In the previous articles in this series I have written about the beginnings of my company ‘Next For Me.’
Next For Me publishes news and resources for 50+ audiences. We host events across the country to discuss work, our communities, and what’s next.
I’m heading into the epicenter of the pumped-up ‘startup economy’ next week. In downtown San Francisco I’m a guest of the hosts of Launch Scale. The conference touts its purpose:
Learn how to raise money and grow your startup.
What entrepreneur doesn’t want that? I need to do both of those things.
The conference is hosted by Jason Calacanis, a successful investor, podcaster and publisher. He famously sold ‘weblogs.com’ to AOL for a reported $25 million in 2005 and he was on his way.
I first encountered Calacanis in 1999 when he was the publisher of ‘Silicon Alley’, a magazine covering the nascent tech scene in New York at the time. They published a cover story about Oncology.com, a company I was working with at the time. It was obvious that he was going places. He had a lot of energy and seemed to be everywhere.
Since those days he’s come west and has been a very public figure first in Los Angeles, and now San Francisco tech circles. He was an angel investor in Uber and other high profile startups. He published ‘Angel: The Book’. His conferences are a popular destination on the startup circuit.
Getting The Most From My Investment
It’s a testament to the focus on founders that the organizers offer free passes to entrepreneurs after an application process. There are also passes with more access and meals, etc. to investors and others who want to be near the next unicorn. I think it’s a smart approach.
It’s difficult for me to justify the cost of high-priced conferences as we are still a small company watching our pennies. The pass was welcome and gave me even more reasons to be in San Francisco for a week for other meetings and to catch up with colleagues.
I’m still stepping away from the day-to-day focus and there are related travel costs, meals and coffees, so I intend to make the most of it.
Who I’ll Be Paying Attention To
My ideal investor, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures, who passed on us recently..., is speaking. He’s cool and open enough that he wants to meet and keep hearing from us. These long-term relationships are always strengthened by some face time.
Nirav Tolia is the CEO and Co-founder of Next Door, the neighborhood community service. I met his co-founder Sarah Leary when they first started. She was smart and knew where they were headed. As a ‘community guy’ I think they’ve done a great job of creating a trusted service. Managing millions of online opinions is no easy task.
Next Door would be a fine partner for Next For Me. Organizing our local meetups through their platform would be an efficient way to piggyback on an existing community and add value to Next Door.
I’ve been systematically looking up each investor who’s speaking. There are a lot of them. I’ve added some to my growing list. I will never forget that my colleague Wendi Burkhardt at Silvernest told me that she has spoken to 400 investors while raising her funding.
Craig Newmark is speaking too. Craig was around the early days of ‘Web 1.0’ and was always an understated, measured guy. We even took a class together on information architecture. He really put that to good use on Craigslist, which he was just starting in those days.
His philanthropic work has really grown in the past several years. In 2017, he became a founding funder and executive committee member of the News Integrity Initiative, administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which seeks to advance news literacy and increase trust in journalism. Noble efforts from the guy who has been accused of destroying the newspaper business by taking away their classifieds revenue stream.
Takeaways
I’ll certainly make the most of it and will speak to anybody that will give me the time. I will walk away with a good list of new professionals to get in contact with.
There are opportunities to pitch and have office hours on the stage with Calacanis. Ack! That would be the first and biggest audience we’ve faced. I think we’re ready for it, if not for the testosterone-fueled bubble of Bay Area startups that I’ve been part of in the past.
I’ll be putting on my ‘Hat of Wisdom’ from 35 years in tech, I think our story is relevant, and is a very big vision. We can just bring some calm to the show.
Previous articles in the series:
- A Conference Talk Leads To What’s ‘Next For Me’
- The Story, The Advisors And The Team
- Putting A Legal Structure In Place
- Spreading The News And Early Investments
- Testing The Facebook Ad Waters
- The Modern Elder Academy
- Can Your Startup Start A Movement
- Meeting Matter.vc
- Becoming A Caregiver Statistic
- Talking To Our Audience
- Making Assumptions And Forming Hypotheses
- How To Cope When You're Alone Again On The Startup Journey
- Developing The Brand Architecture
- Raising An Angel Round and Perception
- A Fellow Entrepreneur Offers Guidance
- The New Pitch
- Gracefully Radio Interview
- Ready For Anything, Even Wait And See
- Always Be Publishing
- Getting Out Of Your Head
- Activating A List Of Investors
- In The Details Of Subscriber Growth
- Interview: StartOut
- Keep On Connecting
- Backing Away From Facebook And Twitter
- Sell Your Product, Not Stories To Investors
- Building An Event Business
- Finding Comfort With Agility
- The Zen Of My Company
- I Got This
- Mapping Our Business Plan
- A Coaching Session and Going Bigger
- Meeting The Competition
- How Writing Boosted My Confidence
