Hiring (3 of 3)

Finding the right talent in a start up is a very hot topic right now and one that most companies struggle with. Finding the right talent for The Callbacks was no exception and something we really struggled with in our first two years. We were fortunate enough to have a great group of founding members, but when we started bringing on new people we ran into a lot of problems.

The Pain of Losing Great Talent

One of the founding members transferred schools after our first year, crushing the group’s morale at the beginning of our second year. He was incredibly funny, organized and passionate as well as the cinematographer who created the awesome videos that got us such great recognition. To fill the void I took on more responsibility by doing administrative tasks and fortunately another member stepped up to do the videos.

Lesson learned: It’s risky to rely too heavily on one person in an early stage company. Even if they are dependable, things can happen that are out of their control. Ideally you’d like clearly defined roles, but it’s important that employees in your company are familiar with each other’s work. Delegation and cross functional projects should be regularly practiced in any sized company so that everyone understands the different elements involved with significant business processes. That way if someone can’t work for a given period of time then other employees will have the know-how to complete their assignments.

Finding the Right Talent

Last year we brought on two new members that I had great hopes for. Joseph was one of the most naturally funny people I’d ever met. He easily churned out great sketches and lit up the stage. Unfortunately, he didn’t fit in with our culture as well as we’d hoped, and when his class schedule got too intensive, he quit. Kevin was funny (at auditions) and impressed me with how much he seemed to want to be in our club. His passion made me want to have him in the group, even though his talent wasn’t all there. He turned out to be neither funny, polite nor passioinate so we ‘fired’ him at the end of the year.

Lesson learned: After our experience with Joseph and Kevin we started expanding the interview process, bringing on more people after auditions and creating an ‘evaluation period’. Once we got familiar with the new members we started empowering them by giving them added tasks that fit their interests i.e. social media, event planning, filming. We’ve found that it gave them a sense of ownership with the group and kept them active during down times. We still lost a member this year because he had to leave the school, but since we delegated tasks throughout the group the pain wasn’t as bad as it had been in past years.

The culture you create in your company will inevitably determine the kind of talent you retain and attract. Once you’ve identified a great candidate make sure to empower them as soon as possible. Get them working on significant projects with several different functional areas involved. Learn what excited them and what turns them off and with the proper guidance they’ll be able to rock the job. But if they don’t take the initiative, or seem disinterested ask them to leave and get someone else to do it.

Building the Brand (2 of 3)

I’ve never met someone working on a startup that didn’t think their product was innately better than their competitors’, but I’ve often met entrepreneurs having trouble raising awareness and elevating their startup’s brand. When I started The Callbacks we reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of our competitors and decided our values would differentiate us from BU’s other comedy groups. The following are lessons I learned while building that brand:

Positioning:

All of the comedy groups at BU had been around for several years and had the brand recognition we lacked. In order to gain traction we decided to differentiate ourselves in every possible way. We created a list of core values including but not limited to: being funny, being hilarious and making people laugh out loud. We tailored our shows to the college audience and constantly sought out new approaches to our shows. We’ve done sketches on famous literary figures, political satires, frat boys, familial relationships- you name it. One time we even decided to recite Shakespeare. Our tagline- “We’re not just sketch, we’re not just improv, we’re just funny!”

Lesson Learned: Differentiate yourself from the competition as early as possible and never stop. We’ve never had a show that was just like the one before it and as long as we are innovative and perform quality material we will be valuable to the customer. It’s important to create a list of core values early on so whenever you’re faced with a tough decision you have guidelines that will maintain your brand.

Selling to a Niche Market

We were competing with groups that had been around for 15+ years. They recycled sketches almost every show from a bank of 10+ years of sketch writing. We didn’t have that luxury and quickly decided we didn’t need it. We knew that BU students were diverse and modern.They didn’t want to see the same sketches over and over again. So we vowed never to recycle sketches in a show and instead to host videos on our youtube channel where they would be immortalized. People responded to it really well and we quickly began to get attention.

Lesson Learned: Niche markets get used to the way things have always been done. If you want to be disruptive, you must have the courage to do something different and innovative enough to keep them interested. People will recognize the unique value your company has and will become attracted to it. Once you’ve created that brand image continue to improve it and never settle.

Building Awareness

In our first four shows we were getting 100+ people which was great for just starting out. However, our competition was used to getting twice that amount. We found it incredibly frustrating that people going to both shows liked ours better yet we weren’t getting the same crowds. So I organized the Boston Funderdome: Boston’s first student sketch comedy competition. I brought in groups from all over the Boston area and challenged our rival group as well. A Tufts’ group ended up winning the competition (deservedly of course), but it did wonders for our credibility and brand awareness on campus.

Lesson Learned: You may have the best product in the market but if people are already familiar with your competitors’ and aren’t aware of yours it doesn’t matter. You should market your product as best you can and never be afraid to try something new. Build your product and then put it alongside your competitors in the eye of the consumer. If you differientiated yourself properly then you’ll reap the rewards. If not then iterate it and try again.

There’s no right answer on the best practice for positioning and marketing. At the end of the day you have to make the tough decisions on what’s best for you, your employees and your company. But never be afraid to be innovative, take risks and make mistakes. As long as you maintain your core values and keep your brand image strong the rest will follow.

Dave Balter speaking at #SVBCEO

Dave Balter, Founder of BzzAgent explains his concept of sponge and stone for entrepreneurs.

Sponges are entrepreneurs that constantly seek information. They don’t read Mashable and TechCrunch. They will form a team of mentors, advisers and peers that they can learn from. They will often have heroes as well. They will all read often- it doesn’t matter what as long as they do it often. They will also be incredibly humble which he cites as a powerful and growing trend among entrepreneurs.

Stones are made of two components. They will work harder than anyone else in the marketplace and have a huge strength of conviction. Sydney Frank is an example of a stone. In his eighties he created a vodka called Grey Goose that he sold to Bacardi for $2 billion. Stones will constantly grind things out and believe the impossible is possible.

Dave strongly believes you can learn to be a sponge or a stone but you have to be willing to commit to your project. It’s not necessary to be a super genius, but it is necessary to have sponge/ stone characteristics. He advises investors and others in the start up space not to restrict these entrepreneurs projects.  He believes its important to support these people because it makes our ecosystem much better.

Matt Meeker

Bill Warner, Founder of Avid Technology, Wildfire Communications and Co-Flow Investing starts the conversation asking everyone about their defining moments. He gets answers ranging from dropping out of school, getting acquired even their first kiss. Bill Warner’s defining moment was at Avid listening to an engineer giving him the idea of one picture and one sound for an editor because “the people would love it.” You know what? They did.

Michael Yavonditte, Founder of Hashable tells us about his experience at Quigo.  His solution was 200% better than Google’s AdSense at the time.  He tells us the story of how he sold for $340 million after denying several offers. It turned out to be an incredibly successful process, but he cites some core team members dragging him down. Some of them didn’t believe in the product as much as he did, but he powered through and learned a lot by doing it.

Israel Ganot, Co-Founder of Gazelle explains how he got involved with Gazelle. Believe it or not, he moved to Boston for his wife after working with companies such as Ebay and PayPal. His defining moment was when he failed to connect with retailers to use their product. They were faced with closing down the business until he had the idea to pivot and focus on consumers. As you probably already know, it turned out to be a very good decision.

Brad Feld. Keynote at #SVBCEO

Brad Feld Co-Founder of Foundry Group is the KeyNote for Silicon Valley Banks CEO Summit today. He was introduced as the man that needs no introduction. A serial entrepreneur turned angel investor he gives the following advice for SVB’s New York and Boston clients:

Focus on your product- He explains that if you’re the Founder of a new company the most important thing to do is to focus on your product at the beginning of your company and forever. Brad says, “don’t be afraid if the first few product releases being great. It’s important to interact with customers as often as possible. Love your product and keep iterating until you get it right.”

Cultivate a motivational environment: “HR staff  and the CEO don’t motivate people. They shouldn’t motivate people. The environment you create will motivate people.” Brad continues, “We view it as our job to machine [motivation] into the organization.”  Brad acknowledges you’re going to make bad hiring decisions. You may hire someone incredibly talented, but they may just not fit. Let them go and focus on your product.

For Brad Feld it’s imperative to link everything back to the success of your product. Cultivate an environment that gets your employees motivated so that you go to work everyday excited about what you do.

The general consensus was that entertainment technology is difficult in Boston, but it compensates with the talented people here. We broke down the three major cities in entertainment technologies: New York, LA and Boston. New York and LA definitely have the agencies and brands that no other city can compete with. But Boston has the development talent, media technology and marketing that is unrivaled. Fran made an anecdotal point with a company that had its development team on the East Coast and it’s business side in LA.

It doesn’t matter the reason companies make their home here: the founder’s could have went to school here, moved because of a spouse’s job or never left after a wild time at the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Boston is a very unique city with great opportunity. No where else in the world are you able to recruit young talent, engage in digital advertising and leverage the PR channels that are all around you.

When in doubt remind yourself that you’re a rare and unique entrepreneur. If it was easy everyone would do it.

Boston is an amazing city. The hub of great colleges, start ups, talent and diversity. It’s a garden full of consumer apps, large corporations, accredited universities and talent. In such an varied group we need to have very strong gardeners that can cultivate this community. We ran through several options. But here’s the top three:

Community Gardener:

1. Overlapping the garden is a necessity. We need to bring starts ups, mentors, investors and potential employees together to develop the most fertile soil.
2. This gardener must be willing to go beyond other industries. A good gardener needs to learn how to work in any kind of soil which some very exotic plants.
3. Simply actively going to events. Coordinate a car pool and  organize joint events. What demonstrates being a strong connector more than renting a ZipCar and bringing people out for an awesome time?

Karl Buttner of Mass Challenge began the conversation asking everyone to introduce themselves and talk to the students in the room. What are the problems students face breaking into the scene and most importantly what can we do to fix it?

We determined the problem to be that students don’t understand the value of a start up life. Then even if they do they have no clue how to get involved. Even if they find great sources like Start Up Digest and Greenhorn Connect students need the validation from their peers and professors to seek out this culture. Our solution is to find local locations where people can create a buzz that even Silicon Valley can hear i.e. Venture Cafe. Then they should find the students on campus to be evangelists and promote entrepreneurship.

Interested in learning more? Connect with these people looking to make a difference today:

Mark Kasdorf, CEO of Intrepid Labs, is a recent graduate that is fresh out of the MassChallenge Accelerator program looking to do something very similar. His start up is a community working space near Kendall Square focused on companies with 5+ employees to work effectively without the price tag.

Chuck Pickelhaupt of Fidelity investments just wants to learn how he can help. He can help with funding, space, conversation- anything eager young people are in need of to connect in the space. Interested? chuck.pickelhaupt@fmr.com

Zach Tribbett and Paulina Mustafa of Start Labs are students from MIT cofounding a non profit focused on encouraging students around the country to get involved with start ups. They have two main goals: 1. Get students involved in start ups to learn the culture and engage in the community 2. Get those students to create their own companies and pay it forward providing  jobs to other students. They are hosting many events over the next few months they suggested students to attend.

This unconference was created because the organizers like Bill wanted to facilitate those connections and success. The #MassTLC #UnCon has over 800 technology leaders looking to connect with each other and share their ideas.  Your pick up line for today – “Hello, I can help you. ” Then give them a brief introduction and enjoy the conversation.