Berlin - September 2015

As mentioned in my previous post, TechStars Berlin is fairly unique in attracting global tech-intensive startups that go beyond Berlin’s commonly established startup clusters.

As a mentor, I was particularly interested in how TS can facilitate a structure for startups with particular tech focus to come in and learn - be it with the 100 local mentors or people from the global TS network. If successful, this means that TS can become a facilitator for significant innovation.

The TS Berlin program is fairly structured. There’s a co-working space where the teams are expected to come and work and hang out with all other teams in the batch on a daily basis. There are also classes, seminars and workshops covering various topics almost on a daily basis: customer development, marketing, PR, and more.

Techstars’ program structure is as follows:

Month 1 – customer development and mentor madness
Month 2 – product development and gaining traction
Month 3 – honing your pitch to investors & practicing for Demo Day

During the first month the startups are pushed to understand theirs customers deeply. They are asked to stop writing code and “get out of the building” to talk to people to make sure they are indeed building something people want. They are also asked to take advantage of the TS network in an activity called mentor madness - this is when the mentors get involved.

Mentor madness works as follows: In weeks 2 and 4 (10 days total), startups spend each day talking to 10 mentors. It’s an intense process - they get feedback from 10x10=100 mentors.

I talked to some of the more tech-intensive startups - shared space for teamwork SaaS startup Treev & infrastructure for DevOps startup datapth - and asked them how they made the process a success for them.

Here’s the five lessons with some added commentary.

# 1 They research the mentors and how they can help

“Every morning we went through the list of mentors we were going to meet and made notes on how we could get the most value out of them. We wrote down specific questions for each based on
- their experience and
- who they might know /
- companies they had invested in.”

“As we have a very technical and niche business, we had to prepare 3 different stories in order to respect the different knowledge of each mentor. Preparation is needed: we looked up every mentor and quickly checked their background to get a feeling in which parts of our business they could give tangible feedback.”

Preparation ahead of a meeting is key, yet rarely happens - especially with the inventor founder types who prefer (cliche, I know) working on the product instead. This results that “meetings for coffee” without any stated goal that rarely go anywhere. Therefore hardly any founder I know and respect accepts this type of meetings. If the person who wants to meet you does not know how you can help them, how can you?

#2 - They put mentors into buckets of help

“As we have a very technical and niche business, we had to prepare 3 different stories in order to respect the different knowledge of each mentor. Preparation is needed: we looked up every mentor and quickly checked their background to get a feeling in which parts of our business they could give tangible feedback.”

But how do you go about knowing what you want as a startup team?

For most teams this is a skill they pick on their way. A good way to figure this out is to create categories of mentors and advisors and come up with an initial set of needs for each field.

Your initial sets of questions and wording does not matter that much. Your mentors will push back and help you learn.  This means that, once you have talked to 100 mentors, you should have iterated your needs and have a better feel in which of the buckets what type of help is effective.

Also, you can ask people only for a couple of things. If you put a mentor in a single bucket, even if he or she wears multiple hats well, your communication with them becomes clearer and “easier” for them to manage.

 

#3 - Once they’ve put a mentor in a bucket, they ask for specific, simple deliverables

“We followed up with every mentor to thank them in the afternoon immediately after the meeting, and reminded them of any introductions or other follow-ups they had offered.”

Even if they want to be helpful, mentors have only so much time. Asking them for specific, simple deliverables and making it easy for them to help is key.

#4 - They make really good intros and become good at intro management as they develop their potential customer base

“We kept track of who responded and were tenacious about making sure that we got a response, sometimes sending a couple more reminder emails. You can rarely get to a deep insight in a 15 minute meeting, so second meetings (especially about the product) and introductions to other people (customer development, e.g. intro to CTO from a big company) were the most helpful.”

“Intros, intros, intros.... Most of the time, the second level of the mentors' business network was good enough to provide a intro to a person, that was either
a) a potential customer, or
b) a potential business partner.
It took some time to follow-up with all the people, but once we figured out how to use a CRM, it became a bliss.”

My friend Raj Singh recently wrote about his introduction workflow and the value of such system. Also adding a CRM, even if the initial one is in Google spreadsheets, is key. The process quickly becomes even more extensive and time-consuming, if not managed well. Most engineer founders I know complain about this part of doing a startup and for them it’s a choice between this being a pain or a big pain.

#5 - The proof is in the pudding - they use the mentor market dynamics to their favour

“An ideal mentor was trying to understand our problem instead of pitching their own company and looking for a potential business or investment.”

There’s 100 mentors + TS network. There’s only 10 startups. This imbalance creates dynamics where the batch companies have a very high supply of mentors and can weed out the ones they don’t want. There's many mentors who like the sound of their own voice, have low value or ask (too) much for help. The setup in TS allows for startup founders to weed out mentors that aren't a fit easily. This should be enacted forcefully - #givefirst.