Marcelo Calbucci posted a link to a TechCrunch scoop broke the news this morning on Seattle 2.0 that Right Side Capital announced that they will be investing seed-stage startup money in 100-200 startups a year.  That’s a lot.  Marcelo links to this Tech Crunch article, which gets into a lot more detail about the announcement and the context in which to place it.

Already startup types are starting the debate about whether this (a) is game-changing after all, (b) will work, or (c) misses the boat on some other criteria.  For the most part the reaction is positive – an evolution / revolution in the classing funding model seems overdue, especially given the drought we went through in the last couple years.  And a  new approach driven more by metrics and less by relationships is … well, interesting, if not necessarily a sure thing.  It will be fun to watch during the lead-up to the funding announcements this summer, and then see what the growth and recapitalization requirements of the original set of companies looks like.

Putting this announcement in a personal context, what would it take for me to get Crowdify off the ground?  Four months of funding?  Six months?  Twelve?  It’s so hard to say, since I have yet to do the hard grunt-work of proving out the market with real live interested customers.  It could be that the first three brand managers I talk to all love it and want to throw business my way.  It could also be that it will take a year and thousands of phone calls / e-mails to get to my first five-figure deal.  Traditional VCs would want to know that the market was there to capture FIRST, before putting any money in, and I can’t fault them.  However, we’ll see if Right Side Capital’s new approach will work, and if it does, what it means to other “idea entrepreneurs” who need time and space to execute.

Interested in your thoughts.

Marc Nager of Startup Weekend just sent me this today – I thought I’d repost (most of it, anyway) and get the word out about the next Portland Startup Weekend.

Hey there!

We wanted to let you know that Startup Weekend is coming back to Portland!

Check out the amazing lineup on the website. We have Matt Compton (venture partner at Madrona and ex vp at Yahoo), Rob Wiltbank (venture partner at Montlake Capital and professor at Willamette U), Eric Doebele (Founder/CEO Reliable.remodeler.com), Nitin Khanna (Founder/CEO of MergerTech), Doug Fieldhouse (CEO of Vesta) and of course the guys from Mugasha Akshay and Justin will be there!

When: March 5-7
Where: NedSpace Old Town
More info: http://portland.startupweekend.org
Looking forward to seeing you down there!

I’ve been to three Startup Weekend events in Seattle, but have not made it down to Portland yet.  If you’re in the area that weekend, and are a startup junkie, you should consider attending!

Remember this name, if you haven’t already heard it: Eric Ries.  He’s got a great blog called Lessons Learned that has a ton of great material for startups, coming at the topic from a lean/agile/fail fast angle.

This post on Minimum Viable Products was recommended by somebody on the Seattle Tech Startups list, and is a good sample: just-bigger-than-bite-sized, chock full of information, well supported with evidence.  Sample quote:

MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don’t need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

The post contains an embedded video from a talk Eric gave at Lean Startup Circle.  Bookmarked.  Enjoy!

The deadline is approaching for NWEN’s upcoming First Look Forum, to be held on Tuesday, April 13th at the Arctic Club in Seattle.  I’m seriously wondering if now is the time to submit a plan for Crowdify and put myself in consideration to pitch.

First prize is not a new Cadillac Eldorado, but rather free office space for a year in Axios’ space downtown (thanks for sponsoring, Adam!).  But from everyone I’ve talked to, the real value is in the coaching and feedback you get as you progress through the stages of the forum competition process.

I’m looking at the list of screeners and have met only a handful of them, and had meaningful conversations with only a couple of them, but it’s a high-profile list of local entrepreneurs, execs, and VCs.

Thinking…thinking…are you planning on submitting a business plan?  Tell me why in the comments!

Hot from my inbox —

The 15th annual Washington Technology Industry Association Industry Achievement Awards will be held March 4th, 2010 at Showbox SODO.  Organizer Katie Douglas writes that it will be a “casual affair” and there will be lounges that feature some of the tech behind the lifestyle characteristics (such as coffee, wine, and chocolate) that makes Washington such a great place to live.

I involuntarily laughed at the tagline/theme: “Washington Breeds Innovation”.  I’ve been doing a lot of connotative / denotative linguistic research as part of my work on Crowdify, and that phrase brings to mind the State of Washington furiously copulating with a passive, bespectacled, softly moaning Innovation.  I don’t know, maybe it’s a guy thing.  Maybe it’s just me.

Curious who the finalists in the various categories are?  I was too.  I’m most interested in the “Breakthrough Startup of the Year” category, in which Gist is nominated.  As I’ve written elsewhere in these pages, my hindbrain has a sort of unhealthy obsession with the algorithms behind Gist’s service and they all seem to be great people to boot.

I’ve seen the VholdR tech in person, and to my mind, it’s neat, but not as neat as Gist.  Plus they get demerits for funky spelling.  The Google correctly points you to their site if you type “vholder” in the search box, but still….

I don’t know a thing about DreamBox Learning, which is funny considering how many projects I’ve done in the online education space over the years.

I’m rooting for Gist in this category.

Register here: http://www.washingtontechnology.org/IAA

See you there?

Ever known the super-smart guy (typically, they’re always guys) who was just an absolute a**hole and couldn’t work well with others?  A recent GigaOM post, The Five Myths That Can Kill A Startup, refers to Reed Hastings’ term “brilliant jerks” to describe these people.  According to authors Michael Fisher and Marty Abbott:

Intelligence is important, but only insofar as it helps with performance and execution. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in “Outliers,” while some minimum level of intelligence might be necessary for superior performance, in many jobs it’s not in and of itself enough to ensure it. You need people willing and able to work as part of a team, and sometimes superior individual contributors can negatively affect team performance by creating affective or role-based conflict (for more on those, see Myth #3 below). As Reed Hastings puts it, you should eliminate all brilliant jerks from your team.

Which of course led me to Reed Hastings’ presentation on SlideShare that Om references.  I love it, and consider it a must-read for managers and entrepreneurs.  I like this statement in particular:

The real company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.

You ever work at a place and wonder how clueless management could possibly be?  (Scott Adams made a fortune off of this omnipresent phenomenon).  Look around: what are your company’s values?  They’re demonstrated by who gets rewarded, who doesn’t get rewarded, who gets hired, fired, reprimanded, how certain people are treated relative to others, relative pay, etc. etc.  The company’s support or non-support of certain people send an absolutely clear message about what’s important.  Printed mission statements and values declarations can’t hide it.

Now, having looked closely at that, do you still feel like your personal values are aligned with your company’s actual values?

If not, what do you do?

It’s been far, FAR too long since that known slacker Nathan Kaiser has done anything for the Seattle community.  To make up for WEEKS and WEEKS of inattention and neglect, he’s grudgingly agreed to organize another world-famous nPost Pub Crawl on February 9th, kicking off from Collins Pub near Pioneer Square.

Of course I jest.  Nathan does more for, and is more involved with, the Seattle startup community than just about anyone else I can think of.   But the part about the nPost Pub Crawls being world-famous is only slight hyperbole.  I think a Canadian citizen might have shown up once.

If you’re free that night, and in the mood for some great company and conversation, head on over to Collins Pub at 5 PM!

RSVP (optionally) at http://www.wiki.npost.com/index.php/NPostWiki:Happyhour.

From Northwest Innovation:

The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) has released its latest venture capital survey for first quarter 2010, showing that local venture capitalists are expecting to see moderately higher deal flow this quarter, with a significant amount believing their portfolio companies will see moderately better revenue growth this year.

Full story at http://www.nwinnovation.com/fullstory/0026441.html

Interestingly, I don’t see the report on the WTIA site – I hate it when web and PR aren’t coordinated like that.  Convergence, people!  Synchronization!  Real-time news!  Information at your fingertips! (Wasn’t that a Bill Gates phrase?).  My attitude is: if you’re a high-tech company, your press releases should be up on your website the minute you send them out via other means.  Oh well.

Overall, I get a sort of tepid feeling from the survey numbers – it’s better than last year, for sure, but I still don’t get any sense that the reins have been loosed and deals are going to start dropping on anybody with a napkin, a pen, and a bright idea.

Last night I attended a planning session for the next Seattle Startup Weekend event, and yes, I can report that Startup Weekend is coming back to Seattle. 

This is great news for the Seattle startup community, as the first two Seattle Startup Weekend events – plus the one in Redmond last August – were great community-building exercises and brought together people who still maintain close connections in the local tech community.

The tentative date is March 19-21 2010, and the tentative host is Amazon (described as “99% certain” by one of the organizers – Clint, I think).  Last night at Cyclops about 15 people showed up, and although the agenda was more of an informal “drink beer and chat” style event than I had originally envisioned, it was still nice to meet others who are as jazzed about Startup Weekend as I am. Among other things, it was great to make the acquaintance of Franck Nouyrigat (@peignoir), a local organizer of Paris Startup Weekend, who is a prolific world traveler among other things – check out his Picasa albums.

On a personal note, it was really nice to see @aviel and @geekcoach again, whom I met for the first time in January 2008 at the first Seattle Startup Weekend.   Relationships I developed at that event two years ago still continue strong.

Seattle Startup Drinks is back – of course thanks to @firewallender (Cassie Wallender), who is the driving organizer of the event since it first kicked off almost two years ago.

It’s happening this Friday, the 29th, at 7 PM at the Two Bells Tavern in Belltown, Seattle.  I haven’t been to the Two Bells in like ten years so it will be fun to go back and geek out and catch up with some other like-minded startup folks over a pint or three.

See you there?

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/event.php?eid=268378466093

http://seattle.startupdrinks.com/2010/01/24/january-startup-drinks-this-friday/