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Mickey Meece is a New York Times columnist that writes about strategies to help small-business owners overcome daily challenges.
I briefly spoke to Mickey for a piece she just published on new ways small business owners are leveraging social networking sites for business. See the full NYT story to see how Froilan (StyleHop CTO) and I first met.
David
I don’t know Brad Feld but I love his Venture Capital blog, Feld Thoughts. He understands investing in early stage companies is first and foremost a people business.
Here is his latest post on Startup Karma:
I met with an entrepreneur yesterday that I hadn’t seen in a few years. I originally met with her about five years ago when she was starting her company. She’d been a very successful executive at a large company and had decided to jump into the entrepreneurial game and re-invent herself. Her business has grown nicely – and profitably – without having raised very much money.
We mostly just caught up on how things have been going (we email back and forth periodically, but it had been a while since we had met in person.) After about ten minutes, she asked if she could tell me a story about the first time we met. Always game for a good story, I said sure. It goes something like this.
I was introduced to you by someone I had met with who was a close friend of yours. He suggested that I get together with you and made an introduction. After I set up the meeting, I went online to learn more about you. After poking around for a while, I suddenly got scared – I had no idea why I was going to meet with you or why you would bother meeting with me. I didn’t want to blow my one meeting and waste your time. I told this to the person that introduced us and he said “don’t worry about it – Brad will give you 20 minutes of his undivided attention and something good will come out of it.” So I went ahead and met with you.
I was really nervous. I was uncertain what to talk about and just starting telling you about my business idea. You gave me some reactions and a few pieces of advice and as some point said “I bet you wonder why I am meeting with you.” I had no clue, said so, and you responded, “I believe in karma. When I was starting out as a first time entrepreneur a bunch of experienced people helped me, gave me advice, and just spent time with me with no particular expectations on their part, except to be helpful. I’ve never forgotten that and want to pass it on. I have no idea what will come of this conversation, but if I’m helpful to you, you can pay me back by being helpful to another first time entrepreneur after your become successful.” This has stuck with me from the very beginning of my business and I repeat it often.
This story made me smile a huge smile. I remember all of the entrepreneurs that helped me early in my career, including guys like my dad, Gene Scott, Helena and Chris Aves, Stewart Forbes, and many others. Whenever I help someone like the entrepreneur above, I’m paying others back for helping me.
Many of the great entrepreneurs I’ve met believe in this and practice it. It’s not altruistic nor is it selfless as there are huge emotional returns from watching other people – who you’ve helped early in their entrepreneurial career – be successful. If you are a multi-time entrepreneur, I encourage you to consider a daily (or weekly, or monthly – whatever works for you) karma break to help someone that is just getting started.
Link to another Vator.tv interview with Erik Stuart. Erik clearly understands the dynamics at play in social shopping and has pretty good advice for ThisNext.
Good post about the impact of the economic downturn on startup entrepreneurs:
Bigelow’s report from a VC panel discussion supports what I’ve been saying for a while now….it has always been really hard for startups to raise capital. Just because you are struggling mightily fundraising doesn’t mean it’s because of the collapse in the financial markets. It could just be your business/idea isn’t that great.
Smart investors will continue to invest in startups…..the biggest risks for tech startups have actually gone down significantly. Here’s my risk assessment for StyleHop in light of the economic crisis:
Risk #1: Competitive Risk – Lower. It is much less likely that someone will come in behind us and steal our market away.
Risk #2: People Risk – Lower. It is much more likely we will be able to attract and retain the right talent.
Risk #3: Financial Risk – Higher. It will be harder to raise cash (but that risk drops after investment).
Risk #4: Market Risk – Neutral. Its is likely that fashion and apparel companies will continue to seek out our demand forecasting tool because it is a high ROI investment with a very fast return.
Manageable, right? Would love comments from other entrepreneurs.
We’re still competing in Vencorp’s Mashable Showdown and now we just entered Babson’s $30,000 Innovation Competition. I’m really enjoying these contests. Unlike the old school business plan competitions, v2.0 always seems to include a crowdsourcing element. That’s great because you can get early feedback on different elements of your plan and then iterate before you get in front of the live judging. And, as a new entrepreneur with zero experience pitching investors, they have been great way for me to get my game on before all the fun begins. Oh yes, and if we win, not bad PR there either.
If you aren’t familiar with Babson College, it’s a real hotbed of entrepreneurialism and I am fortunate to know the president of the College, Len Schlesinger. As a former professor at Harvard Business School and the the Vice Chair at the Limited, he was an encouraging early advisor to me on StyleHop. I haven’t told him we entered StyleHop in the competition so it would be such a cool surprise if we win.
As part of our Babson entry we uploaded a bunch of information about StyleHop including a cool 1-minute video here. If you want to help us out in the competition, here are a few things you could do when you go to the link (you will need to register to do these things):
1. Give us a star ranking
2. Hit the “follow” button to follow StyleHop
3. Hit the Digg and/or Delicious buttons to upload our company profile to those sites
4. Leave a comment on our company profile
Thanks, Dave
We were picked as one of the nine finalists in Mashable’s startup showdown. Yahoo!!!!!!
For those of you that don’t know how the NY Fashion 2.0 Group started, last month I posted on NextNY about how many times I had attended tech events that promised the potential to meet lots of VCs/Angels only to be disappointed by the lack of investor presence.
Charlie O’Donnell, founder of NextNY and CEO of Path101, challenged me to get off my ass and create a fashion meetup:
“In my mind, though, the best way you could ever meet really relevant angels is to run an event yourself. Why not do a “Technology of Fashion” event… there have to be other fashion related startups besides yourself and the Gilt Groupe… or start the fashion entrepreneurs Meetup and start inviting successful people in the fashion industry to come and speak at them. It’s SO EASY to get speakers and if you get to know these folks, they’re much more likely to be angel investors in your company than anyone you meet at one of these big events, where people probably don’t know anything about your particular v-neck of the woods. (ba-dum-bump!)”
Bad puns aside, Charlie was right and Yuli Ziv, CEO of MyItThings took the lead and immediately created a Fashion 2.0 group on meetup. Our first meeting was last week and, like Yuli said, it was a great start. We had over forty people show up all interested in connecting and finding ways to challenge the industry with new ideas and new business models.
At the first meeting alone, I met six other fashion 2.0 startup founders (and know I’m missing a few I didn’t get a chance to meet):
Yuli Ziv – MyItThings
Michael Pratt – Gift Girl
Jane Lu – Dress King
Trish Ginter – Smashing Darling
Tavia Sharp – Ave Swimwear
Seph Skerritt – Archimedes Cloth
How cool! Even if I never meet a single investor through this group (though we’re working on that), the potential to create a platform that promotes the development of the fashion 2.0 ecosystem in NYC is exciting. We all realized after our very first meeting how much we need each other.
Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Yuli. If you are a fashion entrepreneur with a disruptive business model working in NYC, hope to see you at our next event.
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