DARE, DO!
Jun 03
Top Women in Tech in Europe.
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I’m often asked who the top women in entrepreneurship are. Here’s a list put together by The Next Web and Girls in Tech on the top women in tech, many of these are also entrepreneurs (about half).
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Veerle Pieters, Duoh !
Natasha Friis-Saxberg, Gignal
Tine Thygesen, Everplaces
Caitlin Winner, Amen
Claudia Helming, DaWanda
Verena Delius, Young Internet
Julana Chondrasch, Fashionism
Ann Marisa Freese, Pure Equity
Lydia Benko, Corporate Finance Partners
Paula Marttila, Startup guru and mentor
Verena Delius, Goodbeans/Panfu
Constanze Buchheim, i-Potentials
Stephanie Kaiser, Wooga
Catherine Barba, Cashstore.fr
Celine Lazorthes, Leetchi
Anne Sophie Pastel, Aufeminin.com
Marie Ekeland, Elaia Partners
Claire Houry, Ventech
Robin Chase, Zipcar/BuzzCar
Amelie Faure, entrepreneur and startup mentor
Lara Rouyes, Dealissime
Tiina Zilliacus, Gajarti Studios
Ela Madej, Applicake/FutureSimple/Credictive
Agata Mazur, Applicake/FutureSimple
Ola Sitarska, MyGuidie
Liz Fleming, Venture Lab
Raquel Iglesias, Totfan
Sandra Mesonero, Uniccos
Crsitina Galan, BitCarrier
Sylvia Diaz-Montenegro, Leelo
Barbara Labate, Risparmiosuper
Diana Saraceni, 360 Capital Partners
Juliette Bellavita, tipsandtrip.com
Viktorija Trimbel, Quantas Capital
Monika Garbaciauskaite, Delfi
Irina Anghel, South East European Private Equity and Venture Capital
Demet Mutlu, Trendyol
Kristin Skogen Lund, Telenor
Charlotta Falvin, TAT
Sara Ohlsson, HinnerDu
Elaine Coughlan, Atlantic Bridge
Julie Sinnamon, Enterprise Ireland
Helen Ryan, Creganna Tactx Medical
Martina Kolesnik, Oktogo
Elena Masolova, Pixonic
Alisa Chumachenko, Game Insight
Linda Summers, Skype
Moran Bar, VentureGeeks
Helena Chari, TSN ICAP
Baiba Kaskina, CERT/SigmaNet
Marina Tognetti, Myngle
Christine Karman, Stratix
Colette Ballou, Ballou PR
Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital
Jessica Powell, Badoo
Joanna Shields, Facebook
Judith Clegg, Glasshouse
Kathryn Parsons, Decoded
Nathalie Massenet, Net-a-porter
Rachel Bremer, Twitter
Reshma Sohoni, Seedcamp
Sherry Coutu, entrepreneur and investor
Wendy Tan White, Moonfruit
Bindi Karia, Microsoft
Clare Reddington, iShed
Deborah Rippol, Startup Weekend
Elizabeth Varley, TechHub
Jude Ower, Playmob
Martha Lane Fox, Lastminute
Sonali De Rycker, Accel Partners
Simone Brummelhuis, Astia/TheNextWomen
Nathalie Gaveau, Shopcade
Georgina Atwell, Apple
Tracy Doree, Llustre
Sabine Fillias, Chasson Finance
Jennifer Hicks, Forbes
Olivia Solon, Wired
Jamillah Knowles, The Next Web
Sarah McVittie, Dressipi
Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch
Sofia Barattieri, Motilo
Rebecca Barr, LivingSocial
Erin Noordeloos, NBC Universal
Kresse Wesling, Elvis & Kresse
Sophie Cornish, Notonthehighstreet
Avid Larizadeh, Boticca
Orit Hashay, Brayola
Gali Ross, Razoss
Amit Knaani, ooVoo
Mel Exon, BHH Labs
May 18
MAKE YOUR OWN INFOGRAPHIC
I love infographics! Its a clever, pretty visual way to explain important stastics which would otherwise be drab and boring, let’s face it. Now there are sites popping up so you can do your own infographics, even without design experience. I love that and have had a look at some of the sites. Here a review:
Fastest: Visua.ly
This instantly creates pretty infographics about predetermined topics, mostly related to Twitter hashtags, Twitter users or Facebook accounts. It’s fast and fun. But admittedly not very useful unless you happen to need one of the predetermined topics. To me, it mostly seems like a forum for infographic designers.
Above is a template from Visua.ly
Infogr.am will allow you to build your own infogram using standard elements. Love the concept. However I found it a little hard to get it to do what I was after. But it shows great promise, so I will be back. There are some great people behind it.
This tool worked the best, and it is easy. You select a theme and dive straight into building your infographic. The interface looks a like a stripped-down version of Photoshop or Keynote. It is intuitive and drag-and-drop. The free version allows you to play around with three themes and download as image file. The pro version offers more themes and allows downloads as HTML or raw data.
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Here is one Everplaces just made using Piktochart!
May 08
Running an effective company is all about the right tools to save you time and hassle. Today I wanted to share a good little one called RightSignature which allows you to collect signatures digitally and super easily.
So if you have a company that requires a lot of papers to be signed by external parties or by parties physically present where you are then this could help you.
One of the organisations I support is Venture Cup, who runs startups competitions and events for people in, or on the verge of, their first startup. One of the services they offer is a network of hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and business people give feedback to new teams for free. The people all sign NDAs before they get any startup information and its a huge job to coordinate hundreds of signatures to be requested and collected every year. The last few years they’ve used this digital tool, and I just wanted to recommend it to others with the same challenges.
More info rightsignature.com and venturecup.dk
Apr 27
Apr 26
USE VESTING TO FUTURE-PROOF YOUR STARTUP
Vesting is a function where the shares owned by founders (and employes) only become fully owned after a number of years. It’s to prevent that founder leaves, but still keeps all his shares despite not doing any more work. You could say it helps keeping people on the bus.
I just read an excellent long post about this by Dan Shapiro. Here’s the hightligts:
The structure of vesting: The founders get their stock at the beginning in a big whack, but the company has the right to take it back for a negligible amount of money (the “repurchase agreement”). As time goes on, that right erodes.
Acceleration: In case the company is sold/ you get fired: Acceleration comes in two flavors. Acceleration on change of control (aka single-trigger acceleration) means that if the company is sold, some of your stock vests. Double-trigger acceleration means that if the company is sold AND you’re fired some of your stock vests.
The former is obviously better for the acceleratee, but keep in mind that a deal may be hard to get done if the acquirer knows that all the stock incentives to stick around disappear when the deal closes. Double-trigger, or a mix of single- and double-, is often a nice compromise to keep the company marketable (a few years down the road) while rewarding people for their hard work. For reasons of company lifecycle timing, founders are usually fully vested already by the time a deal happens.
Venture Hacks: 50% to 100% of your unvested shares should accelerate if you are terminated without cause or you resign for good reason.
Cause typically includes willful misconduct, gross negligence, fraudulent conduct, and breaches of agreements with the company. ‘Clashing with the CEO’ is not cause. Good reason typically includes a change in position, a reduction in salary or benefits, or a move to distant location. Full article here
Some suggestions for vesting schedules.
- Use a four-year vesting cycle for founders and employees.
- Put founder vesting in place before you raise money. Investors will be impressed and if your vesting terms are reasonable, they’ll be accepted without argument. Then you have fewer things on the table.
- If there’s a “trial period” then consider a cliff that expires after the trial. Stock is best used for people who are totally committed, so the stock accumulation shouldn’t kick in until the commitment does.
- If there’s a meaningful commitment of resources in advance of the vesting agreement, it’s reasonable to “fast forward” the agreement. For example, if you’ve been working full time for a year before vesting is in place, it’s not unreasonable to start with 1/4 of your stock vested already and put the rest on a 3-year schedule.
- Stock that’s in payment for resources doesn’t need to vest. For example, if the company is split 50/50, but then one founder puts in $100k in exchange for 10%, then the 10% that they get should not vest. Since the value is delivered up front, the stock should be too.
- For founders, accelerate 50% of the remaining unvested stock on change of control (single-trigger), and 100% of the rest double-trigger. This is totally reasonable and fair
- It is generous, but not unreasonable, to consider double-trigger acceleration for some or all of your employees. However, you may cause yourself problems down the road.
- Try to avoid single-trigger acceleration for non-founders. It sure to cause issues during M&A (the acquirer will be worried that everyone vests & leaves after the transaction)
Full article can be read here
Brad Feld, famous entrepreneur and venture capital expert explains further on his blog:
“Unvested stock typically “disappears into the ether” when someone leaves the company. The equity doesn’t get reallocated – rather it gets “reabsorbed” – and everyone (VCs, stock, and option holders) all benefit ratably from the increase in ownership. In the case of founders stock, the unvested stuff just vanishes. In the case of unvested employee options, it usually goes back into the option pool to be reissued to future employees.”
Vesting Calculator. You can find a nice one here by FastIgnite.
Image credits to philter.com.au
Apr 25
GETTING MORE ATTENTION - WHEN IS PR RIGHT FOR YOU?
Should PR be a part of your strategy? and what can you expect to get out of it? Most startups and companies love getting press, here’s some wise words from Colette Ballou, PR guru, about how to go about it:
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“PR is not the thing to rely on to help you drive a commercial goal in a super-short period of time. An article or two may legitimise you over time, but it’s not going to drive the deal”
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“PR takes time, up to 6 months to really gain traction. You can’t just show up with your press release and get coverage – that happens about 5% of the time, and only if it’s really interesting news — a huge fund-raising, a truly breakthrough product or service, or if it ties into current news – that’s why there’s a possibility. But it usually takes months of educating your target press about what you do & it’s value before you can get coverage.
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My tips in dealing with PR agencies:
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1. Know your budget and tell the agency what it is up-front — they can sometimes work with small budgets if you’re not in a rush
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2. However, listen to the agency if they tell you it’s not enough. Sometimes we get creative – we bundle the 4K/month you have for the rest of the year into an amazing 4-month project that gets you tons of coverage. We now that the results will often convince the company to find more budget as we’ve helped them overcome their fears about PR not working. Sometimes we tell you to spend your money on something that will be more effective — SEO/SEM, for example.
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3. Take the time to create an agency brief. To help our prospects, we give them a template of a brief to fill in. If they don’t take the time to fill it out and talk to us, we know the relationship is doomed from the beginning and we pass.
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4. Know that PR takes your time and skill – we can get you the interviews, but if you con’t listen to our training and fumble it, or worse, don’t show up, you won’t get the coverage. This is one of the reasons we don’t accept pay-for-results – we can’t control the entire process.
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5. Approach the agency 2-3 months before you need to start PR
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Apr 19
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Apr 18
HOW FAST CAN YOU GET A MILLION USERS?
For long does it take to get 1m users? Well, for most people it takes forever, as it never happens.
But here’s some numbers on the biggest, fastest (or best at getting PR) ones out there. It’s quite useful if founders doing projections for investors:)
-iPhoto iPad app: 10 days.
-Instagram: 2,5 mth (downloads, not users*)
-Spotify: 5 mth
-Fab: 5 mth
-Dropbox: 7 mth
-Banjo: 9 mth
-Wunderlist: 9 mth
-Facebook: 10 mth
-Path (new one): 12 mth (downloads, not users*)
-Foursquare: 13 mth (downloads, not users*)
-Evernote: 14 mth
-Tumblr: 20 mth
-Pinterest: 20 mth (uniques, not users**)
-Twitter: 24 mth
*Some of the mobile ones have released downloads figures, this is hugely different to users. Rule of thumb, divide in half for users.
**Pinterest is quoted for unique visitors, this is even more different. Hard to say a rule of thumb but probably divide by 10 for users.
Know others? Write them as a comment and I will add to the list. Made it? Let me know and we can get a more varied list than just the big ones.
Infograhics from wunderlist and Banjo
Gadget meets fashion: Emotion-sensing dress.
This is pretty crazy. The Blubelle Dress changes the look instantaneously according to our emotional state and our personality. Wild and beautiful!
The Design group Royal Philips Electronics in Holland has come up with it as a part of their SKIN project, an exploration research into the area known as ‘emotional sensing’.
Not sure how useful. But certainly both fun and beautiful.
Full article from CrunchWear here
Apr 13
STICK TO YOUR VISION - JUST CHANGE STRATEGY
Marcus Pincus recently came out talking about his strategy for building a company. I found it a very worthwhile read, and wanted to share it.
“I’m sometimes called a serial entrepreneur, but that’s only because, before Zynga (ZNGA), I failed to create a sustainable company. After starting two companies in the ’90s, I had a social networking startup, Tribe.net, in 2003.
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One of the things I try to instill at Zynga is to fail fast, look at the data, and move on, and at Tribe I failed to do that. We came up with ideas purely based on intuition, and it could take us three to six months to build it and launch. Those bullets were expensive, and many of them were not on target. Tribe reached the point where the investors literally gave up, resigned from the board, and walked away. It was just me, my team, and a creditor. We ended up selling the company to Cisco (CSCO) and paying back all that debt.
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One thing I learned is that while your vision should never change, you should keep trying different strategies until one works.
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If you can fine-tune your instinct and have confidence in it, then you can keep taking different bites of the apple and keep approaching the problem in different ways until you get it right. I did that with Tribe, pursuing the social opportunity from multiple angles. I invested in Twitter and Facebook and bought a social networking patent in 2004.
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I think failing is the best way to keep you grounded, curious, and humble. Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed. You have a lot of time to think about it.”
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Pincus is the founder and CEO of Zynga. As told to Brad Stone in article. Image from New York Times
Apr 12
THE BEST WAYS TO OUTSOURCE DEVELOPMENT
When you can’t afford, or find, the programmers or designers you need at home, should you then outsource (technically it’s to off-shore) to cheaper countries?
This is a common question among companies. My recent post “Is this the end of hiring from Eastern Europe?” really split the waters, so there are quite clearly many sides to this.
In my opinion outsourcing, or off-sharing, doesn’t work all that well.
Things works best when the team sits together. People need to talk, discuss and listen to each other hundreds of times before they really understand each other if you ask me. Being close makes them more committed, more involved and they will want to put in “what it takes” because of the human relations they have to their colleagues.
But, sometime you dont have a choice but to oursouce. In that case, I have seen two ways that work.
1) Establish a whole team working remotely.
Best option in my opinion, but requires a lot of ressources. Create a whole team in a location where you can get better talent for your budget.
But make sure it’s integrated with your company, basically your CTO needs to be there frequently, at least every 5 weeks, you’ll need constant communications channels between colleagues in different locations (like Skype), and send both teams back and forth frequently so they know each other well, at least twice a year. Make sure your location will suit you long term, it should have at least three tech universities.
2) Hire a team from someone else
Some of the outsourcing companies, like Ciklum, offer you to hire people they have screened on a permanent basis who sit at their premises. This can also work because the programmers only work on your stuff so they are part of your team, understand your product vision and your customers slightly. So, it’s not as integrated as the first option, but much better than the third.
3) What doesn’t work
Hiring a contractor part time to do stuff in another country mostly fails in my experience. It’s not because these people aren’t good, it’s just because it is impossible to communicate perfectly what it is you need. From their side it’s impossible to build (or design) it in a way that integrates perfectly with the rest of the architecture, because they inevitably don’t have the full picture.
It seems like a short cut, in my experience, it is actually quite the opposite, you’ll probably have to redo it and then you lost both the money and the time.
What’s your experience?
Photography
A beautiful sunset time lapse by Tyler van der Hoeven
Apr 09
MARKETING TOOL: KNOW YOUR FOLLOWERS
#KnowYourFollowers is a new tool I just found to see who follows you on Twitter. While this may seem a little pointless and self-absorbed for yourself, it can be very valuable for your company account, which you’re probably using for marketing purposes.
You can try it for free and get basic stats over nationality, city, interests, working status, professions etc. Or you can pay to see more. Apparently Schmap, the makers, use data that your followers have chosen to make public on Twitter (their names, locations, bios etc.)
We all know who we’re trying to reach with marketing and social media, this is a helpful little tool to show you if you’re reaching the right profiles. And to study how that progresses.
Apr 03
HOW TO USE STARTUPWEEKEND TO VALIDATE YOUR STARTUP IDEA
How we used StartupWeekend* to test if Everplaces could work:
Both my co-founder Angie and I have been in startups for some years, and we felt time was right for starting a new company. We have a few ideas in mind and were trying to validate which of them had best potential to get really big. In the end, StartupWeekend was a huge help for us in choosing.
We had both worked on other peoples ideas at previous StartupWeekends, Angie as a designer and me as commercial mind. So we decided to take one of our ideas, Everplaces, to the Startup Weekend coming up to see the response.
We spend some hours coming up with an interesting pitch (which may have included pictures of scantily clad girls in a bar:). And it worked! A full 18 people wanted to spend the weekend helping us, so the first task was how to organize that many people in a productive way. Coincidentally, that ended up being a major win, because it meant we needed managers and Chris Kaalund, a programmer from Århus we only knew superficially, became head of the front end team. He later later joined us as the third cofounder and runs the dev team today.
The first concept of Everplaces was that you could snap a picture of interesting bars, art, shops and other stuff you walk by and it should be stored on your mobile so you could find it later. It is still a part of the concept today, however now it’s much larger and you can add places from many other sources like location based services, directly websites, from friends etc. We also added the ability to follow other peoples places according to shared interests as we believe strongly in social discovery through the interest graph. So you can almost say it started like Evernote for locations and ended up as Pinterest for places.
Because we had a both a commercial team, a social media team, a front end team, a back end team and a mobile team we got really far. For example, we did a lot of the research that set the of the direction of product already in that weekend. We ended up producing a functional mobile app, a connected website, found our name and got the domain everplaces.com, the Facebook vanity URL, the twitter handle @everplaces, made promotional video and a basic website where people could sign up. So pretty amazing progress in 56 hours. We still remember everyone very fondly who was there that weekend, they were amazing every last one of them.
The weekend proved we could attract talented people to work on the concept, that there was huge business potential, that is was technically possible and when we then received the first investor call and was approached by a major tech blog already the week after, we knew we had to go with it. Today Everplaces has users in 72 countries and is growing extremely fast.
Team
Image is of the full team just before live demo on day three. Many from our great team are deeply engaged in the startup scene and we feel very privileged they helped us take off.
Ciprian of WebCrumbz
Lasse Chor of Cast.li
Casper Gorm of Planely
Anders Balmer
Luis Pachego
Brian Gjerstrup of StartupSteps
Thor Fridriksson of Pumodo
Angelica Vargas of Everplaces
Nick Bruun of 23
Chris Kaalund of Everplaces
Brian Kyed of MovingMonday
Tine Thygesen of Everplaces
Huseyin Tasbent
Jonas Åradsson of Boliga
Christian Erfurt-Hansen of YEAD
Handan Yilran of Venture Cup
Andrew Curthoys
I wrote this post on request of StartupWeekend.org so you can see the post there too
*What’s StartupWeekend?
A concept running all over the world where people interested in creating products meet for a weekend, gather into teams and try to create something real in 56 hours. It’s great to get a taste of startup, whether your a developer, designer or commercial person. We highly recommend it, also if you have no intention of ever doing a startup as you learn a lot.
