You can check out some of the previous posts here – but its interesting to go back and read through how the “main” focus for my role has evolved over time.

2010: Engage with team 2011: Work with portfolio and platform 2012: Learning deals and investments 2013: Form own opinions and become more external facing

This process was based on feedback from a mentor at Perfect Wave Records early on who noticed I was struggling (and continued to struggle with) giving up control at individual events as the business scaled.

Even as we had 8 people working with us, I still wanted to be at every event and be involved in every small decision – and while that attention to detail had been great when it was just me throwing concerts – as we brought on more individuals and began to add business lines – our success would no longer be based on those skills, but rather my ability to hire and manage talent and work bigger business deals. (And my inability to really understand that advice then was one of the big issues that led to eventually winding the business down.)

As such, my focus at University (and projects since) has been driven by the question – with where you are today, what are the missing skills that help you (and the business get to the next level)

For True, when I joined 3 years ago, I didn’t really have a job title or direct responsibilities. We liked each other and thought we’d be able to figure out a role together – either inside the fund or within the portfolio.

So when I joined (and really in the months leading up to joining), I spent an incredible amount of time meeting with folks involved in the venture ecosystem (early-stage investors, startup founders, incubators, etc) and trying to better know the True team. Internal goals included things like “One Lunch a Week with Someone at the Firm”, “Say Yes to Any External Event with Colleagues”, “Find What People are Passionate About and Try It With Them”

The goal was to get deeply acclimated with the team, how they think, and understand the firm as well as the broader industry – with the idea I’d be able to figure out the type of role I’d like to pursue and have the relationships built to support that decision.

In January 2011, this led to the next set of goals – “Work with Platform and Team.” At the time, we were still a small group and the portfolio had grown quickly in 2010. A big part of our offering to Founders is access to our the True Platform (or our group of ~220 Founders) and the events related to it.  We had a small team focused on hosting events, providing services, and generally making sure our Founders stayed connected.

For this year, the focus was to stay close to the team, help proactively with events, and pick up ad-hoc one off projects for specific portfolio companies (some of which that fit into my background and others that were totally new.)

In 2012, the goals focused to learning more about the deal portion of the business – specifically looking to begin working closely with individuals partners on specific deals (and reading every legal document), interacting with Founders on an ongoing basis, and digging into specific markets where individual partners had research interests. (Mainly enterprise infrastructure)

Going into 2013, I didn’t write a blog post – but the focus begun to shift more external facing – leveraging the experiences of the last three years to start to build a book of business in the venture business.  Many of these goals are directly related to developing my own thinking around markets and sourcing deals, writing and speaking more publicly, and hosting events (small and large) which help solidify relationships in broader industry.

Writing about it in a retrospective makes it seem way cleaner and planned out – the reality is that there’s a lot of overlap and messiness from year to year (as you can see from the old blog posts) – but the common thread was a desire to maintain an appropriate level of discomfort to keep growing every year.

This post came out of a conversation this weekend around when being comfortable – to which I said – I’m only really comfortable when I’m not completely comfortable.

Since the majority of these companies were beyond where we’d play at True, it was a great opportunity to watch how others reacted to presentations and for patterns of success.

Some quick thoughts:

1. Start with the story of the people behind the company.  Even if it wasn’t the Founder pitching, the presentations that started with the story behind the company quickly caught people up with the story and made them able to engage more easily.
2. Figure out your story first, then build slides to supplement the talk.  This enables you to know the one or two points you want to drive home without bogging the conversation down with every detail.
3. Live demos.  This isn’t for everyone – but done correctly, this will capture the audience.  (I’m looking at you Optimizely)
4. Ask for feedback privately from people you trust.  The best founders were rabid about seeking out thoughts and recommendations in a constant attempt to improve.

Though these companies were much later stage than most of the companies we work with, the lessons feel broadly applicable to any person pitching their business (or pitching in general)

While the apartment discovery process is still difficult (and really controlled by Craigslist), I found the actually moving process relatively easy – enabled by a group of new Bay Area startups disrupting the moving process.

These include:

ZippGo

Moving boxes suck.  They’re expensive, unreliable, and disposal is a really difficult process.

ZippGo solves that problem by renting reusable moving boxes made from 100% recycled plastic. Better yet, they deliver and pick-up the boxes directly from the space – meaning I don’t have to worry about tearing the boxes down and finding a place to trash or recycle them.

Zipcar

Not really a startup anymore, but the ability to conveniently rent a clean and working van by the hour is a killer service.  (If you’ve ever rented a uHaul van – this will totally make sense to you)

Exec

Over the past year, I’ve grown to love Exec more and more.  The ability to rent labor by the hour – with having clear transparency in prices up front – is amazing.  Made the move much faster and way easier – thanks Shaun and Jason!

The next step in the process – finding furniture – still feels like an open opportunity.  Specifically, while Ikea has really hit it for basic items, trying to move up to the next level of quality is still a more challenging process.

Any recommendations for companies working in this space?

—

As a quick post-script, I have no Internet in my apartment for the next week – but my makeshift home entertainment center has been working surprisingly well over 3G.

You can check out mine live on this site’s sidebar and get your own from the WordPress widget directory.  Enjoy!

(Pro Tip: When showing up in the Heathrow Airport with long, shaggy hair after an overnight flight from NYC and no return ticket and no real purpose – you will have a hard time with immigration)

Once landed in a hostel, I sat down and made a list of anyone I had ever met who lived in Europe and started to make a plan on how to spend my time.

(It was a very short list.)

The most awesome thing that came out of those first meetings in London was my introduction to CouchSurfing.

Now – despite its namesake – Couchsurfing is not just focused on finding housing – but rather is focused on enabling individuals to more easily connect with each other while traveling around the world.

From their website:

At CouchSurfing International, we envision a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter. Building meaningful connections across cultures enables us to respond to diversity with curiosity, appreciation and respect. The appreciation of diversity spreads tolerance and creates a global community

So while in a few cases, I ended up staying with a friend I met on CouchSurfing – the bigger part of the experience was finding locals with similar interest and seeing their home and community through their eyes.

This is an important distinction from the other big space sharing company in Airbnb which has built a community on the back of economic transactions.

Moving forward to 2012 – we’ve seen an explosion in new ridesharing applications in San Francisco. As an early user of Uber – I was super skeptical of the products which were trying to connect real people for rides.

6 rides into Sidecar – its not the same as Uber – its super different – but different in the same way that Couchsurfing will always be different than Airbnb.

The difference – at its simplest form – is the people.

Call a Sidecar on your phone – you see the person’s name, face, and car as almost half the screen – and you get a feeling for who you’re going to be spending the next bit of time with.  Get into the front seat and you’re greeted as a friend.  I’ve had some amazing conversations now a few rides into Sidecar.

It’s different.  But if you want to have a conversation on your way from Point A to Point B – take Sidecar – and meet someone new.

Talking to others who run – one of the most fascinating concepts that has come up – is the concept of the “Garbage Mile”

Loosely, a “Garbage Mile” is:

Miles run with no purpose, that often fall in the range of too slow for threshold work and too fast for endurance training.

Or more simply – miles run with no purpose – for the sake of hitting a milestone (be it days run per week or a mileage goal)

And while no mileage for training is bad – the debate is around whether or not the small marginal benefit of these miles outweighs the potential high cost of an injury (which is more likely in these scenarios.)

Viewed through the same lens – its interesting to think about day-to-day work – especially at startups where long hours and all-nighters are seen as a badge of honor.

The trap is that Founders (in 95% of cases) are do-ers – they feel progress by taking action and “doing” things.  However, the reality in many cases is that many of these activities will create minimal additional value – and in many cases detract from the Founders ability to see into and execute in the future.

The issues with garbage work:

• Are you giving yourself enough time to think and reflect on the future?
• Are you creating more work to create the feeling of progress – even though you’re not actually moving?
• Are you giving your body time to rest and reset to be alert for future important work?

Whenever I have this internal dialogue, I’m reminded of a great BusinessWeek OpEd from Marissa Mayer on “How To Avoid Burnout.”

The important passage:

I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful. I tell people: Find your rhythm. Your rhythm is what matters to you so much that when you miss it you’re resentful of your work.

For me, this is my morning workout – if I’m able to have an hour to run or go to the gym with my music in the morning – I can work the rest of the week and not feel the strain at all.

I think even more important than the activity is the feeling of accomplishment and control that completion brings – especially as work gets busy and frantic – knowing that there’s always one thing I can accomplish every day gives me confidence that I can do anything.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666376

Specifically, researcher’s wanted to better understand how users thought about Zipcar and spent in depth time interviewing and following their “sharing” behavior.

The paper goes on to argue that collaborative commerce products like Zipcar and Airbnb are missing the point as users don’t really care about community; but rather can’t afford or don’t need the full product now and sharing offers a cheaper and more efficient alternative. (In what they’re calling “Access-based Commerce”)

It’s a very different way to think about the sharing market – specifically, that people care less about the community / caring part of the model – but are instead more focused on the “better / faster / easier” access part of the model.

With that as a lens, its interesting to re-evaluate the space and the success of businesses in each category.

• Lyft versus Sidecar

Both message collaborative consumption. Sidecar is a pure marketplace while Lyft was until very recently directly paying drivers. Outsized growth of Lyft on a relative basis has been driven by better user experience for rides and the fact that it fits into the mental transactional model for rides.

• AirBnb versus CouchSurfing

Both message collaborative consumption. Airbnb brings in commerce which drives a much more traditional buying behavior. CouchSurfing’s growth as a business is hindered by its commitment to its community (specifically people don’t all feel the need to share space / its a harder process to find a place to stay.)

More broadly, this may also explain the lack of success around “Sharing Item” marketplaces like Rentcycle, etc – if the motivation for use of these products is that its easier and cheaper than owning it myself or traditional methods – the friction is still too high with sharing for me to really want to do it.

(Or short answer – the decision to participate in one of these services still follows the rational choice model – the direct benefit (D) of participating is just much lower (or zero) than initially thought.)

For Google’s Android Platform (September 2012):

• 1.3m Android Activations per Day (70,000 are tablet)
• 480m Android Install Base

• 500,000 iOS Activations per Day (~188,888 are iPad)
• 410m iOS Install Base (Includes the devices added through June)

Thinking just about the new smartphones that are added each day across just iOS and Android – you’re looking at roughly 1.54m phones each day.

Lets be hard and say that only 2/3 of those devices are activated in the United States – that’s still 101,640 new potential customers for your mobile application each day.

If you could capture just 1% of that – you’re seeing 10,164 downloads per day - from potential users who didn’t even exist the day before.

Put in that context – scale in mobile applications becomes an entirely different thing.

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