This last class our professor in Entrepreneurship had another very special treat for us. This time he had invited to our class the co-founders of PointAbout – Washington, DC-based mobile applications start up - for a panel discussion on entrepreneurship, what else? I really enjoyed the meeting and the four guys were just fascinating. As the professor introduced them – they were “serial” entrepreneurs.
Really, it was a very stimulating and enlightening discussion. The four co-founders (Scott Suhy, Daniel R. Odio, Sean Shadmand, Isaac Mosquera) seem to have great synergy as a team, and lots of energy individually. First they introduced themselves, their company, and gave a short retrospect on how they started together their company. They believe they are on the verge of something big in the mobile applications market, the magnitude of YouTube. And they have something to show for that too, if you checkout their website.
There were a lot of precious tidbits for budding entrepreneurs scattered all over through that introduction time and the whole meeting.
Daniel, who seems to be the most aggressive of the team in the area of marketing and sales, threw us a challenge off the bat: “Raise your hands who want to be an entrepreneur?” May be a quarter of the audience raised their hands. “Now let’s see how serious you are about becoming an entrepreneur. There is a site coupons.com where you can buy gift certificates to the area restaurants at a discount. For example, you can get a $50 certificate for just $25. Go online tonight, order a certificate and then go and try peddle that certificate to the people in front of the restaurant for whatever profit you can. Who is willing to do that?” Only two or three hands out of some sixty people in the auditorium went up this time.
Daniel has the authority to make that kind of challenge, as he himself has been doing this kind of ”guerilla marketing & sales” all throughout his entrepreneurial career. Check out his blog on entrepreneurship (http://www.danielodio.com) to learn about his “guerilla” way of getting press in WSJ, or read this article from WSJ about his non-conformist approach to real estate sales . I spent a few hours after the meeting just reading his blog, and watching some videos, and going on the links. If you are serious about entrepreneurship, you probably will do the same once you get there.
Sean and Isaac are more on the technical side of their start-up. However, they have been successful entrepreneurs in their careers too. They have co-created/co-founded one of the largest food-oriented social networking sites FamilyOven.com which grew to 380,000 membership and became profitable within first six months of operation. For me it was very impressive.
Scott, the CEO of the company, is the only one who has not had entrepreneurial experience before this company. He came from regional General Manager position with Microsoft and there had a great deal of experience in sales. His driving mantra: “Everything is about partnerships and relationships”. The other guys also referred to him as “deal closer”.
As I alluded earlier, this meeting was a mother lode of entrepreneurial motivation and inspiration for me. Here just a few very short remarks from the meeting:
- Make something different
- Solve the customers’ pain
- If you want to have a restaurant start from selling food from your kitchen. Test the market, see if people even like your food. See if you can sell it.
- Stay “relentlessly resourceful”
- Don’t try to make $10 Mil from the start. Make first $5K.
- It’s not the idea, it’s the people.
- Entrepreneurship is emotional rollercoaster.
- Listen to the customer, and you are not the customer.
- Ideas are overrated. It’s all in execution.
- Raw idea is less than 5% of the company’s value.
- Everything is about partnership and relationships.- Scott
- Know your core competence, and stay focused on it. Outsource the rest. – Sean
- Pain points – business opportunity
- Y Combinator – technology startup mentorship program. Operating principle: Little money, lots of mentoring.
- Paul Graham – founder of Y Combinator
And here are some of the online resources that were mentioned during the panel:
www.ted.com , http://mobiready.com , http://dc.tie.org/ -Entrepreneurs network, http://www.familyoven.com – co-founded by Sean and Isaac, http://appmakr.com/ – company’s site for their application, http://ycombinator.com/
Added April 24, 2010. Daniel Odio uploaded the video of the meeting on his blog, so if you have about 70 minutes to spare you can get the full report of the meeting:
PointAbout Founders Speak at George Washington University MBA Lecture Series from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.
Added April 16, 2010. Also, on Daniel’s blog there is a video of an interview of the guys taken by GWU students earlier this year. I watched it after writing this post. I think they were more relaxed and much more engaging at our meeting on Tuesday though (actually they unwinded a bit towards the end of the video). Still, if you have another 55 minutes, you will pick up some more interesting nuggets on entrepreneurship in general and what they are doing in their market niche in particular.
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