“Hustlin: verb, Havin the ambition and drive to do everything and anything to make mad money.”

If you go to Urban Dictionary and look up hustlin’, the above definition is what you get, and nothing really captures sales better than that. At bloomspot, the crux of our business if built on sales. Unlike many other startups whose product creation and selling stage are more distinct and separate, at bloomspot, the crux of the business is built on sales. Every single day and the revenue it generates matters, and every month is a sprint. Whereas technically every single day matters for any startup, for bloomspot, every single day generates a high degree of revenue making it really a hustle. Consequently, the revenue of the company is entirely contingent upon the ability of our AEs (Account Executives) or the sales team and their ability to hustle.

This brings us to our quagmire: how do you build a first-class sales team?

Unlike Peter Thiel’s infamous most important question to ask a startup of “Why will employee number 20 join your company?”, with a startup where sales is the epicenter, the question is instead “Why will employee number 41, 52, 63, 72….nth join your company?“. Every month, new AEs are brought onto the team leading to the current sales team to be somewhere around forty, fifty people if not more. Every single new sales person brought on board has to completely buy into the company vision. Discounting the difficulties that naturally come with size, how does a startup make every individual buy into the company vision? Furthermore, in the context of sales, it becomes even more difficult to make a senior and novice sales team work together. Providing incentives such as rewards and company perks are useful, but there’s a delicate balance between creating a cut-throat environment that incentives tend to bring and a collaborative environment that benefits the company.

Sales is always a mystery. Creating a world-class sales team is even more of one.

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved – if it can be achieved at all – within the next few hundred years. -Arthur C. Clarke, 1983

Fundamentally, technology, at it’s crux, is about progress. It is technology that drives humanity and civilization to greater productivity, greater advancement, and greater achievement. And for startups, the creation and utilization of technology is inherently tied in whether it be through the development of disruptive business models on existing platforms (cloud, enterprise software, mobile) or developing new technologies (Sifteo). Consequently, the emergence of new technologies eliminates previous barriers resulting in the birth of new companies. Puneet Agarwal elaborated on this within the context of True’s goal of being disruptive to the venture capital landscape.

With the past decade, disruptive innovations both in terms of technology as well as business models have enabled former barriers to the enterprise/infrastructure, hardware, and mobile industries to be eradicated leading to the emergence of countless new companies. For enterprise/infrastructure, the emergence of Amazon’s cloud services, and the consumerization of IT have enabled entrepreneurs to take advantage of developing enterprise-based startups. For mobile, the unification of a platform that enables third-party development through Apple and Android’s smartphones have resulted in an array of startups. Likewise, the ability to now outsource and create small orders of components have enabled entrepreneurs to iterate even with complex hardware components.

To further consider the opportunities for early-stage investment, Puneet pushed us to think of new markets. Some interesting ones that came to mind were:

Healthcare/Biotech:

As an industry, healthcare is worth somewhere around in the hundreds of billions . Startups have previously had a difficult entering the healthcare market due to large bureacrcy and overhead. However, the increasingly cheap and widespread consumer technologies will be able to disrupt the industry as startups and investors take advantage of developing medical tools in conjunction with iPads and smartphones. Some examples include Agile Diagnosis which takes advantage of the iPad to develop a professional diagnostic tool for doctors and nurses. Another company is VaxTrac which has combined cheap consumer technology in the form of a basic cellphone and a plug in fingerprint scanner to create a vaccine tracker for the children in the developing world. Biotech and pharmaceuticals also have huge potential as a future industry for early-stage investment. New business models, such as Thiel fellow, Alex Kiselev’s idea of creating open-source laboratory equipment at a fraction of the current cost of existing equipment, could provide interesting investment opportunities.

Data:

While the 1999 bubble left the groundwork and hardware for Web 2.0 to build upon, the (potential) bubble of today will leave behind a vast network and cache of data for startups and entrepreneurs to innovate with. In retrospect, the amass of data is truly astounding. Facebook and Google+ records our photos, status updates, and social interactions with our multiple networks, Twitter captures our minute thoughts, Google captures our search histories, trackers such as FitBit, MyFitnessPal, and Ibwie amass data on our daily eating and exercising habits. The aforementioned does not even begin to discount the amount of data cread as infrastructure ranging from banking to the military become increasingly reliant on the Internet (see Steve Blank’s analysis that the internet is going to kill us all)

Data is the new industry where we gain invaluable insight into human and societal behavior, and the former barriers of “private” data are slowly become obsolete as illustrated by opening up databases such as Data.gov (the US government’s database). Furthermore, data as a whole is highly capital efficient and easily adaptable to the Lean Startup model. One interesting iteration is OPower which taps into household energy consumption data to create home energy reports to motivate customers to reduce consumption by charting their consumption against their neighbors.

Greentech

Greentech as an area for early-stage investment may be a bit more tricky considering it’s inherent nature of being capital intensive due to the high costs of developing solar panels, wind turbines, etc. However,disruptions to the industry are slowly but steadily expanding through new scientific breakthroughs in nano materials which enable the development of materials such as solar paint that captures solar energy. However, even discounting scientific advancement, there is room for early-stage investment in greentech through two means. One, through joint investments with the government subsidies that often exist for green tech companies, thus enabling earlier investment. Secondly, with web 2.0, there are opportunities for early-stage, and capital efficient investment in startups that are helping develop the supply chain process for the clean energy industry. As greentech as an industry is in a relatively infant stage, there is numerous opportunities to help develop the  One example that comes to mind is PV Power that streamlines the process for solar panel installers and contractors.

The aforementioned industries are just a small sample of potential future industries and markets to invest within. What other new emerging markets can you think of?

Like any other activity or sport, the speech and debate community had its stars and must-knows. Every weekend, without fail, one could find the same group of people walking across the stage during the award ceremony in their respective events. Golf had Tiger Woods, gymnastics, Nastia Lukin, and basketball Derrick Rose. Debate had that high school kid who made sure his name included the III on every poster (true story). Yet while Derrick Rose’s fame lasts off the court, the same cannot be said of the high school speech and debate stars. It was a jolt to reality when I randomly saw award-winning speech and debaters outside of tournaments at school events or football games (especially since they all looked so different without their suits on). Outside of the speech and debate world, nobody knew who won last weekend’s final round with a sneaky topicality card or who could speedread 18 full pages of text in 8 minutes (I too was once able to do that though that’s not a skill I particularly miss).

And the startup world is no different. Of course, individuals such as Mark Zuckerburg and Bill Gates have become household names (although Mark Zuckerburg’s notoriety definitely improved with the release of the Social Network), but to the average savvy individual whose general interest in technology stretched only as far as the when the next iPhone version, the need-to-knows in the startup ecosystem is unknown. For the budding entrepreneur, how do you go about mapping the landscape both in terms of competition (similar startups) as well as resources (incubators, funding, etc.) within the area? To further complicate matters, while the need-to-knows are consistent across the board and the US within sports such as basketball, startup communities vary vastly by city (NYC vs. Chicago vs. Bay Area) with not only different resources, but also different entrepreneurial cultures and preconceptions. As we read in Mastering the VC Game, the atmosphere is completely different abroad in Europe and Asia as well.

So where does one begin? The obvious answer is to network like no other and scour local sources such as Startup Digest in your particular city or blogs of thought-leaders within your area. Yet, that method not only takes at least several months to map the landscape, but also does not guarantee that you have met the right people you need for your venture. Likewise, what if you’re not physically there? Maybe you’re planning to relocate there and want to scout out the landscape, or maybe you are considering expanding to an office in another city. In some ways, understanding the startup ecosystem is similar to market sizing for your product.

Lately, what I have been thinking could be the solution is the categorization or creation of a nomenclature of the startup ecosystem for each city. Like a biological ecosystem, these nomenclatures create a structure but are ever-constantly evolving, similar to how the startup world works.

There are some existing forays into this area out there. One is Crunchbase, and the other is WeareNYTech. There value is immeasurable, as even across the nation, we are able to grasp an idea of who are the key players within their respective ecosystems, and should one choose to relocate there, who they could contact about their startup. Of course, hustlin’ is still needed (as any entrepreneur knows), but these resources create an invaluable starting point.

Tuesday, I went down to Atherton for dinner at blackbox where I had the opportunity to meet individuals ranging from the founders of the Startup Genome Report, to a Thiel fellow who is creating open-source lab equipment, to an angel investor in Taipei, to the founder of  Ayllu (a social enterprise mapping project I have been greatly intrigued with). The ~30 person dinner skewed heavily towards the international side with entrepreneurs from Germany, Russia, Sweden, and France among other countries. Two interesting insights…

- In Europe, as an entrepreneur, you only have one chance. If you fail, the community brands you as a failure. Likewise, being an entrepreneur is not really viewed as an occupation; you are either considered unemployed or really rich.

- A common trend in emerging startups abroad in Europe and Taiwan is to replicate a proven business within the U.S. (i.e. Facebook for China, Groupon for Germany), and then exit by having the original US company buy them. Clever way to capture market opportunity, but doesn’t really push the innovation barrier.

Thursday was a surprise talk by Greg Avis and Dave Rosenberg, both who provided unique and interesting insight into the later stages of entrepreneurship and venture capital. This was followed by a trip to Alcatraz where I may have frolicked in the prisoner’s recreation yard with other TEC-lings a bit too happily (considering it was a prison….).

The Guys @ TEC have something called swag…

San Francisco Skyline from Alcatraz

This past 4th of July weekend involved a lot of hiking around the city. I went to the Palace of Fine arts, climbed to Coit tower, went onto the Golden Gate Bridge and got Middle Eastern food in Presidio. The highlight of the weekend was the Batteries and Bluff trail. Hidden off to the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, very few people venture onto it, but it leads to both Marshall and Baker beach. I spent the day at Marshall beach enjoying the view, and even venturing into the ocean (although that ocean water is probably the coldest thing I have ever been in…). Overall, it was an adventurous weekend, and I look forward to the exciting events to come!

Marshall Beach

Flashback to as I made my way from Chicago to San Francisco, I had a vague premonition that it was going to be an exciting time to be here in the Bay, the physical manifestation of the epicenter of technology and innovation within the United States (admittedly, this feeling was helped along by reading the Economist on the plane). It is not just the innovation and entrepreneurial qualities that the atmosphere here is imbued with, an attribute that I like many of the other TEC-sters have noticed, but also the press of a potential bubble. Whether it exists, doesn’t exist, bursts, or continues on for the next decade, the opportunity to be in the center of it is undeniably exciting.

And as Groupon filed for a S-1 for a $750 million IPO, and shares of LinkedIn jumped to 170% during it’s first day of trading, it was this plausible bubble that my thoughts kept returning to as I read our assigned Founders at Work. In Founders at Work, we were regaled with the origins of companies such as Paypal, Excite, Hotmail, and Lotus Systems. What struck me was that the majority of the companies profiled in Founders at Work have formed the Internet infrastructures that today’s companies are built upon. They harked innovations such as encryption (Paypal) and heraled in innovations along the way such as online advertising (Hotmail).

Whereas previous disruptive technologies have focused on infrastructure and hardware based today, the disruption is found in the social or consumer industry—imperceptibly and permanently changing how we interact with each other. The focus is no longer on the construction of infrastructure and hardware that are at the core of the platforms today’s companies are built upon. As Om Malik aptly stated during our TEC session,

“Silicon Valley…is no longer Silicon. It has become a Digital Valley”

Such an evolution is undeniable, and maybe even natural. Yet, there is a caveat that must be taken into account for such an evolution. Is this the reason we may have a bubble?

With soaring IPOs, and the rolling out of companies that have imperceptible differences, it is very likely we have reached a point of saturation. The innovation is many ways has been confined and stagnated (i.e. social networks—Twitter, Color, Instagram, Foursquare, etc. are all based on a social communities; they vary only on what area they focus on i.e. Foursquare is food, Instagram is photography, Twitter is instant updates, etc.). The reasoning? Without further development of infrastructure and hardware we are forced to iterate on existing platforms. And despite the ingenuity of platforms, they are finite.

Consequently, with the clamoring around these “hot” companies, investors are further disincentivized to invest in the more risky hardware and infrastructure-based ventures. While in the short run the consequences are negligible, at the point of saturation and in the long run, the U.S. will fall behind in our technological competitiveness where our failure to invest in the further development of hardware and infrastructure prevents us from reaching Web 3.0.

So is there a bubble? Maybe. But the things is, it isn’t the existence of a bubble that’s the problem, rather it’s the lack of infrastructure. The last tech bubble in 1999 left behind the Internet Infrastructure that all of today’s companies have built upon. What will today’s tech world leave for tomorrow?

Coming from the University of Chicago with it’s infamous Core, and the theoretical over the practical, I often get asked how my interest in entrepreneurship was spiked. But the truth is, I have always been drawn to the qualities that entrepreneurs and the startup world exhibit: passion, drive, tenacity, enthusiasm, the desire to reach one’s own or the idea’s full potential, the daring to believe and execute, and the pressing interest in changing the world for the better.

I have found these attributes in other sectors, but never the entire set. Imagine my delight when I discovered that there was a whole ecosystem built upon these tenants. For me, though I’ve always strived for these values, I literally stumbled upon entrepreneurship through the founding of the Kairos Society at the University of Chicago a year and a half ago. Since then, I have become a Junior Associate for Hyde Park Angels where I have become exposed to the venture and investing side of the startup world a. Yet, I desired an experience that would enable me to truly understand early-stage companies (and gain some experience should I choose to found a startup), and there is no better way to do that then to be in the center of one in order to truly understand the nuances of what founders need. Moreover, I also wanted to be challenged and pushed this summer.  Enter TEC.

Through TEC, I have the opportunity to work with bloomspot, a company that offers limited quantity exclusive offers for weekend getaways and exceptional local experiences founded by two former Yahoo employees, bloomspot is in the center of the hot space of flash sales/deals (especially after Groupon’s IPO). Only a year and a half old (launched in January 2010), bloomspot already has over 100 employees. As the business development intern at bloomspot, I’m spending my time 50/50 between sales/operations and marketing. For sales/operations, I am working primarily on past performance data analysis. This includes quantitative and qualitative data analysis on the trends that work best for sales within and between types of products, cities, etc. For marketing, my tasks are broader ranging from analyzing monetization to syndication.

As for the fun perks, there are always cute puppies running around in the office, and good food. There are even in-office massages (by a professional masseuse) subsidized by bloomspot. And that’s just work; San Francisco and Berkeley (where I’m living for the summer) offer plenty of adventures.

But for now, it’s back to work and exploring San Francisco!

One of the puppy’s at work.