Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

So now that the election is over, we can move on to new things. I wanted to share for a minute about something i’m involved with - The Connectors Group . The Connectors Group is a new angel investor group being formed out of the collective network of myself and of a few friends (including our MD who was luckiest enough to have been an angel investor in a little company called GOOGLE.) The Connectors Group also will work with companies that need to tap into the collective network of Connectors for help and business development/advisory. The premise is to help great entrepreneurs succeed even if its something fundable or if it doesn’t need funding. Jeevan, our MD calls it “mentor capital” but overall the goal is to build some more infrastructure behind the community here between the Angel Group and Connectors Advisory and some educational events that are being planned so that over the next few years there are more places to turn to in order to help build companies. Like everything I do, expect to see a lot of alliances being formed around the group so it becomes a giant funnel for NYC - hopefully. It’ll help everyone if it succeeds.

hey everyone,

I wanted to share a note about the next facebook developers garage, which Bootstrapper.com is sponsoring from now on …. come to the next one and let’s grab a drink!

NEW YORK FACEBOOK GARAGE DEBUTS GAME CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES
Garage features Sun Startup Essentials, new app tool Zembly, demos and a profile of NYC’s Buddy Media

October 20, 2008 - New York City

The New York facebook Garage convenes on Monday, October 27th at the Sunset Terrace, Chelsea Pier with an agenda of speakers introducing new technologies and debuts of exciting Made-in-New York facebook applications.

The garage kicks off with a presentation of facebook Connect - Making the Web More Social. facebook Connect is a game changer, integrating facebook’s news feed with your friends’ activities on the web. Facebook Connect is rolling out! Several of the facebook Connect launch partner sites have launched integrations. Starting in October, facebook will offer a form to submit your site for review to be launched.

Next up is a demo of a new technology, zembly, by Sun Evangelist Angelo Rajadurai. Currently in beta, zembly allows developers with a basic understanding of programming to create incredibly complicated facebook apps in a very short time and easily convert these web applications to all the social platforms on the web, including mobile platforms such as iPhone and Android. With zembly, you create social applications using just your browser, working collaboratively with others. In some ways, you can think of zembly as a Wikipedia for social applications. Zembly may just be the world’s first and easiest facebook development environment.

Following the zembly demo the garage features “apps to watch” program with debut demos by the leading NYC facebook developers. From elaborate games to social network applications the facebook developer showcase is always a popular feature of every facebook garage, as developers all over the city look forward to see the next insanely Made-in_New York facebook app. The October garage features the fb developer fund winner Teach the People by Jason Beckerman and Joshua Backer http://www.dankapps.com, Family Builder, presented by Ilya Nikolayev, CEO http://familybuilder.com, Navigator by Alex Shapiro, http://www.touchgraph.com and Bananagram by Wade Tinney, Founding Partner, http://www.largeanimal.com/.

The garage concludes with a profile of Buddy Media, a New York-based company that plans, develops, promotes and monitors “app-vertising” campaigns - branded social applications - that increase engagement and interaction between people and brands. Facebook hostesss Melody Bates interviews the companies founders to explore the company genesis, where it is now and where it is going.

New York facebook Developer Garage is a developer grassroots organization founded in 2007 and part of the greater facebook developer garage network of over 70 garages worldwide. Organized for, and by facebook developers, it meets monthly and is dedicated to the showcasing of facebook apps from the greater New York facebook developer community. It networks with other sectors of the New York technology community, including brand agencies and major media networks.

Sponsors:
Lead Sponsor: Sun Startup Essentials
Exclusively for startups, the fee-free Sun Startup Essentials program offers deep discounts on industry leading systems and storage products, massively scalable Web hosting services, plus free training and technical advice. Build your business on an infrastructure that scales right along with your success. Join Sun Startup Essentials today at: http://www.sun.com/startup.

Exhibition Sponsor: Socialmedia.com
Social platforms enable a whole new way for Internet entrepreneurs to quickly build web businesses online by creating social network applications. SocialMedia’s advertising network provides the easiest way to monetize application traffic. Find out more at:
http://www.socialmedia.com

Mobile Sponsor: iPhone Boot Camp NYC
Offering a one day workshop every Saturday in NewYork for entry level and advanced iPhone developers, taught by leading iPhone developers. http://www.iphonebootcampnyc.com

Host Sponsor: intuwin http://intuwin.com
Social Media + Brand Engagement

Media sponsors:
Mashable http://www.mashable.com
Bootstrapper http://www.bootstrapper.com
Mediabistro http://www.mediabistro.com
Bernardo’s List http://www.BernardosList.com
Gary’s Guide http://www.garysguide.org

So I recently produced the BootStrapper Venture Summit and i figured I would share how I marketed the event and what went into it…

1. Pillsbury offered me the space months back and we decided to do an event.
2. I asked Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupiter Media to be the keynote (before even knowing what the event would look like)
3. I found a sponsor to build the website and we threw up a basic website.
4. So now we have 1 speaker and a website … nothing else …
5. I went to Aruba for a week and created the initial event structure
6. I sent out emails to 200 entrepreneurs and 200 investors i know inviting them to apply for the event
7. I built all the investor panels
8. I found half the entrepreneurs
9. At this point, i went to every group in town and offered to bring them on as media sponsors. They got the sponsorship for free + a free ticket for telling their members. I did NOT care if their members bought tickets, i just wanted them to build buzz and be able to thank them for sponsoring so it builds more community by bringing lots of groups together.
10. I sponsored drinks after the Ny Tech meetup. In order to get a free drink, people had to shake my hand. (cost $288) but it started building some buzz.
11. I started mailing all of my databases, hard. Everyone got lots of emails from me. Too many.
12. I created a facebook group, tagged our speakers on flickr and used the ny tech meetup list
13. I sent out a press release
14. I emailed every attendee at least 10 times in the week leading up to the event reminding them to come- i wanted the event drilled into their heads
15. At the event, I thanked the community for making it possible, after all its us, the community that makes it happen, not this blog, not me, not any one person.

So I talk a lot about relationships and relationship building and I was wondering today, what is really the value of relationships? And I’m not always sure. I have tons of relationships and tend to know who to refer people to for just about anything but sometimes I get lost in my own relationships and end up getting nothing done for myself. It’s something to think about - at what point is there diminishing returns in building your network?

So some suggestions i’ve heard from people about how to make the nyc tech community stronger…

1) Mentoring program: We need more successful entrepreneurs giving back and helping younger guys

2) More conferences and quality high end intimate events - again bringing good people together

3) More seed capital - a couple million dollars more in accessible seed capital needs to hit the streets, not a fortune, just a bit more to get people to think they have a shot at raising money

The Next BootStrapper Venture Summit is on April 1/2 2009. If you want to apply to present do it on the site. If you are an investor and would like to be on a panel, reach out to me at rich at bootstrapper.com

So last thursday was our first ever, BootStrapper Venture Summit and I just wanted to thank the entire community for making it possible. We have a sold out crowd and the event was fabulous for a first time event. We had Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupiter Media, Kevin Ryan, CEO of AlleyCorp & Scott Cohen, CEO of Dimestore Media as our main keynotes and other great mini-keynotes from Danny Schultz, co-founder of DFJ Gotham, Lubna Dajani from Mobile Mondays, Jeff Stewart from Urgent Group, Owen Davies from NYCSeed and my mentor Peter Kestenbaum. We also had 13 companies present and Takes All Types was our “goodwill” presenter. I’d also like to thank our panelists and moderators and attendees and sponsors such as Sun Microsystems & Pillsbury Law and the dozens of other supporting sponsors.

Sure, there were things we could have done better but the important thing was that the event happened Our next BootStrapper Venture Summit will be on April 1/2 in NYC, if you’re interested in speaking at it, contact me or if you would like to apply to be a presenting company, do so on our website, BootStrapper Summit.

So I’d like to share with everyone an event I’m helping produce for Jupiter Media. We are producing the Seminole Web 3.0 Event on October 16/17 in CA. The premise is that the next evolution of the internet is based on open data standard and articulating data the way people think – true associative processing or Semantic Web for those that choose to go with the official lingo. I think it’s a very exciting time in the evolution of digital media and technology and that we are on the forefront of the true power of the internet. When search can mimic the way I network in real life and really mine data – that will be the day the internet really grows up. If anyone is interested in attending or speaking check it out at www.web3event.com. I hope to see everyone there.

Patience is very important. Even if you think a deal is perfect, coming off too strong too quickly can easily scare people away. This isn’t a good thing. Make sure you craft the timing of your pitch to the way your counter party works. Don’t scare them away. Feel it out. Give bits at a time. Building business relationships is like getting a date. Sure you can ask a girl out and get her into bed fast - but the odds are if you try that, it won’t work and you’ll look like a jerk. A couple of dates are usually pretty standard. Next time you’re doing a business deal, ask yourself how fast and loose your counter party is and craft your approach accordingly. Don’t be a sleazy jerk!

Courtesy of Peter K - everyone thank him!!!

Everyone is invited …

High Performance Computing for Finance on HP ProLiant servers leveraging NVIDIA and Microsoft Technology

Microsoft, HP and NVIDIA cordially invite you to attend a CUDA™ Tutorial held at the conclusion of the High Performance Computing for Wall Street Conference.
Time: 5 PM, Monday September 22, 2008
Location: Lexington Suite, Roosevelt Hotel (Madison Avenue and 45th)
Note; You do not have to be a conference attendee for admission to this session
To Register: Please send your name, phone, email address to Cese.Child@HP.com .

NVIDIA® CUDA™ is a general purpose scalable parallel programming model for writing highly parallel applications which allows large scale multi core systems to vastly accelerate applications such as Monte Carlo, PDE’s, and various fixed income and risk models. HP and Microsoft are working with NVIDIA to integrate CUDA technology to accelerate solutions in Finance. In this tutorial, NVIDIA will present CUDA and Tesla and discuss their use for Finance quantitative analytics. Over 30 firms now have active projects using NVIDIA’s high performance offering. In this session you will:

•Be introduced to CUDA, its C++ like environment, and GPU computing in general as an approach that has quickly gained acceptance to accelerate production Finance HPC applications.
•Get an overview of Tesla – NVIDIA’s high performance computing hardware platform hosted on HP ProLiant servers
• See a CUDA application and participate in a programming model discussion. You will not only get an overview of the metrics being observed in a production financial application (performance, energy and real estate savings) compared with current HPC server/blade farm architectures but hear a real world discussion on “what it took to get there” from peers.
•Hanweck Associates will describe their experience as a developer who has leveraged CUDA to accelerate real-world Finance production code in the computational option space.

So in a total twist of fun irony, we changed the name of our conference from Early Stage Summit to The Bootstrapper Venture Summit. The new name solidifies the Bootstrapper brand and c’mon its so much more fun. We are a walking contradiction hehe.

So I’d like to tell everyone about an event a friend of mine is producing. Stephanie Frasco of AskFrasco fame is putting together a great event for e-factor on September 10th. Howard Greenstein, NYC’s king of social media is moderating so it should be a fun time.

Check it out - http://efactor-emailinvite.eventbrite.com/ 

Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupiter Media will be the keynote for the Early Stage Summit a great investor/startup conference we’re hosting on October 2nd. If you haven’t applied to attend yet, I suggest you do, the event is filling up fast.

I would like to officially announce that the Early Stage Summit will be on October 2^nd 2008.  The Early Stage Summit aims to fill the gap in NYC in the venture community by providing a forum for great companies to show off their products to the top investors from around town and also from around the world.

The Early Stage Summit is being produced by Bootstrapper.com with the help of Richmond Events, Susan Hahn & Associates, Pillsbury Withrop, Mashable, Seedingit.com, StartupHappy.com, SquareSpace and the Connectors Fund.

The goal is simple, allow 15 great companies to present in front of investors who will give live diligence feedback to help the companies understand themselves better. The event will be broken down into Tracks along industries and each will feature a keynote, a panel of investors, 3-4 pitches followed by live diligence from our investors followed by a chance to meet with the companies of your liking in our breakout rooms.

The event is by application only and I urge anyone, investors, entrepreneurs or press that is interested in attending to apply at EarlystageSummit.com. I’m also available for questions if you want. 

Coming up soon is the Techcrunh50 and DEMO conference. I would just like to take a minute and thank both organizations for helping build our ecosystem. Some people may not like the fact that DEMO charges to present (if you are accepted), others may not be a fan of Mike Arrington’s abrasive style but at the end of the day – without organizations like DEMO and Techcrunch and people like Chris Shipley, Mike Arrington & Jason Calacanis, we would be missing out on a whole lot of great people and products. So no matter which model  you think is better or who you are a fan of – please just thank both them for being an integral part of our ecosystem.