also allow permanent workspaces for individuals and groups. CoCo has been a huge player in the growing entrepreneurial ecosystem and has been steadily growing since its start. CoCo has created a great community around entrepreneurial success as it has attracted well known businesses such as The Onion.
More recently CoCo partnered with Project Skyway (Minnesota’s first seed stage tech accelerator program) in an effort to energize the entrepreneurial ecosystem existing in the Twin Cities. As part of their combined effort CoCo will be opening a new location on the 4th floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange Building where they will welcome Project Skyway’s inaugural class of eight startup companies for three months starting in August. A space that once helped build a booming economy in Minnesota as the MGEX trading floor will now provide “campsites” for Minnesota’s most innovative technology companies. The alliance between CoCo and Project Skyway has undoubtedly started a new chapter for the entrepreneurial ecosystem as they transform this 16,000 Square foot historic space into a massive innovation center.
What next? Well, as a team these two entrepreneurial forces have decided to throw a party marking new beginnings, which will be held July 30th at CoCo’s new location. Stay tuned for more details!
MinneBar Spring 2010 Part I from Joel Dahlin on Vimeo.
I’m constantly astounded at how many tech entrepreneurs I meet that are out there cranking away on a service or product but haven’t heard of some of the biggest events in the Twin Cities that should be on their radar.
Let me be clear, tech entrepreneurs:
Nothing will take you from zero to sixty faster than immersing yourself in the right events and hooking up with the right people that will help you in ways you never knew imaginable.
That said, here’s how, in under 10 minutes, you can start finding people just like you. You’re not alone in this world and certainly not if you’re in Minnesota. If you think Minnesota is Siberia and there’s no tech entrepreneurs doing cool things…then you’re dead wrong. You need to step away from your laptop for a bit and get out more.
1. Look at Tech.mn’s calendar every Monday.
Here you’ll find THE master calendar of every event that could possibly be of value for you. On average, there’s about 60 events per month (peaking at far more in May / June) that will be applicable no matter your stage, your role, your space, or how obtuse your social skills are.
Better yet, pump it into your calendar as a feed that you can view on/off with one click.
Best yet, start a meetup that you think the world is dying for and let the Tech.mn folks know. Because this calendar gets mucho views you’ve got yourself an instant promotion vehicle.
2. Use Plancast and follow a few (but not 126) local opinion leaders that do cool things in your space.
You’ll figure out who these people are over time, but you can start with me.
Better yet, pick the categories (“entrepreneurship”) and location you care about and receive notifications for 2 months to get a lay of the land.
Best yet, be the first to list events on there so that you can feel like Robert Scoble at the center of the startup universe.
3. Stay plugged into Minnov8.com.
They’re good at talking about the bigger, once-per-year events before they happen so that if you’ve never heard of it you can catch the deets, usually in one of their podcasts.
Better yet, if you’re too cool for podcasts just grab the RSS feed for their events category.
Best yet, create a brand new event (I’m talking to you Ty) that’s never been done (warning, that’s tough here. MSP has lots of cool events). Minnov8 has a sizeable and passionate audience and they may just talk about you pending you are remarkable, your event is remarkable, or if you’re simply such a lunatic they’ll talk about you just because of your wtf factor.
Your ten minutes is up. Don’t know a single soul here in the area? Irrelevant, I didn’t either 13 months ago, but I’m happy to be your first. Too busy with your day job? Not good enough, there’s too many evening events. Not a good networker? Get real, we’re talking tech events here! Extroverts are outnumbered, so you’re in good company. The expectations aren’t high. Email/message/tweet the organizer beforehand, explain why you’re coming, and ask them if they would be willing to introduce you to a Rails developer / social media person / good startup laywer / whatever. Your success rate will be 100%.
One last enticement to get you into the loop and into the startup community: Memorize my picture and approach me anytime at an event. If you mention that you read this blog post I’ll automatically carve out 10 minutes for you with my undivided attention no matter how socially bogged down I am at the event. Happy to be of assistance.
Hope to meet you soon, playa!
The startup incubator of 10 years ago was about as natural as alien incubators.
In 1996 a skinny, hyperactive, successful tech geek named Bill Gross started IdeaLab in Pasadena, CA. He dubbed it an “incubator” and, since he was already a successful and rich entrepreneur, he easily attracted talent and capital so that he could “incubate” game-changing technologies. It turns out Bill was on to something big, as most of us have used one of his online companies at least once in our life. They’re tough to avoid — as there were simply so many of them and they all grew large and grew fast.
50 startups and a few years later everyone dubbed Gross a genius (at least until the dot-com bubble burst). His company had incubated blockbuster successes like CitySearch, NetZero, and Commission Junction. From 1998-2000, business people and governments wanted to do the same. “Business Incubator” became a buzz word that economic development folks in state and county governments threw around with urgency. I’m confident over 5,000 “strategic plans” jacked out on long Powerpoints included the word “incubator”. Thus was born the startup incubator, the sure-fire program that would take the billion dollar ideas and help bring them to reality just like Gross did. And keep them local.
Except it didn’t work.
Gross proved to be an outlier. From 1997 to 2001 incubators started up all across the country and failed en masse. Many were private attempts, usually financiers or consultants, but a vast majority were government-run attempts to foster job creation and keep the companies from moving to Silicon Valley or Boston, something most tech startups from 1997-2001 did almost without hesitation.* At one point my home state of Minnesota had 28 “incubators” alone.
So how could the incubator model fail? After all, they provided space to work in, often free or cheap for as long as the young company needed, and made accessible to them resources like PR agencies, consultants, and lawyers. What more does a startup need?
Advice and money, in that order. And lots of it. Startups need to be drowning in it. Because if startups don’t know what they don’t know then it’s naive to think that an incubator that provides office space and a passive mix of technical advisors is sufficient. Hindsight and Paul Graham have proven that. It’s hardly even disputed anymore in startup circles.
Fast forward to today. Almost all of Minnesota’s (and the country’s) public sector incubators either have a horrific or an unknown ROI. You certainly won’t find any making their numbers public. The startup marketplace has evolved and left incubators in the dust. Incubators are dinosaurs, a relic of a bygone era that had good intentions but a flawed formula. The concept is largely extinct, and the name “incubator” should be too.
Today we have accelerators.
ProjectSkyway, Minnesota’s first accelerator which I’m working hard to help make awesome, calls itself a “seed-stage technology startup accelerator”. It’s a mouthful, but it’s accurate on every point. We’re nothing like an incubator because:
- Incubators focused on cheap office space. Project Skyway does hook startups up with a co-working space, but it’s a tiny part of what it provides. There’s easily 10 ways it will add more value than just providing access to meeting rooms, free wifi, and couches.
- Mentoring was never a core part of what incubators did. It was sparse, optional, and not emphasized. Project Skyway’s 3 month program is inundated with mentors who are rock stars at what they do. Startups in the program will learn more in these 3 months about launching and running shit then they have their entire lives.
- We flat out don’t incubate. After 3 months most startups will leave our nest and go to the next level. Raise money, hire more ninjas, and do it all wherever they think is the best place to do it. It’s silly to make a startup do something so high risk like start a company in a geographical location that they don’t feel gives them the best chance of success. If they need to go back home to Atlanta or Madison or Montreal because that’s where their network is best then so be it. Project Skyway and its community will continue to help them every step of the way.
Welcome to Minnesota’s first accelerator program, everybody. The minute you call it an incubator is the moment I’ll ask you if you’ve been to the five-and-dime store lately to buy some YooHoo. Incubators are dead. It’s not just semantic, it’s functional.
*case in point: Commission Junction (which would now be worth several billion dollars had it not been absorbed into ValueClick) got its start in St. Paul but moved to CA by year 2 to recruit qualified engineers and raise wheelbarrows of VC cash.
The White House announced today their big push to help startups start up and Cem Erdem, our fearless leader, was invited to be on hand for the ceremony in D.C.
Although much of it is still vague political-speak, here’s some points worth taking away:
- Our favorite “2000 free minutes” pioneer Steve Case has been recruited by the president to be the face of the StartUP America Partnership. He just retired his entrepreneur hat here.
- TechStars is getting on the bus, creating a cartel of accelerator programs that can work together although it’s not clear what it has to do with StartUP America or how they’re benefiting from creating a network of charter members. ProjectSkyway is cooking up some big plans as well that jives with what StartUp America is trying to promote which is getting private entities more involved in the startup game (rather than government).
- Dan Primack from PE Hub and Fortune writes, “Startup America is focused on the right kind of entrepreneurs: Those with the potential to scale.” Manufacturing has been politically popular for 2 decades but a makes no sense for America. Glad their heads are out of the sand on this one.
- IBM is in for $150m for 2011 and Intel in for $200m to “Promote growth in emerging technologies”. They don’t say if it’s new money so it’s most likely business as usual for these two giants who both do a lot of investing and partnerships with smaller tech companies anyways. Intel has one of the more active VC arms called Intel Capital of any corporation. Other tech companies are issuing press releases as well although there’s no firm commitments from any that it will lead to anything new. However, now at least they’re on the hook to keep up the investment /acquisition / biz dev pace.
- The SBA can’t really convince banks to crank out more loans but they can create funds to incentivize private funds to dole out more investments. With that, the SBA is creating a $1B fund to match 2:1 investments that go to companies in underserved communities as well as a $1B fund to match investments 1:1 to high growth companies trying to raise their series A, commonly agreed to be the toughest round to raise.
- Might we see capital gains disappear altogether from early stage investments? A push to make any investments until Jan 2012 free of capital gains whenever exit occurs is part of this new iniatitive. That’s not an insigificant carrot.
- NAACE, the National Association of Community College Entrepreneurship announced that they are rolling out 10 virtual incubators at 2-year colleges in 10 states as an experiment. Cem Erdem, the founder of Project Skyway, Minnesota’s first early stage tech accelerator, happens to sit on the board of NACCE so there’s a good bet they’ll be quite data driven. If you’re in the community and technical college sphere then watch this carefully.
Cem Erdem with Jumpstart CEO, Ray T. Leach and Board Chairperson, Doug Weintraub
Stay tuned, we hope to share more details about what this actually all means for you in coming days.
- Casey Allen
Project Skyway Champion
In the recent hit movie “Social Network,” Justin Timberlake’s character (Sean Parker) uttered the now classic line, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”
While there is nothing wrong with making a billion dollars…and this line fits perfectly with the scene in the movie…the reality is most entrepreneurs will be lucky (and probably quite happy) if they ever make a million dollars, especially with the first company they start.
Yet the media loves to write about the 20 something college dropout that raised millions (or billions) of dollars to fund the latest tech start-up. It is like business porn. It is almost as if dropping out of college became a requirement to receive seed funding.
What kind of values are we promoting to the young people in our society when we always depict the business world as a get-rich-quick-scheme? What happens to the 99% of people who go into the business world and realize the people they read about in the media or see in movies are as rare as lottery winners?
The reality is the vast majority of all entrepreneurs build their fortunes through long and hard work, and often after experiencing quite a bit of failure along the way.
There is a myth that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive and from the competitive pressures of a market society. Innovation doesn’t come just from giving people monetary incentives. It comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect. Innovation comes from passionate and connected groups of people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they are more like eco systems and networks that travel in clusters.
Software people do it all the time. They share ideas, what works, what doesn’t, etc., and then together they build it because they want to, not because they have to. They love it and get energy from collaborating.
Much like the concept of open source software development, that’s what we’re doing at Project Skyway. We are not only connecting entrepreneurs with business leaders, mentors, advisors, and investors, but we are connecting entrepreneurs with each other and being open about our process.
The most important aspect of Project Skyway will be the mentorship and community we are building. During their infancy, businesses are fragile, and the failure rate is high. All entrepreneurs starting businesses will hit many walls at the beginning. This is why it is important for entrepreneurs to have access to mentors, as well as a community of entrepreneurs, to help them when they hit a wall.
It has been a little over two months since Cem Erdem outlined his vision for launching the first tech accelerator program here in Minnesota called Project Skyway. Since then the Twin Cities Startup Community has come together with overwhelming support and passion to help make Cem’s vision a reality.
While many of the details are still being hammered out—and we fully admit we are making much of it up as we go along— here is what we can tell you so far:
- The first class will consist of 10 companies. Unlike many of the other accelerator models out there (Y-Combinator, TechStars, etc.) knowing how to write your own code will not be a requirement.
- The focus of the first class will likely be on SaaS companies serving the B2B market either in B2B or in B2C with no specific preference or focus.
- The program will be open to entrepreneurs across the nation.
- Applications for the first class will begin in April, 2011.
- The innovation center will open in August, 2011.
- The first class will last three months. We have decided on this length for now, as we want to err on the side of the first class being too short vs. too long. But we promise it will be an intense three months for all our participants.
- Many of the companies that go through Project Skyway will not necessarily need a large amount of seed money in order to succeed, but for those that do there will be a demo day at the end of the three months to attract additional investors.
- Project Skyway needs strong mentors to give the program more credibility. We are building a database of strong mentors, advisors and speakers for the first class and beyond. If you’re interested in being a mentor please sign up for our e-newsletter or email us at join@projectskyway.com.
The Project Skyway community connects entrepreneurs to other entrepreneurs, mentors, advisors and resources and is helping to build a strong startup community here in Minnesota. Many of those currently involved (Casey Allen, Chris Carlson, Darren Cox, Rory Groves, Gary Jedynak, Lois Josefson, Erika Lyremark, Marshall O’Brien, Jeff Pesek, Paul Taylor, Sarah Young) have already experienced this.
We welcome your suggestions and would love to have you participate in Project Skyway. If you want to learn more, please fill out the form on the website or send us a note at join@projectskyway.com.
Despite the lamenting by some on the lack of a startup community here in the Twin Cities, events such as Startup Weekend being held this weekend (Nov. 19-21) prove otherwise.
This is the second Startup Weekend to be held in the Twin Cities in the past few months. Minnesota startups like Qonqr,Rock Your Block, Heavy Analytics, Locate My Deal and others originated from the first Startup Weekend Twin Cities held in September.
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. It is an amazing opportunity to connect with other passionate and skilled individuals, and perhaps even find a co-founder or two to transform your idea into reality.
Augusoft President and CEO Cem Erdem will be a judge at this weekend’s event, and will also share his vision for Project Skyway.
We are excited to see who will be amongst Minnesota’s next class of Startup Weekend grads.
Final Details for Startup Weekend Twin Cities 2 at U of M Carlson School of Management Nov 19-21 can be found here.
