As a seed-stage investor, I get to see companies at the most formative stage of their development. One of the more interesting variables is the one-found-versus-two-founders dynamic. I, for one, am a fan of the two-person founding team (or three-person, or four-person).
In fact, it is now a requirement of our accelerator program that every company have at least two founders.

Why? Because when the 100 decisions that needs to be made that day bubble up to the top of your brain and the Top Five need to be prioritized, I want someone else in the room with you.

Because when you are a single founder, you are always the smartest person in the room and thus every decision is perfect.

I want someone else in the room. Every day.

So, how do you find a co-founder (ideally, one whose skills complement yours)? I would use the same technique you use (or used) to find your significant other. Seriously. The parallels are significant. Here are three thoughts I share with single-founder entrepreneurs:

• Know Thyself. If you are following my “complementary skills” angle you have to have a very good idea of who you are in order to find your co-founder. Not sure who you are? Ask around. Don’t be afraid-;this is crucial feedback.
• Network Like Crazy. Start talking to everyone who will listen about your idea and your desire to find a partner. Meetups, conferences, and entrepreneurial social events are perfect opportunities, as everyone there is by definition a potential candidate.
• Put the Dating in Founder-Dating. My partner, Dave Neal, and I dated for about three months. We met about every week in person and exchanged emails and phones call in between. We worked problems, found solutions, discarded ineffective ideas, and talked about everything we could think of. Most important, we talked about our failures.

As is the norm, there are websites and organizations trying to facilitate this process. It seems like we get asked every day to support some vehicle for matching up people. Think Match.com for geeks. www.cofounderlab.com, www.founderdating.com andwww.startupwithme.com are all good online examples. Some of these sites also host face-to-face events that augment the online experience. Check them out.

As the start-up days turn into weeks, which turn into months, and you enter the classic “trough of disillusionment,” having a partner who inspires you, or covers for you when you have no mojo, or provides counter thinking, or tells you when you are off base is a gift. Of course, your partner gets the same in return.

This year – we crank it up a notch with 2 speakers who pack a national punch and a new venue that holds 3 times what my beloved Bay 7 holds.

Want to know more?

Paul Singh – a partner at 500 Startups (one of the best accelerators in the country) will talk about his experiences & observations as he travels the world operating a global entrepreneurial program.

Scott Case – former founding partner of Priceline.com and current CEO of Startup America will share his observations on the startup economy.

Both of these guys are nationally recognized and have a broad opinion.  Come see what they have to say.

Previous Pitch Days were capped at 200 guests in addition to the 100 investors and we sold out every year.  So we moved to Carolina Theater in downtown Durham.

The theater hold about 1,00o and our goal is to see 500+ come hear our speakers in addition to the 5 company pitches.

We have a few more surprises up our sleeve so register here!

Are you a qualified investor?  Get the VIP treatment and access to the companies over a catered lunch by registering here.

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Soapbox:  Pitch Day is an integral part of the 2 day Paradoxos Festival which was created to celebrate all that the Triangle has to offer in terms of our tech community.  As such, we would really like to see a great turnout.  Come out, spend 2 hours and support our entrepreneurial spirit.

See you all there.

• Raising $1-$1.5 million in early stage capital from angels or VC’s
• Setting up a technical infrastructure that would support your team
• Hiring developers who would produce the product
• Doing market research or using your and your team’s experience in a market to design a product
• Spending 12 months or more developing a product
• Releasing a product and seeing how the market received it

At the time, this process was the way of the software world. It worked for many companies. It was also well-aligned with strong founder vision as a driving force. Fast forward twenty years and things have changed. Most importantly, the same amount of work and progress that required $1-$1.5 million twenty years ago can now be accomplished for $100-$150K. Many things have contributed to this:

• Infrastructure expense can now be replaced with an “as needed” alternative such as Amazon Web Services
• Internet marketing techniques now make it possible to test the demand for your offerings quickly and inexpensively
• You can decrease the amount of uncertainty you are operating under by testing, especially in the early stages of a business

So I’m a surprised when I meet people who have spent several hundred thousand dollars to develop a product without getting a lot of customer validation. In the final analysis it’s all about reducing risk and maximizing your chances for success. Given that rationale, why wouldn’t you use iterative techniques to manage your start up? First, strong founder vision can be of great value to a team. It can provide a cohesive force that drives a team to success by clarifying the objectives and keeping everyone focused on them.

Alternatively, founder vision can inadvertently isolate the founder(s) and the remainder of the team from the things they need to focus on. Striking this balance is a key task for any founder. It’s certainly possible to build a great company based on founder vision, but the question is which approach maximizes your chances to do something great.

I’m always a little concerned when I meet an entrepreneur who has been working on the idea for “several years” in relative isolation. This is especially true if the entrepreneur has put a lot of his or her own money into the company. I’m forced to ask myself what kind of feedback has shaped the idea and its execution. What are the key hypotheses that have to be true for the business to be successful? How have these hypotheses been tested and confirmed? Have they been tested at all? If the idea and its execution have been influenced exclusively by the entrepreneur and the existing team, how much constructive vetting has occurred?

I co-founded at least one software company where I wish that I had employed rigorous testing and proof methodologies. We followed the available techniques at the time. In retrospect, I could have really used a reading of The Lean Startup. That would likely have saved our investors 80-90% of the money that we spent. The choice is up to you.

That said, if you take that path several things are likely:

• You’ll take more time than you need to take in creating and marketing your offering
• You’ll spend more money than you should in reaching key milestones
• You’ll raise concerns with investors – most know about the lean principles and the efficiencies they provide

Again, the choice is yours…….

Our accelerator, The Triangle Startup Factory, is in week five of the current 12-week program. A combination of structured mentoring and serendipitous advice is the order of the day. Our current founders are all smart, thoughtful, high-energy, pedal-to-the-metal people. This is fun.

But I have one concern. A big one.

I was having trouble describing it naturally. So one of our local mentors offered an analogy that seems to fit:

In order to climb Mt Everest, you must plan, work, and make adjustments at each of four Base Camps.

How does this relate to start-ups?

Founders create product road maps detailing and prioritizing various features and functions. They outline, test, and roll out various customer acquisition tactics and model how the acquisition costs will come down as their viral coefficient goes up. They consider various funding scenarios and match their vision to funding milestones.

But as they do that, they tend to in terms of Base Camp 4. Especially if they have a high level of entrepreneurial DNA, as our people do. They immediately project three years down the road. That’s dangerous. You don’t get to skip Base Camps 1, 2, and 3.

You can’t take the express customer-acquisition train. You can’t super-think and super-work your customer acquisition in order to bypass these requisite stages and go right to a million customers.

Base Camp 1 might represent the acquisition of your first set of customers. Depending on your business, Base Camp 1 might mean 50 customers (enterprise-like application) or 1,000 (consumer-oriented). The acquisition tactics at this stage are naturally guerilla–we need customer feedback and data! One of our teams put a table in the middle of a business courtyard and produced 700-plus initial signups.

You reach Base Camp 2 by identifying new acquisition tactics (while possibly doubling down on tactics that worked previously) and making product and feature modifications to fit those tactics. The goal at this juncture is to begin laying out the handful of acquisition programs that will drive the business to the next customer goal.

Base Camp 3 and Base Camp 4 represent bigger and more expanded versions of Base Camp 2. The acquisition strategies may morph with your fundraising strategies as these new investments drive customer adoption. (In plain English, the purpose of your new funds will be to secure new customers.)

My point is that you have to have the patience to acquire customers in this systematic way. You simply do not know enough to grow from 10 to 10,000 customers in two months. This needs to be done incrementally, with knowledge and understanding gained at each Base Camp.

Those companies that find lightening in a bottle and achieve rocketship growth are freakish and not a good model. And in fact they probably grew more slowly than you realize: When you peel back the curtain, you typically find that they too had to go through months or years of incremental growth before they accelerated to the numbers that suddenly made them seem ubiquitous.

The more I have talked about this, the more I see stats like this:

• Meetup.com grew from fewer than 500k active users to 2.5m in six years
• ReverbNation, which has more than 2.5 million bands as customers, has been in business for seven years.
• Twitter took three years to get to 3 million users, and now sits at 225 million.

The significant variable in this equation is time. Work hard, but have the patience to let this play out.

Recently I noticed that numerous media outlets have elected to leverage the “pay-to-read” model. Want to read articles that contain information accessible on other outlets? Read free of charge. Want to read exclusive content? Get your wallet out, that’ll cost you.

Before anyone gets upset, let me be clear. I am an entrepreneur through and through. I understand that the media is a for-profit business. In almost every industry, “exclusive” is interchangeable with “goldmine.” Keeping that in mind, here are my reasons why paid content is handcuffing our growth:

1. Knowledge is power – The Internet democratizes information. Makes it more accessible. Less knowledge is shared when readers are forced to pay for content. This is fundamentally problematic. A great example is the recent article WRAL TechWire wrote on Brian Handly. There are many entrepreneurs who could benefit from his knowledge, insights, and experience. By sharing the “educational knowledge”, the Triangle could improve itself and it’s companies.

2. Exclusive is bad – Every person and their mom wants to see the Triangle’s tech and startup ecosystem get more attention. The RTP is doing a fantastic job of tracking down journalists to cover local companies on a national platform. By taking exclusive content and putting it behind a paywall, local media outlets are drastically decreasing the reach that the content has. WedPics just raised $1.1 million and nobody can read about it because the exclusive story is behind a paywall. Not very encouraging if we are trying to attract additional investors from outside the Triangle.

3. Everyone has an audience – Decades ago, traditional media outlets were the only ones with an audience. In the modern world of social media, everyone has an audience. Media sites like ExitEvent and Triangle Tech Talk are providing valuable content that is arguably more widely accepted by the local tech community. These digital audiences are killing traditional media and causing the established outlets to make ineffective decisions.

If we don’t address this issue, the Triangle is going to suffer. Every time that a local company does something newsworthy, are we going to seal the story behind a paywall? That makes absolutely no sense. If we continue down this path, funding will become even more scarce, students will stop believing it is possible to build successful companies here, and the world will continue to say “WHAT is the Triangle?”

I, for one, refuse to believe that we are willing to accept this fate. As a local entrepreneur, whenever DigaForce has newsworthy information, I will refuse to allow media outlets to put our stories behind paywalls. I hope you join me!

Last week I stumbled upon the old Tom Hanks movie Big, about a 13-year-old kid (Josh Baskins) who wishes he was big, and is transformed over night into a 30-year-old guy (who still has the maturity and interests of a 13-year-old).

In order to buy time to figure out how to go back to being a 13-year-old, he moves to the city and finds a job at a toy company. Initially he is a data input clerk (stop laughing — they did exist), but then he serendipitously meets the CEO of the company and is asked to evaluate, and then develop, new toys.

This is the part of the movie that I have thought about for years and was reminded of last week. There are some very cool business lessons in this storyline.

Be Fearless. Kids have little fear, and one product of that is honesty. When Josh is asked what he thinks of various toy products, he answers frankly, without taking into account other executives’ feelings or stature in the company. In terms of product feedback, they get the raw thoughts of a 13-year-old. The product and the company wins–nothing else matters. Don’t you wish you could find that type of feedback on your products?

Be Inquisitive. During a number of executive interactions, Josh asks lots of questions. Each one probes a little deeper. (This reminds me of the Five Whys from Eric Reis’s Lean Startup.) As a kid with none of the baggage that comes from too many years as a professional, Josh asks questions that most of us assume don’t need to be asked.

Be Positive. Josh is the proverbial kid in a candy store. He plays with products with other kids in focus groups. He goofs around at FAO Schwartz (where he meets the CEO, who is there to watch what people like). He rigs an apartment with a trampoline, video games, and a bunk bed. And he brings that positive approach to his interactions with his secretary, his new girlfriend, and the CEO. I strive to be the positive energy officer every day. Good things come from it.

Be Yourself. As the third act of the film kicks in, Josh begins to conform to the role and responsibility that comes from being a 30-year-old executive. He begins to dress in a suit. He starts to blow off the buddy who is helping him. He goes on dates (a dinner party no less). And he is unhappy. All that he wished for (to be big) comes into question. This is one of my favorite lessons. Be true to yourself. Good things come from being free to create or accept good things.

Ask great questions without fear. Get unfiltered or no-agenda feedback. Bring great energy to your team. Be true to yourself, the product and the company. Go Big.

Triangle Tech Talk was born.  TTTalk for short.

With the help of a few very dedicated volunteers (Anthony Deloso and Katie Page at Knurture and Megan Carriker) we launched in September of 2011 with a very unique business model.  The idea – take the crowd-sourced aspects of Hacker News, combine that with the stylings of TechCrunch, but apply very firm RTP walls.  And we would only cover software tech.

At some level, we have built a pretty fair content machine with the help from a series of very dedicated and passionate writers (Hersh, Diemmi, Robin, Clay, Michael and Logan).  We created a little news engine.  With time, we started to get a few guest columnists as well as a healthy dose of company news through Press Releases.  In 15 months we accumulated over 1,100 pieces of news.  Combine that with another 100 event notifications and I think we had something going.  Traffic continues to grow very nicely and the engagements #’s are very respectable for a local niche news site.

But like any startup, we were not satisfied with what we were producing and the impact we were having on the ecosystem.  Specifically, the volume, quality and timeliness of the news was not where we wanted it to be.  So, we stepped back and looked at what it would take to bump this up to the next level.  The answer – the same thing I tell every entrepreneur – dedicated time and effort.  With more time and effort, we could see better quality articles, written at the right time.  We would also see more coverage across more companies.  The problem?  This is a volunteer effort and we all have day jobs.

So, today, I share with you what you might have already noticed.  I am pulling back on the crowd-sourced content and the dedicated writers fishing for stories.  For the time being, TTTalk will represent my personal blog concentrating on my observations of what is happening in our ecosystem.  From time to time, I will add a guest post from the people who I think are driving big ideas or making keen local observations.  You will also see a few subtle changes as I add items that make sense and remove items that dont fit the current model.

For those of you who have contributed over the past 15-18 months – thanks.  And stay close, who knows where this goes.

For those readers who enjoy what comes from TTTalk – thanks as well.  I hope you continue to enjoy the words.

Durham Tech has created an Introduction to Ruby on Rails course to be taught in the American Underground classroom.  This is something I have been harping about for over a year.  I strongly believe we need people like Durham Tech to step up and help create local talent.  I spoke to their Director a few months ago when we tested a mini-version in the classroom that was very successful.

If interested follow these instructions to register.

Registration / payment instructions:
1) Click on the following link –  https://ist-80.durhamtech.edu/WebAdvisor
2) Click on “Continuing education” box
3) Click on “Register and Pay for Continuing Education Classes” under the Registration Tab.
4) Either search for “Ruby on Rails” or enter in the Course Code Number: 36590
5) The “Introduction to Ruby on Rails” class will appear. Choose the class by clicking the box under the “Select” tab and hit “Submit”.
6) Complete Registration / Payment process.