Posts from Entrepreneurship

Four "Appearances" In One Day

A few weeks ago Gillian, who keeps me on schedule and a lot more, said to me, "there's a day coming up when you are going to do four appearances in one day." I thought to myself that was a bit much but didn't do anything about it.

Yesterday was that day. I gave talks at Baruch College, Google Hangouts/YouTube, Skyped into an entrepreneurs meetup in Milan Italy, and ended the day talking to the Kauffman Fellows Program at the Alexandria Center in NYC.

The thing I learned yesterday is that sitting at my desk and talking to folks around the world, via the power of Google Hangouts and Skype, is an amazing thing. Of course I've been using these tools for a long time. But yesterday was still a bit of a wakeup call for me.

The Google Hangouts/YouTube thing was a MOOC called Entrepreneurship in Education that is being taught by David Wiley, Todd Manwaring, and Richard Culatta. It was an hour long back and forth on the issues around entrepreneurship in online education. Ki Mae Heussner posted about the class on GigaOm yesterday. Here's the video of the conversation.

The really awesome part of this class is the way that Google Hangouts allows you to have a small interactive group talking about things that is then broadcast to a much larger group. I am going to try to replicate that in my final Office Hours next monday in my Skillshare class.

The Skype into the meetup in Milan was equally awesome. I don't have the video of that to share but here's a twitpic that I saw on Twitter after my talk that gives you a sense of how the folks in Milan experienced it:

Milan talk

As much as I enjoyed the talks I gave at Baruch and the Kauffman event, it was the talks that were delivered online that excite me more. Because online video allows me to talk to folks around the world. And I think that takes the conversations I want to have to a much broader audience and hopefully helps people all around the world think differently and ultimately act differently as they bring their ideas to market.

#hacking education

Building The Ecosystem

I've always seen the work that my colleauges and I do as more than venture capital investing. That is our main job and we need to do it very well. But we also need to work to make sure the macro environment for our investing activities remains attractive.

There are two primary activities that Union Square Ventures focuses on in addition to our core venture capital activities of backing and then working closely with entrepreneurs and their teams. They are policy advocacy around protecting the freedom to innovate and efforts to build the ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurship. Longtime readers of this blog understand this from the many many blog posts on these two topics.

I'd like to talk a little about building the ecosystem this morning. We view "the ecosystem" both globally and locally. We want to work to build a world where entrepreneurship is available everywhere. But we also want to do everything we can to grow and nurture the entrepreneurial community in New York City. And we believe that the things we support in NYC can and will be copied throughout the world so that our local ecosystem efforts support our global ecosystem efforts.

I've talked at length about many of our local ecosystem efforts and I don't want this post to be a laundry list of the things we are working on. Many of you are quite familiar with them. I would like to talk about a specific thing that two of my colleagues are doing that inspires me.

Last week, Gary and Christina asked me to stop by our event space late one afternoon and spend 45 minutes talking to a group of a dozen or so interaction designers. I talked to them about writing, the importance of taking the time every day to put words down "on paper" and how that forces you to think crisply and clearly. It was a great discussion.

This was part of a three hour class that Gary and Christina teach master students at the School Of Visual Arts (SVA) here in NYC. The class is a requirement for the Interaction Design program and it is called Entrepreneurial Design. Gary blogged about the class here and Christina blogged about it too.

The idea to teach this class came out of Gary's observation that almost all of our portfolio companies are suffering from a dearth of talent in interaction design and that we needed to do something to help produce more talent in this area. Gary and Christina didn't ask for permission to teach this class from anyone in our firm. They just did it. Freedom to innovate in action. I love it.

Things like this make a difference. They add up and build on each other. USV is not alone in this effort. Our colleagues in the startup and venture community in NYC and our colleagues around the world are actively doing things just like this. And the result is a thriving global startup movement that is getting stronger every day.

#VC & Technology

XX Combinator

Tereza, an AVC regular and active community member, wrote a blog post yesterday proposing that someone start XX Combinator, a Y Combinator style startup accelerator focused on women in their 40s.

Here’s the basic argument:

Y Combinator participants are for the most part very young — in their early 20’s. This is not when women would be most inclined. Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it. That takes up our 20’s. We have kids in our 30’s. Our entrepreneurial sweet spot is around age 40. Conventional tech investors are not really into this group and the metrics they look for are really hard for these people to hit. Most of the (few) women’s businesses that go big were funded by friends & family or strategics, not traditional angels and VCs.

She also points out that the Y Combinator program is purposefully focused on hackers and that is not a term often attributed to women. So Tereza proposes that XX Combinator come pre-populated with hackers, kind of like Betaworks is.

XX Combinator is a cute name and makes the point well. But I suspect a different model is required if this were to work. First, it is not so easy for 40 something women to move to silicon valley for three months. Second, if you have a team of hackers in-house, then you are an incubator more than an accelerator program.

But Tereza is right about a bunch of things. First, there aren’t enough women entrepreneurs. There aren’t enough women VCs. There aren’t enough women developers. The startup ecosystem is largely a man’s world and as a result, we see a lot of certain kinds of businesses and not enough of others. People are drawn to scratch an itch. If it is a 20 something developer, then they are scratching a certain kind of itch.

I know what Tereza is working on. I’m not sure if it is cool to talk about it here so I won’t. But it is the kind of idea a women in her 40s would be working on. And it is not an idea a 20 something man would likely work on all by himself.

Tereza is not alone in her evangelism. The Gotham Gal, who talks to and works with a lot of 40 something women entrepreneurs tells me that this group is “breaking out.” She told me about a conference in NYC this fall that she is involved in that is targeted at this group. And she told me last night that TED is working on a conference for women. Brad Feld wrote a great post yesterday about this topic. And he links to an excellent Eric Reis post that also articulates the need for more diversity (especially women) in the startup sector.

So maybe the time is right for an effort to build one or more efforts focused on helping women get started. These startup accelerators need a leader. Y Combinator has Paul Graham and his partner Jessica. Tech Stars has David Cohen and his partner Brad Feld. Seedcamp has Reshma and Saul. Betaworks was started by John Borthwick and Andy Weissman. So we need entrepreneurs to create these efforts, not committees, governments, or companies.

And we need entrepreneurs with a plan to deal with the realities that Tereza lays out. If there are entrepreneurs out there with the idea, the plan, and the passion to do this, please contact me. I’d be happy to help get something like this rolling.

#VC & Technology

Seedcamp 2009

For those who don't know, Seedcamp is Europe's version of Y Combinator. It was started by Saul Klein and Reshma Sohoni a few years back and has grown into an important part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Europe.

I attended Seedcamp 2009 this week and sat through several panels, pitches, and did a panel and a masterclass talk.

The thing that struck me about this year's group of startups was the geographic diversity of the teams and the number and quality from eastern europe in particular.

The lessons and culture of silicon valley are being replicated all around the world. It will be decades before any other location has the scale of tech-based entrepreneurship that the valley has. But a week at Seedcamp tells me that it will happen.

There is no shortage of engineering skills around the world. The information that drives tech innovation and entrepreneurship is flowing freely in real time. The valley didn't learn about Pubsubhubbub and RSSCloud any faster than the entrepreneur/technologist in Zagreb.

So we are seeing teams and products coming from all sorts of places now. It reminds me very much of NYC fifteen years ago. What NYC didn't have then that it now has is the infrastructure for entrepreneurship, the role models, and a sophistication about how the game is played.

London is developing those things pretty quickly and it is now spreading them throughout europe through programs like Seedcamp. Europe is hard because of the geographic diversity but the internet shrinks things and I'm quite optimistic that we will see a lot more Skypes, Spotifys, and Vent Privees in the coming years. And I am also sure that at least a few of them will be Seedcamp alums.

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#VC & Technology