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Startup Camp SF Revisited

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Startup Camp San Francisco was this past Sunday and Monday. In addition to my Live Feed updates, here are my impressions regarding Monday, which was primarily focused on the Best Startup Competition. When working on building something, you can get deep in the details that you forget how to talk about it with someone who doesn’t know anything about it. This is what the Best Startup Competition was there to help the Startup Founders work out, the kinks of their elevator pitch.

21 startups signed up to pitch their company/product to 21 groups of people, 5 minutes per group. This is where the rubber meets the road. If you can’t explain what you are doing and why someone should care within 5 minutes, you’re not going anywhere. I wanted to be kind to each group and give them their time and due, but eventually, some startups were so painful that I had to start just walking away.

Here are a few hints from someone who has given pitches like this for his living for the past 10 years:

  • Look your audience in the eye, at least once in a while! If you give you pitch looking at the floor or off into space, you can’t connect with the audience. (The one gentleman who I walked away from after 2 minutes, this is the biggest reason why….you know who you are…)
  • Talk about the Forest, not the Trees. No one cares about the little features your system has. What is the big picture value to me…a potential user? Why should I care, state that first…you have 30 seconds (or less), go…
  • If your a technology company doing a presentation, use technology to present! While the guy who did his presentation using old fashion flip charts got retro points, he didn’t get my wooden nickel. (nor did he get my full attention)
  • To really capture your audience, tell a story…don’t do a PowerPoint read along. There was one company who had a presentation that was exactly this, a story about the value his solution provides to his target users, then it went into a brief product demo of the key screens you see to use the system. (I don’t know for sure, but I think he was the winner…see below).

Everyone who competed at the competition gets huge points for doing it. It’s not an easy thing to do especially is such a format. I also think everyone who competed would get value out of the books presentation zen and How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less.

Unfortunately, I had to take off before the winners were announced. But based upon the piles of coins that I saw as I was leaving, Lil’ Grams looks like they either won or placed in the top three. This is the only company that had a presentation that was a story. The startups that I think you should watch out for are (in no specific order):

  • Lil’ Grams – vertical social network for parents to share their children’s growth with family and friends in a micro-blogging format. And they have a model to make money right away…what a concept!
  • Velocious – voice ordering platform for restaurants to enable customers to order food en route for pickup. Think no more long lines and waiting in the morning for your coffee…
  • MarkMail – archiving and discover tool for email. Both public email like lists serves and private email for companies. Their presentation needs a lot of focusing, but I could see thru to the value regardless.
  • Ultimate Football Network – Another great vertical social/mashup service. All the information you need for making your Fantasy Football picks in a single location…or to just catch up on all the latest details of the football world. Based upon the stickiness factor and size of the market they service, this one is a serious contender.

BAM: Startups Get Business Smart

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Earlier this week I got together with a group of entrepreneurs I know and I was surprised to learn that one of them is starting to instrument his online application to provide Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities. Granted, he didn’t realize that what he was doing was BAM, but that just shows that as a business person he intuitively knew he needed to instrument and monitor his business.

This is a very smart move on his part. Early on in a startup’s life cycle all the focus can be on the business of the end users and forget about the business of running the business. With limited engineering resources, where do you invest them? Most startups will invest all of those resources into their product offering. Only later, when the product complexity has grown and they are out talking to investors do they realize the mistake they made.

This particular entrepreneur is the founder of Amahi, which offers a linux home server. You sign up for the Amahi service, which is currently free, and then download the Linux based software needed to run your home server. Amahi has highly automated the process of getting everything installed and up and running, in the end you have your old PC re-provisioned as a home server for your “family intranet”. You can then monitor your home server from the Amahi website.

With their new instrumentation, Amahi can now monitor how many people have signed up and where each one is in the installation process. If a customer stalls out somewhere in the installation, Amahi now knows about it and can proactively reach out to provide assistance. Beyond that, as the person running the Amahi business, the Founder now knows what his conversion rates and time frames are for customers for each stage of their installation. If Amahi ever needs to go talk to investors for funding, this information is invaluable as it shows how their business works and provides the investors a sense of comfort that the business is being professionally managed.

As a long time statistics hound, I worked in the early day of the web providing application instrumentation for running explosive web businesses. We were always focused on the technical instrumentation of the servers, but I also got interested in the business possibilities instrumentation provided. BAM has been a decade long initiative to move that instrumentation up to the business level, an initiative which was highly successful. However, BAM typically focuses on larger companies. The principals of BAM can just as easily be applied to Startups with just as much value. The startups just need to invest the time to build it into their system from the start.

Results from Monitoring the Meter

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In a previous post Green Scene Hits Your Code, I mentioned how a friend of mine loaned me a Kill A Watz. I realize I am a bit behind on posting the results from my non-scientific home test.

For about two weeks, I had the Kill A Watz monitoring the electrical usage of our home entertainment center. Specifically a:

  • Panasonic 42″ Plasma TV
  • Sony DVD Player
  • Sony VCR Player
  • Yamaha Subwoofer

(It’s a really simple home entertainment system. And yeah, I know, the VCR is an antique. Even worse, I don’t own a DVR…which would have driven up my numbers.)

The Kill A Watz records the number of hours it is plugged in as well as the total Kwh of electrical usage. The primary goal of my test was to see how much electricity and money I would save by physically pulling the plug on all this stuff versus having it sit in standby mode. Everything is plugged into a power strip. For about one week, we just left everything in standby mode. Then for about another week, we flipped the switch on the power strip to off when we were done watching TV.

Here are the numbers from the Kill A Watz (note: it wasn’t an exact week for each run):

Stand By Mode 167 Hours 8.03 Kw 48.08 watts/hour
Powered Off 281 Hours 8.53 Kw 30.36 watts/hour

So, by out right turning off the entire system we saved 17.72 watts of electricity per hour. If you calculate this over an average 30 day (720 hour) month with the cost of electricity from my last PG&E bill, ( ((17.72 watts x 720 hours) / 1000) * $.22708 per Kwh ) you end up with a monthly savings of $2.90! Saving me about 2.5% of my electric bill.While that’s not a lot of savings, overall. It’s a start. More importantly it started me thinking about the power consumption of our house in general. The findings would be much more substantial if I ran the same test in my home office. Turning off my 4 hard drive NAS system, all my networking gear along with the computers when not in use — even if just overnight — would result in a huge savings. I actually did this a few years back when my wife and I went on vacation for a 3 weeks; physically powering down all the gear in the home office and the home entertainment center cut our electrical bill almost in half that month.Coincidentally, I recently came across an article in the Economist talking about two devices that monitor the electrical usage for your home as whole. The Owl and Wattson are both similar devices, they have a sensor that attaches to where you power comes into the house and a remote display that shows you your usage. The Wattson has more stylish flare as well as the ability to output data to a computer for further analysis, but today is only designed to be used in the UK (both actually come from the UK). Both do essentially the same thing, let you view your power consumption in real time.

It is amazing to see how much energy different items in your house consumes. One thing I noticed with the Kill A Watz is that when the plasma TV is running, it consumes between 200 and 400 watts of power depending on if the scene is dark or bright. A curious discovery. While these types of gadgets don’t do much on their own to save electricity, the awareness they help raise is a great start.