DevBridge and ConceptFeedback at Exelerate

I’m a skeptic when it comes to venture firms such as Y Combinator who help launch / propel startups, probably because of how much publicity there has been generated surrounding those organizations. I am a firm believer that a useful product or service will always find itself a niche market to utilize, however my recent experience with Excelerate has altered my perception of the value these companies and seminars may bring.

Just last week Andrew Follett rolled into our office bearing the news that Concept Feedback, our mutually birthed crowd sourcing concept feedback service, has been accepted for an interview with Excelerate. Excelerate is very much like Y Combinator in its core: an organization which puts you in contact with mentors, provides seed capital, and guides you through the process of start-up infancy. These services don’t come without a price, of course, as you agree to sign away 5% of your company shares to Excelerate for the participation in the program.

We were briefed that our meeting would take place at 9:30pm, on a Friday night.

As I receive these news a scene starts playing in my head where DevBridge & Andrew enter a drug den filled with shady characters, share our idea, and continue to get our faces blown off with shotguns in a dirty bathtub. Don’t all meetings at 9:30 in the evening end that way?

A short deductive reasoning session later we all agreed that the strange scheduling was probably due to majority of contestants actually having real jobs and doing this start-up thing on their free time. It made perfect sense that Excelerate would have wanted to accommodate their schedules.

The incredulity of this whole arrangement that lead to us not being prepared or coordinated as well as we should have been. We rolled into the meeting without a practiced pitch and with one goal – to find out how they could help us. We learned later on that 30 minutes of presentation time is a really short period of time in which it is challenging to fully express our passion and vision for Concept Feedback.

As a side note I wanted to mention that their office is freakishly awesome, with a huge kitchen area, stylish modern-industrial interior and recessed lighting. I told Martin that this is what our office should look like when we move at the end of this year. For a tech shop we really couldn’t be lower on the “stylish” scale with an office which:

• Floods the first year resulting in computer cases that are watercooled
• Gets leaked on from the roof this spring, messing up our book library
• Is constantly dusty because of this hundred year old air filtration system

Getting back on topic, we were interviewed by Sam Yagan who runs the Excelerate program and is the co-founder of OkCupid, an online dating site. A bombardment of questions ensued that ranged from our target market, pricing tiers, future goals and weaknesses. Some highlights in the conversation:

• We couldn’t figure out / answer if we wanted to raise funds
• I spent a good 15 minutes explaining to them the technicalities of our rating system
• Everyone agreed that we are not certain of our target market and the pricing of the service

Overall it was a very good experience that kicked us in the balls, in a way. Got us thinking about the important questions and made us realize that we actually want to be in this program and learn from these folk. The thirty minutes blew by in a blink and we finished the evening licking our wound s and discussing Concept Feedbacks future at a local pub over a pint of brew. The results should be arriving this week, keep your fingers crossed!

Who Needs Guns When We Have Armies

While it kills me to admit it, our fascination with first person shooters has receded much like the hair on my forehead after I climbed over 25. Red bull and pizza fueled LAN parties are now being replaced by hour long sessions of silence, framed by the soft murmur of chess pieces sliding across the lacquered skating rink of life and death.

Chess creates a much different experience of mind numbing tension. There are no twitch responses and hand eye coordination involved here: the game is all about calculated strategies and madman knights that move in death bringing patterns across the board littered with pawn carcasses. Kingdoms rise and fall, queens are sacrificed, and many swear words are uttered as Tomas annihilates competition with his finely tuned cerebral cortex. I can only hope that one day we shall return to Call of Duty and I get to knife someone in the face for the humiliation I now suffer on the checkered squares.

Gadget Heaven

It is safe to assume that with a job like mine I will have a certain predisposition to new gadgets and technology. It is also safe to assume that once a certain gadget does become available it is shortly going to be available to DevBridge, in one way or another. We recently celebrated Martin’s birthday and as we were consuming the cheesecake, chicken wings, and wine we were still undecided and confused about the present we were going to get him. Martin’s wife came to the rescue (as they usually do in times of peril and manly confusion with gifts) and we all pitched in to get him the new iPad.

I was one of the nay-sayers when the device was announced and I still see limited use for someone who is a power user and has multiple mobile devices (such as an iPhone / laptop / Kindle / etc.). I think of it as a mutated and disfigured supermodel laptop that is missing its legs. It looks fantastic, feels fantastic, you can tell it just got out of the fashion show in Venice but it’s also just as useful as a supermodel when you need to get real shit done. Then again, as the market of useless apps on the iphone has already proved, people love to waste their time so why not give them yet another shiny new thing to smear their little greasy hot pocket fingers over.

Don’t get me wrong, I want one just because it’s sexy, but my aging voice of reason keeps telling me I’ll be sorry for blowing that much money on a portable black hole of time. Martin, on the other hand, can now read emails and work the remaining 4 hours of the day that he’s not in the office.