How To Make It as a
First-Time Entrepreneur

Steve Job’s Technical Co-Founder

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

“I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.” Ugh. I’ve heard that too many times over the last few years and it almost always ends badly.

I was in this situation and we barely escaped. I write this post to put you out of your miserable technical co-founder search and give you some realistic options.

The Challenge of Finding a Technical Co-Founder

To find a great technical co-founder, you need to convince them of the following:

• Your idea is better than all of their ideas
• The equity is worth spending all of their spare time working for no money
• You are worth 50% of the equity of the company
• You will execute and convert an idea into a big successful business
• You’re better than all of the other biz people pitching them

This is a pretty daunting list. You see, good technical co-founders are like the attractive people at the dance. They’re hot, they know it, everyone wants to sleep with them, and they can also go home and sleep with themselves (the analogy got a little weird there, sorry). So, why should they pick you?

Your Options

Here are your options for finding a technical co-founder. Notice how little control you have over most of them.

Getting Traction is a Catch 22

• College Roommate or Co-Worker. Your best bet by far is if you have personally known someone for a while and preferably worked together. They are the ones that know you well enough to believe what you are capable of. If you don’t have someone like this, and most of you don’t, you’re in big trouble.
• Have Experience. If you have already started a successful start-up, you’re probably not reading this post because your struggling to find a technical co-founder; you have your pick.
• Have Domain Expertise. You’re starting a new photo sharing site and you were the project manager for Facebook’s photo app; you’re starting a music label disruptor and you worked for a music label for the last five years. As a personal example, when we told people Yipit was going to be a Kayak for the Daily Deal industry, we would have been way more convincing if we had actually worked at Kayak.
• Traction (the Catch 22 option). This is the only one you can, in theory, control. You’d have a lot easier time getting a great technical co-founder to join you if your initial prototype had 20,000 users and growing. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a Catch 22 in that you sort of need a technical co-founder to build you the first version to get traction.
• Social Proof (the other Catch 22 option). If you had Ron Conway/David Lee from SV Angel or Chris Dixon/Eric Paley of Founder’s Collective investing in you, potential technical co-founders would be a lot more interested. Unfortunately, this is also a catch 22 because without experience, domain expertise or traction, it’s highly unlikely they are going to invest in your start up. In many ways, good technical co-founders and angel investors are looking for the same thing.

Your Realistic Options

Most people find themselves here. You don’t know anyone, you don’t have experience, you don’t have traction and you don’t have investors. You just have an idea and a dream. Here are your options:

• 

  PayPal Offspring

  Go Work at a Start-Up

  • The Hope: You can get some experience and you’ll find your future technical co-founder
  • Why You Should: You don’t have any money saved up and you have no idea how to product manage, acquire users or fund-raise. If I had to go all the way back to 2007 when I left my wall street job, I would have done this option.
  • Why You Shouldn’t: You’re postponing your dream for at least two years. It’s actually pretty hard to find a good start-up job if you have no real engineering or user acquisition / product management skills. There’s no guarantee your future technical co-founder will be there.
• Become a Key Member of the Tech Community
  • The Hope: You’ll form friendships with potential technical co-founders and work on small projects together.
  • Why You Should: You don’t have to quit your day job. You have good community building skills and quickly become other people’s friends.
  • Why You Shouldn’t: This is easier said than done (I wrote a post on how I became a member of the tech community). I’ve also seen many people become key members of their community and still not find a great tech co-founder because, ultimately, being their friend isn’t enough.
• Blog About Your Idea
  • The Hope: Your potential technical co-founder will find your blog, really like your idea and admire the way you are thinking about the problem.
  • Why You Should: You don’t have to quit your day job. You already have an online following. It can be good for you to express your ideas on paper and build some domain expertise credibility.
  • Why You Shouldn’t: It’s a good idea to start a blog but it’s really hard to get mindshare and attention for your blog if you don’t already have a following.
• Hire a Programmer
  • The Hope: You’ll use the programmer to build a prototype that will get you traction and experience.
  • Why You Should: You know what an MVP is and you have a great vision for what it should be. You know how to product manage and you’ve hired programmers before.
  • Why You Shouldn’t: This is really hard and littered with start-up bodies. We tried this at Yipit and failed. I recommend you start by reading this post on how to hire a programmer. This will cost you some real cash- at least $5K for your first version. I say first version because you’re likely to not get it right at first and now you need to fork over another $2.5K for a second version assuming the programmer doesn’t flake on you.
• Roll the Dice on a Stranger
  • The Hope: You’ll learn to work together and trust each other and they’ll be a great technical co-founder
  • Why You Should: You have no other options and believe you can get anyone to work well with you. This does work occasionally. I highly recommend starting with a small project first.
  • Why You Shouldn’t: This is a desperation move. Start-ups are full of risks, you’re about add on another huge one. Also, think about the self-selection bias, if this person was such a great technical co-founder, why are they responding to your craigslist post. They would have probably been scooped up by someone else. Even if you are able to get some traction, you’ll probably be stuck with a less than desirable technical co-founder.
• 

  Learning Python

  Build Your Own Prototype

  • The Hope: You can hack together a prototype to get traction and experience.
  • Why You Should: You’ll be able to build any prototype you want and will be able to pivot your company. It won’t cost you real money other than your living expenses. You’ll have full control over the destiny of your project. If you are fully committed, this will work.
  • Why You Shouldn’t: This requires the most commitment  and will require you to be truly dedicated to your cause. You’ll have to quit your day job and do this full time (you’ll need savings to support yourself). If you don’t quit your day job, you’ll have to take a 9 to 5 job and spend 6 to 2 am every night and every weekend working on it.

What We Did

We tried to hire a programmer and it didn’t go well. So, we decided that I would become our company’s temporary technical co-founder. It took me about six months of working full time before I could really build any prototype we wanted. Four prototypes / pivots later, we landed on the current version of Yipit. (BTW, going to be speaking to a few groups about my experience of becoming our temporary technical co-founder. As part of that, will be writing a series on this blog about what I did exactly.)

What Did You Do?

What was your approach to the problem of not being able to find a technical co-founder?  Did you try an option I didn’t list above? How did you find your technical co-founder?

I hope you now have a much better understanding of how “I just need to find a technical co-founder” is actually really hard. But, not all is lost.  You do have some options, just remember to choose wisely.

This is the first post in a a series on becoming your own technical co-founder:

1. Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder
2. Why You Can Become Your Own Technical Co-Founder
3. Should You Find a Co-Founder, Hire a Programmer or DIY?
4. Big Picture Overview of All the Components of a Web Service [To Come]
5. More to Come…

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

Six months after leaving our jobs to start Yipit, Jim and I realized we had made a mistake: we shouldn’t have picked each other as co-founders.

The Steves: Jobs and Wozniak

Jim and I trusted each other and we were working really well together; but, it became painfully clear that we needed a technical co-founder. We had made the critical mistake of starting a company with someone who didn’t have complimentary skills.  We were too similar to each other.

We tried to find a technical co-founder but it was hard to convince a great technical co-founder to join two “business guys” with no start-up experience. So, we went to Houston’s, our favorite serious business meeting restaurant, and made the decision that Jim would learn front-end development and I would become our temporary technical co-founder.

I had taken a few computer science courses in college but had never built a website nor coded in 7 years. Six intense months later, I had learned how to build our prototype. The code wouldn’t be scalable, but it would be good enough for us to get traction and attract real engineers to join our team.

• I proposed a panel for SXSW entitled “Can’t Find a Technical Co-Founder? Become one” based on my experience. If you like it, vote for it!

Meanwhile, Jim, despite having very little technical background, taught himself HTML/CSS and jQuery in a few months. Another major key for our early success is that Jim became very adept at using Mechanical Turk and outsourced manual processes. We used those skills to quickly solve what would otherwise be very complicated technical challenges that would have set us back months.

Three Important Characteristics of a Great Co-Founder

So, having had the chance to experience picking a co-founder and having met many co-founder teams, I’ve come to appreciate three very important characteristics an entrepreneur should look for when choosing a co-founder.

1. A friend. Your co-founder should be someone you’ve been friends with for a while because you need to really trust your co-founder not to give up on you or sabotage the start-up. Jim and I had been friends for five years. There were serious bleak times on our journey building Yipit and, truthfully, one of the main reasons we kept going was blind loyalty to each other. We had made serious sacrifices to work together and neither one of us wanted to be the one to let the other down by giving up.
2. Previously worked together. Just because someone is a good friend doesn’t mean you will work well together. Making matters worse, it’s really hard to predict which of your friends will be good co-workers. Fortunately, Jim and I had worked together before in college and for a summer after college.
3. Complimentary skills. This is the toughest one. You tend to be friends with people who are just like you but your start-up doesn’t need two co-founders with the same set of skills. I always cringe when I hear three friends who all used to be consultants trying to start a company. As you’ve read above, Jim and I were really guilty of this. As far as web start-ups go, a product manager and a developer seem to be the ideal pairing.

There are way more things to take into consideration like fundraising philosophy, outcome expectations, domain expertise, start-up experience.  But, it all starts with the three above.

Also, I’m sure someone in the comments will say: “I just found someone on Craigslist and we sold our company to Google.” Don’t listen to them, they were lucky that the person worked out. More often then not, those start-ups are disaster stories that you never hear about. Startups are full of risk, if you’re not going to mitigate the risks you control (like picking a co-founder), your chances of success will go down drastically.

How to Find that Co-Founder

Lastly, I know that most people’s college roommate wasn’t an awesome CS major or an established product manager. That makes it tough to find a co-founder matching the characteristics I mentioned above.  For those of you, I recommend the following:

• 

  Work at a growing, successful startup. It’s the place where product managers and engineers become friends and learn how to work together. This is one of the main reasons why so many successful startups are born from perviously successful startups like PayPal and why I’m excited for Foursquare’s, Hunch’s, and Gilt’s progeny here in New York

• Work on several small projects. If you don’t want to wait, I recommend working on a few very small projects with several potential co-founders with complimentary skills. Hopefully, through the course of working on the project, one of them becomes your friend and you realize you work well together.

• Go it alone. If you’re a technical person, this is much easier.  If you’re a product manager, either teach yourself how to build your prototype or hire a programmer to do it. Once you get traction, you’ll be able to attract awesome people.

Picking a great co-founder is really hard. It’s a tough decision that has serious consequences for your start-up. Please take the time to choose wisely.

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

Odysseus resisting the Sirens

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

On my three year startup journey that lead to Yipit, I had over 30 other completely unrelated ideas. Each time I got the idea, I would immediately start sweating profusely for three straight hours in a ridiculous state of unbridled excitement and optimism. Sounds great, right? Not really. Those new ideas and the emotional frenzy were a serious distraction.

To be clear, the “ideas” I’m referring to are the ones that have nothing to do with your current startup. Switching your startup’s focus to a related area based on what you’ve learned (i.e. pivoting) is a winning strategy and one that Yipit employed twice.  This post also assumes that you are and have been actively working on an idea.  If you haven’t started yet, experimenting with new ideas is a great way to start.

In our case, Yipit had always been about organizing local information and we had been working on it for a while. But, along the way, we spent significant time on other unrelated ideas including:

• Social version of delicious (summer of 2007)
• Tool to recommend the best version of the online video you were currently watching (spring 2008)
• 140it.com: Bookmarklett that smartly shortens your tweet to less than 140 characters. Over 350K tweets shrunk (spring 2009)
• UnHub.com:  2-minute personal website creation using your existing third party profiles. 10K accounts, 40K monthly unique visitors (spring 2009)

I now think of these new ideas as the Sirens of the startup journey. If you listen to their call, your startup journey will cease to make progress. Each of these projects were serious distractions from our initial vision of organizing local information.

The Temptation

To understand why these new ideas can be so tempting, I refer you to the incredibly insightful startup transition cycle.

The gist is that when you have a new exciting idea, you are in a state of “uninformed optimism”.  As you spend more time on the idea and start learning about all of the issues, you get into a state of “informed pessimism”.  This is a bad state that eventually leads you to a “crisis of meaning” where you either turn the corner into “informed optimism” or crash and burn.

Most startups are in “informed pessimism” and heading to a “crisis of meaning”. And, that’s when the Sirens start calling with new exciting and unrelated ideas.  Those new ideas are tempting because they are still in the “uninformed optimism” stage and seem so much better than your current idea.  I fell for it several times.

The Danger

Your ability to become a successful entrepreneur is about taking your current “informed pessimism” idea and turning the corner into “informed optimism”.  If every time you get to the disappointing “informed pessimism” stage, you impatiently hop back to a new idea at “uninformed optimism”, you’ll get caught in a never ending cycle. You have to be patient long enough with your idea to see if you are able to turn the corner.

The Solution

I finally learned to resist these new ideas after reading Tim Ferriss’s post. I now see those ideas for what they really are, “uninformed optimism” ideas. They may seem amazing but you just don’t know about all the issues associated with them.

So, if you are in the “informed pessimism” stage, either plug your ears or tie yourself to the masthead like Odysseus and keep working on your current idea.  Don’t be seduced by the Siren call of that exciting but shallow unrelated idea.

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

It’s hard to argue against going through the Customer Development Process (CDP) when building your startup. It just makes sense and experienced entrepreneurs are really excited about it. If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with Steve Blank’s Four Steps to Epiphany and Eric Reis’s Lessons Learned blog.

But, despite reading the books, the blogs, going to the meetups and truly believing in CDP, most of us don’t do it and our startups fail. We come up with some practical excuses:

• We don’t have the time for it.
• I already know what our customers want.
• We can’t convince customers to meet with us without a real prototype.
• We’re not ready yet.

These are BS reasons. The real reason is we’re afraid. We don’t want to grab someone from craigslist and have them tell us our idea is dumb. We don’t want a potential customer at a big company to laugh at our idea. We quit our job for the idea. We have risked our savings. Our professional credibility is on the line. We’ve convinced people to be part of our team.  Their livelihoods and their families are counting on us. What if people tell us they don’t like our idea? I’m not sure we can handle that kind of feedback/rejection.

So, what do we do?  We close our eyes, build the product and launch it. Hopefully, when we finally open our eyes, we find people using it. Most of the time, people aren’t using it and we’re in big trouble. It’s reckless and not fair to our team, our investors and our family.

How do we overcome that fear? We have to convince ourselves of two critical points (the most experienced entrepreneurs have successfully done this):

• Our initial idea isn’t worth much. If our initial idea isn’t worth much, where’s the value?  The value is in the team. More specifically, the value lies in our ability to continually adjust that initial idea based on feedback from potential customers and morph it into something that people need. If we’re not doing that, we’re not creating value and our startups are relying on luck to succeed.

• Changing our idea isn’t inconsistent, it’s smart. Our society rewards people for being consistent.  When people aren’t consistent, our society punishes them (e.g., politicians get negatively labeled as “flip flops” for being inconsistent). In the startup world, we don’t have to be consistent.  We should be willing to dramatically change our views based on what we learn. We have to overcome that instinctual urge to remain consistent.

So, lets stop coming up with excuses for why we aren’t meeting with customers.  Face our fears and get out there and start learning what’s wrong with our ideas and figuring out how to fix it.

(photo via Scott Ableman)

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

As a former i-banker, I struggle to overcome each of the following five shortcomings. I’ll write about how I’m dealing with them in future posts. But, the first step is recognizing you have a problem.

1. You have no useful start-up skills. You certainly didn’t learn how to program (cheap excel macros don’t count). But, it turns out that i-banking didn’t teach you essential non-technical skills either including product management, marketing or fundraising skills. You’ll need those skills, not just an idea, to attract a technical co-founder.
2. You hesitate to make uninformed decisions. In the i-banking world, you were taught to never make decisions without fully investigating the issue. In the start-up world, you are better off making 100 decisions with a bunch being wrong than 10 well-researched decisions.
3. You’re a perfectionist. When I joined The Blackstone Group, Steve Schwarzman, the company’s CEO, told us:  “99% right is 100% wrong”. In the i-banking world, you had to be perfect — the numbers had to tie, the formatting had to be consistent, and, above all else, no extra spaces. In the start-up world, you can’t afford to be perfect. You can only spend 20% of the time to get 80% done.  You don’t have time for the last 20%. As Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin, said:  “If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.“
4. You don’t network. In the start-up world, you’re told to never eat alone. But, in i-banking, you always ate alone at your cubicle. If you were lucky, you got to eat dinner with some of the other analysts in the conference room.  In the start-up world, you need to become a member of the tech community. You need to meet everyone because those people can help make or break your start-up with their support and ideas.
5. You’re too private. You spend hours adjusting your Facebook profile privacy preferences to make sure you couldn’t be searched. You never tell you friends about what you’re working on — you weren’t allowed to. You’re not a self-promoter.  In the start-up world, you can’t be secretive. You have to talk to you friends about what you are working on without making them sign an NDA (sorry to the people I did this to). They’ll completely change the way you are thinking about your project; they’ll make valuable introductions.  You need to start a twitter account and a blog. You need to become a self-promoter.

Fortunately, what you did learn on Wall Street was how to work incredibly hard and do 30 things at once. You just need to be aware that you have some new habits to pick-up and a few habits to lose. I’ll continue writing about what I did to overcome each of these limitations here and you can follow me on twitter. (see #5 for self-promotion).

Update:  Interesting post by Kate Huyett on 5 Things I Learned in Finance That Are (So Far) Helpful at a Startup

Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter.

thegongshow:

When I talk to startups about the benefits of constant, iterative user testing in product design cycles, many people think that cost is a hurdle.

Booking 10 in-person sessions in a rented listening lab with a one-way mirror and screen recording in NYC can get pricey: $100-$200 per *qualified* candidate, plus ~$1000 fixed-cost of lab rental… or, as an even more deluxe option, an all-included engagement with a user testing consultant can run a startup from $5,000 – $15,000. That kind of bill is not feasible when you’re trying to get ramen profitable. But, cost is no excuse for not doing regular user testing in the early stages of a startup. So, for the bootstrapped startups, here’s five inexpensive ways to start doing user testing right now:

1) UserTesting.com – This is a slightly more upscale solution (relative to the other 4 choices below), but for $29 you can get a user to do a 20-min screencast for you while they talk about their thought process outloud. If this sounds confusing, this demo of a screencast explains the value of UserTesting.com well. UserTesting.com has the advantage of providing candidates that are qualified to your specifications (such as: age, sex, social-economic characteristics) and you can have users do very specific tasks you request.

UserTesting.com was developed by an ex-co-worker of mine at Homestead who did some user testing with me on our site’s splash page. He is a sharp guy and great at iterative design, so I’m glad he’s making a tool he finds useful for user testing available to the public.

2) Camcorders and friends – This is perhaps the most economical solution, but also the most time-intensive solution on this list. Schedule family, friends, or even strangers of craigslist to come in and sit down in front of your computer and record their actions performing tasks with a camcorder and some simple consumer-grade screen recording software. It will take time to schedule, prepare, perform and analyze all these tests, but the value of having testers live, in-person is often underestimated. The best benefit of live, in-person testing is the ability to ask follow-up questions when you see users stumble in order to best comprehend their frame of reference and expectations at the time of the incident. If possible, try to get a friend who does not work at your startup to be an independent facilitator. Users are more honest with their feedback when they don’t think they’re talking to someone who works on the site day-to-day. [Update: wow, forget the camcorder.  Chris posted in the comments about Silverback, and it looks amazing.  Do that instead!]

3) Feedback Army – Get direct answers to questions about your site. This is a far more low-fidelity solution than the first to options, but it’s simple to setup and super cheap. $10 buys you one paragraph of feedback from 10 people. This type of testing won’t help much with usability (ie workflow issues), but FeedbackArmy is helpful in determining how your overall value proposition to users is received and how users self-report their user experience (ie how much they enjoy the site).

4) PickFu – How many times have you gotten into an argument with a developer or product manager over the size/color/iconography of a simple button? End those arguments quickly with evidenced-based experimentation. With PickFu, you can immediately A/B test stuff like images, buttons, wording, etc with 50 peoples opinions for $5. This isn’t for full-blown user testing, it’s more for making quick, one-off, informed decisions. PickFu doesn’t have the benefit of A/B testing directly in the context of your site, but it’s the ability to run A/B tests without the messy overhead of site integration is a reasonable trade-off.

Side Note: Both PickFu and Feedback Army are arbitrages on Amazon Mechanical Turk, so if you’re an MTurk ninja you could do this type of testing even cheaper by scripting MTurk directly. But, for 98% of tasks/purposes you should just pay one of these services to do the work of creating the MTurk HITs for you instead of re-inventing the wheel.

5) Starbucks – Seriously. Go down to your local Starbucks with two experimenters during coffee rush hour. Go to the person at the end of the line and tell them that if they’re willing to sit with you in front of a laptop and do a user testing session for 7 minutes, the other experiment will wait in line and buy you the drink of your choice. The person at the end of the line has nothing better to do than to wait in line, so they’re very likely to say “yes.” And, a $5 latte for 7 minutes of genuine in-person user testing is a bargain.

Another advantage of the three virtual solutions mentioned above (FeedbackArmy, UserTesting.com, and PickFu) is that they save you time too. Live user testing in-person takes time in preparation, executing the tests, and then creating actionable conclusions and analysis. All these virtual solutions significantly cuts down or eliminates these time requirements. Of course, you sacrifice impactfulness by not doing a lot of this work yourself, but oftentimes this trade-off is appropriate.

I’m sure I missed other useful software and web services, so please add your favorite ways to bootstrap user testing in the comments. So, stop reading blogs and go user test your site.

“If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.”

• Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn

As a pseudo-perfectionist / borderline-OCD’er, I have the hardest time not spending way too much time getting everything to be just right.  This applies to everything:  programming, user interface design and even my commute to work.

Now, whenever I get frustrated that I’m not doing something in the “best possible way”, I just say Reid’s quote to myself and move on.  I’m a much happier / productive person.  I hope his quote will also help you.

Do yourself a favor and join Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis’s new mailing list.

I know, I also thought mailing lists were dead but, weirdly, Jason retired from blogging.  He now sends out fantastic and practical essays on technology entrepreneurism through his mailing list.  Despite the list being just a few months old, he’s already sent out some must-read essays including:

PR Strategies for Start-Ups

• Rule number one of interacting with a journalist: you NEVER have to bring up what you’re doing
• Be in love with your brand; wear a t-shirt with your company’s brand every day
• Your office space should be a personification of your company’s mission
• Exactly how a CEO should e-mail and speak to a journalist

How to Demo Your Start-Up Company – Part 1

• Show your product within the first 60 seconds
• Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do
• How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to

How to Demo Your Start-Up Company – Part 2

• Use inclusive words like “we”, instead of “you”
• Four methods to start your demo
• Repeat your slogan five times in your presentation

You can find standard advice on these topics all over the Internet, but Jason does a fantastic job of giving you intelligent and practical advice.  Get on this mailing list.

Amidst a river of mostly useless tweets, twitter account vctips stands out as a must read full of good to great nuggets of advice for entreprenuers thinking about venture capital.

It’s just starting out, but look at these tweets from some of the more respected members of the VC community:

• Don’t approach a VC directly unless you know him/her well — an introduction from someone the VC trusts will go a long way
• Six slides is better than sixty and probably better than sixteen. Put all the detail in the appendices
• As a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand slides. Show, don’t tell

Of course you can always conitnue to read tweets about how people are sleepy or just bored.