After 3 events, 45-ish sessions, and 92 lattes, I have a few pointers to share with first timers to maximize everyone’s experience.
We force all of our participants to give us honest feedback (via email or the blog) so we can help improve AVEH. Without a doubt, the number one piece of feedback we get is something along the lines of – “20 minutes is too short” or “we wish you came in knowing more about our company.”
Agreed. 20 minutes is short, but it is an equitable and efficient way to talk to a bunch of smart entrepreneurs in one day’s time. While doing a couple hours of research on each of the 10-14 companies in advance is unlikely, I can/will do a better job preparing my team with the cliff notes so we can hit the ground running, or at least up and walking.
That being said, my suggestion to you is to take the first 5 minutes and do two things:
- Tell us about yourself, especially as it pertains to the genesis of company X. This is just as much of a people business as it is an idea and execution business. Meeting smart people at AVEH has actually been the most rewarding part.
- Tell us about your company. Start simple without assuming we know the micro details of your industry. Remember, we are pretty good generalists and if we know the weeds about your space we will give you a few obvious cues that indicate “we follow, let’s move along to the next point…”
In reality, this first part may take 2 minutes and it may take 8. Either way, when we get there as a group and have that “aha” moment, be prepared to start dictating the rest of the conversation. In other words, have an agenda.
At this point, the elephant in the room is usually “so, what do you (we) think?” That’s a natural question, and probably one that we would answer even if not asked. Be prepared for feedback of the “honest” variety. Seriously though, our goal is to be constructive not evil. Remember that our feedback is based on opinions and observation, not fact. If we don’t think something will work, we will let you know, but we will also help hypothesize a new path (think less Simon Cowell, more Randy Jackson).
Once the elephant leaves, here is when having an agenda really helps you as the entrepreneur. It is a great opportunity to leverage what we are seeing in the market or space… what’s working, what’s not working, etc. Questions like:
- “I am still on a limited budget. What’s more important – hiring a sales guy to help with immediate market validation or an extra developer to smooth out the bugs?”
- “My customer acquisition costs have been steadily increasing via Google Adwords, what do you think about shifting resources to channel A versus channel B?”
- “What metrics are VCs most concerned with when it comes to evaluating consumer web/saas/etc. customer conversion?”
These are just examples off the top of my head (and not necessarily great ones), but hopefully you get the point. I just want to avoid the awkward moment 10 minutes in when we ask, “so how can we help you?” and spend the next 10 minutes talking about the weather.
We hope this helps and we truly look forward to meeting all of you. See you in Dallas.
