Tag: business

A reinvention of Techstars

Nicole Glaros2 Comments

For the past 48 hours, I’ve been fielding texts, calls, emails, and mentions, non-stop, due to the post from Techstars about Techstars 2.0, the closing of the Boulder accelerator program and others in key cities, and the shifting of the HQ to NYC from Boulder.

Techstars has been slowly changing and adapting over the years, and yes of course some of that makes me sad. Many of the best moments of my career and life were in the magical early years there. Techstars has been such a gift, not just to me, but to all the early communities.  

We all bonded not just over the mission of the company, but over its values.  We lived, ate, and breathed the values of the company – and what made Techstars so remarkable was we believed we could not only create shareholder value, but instill VALUES alongside it.  Everyone close to the company, alumni and employees alike, they still carry those values and work to uphold them personally. And it’s why I believe the reaction to the news has been so strong!

But Techstars needs to evolve, it needs to iterate, it needs to reinvent itself because what works on a local community level is very difficult, dare I say impossible, to pull off on a global scale.  The values haven’t changed, but how they execute them has to.

I say this as I think about my daughter who is turning 14 shortly, and is one of the reasons I left Techstars back in 2022; I wanted to spend more time with her before she leaves for college. When she leaves, I will be indescribably sad, unbelievably nostalgic, but also incredibly proud of her as I watch her reinvent herself, as I watch her evolve and grow. She’s going to leave ‘home’ in search of her next chapter, but her roots will always remain here in Boulder, here with me.  And when she leaves, it’s then time for me and my husband to reinvent ourselves too.  For everything, there is a season.

So go Techstars, go reinvent yourself, go create the 2.0 version that kicks the 1.0 version’s ass.  Thank you for all you’ve given us, for showing us what’s possible, and for paving the way.  Please keep spreading those values far and wide, and remember always where you came from.

And for all the communities that feel vacant now – it’s a chance for us to reinvent ourselves too. We can reignite that entrepreneurial spirit that’s true to our communities and not in service of anything else.  We’re already working on it in Boulder.  

Go farther together

Nicole Glaros5 Comments

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

African Proverb

I’ve always loved this quote.

Last week, I kicked off a program for venture-backable early-stage founders in Colorado.  I have 14 CEOs participating in 2 groups that meet every other week for 3.5 hours for 6 months. This program was designed to help them go farther together and is an experiment I’m running to see whether or not the framework I’ve developed can help them move the needle on performance.

That’s 14 founders of startups who believed in what I’m trying to do, who signed up for an experiment that takes significant time and effort on their part, with no guaranteed outcome.  When I let myself think about it, it’s humbling, daunting even, and I feel so incredibly lucky and grateful to have pulled such a winning lotto ticket. 

This effort is the culmination of a lifetime of stars aligning, 20 years of professional experience, 10+ years of rumination, and 4 months of running at it as hard as I could. But really, it’s the culmination of a network of people who have helped me go far, rather than just go fast.

For this first program, huge shout out to Natty Zola, Ryan Broshar, Elyse Kent, Tyler Manley, Ingrid Alongi, Brad Bernthal, Rich Maloy, and Taylor McLemore for their referrals. And second shout out to Kirsten Suddath, Brett Jergens and the good people over at Archipelago, and Tom McGrath for hosting us – the ask was huge, and you stepped up and did it with a smile on your face. And thanks to my friend Mark Solon who reminded me to “just go do stuff” and my husband for the continual emotional support.

I’m not going to talk about the program today, rather, because I’m feeling sappy, I just wanted to take a moment to sincerely and publicly thank those who have been so helpful these last 4 months in the background. May we all have those who help us get farther than we ever could alone. 

Add value first

Nicole Glaros10 Comments

I was at an event recently where one of the sponsors took about 5 minutes to address the room, talk about his firm, what they offered, and how to reach them. 

The crowd politely clapped, as everyone usually does with sponsors, but I seriously doubt a single person from that event will reach out – not because he did anything wrong, but rather because there was no value in what he said. Having been in the event organizers’ position of relying on sponsor dollars to make the numbers work, I was bummed for all of them.  And it got me thinking about the notion of value. At Techstars, we had a word for this, it was called #GiveFirst, but in my mind, it’s not just about giving, it’s about adding value first. 

In the early days of Techstars, we didn’t yet have a lot to brag about. I could show a few logos, sure, but like any embryonic company, you’re trying to figure out anything you can say to gain credibility, to gain attention.  I remember trying to recruit companies for Techstars and David Cohen giving me the sage advice to teach people something, rather than just waving a banner.

Oh, the wisdom in that guidance. Rather than just posting about applications opening (which I did with little effect), rather than just asking every person I knew to refer companies (which I did, with little effect), rather than taking out ads (which I didn’t do because I hate ads and we didn’t have the budget), I just started hosting free talks. It was always about something startup-related, and often I didn’t even lead them, rather I got someone else a lot smarter than me to do it. I just promoted it. For instance, Jason Mendelson on “20 ways to f*ck up your company”, or Paul Berberian on the hilarious Zenie bottle story, or Matt Blumberg on how to be a CEO. It was usually an hour long, and I always ended it with “and Techstars applications are open until X – if you have any questions, I’m here and would love to talk to you about it”. The key was the talks were GOOD. They were educational, from people who knew what they were talking about.  And when event attendees saw this small show of value, they could imagine what a whole accelerator program might be like. I often spent sixty minutes or more after the talk answering questions for people interested in the program. And so the flywheel of marketing began to turn. That piece of guidance was a huge driver of the early success of Techstars.

Fast forward a bunch of years, and the same thing happened with Digital Ocean. They were in their infancy, were a cloud hosting provider up against complex behemoths like Amazon, but had some very lofty growth goals. Digital Ocean was proud of how few clicks it took to set up a web server on their hosting platform relative to Amazon which could take hours to figure out. Taking a page out of “add value first” – they followed some sage advice from Jason Seats; rather than buying ad space, they created a bunch of how-to articles including a lesson in how to set up an Amazon web server without errors, literally helping people be successful on their competitor’s platform.  However at the very end of the post, they said “…and if you don’t want to do this work, check out Digital Ocean”. What I loved about this approach was their main focus wasn’t promoting Digital Ocean (although they hoped that they would get customers out of it). Their main focus was making someone else’s life easier.  They eventually IPO’ed, the roots of adding value embedded deep within the fast-growing company.

Companies spend billions of dollars a year trying to get our attention, such as all the ads we are subject to, or that sponsor who paid good money for brand recognition and 5 minutes on a stage. We are so overrun with this noise, that we tune it out – and the response of the marketing departments is to spend MORE money, say it louder, say it more often, creating more noise and making us filter it out even more. It’s a vicious cycle of absence of substance. 

If you want to get someone’s attention, try adding value first. The trick is that value is in the eye of the buyer, not the seller, so you really need to think about what your audience values. Taking out advertisements to tell me how awesome your CRM is doesn’t add value to me, even if I need a CRM, because every CRM is doing the same thing, so it’s just more noise. But taking out an ad to market a free class or video on how your CRM syncs bidirectionally and seamlessly with no code to that spreadsheet my intern uses, and then giving me a month free trial for taking the class? Love it.

Consider setting up a challenge in your company for your marketing team – ‘You aren’t allowed to market. You are only allowed to teach – even if it’s teaching about how to use a competitor’s product’.  How about co-writing a blog post with an investor about some challenge your business is facing, and letting that investor publish it on their website? The ideas are endless, you just need to think creatively.

Adding value takes thinking outside the box, I dare say it’s applicable in everything you do, and when you get it right, people will trust you more. Your customer base will be more tightly vetted, leading to happier customers with longer LTV. Your investor will be more likely to fight for you and bridge your next round when things aren’t going as planned (and let’s be honest, they RARELY go as planned). 

Challenge yourself to find a way to add value in every interaction. You’ll end up with a tidal wave of support that lifts you higher and propels you farther than you could ever imagine.

Nailing your vision is only step 1

Nicole Glaros2 Comments

I’ve recently worked with 2 different companies who are struggling. In trying to help diagnose the issue, I talked to a handful of people (board, leadership team, employees, etc), and when asked “in your own words, tell me what the vision of the company is” – I heard surprisingly different answers. 

We all know how important vision is – in fact, we know it so well that we dismiss it. “Yeah yeah yeah, it’s table stakes, we did that already at last year’s offsite… don’t tell me about how important vision is.”

Yet vision itself is important only to the extent that:

  1. You have one (obviously)
  2. Others know specifically what it is (communicated); 
  3. It can’t be interpreted any other way (clarity), and 
  4. That people on the team are 100% bought into it, emotionally (alignment).

This is where I see a lot of companies go wrong – you need all 4. Ironclad.  Founders invest in the vision, but not in the other 3 steps, and eventually, things go sideways for them.  Let’s break it down.

You have a vision

I’m not going to spend a lot of time here because there have been entire books written about the subject. Just know that it’s not the same thing as your marketing tagline. It’s a rallying cry, it’s your ‘why’, it’s the reason your employees want to work for you and the reason you get up in the morning. Nietzsche famously said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. By the way, profits are not a good rallying cry.  Numbers, generally, are not. Also know that your vision is not your ‘how’, how specifically you’re going to accomplish your why. Your “how” is very necessary as well, and needs the following elements too, but that’s for another blog post.  

Now if you don’t have a vision yet, it’s okay, you’re exploring, discovering. Try not to succumb to the temptation to raise capital at this stage, it’s fundamentally misaligned with discovery (and that is yet again fodder for another blog post).

You’ve communicated it with others

Everyone, and I mean everyone, in the company should know what the vision of the company is. Nearly verbatim. The board, the leadership team, the new hires and interns. People should be able to state it, within a couple of word difference, upon demand. It should be easy to say and easy to memorize, and you should repeat it ALL THE TIME. An exercise once a year doesn’t cut it. Consider every offsite, every board meeting, every all hands – there is a lot of places to repeat your rallying cry to ensure it’s etched in stone.

This is very easy to test by the way, but it can’t be done in a way that gives people the chance to look up the answer, or if they get the wrong answer, they’re in trouble. If you’re in-person, get an advisor or friend of the company to walk around and ask people what the vision is. Have this person keep track of how many seem on point vs off track. It doesn’t need to be super scientific.  Or if you’re on Zoom, there’s a quiz feature that allows for short answers – the goal is to not give people enough time to go look it up, and done in a way that people don’t feel threatened.  Zoom is nice because you can see how off people are. Remember, deviations aren’t their fault, they are yours. Re-train.

Clarity: It can’t be interpreted any other way.

You would be shocked at how different interpretations can be, and when people think it means something different, then people aren’t working towards the same goal. It’s almost the same thing as not having a vision in the first place.  

Again, the test here is pretty easy, just ask!  At your next allhands, ask everyone to come up with various interpretations to the vision. Give an award for the craziest interpretation – make the object of the game to INVENT interpretations, so people don’t feel threatened. Then edit the vision statement as necessary to improve clarity.

Alignment: people are emotionally bought in

This one is the silent killer. Do people really buy in to your vision? How do you know? Just because they’re not debating or not pushing back, doesn’t mean they’re bought in. Whenever people aren’t debating, I’ve found it means one of three things:

  1. They agree. IMHO I find this case the least likely of the options, yet CEOs think it’s the most common. Beware.
  2. People disagree but they aren’t pushing back and helping you refine it because they don’t feel safe to disagree with the boss.  This causes much bigger issues in the company beyond vision.
  3. They disagree, they’ve told you so, they don’t think you’ve listened, or don’t care, they think you’re wrong and aren’t ‘disagreeing and committing’. They are going to do it their own way, your way be damned. Or they’re going to do it your way, but do it half-assed, so that mistakes abound.

This one is much harder to test becaues people won’t readily admit to it, and once you’re far down the road on issue 2 or 3, it’s hard to repair. The best way to avoid this fate is to start early, ask often, remember people’s concerns so that when you’re wrong and they’re right, YOU say so and not them, and ask people to disagree and commit. A good tactic for this is the Fist of Five, where everyone, simultaneously, votes with their fingers a score between 1-5, where 1 is “hell no, this is a freaking mistake”, 3 is “maybe, I need more info”, and 5 is “hell yeah, let’s do this”. 

Without communication, clarity, or alignment, your vision is merely hallucination (thanks to Gino Wickman for that little nugget). People always seem to focus on the vision, that’s where they put their greatest attention. But remember you aren’t done once the vision is decided. It then needs to be communicated effectively, without room for interpretation, and people need to be bought in. From there, THEN you focus on how to execute the vision. Otherwise the time you spent on vision is wasted and it will have little to do with outcome of the company.

If the company is struggling generally and you’re having a hard time putting your finger on why, run through the above exercises to rule out murky vision and alignment as the reason why.

Now go thee and conquer!

Bigger isn’t always better, better is better

Nicole Glaros3 Comments

There is a long-running belief that things grow or die. In startups and in business, growth tends to mean more topline revenue.

But growth doesn’t have to mean more topline revenue. Growth can also mean improvement, better; better product, better systems, better processes. Here’s the thing (I always have a thing), better almost always leads to bigger, naturally.

The challenge with focusing exclusively on topline revenue when you want to grow is that problems nearly always scale faster than solutions.  When you throw dollars into marketing and sales, without a healthy, underlying business, the top line will grow, giving you false positive feedback, which leads to you to keep spending. However, problems are being created, and are scaling faster than the revenue, and eventually those challenges will consume the company leading to its ultimate demise. For instance, you can’t see that the CAC to LTV ratio no longer works – or maybe it never worked and you figured that by spending more in different niches, it would eventually work. Or maybe you don’t even know what the unit economics actually are, and you’re scaling a business that fundamentally doesn’t work. Or you can’t see that there’s disagreement on the direction of the company at the leadership team level. Or you can’t see that while growth is happening, customer returns/dissatisfaction and churn are happening at a faster rate than before. Or your team spends more time firefighting than driving results, creating incredible inefficiencies and destroying the bottom line (not to mention the employee turnover).

But if you focus on better, the company’s topline revenue often will grow naturally without any additional sales and marketing effort, and often with the same, dare I even say lower, costs – making the business itself healthier in all dimensions.

For instance, a focus on a ‘better user experience’ will ultimately result in:

  • Fewer customer support calls
  • Fewer bugs
  • Happier customers
  • Fewer refunds
  • Higher lifetime value, more renewals
  • Lower churn
  • Higher referral rates, increased virality coefficient or network effects
  • Happier employees
  • All of these items equal less cost, or more revenue, or both.

The better approach indeed takes more time to flow through your company compared to the let’s just throw more marketing/sales dollars at it approach – but it absolutely leads to a healthier, more successful company. And when it’s healthier, it will ultimately lead to bigger top-line revenue.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend more on marketing/sales when you want to grow, but I am saying that you should take a hard, long, honest look at the business before you do so. 

Before you decide to scale the business:

Understand the unit economics and the levers of the business first. What are your unit economics? $1 spent in sales/marketing = how much in revenue? If you don’t yet know your unit economics or the levers that drive the business, you are not ready for growth. You absolutely need to know these metrics before stepping on the gas, otherwise, you’re just burning cash and praying for a miracle. Not sure how to go about this? Check out the book Levers by my dear friend Amos Schwartzfarb for a crash course.

Look for areas in the business to improve.  Here are common ones:

  • Product market fit – are you really in the best market for your offering?
  • Removing bugs (everyone’s least favorite – but reduces customer support costs and improves customer satisfaction)
  • Improving UX, steps, clicks, intuitive workflows, etc
  • Become obsessed with reducing the number of customer support calls because customers just get it, and it just works.
  • Become obsessed with how much customers love your product. What features can you remove (not add), or what niche can you focus on, to improve the love.
  • Removing steps in any process you have internally – this will reduce employee time spent on ‘tasks’
  • Removing policies – policy is never a good substitute for holding people accountable for good judgment, and it slows everyone down.
  • Identify redundancies in the business and remove them.
  • Look for gaps in the business “it’s not my job” and fill them.
  • Push reversible and inconsequential decisions down in the business as low as you can get them 
  • Improve alignment – is everyone incentivized similarly, or by the right things? Make it so.
  • Simplify – what areas can you simplify? Org structure, processes, policies, product.

Monitor the unit economics and key levers as you work on areas to improve, you should see movement! Maybe you started at a $1 marketing/sales spend = $3 revenue ($1:$3), and through your efforts it grew to $1:$4. Hell yeah! Be a little patient though, it can take 6-12 months to flow through the system.

Once you decide to increase sales and marketing spend, keep an eye on those levers and metrics – when you see the ratios start to head south, hold or reduce spending, and investigate. Don’t just keep throwing money at it.

The one exception to this is when your company is very early stage, and you have little to no revenue. But then your focus isn’t on ‘growth’, but rather finding out if you have product market fit (PMF). Don’t confuse the two. A doubling of your customer base or revenue doesn’t necessarily mean PMF. The best measure of PMF that I’ve seen is called the Sean Ellis test, whereby >40% of your customers would be ‘very disappointed’ if they couldn’t use the product anymore. Now, you need a customer base large enough to have statistical significance, and in most mathematical circles, that’s >30, however, I recognize if your customer base is large enterprises, that might be challenging.  But I digress.  If you’re still in PMF mode, do not, I repeat, do not focus on growth. Focus on PMF. Don’t focus on growth until you’re sure you have PMF.

However, there is a play that says “grow at all costs”, and on extraordinarily rare examples, this play works because you can have market effects. Grab as much of the market as possible, which will kill the competition, and then focus on quality later. But for this play to work, you have to be in a winner-take-most market, you have to be extraordinarily well funded, with low-to-reasonable valuations, and very understanding and aggressive investors who commonly invest in the next rounds even if the fundamentals of the business aren’t yet healthy, in a highly stable or growing market cycle. Given all of that is out of your control, you literally cede control of your future and company to fate. Your success lies in the hands of luck, not skill. If it were me, I’d want to stack the odds in my favor by building a healthy business before focusing on growth.

This year, as you’re working on your budgets and strategic plans, consider a focus on quality, a focus on better. Then enjoy bigger happen naturally, with lower costs and headaches, and more pride in what you’ve built.