Each year, we go on a 3 week trip with about 25 of our founders. We take them all around the US – New York, Boston, and San Francisco. The calendar is filled back to back with meetings, and we are constantly travelling.

What I learnt from the past three trips is how you travel smoothly, stay alive, and still get work done:

Travel light

Try to reduce your luggage to a minimum. This doesn’t only increase movability, it also makes dressing much faster.

• Planning laundry in my calendar so I can take clothes for only one week (8 days to be exact)
• Taking clothes that match each other so I can combine anything with anything
• Have a large enough suitcase/bag so I can simply throw stuff together when I am running late or need to leave fast
• I use this duffle bag (90 litres), my super cool backpack, and I take a small shoulder bag as an alternative for days in meetings
• I pack items I can use for different things – running shoes that are decently stylish to wear during the day, items I can layer in the different climates

Stay Healthy

One of the obvious problems, especially when having an established workout or fitness routine at home, is sports and diet. Since I started to take this more seriously at home, I have put an effort into keeping it up on the road.

• Get plenty of sleep. It’s the key to staying fit.
• Use the jet lag to your advantage: I get up early and go to the hotel gym or do exercises in my room.
• Go running or walking where you can. Take the stairs, not the elevators.
• Avoid junk food like the plague. Anyone who knows me is aware this is my Kryptonite.
• Eat lots of green food, and make sure you stay fuelled during the day with nuts and fruit – no candy.

Unwind

Being in the action for three weeks is a lot of fun. However, just like at home, you need to make sure to unwind a little to start the next week on the road with the same energy as before.

• Meet friends. I have amazing friends in all of the places we go to – the US trip is actually a great opportunity for me to see them.
• Stay with friends. This is even better, especially over the weekends. Spending your waking hours with people you care about makes being away from home much easier.
• Talk about something other than startups and tech. Give your mind a break.

Stay in touch with home

Being in a long distance relation ship from Berlin to London is terrible enough. Adding 6-9 hour of time difference to that is hard. I usually talk to Isa at least in the morning and evening, and we stay in touch during the day as well. I can deal with two weeks without seeing her that way, but 3 weeks on the road without her just make me miserable. This is the hardest part.

• Having a smartphone and sending pictures and messages is gold.
• I added an international voice package to my US phone. Best decision ever.

Basically, travelling and being on the road makes you vulnerable and amplifies every experience – for good and bad. In the last two weeks I have found the above to be helpful for me. I know I will be travelling more than ever this year, so I hope I can keep this up.

One from the email outbox, regarding a founder who asked about focus for each cofounder, as they were feeling they were duplicating work.

My answer:

Think about the three things that are most important for your business at the moment, and where you spend the most time.

I would assume it is something like building product, fundraising/long term planning, and distribution/getting users/talking to users are your main priorities at the moment. This roughly translates into CEO, CTO, and COO. Now, fixing the exact positions and names to individuals now is probably overkill, but between those areas, try to decide who is best.

• Who would best present the company at a conference? Who would talk to investors and sell the company best? Who would spend time hiring senior folks?
• Who makes the best decisions about technology and product? Who is the best coder? Who understands implications of big product and technology decisions best?
• Who understands the user psychology best? Who figures out the smartest way to get more users?

On top of these – who enjoys doing what?

Now, you might not know all the answers to these questions, but try turning them around. That means, think about who is most likely to be better at it that the others. Think about which parts of these questions who would like to know more about, learn more about, and be good at.

You can still change the exact area of focus later, but these three things are what needs to get done first. Thus, picking the best for each area is key. You will still need to find a good way of dividing decision power, but having each area with one of you as the “Chief Of” will be very helpful.

I sat near a young family on my flight to Berlin last week, and was able to listen in on a very interesting conversation on what’s currently cool with ~16 year olds.

I heard a lot about various apps, learned a lot about fashion, and was able to confirm the my suspicion that headphones are definitely a more important device of differentiation than various phone brands or operating systems. Here are some tidbits I caught:

What is the right phone?

Dad asked daughter (16ish) if she was happy with her new Android phone. Her answer was delivered in typical Dad, you bore me and you know nothing: “seriously, nobody cares if its android or apple. You and your apple things, dad!” Dad wanted to know more what people use, and the answer was that the poor (sic) kids in class had an iPhone touch, and most others had one of the relatively large android phones. And it didn’t really matter because Skype was on all anyways.

Skype groups are big

This pushed the conversation to Skype – Mum didn’t know Skype was on phones now too. Obviously “Mum, because you don’t know anything about computers”. The more interesting bit was that the group of friends in question would use Skype groups for most conversations, and getting into the right groups was the thing to be worried about. Access to and control of these groups is apparently tightly guarded and the origin of a lot of mobbing and clique behaviour. Interesting.

Whatsapp and Bbm are for nerds and the rich kids btw. Who by now are, “like, so acting like its cool but its not. It doesn’t even have good apps”.

Brands

A large part of the conversation was about fashion and the necessary brands to wear. One thing than stood out to me was the fact that this girl spoke about the actual SKU and color names of items – “I really just need the dirty melee grey workout sweater by American Apparel” (I made that name up). Kind of freaky.

Kids will be kids

Overall, the one thing that did not change since I was 16 (not very long ago, really), is the cliquey behaviour of youth, and the incredible importance of segmenting oneself into a certain niche. Getting accepted and being in the right group is the number one thing kids seem to think about.

If you are interested in these kinds of thoughts, check out Josh Miller’s article. Much more in depth than this rambling…

“For instance, we often ask startups for their analytics logins during due diligence and compare what we find there to patterns from our successful investments. This morning we will be meeting to discuss how to systematize this effort and support it with some actual technology so that we can more easily discover and track new companies.”

—

This is from a post by Albert Weissman on how USV uses analytics techniques to decide on investments. Go ahead and read the whole thing.

500 startups use a similar philosophy: using data on their portfolio companies, especially the early investments, to figure out in which ones to follow on/double down in. Here’s an interesting Post Dave wrote about it.

I like the way both 500startups and USV think about it. In my opinion it is incredibly valuable to use in the series A/B stages of investing, when early patterns are arising. While it can sound like “hey, we just look at the data”, the actual implementation depends extremely deeply on the experience of the team (where, obviously, nobody needs to worry about USV or 500). You need a lot of insight into the data to decide what the patterns and developments actually mean.

In the end, the question is if it will allow you to avoid more type 1 or type 2 errors, i/e. does it serve to avoid investing in the wrong ones, or to avoid missing the right ones? As the usual tricky questions like access to deal flow, ability to join rounds, etc. still apply, this is probably an approach that is most useful for well connected and already successful investors.

Growth is hard.

In the past weeks, one topic came up again and again, in scarily similar situations and conversations. My job puts me in touch with hundreds of early stage (and I mean early) companies and their founders. Usually these guys haven’t started a company before, and also haven’t spent too much time in product focused companies or successful startups. That is what makes most of them so hungry, ambitious, and driven: the belief in being able to do better and faster than others.

Now, this belief doesn’t stop or go away with most entrepreneurs, but it is usually very soon accompanied by either an unstoppable drive to just DO SOMETHING or an insatiable hunger to learn and find out how to actually be better and faster. These two extremes are obviously healthy for neither founder nor startup success, and thus hopefully mitigated by advice or exhaustion.

This is why my position is great: I can see, analyse and share insight from over 70 portfolio companies, and of course also from the more than 200 companies per year that come to our events. My observation is that at one point the above will happen: either the decision to double down, or to learn the shit out of best practices that can help pave the way out of startup stalemate.

The single most important observation for founders usually comes after they have launched the first version of their product: It is crazy hard to get distribution, i.e. large scale adaption for your product. A lot of teams then start looking exhaustively for the one silver bullet that will save them. This is usually an attempt to:

• get covered on Techcrunch or another blog they read themselves
• get a celebrity user (in recent times, celebrity user-investor)
• publish an infographic
• start posting to HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc about their startups

Obviously, none of these work.

To quote my math teacher from high school: “It’s not supposed to be easy. You guys are smart.”

That’s why Growth Hacking is the new cool. With the lean startup methodology, there is now a somewhat scientific method to building product. Growth Hacking takes care of the next step – or is supposed to find at least some copper bullets.

(BTW, not everybody thinks so)

Quora blogging is back… Yesterday someone asked me how they could break into the startup game, so I tried to find a good post on Quora to send him. Turns out, there was almost exactly that question waiting for me (link to post) when I logged in, so I just answered that.

Short answer: In today’s world, you will most likely have to go ahead and build a product, even a very basic version, to show someone that you are worth investing in.

Long answer:

Here’s a potential list of you to go by, assuming that you are in jobs, and live a rather busy life. In case you are in college or freelancing, things will probably be a lot easier (because you have more time and flexibility to refocus on “the new thing”).

1. Define “the new thing”:

What do you want to do? Where do you want to end up with?
This is important for both of you to understand in the first place, and will hopefully be solved already: both of you had an idea together and you now want to turn it into a company/potential business. Even if you say “we just want to try”, you will have to see for yourselves how committed you are, and how far you want to take it (taking into account current jobs, future contracts, family, etc).

2. Start building.

(I assume) you both have the skills to build, so just go ahead and come up with a first iteration or version of it. It can be total crap, but you will find out

• what you need to improve
• what you need to teach yourself to make it better
• what works well and – gasp – other people like about it

3. Rinse and repeat, find time and energy by:

• taking small steps to have instant feedback and rewards
• agreeing on some days or hours you both work on it together
• not letting it slip off the radar – prioritising it
• talking about it – friends, early users, and lurkers will keep you on your toes with feedback and comments

4. Start getting into the startup game:

• READ ALL THE BOOKS (“The Lean Startup” will suffice)
• READ ALL THE BLOGS (Hackernews and Quora will give you a decent start on what’s relevant)
• Go to some events, and try to learn from them, get value and feedback. Don’t go back if you found it nice, but not valuable for your “New Thing”.

5. Try charging for what you have.

You will be surprised by how many people might pay you for it.

6. Start thinking about getting money again when:

• you have built something
• you want to/need to make this a full time gig
• your savings run out
• there is a lot of buzz and traction around your idea (i.e. people are passionate about using it)

Also, do NOT look for money to do one of the following:

• Architect your product to scale to facebook size (worry about users first)
• Legitimise doing a startup to your family, partner, or friends (you are the CEO, that’s totally legit)
• Build a marketing/biz dev/HR/legal/any team before people are actually using your product

7. Go talk to business angels and good accelerator programs to see who would be a good fit

• think about this earlier than when you actually need it (you will anyways)
• find out what they are looking for, and see if you are a good fit
• pitch them.

8. Go build that company

rinse and repeat above, and start dishing out advice on Quora

We spend a lot of time talking about mentoring, advising, and helping companies. Not just at Seedcamp – the whole startup ecosystem is trying to figure out what the best way to grow and support a startup is.

Obviously, there are a lot of people who want to get involved – be it for fame, money, or benevolent motives. In the end, and this is aimed more at you startups out there than anybody else, you need to find out who will do you good and will be good to work with.

With the help of Juan, the founder of Traitperception, I managed to come up with a very simple measurement that can be used to at least roughly figure out whether a person is someone you should or want to work with.

Traitperception is working on a methodology to compare people based on their traits, which might be used for evaluating various things like likeability, a fit for a given position, etc. One good example where it can be used effectively are 360 degree reviews – which by definition, are very relative in nature. You answer a couple of questions about your colleagues, they do so in return, and then everybody gets a rough idea where they stand.

The key about this is the relative nature of rankings. Too numerical or absolute rankings are usually difficult or at least controversial, so TP went a different route.

Intelligence

When you compare people you work with, their smarts are undoubtedly one of the key points you will think about. However, does it really impact you how intelligent someone is? Yes, it makes for insight and sometimes learning, but it doesn’t say much about how that will rub off to you (hint: not much). Not a good measure.

Helpfulness

People who help out most and are always available are the best advisors and mentors. Really? When someone is always there for you – will you learn things on your own? Will you still make your own decisions? Is any help good help? This last point is a sure no, and as anyone who went through a set of mentoring sessions can tell you – a good chunk of advice is not necessarily good for you or your company. Not a good measure.

Activity

Much like helpfulness, a lot of doing and making isn’t always the right thing. Intros, feedback, work, and opinions can sometimes be too much, and it’s hard to stop when you don’t want to stub someone’s toes. Not a good measure.

Likability

Being nice is, well, nice. Being treated nice is nice too. But too often people hide their real feelings or opinions because they want to be nice, and not too honest. Especially in the startup world, everybody is a winner, and everything is “awesome” most of the times. This is why a lot of feedback is watered down and not very straight forward, and why a lot of have to’s are disguised as should maybe’s. It’s easier to be nice, but not always right (I am quite a blunt person, so that’s just my own blunt opinion). Not a good measure.

You already know what’s next:

Impact

What you really want to measure is the impact of that raw smartness, niceness, and helpfulness on you and your project, company, or business. How can someone change the business for the better, and use all of the above measure to do one thing: improve the situation you’re in. In line with the 80-20 rule and the GTD and the PMinventssomeratio rule, impact is a pretty easily graspable concept that you can apply in many situations. Of course, it is again very relative to the situation you’re in, but that’s the beauty of it.

Empathy

While likability and helpfulness are great, they only measure a superfluous trait of a person, that is irrelevant of the situation. Also, both can often stand in the way of someone giving you good, or better, advice than when disregarding those factors, as I made the point above. A great measure, and a relative one at that, is empathy: The ability to understand and share another being’s feelings. In this context, the ability of a mentor to realize what will make a founder or team understand and appreciate his insights, is probably an apt explanation of the rather academic definition.

The ratio: Impact and Empathy

Here we go, with a simple ratio as the outcome of all this thinking: When you measure people around you on the scale of their positive impact, and their ability to show empathy towards your situation, you will hopefully be able to identify those that are both able to help you get to your goals more efficiently by being impactful, and more effectively, because they are able to aptly connect to you and your team.

Tell me what you think, and how you think about people you work with in a relationship that warrants measuring impact and empathy. I am sure this can be applied to all kinds of situations, like coworkers, personal trainers, and much more.