PITCHES

CrowdHall
An online venue for crowd sourced town halls.
The problem is that over the last decade they’re has been the ability to communicate with Twitter, email, Facebook. But what if you want to learn from them as an elected official? Using the tools you will be inundated with email, tweets and posts. No tools to prioritize or respond to it. You will have to cut yourself off from that. You lose personal brand and the ability to tap the collective audience. We allow you to crowd source, moderate and prioritize.
You can create one for a panel or topic and people can speak about it with peer voting. That moderates the topic. Those on the top can see what are the top questions of my audiences. They will have an efficient way to interact.
This doesn’t have to be just for a Senator. It can be for an author, rockstar, or celebrity. This can be for all sorts of people.
We know there is a demand for this but here are a few examples. On another social platform Jeremy Lind had over 8000 questions for him. There was no way to organize and prioritize. You couldn’t read his answers etc.
Reddit had President Obama’s answers but it has a confusing interface.
On Crowdhall we have questions a response separated with the Obama Brand.
Lets take a look at the Beta platform online right now.
Crowdhall.com and see featured townhalls that we have launched there. An interesting one for you is Scott Howell. He lost but had an open Q and A.
We mocked up this one for an agency. You can embed your townhall within your own website.
USAID was our first customer. They used townhall to source with 3 days, 50 experts and 5 heads of state.
We went and took part in Cincinnati with Brandery. We worked with Jeff Holm here in Utah with The Bachelor who did an open Q&A. We had 9k visitors and 500 questions that we were moderated. The average visitor spent 13 minutes on the site and that was really successful.
We worked with Columibia Uiniversity and the Spark people.
Moving forward we are starting to get a commitment with Speaker Boehner and Eric Cantor who want to be leaders in open government. We have commitments from Octagon, a huge entertainment firm, who want to work with large clients. We are also looking at brands with P&G.
It is a really exciting time and happy to be back here in Utah.
ASK
People who can leverage this
Any Engineers or Business Dev then we will be making senior and junior level hires in the next month or so.
Jordan is my partner right here.

Q? How do you filter?
A. Like I said it is crowd moderated. With votes. If there is anything offensive it gets flagged, moderated and removed.
Q? How do you deal with tyranny of majority?
A. Moderating we are also working on tags and topics. I would like to know about Energy, Environment, and others. Then you can sort content by not just popular but by trending. It may not be popular but we are working on deciding how to manage this best in a way that is understandable.
Q? How did you get people to do this?
A. You use the resources and relationships you have. In the political space with USAID and Capitol Hill I had worked in a capacity in DC. We worked out network in Georgetown entrepreneurship community. Jeff Holm is a friend of ours.
In the open government space we are attracting more people.
Q? What age do you see will use this type of stuff?
A. One distinguishing group is that tele-townhall works with the older demographic. We are looking at the 18-34 with the market where they want to participate.
But these other brands want to embed within their website. You can see the top twenty ideas.
Q? If I was a constituent I could subscribe to topics on the people who are my area representatives?
A. That is the direction we want to go. We want to be able to pull out some of these topics. They want to talk about Economics . What we do right now. Most participants are invited via twitter or email. You can subscribe to town hall and we will let you see subscription and once you connect to an event you can choose your contact level.
Q? I now that there was a movement for politicians to move to email. Let’s say someone is opening up to this are there any controls?
A. Early on there is a lot of moderating experience we have learned and will continue to work through. As user behavior comes in we have a toolbox of tools and tricks.
If there is something negative then they don’t want to dodge the question. They can respond to it and anyone else who asks that same question can see that answer.
Q? Wondering about revenue?
A. All of this is all free. With any brand and event we have been charging for those. White labels we have charged for as well.
One exciting probed for public is free. But for private town hall then there is monthly subscription that you can customize with multiple panelists.

Voto App
Scott Paul
Don’t download yet. I have to change the whole presentation.
How this was born was at Armor Active company 7 months ago RayBan came to us and said that they wanted to create an app where they could show products using our hardware. We have the case for it. The deal paused.
We decided to create an app for a platform and could sell to make up companies and others.
So a month or two I went to work. I started building a platform. A social network
Facebook, etc…
What, When, Who, Where, Why
Which??? They say comment nor Like.
Instragram has 4 shoes to pick from on one picture. They are not built for polling.
Voto is the social network for answering the “Which” question.
Which Hair style. Vote and you can select.
Visual and Mobile. You have to see it on mobile.
I like this example of cupcakes.
They can see who is voting and then take a look at this. It is so simple with the four options for people to instantly know which specific item is being voted on and has won.
There are worthy foes out there and they have millions of users. Wayin, Polar, etc. People are thinking about this and we don’t have a lot of time and these people are placed in the right place. But we have a better solution.
And we have Armor Active. We know retail and work with these guys and thousands more. This is how we can leverage. We are going to let you try on glasses and see if you like trying this out.
MONEY: We don’t know yet but we can do it.
ASK: Download the app and use it.

Q? Live?
A. Yes
Q? How are you doing the photos?
A. Photos on the iPhone, Image search and existing photos. We would love to hook in to Pinterest. We follow the square shape.
Q? Twitter poll?
A. They just discontinued and it was text based.
Q? Leveraging Instagram and others?
A. When I started working with Scott I had to learn this whole language and world. There are teens who have 500,000 and 700,000 followers. It has been a little hard but I have been talking with them. I have purchased those accounts and built my own networks as well.
Q? Do you plan on integrating Facebook?
A. We are working on it with next the update. Instragram, Facebook etc. We are working on getting our social graphs implemented.
Q? Traffic?
A. 40,000 / day and we launched 25 days ago.
Q? This and That – they do a connection service?
A. I have heard of that and they have a channel.
We want to keep in Utah and be a social network. We are not an enterprise. We make this live and to breathe we have to get every bit of help in Utah to get downloads.
We are good at SaaS and enterprise.
Q? Funding?
A. Coming from Armor Active. I am doing somewhat like DropShip. We can build something new for Armor Active. We have been at if for four months. This is the right way to do it.We have the right group we are just running to get it to the next level.

Pure Engagement
Started in November in 2012. We are working with CIO at Western Governs University. They have a lot of student data that they are collecting and it is useless. They were kind enough to give us a work order to pay for solving the problem.
We are tracking things like engagements and assessments and streaming that all in. We are batching some of it it in. Pearson Education is helping as well.
We are tracking all that in the browser.
If you could get a bunch of data coming in from the backed on the logs and Omniture data then you can imagine what we have in these groups.
Instead of having to “tag” a website which is hard to do and a pain. THe benefit we have it that we agreeing data from everywhere. We have Richard Wellman who is really smart.
Schools and Publishers want the student data. Schools are getting data from 70 odd providers and not visible.
We want to create a data ecosystem, with machine learning, and Analytics and prediction. We want the schools to leverage their spending.
WGU is awesome and it is all online and they have 42% graduation. We believe they will be able to get over the 50%+ if we solve this problem which will give them $150 million more per year.
There is a way for all the students to learn in an appropriate way. We can help them.
I built this picture of our “stack” which is technical.
Everyone wants to pay us money.
HURDLES:
Optimizing. We have $300k and will get $500k more from WGU.
Once established after success we will look for more money. We have 18 really good friends.
ASK:
Optimizing publisher revenue model
Best pricing model
Marketing

Q? The IP?
A. We own the IP. We are working on one patent with machine learning.
Q? What does this look like for the student?
A. Our solution is seamless javascript for the publishers. It goes out right now. The thing that you can get from the new information is that the instructor is not getting things right.
We had anew browser extension. So then we can help with the student doing some evaluations. Perhaps send the student to Wikipedia because other students went.
Q? Team?
A. I have an amazing team. I forgot about this tonight so I didn’t remind them and they are not here. I have a couple friends. We built a furniture warehouse in the area. My friend also takes me to these Corporate Alliance events and they are fine.
Mark Berry is a really class act developer.
CloudView does support for us.

AMP SESSION
Jeremy Hanks
I started Doba 10 years ago. We saw a lot of opportunities and over a couple of years we tried in various ways to solve it. We finally a year ago spun off with $2.8 million and 9 people. We brought some stuff with us. And we are Dropship.com
What we do is sell software to retail and distributors so they can do inventory. The nuts and bolts is the exchange platform. We help in the brave world of e-comomerce to scale.
That is what we have been doing. We have made a lot of mistakes. We spent 2.01 million and learned a lot. We built tech and changed business model 4 times.
We closed on 1.2 million in September. We have customers we are talking with Nordstroms and retailers. They don’t want to have inventory and want to have a virtual supply chain. We want to build a 1 billion dollar company in the supply chain. The B2C changed with things like Amazon and Ebay and GSSI Enterprise. Magento. and these all came on the scene and Google has helped them. Social came along and mobile has helped them as well. But that has all been the B2C side.
The B2B side is still not ecommerce transactions. They warehouse here and retail store and what costumers want is impossible with the existing supply chain.
So that is the quick update.
4 things as random carp over the last couple of weeks that I have thought of:
1) As an entrepreneur you are the story teller and chief. I don’t have a lot of time but I can tell you a story about our business and pretty much most of you will say that will be big.
There is a lot of junk to know but you would understand the equation. You want to think about telling a story. You have to have characters and real and authentic stories. How do you present with stories?
It is far more compelling. Tonight I rattled off a bunch of things but I should have mentioned Beechmint who partners with movie stars and they sell things for celebrities. They built a site Home Mint.com.
They decided that building the tech was going to kill them. This is a real story and if I can remember the names of the execs then it would be more real. They are using our solution.
So, tell the story of traction. Think about stories – villain, hero?
Villian is the “old way” of doing things.

2) Where should we build a company?
There are a lot of people who go through this process. I have come across a lot of companies that are trying to go other places. You should build your company where you want to live. I can argue why I should move to the Bay Area and could build 10 times bigger. But I don’t want to live in that place. I would last a month there. The people traffic and inaccessible to outdoors. If my company is a 10th as big, oh well. If you have that kind of thought, just where do you want to live.
Life’s way too short to not pick what you want.

3) Fundraising
There is a prevailing attitude that you can’t raise money here in Utah. That’s a bunch of bull. I raised $1.2 million and at good terms. You shouldn’t raise money with just anyone. You need to know what are good terms. It is a pretty steep learning. If you have a couple of good advisers and they can tell you if you are getting screwed or not really quickly. It doesn’t matter where. You have to find the right kinds f people and get the right terms.
Related: You have to have a plan B. Raising money is not easy. Really that is Plan A. It won’t make or break you if you don’t raise money.
I am a big fan of tech and when an investor says you have to move to my location I don’t like that. I want the investors to believe in me. There are ulterior motives of them wanting you to move to them. When they have a motive of geography, they are naturally filtering the deals. You end out taking the deal to move to Vegas but if you take that deal you have a peer group who came through the same filter.
I think the people who enforce it on ulterior motives are also desperate. The companies that will move to Vegas are just coming for money and don’t have the same passion.

4) Final – Community is so important. I regret taking a break this last year. I know some people here. I know their history and stories. They became friends peers and cheerleaders and that doesn’t happen if you don’t get out. That is the high horse I get on. At least come once! Give back to the place
5) – Last is the quote: Every morning I get an avalanche forecast. Drew Hardest is a forecaster – “We live charmed lives. I remember an old friend who looked at me wild eyed. Today will be an extraordinary day and he was right.” I later found out that he said that to everyone – make it an extraordinary day!
There are so many highs and so many lows. Just frame that.

Q? Doba and Dropship?
They are 2 separate companies.

—-
IN THE WEEDS
Intro: Next presenter VC event. We are trying to lay foundations with Dropship commerce being a big company. We are moving all our business to Silicon Valley Bank. They are based here and will tell us about what they do.
Gary Jackson – Director Silicon Valley Bank
I know a bank is the last place you would look when you think of entrepreneurs, but I am one. I have been with SVB for 7 years now. 4 years here. I manage the practice here in SLC. SVB has been around for 30 years. Our niche focus is on technology and life sciences. We have been in the VC industry. We have a global presence and some of the other things most banks have.
Our mission – Is to help innovative companies to have increased probability of success. We are helping those in software and hardware or devices or all sorts of other things. The reason people work with us is because we work with start up companies. Once you are launched we work up to $1 billion in revenue. I work from 0 to $100 million in revenue.
We very much believe in community. We like to come to these events. We also know people and may know those who can invest and the players who have expressed interest in your industry.
The Topic for me was to intro money:
Bootstrap
OPM – Other Peoples MOney
Angels
Customers
Grants
Venture Debt
VC

VC model is based on market that requires upfront capital. You have to be able to attack large growth and that takes big money.
I like to distinguish between doing debt or equity.
Equity is like long term capital and you are creating value over time. What that a means for an outside individual is that you will exit. You want to be able to control? Then outside equity is not probably right. Equity is very expensive and you can use if for development and brand.
Debt finance is assets based. That is things that show up on the balance sheet – receivable, inventory and debt gets repaid in cash.

Equity takes more risk – return is not defined, few conditions on use, higher target returns.
Debt takes less risk – conditional uses, short term capital, lower returns, underwriting your current.

Why Debt?
Its less expensive than equity.
Leverages existing equity – less dilution
Can extend cash runway
No board level representation required.
Why Not Debt?
Debt can’t replace equity
More restrictions
Less flexible on use/ repayment outside of original terms
Potential loss

Criteria:
Team
Advisers
Investors
Market
Business Plan
Technology
Cash Income/Burn rate
Milestones for funding
Source of Repayment

Q? On average how much on return?
A. Usually VCs expect 20x
Q? How many venture deals have you seen in the last few months?
A. 10. I am very bullish on the Utah market. We get a couple a month.
Q? What is different with SVB versus Chase?
A. Creditability when looking for cash. The types of firms that are within the tech community. Introductions to the next investor is something we can help with.
Q? These slides are advice or are you an investor?
A. My bank is secured debt.
Q? Typical package?
A. If we are lending based on VC round we have a 3 year term. A Receivable term is annual and revolving.
Q? How do we lend against VC?
A. A company raises 5 million. We are able to add 2 million so your effective raise is 7 million. The equity is leverage so the eventual request is higher and you have less dilution and more runway to the next round.
SVB can say that if VCs have raised that much then there is enough cash for us to join in.
Q? How do you think crowdfunding will effect you?
A. They are used for a specific project and it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Q? Assuming terms are decent you talked about location. Can you add a couple of critical questions that we should ask of partners?
A. It is really important to know they have a long horizon. You want to know them personally and know that it is someone you can work with for a long time. You have to know who they are. Venture firms act differently. We know how they act. Naughty list or not. You can ask me what our experience has been with your portfolio as well.

Announcements:
Thank you gift certificate to SnowBird for Jared Richards for helping this to run last year.
A couple of last things. We want to thank our sponsors and the food is provided with help.
There’s a group – Bryce Roberts who is a great individual started RunSLC.com. You need to go there and subscribe and tumblr. He had Vinod at a presentation recently. Bryce is going to try and bring people in this month.
First timers to LaunchUp you can sign up at our site. One email once a month and that is it. First Thursdays every month and it will be here. Easy to remember and we hope you come back.
We are looking for companies to present. We generally get you on the agenda.

PITCHES

Vidpresso
Randall Bennett
The small screen – the big picture
Social media for broadcasters. You have seen the NBC showing comments on TV. The smaller broadcaster can’t pull this off. We have Anderson Cooper with Anderson Live. APanama uses us with their national AmIdol show.
We are also with KSL TV and QVC Germany.
We have spent 0 on marketing. We were in Techcruch and some broadcast journals in May 2012. We did spend $200 to get Anderson Live.
Our competitors are clunky and expensive. Lock in contracts, proprietary and difficult to use. We made it easier. No long term contracts (month to month). We are also only $400/month. We also follow Web standards.
This is our interface – we launched in May 2012 and this is the interface that has channels. They click on a button that says “Send To Air.” We are just using the simple web browser and integrates with what they have.
SMALL SCREEN done on the BIG PICTURE
Justin and I are a few of the video hacks in the works. I, Justin was at Radiate Media. I was with the programming side. All the polls are clunky and expensive. Right now they have equipment that costs millions of dollars. They have expensive gear but our clients are getting smarter and they are offloading the work to the client.
We use the Web Standards and you can build stuff that goes on TV. If you are watching a sports broadcast you can send the video to other devices.
So we help with the One Broadcast with many platforms. You can have the broadcast and have it be interactive.
If no budget, no problem. You can just be passionate and you can send up as good as CNN.
randall@vidpresso.com

Q? Next?
A. Big trade show in April. Want to be marketing. Social media we will work on. Broadcasters flawlessly interact with audience. We haven’t focused on marketing and sales but product. We have made sure that our product works well. Next compile more and more sales.

Q? Networks seem like more live broadcasting. Are you going to change to YouTube or tips so that static can have dynamic?
A. We think that broadcasters are ignored. It is a place where we can have maximum impact and they have budget. I want to build the product that I wanted. My end goal is to have the tools that I want. It is too early and there is no money there. Web video is the same as broadcast but on a PC, video is linear presentation of ideas. The tools can be unified.
Yes we want to work with them but not yet.

Q? How does integration work with channel?
A. Most stations have a computer that they use to display stuff that they hook to their switcher. So we just allow them to add the content easier. Most customers are done in two days.
We have to do some work to make sure that it looks right for their broadcast side. We are trying to build tools and it doesn’t cost us anything for now.

Q? Cool product. Metrics? Do you have any sources to help get in to the broadcasters? Do you have the ability to show that your tools are making it more effective
A. Broadcasters just want to show things. If we can score the viral loop then they will be able to show ROI. We have thought about ads for some of the smaller broadcasters. We are not in that world yet. It will be a big thing.
One metric we can show right now, like KSL posts something then KSL gets 10x posts etc. For them they see the number and we can show them that.

Q? FoxSports Southwest in Texas uses our stream and show our stuff on the left side?
A. It if fun when Anderson Cooper and TX and Panama people. We see huge spikes. Since we launched early others have come up with uses that we didn’t think of.
Enough people were looking for your solution.

Q? Someone like us should exist are going to compete?
A. We have talked to some others and why don’t you charge by market size and other things. We want the platform to be bigger and broader distribution. Our competitors are seeing the large money signs and we look at the bigger vision. We swill stay one step ahead. We have the small business advantage. The others do huge integration and Apps.

Q? Sales Cycle?
A. As soon as they see us they want us and then they get buy off. Our clients for 3 people. Sit for six months. KSL was a 3 day cycle. Fox 40 was a 2 month sale.

Q? How many levels?
A. Pretty short higher. We have people that usually make. Sales cycle is the hardest.

Isles of Mist
You guys are just awesome and we are just making a game.
This is a special game.
First collaborative MMORPG. THis of a server with a ton of people who play together. This though is User driven and collaborative. We are using HTML5.
We provide initial content and initial rules.
Battle system and locations.
They get to create new worlds.
Mod-ing like at Oblivion and you can create for your single player game. This is a way though so that everybody can experience it.
Can we trust the user?
The internet is packed full of the memes and it is pretty impressive what they have come up with. People do this for free and create cool pictures with image overlay. People do these things and love to create. Instead of just consuming we are creating.
We have an array of media that we should bring in to the online gaming world.
Default Continent. We provide a starting point.
They show up here with some towns and social tools, shops, beginner quests, dungeons to get started. This is then the games hub.
We then provide them tools to create their own island, geography, quests and create their own pixel art.
New story
Express and have fun
Islands are stored on the server and they can upload to us.
They can be shared with their friends
They can add anyone of them to their own world map.
Because of all the user added content this will pretty much be limitless. If you and your friends want to do a pirate mission or whatever you can.
What about $$$
The frame will be free. No content is pay restricted.
Players only pay for conveniences like extra character slots, item storage space and extra lives.
Players can buy and sell rare items in our marketplace and we collect a percentage of such transactions.

Q? Are you guys launched?
A. We just started making this game 1.5 months ago. We have a demo and it is pretty cool looking.
We have a multiplayer-multiuser world. Looks good custom avatar.
Walk and attack and block. I am the animator and James programs.

Q? People play minecraft and love it? What is your biggest hurdle?
A. We are most worried about creating a MVP and people can play a game and make sales. See the features and play it. We want to have it released in the next 2-3 months. As long as it is acceptable we want people to see how it programs.
One of the biggest hurdles is the bleeding edge of web technologies. Some of them aren’t amazing. We are using web sorts that allow communication between client and server. Multiplayer with large amounts of data.
One of the problems is making it streamlined enough so that everyone can move smoothly.

Q? What technology?
A. We are written in Java and will translate to NODE. We don’t have a way to deploy Java on a server. HTML 5 and Canvas. We want to move away from Flash and I wanted to move away from it.

Q? Competitive?
A. PVP is the first feature. If we need to do it right then that is the key.

ShareTown
Cody Hunter
We formed in July 2012 and just made up the site a couple of weeks ago. Anyone have a garage that is filled with stuff. We saw a problem with people that have stuff they under utilize. Millions of people who have some.
Others even have a second home. You spend $100 to buy a tiller and don’t use it. There is no platform to rent and share your stuff with the community. There is no platform with local trusted brands (like KSL) to enable that to take place.
We will allow millions of individuals to connect and share or rent your stuff out. This is the collaborative consumption space. We want to tie the tech to this to make it more efficient.
We are partnering with trusted local brands. Real property, services and misc. Vacation rentals, pools, offices, backyard. Tutoring, babysitting etc.
We believe there is a disruptive opportunity. The vast majority is Ace Rents, Timp Rentals but this empowers individuals (like Ebay for rentals).
We will partner with local newspapers, websites, classifieds, universities (32,000 at UVU) and other niche intrastate websites.
KSL classifieds has 5 million.
AirBB just raised $7 millions and they are renting out spaces. A lot of people wanted to do that. In Manhattan NY they rent out more personal rooms than the hotels. If they are willing to rent a room in their house why not equipment?
KSL will be able to utilize our platform.
Free to Join. We leverage social networks
Escrow payment provisioning system
List – asset listing functionality
Find – search and booking functionality
Ask – Request ask for something
Post it board
Trust features
Insurance
The local rental is exactly the same as the buy right now with KSL.
MONEY: % of each transaction
UNIQUE
Rent anything
Insurance
Platform – trusted brands partnership.
Early beta – use and list an item
Post on our blog and chance to win an IPad (11/15)

Q? Partnership in key feature with local trusted brands? Other markets and smaller niches. Do you have javascript?
A. Base functionality of the transaction for now. I worked for a couple of startups that were pretty successful. My role at Orange Soda was to partner with the companies. We want to link with feeds as well. We see that on our roadmap.

Q? Challenge to do things onsite?
A. Our initial model is the partner channel ie. KSL. Being able to allow 5 million to sign on to ours is a huge opportunity We will be most likely co-branded with them. The long term goal is to connect with Cars.com and careerbuilder.com. Eventually the users will be ours. If you are searching for something locally you have to work locally.

Q? Why partner with brands? Why not just be like the best thing for UVU? If you went to KSL then they will tell you all you have to do. Why not be more community? University is the best. BYU has so much outdoor stuff. Going B2B you will paint yourself in to a corner.
A. Our initial phase is to test the product. We want to beta with universities. Licensing the platform versus being in the middle. What we are testing with the initial launch. If we can get direct users without partnerships that is even better.

Q? What is the price difference? How are you going to charge enough to cover insurance?
A. Insurance is a third party deal. If I want to rent tiller and it is $50/hour at Ace then I can rent for lower. We are an escrow company. As we get further along we will provide recommendations.

Q? So when things are wrong (out of gas, flat tire etc)?
A. Ebay-esque like things. You are interacting with local issues. You will work that out normally. We will provide feedback as well. Ratings and reviews.
We will have levels of certification that they will sign off on with trusted users.

Q? Do you rent things?
A. I am an entrepreneur at heart. I had an experience that got me thinking about it. 0.5 acre lot. I wanted to get one of those large industrial mowers and they wanted to charge $200 minimum. I guarantee that someone would be in the area with one so that I shouldn’t have to rent. This space is on fire.
There are lot of things that I wouldn’t rent but there are things other people would.

Q? Specific niche?
A. We will probably focus on a couple of categories. Snowmobile and skis. That makes sense. If you have 10 people that use this at a University for skis this would be good.

ASK – developers or engineers.

AMP SESSION
Nick Macey
Experiment or die
Over the years I have seen a lot of failed experiments and that is why I am here. I am with Rock & Hammer Ventures. I am also working with PayPal and we are trying to move the business forward.
Decisions are usually
Idea -> Chest thump and gut decision -> Build -> Fake research -> Launch -> New Idea
The perfect product is not really bug free. With Ideas there is no way to tell what made a difference to the product.
This is mostly driven by gut instinct.
Failures in User Research:
7 states are not the entire US and 7 customer interviews is not your customer base.
When I went to PayPal they were moving offline and they had a bunch of concepts. We had focus groups about what we already had as a product. We got great feedback but then they re-wrote the whole thing for just the small group.
Product Learning Toolbox:
Experiment and hypothesize THEN run A/B Tests; Multivariate test; Pre/Post analysis. At PayPal we changed the flow for the user and just dropped them in to the middle as a test. We then tested the users to see what they would do.
The winning flow increased us by 22% acquisition.
SMALL WAYS:
buy food + drink = focus group (Facebook invite)
twitter, Facebook and google market research
…
nick@rockandhammer.biz
Q? Venture on revenue based financing, how does your structure work?
A. The deals are for a percentage of revenue on a monthly basis. If you have worse or better we do with you. We don’t do an equity warrant on the business.

IN THE WEEDS

Marketecture
Dan Sampson
CTO of 3 different companies. First one was only the two of us. We wanted to look big. At marketecture we have over 80 employees and millions of dollars. Hopefully you will get good information.
Sales versus product. How do you sell and what is delivered.
In a startup you don’t have money. You have to figure out how to get your now money to finance. Usually there is only 1 or 2 of you. And then the customer asks, “can you do this?” and you always answer yes and over sell yourself. You have all these promises and no time to get it done.
1) Learn to say “no.” We can’t do it now but in three months. It is not a big a deal breaker.
2) Don’t drink your own kool-aid. The problem is that we outsell ourselves to a partner that is going to shape the future of the company. But then the launch falls on its face. It doesn’t help grow the company. The biggest thing is be brutally honest with what your product is. Just because you have a product weakness is okay if you have a Roadmap. Make sure you know what you can do.
3) Driving a vision. It is critical as CTO that I drive the vision properly. We are going to do this and this. You have to know what the vision is. We have weekly development meetings. This is what we are doing. But that was not enough. Employees, partners and fellow execs didn’t know the future. You need to know what is down the road. At Marketecture we sit down in December. We have big buckets and we say where we are and where we want to be.
We also have a 3 month rolling Roadmap with more details. Most importantly is driving your vision and communicating early.
Everyone needs to know it before they ask the question.
4) HR is your friend. Most likely your employees want the best for your company. About 1.5 years ago we had an employee who was adequate and passionate but he wanted to do it on his order and timeline. We had to eventually let him go.
I was trying to be nice and walk him through it. And it happened with some other developers. I then decided I should talk with them one on one and be a better a manger. Writing someone up was nerve racking. The wonderful outcome was that they knew where they find in the big picture. So we have some others that are shiny examples – might be a write up.
5) How to scale. When you grow you have to scale employees, process, hardware and other things. We have a small business online tool. We are part hosting company. For the first year and half we managed our own servers. Our biggest problem was that when we would launch new partners we could take 3 days to 2 weeks to order new hardware.
We ended out deciding that we didn’t want to do the hardware that we got sucked in to. We have migrated to the Cloud with Rackspace. We found out that we can use Amazon as backups as well. This has worked for us.

Q? How long from conception to launch?
A. The whole idea has been going from a long while a got. 11/09 we wanted to move to a SaaS company win 3/10. We spun up from there.

Q? When you moved to Rackspace are you managing?
A. If we were going to manage our own hardware we would have to grow admins. They manage the hardware and we have a report that says we need more memory and they do it.
As you grow you hire employees. When you can get rid of those you can save so much time.

PITCHES

SoulPro
I was part of Foundry One.
Soulpro – Is fashion. I went to Westminster College and started a production company. I started a documentary “In Football We Trust” which is about high school and NFL football players.
I wanted to shoot that documentary and now in the past 4.5 years we have soul profiles We became SoulPros because we were shooting the video. People liked the ring of the name and so they wanted to try ads for the video.
We put up fashion concept T-shirts and we had over $2000.00 of sales in five days. Ever since then SoulPro has become an animal of its own.
Skull Candy jumped on our brand and got us there.
SoulPro doesn’t have a formula.
“Passion is Purpose” – we trademarked and now that has done really well. Athletes, artist and others.
Our biggest success is that we went in without a plan but had passion. We didn’t know the fashion line industry. Most people don’t care about that. We went to Vegas and CA. We have reps there now. We have attracted attention. They have throw us stuff. We launched this video out.
The fact that I was in video. We created this material and we launched our video.
Video – SoulPro World video
A model to track the behavior of an outbreak.
We launched this art in August. We hit Facebook and have almost got 10,000 likes. The fact that we have got that much is great. This has been a viral outbreak. We love social media. We love sharing what it is all about.
Academics, Art, Music and wherever there is passion. We are going after everyone that has Passion. It’s unique and we all have it.
We did the Facebook thing and we got all the likes. We gained attention from some celebrities. Most clothing tries to go in to stores and distribution. We started with that. We tried to get in. Consignment and other things and we just were working to do it. They just put us next to everybody else.
Why are we doing to bring our product to your store and then put it up for you. I talk to other people who have lines.
1-2 trade shows. We have to war with them?
We are focusing on artists and athletes .. then lets look at celebrities, concerts and other places. We are putting ourselves in to blue and open waters. We went in to the concerts and the main person and we get them to wear our brand. We were doing everything and making money. We started doing 3-4 events per week and that has really been what has opened us up.
We are viral and everything we do is interactive. We have everybody who is sending us stuff. In the Philippines and stuff and where they are wearing it.
SoulPro sitings. You will get a picture on our page. We are working well. It is brand about the people and not just celebrities. THere is something for them to share their passion. That has brought us to this point. Investors.
Keep your books and when we went in to our investors, because we didn’t know what couldn’t be done was why we did it. We wanted everything. As long as we kept records and we were doing numbers. The people wanted to do a lot of money. We did more in one year than one fashion company in five.
We haven’t had a weekend in a long time.
Second video has been out for 4 days and has more than our first one had in a year (2000 views). This is the philosophy video that separates us from other fashions.

Q?
A. I have done well in sales and mouse and a ret side.
Soulrpo I didn’t’ go vert my whole life. This is something that I have been passionate enough about because I would do it for free. So the artists who understands the looks too. They get the brand of Passion is Purpose. It’s a great tag line.
An investor told us that you know what anyone has called themselves a brand.
I am Solupro. They are using it at parties. A person is cool and they are Soulpro. It is becoming something else. What I found in fashion.
We are learning the business side what we are supposed to do and all.
And it really is like we haven’t had to shut out things.
Clothing works in seasons .. we don’t have have just crowds. Every person can wear Soulpro. We are trying to target meg. We are getting a shirt for it. Everyone of our items sells to 40-50.
We had a lot of criticism because they asked. But for SoulPro it made sense. It has had a fraternity feel. They come back after buying one shirt.

Q? As you go and you get more people and money how do you keep consistent?
A. We’ve been luck y enough to really trust in our brand. I am the Creative Director and we have done what I want. We haven’t ran in to this problem because its working.
The investors that just came on are a dream team. They don’t want to change things. “We don’t want to touch the creative side of it.”
We do see it as a concern with me doing all of it as it gets bigger when we have to turn it bigger. In Vegas you have street and casual.(Polo Lacrosse) Street wear – has crazy energy . So I am watching this and it is going to be trying to figure out how to stay in the Passion and energy.

Q? Next goal?
ASK!!
A. Next step is to push the online store. Next 7 days.
3 points.
Shop, Blog and Connect
Work with our guests and channel our brand.
You will find this interesting. We are not in stores but we need to be out there. Online and events. So we thought how do we do that. We started creating reps that prepay a minimum on clothing that we sell. But we give them a higher commission.
We did not say they can go downline. We said if you want to be a mobile rep. You can’t do wholesale and they sell retail. We have reps in LA.
Our investors think we are crazy – a lot of what we have done.
We are going to start a flagship store. TV, celebrities, real people and establish the brand. Nordstroms. We are waiting now.
Our investors are comfortable to do that.

Q? Foundry?
I was a part of them. What Rob said earlier about network is important.
We people trade out networks. If we did we would win. We had to ask for help. We had to get out there. We can’t go public. Aaron Wendall.
Be flexible, be coachable …

Zeniick
We are all about agile development and lean startup.
We are a lifestyle watch brand. I love SF and skateboarding. It has a very different feel than in LA.
It is built around site and technology. Skateboard and snow board an music. I plan to target the action sports gap in the Sub $75 category.
12/2011 at Foundry. Kickstart in 2/2012, Launch 3/2012.
Instagram the photos and then you could target people who were searching.
Quick 2 page website with Instragram. Add cart button which then sent them to a page “out of stock”. Got a name and email and we followed 100,000 visitors and then got 30,000 email addresses.
We have spent money for domain we have $10,000 in February.
We launched in March on line.
$42,000 in the last 9 months
1000 unites sold. 50k followers with no investment.
ASK
Seeking $75K from friend and family for retail launch
I have to constantly drive traffic and Instagram has limited traffic.
Spent on travel, packing and POP displays, photo shoots, catalogs, founding team salaries., production, website.
We plan to go to Kickstarter in next round 1/2013.
Because we were successful we were able to work with Process Agency (7/2012)
This last month Jeremy Murray was the second senior designer at Skull Candy (9/2012) who joined us.

Pipeline – we are going to focus on core shops with specialties.
Secret sauce
1) Own existing models and distribution rights
We partner cases at scale for the Asian markets. We partner and stamp our brand without having to do a new work. $200.00 can be done for 1/3 the cost. I can come in under $75 without compromising quality.
2) Manufacturing at scale of Asian market

Q? Your Christmas weekend?
A. The class we took from Rob this summer and we are sitting on the samples and decided to do something with them.
Q? How do you differentiate?
A. Our price. In my competitive landscape – Nixon, Getstalt, GShock. When you go to China to manufacture a watch. You have to pay 15-18 dollars. which with retail which watch. Once you are over $100 you become less picky.
Since those 3 companies are in that place they can’t come out with something under 100 since it would “cheapen” their brand.
They are stuck and do what they do.
Neff is trying to eat up every product category. They sell 20-40 watches.
The problem is that they can’t spend the time to do a real nice watch.
We are coming in at the quality price for a point that we can break even.

Q? Artistic side?
A. We can’t look like them because we don’t want to be a rip off. One of the reason bringing on Jeremy is we can have that conversation of Design. We didn’t serve a log until now.
We are actively engaged with that. What resonates is science and technology and how that overlaps with hipster and fashion
What does that mean in an art direction?

INTRODUCTION
Here at the UofU Scott Thompson was supposed to visit last month.
Meg Whitman should visit sometime next year. This is just through cold calls or email at conferences. Why do powerful people want to be mentors and fly to Salt Lake City without incentive? They are just talking to students. Based on my experience is that is that they feel good to give back to society.
There are more among us and passing on the legacy and helping the next generation. That is the reason for most people. It is not popularity or personal benefit. They were once students and struggling to get some knowledge.
Through my connections I have found that the networking is important. It is important among mentors then that they can expand their network.
This is something in the future. They have referral programs. This is something that is better because they stay longer and are more satisfied in their jobs. They don’t have to pay recruiters.
TalkValley – Inspiring excellence among students.
Mentor can interact with students.
Once I have a number of interested students I push to mentors who want to talk to students. They can then schedule a time and make a conference call with the students and mentors. We bring the students together and then bring in the Mentor.
CURRENT STATUS
4 years +
Invested $200k from salary, personal debt and credit card loans.
Overcame server hack and bad guy who held code ransom.
Good team in India
R&D – browser extensions, asterisk (open source telephone system), sharded DB, Solr and other geeky stuff
Successful test runs with mentors at eBay, Microsoft, LDS Church, Adobe, Domo.
PLAN
Focus on CS students (U and BYU)
Expand to other CS departments in other Universities
Revenue: Departments pay 500/year for 125 conversations + $4/conversation
FUTURE
Suggest mentors (using Mahout)
Other Universities
Paid consultancy
Celebrities talk to fans

Q? Lead to other things within companies and employees?
A. I have thought about group sessions and other situations. Get consultancy and training sessions. I haven’t explored it much because I want to focus on the one domain that I know well. That would be a natural progression.

AMP SESSION
BRYCE JOHNSON
Zarbees has distribution through 45000 retailers. We have experienced growth at 400% per year.
I found Les Walgreen, son of Walgreen’s founder and got him some dinners and he got us in with Zarbees. We started with the two all natural Zarbees.
To build our logo and image I asked some BYU guys I knew and we got a side deal for $400.00 versus $10,000 (which would be there usual fee).
Adults want to drug themselves to death but they are careful with kids. So we have the all natural and safe products.
We got in to Walgreens. We became the #1 cough syrup. We knew we were shipping to Walgreens. We bought a report for $18,000 Nielsens to find out who were out competitors. We found out that we were number one.
There was a little bit of a secret sauce in our marketing. You never know who is going to help you out.
Corporate finance lawyer. I called him up (Larry) and met at Starbucks.
This is what we are doing and I said that I moved to #1 at Walgreens. He tried it on his kids and liked it. He sent it to an old roommate who is the Catterton private equity firm and they gave it to one of the lead partners. I got a call from the guy who has the money because it worked on his kids.
We want to do $10 million. But we only need 2… What they bring is print to supervision. 2 days after they invested I got a phone call from a guy who is getting more money from GSK. Be scrappy and we are now in CVS, Rite Aid, Rexall, Walmart, Krogers, Kmart, and Target.

-IQ vs Brain Damage
IQ is okay but brain damage is more valuable. My first company was telecomm. I went all kinds of different companies. Then Etextbooks. That is always risky. I would never have done textbooks if I had known haw messed up it was.
With consumer goods I had no idea how bad. It’s always risky.
-HOW DO YOU SELL
Start to know who will buy
Google, Amazon, B&N and Follett
I already have a tie in to the buyers
Don’t get greedy. The term sheets come and go just as fast (2 days before Christmas it disappeared from us. Who is going to buy and why.
Lots of homeopathic crap but we have a clear vision of what we have.
!Karma and Network like your life depends on it.
Steve@Amazon
Everyone left on eTextbook. Barnes & Noble and Amazon and whoever does the deal. I kept in touch with Steve@amazon and he played soccer with Jeff Bezos. He thought what we had was really cool. Can you fly up here and show us? Competitive bid was back on, so stay in touch.
-PERSONAL NEED
Support system (partner friend)
Surround yourself with good people
Humble
Integrity
Scrappy approach
Sales background
Creativity
Do your best to not be a jack ass

Q? How many people do you talk to a day?
A. I talk all the time. I try to take as many calls as I can. I try to work with younger entrepreneurs. Like 2 days a go I had a lunch with Goal Zero. We have 140,000 fans. Goal Zero, they have a lot more revenue but we can kelp with social. It’s about Karma.

Q? What do you do internationally?
A. This is a constant debate. We are in Canada. The guy that I hired from GSK is that he was over global brands. He has lived in France South America, China. He ran Nicorette and Aquafresh.
We are only 8 guys and a very small team. We got a call yesterday from GSK and we said do the regulations. As long as you don’t impact my team then I am okay.
Someone from Canada got through the regulation and is now selling.

Q? What happens?
A. You sit in front of Target and they ask about your $30 million dollar TV budget. They don’t warm up to what we do easily. Our secret sauce was Dr. Samuel. We carpet bombed the United States. We covered the doctors within a 3 mile radius of each Walgreens.
We put our cough syrup in the squeeze packs. We sent 100 samples to the pediatrician. We sent out 1.5 million to them and they became direct salesmen.
There was no other way to complete with Robitussin or Triaminic. They are a $40 million brand for one SKU. Also, Johnson and Johnson dropped from 600 million to 60 million because of a recall. So right place at the right time.

Q? Better product versus logo and what made the decision?
A. With Zarbees, you can’t get a patent on it. We have a patent on some of them 3 of 6 do. Honey has been used by the Native Americans. We couldn’t patent that. This had to be a land grab. The brand was more of a luck thing with getting a break. I gave them some equity to build the Brand.
The developers from Ukraine that I was paying them. When we did well on a prior project I didn’t have to pay them. But when we sold I sent them some money and they bought really nice cars. Any time I want them they remember.
That is my style. I do believe in Karma. Those guys in Ukraine have helped a lot of my friends.

Q? When you negotiated deals. Some people believe they need a founder level of equity for consulting. How do you defer that?
A. You have got to figure out what is going to work. We did a equity as a crap shoot. The KY Jelly they designed. I put myself out there with $10k and I was betting that they were worth it. I said they had to accept market. I haven’t done that with anything else. I put my own equity on that one. I don’t regret that. I grew the pie rather than shrunk the pie.
Catterton – is shrewd. They get 8% coupon every year and it is expensive. Two months ago we wanted to build massive area of our product. Catterton had us hooked up with top level decision makers (CXO) to do a whole bees rollout.

IN THE WEEDS
Rob Wuebler
Remember what Bryce said in his last two slides. You don’t have to pay attention to me.
I have spent about 15 years building venture backed start ups. Then 5 years of coaching private equity. Then I have worked as an Executive Coach with Corn Fairy. My main focus is to give back to the ecosystem. You guys are all tech based. What can I do in 10 minutes to make technologist cry.
These are some books you can read:
Nail it, then scale it.
Business model generation
The Lean entrepreneur
Startup owners manual
Lean startup
Entrepreneurs guide to customer development
You can take classes and have people come to your office and tell you this stuff. The Large elephant in the room that no one talks about though? What is the evidence that any of these systems work?
There are an abundance of failures. 7 of 10 times you will fail. Are you getting outcomes using these technologies?
Pictures of “permed hair versus straight hair Meg Ryan.”
You want to see if they work for your company. The burden of proof is on the lean community. Maybe accelerators not just the manual.
Kaufmann Foundation study tells you that accelerators provide no effect or slightly lower. The only thing that might be positive outcome is length of time to survive. The idea is to fail fast.

Noam Sasserman – The Founders Dilemma
The company may be an “internal cause”.
Sometimes we are Gollum. Someone who is a collection of biases and leaning on an idea and they can’t see things outside. We have a defective apparatus and we are biased.
Webware upstairs needs to do something.
“Ali” – I am the king. We all overestimate our ability to get work done. Are you a great driver? Oh yeah, but that can’t be true.
Until we can overcome these issues we have to be slightly better? No you have to be an order of magnitude more productive and therefore you are overestimating your ability.
How to resolve the extreme uncertainty. You can’t “de-risk”. Yes they can assist but they do not win the day.
No Mentor, no book or solution for the untrained.
Evaluate new tech to help, new book and get consultants BUT consider for efficacy?
Do they generate “lift” in a situation? Incredible ability to execute?
Help you process uncertainty?
The skills required to build a company and escape velocity are not necessarily the same skills.

Q? No controlled environment assistance or lowered costs to create company?
A. What you said is interested in cool is the digital nation is that you can start very cheap. I don’t disagree with that. How do you test what works?
I personally view the Foundry (which I helped to create) is an assistance group. I teach people to deal with bad news. That is our focus. We are business validation agnostic. I am focused entirely on reducing peoples ability to make fools of themselves. Increase precision, execution, and improve network.
7 of 10 in Foundry succeed. I don’t care about several but they do well.
You don’t need a book or anyone else to tell you want to do.
Networks matter a ton.
You need will power and a capacity to be coachable.
Treat startup as a craft and do it well. You don’t need books.
Willpower and action.

?Q Throughout that lens what makes a good entraps?
A. Being coachable.
Overcome your own willingness – it helps other people help you learn what you can’t see.
Using your own network to overcome the be right, look good. Most people are unwilling to do that.
Those who fail are attached to their own ring usually fail.

Q?
A. My feeling is that the movement for funding is exciting. Old people like me who are looking at Solupro and guest guys. I have no idea about some of the products.
Crowd funding provides social proof through traction.
You should chat with Gary and Chase who have built businesses through a number of iterations.
We have helped do some bootstrap runways and social traction. In a world of uncertainty what can you use? You need other proxies for velocity. Crowd funding is one of those.

Q? Do you have any point of view how culture and community impact success.
A. Proof is in building a culture like the Foundry. To solve the two problems related to failure. We have a very strong culture.

Q? Some in this area are different because they don’t look at the right things – right culture in the right area. What is now happening in Salt Lake what has happened in Silicon Valley?
A. Randy Cammisar says that in the Valley they tolerate failure. There ar more cultures that allow for failure.
My own experience has been in New York when you say that you’re not working. You are a consultant. In the valley when you say I am done and not working anymore you must be “giving back.” That is the experience at the party.

PITCHES

Fownd
Drew Izzo
We provide a free service to find lost stuff. I lost a $500 key. It is very valuable to me. It is for a Lexus.
Who has this problem? 400 million key, billions of phones, cameras, kids, pets. We create a service that anonymously connects a finder with an owner. We launched an MVP then I got a day job. During Launchup We have learned a ton.
How it works?
It’s an iPhone app. It sits on your home screen with the “if Found text this ID to that number.” We would connect the finder so you can instantly connect with someone and they can connect with you. We send message via SMS and email.
We also sell tags like fresh value cards. We also have adhesive decals for things that are valuable.
Business Model:
Initial was free service and sell media company (.99 cent tag)
NOW
Free service and merchandise. As you register key, phone and camera we find out who you are. Our database of customer information is very actionable. It is not like you are going to register for SPAM. After a number of discussions we thought we would start with the attempt at trying to make money all the way.
–Let’s try to make money on the tags.
–Perhaps property insurance. This can be a way to take a picture and registering valuable items in an app and you would have a list of things you have registered with the company. Then we thought about fraudulent claims.
–OEM with product companies
1) Prove the model first. We spent a ton of time over 1.5 years and we could’ve have launched much quicker if we had focused on the right thing.
iPHone app – people who want to have a tag want elegance.
2) Go highly manual and we spent weeks on automation and it delayed our launch and wasn’t used.
3) I thought .99 was the right price abut people who own iPhone are not concerned about that when they want to find their expensive item.
ASK
What do you think? etc

Q? Do you have customers?
A. We don’t know what draws people to this. We did not leverage that excitement. I don’t have any real answer yet.
Q? YouTube channel or video?
A. Good idea. Our app right now is not working. Our site is just brochure ware now. We have thought about having a blog where people can talk about tags and technology.
Q? Radio frequency is getting easier and cheaper. Can you do that with Text?
A. We developed in the original app that we pull out Gmail.
Q? Do you have a competitor?
A. The original plan was low pricing and there are others. They are focused on family though.
Q? Why the anonymous?
A. If you find my key you won’t want me to know where I live. It is an issue of reverse lookup. On a key you could find the house.
Q? Have you thought about channel – low jack or the home security company?
a. Great idea for the people who are already spending money. We were thinking property management / insurance but that is a great idea
drewizzo@gmail.com

Crossies
John Fenley
I am an only child of a single parent – don’t ask for things
I am now married with 2 kids.
I love sci fi, robots (worked on DARPA challenge).
My family is in rental property business
I hate paying money for things (especially monthly)

Problem:
There are thousands of great movies that are not available online. People have great movies at their home that are collecting dust.
Media vs a Car a new car loses 40% of its value.
Media loses 90-100% of its value.
WE combine
Market – Storage of Media – Access : Crossies.com
Wharehoused media is in my store and no one ever touches it.
We have here a digitized version of a VHS tape that is playing on your iPad. What’s that worth?
If you have an active marketplace where there is liquidity you can get high transaction rates and we can take a commission on each transaction.
We want to facilitate you finding what you want.
Our competitors
Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, cable/satellite,
Redbox, murfie is still dealing with the physical media
Pirate Bay is outside the box
We want to produce it for all the media you want to play on.
Q? LEGAL?
This could be the biggest problem. I think we will get sued. The lawyers think we will get sued. The key questions have not been answered.
Can you space shift your media? Do you have to keep the item in the same form? We want to stay on the legal side of things.
Change in the last 2 months.
I have moved from 40 DVDs. we have been moving and are ready to launch this service.
ASK
Ux/Ui design
Marketing
Beta testers (if you have media that I can stream for you let me know)
– see me for a beta code
Vote for crossies on saltvalleytally.com (we can win 5000.00)

Q? Marketplace? Are you selling from one to the next.
A. Only one person can watch it and they have to sell the ownership to the product. John explained to me that once he digitized Spiderman he has only done that once. The money comes in that he can sell a transaction. I keep a VHS, DVD, BluRay copy and then I scan the bar code.
Q? If I bought access then I can stream it?
A. Yes, you can stream that on my iPad.
Q? Are you renting the storage space?
A. The physical media is not that much of an issue. I am not going to be charging for storage.
Q? Who sets the price?
A. Commodity market for the owners. The lower price will attract the market. If there are 50 copies. If the price really drops that low.
Q? How is it different than Voodoo?
A. They take your media with a stamp and they don’t possess it. If you have online access then you pay a fee and can only watch what you don’t own.
Q? Why not subscription model?
A. I hate them.
Q? Why not music as well?
A. There are about 500 albums. Your buying the discs so you have access to everything.
Q? You are the dealer / market maker. You take .08 % with minimum .24 cents. You can make the case for being a market maker. Floor brokers?
A. Right.
Q? It seems like the physical media is dying then that could be an issue?
A. When the physical media dies I think they will send it to me versus throwing in the trash.

Nuvi
Dave Oldham
Struck is awesome with Jason Bangerter. He and I have been good friends for a long time. Corporate Pepsi came to him and they said we are using this tool and we hate it. We want to go in a different direction. We want a creative company to do this.
Strck went and did the creative stuff with Gatorade things. We want you guys to build and design the visualization on top of Radial6. There are too many conversations that are happening all the time. We are all participating in that at different levels. YouTube, Twitter, etc. Gatorade wanted to see how to do a real time analysis and then turn things around immediately. What they had was too late.
Struck helped Gatorade design this Mission Control center with 6 analysts 24/7 monitoring and responding to it. They will engage and watch sometimes. I can let you know what are some of the reasons they take action or not.
Demographics, location, influences etc.
After Struck built Mission Control others said they wanted to do it too. There were already other companies like Radial6 doing it.
The customers were coming to Struck and they drug us in to it.
It is nice to have customers drag you in. We built NUVI and we did not want to build another Mission Control because it was on a competitors platform. They were embarrassed by Struck.
Jason and I have been collaborating and we spun out a team to be a separate company to build the SaaS. We did that. We gave Struck equity and started NUVI. We started from scratch building our own backend like Radial 6 so we could have control.
We took some Angel investment money. I have pitched a bunch of times. I re-pitched them.
This is on a Google platform. Real Time visualizations. These bubbles move across the stream real-time. Last night “Obama” was moving through the screen really fast. Size and brightness is based on the influence versus a mention.
Green / Red (Blue neutral). We do some natural language processing. Sentiment is not easy but we have worked up some language that is getting smarter. It is really fun to watch.
You can then compare two brand or people against each other.
Momentum, volume, reach and spread.
Consistently negative, consistently positive.
We track locations on a Geo map.
NLP – over a time period we look over it and see mentions and similar sentiment in general.
In April we started with a few customers. After Gatorade we have picked a few to deliver with.
ASK
50k revenue / month now
Developers:
HTML 5
Javascript
CSS3
MongoDB
.NET
NLP
Apache Mahout

Q? Are you aiming to provide more in-depth analysis?
A. We can deconstruct it by looking at the message and spread. We know how your message gets out. We can show over time how it grew and spread.
We can do some forecasting and some A/B testing. We are headed to look at that.
One of our guys teaches physics at Cal Berkley. When we showed him this stuff he has friends who have professors.

Q? Where you took an idea that was existing and spun that off – could you address that?
A. That is what I did with my first idea. I pitched it and got some customers and they pulled me a different direction.
Pepsi was a client for other things and they helped with commercials etc. They wanted to improve their social. They begged and paid $500,000 to do this product. Struck isn’t in that business. They were so successful and asked what he should do about it.
Struck is a service agency and their model is that.
Software company and services don’t mix well. I suggested we spin out to separate and we had this list of customers who were a waiting list.
You don’t plan that. It is based on luck and doing a Great job on the project.
They had an existing brand and relationships. There is a big difference of trying to find an audience.
Wherever you can do the latter it is great.

Q? What’s the demand for programming talent?
A. I don’t have a better answer than in HS. I would find the kids that don’t fit in anywhere else. I think that if you can create something yourself you can do anything you want. You can solve a lot of problems if you can code.
You should learn it like how to count and read. If you can expose kids at an early age and encourage them then that’s good.
My education you were afraid to try and feared it. Encourage to learn from mistakes. To try and fail. I am an old entrepreneur as 41 year old. I hate a fat lazy job. I did not work nearly as hard as I have until now.
I wish I would have started when I was 16-18 you can fail a thousand times you can live off your family. When you have a family, mortgage and kids and it is 10 times harder.
If you have an idea then go and do it. The sooner the better. The more failures the more likely to succeed.
Q? Employees and development costs?
A. We started with 6. We have 6 full time and 3-4 part time. When you start it the first thing I did was call my Angel list. I knew what they liked. You should pick the investor that likes the products. Unless the investor has been in it then they have a hard time. I had a couple of lunches. It was a really easy thing because I spent 20 other hours on other conversations. This was the one idea that really connected.
We went on that round. We are break even now. We went out with power point and no code. Will you sign a contract right now?
I would pay for it. I pay at least that much… If I can do it for half.
I didn’t lie to people. But I wasn’t afraid to ask them to buy before it was ready.
You have to see if there is a market.
Q? I love this idea. Is there a way that an individual could use this?
What separates you from the competitors?
A. The Design look.
The long term is the architecture. It is an API that you can use across the program.
We want to have the YouTube model where ultimately the partners can get live data visualizations. Ultimately you can have a freemium marketplace for designers and math guys and developers who can create other visualizations.
We are on a collision with Domo etc but we have thought through this very carefully how to accomplish that. We don’t know what will happen.

IN THE WEEDS
Damon Kirchmeier – FUNDING
Friends, Family and Fools
Bank
Revenue Based loans (Auxano) – it’s new with flexible payments; fairly expensive debt
Crowdsourcing (kickstarter, indiegogo)
Angels (utah angels, parck city, sl angels)
VC (mercato, epci, signla peak, pelion, kickstart)
Companies we have worked with:
Listen, Metro, creerian, propay, ingeo, property solutions, jive communications

Q? Personal guarantee?
A. If you are not ready to take the risk then why should I?

Q? Who are the most active around here?
A. RBF guys are active here. Have been busy. Kickstart has been coming up.
Q? Active?
A. Park City Angels
Q? Terms?
A. 7 years at fixed percent based on today’s price.
Q? Other companies like Kickstarter are less consumer focused?
A. Kickstarter is better. The products are tangible. If you have something more difficult then it is hard to find. These are consumers that are buying it. If you have a cool tech consumer product then it is great.
The Investors love it too. They will increase your valuations etc.

AMP
Jeremy Hanks Q&A
Q? Dropship?
New startup that is very related to what I have been doing for the past 10 years.
Entrepreneurial arc… When I was at BYU I think my ADD reached a point that was hard. I dropped out and tried to go back a couple of times. I finally quit and built a ski swap online business – TradeGear. I didn’t know anything more than that. I talked to people who are ski swappers. I noted that we should sell closeout skis.
I learned about supply chain. Through GearTrade we raised $220,000 and I did it for a year and we ran out of money. We couldn’t keep going. But the 2 of us made it another year.
The key to success is largely a matter of holding on longer.
We sold the assets to pay off all the credit cards and the upside didn’t happen.
I then started my second company and it became Doba. I learned a lot more about Supply Chain and ran in to some situations where we could work with manufacturers and connect them. They could connect via drop shipping and skip a retailer.
Inventory is such a big cost to contain and so we saved by creating Doba in 2007 we have lots of employees now.
We wanted to grow in to another business. We talked to manufacturers and others so that you can look at a product catalog and taxonomy. We built some tools and software.
But everyone has that same problem with virtual supply chains. we worked at it and the best way to move forward was we took $1.5 million of Doba and spun it in to a new company.
Dropship.com We are finding software solutions in the supply chain software. It hasn’t changed and we are trying to do that. We are working on a new round of capital.
My point is that there is an arc. My whole career has been started because I have started with problems. Ski swap led to 13 years later building a large software company and we should go big. If not, I will still continue my arc in this business.
The thought that I have is that you don’t know where this will take you, but until you start engaging and failing and succeeding you will never be an entrepreneur. Ultimately the ideas and solutions that you see are very shallow.
60 entrepreneurs try to solve little problems with college students but you have to get out in the brave world. That is my quick story about what we do at dropship.com and how that already works better.
My next start up continues on that next arc. This is going to take a lot of years to work through. But I already know what this can get to. As I’ve gotten more experience.

Q? Is the GearTrade the same as Backcountry?
A. They sold it after us. They pushed all the stuff. They have some personal value and it still works and persists.
Q? How did you raise money for Dropship?
A. We funded ourselves through my other business. This was possible with my partners. We are working with some investment groups. Our other company is still running,and I am on the board. But Dropship will provide all the software. Next year will spend half as much on what it was spending. Then we should be at the market rate. We have to make the product better for everyone. At the end we will only have to pay $150k/year.
We are happy with where we are at.
Q? Clark is one of our first customers – Curious about other companies, Commerce.org?
A. The short answer is business model. Those companies have a model that will cause them to fail and we will take their customers. They built software 13 years ago and SaaS didn’t exist. The way they chose to roll out means that they charge $1 million per year. Their customers are huge. Doba is a good business and a good value proposition. We couldn’t scale the walls at Doba. At Dropship it makes us money. The middle market needs our solution and we will have the standard.
They send us customers now so we are winning with them.
Q? Did you explore cutting the same deal to Doba customers?
A. We didn’t because we decided that the IP was going to be owned by the same owners as Doba. We didn’t do the long-term deal. SaaS is too low revenue model. When you sell SaaS you have to deploy a decent amount of capital. The Sales and Marketing still cost the same but the revenue is lower initially .
Q? How do you think we can build entrepreneur in K12 education?
A. I don’t know. I believe entrepreneurs are born. You need to figure out the ways to identify those who have the natural ability. 90 out of 100 aren’t. Some of you in this room think you are. You can’t be a broad based approach. These kids exhibit tendencies and we should pull them out.
Go through your school and find all the ADD kids and it will be a high ratio.
Q? Disruption – Doba was running below the radar. It was a good lesson to piss people off?
A. There will be a lot of people against that. You kind of know you are on the right track if people fight against you.

Tom Albrech
I run Incubatre at Miller campus. I ahve been doing that for a year. Thre are really no good collaboraive pace. THre is one in UVU.
Provo there is one.
THis past year we worked on BoomStartup there. We are going to give smart card 24/7 access with Internet $20/month ona motnh to month basis / person.
StartupAmerica 9/10

INTRODUCTION
Missing a microphone so listening closely. The companies are here for your feedback so help them out.

PITCHES
BladePad
We are in the mobile gaming industry. Smart phones have taken over on this. 3D games on your phone. There is a big problem that isn’t addressed and it is the controls. We have found that doing multiple surveys and focus groups. I have a video clip.
“Fingers in the way and the controls are obnoxious.
The finger controls are awful but the game is perfect otherwise.”
This is a pretty big problem and we contacted these people who are normal game reviewers on YouTube. We talked to them about what they want for a solution.
We have a BladePad that is razor thin and attaches to the iPhone.Here is our prototype. I have a rougher prototype here. Full console controller. With Dual bumper buttons and the blade pad is detailed. You have a smooth back on the case and in working with the games reviewer they were very happy about our solution.
“this would make this epic” “there is a sore need for this in gaming.”
9.1 average rating out of 10 with 124 customers who are ready to buy. Wholesale price is 45.00. Landing to the customer cost is $22 with a 51% gross margin. We have made connections with the smaller independent game studies. We have existing relationships.

Q? Ownership?
A. Me and two other partners. We are looking for additional partners as an LLC.
Q? Impressive to put it together do you have lots of experience?
A. A lot of it was the validation I was talking about. We have done a lot without any money. I invested a good portion of my savings in the company. We had enough to do a little bit. We went to the games developers and worked with them to find out how we could get the code to work. They would be interested if we brought companies with a lot of their games. That is the validation of our model. We were able to do most of the partnerships whithout spending anything.
Q? Kickstarter?
A. We are launching this month after game dealer. It is a great to get the idea out there and not selling equity.
Q? Exclusive deals with these guys for the games?
A. We are looking for a big name to move the product. That is really why we have to go big with the developers then Sony and Apple could make their own product.
Q? Trademarks?
A. Just talked to Jared about that recently. In 6 months you have to submit the product with the sale.
Q? Strategy to get with the game makers to drive the sales to market. We want to be the best and first to market. If it doesn’t wok with the games then they won’t buy.
Q? Anyone else like you like competitors?
A. IPhone game blades. They are bad and bulky and don’t have joysticks. They are about in the same price range and without games. 80-124 dollars. We are a pretty good value proposition. The DS3 is a substitute.
Q? ASK?
Game developers and investment right now.

Q? Zagg sold for $105 million recently. They can surely get this in front of everyone you want. Have you talked with Zagg?
A. We spoke with another electronics company. We would prefer to do this ourselves. We have the connections to get this to retailers. So we would be hesitant to shift to someone else at this point.
Q? How long to production once you have funding?
A. October this year.
Q? Best Buy to be one?
A. We have talking with buyers and Walmart is the most interested and they are asking if we have made it yet. There would likely do a test in a few stores. We are looking for a Christmas promotional launch this year.
Q? Work across all games?
A. As of now there is none. We are building an SDK to work with the controller and popular game engines. We are getting ready to tool the injection molds and the SDK.
Q? IPhone compared to other units?
A. It is getting pretty close. The 2 current DS and BVita but it is pretty comparable on the Vita. The DS has the same size. I saw some projections that by 2 years from now the Smartphones will have the same graphics as XBox. There is portability of the smart phone and you won’t carry the game device. The games are a ton less. You buy a $300 device and $50 game then it it not valuable.
Q? Market?
A. We haven’t tested kids yet, just the hard core gamers. Casual to hard core. On the iPhone you have inGame adverts that are targeted. Number one downloaded apps are Games. A lot of them are social games but still games.
Q? Bluetooth?
A. Yeah 4.0
Q? In this SDK how much do you think it will cost to make?
A. We are outsourcing. Our initial quote was around 15-30k. Not small but we will give the SDK for free.
Q? Where are you outsourcing?
A. Found online they have worked with some big guys. They have done games before. We had conference calls. We like them and feel good about it and are going to have them speak with the game developers as well.

DressCode Custom
Speaking of surrounding yourself with good people Jared is our attorney. We are DressCode based in Utah Valley with HQ in Orem on State Street. We got busy and have wanted to present at LaunchUp. We have been in business over 15 months now selling product. We specialize in custom suits and dress for men. We are different from other solutions since everything is custom and created from scratch. We measure in 25 places and we design and make it. Our consultants are mobile and will meet with you at the home. We save in time.
We are different because we are not a storefront and e-commerce. On the supply side of things we run our own production. One of the things is that with retail you have wholesalers with buyer working with chains. Then you have factories and brokerage firms and fabric and suppliers and the average number of parties is 4 or 5. One of our competitors has about 4-5 layers behind them adding to the price. When you buy a suit a lot of the money is going to the chain. Traditional retail dealing with stores and inventory is hard. Nordtsroms doesn’t sell up to 30-40% what is on the floor. It is a big cost. It is expensive and slow to grow.
How can we solve this problem. Zappos and Amazon takes the product to the customer but the suit can’t go online. You don’t want to click and wait for it to show.
One of the main things that we focus on is fit. 75% of the suit look is how it fits. You can get a Walmart suit. Even if you spent
Men’s Wearhouse, Kohls, or some other. Are you loyal to the store?
No
We have an opportunity for the clients to develop the relationship. Our consultant knows what you are eating for dinner and knows your wife. With our product and pricing we develop an experience that is very good.
$299-$349 for fully custom. Our price is great and our experience is phenomenal. You don’t have to to the store and cringe. You get to create a product you like.
When you shop with DressCode you will set up an appointment with one of our of 15 consultants. They come to the home or office. Then you select material and look. We then build the product and ship locally with perfect fit guarantee. Some don’t know how this works. We have to guarantee that it works. 4-5 weeks.
We are now entering year 2. Just opened in Las Vegas. We have enjoyed what we have done. We just hired our first Office Manager.
GOALS:
Shake up the industry, improve the experience, mainstream custom suits, build a brand with loyalty.
When you are looking to shop around companies like ours will provide more value.
-Just closed a seed round
-POS tablet application
-Expand Markets where we don’t have office

Q? So consultant measures and then where does it go?
A. We are migrating form Bangkok to Shanghai. We have four tailors that are working on DressCode products. We get them to work and it takes 2-3 weeks and that is why the 4-5 weeks. The capacity that we have to do that is because the cloud has changed everything.
People ask, our clients, tailors have been doing high end. You go in to get the product made. We saw that custom was bigger in Asia and the experience is so much better. When a suit fits you right you can’t go back. We are working to mainstream customer but it used to have to be 1500-3000.00.
Q? Marketing effots?
A. Good question. We have a couple of techniques. Word of mouth. We have a walking product. When someone is wearing a suit it is a walking advertisement. Our label and logo is inside. We have done word of mouth. Wedding expos where we meet a thousand brides and grooms in a day. The brand that we are trying to build is through reputation. We are working with referral program. Once you meet someone then you want to tell your friends about it. We want to help that.
Q? Custom is luxury. Measuring as a tailor is an art. You can’t take them off the street.
A. Our consultants go through a pretty serious grating. The best thing is to do a final fitting if we need to fix. We create a member profile where we make the light tweaks. We can fit the product to you. If you want a dress shirt we can do that.
There is a budding industry that is online. They are finding ways to reduce to the 20 measures to just 6 and I don’t think that will work. They are showing that you need an expert. They are proving this can be done in scale.
Q? What kind of gross margins do you operate on?
A. We don’t have to talk about that since more of our dollar goes to your suit. We run 50-60% gross. We are migrating to China and we will get better a margins. There are a lot of factories that are looking to scale and run our products.
Our goal is to have the suit be just 3 weeks. Brooks Brothers about 1.5 weeks.
Q? If I were a man and 5’10″ 175 lbs I don’t know that I would need a custom fit. Do you see more abnormal body types?
A. How many of you have loved the fit of the suit that you buy off the rack? (no one) What actually fits and feels good. Fit is a huge part but personalization like lining and other things also is important.
Q? I have had a custom fit and you can put on 20-30 pounds and it still fits better. The suit I bought for my wedding cost 3-4x more than other suits.
A. We have found that custom is yours and it is hard to go back. We have found that another initiative is that we now have relationships on fit. We launched dress shirts and we sell more of those than suits. If we took the same measurements and did jeans and still high end with our relationships. That same problem with fit. We are looking at it.
Q? I went to Shanghai and got a great suit there. If you guys do expand there is no going back. I am 5’6″ but you guys on are to something.
Challenging to expand with menswear since they don’t do as much.
A. Womens clothing is a very different industry. If we offered the opportunity there is endless opportunities so we do some women’s wear as well. But when we look at other products we are sticking to menswear. Women are tough to fit.
Q? What is the opp for the consultants?
A. They are sales people through and through. We don’t spend money on storefront. We invest in our sales people. We reward them with success and they are finding clients and bringing them in. There are a lot of part-timers. Some of them see this as an opportunity. Many of them see this as growth.
Q? Where do you get the fabrics that you get from “Italy” etc.?
A. Instead of buying from one fabric mill. We have relationships with 5-6 mills around the world. We are not after the New York client. We want to stay in the $299-$349 product. At the same time we want to carry about 250 like a curated wine list from the 7 mills. We like the mills that we work with and we work with new styles and new variety.
Q? Slacks only?
A. 70-90 depending on the fabric. Shirts 49-69.
Q? Alternations after the suit is sent from overseas?
A. We have relationships with local tailors and we get a good price break from them.
ASK
Feedback
Intros
Talk to us
Good ways to get the message out!

FuseApp
Mike Maughan
We are happy to be here. I have been with C7 for several years now. My background is in Internet Marketing and some technical background. As data center providers we are at the bottom level.
One level up is IaaS Infrastructure as a Service. So you can just make a monthly payment. PaaS ia Platform as a Service. We provide IaaS so that you can spin up a Platform.
We target SMB so it is a custom experience that we give you. Platform as a Service developers would use us to help create their product. They don’t have to buy the hardware.
SaaS is all the way at the top that are developed on the PaaS.
We focus on IaaS. In 2009 we started our first cloud product. We understand the product. We see lots of clouds in our own data center.
Why FuseApp?
-High expenditures to buy services that you don’t know how well it will work.
-Reduces IT department size
-Flexible. You can add your own hardware on to our cloud in a private suite.
What do we sell?
RAM, CPU, Disk Space, IPs and other services then you build what you like on top of that
DEMO
cloud.fuseapp.com/client-premimum
demo / demo
Just launched this 2 weeks ago (network is failing)
We plan on having 10 footprints around the world by the end of the year.
You can see on this image your resources. You can just buy more you need to. Here is our virtual data centers.
In a virtual data center you can build virtual appliances.
So we can create a server
Resellers can do this
216.194.114.4
After we assign an IP to the virtual data center we can then add Templates of WordPress or Apache, MySQL, LAMP you can drag and drop to provision on the Virtual machine.
Let’s drop a WordPress server here. We will have PaaS templates that you can add to your environment.
In this case we will just do a WordPress server.
We now assign the address
Then we Deploy it.
We are working on Remote Execution tools to help provision. We are arranging deals to do live monitoring. You can spin up and spin down infrastructure based on what you need. You can execute some code to help the scale up and scale down.
Here is Server and we can VNC right in to it now that we have provisioned.
It is an Ubuntu server that we would see. Let’s go to the IP.
We have done research and we are working on improving our User Experience. There are a lot of clouds that are not useful.
We feel like the UX is average or above average. We win in the bandwidth and we buy it in such bulk. A Gigabit connection is best path routing through multiple Tier One routing. We have the best path.
What you are not dealing with is over subscription. We offer metered bandwidth for $50/month. We don’t charge when you do backups between virtual data centers. That is the trend. The costs of bandwidth are going down and we buy so much we can do this. Unless you are a data center provider so we can compare on price for product.

Q? When you offer a Cloud you can pick Ubuntu server and you can get on. Do we have to compile our own things and version control?
A. We would have to build in the templates. If you have a server on there that you can build then we will allow you to create Hypervisor templates you can use with ours.
Q? You are in Utah but you won’t work there?
A. Footprint in data centers around the world to follow the low latency. He has gone to hundreds of data centers in places that we trust.
Q? How does this work with video?
A. 50/month use it then we can do this. That is the paradigm change. Bandwidth is just being on. You should not have to develop around it. People that do backups have to schedule over hours so that they don’t see their billing spike. Or they are in place that is over subscribed. That is because they have 20 other people using that. We are 3:1 which is very low in subscription.
Q? Work with BlueHost and FiberNet?
A. A little bit different we target different customers. BlueHost wanted for a good WP website. Someone loking for $5/month. We are looking for $115-thousands per month. We are different customer and under subscribed.
Q? 100GB of memory on virtual server cost?
A. $22/GB is the calculation. The website is a work in progress.
$22/core and $4 for IP address. $0.60 per GB
Q? Audiences for User Experience?
A. Our existing customers who were with our product in 2009. We talked with them. What we did was reduce their pains. We sponsor user groups and we surveyed them. The average number of servers was 22 cloud servers. That is our target customer SMB. About 90% of the pain points we were able to solve. The other audience reliability is a big one. Being a provider we are not a fly by night company.
Price was another issue.
Bandwidth pricing is really good.
Flexibility is very good. You can also cross connect our hardware with your own.
You can create an instance of ours or we can buy it for you.
Some have regulations in industries that can’t put their data in a shared environment so you have to be in your own private cloud where they can control it all. It costs more but that is what they are required to provide.

AMP SESSION
Aaron Davis
This is like AA for Entrepreneurs or an Amish barnraising. I am at LingoTek. I know Matt Smith and that is how I got roped in to this.
I brought my son Tyge. He has been moonlighting with his friends down in our basement where they have cubicles and card tables. They have a jar with $5 in $1 bills.
I had a great entrepreneur experience growing up. I lived in a rural area and we had 1.5 hour rides. My ideas required money that I lacked. I thought, “how can I take something and sell it to my friends?” I walked down the gravel driveway and I thought, I could sell them rocks. At Show and Tell I had shown them rocks and they loved it. If I can sell rocks to people I will have plenty of money. I remembered this cool word, “agate.” Everything with colors was “Aaron’s Agate.” I am not an agate magnate now. I was a decent salesman even though I am a tech guy.
I called them Aaron’s Moonshine Agates because of the Dukes of Hazzard that always kept moonshine away from Boss Hogg. The problem was that second graders only have so much money and then they run out. Trying to sell up to 3rd graders won’t work because they don’t buy and selling to 1st graders is “bullying.”
I had a friend that said he had some special money but he only got six agates for his 6 actual Silver Dollars. His Dad found out and I had to give the money back. My agates were done.
4 Principles of Motivation:
1) Sufficient money (1.2 million to be happiest)?
2) Self Directed – I was in charge and I was going to do things. I have really enjoyed taking a problem and providing a solution for people. The path may be crazy but it’s a lot of fun.
3) Mastery – Why do some guys pick up instruments? Because they want to master a skill. You are learning new technology and new things. You get to master these subjects.
4) Purpose – The reasonable man adapts to the world. The unreasonable persist in trying to adapt the world to them. Therefore all progress is based on unreasonable people.

Q? What have you done since second grade and how successful?
A. I was involved in first during high school. My Mom and Dad got in to mail order arts and crafts. I liked the programming of the databases. They did quite well and I was involved in the whole thing.
In college while I was with a company very young – iServer. We were bought by Verio then NTT. It was Virtual Hosting. I got to see the whole thing. I also did some consulting for startups.
I wanted to move up the stack and I co-founded LingoTek in 2006 so we have been going for almost 7 years.
Q? Biggest lesson at LingoTek?
A. Never give up. Keep looking back at the original motivation. You are always going to bump in to pain and you can’t run away from that. Just adapt and get to that solution.
Q? Funding for LingoTek?
A. I met this guy who was doing language services. I took the tech from there. Once we had something we pitched all over the place. I wasn’t there with iServer and I was the sales guy here. I was involved in the early capital. At LingoTek we need about a million and I followed this guys lead and that took a year and a half or so. It was not directed and we were just trying anything. We got a regional VC who told us we would do the funding in tranches. At six months if you can show progress with the product then we will give you the second tranche. Then the next phase was marketing an sales strategy. We needed to have those in place. That did us for a while.
We had to pitch some more and then got some help with other groups.
IncuTell funding from the CIA and I have pitched in a lot of places now. I have done some VC and regional VC but pitching to the CIA group was a different experience.

In the Weeds Christian Deputy
Insurance and Risk Management
A brief overview and you don't want to be lectured about insurance. This is a personal story and it ties well to the topic of risk and insurance.
We are a firm that helps companies place insurance and how to transfer the risk. We work with a lot of companies that are just getting started and billion dollar companies here in the valley. Successful companies do some things and make some good decision.
I think athletics is a great standpoint to how business works. You work really hard and get good at something. You take a risk and what I like to do is back country adventure activities. I liked to ski and surf and mountain biking. I am a quadriplegic. I was riding my bike in Big Cottonwood Canyon 2 years ago. Great West Trail and coming down Mildy trailhead. I made a mistake and poor judgment and I got tied up with a tree. I have since been back and the trail was just off the trail. I broke 3 different vertebrae and the second was dislodged and pinched my spinal cord. I was fortunate to have a good buddy who breathed for me and got me off the mountain. I was in the hospital for the next year or just less and worked back to walking and moving as I do now.
In business we make lots of decisions like in athletics. We say I have this awesome opportunity for some kind of reward. Some entrepreneurs don't ask, what is the worst case scenario.
I love taking risks. I have started and lost companies. My Dad has a company in town. Risk provides so much reward. You have to ask, what is the worst case and are we okay with that. Then go forward and take the opportunity. If not then look for a different opportunity.
So you should surround yourself with capable people to help you make good decisions. That is something that we do. My recommendation is that as you start your companies look for quality people who can be partners or vendors or so forth. You should be able to trust your attorney. You need to trust them. Use them.
Frequently they will give their advice for free. Our customers ask us things like "Hey we are thinking about going to Canada, so what do you think?"
I recommend as you look at opportunities involve your broker and attorney. Ask them really broad questions. Send them the contract that your customers want you to sign. You may get some feedback that you wouldn't expect. We are looking at risk. We help them with that to manage or put insurance in place.
Don't worry about insurance at first. It is not VERY important. You will get forced to place it for a couple of reasons but don't worry.
The law: Workers compensation insurance
- Investors or lenders, they want their assets protected. People who have money want to insure. If you go get money in debt or equity then that firm will probably want to require you to get some insurance in place.
-Client contracts do sometimes. Sometimes in having to sell something and they will require some indemnification to back up your contract. When you have it, find a broker you trust and have the broker help you with that. There is a lot of ways to transfer risk if your vendor is willing to insure it on your behalf.
-Morally and ethically sometimes you have to buy insurance it may cause harm etc so you will protect someone in an event. Even when we think we will make good decisions we can't foresee all the events and you can't predict. Insurance is a really as needed thing and it is a good thing. Our theory is don't use it if you don't have to. Manage, transfer and then finally get a good broker if you have to.