by tomnora | Sep 19, 2011 | CEO Succession, early stage, founder, Launch, Scalability, startup CEO
Responses to my Santa Fe Friends + Cali Friends + + letter. In chronological order.
So you and Rich Murray became friends? how long did he last at NMCC?LOL
peggy
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Hey Tom Baby!!! Im HERE!!!Patsy
Lets get together soon
Loved this message!
Thank you.
I have some good ones for you to meet.
Can you send more info on your social media (or otherwise) focus?
Peter
Tom,Thanks for the thoughtful note. We miss you and look forward to seeing you soon.The NM Green Chamber of Commerce wants a ‘buy local’ app. Does such a thing already exist?Would you be interested (or know someone) in creating it? Alex works with the chamber and I know the folks involved.
Don’t get shot out there.
Joe
Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.
yeah very good friends. he runs the poker game! Not long with Jarrett. He barely remembers him.
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show details Sep 16 (3 days ago)
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I missed the excitement of the real business world and the water.
I made amazing friends out there and enjoyed small town life very much, but needed to plug back in and wanted to launch a startup here.
New Mexico is a weak startup location – missing many parts and move too slowly. The best of both worlds is to have both, but I can only live in one place at a time.
Napa is probably similar to Santa Fe in many ways, I could see you living there. Hope all is well for you, have a glass of wine for me.
Tom: Congrats on your move, I wish you the best.
Enjoyed our discussions and adventures. Hope we can stay in touch and please let me know when you get back this way.
Best personal regards,
David
yeah just say when. lunches are pretty open. will you have a car?
T
Yes I’m interested, building up a strong little team here of app developers. Tell me whom to connect with.
Also interested in Teres Kids progress. Did u guys get funding yet?
I’m sure 9/11 was a thoughtful day for you. Take care.
Tom,Wow, what a great letter, what a great way to catch us all up on your move.
As someone who still hangs on to her LA area code, I love your new city and consider it still “my city” even though after seven or eight years here,
I have to admit I’m not living there anymore.
I’m going to be out there in early October to attend Indiecade…do you have a free couch?
You should see my paintings! I am making major progress!
I wish you all the possible best in your new environs and really do hope to stay in touch.
Note my new phone number and I cc’d you on my go-forward email address after I leave EPIC in January.
BE WELL!
Big hugs,
Stephanie
Good luck Tom, thanks for staying in touch.
Stephen Hadwin
Hi Tom. Thanks for your soulful update. Gotta get tough if you’re gonna stay in LA though! Just remember, compliment everyone on everything and you’ll fit right in. – JB
yes i’m back in the groove, moving faster, no mo “manana”, headed to Arrowhead today to catch up with OC friends.
Good luck, Tom. Let’s try to keep in touch.
I had a great weekend in San Francisco and I’m trying to figure out how to get back more often.
Need to start generating some income so I can afford a small apartment in the city.
Trying to figure out how to schedule a trip to India with my new partner in our social enterprise.
Anyway, give me a call when you get a chance. Enjoy the urban life.
Thanks for the official welcome – i’m stuck in town this weekend but could go next wkend if ur still painting. Are u painting walls or canvases?
Heather: Now that Tom is living in Los Angeles, it would be a real favor to my friend if you would drag him along to some events there so he
can get integrated into the social media and tech scene there.Stewart
wow. Life changes, the one thing we can always count on. Back in LA, must feel strange in some ways,
exciting in others. . . curious Tom, as we haven’t talked in awhile, what prompted the move? And, did you rent a u-haul?
I know you like Nascar and all, drive fast and all, but somehow you and Frieda in a u-haul? Nah. . .
I may be in LA to look at some projects there, so maybe we’ll connect.
Texas is unreal, even for me, but here I am.
Brazos y besos
Iim at district 13 right now u gotta check it out.
Gonna miss you! I had no idea that you left to the bigger city. I do get out there as my sister lives near you, in the West Hollywood area and my son, is enrolled at Claremont McKenna College.
So, I’ll be sure to give a call when in the area. Let me know when you are visiting NM and I’ll make a point of taking you for drinks.
Have fun and make a difference out there! Lillian
Hi Tom—
Wow I had no idea you were moving!!! We are definitely going to miss seeing you and hearing about all your entrepreneurial experiences at our events.
Best of luck in California and next time you are visiting in NM let me know. J
Take care! Shandra
Absolutely.
Tom, please feel free to email or call me. Social Media Week LA is happening right now and I believe there’s some events
(looking into it). If not this week, there’s a few good events every month. Would love to connect.Heather
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by tomnora | Aug 30, 2011 | Business Development
People often undervalue Business Development as a critical function in a startup. What is it? How does it differ from Sales, Marketing, Major Accounts? When is the startup big enough to dedicate a headcount to Business Development?
BusDev is less understood than most titles, and widely ranging in responsibilities. It is the critical glue between sales functions and the senior management. BusDev is relationships, longer term thinking, non-revenue partnerships, communication between Sales, Marketing, Engineering and Finance if you have all of those covered.
BusDev people see the potential connections between your company and several others. They find creative ways to do business or vastly improve business relationships, especially when they can work with BusDev counterparts at target partners. It’s like the 2 lead guitarists of 2 bands playing together going off into the corner and working on just their parts, and relationship. They’re focused on one thing.
BusDev people are also focused on one thing –– taking the businesses beyond simple linear transaction based relationships. They don’t worry about this weeks revenue or finance, etc.
In a smaller or earlier stage startup, the CEO covers most areas that have no dedicated leader, BusDev being the most common unfilled spot. Sometimes this works but often not. The problem is when the CEO is not a good match for this position – in experience, skill set or desire. It also distracts him/her from other CEO functions, and is not as impressive to the client, partners.
So, if you can afford a strong BusDev investment early, it can be a secret weapon that ensures your long term scalability and gets you funded.
Contact me if you’d like to discuss more.
by tomnora | Jul 27, 2011 | early stage, founder, Revenue Growth, Scalability, startup, startup CEO
Aurum Rex. Nummus Rex. Emptor Rex.
I.e. Cash Is King. An old sayings, but so true in the startup growth equation. Where does revenue fall here? Is it more or less important? What about Strategy? Revenue? Growth? Buzz? Profit? A “Right On” product?. Smart People? Ambition? Your position on the Bell Curve?
When a startup has none, cash seems like liquid gold that can flow over the business and cure all – salaries, resources, exposure, growth, success, new offices, marketing. But often entrepreneurs fool themselves into thinking that lack of cash is their only problem. I’ve been involved or almost involved in so many early stage companies that said “If only we had $XXX in cash, everything would be o.k. Sometimes they get the new cash but still can’t scale or survive. Cash is certainly required to play, but it has to be part of a larger system, purpose, goal.
Venture capitalists, controllers of cash, are always looking for mind blowing new things that can “change the world”; can step out in front of our regular world and catch fire, anticipate what the world needs that no one else has figured out yet. And they have cash, high risk cash, to take a shot at being part of these new phenomenons. They get in early and guess at the future, which means they could be often wrong. But that’s not a problem; they only have to be right once in a great while to win big. That’s the game they’re in. What an exciting job!
On the other side we have the yet-to-be-funded or need-more-funding startup. Whatever cash is in this company is less than enough to spark it to the next level quickly enough to meet the business goals, or often just to make the next few payrolls. Is this you?
So what about REVENUE? Revenue is close to cash in it’s power within a startup. It can solve so many problems, including cash issues. It attracts more cash investment, it creates profits, it legitimizes your business. Revenue has to be managed properly and leveraged wherever possible, but those are good problems to have. It’s eventually more important than cash, especially when it’s steadily and predictably growing. Growing revenues, not cash, create higher valuations.
Early on, most startups focus more on adoption, eyeballs, users, traffic, assuming these will infer and convert to future revenue (Twitter, Google, Zynga, Facebook). The actual cash on hand and/or revenues don’t fully support the business, but no problem if major growth is apparent.
So is that it? User adoption? For Twitter it is, they’re currently at a valuation of 40X revenues, way high. But there’s no question that they’re permeating the globe, possibly with more longevity than Facebook.
The bottom line is value. What value, how many valuable things is your company providing. What’s better, cheaper, faster, unique, easier. Google is a great example of amazing and increasing value to user. It’s all of the above, mostly free, with an attitude of always wanting to provide more to its users while simultaneously simplifying use of everything digital.
Early on Google didn’t focus much on cash or revenue; they eschewed it, they had a higher goal – organize all the worlds information. Their goal and execution of it was most important to them. Of course they also happened to be a few blocks away from the highest concentration of venture capitalists on the planet, but they went 3 years without VC funding. Their first 2 years they had no revenues and received only $100K in funding, from Andy Bechtolsheim. A year later they raised $25 million. Their great ideas and excellent execution came before any cash.
So maybe cash shouldn’t be #1 for an ambitious startup, rather amazingness should, true passion, even if it’s nights and weekends around your day job.
@tomnora @cowlow @norasocial
by tomnora | Jul 19, 2011 | founder, Scalability
From July 2011,,.
California. Most of my 25 year career has been in California; about half of those in Silicon Valley. I’ve been involved with several amazing companies throughout Northern and Southern Cal; I have expanded, launched, M&A’d, relaunched, liquidated, succeeded and failed, you name it.
I’ve also had the good fortune to operate and sometimes live in several other fledgling tech corridors – Cambridge, NYC, Portland, Boulder, Santa Fe, Austin, Dallas, SLC, Frankfurt, Paris. In every case these other places aspire to be a self sustaining baby Silicon Valley of their own – Silicon Alley, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Coast. But they don’t quite make it. Some come close, like New York or now Boulder but it’s still not quite the same.
The term Silicon Valley is now a misnomer – it has moved way beyond silicon and way beyond the original Santa Clara valley to spread all over California. The new hot spots are San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, the east bay, etc.
San Francisco
San Francisco has actually successfully co-opted the Silicon Valley magic and even surpassed it in some ways (Twitter, Salesforce.com); it’s again a very hot place to be right now and this will continue. Talk about scalability! If you plop your company here, great things could happen. It wasn’t always that way – in the 80’s and much of the 90’s San Fran was a sub-par runner up to SV, trying to catch up. Great PR and finance firms, but not many startups. Houses were cheaper, you couldn’t get good engineers, etc. That has all changed. Now companies have bidding wars for office space amid a major national recession.
There’s a magic and complex dynamic to the combination of things that make California so different. Just say the word and people take notice. There’s a seriousness, a buzz, confidence, reliability, completeness, professionalism. An assumption that you’ll more likely make it there.
Southern California
The “Silicon Basin” – – With the convergence of social media, the Internet, and digital entertainment, Southern California is now humming as a great startup region. In 2003 Electronic Arts actually moved their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Playa Vista, an crazy move at the time, and accelerated their growth as a result. Several smaller software groups, vfx studios and creative design labs are now benefitting from the movement south. Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and others are growing their employee base and presence in L.A. Venture Capital from Northern and Southern Cal is flowing into the L.A. basin. It has the key catalyst – several excellent universities spitting out young engineers and business people. It has a strong and growing angel investor base, tapping one of the largest concentrations of individual wealth in the world.
There are exceptions to the California phenomenon; several amazing companies have emanated from these other areas, always have, and many of these ecosystems are now of course self sustaining, but they’re not the same as California. Countless companies have moved there for this advantage, reference Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook. Good move. If you’re somewhere else, it’s because you’ve made a tradeoff, a compromise. I know as I’ve done it myself several times and I’m glad I did. I’ve rooted for other places to approach California’s ecosystem, but I know they’ll never come close.
If you want maximum scalability for your business, you should be in California. If you the best capital providers, the best people, the highest valuations, you gotta be in Cali. You could get more advantages from a couple of visits to a coffee shop in Palo Alto than spending a year in some other town. @tomnora @cowlow
by tomnora | Mar 20, 2011 | founder, Revenue Growth, Scalability, startup CEO
What’s more important for your company, growth that is stimulated internally or externally? Which is more Organic? More Sustainable?
The answer is that both are equally important, and quite dependent upon each other. Internal (proactive and reactive) actions by your team must intertwine and hopefully spawn and tune external factors that match your growth goals.
Externally stimulated growth, where the market is coming to you, is when the outside world has significant impact on your message, your “buzz” increases as well as your message hitting where you want it to. Viral growth. Can’t be stopped (for now).
External growth is more exciting, also more difficult and more expensive, but can be quite rewarding. Expensive means using precious cash, which most startups are very reluctant to do. On the other hand, if well placed promo dollars (internal) cause external market to take off on it’s own, it may be worth it.
Internally stimulated growth is all the things you do, inorganic, synthesized. A strong internal growth plan focuses on coordinated, timed, manipulated maneuvers, paying for press releases, making sales priority 1. Internal growth is safer and controllable but limited in it’s effect without your message catching on externally. Old school internal growth strategies are still vital to the plan: marketing, advertising, marcom, sales, work ethic, camaraderie, common vision, right attitudes, belief in the leader. All of these things help you to be prepared for external spark when it happens.
But External growth is harder to synthesize, unless you’re Steve Jobs. Stimulation can come from many places – the momentum of the market, outbound marketing, results from outbound marketing, all trying to create this external alchemy.
The best channel these days for external pop is Instant Social Media. Instant Social Media can make your message travel very rapidly to giant volumes of people, into the highest levels of the market, for little money and hassle, viral marketing. For more see my Instant Social Media blog entry.
The key to all this is to challenge yourself for the best in both areas. Please contact me if you want to discuss your situation and plans.