To future 2011 TECsters, if you are checking out this program via our blog posts, let me share a little secret with you: you will learn more in this two month program than you ever learn from any semester in college. You will work hard and learn so much, and most of all become inspired to start your own company or put effort to an idea that you are passionate about. But the best part of this internship is the people: True Ventures is renowned as having some of the best people in venture capital, and you get to hang out with not only their accomplished partners, but also the CEOs of their startup companies and incredibly knowledgeable friends of the firm. This leads me to my own motto for this summer and for what I think the TEC program stands for. It is:

TEC: Come for the education, stay for the people, leave with the dream.

Thank you all, and keep in touch.

Cheers,

Tyler York

PS. You didn’t think I would miss my last chance to post a song, did you? Well, you are right. When I first started listening to electronic music, it all began with Daft Punk’s hit single Around The World being on a mix CD I bought. From there, my life changed. Now, for the first time in almost a decade, Daft Punk is releasing a brand new album, the soundtrack to the upcoming movie Tron Legacy. I love the Tron Legacy theme by Daft Punk and I am very excited to hear the new direction that they are taking their music in. And thanks for listening for all these weeks. I hope it was worth your time.

Life has been super hectic! I will take more time to ruminate on the past year in my blog post next week, which should be a doozy considering everything that happened this summer. It has definitely been one of the best two months of my life and I am very grateful for everything the True Ventures team has put together.

It is comforting, however, to see that other people are as busy as I am.

I have also found that like me, SendMe Mobile valued the people over the deal in choosing its venture capital firm. They still got a great deal from True Ventures, don’t get me wrong (True is known for having the most entrepreneur-friendly term sheets around), but what really sold them was the people and values in the firm. The True Team helped SendMe long after the deal was done, assisting them in tasks ranging from hiring to raising their next round. SendMe Mobile is now a company with significant revenue and four great brands: SendMe Mobile, SoLow, WT411, and mBuzzy. Considering the company was only founded in 2006, this is a tremendously successful business and their product offers will only get better with time. It is hard to say what they will be doing in five years or ten years, but over the next year, SendMe would like to focus on building out mBuzzy in order to expand its dominant position as one of the top mobile social networks. I think this is a great direction for them and I am excited to see what they do to build the product.

This week’s track is from what I find to be a promising new avenue of electronic music that combines aspects of deep bass with aggressive electro strings. “Dubstep” is finding its way into the minds of countless people online and many of the best dubstep artists are remixing tracks from other genres. It is easy to see why dubstep has such appeal: it’s got a totally new sound and sonic frequency that goes very well with heavy bass while being slower and more manageable than hard-style or drum & bass. This track is a fantastic remix of “Prituri Se Planinata” by Stellamara by the very talented NiT GriT. Based right in our backyard in San Jose, NiT GriT has gained most of his notoriety and following from Soundcloud.com, which should be an indication of how the future of the music industry is going to be dominated by services like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, not record labels.

See you next week,

Tyler

View of the Golden Gate from Marin (thanks Steve)

This week was pretty exciting. Last Saturday, almost all of the Bay Area interns went to Marin and hiked around. Connor scaled a cliff, Amelia almost got blown away like a leaf (it’s windy up there!) and everyone had a great time. We got to go into the True office on Friday and meet with Pureet, who we all had a great time discussing current market trends with. After finishing our 30-page group research project, we were all primed and ready to give our opinion on the future potential of various industries for venture capital investment. However, there is no debate that the cloud is the future.

However, the rest of the day was spent talking about Business Model Generation and our projects, both of which were very hands-on, but in different ways. Our project gave us a detailed, in depth look at the emerging trends that will attract venture capital investment over the next decade. However, the book Business Model Generation was hands on in the way that it had us analyzing situations and solving problems. BMG is a fantastic way to visualize your business and your value chain: how you create value, distribute it to the customer, monetize it, and use that money to create more value. The process is beautifully described by the BMG Canvas, a picture of which is above. This canvas helps you understand the entire process.

It is also important for young entrepreneurs such as myself to remember that a business model is different from a business plan. In fact, if a business plan was a map, a business model would be an entire road trip: a car, gas stations, friends to split the cost with, a rewarding destination and the relationships built getting there. It is no surprise that business model innovations are now becoming more common than business plan innovations. There are many ways to build a relationship with a customer based on your value proposition, customer service, supply chain, partnerships, and the relationships between all of those components. These are typically far more innovative and profitable to pursue than simply picking a new route on your proverbial map, and even if you pick the “white road” like Gary Erickson from Clif Bar.

And yet many businesses run into a chicken and egg problem, or in this case, a cow and cow egg problem. Many large corporations would love to change their business models to reflect modern innovations and strategies, but they cannot see the monetary benefits of doing so until they invest massive amounts in changing the way that they do business. This is often why many startups can innovate a new business model from scratch, and do so with great agility compared to a larger company. For most startups that are competing on business model innovation, this agility is their lifeline, which is a testament to how hard it is to replicate that trait in a larger corporation. I have seen this firsthand with SendMe Mobile, which is trying to improve their business model in order to better monetize their users on their mobile social network, Mbuzzy. Many competitors in the same market are seeing similar revenues to Mbuzzy with a fraction of the 50m users that Mbuzzy has. SendMe has recognized this discrepancy and is working hard to adapt their business model to one more focused on virtual goods, but the transition is challenging, even when SendMe is only 80-100 employees rather than the thousands of so-called “dinosaur firms” like Yahoo!. The most difficult part of shifting a model over time is two sides of the same coin: it is difficult to shift the actual product and its content from one type of focus to another when it is already established, but it is often even more difficult to shift the minds of the many employees that have put their hearts into working on the product, only to find out that it needs to change to keep up with current trends. While SendMe is more flexible than most companies, I can see how these problems would grow exponentially as the product and its producers grow more entrenched. As a testament to this, even now companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Yahoo! are fighting for their lives as new business models make them irrelevant. Business models are definitely becoming as important as the revered business plan, and they should be. Life is not just about mapping out and hitting your goals. It is the journey along the way that makes the trip memorable.

For this week, I am going to break the techno mold and show you some indie rock (I’m sure Ali and Katherine would be pleased). These guys are a great combination of guitar talent and vocal prowess, something that is far too rare in today’s world of auto-tuned voices and copy-pasta guitar riffs. Enjoy What You Know by Two Door Cinema Club.

Until next time,

Tyler

Hey everyone,
This week went by even faster than the last. It’s truly amazing how time flies and between setting up my new apartment, starting my own business, working full-time and doing TEC work, it has been flying quite fast. However, I found a *really* cool to-do list tool that is called, appropriately, TeuxDeux. Check it out.

As part of our TEC term, we are doing a research project that, broadly speaking, is supposed to educate us on the greater trends driving the technology industry. Then we are to reapply the knowledge we have accumulated into a company search that culminates in a list of interesting companies and promising trends in Silicon Valley and the industry. This project is very cool and has a lot of potential for depth, so much so that I wish I had even more time to work on it. I feel like it could be possible to submit a 100-page report on this engaging subject and still not cover everything that is going on in the Valley. It’s been fascinating learning about these companies and the trends behind them, but the most influential and probably the most surprising is the “death of the PC”.

As Steve Jobs eloquently explained in his interview at the D8 conference (from 4min to end), the post-PC era is starting to emerge and its impact will be dramatic on all consumers, from the earliest adopters of high tech to the mainstream. As someone who grew up with PCs, the idea that a technology that was such a necessity only years ago was going to become “like trucks” where “they will still be around, but most people won’t need them.” The dramatic change that will be brought about by the shift to the post-PC era is exciting and will provide a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Back in our little corner of the world, we spent this week learning and talking about corporate culture and how it can be a tool to motivate your employees and drive your business practices. At SendMe Mobile, there is a friendly culture between employees but That said, there is not the same sense of an overarching mission as the employees of Zappos that we read about in this week’s book, Delivering Happiness. The kind of culture that they have at Zappos is very powerful and in many ways, culture does not pay in strong dividends until much has been invested into it. Seeing as SendMe is a newer company, I feel like they have some time to define what is already a very positive culture. It may be hard to find inspiration in selling ringtones, but Zappos found inspiration in selling shoes, so perhaps it is possible with anything.

Many of this weeks’ speakers felt that their biggest mistake related to culture was waiting too long to instill a culture in their company. What used to be viewed as pointless human resource exercises (creating a mission and vision statement that accurately reflects the company’s attitudes and long-term goals, for example) is now seen as an essential step towards crafting a healthy company culture. In many ways, the company’s culture defines not only how the company’s employees interact with others in the business environment, but also how the company’s employees interact with each other. Many companies believe that a competitive, ruthless internal culture will build strength and create a profitable business overall, but these tactics are often divisive and the loss of team spirit and unity can cause more losses than individual motivation stands to gain. Companies such as Zappos have proven that it is possible to have a profitable business with a company that sacrifices immediate profit for team spirit and employee well-being. Creating a healthy environment for employees has given Zappos a competitive advantage of very happy, helpful customer service representatives and a strong motivating feeling of togetherness. These are the qualities that every company is now reevaluating their culture on, and it is my hope that the “happiness movement” goes beyond the doors of Zappos.

We had many fascinating speakers this week, including a really cool presentation on ice and entrepreneurship by Jeff from Typekit. However, the show was stolen by David Merrill from TED-talk fame, who was clearly both imaginative and entrepreneurial. I can’t tell you more, but his imagination may change all of ours.

I leave you this week with a song from a band I had never heard of until today. Apparently Swedish songwriter Lykke Li has been around for over two years, but this highlights two great things about the electronic community: first, there are tons of songs and artists that you will never hear of because the continuum of music is so large. But the second and best part is that when you do finally stumble across something you’ve never heard before, it’s one of those little joys in life, like finding a new dish at your favorite restaurant. This type of music is not what I typically listen to, but that’s why I found it so interesting. Give Lykke Li – Little Bit (Gilgamesh Remix) a try.

Cheers,
Tyler

Our internship experience is now halfway over, something that really hasn’t quite hit us interns yet. I was talking to a couple True interns after this past Thursday’s session and we all agreed: there was no way 4 weeks had gone by. It felt like one or maybe two at most. What can I say? Time flies when you’re having fun and working hard!

This past Monday, True took us out to a Giants game with great seats right up the line from 3rd base. As a diehard Giants fan, this wasn’t my first game, but it was a great time and fun to be around such interesting people. The crowd was really into the game (against our archrival Dodgers) until the top of the 8th, when on a 3-2 count with 2 outs, a middle-of-the-lineup Dodger broke the 2-2 tie with a 2-run homerun. Just like that, the fan’s energy and the team’s momentum was sucked away like the wind leaving a sail. This taught me an important lesson about momentum: never take it for granted because if you lose it, it’s very difficult to get it back. The Giants ended up losing that game 4-2. I feel like maintaining momentum in a startup is very similar.

Also on Thursday, with Phil Black’s guidance, we learned about the legal dance between entrepreneurs and their prospective investors. I had no previous knowledge of this subject, something many interns shared, but Mr. Black helped all of us understand which terms were entrepreneur friendly and which terms were not. The way that he phrased the process was very insightful: either your investors are going to build value for your firm or extract value from your firm. It is important that they want to see themselves make money through your success. Both the company and the investors need to be working towards the same goals in order to reach them as efficiently as possible. Fundraising is mind share driven, which means your valuation (and therefore, the “bang for your buck” you get while raising capital) is often based around how well you present your ideas and how valuable the investors think those ideas are. There aren’t always metrics or concrete answers for how much a startup is worth: it can sometimes be all in your mind and the minds of others. I found this to be pretty surprising, but what is also surprising is how many successful companies started with an idea and found ways to do the rest of “that business stuff” later, like creating a revenue model or being cash flow positive. There are many companies that are based around an idea that become incredibly successful, and it must take some crazy talent to be able to see that as a venture capitalist. That said, Mr. Black also warned us that not all venture firms are funding “napkin-based companies” any more and now the rules have changed. Some venture capital firms now ask for these ideas to be more fully formed business plans or even revenue-generating companies before handing them the keys to a “Hyundai full of twenties“.

(OK, so that link isn’t exactly relevant: Woot! was bought by Amazon, not invested in by a VC firm, but I liked that post enough to share it with you guys. Clearly, the guy who founded Woot! has a great since of humor.)

My company, SendMe Mobile was funded by True at a very early age, and grew like a weed until its current inception today. The lesson I took from this was that when you create a great product that people want, the rest can fall like dominos. It may not be everything to have a great idea nowadays, but it’s definitely a good way to start!

I leave you with an airy guitar riff combined with a chanting chorus that is perfect for the summer sun. Enjoy MY KZ YR BF (Clock Opera Remix) by Everything Everything, especially 1:30 to 2:00.

Thanks for reading this,

Tyler

This week was exciting to say the least. Connor Hood, Ali Shah, and myself went to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco’s double feature on Wednesday night. The first talk was Michael Arrington from TechCrunch interviewing David Kirkpatrick, the author of the hyped new book “The Facebook Effect”, which was a fascinating look into a company that Kirkpatrick began following when it had “only” 50 million users. He found the company’s story so compelling that he quit his Senior Editor of Technology position at Forbes Magazine to write a book about it. Arrington was also quite fun to see in person because he is a notorious interviewer. Overall, the takeaway from Arrington’s TechCrunch article sums up the interview quite nicely, though Arrington is harder on Kirkpatrick for his bias than I would have been (then again, I also got my copy signed by him after the talk!).

Work at SendMe Mobile has begun to pick up nicely. I am given more to do every week and I am encouraged to strike out on my own with new ideas or help with the brainstorming process of things that I am familiar with. It is a strong aspect of startup culture to embrace employee motivation and creativity, which is an aspect I think SendMe really wants to hold on to. That combined with a couple new employees a week gives SendMe a lot of life as it moves forward.

The big event for this week was the GigaOm Structure 2010 Cloud Computing conference. I knew little more about cloud computing than the general overview articles and presentation we got to read in the days leading up to the conference. That said, my inexperience was actually a blessing because it gave me an open mind for the concept. It was very interesting to see very intelligent people talk about this young and dynamic industry. Cloud computing has an extremely bright future and it promises to change the way the business world thinks about IT and computer services. My favorite speaker was the VP of Tech Operations for Facebook (I forget his name and actual title, unfortunately) and him talking about the incredible challenges that Facebook faces in running its half-a-billion-user website. It’s pretty incredible that they have pretty much never had any crashes, bugs, or downtime at all.

The biggest takeaway that I got from Structure 2010 was that businesses are moving to their core competency and outsourcing things that they don’t want to handle. For instance, one of Amazon’s core competencies was having a ton of high-traffic, high-capacity servers but they only got used on Christmas day. So they rent their servers to other companies that don’t want to worry about their servers so they can worry about serving their customers instead. I think that as an overall trend, this is incredibly important. If you look at how employees are trending in the workplace today, everyone is specifying their career into a set of skills so small and targeted that they are perfect for a particular type of job. Though granted, there may not be many of these jobs available, but there are also fewer competitors. The way that Charles Smart put it was that people are “developing their skills in silos”, which I thought was really insightful. As this is slowly happening to the employees of firms, I also realized that the same trend exists with companies. A marketing company like SendMe might someday rent its server space from Amazon (or a competitor), outsource its customer support to a customer support company, and so on. This is encouraging news to me, because the company that I want to start at the end of this summer (as a part-time side project) will hopefully become a part of this trend.

Other than that, my personal life has been very hectic recently due to me moving into my own place. Building Ikea furniture is quite the workout! This song helped me get through what was otherwise tedious work this weekend, and it’s a great example of the capability of electronic music to blend genres. This band, Pretty Lights, has risen to fame by combining house beats with mashed up rock and rap lyrics. Often times, the lyrics are used more as an additional instrument than a completely separate entity. I think this is one of the best examples of effective use of lyrics and human voice in electronic music today. Check it out on Hype Machine.

Cheers,

Tyler

Speaking of entrepreneurial spirit, every speaker we have seen in the past two weeks has had that quality in spades, and you can see how it drives them and their businesses. John Burke and Om Malik both brought wisdom and experience to a group of interns that were just beginning to build their own libraries of knowledge. It was clear from these speakers that entrepreneurship is a long road that almost no one knows how to navigate the first time they ride on it. But Raising the Bar author Gary Erickson took that disadvantage and turned it into a strength through the growth of his company, Clif Bar. Erickson saw his road less traveled, the proverbial “white road”, as a way to not only set yourself apart from the pack but also grow as a person and a company along the way. Many of the lessons I took from Erickson’s books will guide me as I attempt to start my own company some day, but especially his triple bottom line: people, profit, planet. The way Clif Bar treats its employees is extraordinary and its treatment of the environment as both sacred and valuable is a necessary step forward in corporate thinking. It is amazing to think of the difference we could have on the way that the world and its people are treated if we all ran our companies in this fashion.

As for running companies, all three of the speakers that we met with this week are currently running their own companies. Toni Schnieder and Tony Conrad are running Automattic and (insert stealth company name here), respectively. They both had a lot of lessons on starting their own startups and what it was like to be at the helm of a growing company. It was great when Tony Conrad said you had to be ‘unreasonable optimistic’ because you are faced with seemingly crippling challenges to your business every day and your only hope of getting through them all is to keep your head above water and keep swimming forward. We then heard from Danny Shader, CEO of Kwedit, which is a fascinating company with a great idea. The last speaker we heard from this week was Hiten Shah, the founder of marketing tool KISSmetrics. His talk helped me as a marketer understand how companies are affected by marketing and how the web has created a whole new channel for marketers to use to reach their audience. His perspective on marketing is very forward thinking and I expect him to be an innovation-driver in the marketing field with both KISSmetrics and his future projects.

SendMe was founded in June 2006 with the goal of bringing products to users that didn’t have expensive smartphones. They saw an opportunity with use text messaging, connecting with other people and personalization as areas where they could make fun products available for anyone with any phone. SendMe has stayed true to its original mission in this regard and now provides many great cellphone products to any phone on the market. They have hit many road bumps along the way. The key is to keep focusing on what you can, and you will eventually get over the road bump or find a way around it. Something I was exposed to this week first in Raising the Bar, and then yesterday from Tony Conrad, was the phrase “que sera, sera”, which loosely translated means ‘what happens, happens’. It’s a nice way of looking at road blocks as an entrepreneur: you will find them, it’s inevitable. You just have to shrug and find a new way. If you are too focused on something having to be a certain way, you will never pivot and evolve your company into something that it could truly build a business out of.

I’m going to take a page from Jacob here and post a song every week. I will admit that I have an agenda in doing this . I am a big fan of electronic music, more commonly referred to as “techno”. I love sharing it and I actually feel like there is a serious potential for electronic music to forever change the way music is made. You can already see it happening with modern pop adopting many practices found in electronic music, but what really excites me is the explosion of different sub-genres that are turning electronic music into its own community of new, creative forms of art. One of the most famous and popular artists that creates electronic music is a Canadian called Deadmau5 (pronounced dead-mouse). His music is complex, rhythmic, and dare I say intellectual. I also find that electronic music in general makes for great work music. I am going to post one of my favorite tracks of his, which is a long, slow buildup that my friend called “Stairway to Heaven for electronica”. So while you grind away at your respective internships this week, I hope you all give it a shot.

http://hypem.com/track/1107649/Deadmau5+-+Strobe+umstrum+Radio+Edit+

Until next time,

Tyler

My name is Tyler York and I just graduated with a degree in Business from Carnegie Mellon University. I have graduated and made the decision to move back to my home in San Francisco, CA after attending school elsewhere for 7 years. I made this decision begrudgingly at first, since I was choosing to abandon my friends and fond memories of college to pursue a career in Marketing in Silicon Valley.

As one of the few people not going back to school after TEC, this program has provided me with an exciting and very educational transition period between school and the working world. I am already learning more every day about the working environment, marketing, and how a business is put together, much like John mentioned previously. However, what is even more exciting to me is the fact that I get the opportunity to learn so much about entrepreneurship, startups, and the tech space. Those are the three areas of business that fascinate me, and I am right here at the center of it in Silicon Valley. I am sure that the knowledge I gain from this summer and the TEC program will last me a lifetime, and I hope that the relationships I build here do as well. Here’s to the TEC Class of 2010. Let’s make this summer a good one.

Cheers,

Tyler