Monday, December 31, 2012

New Years Advice for Founders

As we approach year end certain things are changing while its true that SoLoMo investment from VCs and Angles is lower they are in fact switching GeoLocations and looking in other Geographical locations other than West and East coast in the US such as the Midwest. I ran into something recently that I would like to highlight in a certain way as advice for Founders looking for CTO-Cofounders.

1. Respect the User is the first law for anything involving applications and services.  That somewhat means that instead of lying when you only got 500 downloads a month and calling it successful while at the same time posting fake astro-turfing app reviews in the AppStore that you instead respect the user:

    A. If caught astro-turfing by a user, do not snipe back at the user in your    apology just straight accept responsibility and apologize.
    B.  If you were dumb enough to snipe at the user after getting called on astro-turfing and the potential developer you want to network as the potential CTO-cofounder  catches it do not shove your head up your asshole and call such things presumptions without merit. Your Mom did not raise you to be an irresponsible asshole,

2. You are nothing to the developer as he or she does not know you  or your firm and we are in fact effing busy and so do not be surprised when we ask that you come to a near by eating place to buy us an inexpensive meal to start that first networking conversation.

3. Remember a developer will judge your interaction with him or her to see if they get the impression of how you will treat a stranger that is a VC or Angel investor. That means if you are caught at anything your correct response is to drop the attitude and apologize. And yes this is not optional.

4. You are a stranger to any developer. do not start with a pitch, because we have a sick game of tearing about pitches from strangers not bright enough to understand the proper sequence. Your job as founder is to have that first networking meeting go off in the proper manner. The way to handle it is to pick some tech questions that you might have that are easy to answer in about an hour. You will do this several times with each developer you talk over several months of meetings with each developer.

5. Signing up for a whole bunch of meetup groups is not networking. At the most its ego tripping. Physically meet with a developer and break bread with them as that is in fact real networking.

Last, I must apologize to those who somewhat responsible and already have put this into practice.

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