Feel the Boot

I judged a pitch competition last night and the other judges and I, all noticed something about most of the pitches. They were going way too fast. The founders were just tearing through the material and leaving us baffled about what it was they were talking about. So I was inspired to create a quick episode talking about this issue, unpacking why it happens so often, and some ways to try to avoid the problem yourselfRead the whole blog here: https://ftb.bz/52BWatch the video: https://ftb.bz/52VJoin Feel the Boot free for access to my office hours: https://ftb.bz/joinIt is not hard to guess why the founders were going so fast through their material. They only had three minutes to pitch their company, and so much they wanted to say about it. They felt that they had to rush to get through all of the things they thought we'd need to hear. And therein lies the problem. The presentations ended up being like a fire hose of completely undifferentiated words. So, the paradox is that you need to say a lot less. And the less time you have, the more rigorous you need to be about what you cut out. There is no way that you're going to say everything significant about your company. It's just, it's not possible. You're going to need to pick and choose. So say less, really edit down the information. Even if you know you need to provide a piece of information, you may be able to go through it quickly. Some points will only take a couple of seconds, then pause for it to be received, then move on. And the pause matters. Let things sink in. When I listened to the pitches, my inability to understand the key elements of their business was driving me insane. They spent two seconds on one topic, and as I was trying to work out what they meant, they were on to talking about the next topic. Because I was still thinking about the previous point that I thought might be important, now I've missed the following two things, and I'm trying to scramble to keep up. Not good.So take a breath, slow it down. It was funny to read the chat window during the pitch competition. The founders were talking to each other about how they were getting out of breath. They literally forgot to take breaths, and it showed. The key here is just to own your time, which also exudes confidence. If you slow down what you're saying, you're master of your space and time. You show that you know the points you want to make. You're not just trying to fill the time available, but rather convey exactly and only the information that you want to share. You pause to allow them to understand that, and then you move on. It shows that you are in control of the situation.We know that investors make a lot of their decisions based on the CEO. To a great extent, the job of a CEO is to communicate. Demonstrating that you're a strong communicator is essential. All this is a very long way of saying, "In your pitch, take your time, slow down, say less."Till next time, ciao

What are trademarks, patents, copyrights, and trade secrets, and how should you use them in your startup? Investors frequently pepper startups with questions about their intellectual property and how well it is protected. Most founders know very little about this somewhat arcane and complex topic. Fortunately, with a bit of information, you can start making the right decisions for your business and speaking intelligently about the issue with angels and VCs.I brought in Adam Philipp to get you up to speed on the basics and some initial strategies. Adam is the founder of the IP law firm AEON Law, a patent attorney, and has been practicing IP law for over 25 years. If you have any questions or would like us to go deeper on some topic, please let me know in the comments. I am sure Adam would be happy to come back for another episode. You can find Adam’s law firm at aeonlaw.com and follow him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamphilipp/ and @AdamPhilipp on ClubHouse where he can be found offering the occasional “Patents and IP Law AMA.” Read the blog version: https://ftb.bz/51BWatch the interview: https://ftb.bz/51VJoin Feel the Boot: https://ftb.bz/joinCheck out our community of founders: https://ftb.bz/allianceIn this interview we covered:1:37 What is intellectual property?5:08 What should founders do early on to protect their intellectual property?10:05 What are the elements of a patent?14:22 How can a founder talk safely to investors without an NDA?19:54 When should you file your patents?24:27 Which provisional patents are worth converting to full patents?27:32 How do you enforce patents?34:30 How should startups use copyright?42:10 Patents vs. Trade Secrets

I am concerned about a lot of the startup advice I see out on the internet. Much of the advice is sound, and almost all is well-intentioned, but I think that a significant fraction is problematic. The troubling advice is typically in the form of a recipe or template for success. It tells founders that if they take specific actions, follow a given pattern, or use a particular pitch deck, they will succeed. I often see this guidance in interviews with extremely successful founders. The implication is that if you do the same things they did, you will have a similar outcome.I worry that these kinds of guidance are too rigid and replace thinking with mimicking. Startups are not like snowflakes; they are far more diverse. Tips that apply to one company may be inappropriate or harmful to another. I suspect that this kind of advice often leads founders into cargo cult thinking. Since many of you might be unfamiliar with cargo cults, I will take a quick detour to explain them before discussing how the concept applies to startups.Read this as a blog: https://ftb.bz/50BWatch the Video: https://ftb.bz/50VListen to the Podcast: https://ftb.bz/podcastVisit the Founders Alliance: https://ftb.bz/allianceJoin Feel the Boot: https://ftb.bz/joinThe 5 step pitch deck process is here: https://ftb.bz/33B

I have talked to many founders about automating business processes and why they should put that off as long as possible. You may have heard the Y Combinator mantra “do things that don’t scale.” Usually, they discuss that in terms of sales or support, but we rarely talk about the idea with respect to software and automation. We need to understand the value of doing things by hand in the early stages of a business. In this episode, I explore the kinds of automation you may want to defer with some specific examples. I then share the six primary ways that performing these processes manually, in the beginning, can provide value to the business and avoid unnecessary costs. Read this as a blog: https://ftb.bz/49BListen to the podcast: https://ftb.bz/podcastWatch it on YouTube: https://ftb.bz/49V Get exclusive FTB content and member-only office-hours by joining free on our website: https://ftb.bz/joinJoin us at the FTB Founder’s Alliance: https://ftb.bz/alliance  Founders often have a strong bias towards action. When you see that some process will eventually need to be automated, you may want to do it immediately. In most cases, I suggest that you hold off and go with “mantomation” at first. Mantomation is what I call it when you fake your automation using people. Users want results. They don’t care if some sophisticated software is doing the magic or a box of hard-working hamsters. It is the result that counts, and it does not matter if they need to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” I am not suggesting that automation is bad or that you should not do it at all. In my examples, the companies all eventually make heavy use of software processes. My advice is to wait until the last possible moment before you start that development. When the manual approach is strained to the limit, and you have squeezed all possible information from working directly with the data and customers, then start automating.

I don't introduce myself in these blogs or episodes, which may leave some of you wondering, "Who is this Lance person, and why in the world should I take his advice on startups?" I thought So, that’s the topic for today.TLDR:I have been an entrepreneur where I ran my own business for 13 years. I then stayed on as Chief scientist for the acquiring company, where I helped develop their technology, delivered sales presentations, managed their PR, and ran their marketing department.Since 2012, I've also been an active angel investor and startup mentor.Before all that, I was an astrophysicist, so I bring a scientific approach to the startup process. The longer versionI grew up in an academic household where both my parents were professors. One of them was a physicist and the other a sociologist. From the age of six, I planned to follow my father footsteps to becoming a physicist I went to graduate school at UCSD to study astrophysics. I was working with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck, trying to understand the early Universe. In my spare time, I started dabbling around with cryptography, privacy systems, and building anonymous email systems. About the time that started to take off and get exciting, I realized that the Hubble Space Telescope wasn't big enough to answer the questions I was trying to ask. That was getting frustrating, so I put my Ph.D. on hold and founded what became Anonymizer, a company focused on consumer internet anonymity. It allowed people to avoid all tracking on the Web. I grew the business for several years, but we began to hit a plateau around 2000. And, of course, 2000 was an exciting time to be in an unfunded startup. That was when the .COM collapse happened all the fundraising dried up. It was touch and go to survive at all.After that, there was the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. We, like everyone else, started to wonder what part we could play. We started reaching out to people that we'd met in the government, mostly in the FBI, because they kept subpoenaing us for records on our Anonymous users. We were able to talk to them about how they were conducting online undercover operations, and we pivoted to focus on building covert operational platforms for the national security community. This model was very successful. These had extreme pain points and were willing to pay a lot to have them solved, and we were the only people around doing it. Between 2001 when we started selling to the government, and 2006 that segment of our business went from about 1% to more than 95 percent of our total revenues. Around that time, we realized we didn't have the background or government connections to take the business where we wanted to go. So we started looking at being acquired by a Beltway Insider, and in 2008 we had an excellent exit to a small systems integrator. The founders of that company were all former Spooks and had the connections, knowledge, and understanding to take the solution where I couldn't. But, being spooks, they weren't going to talk to the media, so I ended up becoming the face of the company that bought mine.I did all the pr. I did most of the public speaking. I wrote the company blog, and it was my face & voice any time we needed to speak publicly.After a few years of being the Chief Scientist for this company, I decided I didn't want to live in the DC area anymore, so I moved out to Wine Country in California, where I could telecommute.That was I started to get involved in Angel Investing. One of the first things I did when I moved out here was join the North Bay angels and get involved in a startup mentoring program. Helping startups became a passion of mine. I discovered that I loved working with and helping these early-stage companies achieve success.At this point, I don't need more outward trappings of success. I'm enjoying living on a hilltop next to my vineyard with beautiful views and an excellent wine cellar. Now I'm much more interested in giving back to other companies. The great thing about advising is it provides most of the fun of being a Founder without the hundred-hour work weeks and constant existential dread.Shortly after joining the North Bay Angels, they invited me to be on the board and their selection committee. The committee is the group within the North Bay angels that looks at all of the applicant companies and decides which will present to the entire group. That is a great experience because I get to see so many different pitches. These are not the finely polished best of the best. I see many rough presentations, which helps me know what makes the best of them shine.A problem with the in-person advising was I could only meet a limited number of companies, and I wanted to help a vastly larger number of Founders. That's why I created Feel the Boot as a platform where instead of doing Just one-on-one advising, I could put this information out on the Web where would be accessible to anyone. Then, if they needed more specific individual coaching, they could seek me out, and I'd be able to do that.At the beginning of 2020, I walked away from my role as Chief Scientist to focus full-time on advising.Later in 2020, I joined the Founder Institute. I reached out to them, and they offered to make me a global entrepreneur in residence. That means I'm advising their companies everywhere in the world. One of the great things about this is I talk to many companies with different issues and problems. I am continually learning from the experiences of every founder I help.The advice I give through Feel the Boot comes from my history as a founder, my experiences as an investor, and learning from one-on-one advising, consulting, and BoD work with founders.But everything always comes back to my experiences as an academic and a scientist. It shapes the way I think about everything. I am always looking for patterns. Why do startups work the way they work, and how can we understand them at a fundamental level. I want to get founders away from the "cargo cult" approach where they think that if they emulate a pattern, it should work because it worked for someone else. I want to get to the fundamental why and how. Think deeply about what you're doing so that you can take what's unique about your business and put it in the best light, and leverage it in the best possible way.I question whether this will be useful to anyone, but hopefully, this gives you some idea of where I come from, why I'm passionate about startups, and why the things I say hopefully carry some weight.Till next time … Ciao.

As a Global Entrepreneur in Residence at the Founder Institute https://fi.co and chair of the selection committee for the North Bay Angels https://www.northbayangels.com/ I see heaps of pitches. Unfortunately, the same few fundraising mistakes doom most of their efforts. I want to share with you my list of the ten most common fundraising mistakes founders make and how you can avoid them.1 – Only Looking at EquityJust because you can get angel or VC investment does not mean that you should. Some other sources of growth capital don't require selling part of your business.2 – Going in ColdAt the North Bay Angels, companies introduced by a member receive funding several times as often as previously unknown startups. You are at a massive disadvantage if your first interaction with an investor is to put your hand out asking for money.3 – Fundraising too EarlyA large fraction of companies applying to the North Bay Angels are not ready for angel investment. Unfortunately, you typically only get one bite at that apple.4 – Missing the What and WhyI often reach the end of a pitch, having heard all kinds of information but with no idea what the company does or why. I need to be able to picture your business in action and your users interacting with the solution.5 – Failing to Understand Your AudienceYou know your business far too well, or at least I hope you do. You no longer remember what was obvious about your market space and what you learned while working on your business. This leads founders, particularly technical founders, to assume that their audience of investors understands these things too. I assure you that we do not.6 – Weak CommunicationsIn a perfect world, investors would judge your company solely on the quality of your idea, plan, and execution. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Investors are unlikely to see past an ugly surface to the gold within.7 – Hiding WeaknessesMany startups have some skeletons in the closet. If it looks like you have been trying to keep these issues hidden, you are violating our trust. And trust is everything in early-stage investing.8 – Failing to Make CommitmentsOften founders are vague about timelines and milestones. I want to know that after this investment, you will release a new version of the product with the following enhancements, grow to some number of customers, and generate a specific amount of revenue. If you can show a history of making and keeping commitments, even better.9 – Raising too Much (or too Little) CapitalSometimes funding applications draw an immediate rejection because they are raising too much money or too little.10 – Failing to Follow-upFinally, follow-up after your introduction, pitch, and any other interaction. Most investors are busy and easily distracted. If you wait a few days to get back to us or set the next meeting following a pitch, I am likely to have forgotten most of what you said and be off chasing some new shiny object.ConclusionFundraising is hard, time-consuming work. Even if you do everything right, the odds of any angel or VC investing in your company are low. But, if you make these unforced errors, the odds quickly drop to zero. You are taking a huge risk as an entrepreneur. Make sure you give yourself the best possible chance of success.

In this year-end installment of Feel the Boot, I want to, not surprisingly, look back at 2020 and also talk about some of the ideas I have for where Feel the Boot can go going forward.When I thought about this episode, the first thing that came to mind was the "I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue" scene from Airplane!For those of you who aren't familiar with that reference, check the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane!A time of transitionThis year has been kind of a train wreck for almost all of us, and it made me realize how much privilege I have personally. I know many people who are having a rough time while I'm up here on a mountaintop with a beautiful view, a vineyard, and naturally isolated. Plus, I've been working from home for years, so not that much has changed for me.The reason I thought about the "Picked the wrong year to quit sniffing airplane glue" is that at the beginning of this year, I chose to leave my job after 24 years. I founded Anonymizer in 1995, eventually exiting through an acquisition. I became the Chief Scientist of the company that acquired mine, which then got reorganized. I ended up doing PR for the company, public speaking, running the marketing department, and helping with sales and technology, all kinds of different jobs and roles. But fundamentally never had to jump off that cliff, as I did when I first started Anonymizer, until January 1 of this year. I decided to leave a job where they treated me very well and paid me well to go full-time with Feel the Boot, helping startups, advising mentoring, and Angel Investing. Of course, that meant I walked away from my entire income stream. Angel Investing is not a short-term returns kind of activity. Also, I don't charge for my advising. So, walking away from my paycheck was scary enough without doing it in a strange year like this. It wasn't just the risk of taking on this new role and focusing on this new kind of activity, but then there was the covid crisis, the pandemic, the lockdowns everything got transformed. As usual, we had fires. I live up here, north of San Francisco, where the fire seems to come through every year. Fortunately, I didn't get evacuated this year. I got evacuated. In 2017 and 2019, but not in 2020, going against the pattern of things this year. The fires only came within a couple of miles of me, but I was able to wait them out at home. I had to use industrial Quality Air Filters to go outside, but even so, we did better than in some of the previous fire seasons.New rolesWith this new focus on my advising activities, I took on some new roles. One of the things I'm doing now is chairing the selection committee at the North Bay Angels, which means I am in charge of looking at all of the companies applying to get funded and deciding which ones get to go through to present to the group as a whole. It is a severely narrow funnel. We might get 30 applicants in a two-month cycle. The committee will look at maybe 15 of them, with the rest dropped right off the bat. We pick five or six to present to the committee, and the committee then selects two or three to pitch to the whole group in that two-month cycle. That's why I talk so much about fundraising and how competitive it is. Many of the companies we reject are good companies with sound business plans. One change we made this year is looking at companies from a much wider geographic area because of things like zoom and the fact that people don't need to travel to present to a group. Now it's not a hardship where someone needs to fly out to Sonoma for a chance at funding. They just need to show up for a quick Zoom meeting. Rather than being exclusively Bay Area focused, the North Bay Angels is now looking at applicants from anywhere around the country. The dissolving of geographical borders is a big trend in the investment community right now.The other activity I have taken on this year is becoming a global entrepreneur in residence for the Founder Institute. With them, I provide advice to the companies in their program anywhere around the world. Founder Institute is a global organization with chapters in 90 countries. I might have office hours with someone in Toronto, and then the next call with someone in London, Sydney, Cape Town, or Hong Kong. These days I open my sessions by guessing whether it's day or night by the light in their room and then asking where they are. It's fascinating to see all the different kinds of businesses they're launching relevant to their specific geographic areas.I'm finding that this Covid lockdown environment has been a real boon for my ability to engage with the startup community without regard to driving distance. Before this, I would usually have to go down to San Francisco for most activities. That's at least an hour drive in good traffic, and it's rarely good traffic, to attend a meeting for an hour or two and then drive back. So I didn't do that very often. Whereas now that I can just jump on the zoom, I'm going to tons of these kinds of events. They give me exposure to a much greater range of companies in different situations doing different types of things. Those experiences informed many of the videos I created this year.Most frequent advice of 2020I don't know if it's something about the plague that we're having, but I've noticed that I seem to be giving two pieces of advice more than I ever remember doing before. The first is about the need to focus on talking about what your business is. More than ever, I'm seeing pitches laser in on some technical aspect of the business, or diving into jargon, and skipping answers to the big picture questions.  Who are you doing this for? Why are you doing it? What is the business? How does this make money? Why do people want to pay for it? I need to understand these big dumb picture items before I can appreciate the subtle aspects of exactly how you're accomplishing what you're doing or what's unique about your technology.The other theme of my 2020 advising has been narrative. Convincing people that they need to spend more time telling stories. They present a lot of facts, and they've got compelling data, but it's hard to digest it and contextualize it when it's just presented in that raw form. I think most of the companies I'm looking at would do much better if they could tell a story about their customers, the problems they're having, and why engaging with this product will benefit them.I am not sure why those two are coming up over and over this year, but it's definitely a pattern. I'm curious to see whether that continues into 2021. Feel the Boot going forwardSpeaking of 2021, I think we're going to be doing some reorganizing of the Feel the Boot content. Starting off, I only had a couple of episodes, so the blog format worked well. Now that I have 40+ episodes recorded, and by the end of next year it'll be a lot more, we need to find ways of making this content more accessible. We must ensure that when you come in looking for an answer to a certain kind of question, you can immediately find the episode or the blog or the content that's relevant to what you need to know as opposed to digging through them all in chronological order. So I'm going to be spending more time thinking about how I can curate the information to make it more useful.I'm also considering creating more of a course like structure. Rather than just having an episode on whatever topic occurred to me after talking to some founder, I could try creating a series on getting started, finding product-market fit, doing experiments, or what have you. The episodes would flow together in a logical way to create a program Founders could go through, for free, to take them from point A to point B. From getting their funding rounds, or not getting their funding rounds and bootstrapping their way up, to eventually reaching whatever level of success they're shooting for.I also think that it might make sense to start pulling this together into a book, so one of the projects that I'm going to be looking at this year is whether I can take all of this content that I've created and distill it down into a volume which would provide that clear roadmap of progress making it much easier to find or refer back to relevant information when experiencing particular problems as you go through different phases of growth.Finally, your feedback would be invaluable in helping guide our direction. What kinds of content would you like me to create? How can I, and Feel the Boot, be maximally useful to you as a Founder? What kind of problems are you having? What kind of information or answers are you unable to find in other places? Many other people are writing and blogging on these topics, but you're here for a reason. How can I make this more effective and productive for you? Let me know what you like, what you don't, and how I can improve. Until next time, next year, ...Ciao.

Watch the video version here.Or read the blog here.I want to talk about a different way of thinking about your competitive environment. It's been resonating with a lot of the people I advise.I talk with a lot of founders about their competitive environment. Usually, that starts in the context of helping them with their deck. They're often in the process of putting together that all-important competition slide, which shows how they stack up against the other companies in their space. Inevitably, it shows that they're superior and puts them in the upper right quadrant or gives them all the little checkmarks down the grid. But one thought that occurred to me during these discussions was that your competition isn't just the other companies in your space.Fundamentally, your competition is absolutely everything else in the world with which your customer might need to engage. Although you might be better than their existing solution, they still might not choose to buy your product. So often, I see companies where the competition is Microsoft Excel. They've created a solution targeted at some particular vertical that is far better at solving this problem than Excel, so they think: "well, of course, people are going to want to switch to us. We're going to save them money. We're going to save them time we're going to provide whatever benefits we've got." And those are all true statements. But the problem is, will the customer engage? Just because you're better doesn't mean they're going to buy.Why won't they buy? In many cases, it's because they have too many other priorities. A company or the purchasing manager only has so many hours in the day. They have a limited budget to start these things. They only have a few people free to work on new projects and finite mental energy to even think through these issues. It's not just a matter of being better than what they're doing. It's a matter of being able to rise above that level of noise and get on the priority stack at all. Of the thousands of things this person could potentially do, they will only act on maybe 10. How do you get to be one of those 10? That is why any other thing they could spend time attention money on is a competitor to you. When you're thinking about the question "how much do people want my product?" it's not enough to say it will save them money or produce some sort of beneficial outcome. You need to show that this is a big enough problem for your customers to put it at the top of their priority stack. People talk about a solution needing to be much better than the alternatives and addressing a substantial need. It's not because what you're doing isn't better. But if it's not a whole lot better, it will not lose to your direct competition, but rather to the fog of war that's going on all the time and all the other things people need to do. I'm encouraging the people I advise, and I'm encouraging you, to spend a lot of time talking to potential customers. Understand the problem set, understand what other priorities they're dealing with. Make sure before you invest time and treasure into your own business that you meet the threshold where people will put you above the set of priorities that they were previously considering. I would appreciate your feedback on this shorter and more casual blog/episode format. Please leave a comment down below to let me know whether you like these shorter episodes or whether you'd like me to stick with longer, more formal episodes that I've been doing in the past.Until next time ... Ciao!

I first interviewed Che Voigt a few months ago. He is chair of the North Bay Angels and co-founder and CEO of Altwork. If you have not already listened to that episode, you can get it here: https://ftb.bz/32B At that time he was getting ready to release a new version of his product right in the middle of the COVID crisis. Little did we know that all his plans were about to change. Shortly before the launch, Black Lives Matter protests broke out all over the country. Out of respect to that situation, Che had to radically alter his approach. We started this interview by looking at how he adapted to that rapidly changing situation. We also talked at length about raising angel or venture capital, when it makes sense, what kinds of companies are suitable for it, and how the fundraising climate has evolved. Che has thought long and deeply about all aspects of the startup process and shares many of his profound insights in this interview. Enjoy!

When I founded Anonymizer, I struggled with selling and marketing our solutions. I want to talk about how I overcame my engineering and science habits and prejudices to become effective at sales and marketing. Selling does not come naturally to most technical people. From a cultural perspective, we see it as a “bad thing.” Engineers typically dislike being sold and don’t want to sell. It is a bad word. However, selling is a core responsibility of any founder. You need to do it all the time, in many contexts, and do it well if you want to be successful. I want to help you by sharing a mental framework for approaching sales and marketing that worked for my technical/scientific brain. It worked well enough that after Ntrepid acquired Anonymizer, even though I was chief scientist, they had the marketing department report to me.Watch this as a video https://ftb.bz/43VRead the whole blog: https://ftb.bz/43BJoin your fellow founders over at the Founders Alliance group on Facebook https://ftb.bz/alliance