Mike Kane is CEO and Co-Founder of Hedgeable, an online service providing sophisticated financial tools and analytics to retail customers. Hedgeable has developed powerful proprietary technology that helps investors of every level manage their portfolios, currently totaling over $5 billion. Hedgeable is currently beta testing an advisory platform.
Mike talked with us about how he started Hedgeable as a bootstrapped startup:

From my previous work at a hedge fund and as an ultra-high net worth private money manager, I knew there wasn’t much technology out there to help retail customers. This is where I saw the opportunity to change the market. With this gap and the advent of cloud computing, I saw the opportunity to change the game by offer sophisticated tools for the “little guys” that perform calculations on the fly.
We weren’t venture-backed like some other startups, so we had to be more resourceful. Some other financial sites have raised $7-10 million in the first round. My big challenge was how to compete with them! Rather than raising a lot of money and going out on a spending spree, we tried to form partnerships and get what we needed for free or cheap.
My small team and I quickly realized we had to do everything ourselves and move extremely quickly if we wanted to survive as a company. In September, we hired an expensive PR firm, but we fired them a week later when we hadn’t seen results. That’s the last time we paid anyone for anything!
To get the job done internally, it’s been absolutely critical to have an A+ team. I’ve spent more time on recruiting than any other of the business, and it’s been well worth it. We’ve interviewed 50 people to hire one. That’s because we value personal traits, not just experience, and we look for a 100% fit.

Chris Becker runs Filemobile, a software company that provides rich social media products such as user-generated contests, broadband video and citizen journalism.  Filemobile’s clients include enterprise-sized firms, media companies, content producers, major brands, and digital agencies. Chris comes from the management consulting world, with experience at Arthur Anderson and PWC.
I asked him how his consulting background helped him take the leap into entrepreneurship:

My experience is in change management, especially large-scale change, custom implementation, and ERP. The structured approach to problem-solving is a common element in consulting and entrepreneurship. I think the curious nature of consultants can naturally lead them to become entrepreneurs. The big difference is that, as a consultant, you are tangential to the execution, not an accountable manager.
The joke about consulting teaching you what not to do is at least partly true. I’ve worked with large clients and learned the inside of companies, observing failures that teach you lessons. Consultants that go into entrepreneurship have had this unique exposure, and come in with a strong set of skills. But not all of those skills are relevant. When I moved from the large corporate environment to a small, scrappy, bootstrapping culture, I had to take a hard look at those skills.

Best transferable skills from consulting
• Corporate governance – most startups don’t spend enough time on this
• Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
• Clear communication both within the team and with clients

Not so relevant to entrepreneurship
• Building a body of company knowledge
• Evaluation forms and 360-feedback
• Building the “Sales Team of the Future” or “Best-in-Practice Finance Department”

Other skills from consulting are relevant, but you have to take with a grain of salt. For example, consultants have an appreciation for process that’s useful in a startup – but avoid putting together binders of administrative materials! Also, project management is critical, but in a startup the focus is on getting things done quickly, so don’t over-manage every detail.
In the rush to build the product or acquire the first customers, many startups don’t focus enough on building efficient, repeatable processes. For each process, ask “Who?”, “What?”, and “Why?” and make sure it’s done in a collaborative way with your team. Baking in the process when you’re 4 people is easier than when you’re 40!

Anand Sanwal runs ChubbyBrain, an information and data services company that organizes information on the “Fortune 500,000”. He’s just launched CB Insights to track high-value companies ranging from startups to VC-backed and mid-market private companies. ChubbyBrain has been described as Bloomberg for private companies.
Anand cut his entrepreneurial teeth with Kozmo, the popular but short-lived service that delivered movies and candy via bike messenger. He moved to American Express for several years before returning to the startup world right before the market crashed. We chatted with Anand about making these transitions and what he’s learned along the way:
My intention wasn’t to work for a big company; I expected to be at AmEx for 2 years but stayed for 7. I decided to take the leap by the end of 2007, as I felt I was becoming too entrenched in the corporate world. I wrote a book on corporate portfolio management, did some lucrative consulting and speaking gigs, and hired two of my former co-workers from AmEx to help me build the technology behind ChubbyBrain. But nothing really goes as planned… When the financial services market collapsed in the span of 3 weeks in the Fall of 2008, the consulting and speaking immediately dried up. I learned the hard way that until the ink is dry you don’t have a deal, no matter who says they love you. I felt a deep sense of gratitude to my teammates, who had given up comfortable jobs at AmEx to put their faith in me. With that gratitude came psychological and financial pressure. I had to meet payroll out of pocket.
We skipped the “woe is me” phase and moved right to figuring out how to adapt quickly to the new reality. We are strong believers in luck, but to some degree we made our own luck. New legislation in credit card arena helped introduce uncertainty that helped our business. At the same time we became very disciplined with our money.
This discipline, and being a nimble small business, has helped ChubbyBrain launch new data-driven products using the information we collect. A lot of our energy goes into trying to outflank our much larger competitors. We’ve consistently published our data 1-2 weeks before the incumbents and want to keep it that way!

Warren Buffett once said he wouldn’t mind being in prison as long as he had 3 decent bridge partners as cellmates.
When Mila Antonova arrived in the U.S. 3 ½ years ago, she didn’t know anyone or speak any English. Today she is teaching bridge to students in afterschool programs in Harlem. Inspired by her own background and by Buffett (who along with Bill Gates donated $1 million to the School Bridge League) Mila runs BridgeUnion, an online and offline resource for bridge players. Mila spoke with us about her journey:
Growing up in Russia, my parents always dreamed of a better life. My father fantasized about inventing things but never had time because he had to work hard to make a living. I knew I wanted to be my own boss and take control of my life, but I knew of entrepreneurship only from the movies.
I didn’t like school much, mostly because I had to memorize facts and dates that didn’t mean anything to me. Teachers tell you what to do and students must listen and follow. I finished high school with decent grades but felt unsatisfied with my education.
I took my first bridge class at college, and I was fascinated by the strategy and concentration required to become a good player. It was like a gym for my mind, a great way to exercise my skills. Since most other students were also novices, I didn’t feel as if I had to catch up as with my academic classes.
When I came to the U.S., I tried to find bridge partners, but people usually laughed at me and said, “my grandmother plays that!” I looked further and found there are avid bridge players out there, but not many resources for beginners who want to learn and experts who want to teach. I created BridgeUnion to fill this gap and to share my love of bridge with others.
While she works on her goal of become the world bridge champion, Mila is planning a new venture. As with BridgeUnion, she plans to combine technology and community- building to create a social tool that will to help others achieve their goals and dreams.

Jason Olim currently runs Wee Web, a new online community for families and children, and Freshman Fund, the college savings registry site. Jason is known for founding CDNOW, the online retailer that grew to over $130 million in annual revenues before being acquired by Bertelsmann, then Amazon.com. More than 15 years later, Jason is back in the startup world. He talked with us about getting the itch to start another company after his success with CDNOW:
At CDNOW I had the chance to create something. Afterwards, I was consulting for startups, helping them solve their most important management problems, but I quickly got the urge to build something again.
I wanted to build a company that was highly relevant to my personal experience. I saw the opportunity to combine my background in technology and music with my more recent experience as a father, to launch a company in the parenting space.
The most successful entrepreneurs are unbelievably motivated, hands-on, and optimistic. There’s a hunger – a natural energy of youth – that drove me to work like crazy at CDNOW. My life was admittedly unbalanced; I worked constantly. The second time around, I still had that hunger, but there are different priorities at another stage of life. With Freshman Fund and now Wee Web, I needed to use my time wisely and leverage other people’s energy.
The trick is getting people on your team who are as hungry as you. You can’t just hire someone to be an entrepreneur; they won’t have the same drive. As an entrepreneur I always did everything I couldn’t get someone else to do – which is a lot. I’m lucky to be part of a fantastic team of three. Together we probably make up that one incredibly driven, somewhat unbalanced young person!
With this team I run Wee Web, a place for families to share in their children’s adventures online. We’re in the business of creating connections among family members and enabling dialogue within the family.

At the dawn of the Internet’s widespread commercialization, Tina Fine wrote her doctoral dissertation in economics at Columbia University on a game theory model of how technology would turn the real estate market on its head.
She’s now about to launch Homing Cloud, a social networking site that will change the way consumers buy and sell real estate. Tina’s mission is to connect buyers and sellers directly, without brokers, and give them the resources they need to transact real estate. Homing Cloud will let you “cheat on your broker”, or you could use the site along with your broker. Tina’s background in screenwriting has lent a unique element to Homing Cloud: the company will provide entertainment value by helping sellers produce and share videos about their properties. Homing Cloud is even planning a contest for the most imaginative video. Driven by her passion for community service, Tina is donating a portion of the site’s revenue to charities serving the homeless.
Tina spoke with us about her journey from her economics Ph.D. to launching Homing Cloud:
My dissertation was about how disruptive technology would drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the real estate market by increasing competition, driving down costs, and eventually making brokers obsolete. We’ve seen huge changes in recent years in stock trading, but there’s been very little price competition in real estate. But the perfect storm is brewing: Internet users are publishing their own content, taboos regarding talking and transacting online have been shattered, and social media is allowing people anywhere to access data quickly and easily.
Even so, the real estate market has been slow to change. I always thought something like Homing Cloud would already exist by now. If my dissertations’ predictions hadn’t yet come to be, the time was right for me to make them happen. I never thought I’d be the one to do it, though. After all, I’m an economist, and economists don’t do stuff!

Vito Rago is the Executive Producer and CEO of Cooking with Nonna, an online cooking show and recipe sharing site that invites guest “Nonnas” (grandmothers) from all over Italy to share dishes from their native regions. The host of Cooking with Nonna is Vito’s daughter, Rossella Rago.
Vito is a telecom executive who was instrumental in the expansion of broadband. I asked him how he decided to launch Cooking with Nonna:
My wife and daughter have always been involved in entertainment. Two and a half years ago, my daughter Rossella started college at St. John’s. It was impractical to commute to school from New Jersey, so she moved in with her Nonna in Brooklyn. One day while we were having dinner, we were brainstorming about the future, and I asked Rossella “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I had just returned from the CES in Las Vegas, and I told my family about the advances I saw in the convergence of video and the internet. We wanted to do something in this field. What kind of content could we create that will generate interest? Rossella said, “Grandma is teaching me how to cook – how about a cooking show?!”
There are countless cooking shows and recipe sites out there, including those focused on Italian food. But the angle of a grandmother teaching the young generation to cook is unexplored. We also wanted to also celebrate the role of Italian grandmothers in the family and trace back to the area of Italy that they came from.
Family and friends provided enough nonnas – and recipes – initially, but we quickly decided to open it up to grandmas from different regions. We did a casting call in New York last June, and girls volunteered their grandmothers. Each of our Guest Nonnas on our show teaches my daughter one of their recipes.
I’ve always had a passion for food, and I saw this project as an opportunity to bring together food and tech, while showcasing my daughter’s talent. My advice to entrepreneurs starting out is to have a strong passion for what you’re doing, and don’t let anything else distract you. What’s next? The story of a grandmother teaching grandchildren to cook is a universal, not just an Italian, story. We plan to expand to other countries and cultures!

Jordan Goldman is the entrepreneur behind Unigo, an online destination website for information about colleges supplied by college students.  Unigo has thousands of college reviewers, and they are currently targeting the 60 million parents and prospective college students who each year seek to learn about various colleges.  They are currently looking for partnerships to spread their unique content.

Jordan told us the story of how he got help to start Unigo:

I started working on Unigo when I was 23.  I had been an English major, never taken a business course in my life.  I wrote a business plan after doing a Google search to learn about business plans!  I didn’t have any business contacts at the time, so I decided to email a couple hundred well-placed alumni that graduated at least 10 years before I did from my college.  I ended up taking over 50 of them out to lunch, asked them to read my business plan and tell me what I was leaving out, what did/did not make sense, etc.  Some of the people I talked to were small business owners; some were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.  I had no previous connection to them and they had no reason to help me out – but they gave me some amazing business advice, the equivalent of an MBA for free, and I eventually fine-tuned the business plan.  A couple of the alums I talked to ended up becoming advisors and a bunch became investors.  I started Unigo in September of 2008, and we now have more than 50,000 students on the ground.  Right after we launched, we got a feature story in The Wall Street Journal – I got it by emailing them randomly.  We later entered into a partnership with them and created a whole new brand called WSJ On Campus – for every article, you get the WSJ point of view, Unigo’s student-on-the-ground perspective, and a write-up from an expert in the education space.  Sometimes people feel like business is a clubby “old boys” network, but I haven’t found that to be the case.  There are a lot of entrepreneurs with good ideas; they just don’t know what to do next.  I always recommend asking others for help, people are willing.  Give it a shot, the worst they can say is no.

Rosalind Resnick, a former business and computer journalist who built her Internet marketing company, NetCreations, Inc., from a two-person home-based startup to a public company that generated $58 million in sales, is the Founder and CEO of Axxess Business Centers, Inc., the leader in strategic consulting, business plan development and outsourced financial and marketing services for startups and emerging businesses.  She co-founded NetCreations in March 1995 and served as the company’s CEO and President until December 2001, pioneering the concept of 100% Opt-In® email marketing in 1996 and spearheading the company’s successful IPO in 1999.  Rosalind also hosted America Online’s NetGirl Forum, one of the Internet’s most popular online dating services, from 1995 to 1996.

She shared a story with us about people management; it is also in her new book, found here:

I’ve found out the hard way that a management style that’s all stick and no carrot can end up driving employees away.  Back in early 1998 when I moved NetCreations from my brownstone in Brooklyn Heights to a sleek, second-story office in SoHo, our little email marketing company had grown to four employees in addition to me and my partner.  Back at our home office where everyone sat in two big adjoining rooms, I could see and hear what our employees were doing and catch any mistakes they made in managing accounts or making sales.  Once we moved to SoHo, I took the big window office for myself and put our three sales and customer service staffers in the main room by the hallway.  My partner, our CTO, worked with our tech guy in the office next to mine. It was a disaster.  Without the hands-on coaching I used to give them, our three-person sales team starting dropping balls left and right.  Angry customers started calling to demand their money back.  No matter how many times I went over and over the same things, our little gang just couldn’t seem to shoot straight.  One Friday night after a long and trying week, my partner and I (who had already hired an experienced sales manager who was scheduled to start the following Monday) decided it was time to fire our sales staff and start over with a clean slate.

That Monday morning when I got to the office, I was surprised to see that no one was there.  Usually, our sales reps showed up by 9 AM and I came in a little later.  I walked past the empty desks and into my office.  As I sat down in my chair, my heart sank.  There on my desk were four resignation letters and four sets of keys.  Apparently, our sales reps were not as dumb as we thought.  Sensing our frustration with their performance, they had ganged up with the tech guy (who we had actually wanted to keep) and quit before we could fire them.  To drive the point home, they changed the screen savers on their computers from our company logo, “100% Opt-In Email Marketing” to “100% Opt-In Turnover.”

I was crushed.  It’s one thing to complain to your partner about incompetent employees — it’s quite another to have them all walk out the door on the same day.  And, even though our new sales manager decided to stick it out and we quickly replaced our old sales reps with people who were a whole lot better, I realized that I had to change my management style effective immediately.  So, the next day, I ran out and picked up a stack of books on how to be a better manager.  Armed with a slew of new insights, I immediately changed from a tiger to a pussycat.  Our company went from 100% percent employee turnover to zero.  But that wasn’t the solution, either.  Now things were so warm and cozy that everybody wanted to stay.  For me as a manager, that was a problem since I didn’t want to have to fire any low-producing sales reps who I wished would just quit and find jobs elsewhere.

Finally, I hit upon a better answer — managing by the numbers.  As I learned more about finance, forecasting and budgeting, I came to realize that every employee’s salary — especially, that of a sales rep — is directly related to the company’s bottom line and how much additional profit that employee can produce.  With the help of our CFO and senior management team, I began to construct a series of departmental compensation plans that set performance goals for our employees and rewarded them financially for meeting them.  This way, a poor-performing sales rep would quickly see that he wasn’t going to get his quarterly bonus and leave on his own.  It worked.

So, while I still occasionally lose my temper with the people who work for me (and am grateful that they’re willing to forgive me for it), I’ve come to realize that the best management style for me is to manage by the numbers.  This minimizes the politics, the personalities and the confrontations.  I’ve also realized that, if a prospective employee or contractor can’t understand numbers, then I can’t afford to have him on my team — no matter how talented he may otherwise be.  Which brings me to the point of my story: There’s no right or wrong way to manage people, and there’s no textbook approach that works for every company every time.  The key is to decide what kind of manager you are and be it — the tiger or the pussycat, the politician or the CFO — and to hire the kind of employees who will respect and love you, anyway.

Met with Peter Chislett, and checked out their office space available for startups at 200 Varick Street, called New Work City – they probably have desks for 20 people in a nice loft environment.

Geoff Lewis is the Founder and CEO of Udorse, a company trying to create viral games that currently involve photos and rewards.  They received seed funding from Founders Fund and premiered a private alpha at TechCrunch 50 in September 2009.

Geoff told us the story of starting Udorse:

I started right out of college as an Assistant Brand Manager at P&G, got promoted, and later moved to Europe.  After a few years, I was asked to take on an assignment that I didn’t want to take.  I realized then that when you work for a large company; you are not in control of your destiny.  So I quit and got a job at this hedge fund Clarium and made the big switch from marketing to finance.  I shared an office there with my now co-founder at Udorse, Trevor Austin.  We became buddies and shared a common motif: “when you’re young, you think there is this room full of very smart guys with skinny ties who know all the answers – but really, nobody has the answers.”  In trying to understand the implications that the radical transparency of things like Facebook, Twitter, etc. brought, we started brainstorming and came up with the idea for Udorse.  In July 2009, I was sharing a ride with my boss, the portfolio manager at Clarium, and I mentioned that Trevor and I were brainstorming about starting a new company.  I was scared to even mention it to him, but he actually told me it was a great idea.  He also said that I should leave the hedge fund and that he would invest in us and provide us with office space to use!  I couldn’t believe it; I wished I had tried to do something entrepreneurial a lot earlier.  People shouldn’t be so risk averse when they’re young.  This “track” of lawyer, consultant, banker, etc. is great – but I think more people should take more risks earlier in life.  Our initial model at Udorse is working, we have revenues and 20,000 users, but looking ahead we have found a time-sensitive new opportunity – so we’re changing our strategy.  We are renaming the company and launching a new product called “TopGuest” at South by Southwest.  The worst thing that happens is that we fail, which I think is still better than moving slowly through a big company.

Giovanni Battistini is the entrepreneur behind Zonebee, a research tool that helps legal researchers explore their learning goal before jumping into a search, search content on the Web and beyond, focus on the websites they find, build artifacts that summarize what they’ve learned, and reflect on how they learned it by reviewing and sharing their trails.

Giovanni told us the story of starting Zonebee as a University of Arizona spinout:

I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur until I came to this country from Italy.  Other countries have a comparative disadvantage regarding the entrepreneurial culture, which is what’s so great about the U.S.  Prior to starting Zonebee, I hadn’t spent much time in an academic environment, but I quickly learned that working with a university is all about understanding tech transfer, a traditionally very rigid model.  When I came here, I thought universities would be relaxed and forward-looking when it came to commercializing startups.  I was very wrong.  Most universities are behind the times – they don’t understand that success doesn’t come from the number of spinoffs, but rather the success of those spinoffs in the marketplace.  Spinning Zonebee out from the University of Arizona (licensed) was very difficult.  The process, from start to getting Board of Regents approval, took 2.5 years.  The licensing agreements (including employment clauses, royalty payments, etc.) were way over-engineered – our contracts looked like books!  But we got through it, and quickly afterwards came across our first important challenge – where to focus.  We had to decide whether to provide our offering to other business researchers or directly to consumers.  Because of limited funding, we decided to go B2B; but we weren’t sure of the type of business researchers (news, financial, healthcare, legal, etc.) we wanted to target.  Based on insights from members of our team, we settled on legal researchers – they are well-established providers but don’t understand the free content marketplace.  And every time we spoke with lawyers, we got tremendous feedback.  After making the decision, we quickly realized that law firms buy based on reputation and peer purchases.  So in order to hit the market full-scale, we needed to partner with information companies (publishers like Thompson Reuters) and leverage their credibility.  Startups are all about making decisions without full information.  As an entrepreneur, you really have to be meta-cognitive, learning as you go and adapting quickly.  Our initial business plan at Zonebee became obsolete quickly – I think if it doesn’t, you are doing something wrong or you’re getting very lucky.

Jim and Ingrid run Speaksake, a company that creates recorded CD keepsakes of voice messages from friends and family.  Speaksake’s process is to email invitations to the people you select, who in turn call Speaksake’s phone number and leave voice messages; and then Speaksake puts those messages on an audio CD and ships it to your recipient.  They are working hard to get out of startup stage, and are currently pushing sales and looking to form partnerships.  Their dream to raise $10,000 for patients facing cancer.

Jim and Ingrid told us the story of their moving journey in starting Speaksake:

A few years ago, I [Ingrid] was sick, and Jim and I were apart on my birthday.  So Jim got this amazing idea – he decided to invite all of the people in my life, all of my friends and family, to call a phone line and leave happy birthday messages to me.  Jim put all of these messages together on a CD, added effects, and then he flew across the country and hand-delivered it to me!  When he started playing the CD, I was so moved, completely choked up, hearing my grandmother and all of those other people close to me saying such nice things.  After I received the gift, I immediately wanted to give it back to others.  So we started to do just that, and Speaksake was born.  We’ve had the typical entrepreneurial ups and downs, but it’s been an amazing process.  One of our big challenges occurred when we were ready to launch – Jim was diagnosed with cancer.  He is now in remission, and it ended up being okay, but at the time, people really came together for him, it was really amazing to see how much others cared!  When we first started out with Speaksake, our thinking was too limited – we were only targeting “middle-aged moms” – and we designed the whole website around that idea.  It turns out that lots of different people are interested in this concept.  For us, it’s been a learning process on how to get out of the way of our growing business!  We started Speaksake because we wanted to remind and inspire people to give to others in their own way.  Our company helps people remember what really matters to you, the people in your life.

Jeff Novich runs VocabSushi, an online service that scours the daily news from around the U.S. to find actual examples of specific words, in order to help students improve their vocabulary.  Jeff was an SAT tutor in New York City before starting VocabSushi.

Jeff told us the story of how he came up with the idea:

I had been doing SAT tutoring for 6 years.  A few years ago, I was working with a number of students, trying to help them improve their vocabularies – typically with flash cards and lists and helping them memorize definitions.  I realized the approach worked okay for helping them prepare for the SAT and standardized tests, but students had no idea how to use their vocabulary effectively, in context.  With one particular student, I searched the news for challenging words, and pulled together short paragraphs where those words were used.  I found that when I read short passages with difficult vocabulary, the student would not only grasp context but also improve his reading comprehension, learn what’s going on in the world and discover new words, all without lists, cards or dictionaries. I myself was inspired by Kevin Rose’s story in Businessweek.  I read how he built the first version of his website with freelancers from eLance, and I thought I should try that!  It was an interesting experience – I used a number of different people from various countries (Pakistan, Romania, Hungary, etc.) – they all did little bits of the website, and they all did it really poorly.  I ended up losing a lot of time before hiring a team in NYC face-to-face who shared my vision.  Initially, VocabSushi was going to be a paid service direct-to-students (ala SAT courses), but it was not getting much traction like that.  So I made it free and a funny thing happened.  A lot of teachers called me up and asked how they could use our service for their classroom – and in doing so they asked for specific new features.  So I launched VocabSushi Pro for teachers, tutors, parents, etc.  Self-financing VocabSushi has been tricky, but we’re growing quickly.  We now have over 10K users and were recently picked up in TechCrunch.

Mark Caron is the Founder and CEO of Snac, a mobile widget that makes accessing cell phone content significantly faster.  With Snac, consumers can personalize their own downloadable widget and have a much better, faster mobile phone experience.  Snac recently launched and currently supports 300 different phone models.  Mark is looking to do a $3M Series A in the summer of 2010 to beef up sales and marketing.

Mark told us the story of his entrepreneurial experiences, culminating in starting Snac:

Many founders claim to have a eureka moment, but I don’t know how many of those are really true.  My ventures formed from a series of observations, ideas, and experiences.  I used to be a product manager at Erickson before joining Omnipoint Communications, a 4 person startup, as the marketing guy in the 1990s.  I remember a lot of naysayers back then, saying that it would be difficult for us to raise money and succeed.  But we did, eventually selling the company to T-Mobile in 2000.  That same year, I started MobileSpring, an inter-carrier text messaging service.  It was the peak of the peak of the bubble, and I raised a seed round very quickly.  Soon after, people started throwing money at us.  I remember turning down over $6 million!  After raising our seed round, T-Mobile got back in touch with me and said they needed me to stay on for 6 months longer at Omnipoint, so I did.  At the end of that time, the world had completely changed – I had missed the entire craziness.  In retrospect, I’m glad I hadn’t taken the easy money at that time; it would have made our startup different, perhaps for the worse.  After growing MobileSpring for a few years in the early 2000s, we decided to merge with another mobile software company, Ztango – and I became CEO of the combined company.  In 2004, we sold the combined company to a Korean firm named WiderThan, who was looking to enter the U.S. market.  We had all of the wireless carriers as our customers, which was attractive to them.  After acquiring us in 2004, WiderThan did a U.S. IPO in 2005, and then they themselves got acquired by RealNetworks in 2006!  After that experience ended, I started doing the research that eventually laid the groundwork for Snac.  I realized that there was pent-up demand for people using their mobile phones for web services & content, and that speed was a real challenge.  I started Snac and financed the company from proceeds from my previous startup.  I also did a small angel round.  Having been in the mobile space for over 15 years, I pulled people together from my background, as well as brought in new experts in the consumer applications space.  My vision is that all phones will one day have the faster capability that a product like Snac enables, it is inevitable.

With his firm EnergIntelligence, Brad Shoening is consulting to companies like Cisco on how to manage energy in a corporate environment by enabling devices to to query networks for reporting + scheduling energy levels.  Brad’s goal is to break down barriers and build solutions between energy monitoring and IT-monitoring teams.  While he is currently consulting, he hopes it will lead to a new product venture for himself and is actively looking for potential partners in the energy space.

Deborah Novick runs Silver Lining NY, a small biz consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs create and execute one year growth plans for their small businesses using our Silver Lining Action Plan (SLAP™) model.

Fred Rassam runs business development for Transclick, a software tool offering real-time translation capabilities for cellphones, messaging and collaboration systems.  He joined Transclick when it was still a consulting venture, and helped turn it into a product.  Transclick is currently looking for Series A financing – they have already identified a lead investor and are currently looking for co-investors.

Fred told us the story of how he joined Transclick’s founder in the early days:

I had studied control and embedded systems in engineering school, and after business school, I was thinking of doing tech sales at a large semiconductor firm or technology company like IBM.  A lot of firms weren’t hiring, or jerking me around – I had interviews with several of them, but didn’t find what I was looking for.  Around that time, I went to a party called French Tuesdays, and I met a girl and told her I was looking for a job in tech sales.  She immediately recommended I meet Robert Levin, a former Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, and introduced us.  It turned out that Robert and I had other connections in common.  Transclick started with commercialization of previous work for the US Army Research Lab after receiving a patent in 2006.  I decided to join him in the spring of 2008 – and told him honestly at the time, “I am a semiconductor guy and will be here for the summer, but may move to the Bay area and work elsewhere after that.”  I never left.  It has been a great ride – just 3 months after joining, we were invited by the Tech Museum of Innovation to join them at the Nasdaq bell closing – what a fantastic experience.

Yael Gavish is the co-founder of Auntie Chef, a marketplace to buy and sell homemade food – their mission to make food personal again.  Yael’s background is in technology and management consulting, and she started her business after years in corporate America.  One of her inspirations behind AuntieChef was sharing the food of her mother and grandmother, both great cooks – her startup allows people like them to start their own restaurant virtually.

Yael shared the story of her startup with us:

I wasn’t one of those kids that started a lemonade stand at the age of 7.  I studied computer science in college, and when I graduated in 2000 at the height of the Internet boom, I was getting 5 calls a day with job offers.  Instead of joining a startup, I decided on getting a structured, big company experience.  So I went to Sun Microsystems and worked in their R&D center, which was actually run like a startup!  After Sun, I continued the traditional route, went to business school, and joined McKinsey afterwards.  I really only got into entrepreneurship by process of elimination.  Last year, I was consulting to several mammoth companies, and I saw that in order to make even simple things happen, one needed extraordinary patience and politics.  It was then that I realized that I wanted to make a big impact, quickly.  I started talking to my eventual co-founder of AuntieChef (who was at the time reporting to me at McKinsey) about several different startup ideas.  We considered starting an entrepreneur-networking site, a sauce/spice mix company, and a marketplace for discovering unique niche products – before we came up with AuntieChef – that idea felt right, from the gut.  People always talk about whether to start a business with friends, and whether it will lead to failure or success.  Looking back over the last 9 months, there have been lots of hurdles that we would not have been able to overcome without the incredible trust and understanding that comes with friendship.

Barry Cohen of Cohen Partners has been providing small businesses with insurance for decades.  Barry is sponsoring and running a panel at the 2010 Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference (February 18, 2010).  We recommend him warmly, he’s is a straight shooter and his team provides great coverage.  And Barry’s son Danny was one of CreativeHub’s best interns.

Vasu Kulkarni is the entrepreneur behind Krossover Intelligence, a provider of sports technology products and services.  Krossover is currently helping basketball coaches across the U.S. better analyze game films by processing the video, making it searchable, adding filters to it, and allowing it to be shared.  Since launching in 2008, Vasu has signed up over 30 high school teams and built a company in the U.S. and India.  He is currently interested in fundraising from potential strategic investors.

Vasu told us the story of how he became interested in his field:

I grew up in India and was truly obsessed with basketball, which is pretty tough to follow over there.  But I was that crazy guy who would find a way to watch the sport constantly.  Then I showed up for college at the University of Pennsylvania and realized that everyone else was 5ft. taller than me.  I tried out for the JV basketball team my freshman year, and got cut the first round.  So I spent the next 3 years of school practicing basketball and working out.  I was crazy, but I was dedicated!  By my senior year, I was able to walk onto the JV team.  After school ended, my love for basketball directly led me to start Krossover – the perfect intersection of sports, business, and technology.

TiE NJ-Philadelphia is hosting their next Philadelphia event for entrepreneurs on Feb 18th.  They have two successful entrepreneurs, Dr. Michael Zisman (founder of Softswitch, former CEO of Lotus Development Corp and Managing Director at Internet Capital Group) and Bhairav Trivedi (founder and former CEO, Payquik, curently Head of Global Remittances at Citi) sharing their stories.
http://events.linkedin.com/Building-Business-Scratch/pub/225019

Victor Grillo is a serial entrepreneur who has had great success in the direct response TV space; he was behind the Ginsu Knives and the Ab Roller in the 1990s.  Victor runs Cricket Holdings (one of CreativeHub’s clients), a full service direct marketing company that does product development, DRTV spot creation, telemarketing, customer service, fulfillment services, etc.  They offer lead generation services in the healthcare, financial, legal, and gold-buying industries – and provide a turnkey lead-gen solution for their partners.

Victor’s been involved with many deals, here’s one he told us about:

I’m a pretty casual guy, I always wear jeans and a t-shirt or golf shirt.  When I was selling one of my companies several years ago, I was asked to come to NYC to meet with the potential acquirers and our bankers.  This was a big meeting, the acquisition price was over $100M, and we were supposed to meet at the University Club (a strictly formal attire meeting place in NYC).  I don’t think I even owned format attire back then.  So I’m at the Trump International with my banker, having breakfast at Jean Georges.  The banker starts freaking out when he realizes that I don’t have a change of clothes – he is seeing his commission disappear before his eyes, and he starts panicking, thinking this deal will fall through.  Its 7am, and he calls several clothing stores which are all closed; then he calls some friends, but none of them can come in time for our 9am meeting.  So by 8am, he’s sitting there in a total sweat, saying “we’re screwed, I can’t believe it, we’re screwed!”  As we’re talking, I casually say “It’s a shame we can’t take the waiter’s shirt & tie – he’s just my size.”  The banker’s eyes light up and he turns to the waiter and says “I will give you $5,000 for your shirt & tie!”  Now I have a shirt & tie, but no coat or pants.  We leave the restaurant, and in the hotel lobby, the concierge is standing by his post – the banker runs over to him and pays him thousands of dollars to buy his coat from him!  Now its 8:45am, we hurry over to the University Club, but I am still wearing jeans.  The banker’s friends arrive, and they form a ring around me, hiding me and shuffling me through the lobby.  We get into the elevator, I’m safely inside, and we have the meeting, no problems.  At the end of the meeting, after the deal is done, one of the acquirers comes up to me and asks me why my coat has a pin on it, saying my name is “John” and that I am a concierge at Trump’s hotel!

Ian MacMillan is an entrepreneurship professor at The Wharton School of Business.  Ian pioneered “discovery driven planning,” a methodology of innovating and recreating success with entrepreneurship, and he currently consults to various companies in its practice.  Ian always advises clients that, besides financial projections, a business needs physical projections of what must occur in order to get to success.  He also advises entrepreneurs to think about the opportunity cost of starting a business – today you have a sure income stream, working 9-5 – with a startup, you will work 26 hours a day, 9 days a week, 400 days a year. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, Ian ran an adventure tourism business in South Africa, before selling it to a larger European rival.  He told us about the story of how he creatively exited his adventure tourism business:

After starting the business in the early 1960s with my uncle, who was a nut, we had a great run of it.  But by the late 1960s, the bigger tourism companies moved aggressively into our space.  The way I saw it: you can either sit on your deck chair, holding your hand up to a tsunami approaching – or say “hell with it, I’m going to sell out.”  Just before selling, a friend recommended we invest in woodlands; the price of wood would always go up, he reasoned.  That seemed about as sane as anything else, so we identified a 1,000-acre plot of woodlands in the Canadian wilderness, and we purchased it.  Now, in the middle of this land, there was a beautiful lake, and I thought that it would make for a great vacation resort if only we could build several log cabins for visitors.  But that was expensive.  So I came up with an idea.  For our very last adventure tour, I took out an ad in all the papers in South Africa, and it read: “Most dangerous tour yet. Only the bravest men need apply. Survive a winter in the Canadian wilderness. Build your own log cabins. $3,000.”  Of course hundreds of crazy young guys responded!  We picked the 30 strongest looking ones and shipped them over to our Canadian woodlands, along with an architect to supervise their log cabin building.  They survived a tough winter out there; in fact, one of these crazy buggers was mauled in the leg by a wolverine.  That became their badge of honor, the story of the trip!  And at the end of the winter, we had a beautiful set of log cabins, a perfect resort for our new business.