Week 1 Post 500 Startups – AKA welcome to our new office

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I am going to keep this post short and sweet.

To anyone who was wondering, the blog lives on!

Starting next week we are going to have a new format in which every week a different founder from our batch will give an account of what their company is up to.

On he OLSET front a lot of stuff I can’t talk about happened this week…

The one big thing that I can’t talk about is the move to our new OLSET / BTCJam office is SOMA.

Monday saw much activity moving in and putting furniture together and learning about a lot of hidden skills!

Here is an assortment of pictures of the team showing off their skills 🙂

It took a good part of the day on Monday but by the end of it we were OLSET!

We have a great view from the meeting room including a sunset:

But while the rest of the office is set up and the teams are cranking along:

Bottom floor:

And top floor (before anyone came in, in the morning):

The meeting room still needs some work…

A bunch of our batchmates were featured on Wall Street Cheat Sheet: http://wallstcheatsheet.com/business/8-new-startups-coming-up-from-dave-mcclures-stable.html/?a=viewall

Go: Shortcut, EquityZen, LaunchTrack, AdEspresso, uBiome, RealtyShares, Populr, OLSET and of course Dave McClure from whose stable we apparently come…

Oh, last but not least. Wednesday was a VERY BUSY day and all I had a chance to eat was Taco Bell on the way between meetings. I am sure Christine will be proud!

Look for a post from one of our batch founders next week.

Gadi

500 Startups week 16 wrap – Demo Day Goes BOOM!!!!

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OK, let’s start by saying that there is absolutely NO WAY to capture the experiences of this week in a blog posting (well, at least not for me…).

Let’s do this in order…

Sunday was a very disappointing Superbowl (not that I care too much who won, it was just not a good game!). But before the game, 500 S’s Mark Seldana hosted a fantastic champagne breakfast.

This was followed by a superbowl viewing at 500 S. Dave brought the kids who were fascinated by the game!!!

Monday kicked off with the LAST batch meeting.

The whole 500 S crew was there. We had a very interesting discussion regarding what we can and can’t say at demo day and it got very personal between Dave and Greg…

After the batch meeting we met with Jennifer McCormick, one of the UX mentors for our last mentor meeting and some great feedback on our UX.

On Tuesday we had a bunch of meetings and some good time to prepare for the big day on Wednesday!

Apparently the morning was cold. When I showed up in the office Daniel from Populr & Gina from WePlann seemed a bit chilly.

And then it was Demo Day in Mountain View. Great production by the entire 500 S team and awesome presentations by all our batchmates – Go 007!!!

We showed up at Microsoft in MV in the morning to get set up

Each presenter had their own way to present.

Some like D2 from Anyadir Education stood on stage and recited their presentation

While others like Maddie from Popbasic just used some uppers 🙂

We had good division of labor in the OLSET team. While I was preparing to pitch the team was hard at working getting $hit done!

And then we were off to the races. Dave got us started but then Christine Tsai took over and put on a show the entire day

We were in the 2nd group to present and this is what it looks like standing in line waiting to present after Tom from 3Sourcing & Aakash from Shopseen:

I can’t really talk about all the pitches because there is way to much to say but I can at least share some pictures of all the great presentations at the end of this blog posting. See below.

I will call out the fact that for some reason we didn’t get a picture of Hitesh from SilverPush presenting (I can confirm that he was there) but then I did see him post the following picture so I can only assume he pitched somewhere else at the same time. Now, that is impressive technology!!!

We got the opportunity to get some great pictures and meet awesome investors, reporters and partners after the pitches.

We got some amazing press coverage after the event and had a lot of follow up meetings scheduled. Here are a few links to some press where OLSET and many of our batchmates were featured

1. TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/05/its-almost-like-im-writing-checks/

2. The Next Web: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/02/06/10-favorite-companies-500-startups-seventh-accelerator-class-demo-day/

3. Silicon Valley Business Journal:  http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/02/06/heres-whos-trending-from-500.html?page=all

There was quite a bit of celebration at 500 after the presentations and we had a Looooong night following up on all the meeting requests. Some of had time toplay FlipCup:

Thursday was whirlwind of meetings and on Friday we had the batch 007 Goodbye Party (no worries, we are all hanging out in NY next week).

The festivities started with a viewing of the Movie Crocodiles on the Yang-Tse – the Story of Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba. This was set up by Patai from Builk:

The future tenants of 1 Bluxome apt 418 can be seen here. We hung out with our office-mates to be – BTCJam.

And many other festivities including Dave showing off his love for More Cowbell:

Here are pictures of all the presenters at demo day, I’ll let others in the batch add more comments and thoughts!

One week to go!

Have a great weekend

Gadi

500 Startups week 15 wrap – Irish Twins

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Our batch 007 hasn’t even wrapped up and this week batch 008 kicked off up in San Francisco. This is the new 500 Startups strategy. 4 batches a year, 2 in Mountain View and 2 in SF.

So, what did we have this week?

Most of the focus was on prep for next week’s demo day – woo hoo, but as usual at 500 there were a lot more afoot…

But, before the week actually kicked off, many of our batch-mates got together at the BTCJam complex to celebrate a beautiful weekend in the Bay Area with food and much drink.

 

Due to the batch 8 kickoff, batch 7 got no love on Monday and this was the first time we did not have a Monday batch meeting. Well, we will really be in trouble if we can’t do without them as we only have 1 left before we leave the nest.

Apparently the 500 S office in the city is not quite ready yet so their kickoff was a bit improvised…

We were compensated by having Stephanie Palmeri @stephpalmeri from SoftTech VC ran pitch prep on Monday and provided some great feedback to many of the teams.

 

On Tuesday we had a bunch of meetings in SF so did not make it down to Mountain View but there were many things going on. We did manage to remotely join the fireside chat with Pierre-Olivier Latour from EverPix:

Pierre shared a lot of valuable information regarding what to do, what not to do and what could be done better based on his experience!

Our team huddled in our shared office @WSGRSoma to view the live stream:

On Wednesday afternoon there was more pitch prep followed by the formal batch 8 kickoff. Great opportunity to share our knowledge and catch up with founders from past batches and the newbies from batch 8. We heard their initial pitches and while they have a LOT of work ahead of them (wow, did we ever sound that green?), there seem to be some awesome companies in this batch.

 Parker Thompson did a great job corralling a horde of founders and keeping us on track.

The kickoff was at the very pimped out Pivotal labs office…

Thursday was the Chinese New Year. Goodbye year of the Snake, Hello year of the Horse! The BoutyHunter team celebrated the year with some the customary ping pong game (well, I am quite sure this had nothing to do with the New Years but notice how quickly Hana moves) and great Chinese food.

 

And those of us who couldn’t make it to the dinner went to a Mongolian BBQ to prepare for the nightly pitch prep.

 

Great catching up with the EquityZen, PopBasic, Populr, OLSET and WePlann teams over dinner and surprisingly fantastic ice cream.

And then we had the traditional Thursday night pitch prep with Maneesh Arora and James Cham.

 

Maneesh and James provided extremely valuable feedback, focused on why our products are better and how we can better convey our messages.

 

Massimo from AdEspresso won the prize for best visual deck.

The last pitch prep session was on Friday and we also got the new OLSET shirts:

 

The other exciting news for the week is that we found an office in San Francisco that we will be moving into on Feb 17.

2 More weeks to go!

Wish us luck with demo day on Wed!

Have a great weekend.

G

 

 

 

 

 

500 Startups week 14 wrap – Preview day goes Boom!

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Now worries, that was a GOOD BOOM!

Wow, things are really heating up as our demo day draws near.

We had a local peek this week with preview day. Preview day is a small demo day where many 500 Startups LPs and mentors come to see our pitches in preparation for demo day. More about that later.

Monday kicked off with an international prep session. Angelika Blendstrup came in to help international founders perfect their accent. Considering the quality of the pitches on Wednesday I would say – GREAT JOB. Rui from Careira Beauty pitching:

And Hana from BountyHuntr:

 

The prep session was followed by the weekly batch meeting. The 500 S team was there in full force:

 

Most of the discussion was around the upcoming demo days.

On Tuesday we had a dry run for the Wed preview day. This was a full dress rehearsal (sans the partying later). Celso from BTCJam put on a show:

 

And Brian from MailLift shared the importance of sending hand written letters and how customers like Adroll are seeing a great lift in conversion rates using their service.

 

This is a good panoramic view of prep day:

 

And then it was preview day! Wednesday started with a bang. This is how the office looked at 10AM…

 

I was a bit concerned that I am in the wrong place but turned out the teams were just getting in a bit later. Within a few hours we were in full force:

 

And then the pitches commenced. MC Christine Tsai did a great job getting us on and off stage with awesome support by Tim Chae and Max F-S.

 

Dave McClure helped kick things off and then headed to the back to hang out with Parker and enjoy the fruits of their hard work:

 

James Levine sat beside them and enjoyed his hard work as well:

 

There were a lot of great pitches and things flowed well. I’ll share more about the actual pitches on the real demo day. We don’t want to ruin anything.

And then there was much drink and celebration.

Tom from 3Sourcing showed up his socks:

 

 

and we had great food:

 

The teams needed to relax after the pitches by playing cards:

 

Then we headed to a bar to chill and Daniel from Populr who worked all night to create an app for accredited investors to show interest in companies showed that he can crash anywhere if needed:

 

Apparently there was a loooong night of Kareoke that followed but I missed it.

Teams recuperated on Thursday and on Friday we were right back to pitch prep with VCs from Grelock.

All in all very good week. 1 more full week to go before demo day.

500 Startups week 13 wrap – Things are warming up

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Things are getting very exciting at 500 S. Next week is our pitch preview day for 500 Startups LPs and mentors.

Pitch prep continued this week and many of the teams are making huge strides and starting to deliver great presentations.

I promised 3 of our mentors who came in a number of times this week and provided a ton of value that I would give them a shout-out. So, James Levine, Rob Neivert and Marvin Liao. Thank you for heckling us and proving that in 2014 the 2 old guys from The Muppet Show (Statler and Waldorf, I looked it up) have turned into the 3 mentors :).

In all honesty, a huge thank you to Rob, James, Marvin and all the other mentors who provided great feedback and direction. Last shout out to Tim Chae for organizing the pitch prep events.

Now back to the week’s activities.

We missed the weekly batch meeting as we had meetings in SF on Monday. Great view of the Bay Bridge from where we had the meetings.

Mark Seldana from 500 S posted the travel founder interview he held with Oliver Comargo from WePlann and me about founders focused on travel at 500. You can find the recording here: http://buff.ly/1dOjz28

On Tuesday Patrick Collison from Stripe dropped by and shared much wisdom on starting stripe and all his learnings about hiring, culture, growing the team and focusing on accelerating development. Very insightful and helpful.

This session was followed by a pitch prep session. Antonio from Careira Beauty kicked us off:

As our time at 500 Startups draws to an end it is time to find a new office for OLSET back in San Francisco. I went office hunting on Wednesday and saw some interesting offices:

This process continued on Friday and Saturday and we are pretty much down to deciding between the back room of a dental spa and a room above a car wash. Yep, that’s how we roll…

We launched a new version of the OLSET site on Wednesday. You can check it out at http://www.olset.com. We also had a couple great articles posted about our progress in tnooz and skift. You can read more here:

tnooz article: http://www.tnooz.com/article/olset-funding-hotels-anydo-personal-assistant-android-white-label-B2B-travel-startup/

Skift article: http://skift.com/2014/01/16/startup-raises-500000-to-add-smart-hotel-bookings-to-productivity-apps/ 

Thursday kicked off early and this is what 500 S looks like at 8:15AM:

At noon we had a great founder presentation by Sean Percival. One of the growth mentors at 500 and a former founder himself. Sean talked about the ups and downs of starting and closing a company. Great presentation from the heart! Max Fram-Schwartz did a great job interviewing Sean.

On Thursday afternoon the Startup2startup group held a networking event at the office. Great opportunity to meet other founders and learn from their experience.

Imagine my surprise when I showed up in the office at 8AM on Friday and Maddie from Pop Basic and Nick from Populr were already there. Great opportunity to have a quick breakfast with a couple good friends and founders.

Turns out that Nick pulled an all nighter on Thursday. Well, I guess that if your choice is going back to a studio apartment and snuggle with Daniel and Jared, or stay in the office I know what I would choose 🙂

Friday afternoon we had both pitch prep and a visit from the TechCrunch team. They were filming a series about accelerators and hopefully caught some of my pitch and will share it):

Arka from Sidelines App was preparing for his pitch and showing off his colors. A little fight broke out with a few 49er fast but no-one was seriously hurt.

I guess I’ll wrap this week up with GO 9ers!

Wish us luck with the preview pitch day next week!

500 Startups week 12 wrap – Pitchslapping!

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We’re Baaaaaack!

After a couple weeks off for the holidays the activities have resumed at 500 Startups.

The theme of the week watch Pitch Prep. As pitch days approach we are all starting to figure out our pitches, what works, what doesn’t work and what people love and hate.

We had a number of amazing investors and advisers come in this week and critique our pitches. As you will see below they had great feedback. You very quickly learn to focus on a few points:

1. Grab the audience attention in the first 15 seconds or lose them forever.

2. Don’t give them any opportunities to go down rabbit holes. If you bring up anything that distracts them and they start thinking about something else. You lose them forever.

3. Be memorable. There are 30 companies pitching and we all have a great story. How will I be remembered?

4. Focus your pitch on the people who care about you. Very few companies are interesting to all investors. At least 50% (and in many cases 90%) of the investors are not focused on what you do and are not likely to invest in you. Make sure that your pitch captures the attention of the investors who care.

5. Don’t be boring and don’t confuse them!

I am sure there are many other key points but those 5 are a good start. I’ll leave it to others (and future posts) to add more pointers.

So, let’s get to the activities of the week.

As usual Monday kicked off with the batch meeting:

 

Meeting was a bit sleepy as many teams were not back yet due to the horrible weather all around the country (except California :)).

Most of the discussion was about demo days and the prep we need for them. Dave McClure and Christine Tsai also collected feedback from the batch to see who needs help with making some noise about their team and raising money! The next few weeks will be very interesting. At OLSET we are shooting for an investor marketing blitz this coming week.

Monday afternoon we started with pitch prep. This process will continue every day until the Mountain View demo day on Feb 5. Each company decides when and how many times they want to pitch. Every day we have different mentors (some of them were very kind and came in multiple times) and they provide feedback and direction. Our strategy was to give 3 different pitches, 1 each day, see what people like and don’t like and hone in on the one that works best so I can run with it starting next week. After giving my 3-pitches, I think I am going to try a 4th version next week (yes, they loved the 3 that much :)).

I don’t remember exactly who pitched on what day and which mentors were in on what day but here are some pictures and mentor pointers from Monday through Wednesday.

 

Patai from Builk got us started.

Marcus Ogawa, James Levine, David Shen, Marvin Liao and a few other mentors were in and shared the love!

Hana from BountyHuntr experimented with a bunch of different versions of her pitch

I don’t recall who the feedback was to (probably best that I don’t remember) but Marcus definitely had the most pointed feedback to one of us saying “I felt like you opened the kimono and showed me all your warts”. Aka, Waaaaaaaay too much info that led me down a bunch of rabbit holes.

Brian from Mailift got the best logo feedback from Angelika Blendstrup, I’ll leave that yo everyone’s imagination.

 We also got to experience pitches from Silverpush:

 

 

 

 

 

Atish from EquityZen:

 

Prof’ D2 from Anyadir Education:

 

And many others. My apologies to all the pitchers and mentors I did not mention. I’ll catch you next week…

On Wednesday Oliver Comargo from WePlann and I had a travel founder interview with Mark Seldana from 500 Startups. I’ll post a link to the interview next week at it is not online yet.

I wasn’t at 500 S on Thursday as I started looking for offices in San Francisco for our post 500 days but Gina from WePlann posted this picture of Sunset in Mountain View. I think this is Shri from EquityZen but I am not sure:

 

The 500 startups team had an offsite later in the wek and we received some pictures. Looks like they didn’t suffer too much:

 

The week wrapped up with a visit by the Japanese minister for innovation at 500. Good to see that Silicon valley is inspiring innovation around the world.

 

Have a great weekend and let the fun continue!

 

Gadi

500 Startups week 11 Wrap – Big push before the break

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Week 11 came and went. Right before we have a couple slow weeks at 500 Startups for the holidays, we had another big week.

The week kicked off with the batch meeting. This week most of the 500 S team was focused on interviewing teams for batch 8, but Parker Thompson was kind enough to run the meeting and others trickled in over time.

 

Daniel from Populr was VERY excited about the meeting. He might have been caught on tape sleeping during the meeting. In his defense he did apparently pull an all nighter Sunday night.

 

Ah, the joy of sitting next to me…

On Tuesday,Ben Ling from Khosla Ventures came to 500 and told us about his investment strategy & focus. He shared both hos current focus and his strategy when he was an angel investor. Very good insights for those who are fundraising in the batch.

Ben’s presentation was followed by an afternoon & evening with Sami Inkinen from Trulia. Sami both had a mentor session with us and then a fireside chat in which he shared a lot of insights about company culture, company growth and his experiences on what to do and what not to do. Sorry, fireside chats are not recorded so I can’t share them…

 

We worked form the city on Wednesday but rumor has it that some of the other teams had great mentor meetings.

On Tuesday we also launched our GA partnership with Any.Do to all their android users. Now whenever an Any.Do user puts a task to book a hotel they can automatically do that via OLSET. Exciting times.

On Thursday Kris Duggan from Badgeville gave a pitch on enterprise sales 101. Great insights for those who do not have B2B sales experience.

 

And then it was Friday, aka pitch day #2 for the companies that did not pitch last week.

We had a whole gamut of pitches. Some great, some in need of improvement. All, on their way to doing well on demo day.

Jonathan from Launchtrack got us started:

 

Dave McClure jumped in and provided some joyful feedback

 

There were a bunch of other pitches, I didn’t take all the pictures but then Pouria from CityBlis played Emily and pitched

 

We set up the batch with an easy way to book hotels for the NY demo day on OLSET. A coupe teams already booked. Fun times.

 

Happy Holidays!

Gadi

500 Startups week 10 Wrap – Let the pitches begin!

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Rumor has it this past week was the coldest we have had in the Bay Area in over a decade. It has now warmed back up but this is definitely reflected in the pictures from the batch meeting on Monday (notice the beautiful hats Max & Dave are wearing and Christine’s freezing stance…):

 

Most interesting news in the batch meeting is that the demo day in NY is on! So we have a preview day on Jan 22 in Mountain View, Pitch day in MV on Feb 5 and then we are off to NY on Feb 13. We are going to book all the hotels for the batch using OLSET!

After the batch meeting we had a “pitch view party”. We looked at a bunch of pitches from previous batches and learned the good and the bad, Very interesting and insightful.

On Tuesday, Christine Herron from Intel Capital dropped by and told us all about how VCs operate. We missed this presentation as we had the first OLSET investor / advisor / team meeting at that time.

You can find a recording of the presentation here: http://new.livestream.com/500SAcc/events/2611496

Stephanie Hay came to 500 startups on Wed and Thu and raised a storm! Definitely a couple of the best presentations we had throughout the program and a very informative mentor session. Stephanie has a knack for cutting through any BS and getting right to the point. What is the value you provide, to whom and why the hell are you doing what you are doing?

On Wednesday Stephanie gave a pitch on content for startups and what we should, or shouldn’t have on your website.

 

On Thursday Stephanie focused on our pitch on pitch day, what is important, what is not important (mainly what is not important…). Great insights!

 

You can find Stephanie’s presentation here: http://new.livestream.com/500SAcc/kickasspitch

Rewind a bit to Wednesday evening. 500 S hosted the Blue Hawaiian accelerator pitch day in MV. We saw pitches from a few very interesting companies. There are some great ideas coming out of Hawaii. They also shared pictures of having board meetings on surfboards and catching waves. If anyone is interested in joining an accelerator in paradise, this is not a bad option (not much money but who cares?).

 

They were kind enough to not only pitch but also share some Hawaiian Mai-Thais and Hawaiian food.

Here’s the CityBliss team after a few cocktails 🙂

 

And me enjoying a drink:

 

The drinks looked good (a bit froofy in my taste):

 

On Thursday evening our very own Celso Pita, the CEO of BTCJam gave us a presentation on Bitcoin 101. Amazing how much we don’t know about Bitcoin. 

You can find Celso’s presentation here: http://new.livestream.com/500SAcc/Bitcoin

And then it was Friday and we had pitch practice! 

A few of us volunteered to pitch on this first day, get feedback (some positive, some negative, most very helpful and surprisingly nobody was hurt).

Nick Holland from Populr was the first to go (apparently he pulled an all nighter before this):

 

Dave McClure was as gentle as a feather with his feedback (or not)…

 

I went second. Fun times. I definitely recommend pitching early as you get the most feedback that way and can improve the most.

We wrapped up the week with a meeting with our POC Parker Thompson and planning the next couple weeks. The OLSET team is working hard this weekend making some final adjustments to our Any.Do partnership in preparation for the GA launch with them this week.

Rumor has it that a bunch of our batch-mates went skydiving this afternoon. I wonder if we should be concerned as we haven’t heard anything from them yet and no pictures were posted on Facebook.

Well, that wraps week 10. The next couple weeks will be quiet as many of the teams are heading home for the holidays.

Have a great weekend

Gadi

500 Startups week 4 wrap!

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Writing a bit later than usual this week.

Just got back from a whirlwind 48-hour trip to Vegas and LA celebrating a birthday and a wedding with a couple cousins. No pictures will be posted in this blog (it was Vegas after all).

So, back to week 4 at 500 Sstartups!

The fun continued this week. I’ll start with some shout-outs for our batch companies that had some achievements / recognition this week.

Our friends at ViralGains won the $100k mass challenge prize. You can read more about this here:  http://www.necn.com/08/30/13/MassChallenge-finalist-ViralGains/landing_business.html?blockID=851085 – great job and looking forward to having you back in the bay area.

Tom from 3 Sourcing (www.3sourcing.com) got written up in the SV business journal for his interesting life choice while out in the bay area :). More here:  http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/11/03/roughing-it-in-silicon-valley-a-man.html

We had our first field trips to Google and FaceBook this week. Unfortunately I missed these due to a few other meetings I could not miss but fret not, Duleep “d2” from Anyadir Education was kind enough to contribute to my blog.

Google trip: Forty 500 Startups batch-mates packed into a Google Bus to explore the land of the Google-ites. From the colorful red, blue, yellow, green Google bicycles that dotted the landscape to the colorful umbrellas in the various patios, it was like a kid in a candy store, as colors were in full display. We had lightening presentations on Google Wallet, Fundraising, YouTube and YouTube API, Google maps and Cloud Services. These were followed by parallel breakaway sessions on each of these topics for about 45 minutes. It was fast, short, sweet and simple. We wrapped the visit with a walk through the sprawling Google campus, a trek through time with a visit to the site where we learned of the Wrath of Kahn footnote, and we stood on the very site where if you looked right you saw Mozilla and if you turned left you saw Chrome, the two most popular browsers were created. And how could one forget the short history on the birth of Adobe, the naming of Acrobat, and then there we were face to face with our android dessert! At the end of it all, 40 happy faces clutched their new prized Google Tshirt, a small memoir of a day spent in Google-dom!

D2 looks very happy with his Google bicycle here:

Monday evening was the Facebook visit. D2 reports: A packed room with 150 folks who wanted to learn everything about mobile ads. A smart team of presenters dressed in FB Blue in quick succession walked us through what has been developed and how we can leverage FB mobile ads for our respective businesses. The nearly one hour presentation was followed by a quick dinner, and then out trooped all the young experts who discussed 1-1 all possible situations and questions one could possibly have in a 30 minute time span. The established well funded companies were there as were several of the 500 start ups. For many (if not all) of us, it was more about questions related to FB marketing since none had still ventured into the mobile ad space. Something to think about! BTW, you can read the Anadir blog here: Anyadir.quora.com

We took a little breather from mentor meetings this week. Instead we started working with our batch co-founders to get their feedback. Some great learning interacting with the other companies in the batch. Very much looking forward to continuing that this week.

We had the first 500 Startups Halloween party on Thursday. Many famous guests showed up. See if you can spot anyone you’ve seen in movies recently here…

On Saturday the batch had a little social BBQ hosted by Alex from Grata and others who live at the Avalon close to the office. Some great time for bonding and talking about everything not related to startups, pitching or fundraising. These words were banned from the discussion…

There are a lot of events coming up next week and we need to start focusing on our presentation at the PhocusWright Travel Innovation Summit coming up in a couple weeks. OLSET is one of a few startups selected to present at this prestigious travel event. More details here: http://phocuswrightconference.com/travel-innovation-summit

Looking at my post you would think we don’t have any time to get stuff done. Amazingly enough the team does find time to focus and we are ready to launch with our first partner (GetGoing) this week.

4-weeks in, the ride continues….

Have a great week!!!

 

Week 3 Wrap!

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Back in the home office on a Saturday morning.

The bridge looks very different this week.

Rumor has it that it will clear up in a couple hours and we’ll have another beautiful weekend.

I thought week 3 would slow down a bit at 500 but guess what? It didn’t…

So, what did we have this week?

Monday kicked off with the weekly batch meeting. We are still showing up to these. I don’t think that will last much longer. Star of the meeting this week was Greg. If I am not mistaken he was fighting a stomach ache here after trying to talk about general solicitation…

Then there was a strange man limping around the office offering us candy. Strange happenings at 500:

Mike Curtis from AirBNB dropped in on Tuesday afternoon and shared some words of wisdom about AirBNB culture & innovation.

Mike had some great pointers. I caught up with him after his presentation. Sounds like a lot of their plans for 2014 are focused on personalization. Very aligned with OLSET’s strategy in the hospitality business. We’ll see if we can do something together. We filed our process, technology and algorithm patents in these areas this week – woohoo!

We had a bunch more mentor meetings this week. Tony Adam provided great insights on SEM, SEO and content marketing. Stephen Wendel gave us good pointers on measurement, peoples’ behavior and traveler engagement and James Levine had good insights into marketing spend & our ability to compete. James also showed us that he can give good advice while getting shot:

OK, I might have meant getting a flu shot…

BTW, I blame Tim Chae for suggesting that we get the flu shots and practically giving me the flu. Not feeling great today.

Unfortunately I missed the LGBT entrepreneurship event with Startout on Wednesday evening because I had to be in SF for meetings but I heard it was a great event. I did get a picture from the event:

Anyone who was there, feel free to add color!

Thursday was very eventful. It kicked off with a metrics session with Matt Berman. Good focus on what to measure, when to measure and when. Greg shared a lot of information about general solicitation over lunch. I think we all realize that we should not risk it…

We had a very good session with Amir Shevat from Google after lunch. There are some great technology and partnership opportunities for us with Google. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

The Punchd guys dropped in for a fireside chat in the evening. They were part of batch 1 of 500 Startups and were acquired by Google a couple years ago. They had great insights and pointers on bootstrapping a company and what not to do when you are in M&A discussions 🙂

The evening wrapped up at Saint Steven’s Green. Dave came out for a drink with us before his world tour. It was good to hang out with Jared from Populr and Ellis from Grata.

 

I was able to obtain a map of Dave McClure’s upcoming travels. If anyone wants to intercept him on the road. See the map below (click to enlarge & see the route):

 

Friday kicked off with my breakfast of champions (different angle this time :)):

 

We met with Felix from Microsoft on Friday. They have some interesting stuff going on but it looks like it will be much harder to partner with them. Too bad…

Week wrapped up with a mentor / founder mingling event and then it was time to head back to San Francisco for the weekend. I took a picture of our office from the parking lot and marked our windows (same window I took the picture above from):

 

We had a ton of other meetings starting to prepare for the Travel Innovation summit in November. OLSET (www.olset.com) will be one of 10 startups presenting at this event: http://phocuswrightconference.com/innovators

OK, back to work…