#nyvc

Discontinued 'V' line (IND Queens Boulevard Line & IND Sixth Avenue Lines).

                        Last night I attended the NYVC Speaker Series at Dogpatch Labs, featuring Skillshare Founder/CEO Mike Karnjanaprakorn.  Mike was incredibly generous with his time, and willing to speak openly about his experiences as an entrepreneur, and his current role in building Skillshare.  One idea that Mike focused on was how people need to climb the entrepreneurial ladder.  In most traditional career paths, there is a career trajectory on how someone can move upwards in terms of promotions, and titles, but this is not the case for entrepreneurs.  In order to climb up the entrepreneurial ladder, an individual needs to execute on ideas.  Executing on your ideas, and acting on your instincts allows you to make mistakes, so you can learn not to repeat them again.  It is a good idea to ask successful entrepreneurs what ideas they have worked on that ended up failing; it can provide you some interesting insight.  As you execute on your ideas, you can begin to understand what does, and does not work for you, but you will never be able to do this unless you actually do something.

Mike also gave us some great advice on finding cofounders, building a company, and fundraising.  Finding a technical cofounder is not something that can be done effectively at a meet-up.  Ultimately, you need to understand that starting a company with someone is similar to a marriage.  Just like you would date someone before proposing to her, it is important to get to know a potential cofounder over an extended period of time.  It is best if you and your cofounder can both come up with the idea together, to ensure that it is something you are both passionate about working on. It would not be a good for the non-technical founder to just tell the technical person what they should build.  A great point that I had never heard anyone else highlight, or read in a blog before, was when Mike explained that when evaluating a potential cofounder, it is important to explore if they will be a good manager, and partner in running the company after the initial build.  Once you start hiring programmers, and designers, can your technical cofounder become an effective leader within the organization?  Not every technical co-founder will be capable, or even interested in making that transition, so it is a conversation you need to have before proceeding in founding a company with someone.

Mike explained how it is not wise to quit your job to pursue an idea, until you have done the work to validate you idea, to confirm that it works.  Mike worked on Skillshare for a year, reviewing the risks, and talking to people, before launching.  Rather than having people focus on what they liked about the site, he asked them why it would fail? Then he went back and came up with solutions, and rebuttals to all their objections.  When getting feedback from people it is important to listen, and not to talk.  On the topic of building a company, Mike explained that it is important for every employee to be able to answer several questions.  What is my job? How do I know I am successful? What impact does my job have on the company?  Being able to answer these questions gives everyone a sense of a personal investment in the company’s success, and reenforces accountability across the organization.  He also explained that when building your product, you should not focus on your competition until you are huge.  When it comes to fundraising, it is never too early to start building relationships with investors, but it is important to know when to actually raise money.  You don’t want to raise money too early, because as soon as you do, the clock starts ticking, and you need to start to meet expectations. 

Ultimately, the best advice I took away from the talk was that everything you do is going to be harder than you expected it to be.  There will be obstacles, and challenges that will come up that you will fail to anticipate.  The only thing you can do is to prepare the best you can, and execute.  You can only move forward, and upward by executing, and learning from your mistakes.  

This past Tuesday, the New York Venture Community hosted Doug Perlman, one of the preeminent thought leaders on sports and digital media, to speak about trends in the sports and tech space and which areas are ripe for disruption. We "sold out" the free event on Eventbrite and had over 50 people attend on a night when there were other prominent tech events going on in the city. It was a great 1.5 hour conversation that was driven primarily by audience questions rather than having Doug merely speak at us for the entire time. The audience composition was also important to the overall success. We had a great mix of traditional VCs and other tech people, but we also had a number of representatives from different sports leagues and sports startups. This event was the first time that NYVC really dug into a specific vertical, and to start with sports and tech (a relatively unproven one) was somewhat risky. However, the demand for tickets and the feedback we received all scream to me that not only was the event itself a success, but we need more sports and tech meetups.