Startup2Startup

We first met Dave Kashen a few years ago after he sold the startup he co-founded. He had just started coaching fellow startup execs on scaling and building their businesses. But what was unique about Dave was his precise thinking about culture and values, two of the squishiest and most important concepts for any leader in a startup. Since then, he’s been advising some of the best startup teams in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, so we’ve asked him to come and talk about the importance of and–more importantly–how to build extraordinary cultures at startups.

The Values-Driven Startup: Building an extraordinary culture
Drawing insights from Google, Facebook, Netflix, Zappos, Eventbrite, Southwest Airlines, Trulia, JetBlue, Meebo, Joie De Vivre, and many others, startup coach Dave Kashen will share a methodology for building and scaling an amazing, high performance culture that will maximize your chances of success, and help you enjoy the journey.

As co-founder of Wellsphere, a fast-growing online health startup, Dave experienced firsthand the challenges of creating a great culture amidst the demands of building a company from the ground up. After Wellsphere was acquired, he took a step back to figure out what he really wanted to do with his life, and realized that his life’s purpose is to help people be fulfilled and increase the level of well-being in our society. Seeing business as a platform for increasing fulfillment and well-being, he made it his mission to inspire, empower and teach entrepreneurs to build companies that bring out the best in their people.

Through his firm Quantum Leading, Dave has spent the last few years working with startup CEOs and their teams to help them to intentionally and systematically build their cultures, and develop as authentic, inspired, values-driven leaders. He co-founded the Unleashed conference series, bringing together hundreds of startup CEOs with leaders who’ve created some of the world’s best cultures to learn about and discuss how to build workplaces people love. Dave also writes about building startup culture at awesomeculture.com.

It has been an amazing 2011 and we hope you’re excited for an even better 2012! Please join us on January 18, 2012 for our annual holiday party in January, as we celebrate another great year of Startup2Startup.

Interested in joining us? Fill out this form.

Earlier this year, we had a few friends from the tech giants of Silicon Valley share what it is like from their point of view to buy startups. But what is it like to sell a startup? How do you make that decision? What mistakes are made even before companies are started? How do you get over the negotiations hump? And what happens after you get acquired?

This month, we’re lucky to have a few friends help answer those questions. Jack Abraham, Leonard Speiser and Bryan Mason will lead a panel on the secrets of selling startups.

eBay bought Jack’s company, Milo.com, last year and Fast Company called him one of the 100 most creative people in business today. Leonard is the founder of clover.com and Startup2Startup. Yahoo snapped up his company, Bix, about a year after it was started. And Bryan Mason’s company, Typekit, was acquired by Adobe last month.

Typically the lessons that these guys have learned are spread quietly over coffee meetings and emails. We’re lucky to have them and look forward to the lively discussion to follow.

As always, space is limited so please sign up soon. Invitations aren’t transferable so please contact James, Josh or one of the organizers if you’d like us to invite someone to this event.

The landscape has shifted dramatically since our dinner on corporate development and M&A last year. With a series of newly minted public companies (and a few more companies to come), how should entrepreneurs think about things? We’re bringing together new friends and old from big players like Twitter and Facebook for a lively panel discussion about this new world.

This month, we’re building on April’s discussion on Interaction Design by inviting BJ Fogg, head of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, to share how Behavior Design should change the way that you think about users, design and the way you launch (and relaunch) your product.

His approach will change the way you think about why products like Zynga, Instagram, Groupon and Facebook are effective. It is no accident; students of his are working at all of those companies.

BJ taught the first Facebook App class at Stanford in 2007 and he’s spent the last decade understanding how software can create new habits. He makes a persuasive case that most startups spend too much of their time working on the wrong approaches to getting traction. Instead, he suggests a behavior-centric way of thinking that asks exactly what startups want users to do and focuses on the triggers to get them there.

Fortune magazine says that he’s “one of the most sought-after thinkers in Silicon Valley” and named him one of their “10 Gurus You Should Know.” Students from his Stanford Facebook App class convinced 16 million people to install apps that they built during his 10 week course. He spends most of his time split between teaching at Stanford and consulting with companies like Nike and eBay. You can read more about him at his website or twitter feed.

We’re in the middle of a series on core issues for startups. This time we’ll cover interaction design. We’ve invited the lead designers responsible for Facebook, Mint and Posterous to give us their point of view on designing great products, hiring great designers (and figuring out if they are any good), the value of A/B testing and what drives great designers crazy. Plus they’ll answer your burning questions.

Kate Aronowitz is Director of Design and User Experience at Facebook, where she leads a team of designers, researchers, engineers and content strategists. Prior to Facebook, Kate was the first Director of Design at LinkedIn, where she helped build and establish their design and user research group. Previously, she managed design teams at eBay. Kate holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from The Savannah College of Art and Design.

Jason Putorti was lead designer at Mint.com from early 2007 through launch and acquisition in November 2009. After Mint.com, he was Designer-in-Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners. He’s now co-founder of Votizen and on the side runs elegant.ly, a resource for startups to pitch great designers.

Garry Tan is designer-in-residence at Y Combinator. Previously, he cofounded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions. He also cofounded the engineering team for Palantir Technology’s quant analysis platform. He was named among BusinessWeek’s Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2010, Inc Magazine’s 2010 list of 30 under 30, Advertising Age Magazine’s 2010 Creativity 50, and Business Insider’s 2011 30 Under 30 Who Are Shaking Up Industries.

We’re starting the year off with a return to the core issues that face startups. First up: engineering.

We’re pleased that Yishan Wong has agreed to be interviewed on starting, building and nurturing startup engineering organizations. He’s got some insight into these issues as he was Director of Engineering at Facebook. From 2005 to 2010, he worked on many of Facebook’s key challenges: mobile, ads, payments, platform, applications, hiring and internationalization. He’s currently spending time at Sunfire Offices, a co-working space in Mountain View that he co-founded. He started his professional career as a Senior Engineering Manager at PayPal.

You can get a sense of Yishan’s perspectives on startups and engineering at Quora or about his background at TechCrunch.
Dave McClure will lead a lively interview with Yishan on topics such as recruiting and hiring, Yishan’s pre-Facebook social dating site, mentoring engineering managers and the engineer’s way to scale a business.

Who needs the public markets? IPOs are so last century. The secondary market for stock in private companies has created an opportunity for shareholders to get liquidity once again, and investors are jumping in head first. But how can companies benefit from the secondary market? How do you sell your shares on a secondary market? How are shares valued, and what are the mechanics behind the secondary market? Or perhaps you’d just like to know how you can buy some of these elusive shares? For good measure we’ll be selling shares of the top five start-ups in Silicon Valley to all attendees! I bet that got your attention, didn’t it? Well, we might not be selling start-ups shares at the event, but Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket, will be educating all of us on how we can buy and sell start-up shares of some of the hottest companies by talking about a world he invented six years ago.

Barry Silbert is the Founder and CEO of SecondMarket, the world’s largest marketplace for buying and selling illiquid financial assets, including private company stock. Founded in 2004, SecondMarket has conducted billions of dollars in transactions across nine different asset classes. Since 2009, more than $350 million in private company stock traded over SecondMarket in numerous venture-backed companies, including Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and LinkedIn. SecondMarket’s customized liquidity programs provide private companies with an effective way to organize and control secondary activity in their shares.