thederekjohnson.com

My experience in fundraising has been primarily with Angel Investors, but I had to post the advice I received from Bill Bryant a venture partner from Draper Fisher Jurvetson regarding how to get a meeting with a VC. Not only is this good advice while working the VC scene, most of these tips also work very well to get in front of Angel investors.

Bill’s comments & tips are below…

You should know that the likelihood of a response (let alone an eventual investment) to an unsolicited, over the transom email approximates being attacked and eaten by an Australian man eating croc here in Puget Sound.

Investors receive literally thousands of plans. I believe that DFJ received something on the order of 12,000 plans in the US (30 thousand worldwide across all affiliates). That’s 1K per month, ~ 30 each and every day.

Unless a deal is referred in by someone known to the firm, the plans are not reviewed. Not because they aren’t some viable businesses but because there isn’t enough time in the day to properly review.

If you want your plan to be reviewed by a VC that you do not know, in this order, here are the best ways to accomplish the objective:

1)  Get an entrepreneur who has made money previously for that particular firm to introduce your plan to the partner that they worked with. This is a 100% guaranteed approach.

2)  Get an advisor or board member who has been working with the company for a few months, and has credibility and knowledge of that firm & its partners through previous deals or general reputation, to introduce your plan.

3)  Get one of your reputable angel investors, hopefully one who is known to that VC, to make the introduction.

4)  Get your attorney to introduce (but only if they are from a group of legal firms known to do early stage corporate finance).

5)  Get your commercial banker from the very few banks that cater to early stage companies to make the introduction.

So, we’ve got a cool little contest for you.

We just received a few cases of Brain Toniq, and we thought we’d give one case away to you, the readers.

Here’s the contest, we’re looking for the best impersonation of Derek, jazz hands and all. Leave us your best impersonation of “THE” Derek Johnson in the comment section below using the “Record video comment” option. The contest ends February 5th, so get your entries in!

Best of luck, looking forward to the videos!

- Andrew and Alex

At Tatango we have been wrestling with one function of our website for months now, and it’s frustrating as hell. This one function alone has caused heated arguments, hundreds of revisions, and many a late night at the office. We just tried a new approach to fix this function, and it failed yet again. After this failure, one of our new employee threw up his hands and said “this sucks, we just wasted a week and haven’t got any closer to solving the problem”. That’s not the way to think as an entrepreneur. Think of trying different approaches to a problem like Russian Roulette. You know one of those chambers has a bullet, the more blanks you fire, the closer you are to figuring out which one has the bullet. (maybe not the perfect analogy because in Russian Roulette, you don’t want to find the bullet, but I think you get the idea.)

“If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try again” - Thomas H. Palmer

Announcing the winners of the free tickets for the Teens in Tech Conference!

I want to give a big congrats to Mitch, Mike, and Luke!  Your reasons for wanting to go have earned you tickets to the conference as well as dinner with the Tatango Team!

To view the winners, click here

 I’d like to thank all of you for entering the competition. Even my sister Amanda entered, so feel honored!  (Sorry, Amanda.)

To pick up your free tickets and to arrange dinner with us, email Andrew Dumont at adumont@tatango.com.

Ciao.

At Tatango we all work in our own private offices, well until tonight. We just moved myself, marketing, PR and our interns into one space to see if we can generate a better working environment by having all of us together. (engineers and designers still get to keep their private offices… for now) I will keep you updated on the results. A picture of the new workspace is below, threw all the computer together in under 20 min so it isn’t too pretty. 

Below is Nathan Carnes advice for entrepreneurs. For more information on Nathan Carnes, be sure to check out his website or follow him on twitter.

How to get cool, professional business cards for less than $100

With the spread of affordable graphic design tools and inexpensive digital full-color printing, getting professional business cards is a much faster (and cheaper) process than ever before. There’s no excuse for having boring cards on cheap paper stock. If you’re using Avery tear-apart sheets from Office Depot and your $50 inkjet printer at home, I’m looking at you.

Even if you don’t have the design skills to design your own business cards, you can still get them done for a decent price. Here’s how.

1. Get your act together. Gather all of the information you want on your business card, exactly how you want it to appear. This will include your name and business, at least some contact information (phone and e-mail address at a minimum, address and fax if you want, website address if you have it), and things like your title if you want. If you have a logo, get a high-resolution (or better, AI, EPS, or PDF vector) of it for your designer.
2. Figure out your style. Find examples of business cards you like. Dig through business cards you’ve received, promotional giveaway bowls at restaurants, and scour sites like FaveUp.com. Make sure the style you like matches your personality and business. I don’t want my dentist to hand me a business card with a grungey style.
3. Find a designer. Look around online, or look through your local Yellow Pages, but either way, find a designer who’s work you love, and who works in the style you want. Get in touch with them, and ask them if they can put together a business card for you, ready for Overnightprints.com or VistaPrint, in one hour with no revisions. Let them know you already know what style you want and have your information and logo together, and let them know you’ll pay upfront, in cash.Remember how I said you had to find a designer who’s work you loved? No revisions means that you get what you get. If you like the designer’s portfolio, chances are they’ll surprise you with their creativity, and you’ll get something better than what you pictured. If not, well, you’re only out for an hour’s labor. That’ll run you $45-85 in most cases.
4. Get them printed. Since you asked your designer to get your cards ready for a specific printer, you should be ready to go, right? There are lots of options for printing, but for speed, price, and convenience, I find it hard to beat either VistaPrint or Overnightprints.com. You can find coupons online that will lower the cost of 500 business cards, full color and double-sided, to around $35 more often than not. Hard to beat.

There you go. Professionally designed, professionally printed business cards for less than $100 in a lot of cases. Sure, it’s a little scary to have so little input on the design, but I think you’re better off letting a good designer run with their imagination than go through a long revision process with a cheap design who’s work you don’t like. Now that you have no excuse, get out there and get going!

I was at a house party last night, surrounded by people my age that are in college. A few times the same question was asked of me, “What is it like being your age and the CEO of an internet startup?” I obviously answered with my same cocky response, “It’s fun as hell”, but this morning I realized that I needed to give them more. I needed to find a way to put the pressure, stress, and rewards of a job like this, in a context that a college student may understand. Below is how from now on I will try to explain to a person in college what my life is like.

• Everyday you have final exams, and everyday after that.

• Your girlfriend, friends, etc. are all on summer vacation and wanting to go out and have fun while you are in the middle of final exams. 

• You are hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt and you are crazy enough to be meeting with new credit card companies to ask for more money.

• You have gone to the race track and put your entire life savings, reputation and college career on one horse that runs really well in the muck, and the weather is completely out of your control.

• Your family wants a quarterly report, which includes your grades, how many friends you have, what you have spent, what you have made and they also have the right to ask you for anything else they want to know. Also don’t think about lying to them, the government can now throw you in jail for lying to your parents.

• Every purchase you make (textbooks, housing, food, entertainment) is all being scrutinized by your parents and has to be justified.

• Every new friend you want to make, you have to get your teachers approval, you have to find a way to pay for that new friend’s college tuition and everyday expenses. To make matters worse, their parents want them to stick to the current friends they already have.

• You have the press, your parents, family, friends, teachers, administrators, etc. watching every move you make.

• You are majoring in some obscure study, that everyone around you has no clue what you are doing, they can’t help, they can’t sympathize with what you are doing and some of them keep asking you why you just didn’t choose an easier major. Read More →

Post the reason(s) you think you would most benefit from going to the Teens In Tech Conference in San Francisco. I will pick the most deserving person from the comments below and they will get (2) free passes and I will take them out to dinner to meet the entire Tatango team. Good Luck!!!

I was asked by Seattle 2.0 to keep a journal while I was in the Bay Area, which would allow their readers to get a glimpse into the life of a startup CEO during the fundraising process. Below are my journal entries, enjoy!

TUESDAY

11:00 PM - Tomorrow morning I have an investment presentation to the screening committee for the Vancouver Angel Network for Technology Companies at 9AM. As I’m finishing up work at our office in Bellingham, I make the last minute decision after getting news of more snow coming overnight, to drive up to Vancouver. I decide to stay overnight in a hotel to make sure there will be no problems making the trip to the presentation in the morning. Being on a startup budget, it’s very rare that I get the luxury of staying at a hotel, so I’m going to enjoy it.

WEDNESDAY

8:00 AM - I catch a cab to my investment presentation, and thankfully I made the decision to stay overnight in the city, as the roads are horrible due to last nights snow fall.

8:50 AM - The company presenting before me turns out to be Tagga who is also in the mobile space, with more of a focus on the commercial aspect of text messaging. I introduce myself to their CEO and we discuss a few strategic ways that we may be able to help each other in the coming year.

9:00 AM - The screening committee for the Vancouver Angel Network for Technology Companies has 6 members, and I present our 10 minute PowerPoint investment deck. After the presentation, a few of their members say that our deck was one of the best they had seen all year. I owe most of the credit to the screening committees of the various Seattle Angel Groups who have been such a great help in refining our deck. I actually wrote a blog post about all of the things I’ve learned in regards to doing Angel presentations, be sure to check it out here.

9:30 AM - The investment presentation is over and I head back to the hotel to catch the shuttle bus to the Vancouver Airport, for my flight to San Francisco.

5:00 PM - After touching down in San Francisco, I take the BART, which is a subway that runs from the airport into the city. The BART only costs $5.50 compared to the other option of a much more expensive cab ride into the city.

6:00 PM – I meet Ian, one of my Delta Upsilon Fraternity brothers from UW at his office. He works for McKesson, one of the largest health care services company in the US. We grab a cab back to his apartment, where I will be crashing on his couch for the remainder of the trip. Welcome to the glamorous life of a startup CEO. When we get back to his apartment I get my first wake up call into the realities of the cost to live in the San Francisco. He has a 2 bedroom, 1200 sq. apartment and pays $2,500 a month.

9:00 PM - We venture out into downtown San Francisco to grab a bite to eat. It’s amazing how many different restaurants there are, we pick a Thai restaurant with the assistance of Yelp, which from what Ian tells me is one of the hottest apps in the city.

11:00 PM - We get back to Ian’s apartment and he graciously lends me a pillow and a blanket to crash on his couch, calling it a night.

Read More →