Innovators Support President Obama on YouTube

Back in August in San Francisco, I was interviewed by CNet Co-founder Shelby Bonnie on my thoughts on innovation in America and why I support President Obama in the 2012 election. The interview was part of the Technology for Obama Innovator Series and also included interviews with other entrepreneurs who support Obama like Drew Houston of DropBox, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Jon Bischke of Entelo, Dave Morin of Path, and Aaron Levie of Box.

I, along with these leading innovators and entrepreneurs, believe that President Obama is the best candidate for business, innovation, immigration, and education.

Below is the intro video from Tech4Obama followed by five videos from my interview. Please feel free to share these videos with your network.

Intro – Tech Entrepreneurs on Innovation and President Obama (2:06)

1. Innovation In America (4:42)

2. Innovation and The 2012 Election (2:24)

3. Lessons Learned in Business (3:05)

4. The The Story of iContact & The Steps for Innovation (4:30)

5. Keys to Success & The Start of Connect (3:33)

You can watch the full series of videos on the Tech4Obama channel on YouTube.

President Obama Has Been Great for Business

Here’s how the stock market, job market, and corporate profits have fared the last few years. President Obama has truly been great for business.

1. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 92% since March 2009
2. The country has created 4.3 million new jobs since the bottom in March 2010
3. Corporate profits have increased 64.8% since January 2009

Keeping in mind the depths of the Great Recession during which President Obama came into office, this performance is very strong for one term. Even in normal times, this would have been very strong performance as President.

I also like much prefer President Obama’s perspective on women’s rights, foreign policy, immigration, and creating the jobs of tomorrow in clean energy and advanced manufacturing here at home.

He’s earned my vote for a second term.

What Harvard Business School is Teaching This Tech Entrepreneur

Reflections on the Last Three Weeks at HBS:

Over the weekend, I took some time to reflect on my last three weeks at HBS and the key lessons I’ve learned. This post is a follow-up to “What I Learned: Week 3 at HBS.”

As an entrepreneur, I continue to be really glad I’m at HBS. From classmates and through the HBS case methodology and out-of-class simulations I’m learning a lot that I’ll be able to take with me into to the next company–particularly about leadership and organizational behavior.

Here’s more color on what I’ve been up to the last three weeks and what HBS is teaching this tech entrepreneur so far…

A Journey Back in Time to iContact in Q4 2010

This time, I’ll begin with a story.

It was October 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina. I had been the CEO of iContact since 2003. I had recently turned 26. I was definitely learning as I went along. The firm at the time had around 250 employees and 60,000 customers. We had just closed on a $40 million round of financing that August from PE firm JMI Equity. We faced, perhaps, our greatest strategic choice yet and the stakes were higher than ever before.

To continue our growth–should we:

1. Launch a free version of our product to reach a lot more users (and eventually more paying customers) as a competitor had shown to be possible;
2. Develop a social media marketing product to enable us to serve our core small business customers more fully;
3. Move upmarket into serving larger customers;
4. Some combination of all three.

All the information needed to make the right call was at my fingertips. But what was the right strategic choice?

I spent weeks agonizing over the decision and looking at the internal, customer, and market data from every angle to make up my mind. Then, I kicked off a month long process to bring my executive team in on the planning process. Then, we went through a five month operational process to implement the decision.

Wait a second–did you catch that? I spent a month making up my mind and then I brought my executive team into the process? What was I thinking?

Strategic Mistakes I Wouldn’t Have Made Had I Attended HBS Before iContact

I made (at least) three critical mistakes in the above strategic planning process.

1. I brought in my executive team after I had spent a month making up my mind on the decision. I didn’t bring them in on the process early enough and I didn’t properly incorporate the information they had into the process. By the time I brought them in–the bias-toward-action get things done entrepreneur in my blood was ready to act and implement. But from their vantage we hadn’t even discussed the key strategic decision yet.
2. I didn’t create a process under which needed information could be freely brought to the table.
3. I still thought my job as CEO was to fix the problem rather than develop my team to fix the problem.

One of the key “HBS takeaways” from the last few weeks for me has been that to continue to grow beyond initial success, an entrepreneurial founder CEO must change their very nature and slow down to:

1. Create effective processes for disciplined information sharing.
2. Give up as many operational roles in the company as possible.
3. Bring the senior team in early on during strategy formation.

The Key Difference Between a Start-up CEO and a Later Stage CEO

As I’ve reflected this weekend on the last three weeks of classes, I’ve crystallized some thoughts I’ve been having recently regarding the key difference between the CEO of a start-up and the CEO of a larger company.

As CEO of a large profitable company, if you do nothing, a lot continues to happen just fine–for quite some time anyway. Larger profitable companies have an infinite number of months of operating funds on hand (as long as they stay profitable).

As CEO of a start-up, if you do nothing initially, you never go anywhere. And once you’re burning through cash, if you do nothing, you go out of business. In general, start-ups are burning through cash every month and struggling to survive.

Start-ups may only have 2-9 months of cash on hand (sometimes less!). Start-ups often have a short timeframe until they will be either forced to generate more revenue than expenses, raise another dilutive round of capital, or go out of business. And so, if you’re leading a start-up, generally you have to act. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Right now.

The big mountain in front of you will only be moved through the will of a determined, focused, and fast moving leader. You think as you go. You develop a great deal of self-reliance. You intimately understand the customer problem you’re solving because you live it daily. You have a clear vision. And you just make it happen through sheer determination and persistence.

The Chief Everything Officer vs. the Chief Empowerment Officer

In the first year of a start-up, the title “CEO” stands for Chief Everything Officer. You’re often the chief janitor, chief recruiter, chief marketer, chief spreadsheet maker, chief evangelist, and sometimes even the chief engineer. If there’s a problem–solve it. If there’s an issue–fix it. The mantra is: Do. It. Now.

The very reason why so few start-up founders can successfully scale as a leader beyond 50 employees is simply this–start-up founders too often don’t get the training or mentoring they need to go from the perspective of “I’ll fix it” to “I’ll develop my team to fix it.”

After your firm reaches 100 employees, “CEO” stops standing for Chief Everything Officer.

After 100 employees, “CEO” begins to stand for Chief Empowerment Officer. Your job is not to do everything. Your job is not to solve most problems yourself. Your job is to develop your team and empower your team to solve problems.

While fixing the problem yourself and micromanaging the solution is often quicker in the short term, micromanaging actually makes the company slower to solve problems in the mid-term and long-term.

Why? Because micromanaging inserts a bottleneck (you) in the process and fails to develop critical team problem solving skills. This reality seems obvious. But, too often the start-up entrepreneur who actually makes it to 100 employees feels like they’ve succeeded against all odds and so they should just continue doing what got them there.

What is the Job of the Later Stage Venture-Backed CEO?

So, what is the job of the later stage CEO (post-100 employees)? Here’s my take:

1. Recruiting and leading the senior team and holding them accountable to pre-defined quantitative goals.
2. Guiding the team in developing a cohesive and focused business and product strategy with clear market positioning.
3. Intimately understanding the needs of customers and market trends.
4. Raising capital and managing resource allocation.
5. Guiding and building the culture of the organization.
6. Managing investor, board, and analyst relationships.

None of these six job requirements say, “fix operational problems yourself” or “set strategy yourself.” Yet too often–this is what Founder CEOs continue to do way too long into their tenure.

Start-up Genes and Cruise Ship Captains

So why is it that the successful “start-up CEO gene” negatively correlates with the successful “large company CEO gene?” Why must this lesson on micromanagement and process be learned eventually by nearly every start-up CEO as they mature?

This phenomenon occurs, I believe, because the key trait that leads to success as a start-up CEO (which is a relentless bias toward action and focus on rapid implementation and incremental improvement) is often the exact trait that causes that same person to become impatient with the processes necessary to prudently make the right decisions and run the company when it grows larger–at least without the right mentorship and training.

Sometimes the swiftest speed boat racers (entrepreneurs) end up sinking the cruise ship (the large company) by trying to turn it too fast and too frequently. Larger ships require coordinated plans and defined processes to properly turn their direction. Speed boat racers rarely enjoy “process” and “planning” and often have this “success bias” that makes them think what’s worked so far will continue to work.

However, if the entrepreneur is going to build something that long outlives them and makes the impact on the world they hope for, it’s either time to learn to manage a large organization or bring in someone who can.

As HBS Professor Noam Wasserman has noted in his research on Founder-CEO succession, “While the Founder-CEO’s skills were a good ‘?t’ for the contingencies faced by the company before, enabling the company to reach its critical milestones, those skills are usually much less important now that the company faces radically different contingencies (Organization Science, March-April 2003).”

While an outside professional CEO often doesn’t have the same passion for the business as the original founder(s), disaster can occur if the unprepared entrepreneurial CEO keeps the helm too long without the right guidance and mentoring.

I Learned The Micromanagement Lesson – Yet I Clung On to Strategy

As CEO at iContact for nine years, over time I “half learned” this lesson regarding not being a micromanager.

We had built a wonderful and experienced seven person Senior Leadership Team including an CFO, CTO, CMO, Chief Architect, SVP Sales, SVP Support, and VP HR. In every case, I was fortunate to have hired people much more experienced than myself. I let Tim run finance, Ralph run tech, Kevin run sales, etc.

I had learned the key lesson around 2005 that my job as CEO was to hire people more experienced than me and hold them accountable to clearly pre-defined results, not to process. Thus I could step back and the company grew–from $3M in sales in 2006 to $48M in sales in 2011.

While I gave up the individual departmental operational responsibilities (and benefited greatly from having done so), what I never truly gave up at iContact was strategy. This ultimately, was one of the practices that prevented us from succeeding further and reaching a greater potential.

We would have these quarterly and annual strategy retreat sessions–but too often they turned into me guiding the team toward what I thought the right path was instead of the other way around.

Strategy is Really About Choice and Focus

By the end of 2011 at iContact I finally came to understand the value of process and integrated thinking in the setting of corporate strategy. I brought a bit of a more structured process into how we thought through 2012 strategy, asking each team member to prepare position papers on what they would do if they were CEO.

By then, however, the market had become more competitive, the path we had embarked on for 2011 hadn’t worked as well as we hoped, and we had fewer good options to choose from. Ultimately, we chose to sell the company to Vocus in February 2012 to gain liquidity and access greater distribution channels.

So which of the four choices did we choose in 2011 at iContact?

Strangely, #4. We did all three of the above listed options! We launched a free version, launched a social media product, and positioned upmarket.

If had taken HBS Professor Michael Porter’s strategy class back then I would have known that strategy is about choice. A “do everything in one year” strategy rarely works. While things turned out okay–in hindsight I believe if we would have focused on executing one of those key moves in 2011 extremely well instead of attempting all three we may have been better off.

How HBS Has Taught the Key “Micromanagement Lesson” Three Times In The Last Three Weeks

It really wasn’t until the past three weeks as HBS has consciously taught this “micromanagement lesson” three times that these learnings above have truly cemented in my brain. I have to say, learning through experiential cases and team simulations at HBS is a lot less costly than learning on the job!

Over the past three weeks, HBS has attempted to teach us this oh so important lesson of how to bring the best out of a team at least three times…

1. During the Everest Simulation – We were put on a team of five and given the task of reaching the top of Mt. Everest in a computer simulation. We were given the roles of leader, marathoner, doctor, photographer, and environmentalist. I was the environmentalist. While I’ll leave out the details in order to not spoil any surprise for future classes, suffice it to say the simulation was very effective at teaching the importance of the leader creating a process to share information.

2. During the Shad Simulation on Building Circuit Boards -

HBS split the entire first year class into around 75 teams of 12 students. Each team had a leader designated and was in charge of creating an assembly line process to build three different types of circuit boards – economy, deluxe, and imperial. We learned not only how to organize our labor for maximum efficiency of output in a timed contest, but more importantly how to create a process to share information effectively within a team of twelve very smart people.

3. During the Wolfgang Keller Konigsbrau Case in LEAD class -

This case chronicles the path of Wolfgang Keller, General Manager of a Ukrainian Premium Beer Brewery, as he figures out what to do with his head of sales and marketing, Dmitri Brodsky. While I won’t describe the case in much more detail, suffice it to say that Wolfgang was the classic micromanager and hadn’t yet learned the lesson to hold his team members responsible for results rather than process.

It was the class discussion however with our LEAD Professor Lakshmi Ramarajan that left me with the best takeaway of my time so far at HBS. She told us, paraphrasing, “There are two types of leaders. Those who solve the problem and those who develop people who solve the problem.”

I was so glad to hear HBS reinforce these two key business lessons time and again:

1. Build and develop a team to scale yourself.
2. Teams which have a good process of information sharing (combined with smart people in the room) generally get much better results than those in which the leader does not create such a process and whose team members keep key information in silos.

What I’d Do Differently Now

Summarizing my key leadership lessons at HBS so far, here’s a comparison of what I thought prior to coming here and what would I have done instead had I already been through the first six weeks of HBS…

Topic	What I Thought Pre-HBS	What I Probably Should Have Done — Incorporating HBS Lessons
Strategy Development	I thought my job was to analyze the internal, customer, and market data and come up with a viewpoint relating to company strategy, then to lead my team to seeing it the way I did and have them build the operating plan to implement the strategy. I would often spend weeks analyzing data and only once I had come to a pretty firm perspective, hold a quarterly strategy retreat. Unfortunately the retreat was generally held after I had already made up my mind and thus I missed incorporating critical pieces of information that may have helped us make better decisions.	Instead of brining the full executive team together for 1-2 days per quarter, I should have brought together a small committee of the key members of the senior team to discuss strategy at least monthly in shorter meetings as part of the input and analysis phase. Instead of analyzing quickly at the last minute and then rushing to implement an all-of-the above strategy, I should have forced us to clearly choose and communicate our target audience and differentiation factor and built up a year long program focused just on moving toward that well-defined and well thought-through market position. My bias toward action got the best of me.
Information Sharing	I didn’t create a process under which needed information could be freely brought to the table.	I should have created a process under which needed information related to strategic decisions could be freely brought to the table and one through the painful work to create an agreed upon accounting costing system to better calculate the profitability of our two major customer segments (like in the case of Kanthal the Swedish manufacturer).
Developing Your Team	I still thought my job as CEO was to fix the strategic problem rather than develop my team to fix the strategic problem.	While I did give up almost all operational control to the six departmental heads, I still retained strategic control. I spent too much time cerebrally “in my own head” reviewing data and figures and not enough time pushing the team (who had a lot more experience than I did) on what they would do strategically.

The Adventure Continues in San Francisco

I’m drinking an Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout at my house in San Francisco. Our Chief of Staff candidate is for some reason awesomely dancing in the kitchen behind me. I’m looking out the window at a view of the Castro, Mission, Potrero Hill, SOMA, Russian Hill, Corona Heights, and Buena Vista.

So here’s the story…

On April 14th I was in Mountain View, CA during a lecture on neuroscience at the Singularity University Executive Education program. A eureka moment had just occurred during a rather intense theta wave. The vision for what I just had to create came into my head. The same focused intensity that overtook me in the Summer of 2003 while building out iContact with Aaron had returned.

The next few days I was in whiteboard sketch-up mode in pure John Nash style. I was also on the lookout for a co-founder and knew I would need to start building out a great technical team.

Meeting My Co-Founder

A week later, Anima Sarah LaVoy (whose first name means “soul”) and I met here in San Francisco through our mutual friend Bear and her boyfriend Daniel, an engineer at Google. She was a brilliant and ebullient 31 year-old with an Oxford MBA, a decade of experience building complex political organizations, and a deep understanding of psychology and the human operating system. Turns out, she had the same problem I had: “How to intelligently scale our ability to organize and visualize our human relationships.” We decided to work on solving this problem together.

The Summer of 2012 in SF

By May 4th, I had decided to move to San Francisco for (at least) the summer and start a new company to bring this vision to market. I wrote my friend Burcu in an email:

“The intelligence and ambition and care and values of the people here is unmatched anywhere in the world. My best friends from so many different walks of life all happen to be living within a 6 block radius of a park called Dolores Park between the neighborhoods of the Castro and the Mission. I have found a great home to rent for the summer right here in the middle of it all, on a nice hill with a great view of the city. The values driven innovative culture here is palpable and this area of the world is truly the vanguard of our culture. It’s sort of like 1968 with iPhones. Imagine if the social justice passion of the 60s were combined with the connection and communication technology of 2012. Imagine how you could change the world in that environment. And then you wake up with a smile and realize that’s what’s actually happening. I’m like a little kid in a candy store here.

I’m consistently amazed that it feels like the future here. People are commonly talking about genomics, self-driving cars, 3d printing, the application of smart phone diagnostics to global public health in remote villages, artificial intelligence, robotics, and solving humanity’s greatest challenges. I may have found my tribe. Oh, and they dance and dress up in banana costumes! There is an amazing casual run called Bay to Breakers coming up on May 20th when everyone dresses up and jogs across the city as groups of penguins or bears or salmon or bananas. You must join my group of penguins.”

I think those two paragraphs pretty much summed up my thoughts on San Francisco as the Summer of 2012 begins.

Life, Death, Renewal & Innovation

On May 6 I left for my HBS interview in Boston and then Kenya for a week for a trip with the UN Foundation to Nairobi and the Kakuma Refugee Camp near the South Sudan border. After coming upon two Somali refugee teenagers who had Android smart phones in the remotest part of Kenya– I was hit by quite an obvious yet significant realization–smart mobile touch devices will be nearly ubiquitous globally within three years.

When I returned from Kenya to the States, I went to Florida as my mom was ill. While I was there, she ended up passing away from brain cancer on May 25th six months after being diagnosed. She was a social worker from Yorkshire, England who primarily worked with mentally handicapped individuals during her professional career. She taught me to be confident, think big, travel widely, and read often. She taught me to follow my bliss and to live fully everyday. I gained so much inspiration and purpose from her. I am now on a super-clear life mission.

When I came back to California on June 1st, I was focused. I would build this new company in my mother’s name. And at it’s core purpose would be a social mission to make it much easier for human beings to connect with each other globally on mobile touch devices. It would be a B Corp from the start.

Anima would become our Co-Founder and Chief Connector/Chief Alchemist. I would be the co-founder and Chief Energy Officer (chief “executive” officer sounds so boringly corporate). We would all work our butts off for the summer and get an alpha to market by mid-August.

And so, after May 22nd a new mobile technology company was born with the help of my good friends at DLA Piper and the lovely Delaware Secretary of State. For the next few weeks, we’ve decided to keep the official company name a bit stealthy until we lock up our domain assets. Our temp domain is stealthstarship.com . Yep, we’re that nerdy.

And Then There Were Five

The last week has been just amazing. I had a chance to meet President Obama on Wednesday during a roundtable in San Francisco with Marc Benioff and was excited to join on as a National Co-Chair of Technology for Obama (T4O) for the remainder of the campaign season.

Our team also grew from 2 to 5 members last week. Addison Hardy the preternaturally brilliant PHP/Python engineer arrived from North Carolina, Sara Luchian the Chief of Staff candidate joined us from Philadelphia after completing her Wharton MBA, and Marwan Roushdy the CSS Guru/Front End Designer flew in from Egypt.

What we’re building is rather technologically complex and requires an integration of left brain big data analytics with right brain creative aesthetics and so we really have no idea if we’ll succeed or not, but we’re going to have a damn good time trying. We’re not afraid to fail, as to us, the only way to fail is living out of integrity. We’re super focused and we’re putting it all on the line.

The team is living/working in a house in Noe Valley/Eureka Heights, SF in a house that I now own, by way of Googler Max Ventilla, and having lots of fun while taking the time to bring together great advisors for wonderful dinners and think deeply about the problem we’ve set out to solve. I’m learning how to make super healthy smoothies on our Vitamix 5200. And we’re watching Star Wars movies at night in The Temple (which is complete with a gong, multicolor LED lights, and sayings from the Dalai Lama).

Here are the house rules we’ve posted on the front door and a white board…

Above our whiteboard is the quote, “Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. Everything else is hackable.” Above the fishtank is “A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.”

You can check out my Tumblr for more recent team photos.

We’re Hiring! Come Join Us!!

Now, we’re now looking for team members 6 through 8 to join over the next 2-4 weeks to join us on this crazy adventure with an ambitious, caring, competent, and semi-well capitalized crew.

We’re now accepting applications over the next 5 days for a senior PHP/Python engineer, a Data Scientist, an API Engineer, and CTO/Technical Co-Founder. We’re primarily looking for people from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Twitter, and Salesforce with significant experience with scalability, but are open to applicants from anywhere. We’re also only looking for compassionate, caring, and highly competent people who want to make a difference in the world.

We’re centrally located in SF, paying above market salaries, offering early equity positions and the opportunity to work with the best technology, and promise an amazingly fun and meaningful summer. Come join us!

> Here’s some additional info on the technical job openings.

If you’d like to apply please send your CV to me at ryan@stealthstarship.com. If you know someone who may wish to apply, I very much welcome introductions at that email address.

With so much love,
Ryan

My Message to Egyptian Entrepreneurs

On Thursday at the Smart Village Egypt outside of Cairo, I had the opportunity to give a keynote speech during the NexGen IT Entrepreneur Bootcamp award ceremony.

The winning teams were Bey2ollak, Inkezny, Supermama, and Crowdit. The team from Bey2ollak and one other team TBD will be interning at iContact in North Carolina in October. The other two winning teams will be participating in a three month Danish startup bootcamp in the Fall.

My message to the young Egyptian entrepreneurs in the room was “You can achieve anything you set your mind to.”

Mike Ducker from the Global Entrepreneurship Program at the U.S. State Department gave an introduction and then I jumped right in.

Here are my prep notes from the speech:

Intro

• Congratulations to all the teams that have participated in the NexGen IT Entrepreneur Bootcamp.
• Coming here Monday I wasn’t sure what to expect.
• The quality of the young tech entrepreneurs here in Cairo is world-class.
• The youth of Egypt have already proven their ability to affect change, and this class of tech entrepreneurs has been extremely impressive.
• I run iContact in North Carolina. We do email marketing and social media marketing software and services for small and mid-sized businesses.
• I also have a small investment fund called HumanityFund that invests in entrepreneurs who are changing the world in both the United States and in East Africa.
• I hope someday to have my first investment in Egypt.
• Today I’m going to challenge you to be a leader.
• Be a leader in in your community.
• Be a leader in your nation.
• Be a leader in changing the world.
• Entrepreneurs change the world.
• Entrepreneurship is not about making money.
• Entrepreneurship is about helping others.
• Entrepreneurship is about creating value–for your customers, employees, community, and shareholders.
• Wonderfully, the more you help others and the more value you create, the more money you will make that you can then invest in giving back and helping other entrepreneurs succeed.

My Story

• I started in business at age 11 helping senior citizens learn how to use the internet in Florida.
• I learned that word of mouth marketing is the best type of marketing you can get because it is trusted and it is free.
• At 14 I had a business creating web sites.
• I learned that you need to hire a team of people around you to scale the business.
• By 18 I was the CEO of iContact.
• I learned that if that you hire people much more experienced that yourself, amazing things can happen.
• Today iContact has 300 employees and $50M in annual sales.
• Here are the eight of the lessons I’ve learned in business in the last fifteen years.

Lessons Learned

1. Set your goals high. Write them down. Frame them. When I was 16 I wrote down the goal to build a company to 1 million in sales by the time I turned 21. At that point I was making $4000 per year designing web sites, so it was an ambitious goal. I missed the goal. On September 1, 2005 iContact reached 1 million in sales. Eighteen days after my 21st birthday. Because I set that specific definite goal, I went after figuring out how to get the people, knowledge, and resources into my life necessary to make it happen, even though I wasn’t sure how it would happen when I set it.
2. Don’t be afraid to fail. Fail your way to succeed.
3. Surround yourself only with positive people. Avoid negative people.
4. Hire people more experienced than yourself. You should never have a direct report who can’t do their job better than you could do their job.
5. Have fun. Enjoy the journey. Don’t be boring. Consciously create an awesome culture at your company.
6. Think big and think globally when you build your business.
7. There are two types of people in the world. People who watch more TV than they read. And people who read more than they watch TV. Be the second type of person. Read as often as you can. Five hours of reading per week minimum. Book recommendations: Rich Dad Poor Dad, Think and Grow Rich, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.
8. Create your business around one simple principle, “do unto others as you’d have done unto yourself.” Make every interaction you have with every employee and customer follow this principle.

Final Thoughts

• As entrepreneurs, you are all in the business of changing the world.
• Our generation can communicate and collaborate globally like none other before it.
• Work hard, collaborate.
• You can do anything you set your mind to.
• The world is watching what you do now.
• Be a leader.
• End with chant of “I’m an Egyptian. I can change the world.”

What message would you have shared with an auditorium full of future Egyptian changemakers and innovators??

Egypt: From Political Revolution to Entrepreneurial Evolution

I came to Cairo five days ago not knowing what to expect. I leave knowing there are world-class tech entrepreneurs here in Egypt.

In April, I learned I had been selected as one of six American entrepreneurs who would be mentors for a USAID/State Department program backed by the Danish and Egyptian governments to mentor tech entrepreneurs here in Cairo. I learned about the program from Scott Gerber of the non-profit Young Entrepreneur Council.

The program, called the NexGen IT Entrepreneur Bootcamp kicked off on Sunday in Egypt’s Smart Village, just outside of Cairo.

The Mentors

The six American entrepreneurs were:

• Jeff Hoffman, Co-founder, Former CEO of Priceline.com
• Scott Gerber, Founder, Young Entrepreneur Council
• Alexis Ohanian, Co-founder of Reddit
• Shama Kabani, CEO of Marketing Zen
• Kevin Langle, Global Chairman, Entrepreneurs Organization
• Ryan Allis, CEO iContact

We were joined by four entrepreneurs from Denmark:

• Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Podio
• Natasha Friis Saxberg, Gignal
• Kamran Jamshidi, Marketing Lion
• Alex Farcet, Startup Bootcamp

Together, we worked with nineteen teams young Egyptian tech entrepreneurs age 18-30 on Sunday-Wednesday to help them refine their business models and pitches in preparations for the final pitch competition on Thursday. It was extraordinarily impressive to see the immense improvement in the pitches as each day passed.

The Winners

On Thursday we held the final pitch session. Each team presented for 8 minutes followed by 2 minutes of Q&A. We served as the judges, scoring each team across five category. After four hours of final pitches, the four winners were announced:

• Crowdit -A digital collaborative storytelling platform that is using real-time pictures, video, and social media reports to reinvent the way stories are told and shared online. Their first project will be called 18 Days in Egypt and provide a 360 view of the Egyptian Revolution told through the eyes of the people of Europe.
• SuperMama.me – The iVillage of the Middle East. Creating a community of mothers designed to connect and empower the women of the Middle East / North Africa region.
• Inkezny (RescueMe) – An iPhone app that enables travelers to make emergency calls (Police / Ambulance / Fire ) in any location they are traveling in the world without having to know the local emergency phone number, as well as seeing GPS directions to and phone numbers for the nearest hospitals, and posting a panic notification with location to a users social networks.
• Bey2ollak – An iPhone app that provides live user-generated reports of traffic conditions on the streets of Cairo. They already have 50,000 users shortly after launch and are working on expanding their application globally.

In addition to these four winners, I also really liked

• Balooshy – A location-based ad network for mobile content.
• Tabshora – A 37-signals like tool enabling designers to easily get feedback on design comps from customers.
• OfferQ – A social network for daily deals.

Across the board, the quality of the teams was high, nearly akin to what you might see at a Y Combinator or TechStars in the USA.

The Winners to Intern at iContact

Two of the winning teams will be coming to North Carolina in October for a three week internship at iContact. We are very excited to host them.

They will have a chance to observe every area at iContact including marketing, customer service, sales, finance, and technology. They will also have a chance to meet with investors in both North Carolina and New York City.

The other two teams will have the chance to attend the three-month Startup Bootcamp in Denmark in September, October, and November.

Creation of an Investment Fund for Egyptian Tech Entrepreneurs

On Wednesday night, we all had the opportunity to have dinner at the residence of the Danish Ambassador to Egypt.

While there, we met Hany Al Sanbaty, an Egyptian venture capitalist who runs Sawari Ventures and?Flat6 Labs, an incubator and fund that is launching in Egypt in July.

We were so impressed by the quality of the Egyptian tech entrepreneurs. We wanted to do something tangible and meaningful to show our belief in that these businesses would succeed.

After discussing, members of the American and Danish delegations came together that evening to create a $100,000 pool of committed angel investment funds (which has since grown larger) to invest in the Egyptian tech companies that will come out of the Flat6 Labs incubator in the coming months. The excitement on both sides was palpable when we announced this commitment the next day at the finals. It was clear that we believed in these Egyptian entrepreneurs and were willing to back them with more than words.

Leaving Cairo

And so, after a wonderful celebratory dinner cruise for all participants on the Nile earlier tonight, now I am in the Cairo airport heading back home to the USA.

Tonight, I leave Egypt inspired. And I leave immensely impressed by what Egyptian youth can accomplish, whether it is in eighteen days in the Spring or five days in the Summer.

Going to Egypt Tomorrow

Hello from Boston. I’m here today for year three of the EO/MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program.

I am excited to be heading to Egypt tomorrow as part of a U.S. State Department and USAID funded program in alliance with the Egyptian and Danish governments. I’ll be headed there with American entrepreneurs Shama Kabani, Alexis Ohanian, and Scott Gerber of the Young Entrepreneurs Council.

We’ll be mentoring 48 young Egyptian tech entrepreneurs ages 18-30 in Cairo with the NextGen IT Entrepreneurs Bootcamp and judging a business plan competition. Four of the winners will be coming to the US in October to intern at iContact for three weeks. I’m passionate about using business, technology, and entrepreneurship as tools to make a positive impact in the world, so this will be a great opportunity to see Egypt and work with great tech entrepreneurs in an exciting part of the world.

This will be my fourth trip to Africa, but first in North Africa. In about 5% of my spare time, I invest in tech entrepreneurs in the US and Africa via the Humanity Fund, so when I was asked to go by Scott Gerber I knew it would be right up my alley.

Egypt is passing through a very significant time in it’s history and it will be fascinating to be there. Quoting one of the participants in the program, “Egypt holds an important place in human history as one of the birthplaces of commerce, and the knowledge and experience of Egyptian business people will lead to many exciting and valuable products, services, and innovations for years to come. This is a great time for Egypt to truly shine.”

Here’s some additional info on the program. More blogging to come as I’m there…

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NexGen IT Entrepreneurs Boot Camp
Background

The NexGen IT Entrepreneurs Boot Camp, is a collaborative effort by the Government of Denmark, the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program, the United States Agency for International Development’s Egypt Competitiveness Project, and the Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre, affiliated with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology. The NexGen IT Boot Camp is a series of training events that includes a Business Plan Awareness Class and an IT Master Class. The later will be taught by US and Danish Delegates in which prizes will be awarded to four winning teams. Two of the winning teams will travel to the US in October to intern at iContact, a very rapidly growing American tech company.

More on the US internship @ iContact

The US internship will be with iContact in October. iContact is based in Raleigh, NC and is working to make email marketing and social marketing easy so that small and midsized companies and causes can grow and succeed. Founded in 2003, iContact has more than 300 employees and more than 700,000 users of its leading email marketing software.

As a B Corporation, iContact utilizes the 4-1s Corporate Social Responsibility Model, donating 1% of payroll, 1% of employee time to community volunteering, 1% of equity, and 1% of product to its local and global community as part of its social mission. iContact works hard to maintain a fun, creative, energetic, challenging and caring company culture. The Triangle Business Journal has named iContact one of the best places to work. The company has been listed on Inc. 500 3 years in a row and its founders Ryan Allis and Aaron Houghton were selected by Inc. Magazine 30 under 30 in 2009.

Two of the winning winning teams, composed of two individuals, will win the opportunity to gain critical knowledge of how to grow a business during a three weeks internship at iContact in Raleigh North Carolina. The iContact internship will be an entrepreneurial rotation in which the interns will learn about the critical parts of the business including marketing/sales, IT, customer service and finance. The internship is paid for by USAID through the Egyptian Competitiveness Project (ECP).

Tour of the iHub Tech Incubator in Nairobi Kenya

Today I visited the iHub, the “innovation hub” in Nairobi. It’s a tech incubator for developers. I met with Jessica Colaco, the iHub Manager. I got in touch with Jessica through Erik Hersman (@whiteafrican) of Ushahidi and Nathaniel Whittemore of AssetMap.

Take a look at this tour of their space I filmed this afternoon.

What is iHub?

iHub is an “open innovation space” with 2000 members. They have three levels of membership, white, green, and red. “White memberships” include virtual community access and are free. Green memberships are also free and include access to the space and events. Red memberships cost 10,000 Kenyan Shillings per month (about $125) and include a dedicated desk and access to conference rooms.

iHub has one of the fastest internet connections in Nairobi. When I visited at 3pm in the afternoon on the day before New Year’s Eve it was pretty busy with about 20 young developers working away, some in relaxing bean bags and other at open desks. I loved the feel of the place with a coffee stand, Matatu route map, high 20 foot ceilings, DJ-like booth for Jessica, programming book library, comfortable seating, and an outdoor terrace overlooking Nairobi.

Jessica says the purpose of iHub is to be a “encourage collaboration and be a physical nexus point between investors, academia, the tech communities, and tech companies.” iHub has fireside chats with tech entrepreneurs once per month. They recently had the CEO of SafariCom Michael Joseph do a chat. They also hold BarCamps, Designer Meetups, Research Meetups, and Hack-a-thons.

iHub recently hosted “Random Hacks of Kindness” which gave developers 36 hours to develop a software solution to problems that were submitted by the community. They also hosted Apps4Africa in conjunction with the U.S. State Department and Ugandan incubators Appfrica and HiveCoLabs.

iHub operates as a non-profit with the support of Erik Hersman’s Ushahidi and earns revenue from memberships, sponsorships, and event space rentals.

iHub reminded me a lot of LaunchBox, BullCity Forward, and JoystickLabs in Durham.

Happy New Year 2011!

-Ryan

Announcing iContact’s Series B Investment

Eight years ago when Aaron Houghton and I met at UNC, we never fathomed we’d have the opportunity to build the nascent iContact into a great global company based here in North Carolina. As iContact passes 225 employees and $40M in annualized sales, we see an opportunity to do something rare—to build a venture-backed IT company here in the Triangle from start-up to IPO. Today, we’re announcing a critical milestone on our journey.

I’m thrilled to share the wonderful news that iContact has closed on $40 million of Series B venture capital funding from JMI Equity of Baltimore, Maryland. We worked with Allen & Company out of New York as our investment bank advisor in this round.
This $40M comes in addition to the $13.3M we’ve raised so far from our investors IDEA Fund Partners, Updata Partners, and North Atlantic Capital.

We’ll be using these new funds to make significant investments in sales and marketing, back-end technology, our product features and usability, global expansion, and of course our people that drive all of our success.

Over the past eight years we have been on a growth spurt, increasing from $2M in annual sales when we raised our first round of funding in May 2006 from IDEA Fund Partners in Durham to $40M in annual sales today four years later. We have been fortunate to find great people to join us at iContact as employees and investors. We would not have been able to get to this point without the amazing team that is with us.

For us, this is just the beginning of building a company that will be here in North Carolina for many decades to come. iContact’s vision is to “build a great global company, based here in North Carolina, for our customers, employees, and community.”

Building a Unique Company, For the Long Term

We are working on building a unique company, one that sees social and environmental responsibility as additive to success not counter to it, one that invests heavily in building a fun and creative place to work, and one that cares about maximizing value created in the long term not profits generated in the short term.

Our business philosophy says “The purpose of business is to solve human problems and that if we focus on creating positive value for our customers, employees, and community we will maximize financial return for our investors and shareholders.”

We will use these new funds to invest in building iContact into a customer-focused socially responsible high-growth company with a wonderful work environment and company culture. We are glad to be part of the conscious capitalism movement that the B Corporation community is forwarding and wish to provide another example for what a socially responsible company with a great employee culture can become.

Our Three Promises

These new investment dollars will enable us to better fulfill what we call our Three Promises. Our Customer Promise is to “help SMBs succeed and grow.” Our Employee Promise is to “create a wonderful work environment that attracts A+ talent.” Our Community Promise is to “make a positive wake in our local and global communities.”

Our Customer Promise
Working toward our Customer Promise, we have recently rolled out our brand new MessageBuilder to our 65,000 customers and 700,000 users that has been under development for the last year. MessageBuilder makes it extremely easy for anyone to create a beautiful, professional, effective communication. We currently have 110 templates with the new MessageBuilder and will have hundreds more by year end.

We will also be rolling out the brand-new iContact for Salesforce next week, which has been in limited release for the last six months. We acquired Ettend.com in April to enable added event marketing capability for our customers. These product investments are in addition to an upgraded back-end infrastructure, an expanded QA team, and a six person in-house User Experience Team who talk to customers and users to help us design extremely easy to use features and functionality.

Our Employee Promise
Working toward our Employee Promise, we will be moving to brand new company headquarters on October 24th in Morrisville, North Carolina in Perimeter Park within the Lenovo Campus that will allow us to expand to 550 team members.
We have recently implemented on-site monthly massages to add to our list of unique employee benefits like on-site car washes, Bagel Mondays, monthly lunches, unlimited free sodas, and a culture that encourages Nerf gun battles, dressing up in drag, and creative expression.

Our Community Promise
Working toward our Community Promise, we rolled out our 4-1s Corporate Social Responsibility Program which includes giving 1% of payroll, 1% of product, 1% of equity, and 1% of time back to the community.

For 1% of payroll we will contribute $150,000 in 2010 to 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations. For 1% of product, iContact is now free of charge to any North Carolina non-profit to send newsletters up to 10,000 subscribers. For 1% of equity, we have committed 1% of the equity in iContact to the iContact Foundation to endow the foundation with funds to expand our ability to give back permanently.

For 1% of time, we have provided each employee 2.5 additional days off per year to volunteer in the community during business hours. When we started the year, I set a goal of 1000 hours of community service in our first year. iContact employees have already completed 1200 community volunteer hours and it is only August!

Special Thanks

We worked with Brad Wolosen, Jit Sinha, Bob Nye, and Krishna Potarazu from JMI Equity’s Baltimore Office on this fundraise. Brad and Jit will be joining Aaron, myself, and Carter Griffin from Updata on our Board of Directors.

We used Allen & Company to represent iContact as our investment bankers on this transaction, working with John Griffin, Dave Wehner, Kemp Webber, and Michael Melnitzky.

We worked with Joey Silver and Sarah Loya out of DLA Piper’s Atlanta office and Neil Bagchi of Bagchi Law, with Mark Burnett, Kathy Fields, and Maggie Wong representing JMI at Goodwin Proctor.

Special thanks go to our internal deal team of Tim Oakley, Ben Redding, Bryan Conner, Robert Plumley, and Susan Harrison and to our full Senior Leadership Team who endured two months of due diligence requests while still getting their day jobs done.

Our goal is simple—build a financially successful socially responsible company based right here in the Triangle that becomes the global leader in email marketing software and services for SMBs.

Thank you to all of our customers, employees, investors, mentors, advisors, and supporters who have helped us get iContact to this point and here’s to the road ahead!

The Brand New iContact.com – Oh My How Design Standards Have Changed!

In late 2002 I met my business partner Aaron Houghton at the October meeting of the Carolina Entrepreneurship Club on the UNC campus over Chic-Fil-A nuggets. At the time, Aaron ran Preation and I ran Virante. We partnered to launch IntelliContact Pro, which became IntelliContact in 2005 and then just iContact in 2007.

Today, iContact is a 205 employee company here in Durham, NC with 64,000 customers and 700,000 users. Our marketing and IT teams launched a brand new web site today on icontact.com. As a former web site designer myself, it’s been fascinating to see the site evolve as design standards have changed.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to show how the web site has evolved over time…

Which one was the worst? Which one was the best? What do you think of the new site?

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/4256/125j.png

Tech Awards: $50K for Using Technology to Address Humanity’s Challenges

Tiffany Yee from Santa Clara University reached out tonight to ask me to share information about the upcoming Tech Awards which is offering five winners $50k each to scale their innovation solving a major human challenge.

The Tech Awards, a signature program of The Tech Museum, honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to address humanity’s most urgent challenges.

In partnership with Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society, 15 Laureates are selected annually and $50,000 is awarded to one Laureate in each category: Environment, Economic Development, Education, Equality, and Health.

Individuals as well as nonprofit and commercial organizations are eligible. Anyone may submit a nomination. Self-nominations are accepted and encouraged.

Deadline for nominations is March 31.
Deadline for final applications is May 5.

This year’s Laureates will be honored during a week of activities in Silicon Valley leading up to The Tech Awards Tenth Annual Gala on Saturday, November 6, 2010.

You can nominate today at www.techawards.org

Past winners can be found at http://www.techawards.org/laureates/

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