I chose to interview Joe Fernandez of Klout.  Klout is doing pretty incredible things to track influence across social media networks.  It’s not perfect but it’s an excellent way to get an idea of who you are influencing  on social media channels.  The vast amount of data and algorithms incorporated with Klout are incredible.  They have even employed semantics research to gauge what conversations are more influential and impacting on someone’s “klout.”  For example, if you tweet @teddy: want to grab coffee sometime?  You can assume based on the inquiry that the two parties closely influence each other.  Klout is growing and is up to somewhere around 45 employees.  If you have a chance, you should check out their awesome office here in San Francisco.  There is a Foursquare special when you check-in to their office to receive a free t-shirt but I think they were out when I visited.

My Klout Score, what's yours?

You grew up in Vegas but attended school on the east coast at University of Miami, how did you end up in Miami?
 It definitely was not strategic.  I think I went there for the warm weather.

 When did you know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?  Did you always know that you wanted to build businesses?
I started my first company at 13, buying and selling video games at school.  That turned into selling bootleg CDs in college.

I noticed that you had started Evalulogix before you started working at Onboard Informatics, how did that work?
Well, Evalulogix licensed a technology to Onboard so that’s kind of how that worked.

 You also started Klout while you were still working on Evalulogix.  How did you know that you were ready for a different venture?
I was really passionate about Klout and it was all that I could think about.  I sold my shares to fund Klout.  There was definitely a lot of things going on at same time.

 What has been your biggest challenge in your entrepreneurial ventures?
To keep pushing when you fail or when investors don’t like an idea.

 What suggestions do you have for someone my age looking to build a startup?
A lot of times, people are too worried about what they don’t know.   They want to learn the rules of game before they start playing.  They ask: should I get an MBA or work in a startup to get experience?  If you get an idea, go for it.   Don’t not do it if you think you can do it.

 What has been one of your more valuable experiences?
Starting a company and being able to live in New York City.  I actually started Klout in New York City.

How did you decide to move Klout from NYC to San Francisco?
 We decided that if we are going to build a company that layers over Twitter and Facebook, we’re going to need to be near them to make things work.

 Some people say that despite the startup growth in NYC, the Valley is still the best place to start a company. What are your thoughts?
 You can definitely start a company in New York.  There are big companies like Foursquare that are doing very well there.  San Francisco is obviously like a fantasy land though.

What’s the next big thing for Klout?
We want to move from being an interesting startup and a novelty to becoming more mainstream like Groupon and Zynga. That is more of a broader goal for us.

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Keep on a lookout for Klout.  They are forging new partnerships like crazy, including a recent stint with Spotify and True’s own About.me.

Both Thiel and Wadwha seem to take a pretty extreme position on the topic of education.  I wanted to talk a little about this because I have opinions that lie somewhere between Thiel and Wadwha.

Thiel’s group of 20 young individuals is a rather self-selecting group.  One winner left Stanford’s Neuroscience Ph.D. program, another matriculated at MIT when she was 14, another has worked for Microsoft, Stanford, and Mozilla… you get the point.  These are all highly successful individuals who probably will end up doing amazing things.  If you apply Thiel’s vision to the average college student, does it still work?  Can you give just any motivated student who wants try out their idea a large sum of money to just go for it?  I don’t think this is what Thiel is saying but I think this might be how Wadwha is interpreting Thiel’s vision.

In Wadwha’s research, his team found that a student from an elite university isn’t anymore likely to build a successful companies than a student from a “non-elite” university.  Thiel argues that we are amidst a higher education bubble where students and employees are overvaluing degrees.

I find it particularly amusing that two of the most vocal advocates of dropping out of college are Peter Thiel and Mike Arrington—both of whom completed Stanford Law degrees. College dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are strong proponents of finishing your degrees. Even Steve Jobs talks about the importance of liberal arts education.  -Wadwha

So is Thiel saying that everyone should drop out of school and try to work on an impacting venture?  No, I certainly don’t think so.  However, he is saying that if you are a bright, accomplished, young individual like the 20 former-students that he selected then why would you postpone your venture?  Go for it and go for it with a full head of steam.  School doesn’t go away.  Maybe the venture fails.  Maybe there is another venture that follows.  Maybe not.  Regardless, the option of returning to complete your education is usually there.

 “Everyone thinks kids in inner-city Detroit should do something else,” Thiel says. “We’re saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top.”

A commenter on a TechCrunch post, Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education presented an interesting point:

And here’s what I think will change the game: alternative signaling and credentialing mechanisms. When universities no longer have a monopoly (or near-monopoly) on signaling/credentialing we’ll witness a sea change. I’d offer that this is already starting to happen in certain parts of industry. Would you rather hire an engineer with a lot of GitHub followers, a great reputation on Stack Overflow and/or someone who is a Y Combinator alum or would you rather higher a Stanford or MIT grad?

Are  we slowly approaching a crossroads where employers, on a wide scale, will hire based on true merit like Stack Overflow / Quora reputation or the quality of personal projects?  I think those types of qualifications will certainly become more and more commonplace. Does this mean that people shouldn’t go to school at all? Of course not. Often times, being surrounded by intelligent students in a university setting spawns ideas and builds networks for starting a venture.  But if you feel that you are ready to jump in and build something, why not take some time off?   That being said,  I think both Thiel and Wadwha need to take a less extremist view of education.  It’s a highly situational thing.  Some say Thiel is doing it as a PR stunt for himself, which may be true.  Regardless, I think you should go with your gut.  If you feel that you have a solid plan, go for it and go for it in a big way.  Don’t think of formal education as some omnipotent force that will grant you all of your wishes but at the same time, don’t underestimate its value.

It has always been clear to me that companies value user feedback in the development of their products.  However, my experiences so far with TEC have exposed me to how incredibly crucial it is for startups to evaluate their users’ experience.  A lot of times, it comes down to deciding which user requested features to implement.  They have to decide whether those features fit their vision for the product even if it’s a widely requested feature.  It has been interesting to see the number of ways that companies evaluate what users want in the ideation stage (and even later) and how they eventually gauge the quality of their experience.

Surveying your target demographic seems to be the most effective way to pin down some ideas in the early stages of your company. How do you do this effectively though?  You can go out into the “field” and talk to people on the street.  One company that came in to talk to us did exactly this, using iPads to lure passing strangers to conduct a survey.   They mentioned that a lot of people simply enjoyed playing with the iPad and as a result went ahead and took the survey.

Alternatively, you can do all the surveying by buying targeted traffic and sending it to a survey or a landing page with some type of A/B test.  Funneling targeted traffic in this way  may also help you pick a logo or design or even a name for your product in your earliest stage.

Often times with a newly launched product, you see a feedback tab tucked into the side of the design of the site. Personally, I’ve never used those tabs, not because I don’t have any feedback but simply because it’s inconvenient for me.  I think that feedback requests should be integrated into the flow of the product in a non-intrusive way (easier said than done) rather than passively sitting on the sidelines.

The first two solutions are expensive but indefinitely important.  After all, you are building the product for the user.   As a user, product testing is actually kind of fun.  Getting people to be honest and candid is obviously important and likely often challenging.  It seems like the hardest and most expensive part is getting that user through the door to offer their 2 cents.

I think that the lessons of execution and risk taking are applicable to almost anything.  I started collecting quotes from the books we have been reading and I have toyed with the idea of picking a few and painting them on the wall of my room when I head back to school.  Or how about a big “just do it.”   I like it.  I hear there was a company that used that as their slogan once.

Do More Faster

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”  - Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines

“Blame Nobody. Expect Nothing.  Do something.” – Bill Parcells, NFL Coach

“We regret the things we don’t do more than the things we do.”   – Mark Twain

“Do or do not – there is no try.”  -Brad Feld

 

Delivering Happiness

“Hope is not a good plan.” – Tony Hsieh

“If you have more than 3 priorities then you don’t have any.”  - Jim Collins

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw

It would be far from the truth if I told you that I understood the complexities of the cloud.  However, Structure helped me understand the vast potential uses of the cloud from the most obvious like music to less obvious, and arguably, most privacy sensitive uses, like billing and accounting software.  Seeing some of the booths on the floor, where reps talked about their products gave good insight into who is using cloud technologies and how.

When I was in London,  Steve Ballmer came to the LSE to talk about the future of the cloud.  In particular, he discussed: “how cloud computing is radically altering paradigms, and new business opportunities enabled by the cloud.”  Judging by Ballmer’s talk, it seemed like Microsoft was leveraging the cloud to improve their customers’ gaming experience.  They released products like the Kinect on Xbox, which heavily uses the cloud.  They also have products like Windows Azure…. wait Azure?  They surely aren’t a huge player in the space but they are trying to break into it.  At Structure,  one of their reps was asked whether they saw the Cloud as a threat to their traditional products.  He obviously said no but the reality is that their cloud unit is in direct competition with their traditional enterprise software, since they are encouraging people to move into the cloud.

The cloud is an intriguing technology and I thank Om of GigaOm for giving the TEC group an opportunity to learn more about it.

On a side note, our weekly TEC reading this week is Mastering the VC Game by Jeffrey Bussgang and I have to say I have really enjoyed it.  A quote by Reid Hoffman really struck me:

“Today, every individual is a small business.”

Hoffman discusses the idea of taking one job for an extended period as being obsolete.  Not only is this concept obsolete, according to Hoffman, but so is the education system as a whole.  There seems to be a movement in the entrepreneurial community to reshape the meaning and fundamental aspects of education.  Peter Thiel is leading this movement with his Thiel Fellowship.  In fact, one of the recipients of the $100,000 grant, Dale Stephens, is founder of a social movement  that is “changing the notion that going to college is the only path to success.” It will be interesting to see what kind of impact major players like Thiel and Stephens will have on the education system.  It is clear that change is imminent and frankly, I think it is well overdue.

A startup office move is symbolic in a lot of ways.  Much akin to a mother watching their child outgrow a pair of shoes or move on to the next grade in school, an office upgrade for a startup often means bigger and better things are on the horizon.  We moved into Slideshare‘s old space, less than a half mile from our old office.  Slideshare is growing fast and could no longer keep jamming new team members into their space.  They left in a hurry.  Even one lost day of work is equal to at least 10 in startup land.  They left remnants of their hard work, with wireframes carefully crafted with dry-erase marker on the plexiglass windows and countless check-ins into the location via Foursquare.  Okay maybe only the first part is representative of their hard work.

The Kiip founders shared a similar story with us when they came to give us a “TEC talk” on Thursday. They formerly inhabited True’s space before leaving the nest and finding their own home.  I can’t speak for Kiip but it seems that the workplace in an early stage startup is a main part of shaping the initial culture of the company.  It’s where the team spends waking hours together in the most crucial stage of the company’s growth.   It’s where you know you can go to be “wired in” and bang out some code.  It’s where you may have had influential meetings that forged the partnerships that helped you grow.  It’s where you probably have had a ton of fun.  An office should have an abundance of good vibes.

So what big things are on the horizon for SaveUp?  Well one of our co-founders is off to the White House this week to speak on a panel on developing an “Impact Economy.”  The agenda involves discussing “how to catalyze capital to businesses that generate both financial and intentional social returns.”  Intentional social returns?  We’ve got an app for that. Very few people know “social returns” like SaveUp’s co-founder Priya and it is one of SaveUp’s primary goals

While I’m on the topic of offices and workplaces,  check out Philip Rosedale’s “work club” concept.  It is a co-working space with free coffee and fast internet.  It is fueled by smart people helping other smart people.  When you go to the

work club, located on Market St, you are expected to volunteer your services to other members of the club.  Graphic designer?  Your name is put up on a display, showing that you can offer a helping hand with graphic design when you have a spare minute.  They use a green/red light system to show your availability on the screen.  I stopped by this weekend and took a peek in and it screams awesome.  It is such a revolutionary concept and I hope it catches on in other cities.

Today marks the end of the first week of TEC.  It has been an incredibly busy week in the best sense of the word.  I flew almost directly here to San Francisco from London where I was studying abroad.  Settling into the city has been surprisingly easy, especially considering it is my first time in the great state of California.

The TEC team was fortunate enough to meet four of the True Ventures founders on the first day of the program.  By mid-day, we were off to our first day at our companies.  The SaveUp team welcomed me to the office and on day 1, I sat in on a team meeting with the founders.  This type of exposure to the inner workings of an exciting early stage startup is exactly what attracted me to TEC.  It is a rarity that a student can be so close to the action happening in a game-changing company.

SaveUp
So what is SaveUp and what am I doing there?  SaveUp is a brand new company that is working on innovative ways to encourage people to save and pay off debt.  The company has not launched yet so I can’t write too much about their secret sauce!  The two founders, Sammy Shreibati and Priya Haiji are fresh out of successful startups.  Priya founded World of Good, the world’s largest marketplace for ethically sourced, eco-friendly products.  World of Good was acquired by eBay.  Sammy was the first engineer at PrepMe.  There are 8 members on the team, including me.  The SaveUp office is a very laid back environment but like most startups, we start late and stay late.  Oh right, we also have two little helpers…

I will be working in marketing here at SaveUp.  A majority of students head home or to their respective universities on July 29th but I have opted to stay with SaveUp for 3 weeks into August.  The atmosphere here at the company thus far has been filled with creativity and hard work, and most important of all, there is certainly not a lack of fun here in the office.

I look forward to sharing more about my TEC experience with you.  I have no doubt that it will be a spectacular summer.