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It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.
Hungry and foolish? You’ve got advantages like never before.
Relationships used to be hard to establish, build over time and were location advantaged. The people you went to school with or the people you worked with were a huge part of your network. That was great for Harvard and a networked company like McKinsey, but you no longer need to join those ranks to gain access to the exact same people.
Now, it’s easier to connect to ANYBODY IN THE WORLD. I found out I was one degree away from one of the Powerball winners in TN, we’re all so close, even when we’re far. The internet connected the globe, and the social web has brought each individual online. It’s more noisy but for most developed nations, we’ve all joined the web and we aren’t leaving.
Fortunately, entrepreneurs noticed the increased noise from so many people now being present in social networks. They’ve created tools that have given us all greater capacity for relationships than ever before. According to Dunbar, the human brain maxes out at 250 human relationships. Tools like Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail Contacts allow storage over 1000 and give us just enough information over time to feel connected to thousands of people we’ve met. How many people do you feel are part of your family, personal and professional network? Most likely more than Dunbar imagined.
Financial Capital used to operate under old rules. Only a few people had excessive capital and only a few beyond that could get access to it. Money was granted under strict rules from a small group of people, banks awarded loans and lines of credit but usually only with substantial assets or strict rules based on federal credit scores.
Now it is possible to raise money from a number of sources for very niche reasons. If you want people to fund you based on your future earnings, check out GoFundMe or Upstart. If you are looking for personal loans with smaller fees than what Mastercard or Visa offers you, you can seek loans through Lending Club or Prosper. If you’re interested in small business loans or capital to fund your business, you can check out Funding Circle, CircleUp, Angellist or Gust. If you have a working business and just need capital before you’ll get paid, there is C2FO for that too. If you have a product or idea, you can crowdfund from friends or strangers via Kickstarter. Interested in raising money for a real estate project instead, yes you can find funding for that too. Personal loans, small business loans, projects or property, you can raise money through many platforms today, no bank or credit score required.
Financial capital is still not free, but there are lots of financial tools to find the funding that helps get your future off the ground.
Education is in abundance. Anything you want to learn, anything at all, you can do so today with an internet connection. Rewire your home or learn Chinese, learn to make a film or how to build a website. Education used to be limited, restricted to those who could show up, and very expensive. Today, everything is available to learn online for free.
If you find something that is not currently being taught online for free, you my friend have found a business opportunity! For the most part, it’s all free. Most new education companies charge for content even though it could be found elsewhere at no cost, the difference is that they are selling the better learning experience. A more curated path to education is nice, but isn’t necessary so if you want to learn it, get to it.
Customers are everywhere. There are more people participating online than ever before, that means more than yesterday, the year before or a decade before. Google made a big business on a much smaller number of customers. The good news for google, more people online means more fragmentation. People are finding new places to spend their time. So there are more of them to find but the efforts to find them aren’t as easy.
Mobile to the web, there are participants online and they are ready to engage. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to worry about the size of your audience, instead you have to look at the cost to acquire their attention. Attention grows with new people online, but don’t think every other online competitor doesn’t see it. The companies that figure out how to provide value to customers that are easy to find will have an advantage.
Experienced talent grown from the new incumbents. Apple, Google, and Facebook are the new tech incumbents. Players like Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and Cisco still have a big place in the market but they are overshadowed by the new big three. The move to mobile has shaken out for now with Apple and Google in the lead with rights over most mobile phones in the developed world. Those platforms are stable and a great place to build a career if you’re an engineer.
Five years ago you couldn’t find an iOS developer with more than 5 years experience. Those platforms have evolved but aged nicely to allow great talent to become experts. The first iOS developers at Facebook have already vested and are in the market, and may be ready for their third new role now. Small and big companies can attract experienced talent. Stabilization in those platforms over time means that everyone wins in having a big pool to pull from.
No longer are engineers learning on your dime, they likely come from somewhere that could afford that type of risk. They now have experience and an interest in working for you, even if that means cut wages and longer hours. You’re in a good spot to continue to invest in great engineering talent, it may even get less expensive as the talent pool grows.
It’s a good time to be an entrepreneur. It’s a great time to the part of the tech ecosystem. Build the relationships that will earn you the new role that you want. You have access to all of the education that you need. Seek out experienced mentors and pursue the path that leads you to the customers you want to serve. A mature ecosystem will continue to evolve, but there is more room for you to be there to shape it.
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In 2015 the USV Network hosted 50+ meetup events and social gatherings. Since our portfolio is distributed across 20 cities in 6 countries, we often try to center NYC or SF centric events around other larger conferences, so anyone outside of those cities could pair their trip with another event.
As we plan 2016, we’ve crowdsourced the top conferences and events that our portfolio is planning to attend. Check out the calendar if you’re looking for great events, want to plan your own event without conflicting with others, or if you’re just planning trips to SF and want to avoid Oracle or Salesforce conferences hotel-pricing.
One last note, our portfolio shares interests beyond just traditional “tech”, so you’ll see a mix of things from maker events to money conferences, music to film. This list is not comprehensive so if there is anything not included here, please add it in the comments or ping me on twitter, @br_ttany.
JANUARY
6-9: [Las Vegas] CES
17-19: [Munich] DLD
21-31: [Park City] Sundance Film Festival
FEBRUARY
22-25: [Barcelona] Mobile World Congress
MARCH
1-6: [Valencia] Internet Freedom Festival
11-15: [Austin] SXSW
30: [SF] RightsCon Silicon Valley
APRIL
12: [NY] Dev:Network CTO Talks
14: [NY] WE Festival
26-28: [New Orleans] Collision Conference
MAY
3-4: [NY] DLD NYC
9-11: [NY] TechCrunch Disrupt
20-22: [SF] Makerfaire SF
24-26: [SF] Twilio’s Signal Conference
TBD (28th?): [SF] Google I/O
JUNE
TBD (6-8th?) [SF] WWDC
21-22: [Madrid] Money Conference
28-29: [NY] MongoDB World
JULY
<conference free zone>
AUGUST
<conference free zone>
SEPTEMBER
12-14: [SF] TechCrunch Disrupt
18-22: [SF] Oracle Open World* (aka, don’t book a trip to SF)
OCTOBER
4-7: [SF] Dreamforce* (avoid downtown SF)
NOVEMBER
1-2: [NY] Makerfaire NY
7-10: [Lisbon] Web Summit
30 - 1: [Helsinki] Slush Conference
DECEMBER
<conference free zone>
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This time of year I’m usually making resolutions just like everyone else. A wonderful holiday break traveling to see family and friends kept me present moment to moment, a complete treat. However, it kept me away from being too reflective, and left me with a head cold to kick off the New Year. A good reminder, that the ebb and flow of life means that expecting to meet all expectations all the time, even your own, is not always your choice.
It’s worth remembering, expecting to always operate at 100% capacity is not possible. Maybe a day or two a quarter, but not everyday. Instead, systematic small steps is how you get to 100% over time. So you can operate at 75% of your capacity but complete 100% of your goal.
Goals can be big and scary, you might as well because they will likely take as much effort and energy. It will probably also push you to think more about leverage of your time. If a goal is smaller, say accomplishing 10 blog posts, then you may feel more pressure and time constraint to do those things with little strategy on how to do it. It’s brute force and it will take, let’s say, 25 hours, 2.5 hours per post.
Instead, if you said you’re going to spend 25 hours writing 25 blog posts, what would it push you to consider? That constraint could push you to think about shorter posts, breaking a broad topic into smaller pieces, or even co-authoring posts so that you cut down on your personal time of editing and add more connections.
Bigger goals can help push us to better outcomes, even if we fail to reach them.
Say you spend 25 hours and write 20 posts instead of 10, isn’t that still better than 10 for 25 hours? You doubled your goal by being more strategic with your time.
Output over a given amount of time is not the only measure of success but it is often one of the most expensive trades we make. If you get better at spending time wisely, you earn more time.
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