"How do You Find your Wife?" and other such compelling questions and answers on team-building....

At our second Alliance of Angels Alumni event, panelists Robert Bergquist (CEO of Widemile) , Jeremy Jaech (CEO of Trumba) and Glenn Kelman (CEO of Redfin) shared some gems on team-building with a standing-room only crowd. John Cook of the Seattle P-I both moderated and blogged on the event, and much of the panel's wisdom was amply covered there. Here, we’ve indexed some additional insights from panelists and moderator alike.

ABR

• Always be Recruiting: the acronym of the day, coined by Bob Bergquist.

Chemistry

• Asked “how do you find the right team member to add to the founding team?,” Jaech responded “how do you find your wife?” It’s not just about hiring the resume.

Compensation

• Kelman suggested an employee response : "3% raise? 3% my a**! I need to move out of my parents’ house!"
• Bergquist: With pay, we can’t match the big guys, but there are intangible benefits to being part of a startup.
• Kelman: It’s a red flag is a prospective employee asks for a big severance package. Don’t even negotiate, just don’t hire.
• Bergquist cautioned that everyone has a different concept of fair, so surface those expectations, and match them.

Competition

• On out-recruiting the competition in the Bay Area, Kelman suggested: It’s tough when Stanford students come into Seattle on a rainy weekend. Facebook is basically hiring their entire class. However, Microsoft just backs up a bus in Silicon Valley and trucks ‘em up here.
• On recruiting talent away from the competition, Jaech noted: We’ve seen great programming talent out of Microsoft, but being a monopoly they don’t necessarily know how to sell.

Costanza

• When Glenn described his refusal to leave the building after being fired from Plumtree, Cook suggested he was the George Costanza of the start-up world (1992 Pez Dispenser episode, where George rejected the breakup).

Executives

• Jaech: With your executive team, you need trust. I don’t mean love and affection, you just can’t be checking up on people all the time.

Firing

• Kelman recalled commentary from a start-up COO mentor of his “I couldn’t fire the f-ers fast enough!" Glenn further reflected how the CEO of Alaskan Airlines had advised him to hire slow, fire fast.

Founders

• Jaech: Build your business around the team you have; don’t wait to hire those critical skill sets.
• Cook has interviewed more than entrepreneur who claimed to be a member of the founding team when they came on board 5 months after the company’s inception. He’s on to you so, don’t even try it.

Referrals

• Regarding employee referrals, don’t you want to expand the gene pool? Bergquist noted that in Seattle, it’s two degrees of separation, however…….

References

• ...all panelists suggested the tightly-knit Seattle community is no excuse not to do thorough reference checks. Jaech cautioned employers to listen for coded language in reference checks. "Don’t just ask their last boss- they might be trying to get rid of them!"
  

Recruiting

• When asked about the success of joint recruiting events, Kelman suggested the co-host has to be a somewhat attractive company to work for, just less attractive than Redfin.
• How long does the CEO stay involved in interviewing new hires? Bergquist predicted: "I’ll be interviewing for a long time to come."

The Serious Business of Having Fun

Did you know that October 5, 2007 was declared "Video Game Industry Day in Seattle?" To honor the occasion, along with 120 entrepreneurs, politicians, and service providers, I trekked down to Qwest Field for Enterprise Seattle's Interactive media Lunch. As my luck and lack of direction would have it, on my way there, I got lost wandering through the simultaneous, neighboring event: the World Cyber Games. Complete with black-and-silver decked cheerleaders and 1600 PC's for interactive play, Qwest's event venue was crawling with global gamers, floor-to-ceiling screens, and virtual-reality booths. So what is it about Seattle that attracted this kind of event? How is it that Western Washington (primarily the Puget Sound) support 15,000 jobs in gaming? Why did Sperling name Seattle the top gaming city in 2006?

Some of the panelists' thoughts, below:

• Jeff Pobst (CEO, Hidden Path Entertainment) argued that UWs superior educational program, he training prowess of DigiPen, and companies such as Microsoft, Real Networks, and Nintendo have made Seattle one of the top places in the country to recruit talent in art, audio, video and game programming. He suggested, however, that we view Gaming not as part of the Software industry, but the Entertainment industry-- games have to be fun to be successful(turns out this is not a requirement for functional software).
• Seattle enjoys a burgeoning "creative class" and urban attractions, and though rainy, at least it's got better traffic and cleaner air than LA, quipped Flowplay CEO Derrick Morton. As for entrepreneurs in the gaming space, Morton further suggested "Seattleites are bored out of their brains working for big companies!"

Additional take-aways:What are the success factors in gaming? What's driving growth?

• Samantha Ryan, Senior Vice President, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment: It's not about competition, it's about community.
• Morton: For FlowPlay, the name of the game is collaboration.
• Shane Kim, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Game Studios: X-Box combines competition and community. And let's remember we've got our first generation of dad's who grew up gaming....I'm not going to let my kid beat me!
• John Mechey, CEO PopCap Games: Hasn't moved into community gaming, but it's hard to argue when a gamer asks "Why am I playing a game with a unicorn? I feel stupid but I've been doing it for 12 hours."

Trend watch:

• "Serious gaming." Though casual gaming has been the largest growth area thus far, keep an eye out for this sector. Whether it's safety testing for Boeing or medical simulations, the Pacific Northwest could well become a hub in these emerging areas.

WA-The “State” of Entrepreneurship

At the Sleeping Lady Lodge in the old Bavarian town of Leavenworth, the Tech Institute recently conducted their semi-annual retreat, focusing on the state of K-12 education and entrepreneurship here in WA State. A mixture of state legislators, educators, and general movers and shakers in the state came together over cocktails, excellent food, and some more cocktails to work out some of the more difficult questions confronting the state.

The Alliance of Angels participated by putting on an interactive seminar in angel investing getting the audience to evaluate and decide whether to invest in several different early stage companies. One of the highlights of the event was a panel discussion about Entrepreneurial Company Leadership featuring some great up and coming and established CEO’s from local companies. Moderated by Peter Wilson, Engineering Director at Google, the panel featured Jeremy Jaech (Founder of Aldus and Visio and now with Trumba), Rob Arnold (President of Geospiza, Inc), Christina Lomasney (President and CEO of Modumetal, Inc), and Steve Sliwa (CEO of Insitu, Inc).

The Panelists addressed a number of questions about the “competitive advantage” of the Northwest as a place to start and grow a company vs locating in the Bay Area. Several chief concerns in this process were raising funding, finding good workers, the cost of starting and running a business, and the quality of life for employees (focusing on housing prices).

On the first note, while the Seattle venture community has grown by leaps and bounds and is now third in the country after the Valley and Boston in dollars invested, the panel felt that it was still more difficult to get that first VC to bite. While Jaech’s didn’t have much trouble getting funding for Visio (he attributed it to great timing, although after Aldus he obviously didn’t have to go knocking down many doors) he did get all of his funding from the Bay Area and two other panelists mentioned that getting that first investment from the Bay Area helped speed up the process of getting commitments from local VC firms.

On the second point, several presenters made the case that proximity to the UW has been hugely beneficial both in terms of shared resources and research. While Lomasney did mention some real frustrations about getting ideas out of tech transfer, the process has been streamlined in recent years with changes to the ethics laws and more technologies are making their way out as noted recently by John Cook.

Contrasting the cost of starting and running a business in the Northwest vs the Bay Area, Seattle maintains an advantage. While none of the panelists went into great depth about the business costs associated with starting out in WA, Glenn Kelman recently posted a great piece on Guy Kawaski’s blog disclosing his actual financials for the first two years at Redfin vs his original projections. He also addresses what the costs would have been had he started in the Bay Area.

Finally, even with the recent jump in housing prices, the Seattle area is still downright affordable compared to the Bay Area and there is no great danger of Capital Hill passing Nob Hill in terms of prices or snobbery anytime soon.