albedrio.com

It has been a hell of week. On Wednesday our team wrote like hell to submit a federal grant proposal. I was depleted. Exhausted. Mind blank.

Yet that was not all…on Friday I had another deadline, this time for the Enterprize Business Plan Competition. So on Thursday morning I fired up iWork Pages, stared at a blank screen, and let it rip. I did have a financial model done already, so I had it all in the head…it just had to pour out over the next 36 hours. Thirty minutes before the deadline, I race to my car to deliver the paper copies…and found it…blocked by another car. I leapt over the valet parking dudes, who, fortunately, were behind the blockage, and I spoke in that wailing tone that tells you, “Do This NOW!” Through the miraculous power of Divine Providence, I made it at 4:57pm, three minutes before the deadline. Let me tell you…I broke all available traffic laws, but I made it.

What I learned is that when you really want it, you will make it happen.

What I learned is that Clearshore is a really good concept. Writing the business plan taught me that.

What I learned is that I am blessed beyond conception, being at the right place at the right time with the right team. I am stunned. Amazed. Thankful!

Last April my friend Ramphis Castro and I started kicking around the idea of a “Pitch Club”, an opportunity t for local entrepreneurs to get their pitching groove on, and in the back of my mind this could serve as a platform for angels to start congregating on a regular basis, the model pioneered by the Band of Angels. Wouldn’t you know it, that Jason Calacanis’ This Week in Startups would launch Global Meetups built around pitching. We instantly recognized it as the platform for our Pitch Club vision.

Yesterday we saw the vision realized with the second Startups on a Global Stage event, a pitch workshop leading up to a pitching Jason Cohen, and later pitching Jason Calacanis in the Global Meetup, which we did starting at 29:17 of this video:

The minute the first local entrepreneur started pitching Cohen, we knew it was a success. I mean, this was hard to organize. Not setting up the technology, securing the venue or scoring free food sponsorship…the folks I spoke to simply were not ready to pitch their companies, and others were just afraid that someone would steal their ideas.

I thus asked Jason Cohen specifically about this, and he was quite clear that:

1. Pitching is a discipline of clarity…people who don’t pitch usually don’t have a clear idea themselves of what the company is all about.
2. Your ideas will be copied anyway, so you are better off leveraging the advantages of pitching!

Ramphis led the pitch workshop, influenced by the excellent Pitching Hacks, and Luis Almodovar of Brainvent beat out his competitors to pitch Jason Calacanis:

This is just the beginning! We have tasted the power of using interactive video, combining Skype and Ustream, to cross the oceans and connect entrepreneurs directly to the investors, angels, mentors and partners already on the world stage, and who can help us get there. We look forward to the ride!

Photo Credits: Hector Ramos

I was just  chatting with a young, bright entrepreneur with a vision new functionality in the location-based services space. Yes, you ask, could your be more specific? Isn’t every single soul in Silicon Valley in this space? True, yet this found had the moxie to get a meeting with a top company in the space…a senior partner…yet from the looks of it he was ready to talk about his product functionality, with the ask being as showcase or getting into the senior partner’s roadmap.

Hold on.

I get exactly how that works for the founder, yet how does it work for the senior partner? First, we need look at a day in HIS life. It turns out that they are in a battle for their lives, and are desperate for more time in order to build their franchise before a titan slits their throat. 

Oh, bingo!

We formulated a way to talk about the product functions in a way that directly addressed the strategic partner’s competitive situation and threat. Now the startup founder is speaking as a peer, solving pressing problems, rather than as a supplicant hoping to make it past the audition.

So the answer is yes, partners are customers, too. Put yourself in their shoes, and you will see a whole new world of opportunity.