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Early last week we launched a new way to expand the FounderDating Network that calls on communities to rise up, rally together and demand we help unlock more entrepreneurship there.  We want this to be a bottom-up effort to ensure that communities are excited about the network and truly value bringing the right people together before we make a long-term investment there.  Ultimately, we’ll be anywhere entrepreneurship is alive and well but this helps prioritize.  We really didn’t know what to expect.  Sure, there were some guesses as to which cities would take the lead  (hello, Boulder, anybody home?), but more than anything we were/are open to being surprised.

And we were.  Portland is rising up, as are D.C. and Detroit.  However, Las Vegas was first to impress.  In less than a week #Vegastech) banded together louder and more cohesively than any city thus far and made things happen.

As we’ve told people that Vegas was first to unlock most of them have said something like: “Vegas, really?” or “Oh, so you got Tony (Hsieh) to tweet about it?”

 While I appreciate the vote of confidence that I have Tony Hsieh on speed dial (sidenote: he should be pumped), this was an entirely bottom-up effort.  The tech community in Vegas, of which I knew a total of 1 person prior to a week ago, got excited.  And it wasn’t 1 or 2 people, it was 10+ consistently tweeting, sharing, posting blogs, announcing at meetups and hackathons and putting the call out for entrepreneurs to help themselves and the community. 

There is no shortage of talk about how to foster entrepreneurship outside of Silicon Valley.  I don’t want to pretend that I know the exact recipe or that there is only one key ingredient, but I do know that what just happened in Vegas should NOT stay in Vegas. 

 Will your city be next? 

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It’s been an amazing few months for us, not only launching our online matching site but also expanding. We have a simple mission: enable entrepreneurship.  So, we’re excited to announce furthering this goal by adding two more cities to the FounderDating family – Los Angeles and Austin.  First rounds are open now for applications - June 6th (Apply by May 23rd) and May 23rd (Apply by May 15th) respectively.  

At the heart of our success are our amazing ManagingDirectors (MDs) and we could not be more thrilled about  Patrick, William and Damon joining this group.  Aside from all having pretty awesome twitter handles, they are leaders in their communities and believe in starting a company with the right foundation. So, what are you waiting for? Apply Now or at least pass it on to your friends.

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Scott Dodson and John Bito were a part of the very first FounderDating Seattle round. They now make up 2 of the 3 co-founders of Bobber Interactive. Scott is the COO and John is the CTO. Bobber is an award-winning financial technology company that engages Gen Y in the language they speak. Bobber helps financial partners drive critical business metrics with customer engagement solutions grounded in motivational psychology.

We caught up with them recently to find out how the company was doing and to get their advice for future FounderDaters and those interested in starting a company.

When did you get into startups why did you decide to apply for FounderDating?

John: I’ve been a startup guy for 30 years. My first startup went public in 1987 and Bobber is my 6^th startup all told. The one prior to this we had to scale back when the last downturn struck, so I went out and started doing some consulting. But I knew that I wanted to get into another startup and start building ownership.

Brian Schultz, ManagingDirector for FounderDating Seattle, posted on the Seattle Tech Startup list and this looked like exactly what I wanted to do. 

Scott: I’m another chronic entrepreneur. I started my first company back in 1994 and never looked back. I had done three startups — two sold and one was a victim of the 2008 crash. I thought I was done with startups for a while, until I met the CEO of this company, Bobber.

I was speaking at a game conference about how to raise money for gaming companies. Eric, the CEO, introduced himself and we hit it off. I was really impressed with him and I started advising, then consulting, and then finally as a tentative founder. But we really needed a strong technical cofounder. Dan Shapiro is a long-time friend of mine and he had heard from Brian about FounderDating and put the recommendation in for me.

What was helpful for you about FounderDating?

John:  We found each other when FounderDating was just an event – there was not even a site to connect the network like there is now. Even still, I thought it was really a unique opportunity. It was great being in an environment where everyone was looking to talk about what idea they could pursue or how they could contribute to an idea.

There are quite a few startup events around Seattle, but for the most part, the folks that attend are already underway. They have their startups at least mostly populated and bootstrapped if not somewhat funded.  FounderDating has all of the advantages of  startup networking, plus you’re in an environment where you don’t have to waste your time trying to figure out what stage the other folks are at, your desire to join as a founder is welcome and expected.

Scott: What I loved about it was that it was a pretty selective group, a nice high-caliber group of participants who were largely seasoned and very motivated folks. It was a great mix of technical and non-technical founders. The quality of the people, enagaged there, essentially looking for the same thing is very, very efficient and productive. I mean we literally came out and had 3 technical cofounder candidates, of which John ultimately won the gig. That’s extremely hard to do —  to find 3 people who could have potentially worked!!

Tell us about your “dating” process.

Scott:  We didn’t know exactly what product we wanted to build but we knew the domain in which we wanted to build it. We needed someone who believed in the opportunity in the space. It’s the intersection between social networking, financial services and, what we now call engagement.  At the time we used a different word, that began with “g”. The was the most important things to us were: does this person have an affinity for this type of project? And are they someone who can roll-up their sleeves, deliver code and scale?  Can they build out a team? And it was pretty easy for us, John fit the bill on all accounts.

John: I was mostly trying to understand how the executive team was going to work together. From my experience with startups, the people are the most important ingredient — the ideas change pretty quickly. It’s not easy to change the people, particularly the founders. We spent about 6 months working increasingly together before we made the commitment.

Scott: Essentially there was a company that existed, but we literally reformed it and recreated the cap table when John joined as cofounder.

John: We spent 6-months working together before taking the plunge full-time. During this time we were primarily trying to form the idea. We built a mockup, user experience. We connected with incumbent players in the space and talked about the opportunities to work together with them. We mostly explored the idea and how it was to make decisions together. There wasn’t much in the way of building things at that point, but we did engage with potential partners. I spent less time drumming up consulting gigs, so that kind of faded and I began to spend more time on the business.

How did you know that you wanted to take the plunge together?

Scott: This is a funny story. One of the things John insisted upon, that I think is great,  is that we have a meeting of the wives. When you do a startup, there’s a big impact on the people around you and so we wanted to test compatibility one layer deep. It went really well.

We also had the great fortune of being able to test out the concept at Finovate which is the financial innovation conference in San Francisco. And we won best of show. It was very validating and showed us that the concept had legs. This was a critical group of the financial industry – banks, big financial institutions and service providers voting for us for best of show. That was what convinced us all that this thing had merit. So you take that with the compatibility of the founders and you go this is something worth to pursue for all of us.

What do you say to entrepreneurs that aren’t looking for someone to compliment their skillsets?

John: It never occurred to me to try to find someone else who was technically focused to join up with. Business requires a lot of expertise that is very different from building software or constructing products or delivering services. You need someone with a marketing background, that can understand what it takes to sell or position a product. 

Raising capital is also a very important job. The quality of capital really matters too. You may be able to find people to put money in, but if you get money from people who don’t really respect you and don’t want to work together with you, they can cause you problems later on.

How have things been going recently?

Scott: Going really, really well. We’ve raised over $1M, but are taking it slow. We have a small team of 6.   And we’re actively raising a small round now and targeting a Series B before year-end. We’re right on the cusp of things that we can’t specifically talk about. But we just got a ‘yes’ from a Fortune 100 financial institution for a project that has a long term life component as well as something with an initial fee structure. And it’s a really good fit on both sides and could be a huge piece of business for us. The consumer app that we’ve built is starting to get some early traction as well, which is great.

What advice would you give to others interested in FounderDating?

Scott: I’d say take advantage of the fact that that you can be transparent and open in both sharing and listening. If you’re too protective or too attached then you’re not going to get as much value. You only get people enrolled in ideas that they are a part of. If you’re too attached to a very specific thing, that’s a sub-optimal recipe.

What advice would you give to others that are interested in starting a company?

John: Openness and try not to be too attached to what you think is the right way to do things at the start. Find people that have different perspectives, different backgrounds, and different strengths than what  you possess. Make sure there’s good communication, mutual respect and that there’s a decision-making pattern that builds on the strengths of all involved. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Scott: I’ll echo what John said. It’s all about the people.  You’re not going to succeed on your own. The set of what you don’t know, that you don’t know, is a fuck-ton bigger than you think it is. There’s so much to be done and you’re crazy to do it alone. A division of labor just makes more sense. 

This is my 4^th startup and it’s the strongest cofounder team that I’ve had. It’s so nice to not have to be the guy that’s the “queen on the chessboard” – the strongest piece on the board. It’s great to be able to play with “3 queens.”  Basically, it’s great to have 3 really strong cofounders in different domains. And it’s proven itself time and time again. We’re pretty anomalous because we’re all 40+ founders. But even among three guys who are pretty accomplished we often find areas that we don’t know as much as we thought we knew. And inevitably someone on the team is smart enough to realize that or pull in a resource that has that capability. 

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Thanks again to John and Scott. Make sure to check out Bobber Interactive for a fun way to achieve your money goals.

Links:

• John – @Jwbito
• Scott – @Gamebiz
• Bobber Interactive – @BobberInteract

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Andrew Draper (@andrewdraper) is a designer and hacker. He’s been an entrepreneur in one way or another for most of his life. He co-founded Manpacks 2 years ago, a service to help guys remember to replace their essentials and give them more time to do the things they’d rather do. Cross-posted with MapleButter.com.

There’s a lot written about having passion and how it’s the key to building something great, but nobody talks about what to do if after you successfully raise a seed round, get thousands of customers and get lots of press/social media attention you find yourself unhappy, unfulfilled or no longer interested in the challenges your startup faces. Here’s how I handled it.

When a spark no longer lights a fire

Years ago I played in a few rock bands, put out a few records and did a small amount of touring—we had a “policy” in each of the bands, something like: “When it stops being fun we’ll stop playing”. I was never the guy who invoked it so I never had to consider what the ramifications of invoking it actually meant—until recently.

I’d had “the thoughts” off/on for a number of months but always attributed them to the normal entrepreneurial roller-coaster of seemingly bi-polar emotions. In early December I flew out to San Francisco for a week and was asked how things were going, with my most recent startup, Manpacks, by a number of people I respect. I came to the realization that I was faking it, and generally being dishonest (especially to myself) every time I answered.

We’d enticed thousands of people to subscribe to Manpacks, received awesome press attention, recently raised a seed round, and hired a developer and a marketer. I was incredibly proud of what we’d achieved (and still am) but at the end of the day I wasn’t fulfilled and felt I could be doing something that interested me more. So, we’d gone to war and in the middle of the battle I was thinking of waving the white flag.

After talking to a few people about how I felt, their answers were all basically the same (paraphrased), “If your passion’s not truly there, life’s too short and you won’t be doing your best work.” I thought to myself, “Wait, they were telling me to abandon ship in the middle of a storm?” That’s the exact opposite of the type of person I see myself as. I had some soul searching to do.

The Breakup—It’s not you, it’s me

That night, I tossed and turned, wondering, how might Ken, my co-founder, react? What would the investors think? I’d helped hire and sell a vision to some great people, what would their reaction be? Was I screwing up everything I’d worked so hard to build over the last 2 years? Did this make me a quitter? Would this make me unable to raise money for my next adventure? I’d had many sleepless nights contemplating. When I awoke the next morning I knew deep down it had to happen, that today was going to be the day.

So, what now?

Practice. Like any good pitch I practiced for an hour or so, running various scenarios to how I thought Ken might react and how to best mitigate the reaction. Fearing he might think I was abandoning him, that I was dumping everything onto him, destroying what we’d built, the list goes on. I feared the worst and practiced every possible way I thought the conversation could go…except one.

After some reflection I made the call…and got voicemail. Ack. A few minutes later my phone rang. Gulp, it was him. I stared at the phone and let it ring probably 3-4 times. I picked it up.

The one scenario I didn’t consider while practicing? Ken totally understanding and taking it all quite well. The truth is, like anything tough or difficult, thinking about it is always worse than the reality of doing it.

I don’t want to put words in Ken’s mouth, but he had realized on his own that my heart was no longer in it. He had sensed I wanted something different and to go on “faking it” would’ve harmed the company more than it would’ve helped it. With that, we put together a plan to make it all work out for the best and allow me to be minimally involved going forward.

Everyone’s happy. Awesome, right? I can work on something I’m truly passionate about and we can all have cookies and milk and go to bed with visions of sugarplums…not quite.

OMG, WTF did I just do?

I still had a few days in California so I worked on some ideas I’d been toying with for awhile, hung out with friends and everything was great. Then I went home, started creating MVP’s, testing ideas and trying to hit on a winning combination for an awesome, fast-growth company. And, my lizard brain took over for a bit. It still does from time to time which means waking up at 3 am, thinking my entire world is collapsing and I’m screwed. It means looking at the bills piling up and wondering WTF I’ve done—you know, the glamorous stuff no one wants to admit is real entrepreneurship.

Me? I love it. Even with the ups/downs. I have no doubt I’ll be able to build another company that’ll leave a dent and I won’t be listenting to my lizard brain, the naysayers or anyone not truly all-in. It might well be a bumpy ride but it’s going to be truly awesome.

It’s been said many times, startups are hard. The only thing that is certain is that there are ups, downs, lefts and rights—and you have to be really good at bobbing and weaving sometimes. BUT, make no mistake they’re even harder when it feels like you’re stuck having to do something you’re really not into anymore. Staying out of loyalty is actually doing more harm than good. I’m not advocating jumping ship as soon as times get tough (which they will), just gut checking to make sure you’re passionate enough to make it through those times. My hope with this post is if you have similar feelings you’ll realize there’s something you can do about it, you just have to be willing to see it through and feel that, no matter what the outcome, you and the company will be better for it (and hopefully learn something in the process).

If you are having similar thoughts, and need someone to bounce what you’re thinking off of, hit me up, I’d be happy to listen and offer any help I can. Otherwise, put your head down and get back to hustling/hacking—there’s gold in them there hills.

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This FounderDating Guest Post was written by Lane Becker for our series: FounderTalk – The Real Story.  Lane is Co-Founder of Adaptive Path and Get Satisfaction and co-author of the upcoming book, “Get Lucky” (get it now!). He’s also an advisor to several startups and can be reached and/or followed at @monstro.

Silicon Valley runs on money, talent, and sheer, unadulterated willpower. At least, those are the obvious things. Less obvious are those skills that are just as important but not so readily apparent. In particular, this industry banks on an ongoing influx of naiveté and unchecked optimism to keep its motor running. Try asking anybody who’s been ground through the venture mill a couple times—the second and third times down the startup chute are much harder than the first. First timers all share one distinct quality: they don’t know how hard it is. Yet. This is a blessing.

It Never Gets Easier
In my career I’ve done 4(ish) startups, and each one has required from the get-go a huge leap of faith: A belief that we know what the future holds, and that our new idea will push it further and faster in that direction. In other words, a belief that we could truly change the world—an easy thing to say but a hell of a thing to do. But each time, that belief gets harder to sustain, because every time you start over you’re cursed with the knowledge of how hard it was previously: The absurd challenges you faced. The places where you got it wrong and had to reboot. The hurdles you had to jump. The diving saves. The constant rejection. And worse of all, the times when you didn’t quite pull it off. For all the talk about our culture of celebrating failure, the truth is that failure, when it’s yours and you own it, fucking sucks.

And yet, I love it. Love it. Wouldn’t have traded any of my experiences in those 4 startups, the great ones or the awful ones, for anything else. Can’t believe how crazy lucky I’ve been to ride along for both the first and the second wave of dotcommery, and quite curious to find out what role I can play in the ones that come next. But here’s the thing: I don’t love it for any of the reasons I was told I would love it.

Instead, I love it for what I learned along the way about what really matters. So, here’s my advice for people who are starting companies right now, or anytime in the future. It’s not ten tips or eight things. It’s just a story, but one that matters hugely to me, because it taught me what really matters when you’re trying to build something you care passionately about. It’s the thing that keeps me going in this industry, even after all the tired Silicon Valley cliches long ago ceased to mean anything. It’s the story of our five million dollar seed round. Here it is.

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This FounderDating Guest Post was written by Frank Barbieri for our series: FounderTalk – The Real Story.
Frank is a SVP of emerging platforms at YuMe and was previously Founder/CEO of Transpera, a mobile video delivery and advertising network which sold in February 2011 . He’s also an advisor to several startups and can be reached and/or followed at @frankba.

You may be lucky enough to not have to raise money for your new venture. Or lucky and successful enough to have investors already banging down your door to give you money. More likely you are, as I was, one of the 99% of entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their way along the passionate road to launching and scaling by any means necessary. And “necessary” for you might mean raising money. If it does, you will hear this: ‘VCs are rude.’ Is that true?

Before we tackle whether it’s true or not, know that this will definitely happen to you: A meeting that you think went great is followed by soul crushing silence.

Taken at face value this is rude behavior. And there are no shortage of entrepreneurs who rail against VCs who have exhibited this behavior (http://thefunded.com/). But, whether it’s rude or not, what I’ve found helpful is to treat fundraising like dating. Try it and it will make your life far less stressful and your fundraising far more efficient.

When raising the B round for Transpera I had one very public VC get excited enough to pull me off a conference show floor and into a hastily arranged all partner meeting across town in a matter of hours. It was crazy, spontaneous, exhilarating, exciting. I was certain we had found a match. After all, I burned an entire day chasing him and his partners around town and two hours in the actual meeting, which seemed to go very well. All day we were txting, calling, pitching, riffing, flirting. It was the perfect date. Like when you meet someone at an afternoon BBQ and spend the entire day and night doing one spontaneous thing after another ending up on their doorstep at midnight looking back at an expectant gaze.

I thought it was love at first sight. Breathless, the next day, I emailed the promised follow-up. That was four years ago. He never called back. And this is one of those “I’m a former entrepreneur so I’m different” VCs. After a few weeks, I admit, I went a little psycho. I txted, “Hey…I just wanted to check if my e-mail might be getting caught in your spam filter or something.” #humiliating.

It turns out, he was just not that into me. I’ve since gone through multiple rounds of financing and gotten a lot closer to many VCs, and I empathize. The sheer volume of introductions, reviews, follow-ups and due diligence that any one VC has to support is built for breakage. Though many have tried to make the process more efficient, there are few short cuts to running due diligence on a set of people and a company you’re about to pour a seven figure check and seven years of your life into.

Is that rude? Let’s say that there are many different communication styles and not all styles are compatible. I now know, and am confortable with the fact, that lack of follow-up is a simple indication of lack of interest and I don’t take it personally.

In sharp contrast, one of my favorite VCs is a guy who I still interact with regularly. Before I even pitched him he laid out his process: “I’ll listen to your pitch today. Think about it and research the rest of this week. Talk to my partners on Monday. And tell you my decision on Tuesday next week.” And w00t, the following Tuesday he called me to say, “No.” But it was the best “no” I ever got. He even told me why he was saying no. You’ll learn in fundraising that a fast “no” is always better than a slow “maybe.”

Raising money is like dating, so don’t go psycho. If you went on a date, and that person never called you back, would you write them a nine hundred word treatise on why you would actually be a great boy/girlfriend? Would you continue to call and text them? Hopefully not, so don’t do that when a VC ignores you. You are not going to talk them into loving you, and if you have to, it’s going to be a bad relationship. It is astonishing how many entrepreneur friends I have who have written that note. Would you really want to marry someone you had to convince of your hotness?

The quirk of raising venture money is that no matter how big the market, or how great your team, you may just not be the right fit for a certain partner, firm or time. The really good partners and firms will tell you this straight up, and keep in touch for your next project. But a lot will simply not call you back. Don’t take it personally.

You could rail at VC #1 in this story, but it’s far less stressful to look at these two different styles as simply different ways of saying ‘no’ to you. Signals that you should move onto your next prospect so you can close your round and focus on the business.

I did eventually find true love. And I can tell you it made all the jilts worthwhile.

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Hey folks,

Our last event was a blazing success! Less than a month after our handpicked crowd gathered, superstars Elizabeth Knopf and Jim Morrison decided to take the plunge and start a company together. Best of luck to the new venture!

FounderDating is back in the Bay Area just in time for you to meet your co-founder and take him/her to Burning Man for an intense creative experience…

If you excel at what you do, have a passion for innovation, are ready to take start your own company, but just need the right partner, apply now!

FounderDating brings together high caliber entrepreneurs. We handpick superstars from the serial founders to the best talents of top companies. We bring together technical and business innovators so you can build solid, complementary teams, ready to create the next big thing.

Apply by August 12th. Drinks are on us, just bring great ideas. Rock stars only, please!

See you soon!
Sophie-Charlotte

Note: FounderDating events are by invitation only. Application does not guarantee participation. All information is kept confidential.

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Do you excel at what you do? Are you passionate about innovation? Are you ready to take the plunge and start your own company, and just need the right partner? Apply now to join FounderDating! Our next SF event is around the corner.

What makes FounderDating different is the extreme quality of its members. We handpick superstars, from the serial founders to the best talents of top companies. We bring together technical and business innovators so you can build solid, complementary teams, ready to create the next big thing now.

Apply if:
* You have a killer idea and need the right partner(s)
* You’re a superstar, ready to join a founding team for the right opportunity –it’s ok if you don’t have an idea yet

Apply by April 15th. Drinks are on us, just bring great energy. Rock stars only please!

Note: FounderDating events are by invitation only. Application does not guarantee participation. All information is kept confidential.

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OnStartUps recently published an article entitled “The 11 Harsh Realities Of Being An Entrepreneur.” Certainly all of them hit home for anyone who’s ever tried to start a company.

So a few of the 500 Startups founders decided to share real examples to back up each of these harsh realities. With all of the splashy headlines, stories, and buzz surrounding startups, very little of it serves to shine a light on the heaps of blood, sweat, and tears that go into building a company from scratch. How there are probably many more failures and mistakes than the media makes it out to be. How un-glamorous startup life really is.

If you’re feel discouraged after reading this, don’t be! Rather, take comfort – especially if you’re a current founder and going through some tough times or struggling. You’re not alone!

Without further ado, here are some real stories from 500 Startups:

Your First Iteration of an Idea Will Be Wrong
“We launched at TechCrunch50 with a product focused on disposable email addresses which was far too narrow. But that led us to our Organizer product which has very broad appeal. It took too long to admit we were wrong.” (Joshua Baer, OtherInbox)

Your Friends And Family Won’t Understand What You Do
“My mom keeps asking, when I will get a “decent dayjob” ” (Kris Hiiemaa, Erply)

“It’s not always that they don’t understand, it’s the unsolicited advice that gets me! When you have a little startup, every last person *without* startup experience seems eager to give you their 2 cents… it’s often completely off topic or downright obvious. So I made a kind of obnoxious but useful resolution to be upfront and say “I only take business advice from people who have already been there and done it.” (Robert Laing, myGengo)

You Will Make Less Than Normal Wages For A While
“I only realized how little I had earned during the first year of our startup when my wife and I were trying to rent a new apartment. My taxable income for 2009 was… $4,000. I was pretty shocked I had managed to survive for 11 months on basically nothing.” (500 Startups Founder who will remain anonymous)

“Upon graduating, I turned down offers to make 3 to 4 times what I get paid as a founder. To be within budget I slept on a futon and had most of the furnishings for my apartment donated to me — even still I cut into my savings and began taking on debt. One year later I still make less money on an hourly basis than the interns who get internships through InternMatch.” (Nathan Parcells, InternMatch)

Everything Takes Twice As Long…If It Even Happens
“I remember working on a ‘two week’ project which was a Q&A section of our site… 18 months ago. It’s going to launch at the end of this month. Haha.” (Robert Laing, myGengo)

“Shipping the WakeMates… ’nuff said.” (Arun Gupta, WakeMate)

Titles Mean Nothing. You Will Be a Janitor
“In the almost two years that we’ve been building EcoMom, I’ve been the CEO, loading dock worker, fund raiser, legal clerk, delivery guy, trade show set up guy, purchasing guy, accountant, graphic artist (barely), credit card puller outer, food getter, vendor schmoozer, customer service manager, blog network coordinator, and many other titles. Each day brings a new role, to add to all of the others. And when someone calls for customer service and I say “this is Jody” there is almost always a long pause, which lets me know they were expecting a woman to answer the phone (makes sense since our company is called EcoMom and we serve mostly women). Some people might complain about all of the work that is outside of their job description, but I don’t really think about that. I think about what it takes to get the job done and having done all of these jobs, I know what others are capable of and it makes it easy to hire for these positions, have empathy for the people who are taking on these roles, and allows me to pitch in when things get overwhelming.” (Jody Sherman, EcoMom)

“As the weakest-nosed member of Estately’s founding team, I was de facto Chief Janitorial Officer (in addition to CEO) in charge of taking out the trash 48-72 hours after it had fully matured. I also vacuumed our old offices every 3-6 months to conserve cash (because you need a break from mental work every so often). I also paid myself as much as a non-unionized janitor, but union wages are now here to stay!” (Galen Ward, Estately)

“Everyone in our startup takes out the trash on weekly rotation. As CTO, I must make the phone-call to order the custom municipal trash bags when we run out (this is Japan…).” (Matthew Romaine, myGengo)

There Is No Silver Bullet
“Pitching to investors and customers puts you in this mode of explaining everything away as a total breeze… “Oh yeah we’ll use AdWords, we’ll get $2 back for every $1 we spend” etc. Bullshit. I can’t actually think of anything that was easy. But at least you know it’s just as hard for your competitors.” (Robert Laing, myGengo)

Customers Will Frustrate You
“We were once on a video call with a customer who pointed a .44 Magnum at his head and then at the screen after a comment we made. He ended up being our first paying customer.” (Gagan Biyani, Udemy)

“Our market is in Korea and cultural differences completely permeate the web culture. We were frustrated to discover that Korean web users don’t actually know the URLs to their most-used web services; they go to a Korean search engine and search for it *every single time.* Ranking on Korean search engines costs a *lot* of money, so we don’t rank. Some of the early users of our service who signed up never came back because they could never find it again.” (Darien Brown, YongoPal)

You Can’t Do It All Yourself
“After getting rejected by Y Combinator in 2008, my soon-to-be co-founders couldn’t take on the risk. I decided to do it myself, and ran out of steam (and moral support) after about 12 months and decided to fold.” (Sid Viswanathan, CardMunch)

“Anyone can delegate stuff they don’t like doing. What’s hard is delegating things you *like* doing.” (Robert Laing, myGengo)

“We have had extraordinary support from friends, family and mentors who believed in us and our company from very early on. Some chose to make introductions to people at the top of their network before we even had a landing page and which propelled our company forward, others lent us their homes and cars as we came to work in a new city. All have given us the motivation to push through the challenges and scary moments while building InternMatch from the ground up.” (Nathan Parcells, InternMatch)

Building A Team Is Hard
“The phrase ‘Good people are hard to find’ is quite an understatement. I spent three years going through ten people and two founding teams before finding a set of co-founders who really clicked. When that happened, the difference was like night and day. There’s no more valuable asset for a startup than its founders, and it’s worth doing whatever it takes to find the right people.” (Ryan Damico, Crocodoc)

“When I was bootstrapping, I was overjoyed to find a human being that would support me. But the skills and attitude you need from someone very early on are often completely different from the skills you need to build a business long term. You realize quickly that people who may have been instrumental in the early stage of the company can actually become dead weight when you reach a certain size, because they haven’t changed with the company. It’s really painful to remove them, but necessary for the company.” (500 Startups Founder who will remain anonymous)

Finally, this wasn’t part of the original OnStartups list but it was contributed by one of our founders as #12:

You will LOSE all of your money that you ever earned, and then a bunch that you still have not earned. If you’re not prepared to put it all on the line, you’re not prepared for a start-up.
“The economy tanked, we ran out of money, and still didn’t have the “right” model figured out. The whole team of ten had already gone more than two months without any pay, vendors were waiting for payment, and still no funding in sight. Because of my unwavering belief in our vision (and opportunity) and personal support with my own resources, I had spent much of my savings.  Continuing the trend, I brought in $30,000 in cash one day and handed it out in envelopes to the entire team evenly to get us through the next six weeks. Just over one year later we’re rapidly closing in on profitability, have signed half a dozen meaningful partners, and are on track to build what I believe is a billion dollar company.” (TJ Sassani, Zozi)

This is republsihed from the 500 Startups Blog…
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This FounderDating Guest Post was written by Dan Martell for our new series: FounderDating Blog: Founder Talk – the Real Story.
Dan is a co-founder of Flowtown, a social marketing platform focused on helping small businesses achieve real results in the world of social media. He’s a serial entrepreneur, and a technologist by background who’s learned about startup business and marketing by being hands on, having founded his first web company at age 25, selling it four years later in 2008.

This is a new, Q&A format. We asked him some questions related to his experience as a two-time founder, and technologist turned general startupper. He gave us very honest answers.

Q1: As a technologist without “formal business training” (as in your bio), what do you think about the concept of the “ideal” startup team being a technical and business team? True?

A1: Totally disagree. There’s no ideal situation. I know engineers that can out sell MBA’s, and some folks who can’t deliver on what they sell.

Startups win because of attitude, not initial skill sets.

At the end of the day, you need to be able to build the product and iterate for free. This usually means a technical co-founder. If you incur cost ($) to iterate and learn, then you’re in big trouble. There’s a high probability that you’ll be wrong with the initial version.

Companies fail because they run out of time before they figure it out .. either building the wrong thing, or not being able to find a repeatable business model (i.e. customer / sale).

Q2. You were a technologist who “did it yourself” (no biz co-founder) with Spheric, your first startup. What were the benefits and what were the costs associated with that? What would you say to a technologist thinking about “going it alone”?

A2: You need to learn how to sell. I remember right from the beginning at Spheric I started reading books on sales & marketing. I probably read over 30+ books on these topics. I made it part of my job.

So, yes you can do it alone but it does mean you’ll need to learn these skills.

Q3. With Flowtown, you do you have a co-founder (Ethan Bloch) who is not a technologist by training. Why doing it this way this time?

A3: Ethan’s a freakin rockstar. Most people don’t know this, but he taught himself Ruby / JS / CSS so that he could contribute and push code (sometimes with negative side effects .

The reality is that when we started Flowtown, I wanted a co-founder who played at the things I worked at. Ethan’s background is finance and he’s very detailed. I’m not. He focuses on the parts of the business that I don’t enjoy, and he loves. I think that’s the best type of co-founder regardless.

And this goes back to what I said above about attitude. Ethan’s the kind of guy who will just grab ahold of whatever needs to be done, at the time it needs to be done. It’s that attitude first that’s so important. Skills can be learned.

Q4. What’s the 1 piece of advice you wish you got sooner or wish you got and why?

A4: My answer to that question will be a bit of meta-advice–advice about advice: only take advice from someone who’s already done what you’re trying to do. I wish I had learned that a lot sooner. A lot of people are smart enough to match patterns part of the way, and reason their way partway to a solution that they haven’t implemented. But there are always gaps, and that sort of “knowing-doing” gap can lead to big, big problems.

Q5. What are the two pieces of advice you got that you’d now ignore and why?

A5: Well, related to the above, advice from folks who have not done the thing that you’re trying to do. When you’re building a company, you get so many people, for good or for bad, trying to guide you–it’s really important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. And this is one way that I’ve found really works.

You can follow @danmartell

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