nick baily's two cents

EPIC WIN FTW! (Also known as best presentation I saw at Launch Conference)

Why bother with an intro. Meet.... DOMO!

 

Advice to Startup Founders: Be Yourself (not too much)

In the many years I've known Adeo Ressi he's never failed to be an inspiration, for sheer energy if nothing else, but also an unbounded optimism, bias towards getting things done, and a willingness to toss aside the old in favor of a vision of how things could be. So its no surprise that his most recent endeavor, the Founder Institute, a "school" (or bootcamp?) for startup founders, has grown so rapidly.

It's a no-nonsense semester long class that takes in people at all stages, united only by their desire to be entrepreneurs. A crash course intensive, it covers direct hands-on issues and skills required to run a startup, as well as the intangible stuff that really matters but is rarely taught -- like dealing with stress, or partners, and how to explain yourself and what you do (a message Adeo has a gift for delivering with brutal clarity, as this video makes clear).

So needless to say it's been a blast to participate in this semester's NYC chapter as a mentor, with chapter head Gabe Zichermann. I had the pleasure of presenting at the semester's first formal class a few weeks ago, dubbed "Vision & Values," about the big picture questions that face every founder as they get started.

Here's the video, and there's a link to the slides below. Also you can see this clip as well as the great presentations on the same night by fellow presenters Carter Cleveland (art.sy) and Gary Whitehill (NYEW) too via this Vimeo link

Belgrave Trust Founder Nick Baily Speaks at NY Founder Institute Session #2

Slides also viewable here, as PowerPoint and PDF

Huffington Post Story on Startups & "Contest Economics" (Stone-Age Blogging Edition)

So my piece this week for the Huffington Post has been generating some discussion. Well at least on Twitter, which people tell me is a quite important site on the interwebs these days. It was a fun post to write, the entire thing was actually just a riff on a single sentence that Jason Calacanis wrote for his email listserv, which was:

The proper protocol in the valley is to at least try and partner, or purchase, the startups who have innovated in a space you’re going into.

The idea of one of the most highly competitive sectors of business "playing nice" just wedged in my head. It's one of those against the laws of physics sort of observations that you can't help but struggle to reconcile.

But alighting on word "cooperation" reminded me of something I wrote a couple years ago for this here little neglected blog of mine, and it seemed like there was actually something interesting going on here.

Only problem was it was real late after a marathon day in the office and I was walking down the stairs to get on a pretty long subway ride. And my brain can become Swiss cheese when I'm tired, it wasn't gonna work the next morning. So... I became a blogger, except with a pen and my notebook, in longhand. 

Came out pretty much in final form, with one exception being the crack-brained idea of feeling like it just had to have poker as the main theme. That didn't work out (though I emailed that part to Jason and he used it, so all was not lost) but otherwise all was OK. 

Anyways, so I was wondering if I'm the first ever blogger to use this method. I think it needs a name, how about "offline blog leveraging."

Oh wait, I think it's called "writing."

Damm. 

Ah well, hard to be original in this world. Feel free click through and read for yourself if you're bored. Here's the first part: 

For decades, there's been a gentleman's agreement in the Silicon Valley. If you're the big guy, when small companies get some traction in an area you dominate, you partner with them, or buy them. Taking young startups' ideas and using dominance and power to overrun them isn't sporting.

"Microsoft killed Lotus, WordPerfect, and Netscape. But the recent hurricane of criticism is hitting Facebook, and not just on privacy. They almost got into an all out war with Zynga (makers of the extremely lucrative Farmville and Mafia Wars games) and have been accused of rampantly "borrowing" ideas from Twitter, FourSquare, and many others.

"That's just not how things are done."

...so, um, why?