Exec's brutally honest pitch to potential investors I wish I had sent
Exeq, the New York-based startup founded by four New York City college drop-outs, has taken an
unorthodox approach to pitching potential investors. In this email, Exeq CEO Derek Brown, a former engineer at LinkedIn and Addepar, explains the values of his startup, which wants to change the way millennials think about spending their money. The emphasis is mine.
"At Exeq, we don’t have everything together. We don’t know the future for our product and platform. We don’t know or control the external circumstances around our company."
The point of the app is to help people make more efficient decisions about their spending. It does so by notifying users when slight changes to how they spend can be made. For instance, the app might alert a person who frequents a coffee shop on their way to work that there is a more affordable alternative nearby. The app, which is only available in New York City to iPhone users, has 6,000 users. But, like most startups, their sights are set higher.
"By combining financial and lifestyle data, we’re able to build a consumer product that enables consumer behavior…responsibly," Brown wrote in the email.
And also this:
"Because you have a fiduciary duty to your LPs to make the best investments you can. We’d fall in that category. ;) On a more serious note, the answer’s simple: if you don’t see the shape of the world in the way that we’ve described above, then you shouldn’t invest in us."
I have been working on startups for 10+ years now, with no outside help. I created
Bighow in 2007, a news publishing platform for curating news and listings, before Huffington Post and others took it mainstream. I wrote about my startup journeys in 2006, '
Startup is hard in Delhi'.
I just launched
Truho, multipurpose publishing / payments, but I am hesitant to knock on investors's doors. I have no IIT/IIM degree. I have entered the fast-passing 40s. So I am hesitant.
A man without the pedigree of a degree.
But having seen Exec CEO's email to prospective investors, I wish I could send a similar kind to investors, but then I think what use would it be, other than sheer linkbait.
Labels: pitch email, startup
How to disrupt any industry, Version 2.0
This post could be titled "
How to disrupt list-type articles and really help the user". Jason Baptiste writes "
9 Ways To Disrupt And "Hipmunk" An Industry". It is a good article. Jason always writes well. But it is in danger of being just another generic list article. So, I went ahead, rearranged the list, put in some categories, and now I can understand what I have to do with my next startup. The modified list in summary:
A. The Industry:
1. Find Something Tied To A Process That Consistently Sucks
2. Make Unsexy Businesses Sexy
3. Look For An Industry That Rarely Changes
B. The Service:
4. Simple And Clean Interfaces Come First
5. Deliver Great Support
C. The Users:
6. Focus On Power Users
7. Work Towards Building Fanatics
D. The Competition:
8. Call Out Your Competitor (and wage war)
9. Be Disruptive, But Respectful
Labels: list, startup, tip
The enduring wisdom of Mahesh Murthy
Some entrepreneurs are born writers. Good writers. Mahesh Murthy is one such good writer/entrepreneur. I used to read his articles in Businessworld running in 2000 and abouts. Good writeups. Good inspiration. Good advice laced with honest, punchy strains. I saved some cuttings. They were that good.
Thus, one is glad to read him writing that kind of writing again. In the Wall Street Journal, he writes a piece on
the value of being an entrepreneur and it gives me heart and makes me willing to go on with
Bighow.
Mahesh writes,
(Why I am an entrepreneur)...there are perhaps a few million types of jobs out there. And there are seven billion of us. So there’s obviously a lot of us who are not in jobs tailor-made for us. Look around you – know anyone who isn’t deliriously happy in their current job? Know anyone who is?
The rest of us just can’t find a job that suits us. And we really don’t like ‘adjusting’. So we make a job for ourselves. Where we like our bosses - ourselves, the business - our own, the working hours – whenever we feel like, and the location – wherever we are. We don’t do it to take a risk – we do it to be safe.
And the world calls us entrepreneurs, heroes of some sort. But really, we’re just folks who didn’t find a job that suited us well enough.
.
Amen.
RelatedStartup is hard in New DelhiLabels: bighow, startup
BarCampDelhi3: random thoughts on Bighow
The latest edition of Bar Camp in Delhi will be held on December 8, 2007, and promises to bring together a disparate collection of this Capital City’s inquisitive tech professionals, ambitious startup entrepreneurs, intrepid and nimble-footed investors, gawky media persons and enthusiastic bloggers.
As usual, there will be a number of exciting sessions and interesting people and I shall try my best to make it there. It is interesting that the day-long event is being held in Noida, and not in Delhi and that gives me an opportunity to come back to some salient features of the startup environment in this city, an possible in this country as whole:
1. Startup is still hard in DelhiNot much has changed since I wrote this
post in 2006. Php programmers are still hard to come by if you are short oj funds. Garage startup is a misnomer here and most probably means an air-conditioned basement in any one of Delhi’s tony neighborhoods. Sweat equity amounts to zilch in a community where job and career pressures envelop everything in a foreboding shroud.
Maybe, I will go to the event and shout
‘Php Pehelwaans Wanted!!!’ till someone listens.
2. VC is tough, angels are tougherThe reality is investors are more interested in Indian startups prefer them to be in fields other than internet – real estate, green technologies, micro finance, retail…
It doesn’t help that many Indian startups are
me-too offerings.
The first VCs who responded to my email about supporting my startup
Bighow.com (concept site is already up, thanks to a supportive programmer), about whom I had read much in the media, responded after a while and they sounded like they did not read the executive summaries, introductions etc. and recited the tired spiel about internet not being widespread in India, when I prefaced the email with something like
‘Bighow.com: world’s first community publishing tool (aggregator cum publisher)'.
As for angels, don’t get your hopes up. There are so-called angel networks which are actually fronts for well-off businessmen and it takes a while before your documents reaches to the intended person and by the looks of it, the decision is based on
1. community think and
2. numbers – they asked me for 3 year income statement projections and having supplied the basic numbers, all I have to do now is to make some fantastic adsense–based projections, with absurd CPM rates, among other things.
Lest this post turns into rants from a disillusioned entrepreneur, let me quickly give you the important links about BarCampDelhi3. I hope you benefit from this useful event.
Links and addressesThe BarCamp Delhi Wiki (where you can log in for free, enter your details, register etc.)
http://barcamp.org/BarCampDelhi3
Location of BarCampDelhi3Impetus Technologies (Direction on Google Maps)
D-39/40, Sector - 59, NOIDA
Bar Camp Delhi Mailing Listhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/delhi_barcamp/
Labels: barcamp, bighow, community, india, startup
Bighow beeps in
On October 21, I quietly launched my new startup
Bighow.com. Bighow.com is based on a simple premise:
what if there was one web service where you could share links, like digg.com or del.icio.us and could also publish original items, like a blog post? And wouldn't it be sweet if you could do that in not only news, but 21 others topics as well?I like to call Bighow.com an
all-in-one Community Publishing System (COPS, anyone? :-))
With
Bighow, I have tried to do something of a structured database. As a result, there are some preset categories and sub categories when you submit your items. However, we have also incorporated tagging, thus ensuring a two-level categorization - the best of structured data and folksonomy.
Last year, when I left a comfortable job to pursue my dreams, like most startups before me, I faced challenges and I even wrote about it back then in a post titled
Startup is hard in New Delhi.
Much of what I wrote is still valid. But developing Bighow has been the most exciting educational journey in my professional life so far.
We have tried to do something FUN with the
'Craigslist+Google Base+Digg/Del.icio.us' approach. Bighow is nothing great to look at and I think we have only archived 10% of what I hope to achieve with Bighow.com. Interesting things are in the works - Microformats, APIs, XML/Republishing, Edgeio type deportalization...
I started with $8000 in my bank and in fact, Joydeep who developed Bighow learnt php while we started coding.
Here are the topics that Bighow covers:
News - news, reviews, events, announcements, forums, community, polls
Classifieds - jobs, wanted, services, for sale, products, travel, vehicles, housing, vacation rentals, matrimonials, business for sale, coupons and
Listings - resume, personals and business profiles
I am particularly excited about
Bighow Polls (http://bighow.com/poll) and about we have tried to display information submitted information across Countries, cities, localities and groups. Bighow has RSS feeds for everything, including
advanced search. Even the Classifieds section has detailed flagging and comments.
I am taking it slow with Bighow and partly the reason is that Bighow is hosted on a shared server, my busted bank account partly the reason.
Bighow is about a new news foundation and I hope we don't get caught up in the
Web 2.0 is dying rant cycle. In fact, I agree with PR Guru Steve Rubel's suggestion to
question conventional web wisdom and I am looking forward to building a small news team to bolster, moderate and seed Bighow and and do interesting things with Bighow on a local basis.
I hope Bighow plays an important role in the news business of tomorrow and while I work at raising some funds to promote Bighow, build a team, I would like to hear what you think about Bighow, what I should do with it and so on...
Labels: advertising. online advertising, bighow, startup
Niche search 2.0: Startup Search, Techcrunch database and other possibilities
While covering
StartUp Search, I mentioned that niche searches could achieve what broad human-search services couldn’t do.
I forgot to mention the soon-to-be launched Techcruch Database, an excellent database of detailed information about Tech startups, covering products, people, financials and more…
Techcrunch database can do it because it has a huge, almost unparalleled database of write-ups on Web 2.0 startups.
Next upI envision
Engadget and
Gizmodo do something with Gadget databases, aggregating reviews, ratings, and news – these sites are in a position to channel their hue user base towards additional services.
Also up: Game database from Joystiq, Environmental Friendly product database from Treehugger…
Interesting possibilities. indeed.
Example of a Techcrunch Database entry can be found
here.
Labels: search, startup, techcrunch
Startup Search: what Mahalo couldn’t do?
While
Mahalo is in the consumer search space,
Startup Search was
launched to help people track minute detail about any startup online.
Niall Kennedy describes the Startup Search model as
Directory cum Analytics tool.Startup Search goes one up on the spammy
About us service tracking online startups, their offerings (products & services), management and employees, investors, success of each offering – aggregating all publicly available data including search and page view metrics.
It seems to delver all that a niche service needs.
If only Mahalo had started focusing on a niche –
for example, a human-powered search for all celeb scandals.Labels: search, startup, web 2.0
Google’s biggest fear: Googlers
Consider this the sequel to my earlier post about
10 things that ex-Googlers could do.
Sometime back, CNN Money carried out a story about many Google employees deciding to sell their Google options, cashing out while the going was good.
Robert Cringely writes about the dangers (For Google) of Google’s much-hyped
20% time – the freedom given to Google’s employees to spend 20% of their time on working on new ideas.
Robert says out of 4000 or more probable new ideas that the Googlers come up with, in the end Google can’t take more than 10 new projects in a year, if it has to really make a good effort at successful execution.
Then there is the hurting reality, plaguing many Googlers that their company is still a one trick pony –
Search Giant to Ad Giant. How many more innovations still left in the giant?
What about the discarded 3990 (or more, or less) discarded ideas?
Let is put aside the pride of those bright PHDs, MBAs, for a while.
How long are Googlers going to be satisfied frolicking in the cool Googleplex ( great PR point) and bragging to others they aced 20 interview sessions (PR point#2) before they got in?
Someday I would like to learn in detail what exactly those thousands of the
‘nerd and the nerdiest’ do at Google, Microsoft or Yahoo?
What does that entire IQ go into? However, that is another story, to be explored another time.
Robert talks about the possibility of
frustrated Googlers, whose ideas have been discarded, leaving the company, selling their options and investing the money into a startup centered on their idea.
The possibility that their startup might be bought up by a giant, including Google, is full of delicious ironies, indeed.
Googlers leaving Google to start their own is not a fantasy.
Someday, business professors might call the phenomenon,
‘Creative Destruction, Google Style’.
Or
'How the Giant was beaten by his own'.One of these companies might beat Google at their own, coming up with the
next disruptive innovation to beat.
Labels: google, innovation, startup
