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
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.
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.
Accelerator Programs such as Y-Combinator (Silicon Valley) and TechStars (Boston, Boulder, NY, Seattle) have in many ways taken on the role of VC firms to help mentor emerging tech companies develop their product, create a business plan and connect them with investors to provide necessary seed funding.
While Y-Combinator and TechStars are the two best known programs out there today, there are roughly 50 to 75 tech accelerator programs now throughout North America and Europe, with two recently just starting in Chicago (Excelerate & Lightbank). These include programs such as AlphaLab (Pittsburg), BoomStartUp (Utah), Bootup Labs (Vancouver), DreamIt (Philadelphia), The Founder Institute (Silicon Valley and several other cities now), Seedcamp (London/Europe), and SeedRocket (Spain).
To date there has been no such program like this to emerge in the Twin Cities or Minnesota. We at Project Skyway not only believe this region can use something like this, but we can do it better and in a way that is uniquely Minnesotan.
How will Project Skyway be different?
For one, we intend to invest in people, not just ideas. We are seeking people with dedication and a passion for excellence. What does this mean? Here are some examples of philosophies that we think will work well in Project Skyway:
We are not interested in attracting people that adhere to the philosophy of “getting rich quick,” or feeding into the “Business Porn” that loves to report about the latest 20 something that drops out of school and strikes it rich by raising a couple of million dollars in three months. This is the equivalent of winning the lottery. While we are not opposed to making money or profits, we believe in teaching entrepreneurs the value of hard work and building companies that will last a long time. We are looking for entrepreneurs with the passion, persistence and drive to make it happen, no matter how long it takes.
We have also noticed that many of the accelerator programs out there mainly cater to computer coders. Project Skyway is not after coders and will not be a “code fest.” Instead we will provide entrepreneurs with access to developers (if needed) that can help them achieve their vision in an affordable way, much the same way a “fab lab” provides the tools for entrepreneurs to build almost anything they like.
Finally, raising VC money will be an option, but will not be required. After going through the Project Skyway program, graduates may continue on and raise VC funding if they so choose. However, raising a large amount of funding will not be the sole goal of our program, and may not even be required if the business can become profitable on its own.
While many of the details of Project Skyway are still coming together, we feel it is important to differentiate ourselves from the many accelerator programs out there today. We welcome all comments and feedback on our vision.