I launched my own StartUp Week festivities by attending last night’s Entrepreneur Panel at NYU’s Kaufman Auditorium, a place I’ve become quite familiar with lately.
Having reached saturation on pure software startups, I decided to take in the Biotech-Cleantech-Social panel that was scheduled for the second half.
I wanted to hear, for a change, about entrepreneurs who made or had more intimate connection with actual physical stuff, in this case drug molecules, smart thermostats, and software that maps and helps preserve flora and fauna, the organic stuff of the world.
Chatting with the guy next to me—who is part of an e-commerce startup—during the break between sessions, I learned the first set of panelists from bit.ly, Carbonmade, and Yipit gave the audience of student entrepreneurs good lessons in how to run lean. I was inspired: no doubt, I’ll get my software mojo back by next week.
This second group was a fascinating collection of socially minded entrepreneurs, and if had to put a theme on their business ethos is that they are really infused with passion: they see their startups as a realization of a calling to improve the world in deep ways.
As I’ve noted before, these smaller meetings (probably under 50 or so attendees yesterday) have an advantage in that the entrepreneurs feel more comfortable in dropping their well-practiced pitch routines. And this was certainly true for Colin Freund (Agennix), Seth Frader-Thompson (EnergyHub), and goes triple for Yasser Ansari (Project Noah).
(l. to r.) Seth Frader-Thompson, Yasser Ansari, Colin Freund
Frader-Thompson, who has a background in robotics honed at NYC’s Honeybee, turned his engineering talents to Internet-aware home energy management gadgetry that helps utilities manage peak demands without cranking up more carbon spewing generators
Freund was a management consultant who shifted to life sciences after deciding that the world didn’t need another well crafted PowerPoint slide. He found his calling as a CBO for a drug developer, which now has a lung cancer therapy in the pipeline.
And Ansari studied molecular biology, developed mobile software for Qualcomm, and then cross-bred his love of the natural world with his tech tinkering. The resulting hybridization is an iPhone app that crowdsources the capturing of picture and data collection of nature to “citizen scientists”.
There were so many interesting, insightful, and yes, provocative comments made yesterday that I went through the tapes to find the best nuggets to share:
On Getting Financing
Frader-Thompson: “Raising capital is a fake milestone … You’ve not done anything… You still have your business to build.”
On Partnering with Larger Brands Who Are Not Used to Working with Startups
Ansarai: “You basically tell them to fuck off to be quite honest with you. You kind of have to tell them the reason why we got to this point because of what we were able to do. You have to be really assertive about that.”
On Management Consulting
Freund:”You write slides and sit and worry about the color of the bar and the spelling. That’s what you do, that’s the product you have. It’s somewhat otherworldly after a while.”
On Failing
F-T: Even if EnergyHub fails … it has changed my life, and I would never approach any job in the same way again.
A: Even within that failure, there’s so much success right around that … you’re going to meet so many interesting people, you’re going to learn so much about what you’re good at.
On Harvard and McKinsey
F-T: If you went to Harvard and then Stern and then McKinsey, it might look like you work really hard, but it might also look like you’re not that creative… At some point that level of success can alienate you from the types of people you might want to work with in the startup world.
On Investment Bankers
A: There are a lot of brilliant,brilliant technical people I knew that I went to college with that are amazing software developers and creative and they’re all fucking investment bankers.
On Being an Entrepreneur
F: It’s not for everyone. You have to really ask yourself are you passionate about doing something, are you passionate about making a difference, are you a risk taker … Not everyone is like that. You have to acknowledge that.
A: I’ve had investors that I’ve talked to that I greatly respect say “they only reason why we’re interested in you and sitting down and talking to you about potentially investing is becuase we felt you are passionate about the project.
On Original Ideas
E-F: “Even if you have the best idea in the world, you will read about other people doing something similar… If you can’t find anyone doing exactly what you’re doing, it’s probably not a good idea
Related articles
