Office Hours At TC Disr...

One of the most memorable moments of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year was office hours with Paul Graham, who is the heart and co-founder of Y Combinator . We are doing it again this year. But because Graham is back in Silicon Valley with a newborn baby, we’re doing it in a slightly different way. Over the past few years, we’ve heard that it’s not only hard to find engineers. It’s hard to find great design talent. And if Apple’s still unbelievable and mind-boggling rise over the last 15 years shows anything, it’s that design matters. Design and simplicity made the difference between Instagram and every other photo-sharing app. It revived Path. It made Square stand out among all of the other credit card readers. So we’re changing Office Hours to focus on design. Design Office Hours will be held on-stage at Disrupt NYC on Wednesday, May 22nd, from 11:55am to 12:30pm. Just like we did last year at New York during Disrupt, six companies will be chosen from the completed applications below to spend time on-stage with some talented design experts. Startups will get to go up on stage, show our experts their designs, and receive advice and feedback. Our on-stage design experts include Leland Rechis , who is a director of mobile product at Etsy and was a lead mobile product manager at Twitter. He was also a user experience designer on the launch team for Android OS. We also have Jamie Divine , who was director of user experience at Boxee, a senior visual designer at Google and a head of user experience at AVOS Systems, the company led by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Jason Morrow  is a lead product designer at betaworks and has led design teams at Google on products like News, Finance and Search. Finally, we have Mimi Chun , who is the design director for General Assembly, a co-working space and startup education institute near Union Square. She was the communication design lead at Ideo before that for several years. If you’re interested, apply below! Loading...

Think You Deserve To Be...

Editor’s note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital . Follow him on Twitter @ ahaislip . Congratulations. You’re the CEO of a startup. You’re doing the hardest job in business. You’ve raised money from venture capitalists and turned down better-paying jobs elsewhere. You’ve mastered complicated things such as capitalization tables and common things, such as payroll. You’ve fought with competitors, coworkers, friends and even yourself without losing your way or your wits. You’ve inspired others to work beside you each day to make your dream a reality. I salute you. Now, everybody else calling himself or herself a CEO—listen up, this is for you: stop it. Just stop calling yourself a CEO. Stop putting “CEO” on the business cards you printed last week at Moo.com for YourLastName Consulting LLC. Take it off your LinkedIn page. Remove it from the résumé you’re passing around in hopes of getting hired. Self-titling as CEO is an atonal homage to structurally mandated social hierarchies, not a statement of your iconoclastic self-determination. Maybe it’s generational.  Steve Jobs’ early business card  read: “Vice President, New Product Development,” in part because he recognized he didn’t have the skills to run the company he wanted to build. At least not yet. Bill Gates went with the classic and somewhat understated “President.” But today’s tech titans have opted for something much more conspicuous. If you were one of the folks to get an early Mark Zuckerberg card, you may remember the supercilious line: “ I’m CEO, Bitch. ” Way to stay classy, Zuck. Facebook aside, title inflation is bad for business. Calling yourself the CEO will label you as either an egoist or someone with confidence compensation issues. That will make people less willing to work with you or help you. Taking the top title in a company also suggests a limited vision of what your company can become. Ask yourself: would you still be CEO if it were a $100 billion business or would you require what’s euphemistically called “adult supervision?” So stop pretending to have attained a title you didn’t earn and start doing what you need to do to get to where you want to be. Here’s how: Attract Awesome People Jobs had Wozniak and later,  Markkula .  Clark  had Andreessen. McNeally had Bechtolsheim, Joy and Khosla. A remarkable CEO should be like the moon, illuminated by the reflected light of all the stars he or she has brought into orbit. Awesome people act as accelerants to whatever you’re doing. They push ideas forward, execute with aplomb and challenge you to new heights. If you can hire, hire. If you can’t hire, bring them into your orbit as advisors, friends and fellow travelers. Get them to invest their creativity and energy. To get the true benefits of awesome people, focus on diversity. You want to have as many different perspectives on a problem as you possibly can, so bring on the best people from as wide array of backgrounds and from different generations. They’ll learn from each other and the confluence of their experiences will be the basis of company creativity for years to come. Most importantly, attracting awesome people to your company precludes retreat. You carry too valuable a cargo of energy and confidence invested by others to turn back. Build an Experience, Not a Product Eric Ries has put the concept  of the minimally viable product (MVP) front and center in the minds of Silicon Valley startups. But this focus is somewhat misguided. Products give you utility and then may be discarded. Products are the one-night stands of business. Experiences give you memories and good experiences will bring you back for more, it engenders a long-term relationship. The best CEOs know this instinctively and do all that they can to create and cultivate an attractive experience for their customers. Once you’ve got a good experience, cement it with the bond of buying. A funny thing happens when people buy your product: they invest their energy into the choice and will find reasons to justify their action. In the early days of Apple, customers loved their computers because they had to pay a boatload of money for them. They found aspects of the experience they could rave about just to justify their purchase to others. That price tag is valuable to you too. It focuses the mind tremendously and forces you to deliver a unique and memorable experience of real value. When you offer a product for free, you aren’t forced to justify your existence to customers or show a useful benefit. That’s why we see half a dozen Instagram clones. A CEO doesn’t market a product to users. A CEO sells an experience to customers. Learn Finance If you wanted to be a rock star, you’d have to learn to read music and if you wanted to be an award-winning novelist, you’d have to learn basic grammar. It should not come as a surprise that if you want to be the CEO of a business you should learn finance. Yet we regularly see founders blowing off finance or outsourcing major financial decisions to hired guns. There’s no secret to learning finance. There are plenty of good books that can take you through the basics of accounting up to the execution of liquidity preferences under preferred stock agreements. Interview friends that have run their own companies, worked in banking or had P&L experience for a division in a larger company. Start using QuickBooks. Today it’s easy to find help online from corporate finance communities such as  Proformative . For startups, there’s one important financial metric that matters more than any other: months left to live given your current burn rate. Real CEOsknow this number and manage it religiously. Define a Big Goal and Take Small Steps Plenty of wannabe Silicon Valley CEOs have read Jim Collins and will tell you about their BHAG (That’s their Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal). They’ll tell you that they want to revolutionize the datacenter, or change the face of mobile payments, or create a new paradigm for social sharing, or something equally nebulous. That’s great. But it’s the ability to both set that goal and show how you’re going to achieve it that marks a real CEO. Successful CEOs balance aspirations with operations. They focus on things that can be done today to secure customers and growth over time—not on the title they put on their business cards.

Betterment Talks About ...

Betterment , the better investment app, launched at Disrupt in 2010 and went on to manage approximately $50 million in two years. The site is essentially an investment engine. Seamless automatic deposits ensure that you drag cash over to your investment account every month and the UI is clean, readable, and eminently simple – a gauge tells you how much you’re investing in various buckets of stocks and bonds, and a built-in advisor tells you where to keep your money in order to reach a certain goal. Betterment is slowly rolling out improvements to the interface and site and we talked to CEO Jon Stein about the Disrupt bump, how his employees had to take service calls in the audience, and the stratospheric growth of the company. He said that it took them a year to reach $10 million and less than a year to quadruple the money under their management.

The Winklevoss Twins Ar...

It’s a Friday afternoon (in some parts of the world, at least), so go ahead — take a nice long drink of your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you’re like me, you’ll need it to make it through the CNBC interview with the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss that aired today. It is embedded above for your viewing pleasure, complete with CNBC reporters asking for the Winklevii’s autographs and all. Really, drink up. Anyway. On air today, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin talked with everyone’s favorite Harvard grads cum Olympic athletes cum Mark Zuckerberg nemeses about their latest foray into the tech startup space as individuals with significant financial reserves and no apparent engineering credentials. They’re becoming venture capitalists. The VC Gold Rush As PandoDaily’s Paul Carr has quite humorously written , this is just one example of the larger VC boom that’s happening: “In the coming weeks and months, I look forward to headlines about: An infant who has decided to call herself a VC. A robot that has decided to call itself a VC. A duck that has decided to call itself a VC. An infant robot duck that has decided to call itself a VC.” The Next Web’s Drew Olanoff had a good point about their prospects as well: “Personally, I’d rather take money from the guy who played them [in The Social Network movie], Armie Hammer .” But we really shouldn’t take away from the Winklevii’s vision preemptively. It’s entirely possible they have deeper insights into this whole space than many realize. “We think the cloud is going to be huge,” Tyler Winklevoss told Sorkin today, after all. They’re focusing on “early stage disruptive startups” who are “shifting the paradigm.” I mean, Marc Andreessen , watch your back. It’s Not Actually All Bad OK, all snark aside. Like it or not, this really is just the beginning. The Winklevii have actually had their hands in the web world in one way or another for years — so if Silicon Valley peeps are feeling appalled at them jumping into the scene full time, they should really brace themselves for what’s coming in the future. Wall Street isn’t as lucrative as it once was – and for many years, the most ambitious, savvy, money-oriented people from top universities just went straight into investment banking. Now that those jobs have dwindled and seem unlikely to make a resurgence anytime soon, those same people are now heading west and hitching their wagons to the tech industry’s star. I actually think that this shift away from Wall Street and into Silicon Valley is a good thing, on the whole. The best and brightest young people in our society have been going into the finance world for far too long. And whatever we think of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in particular, they are part of a larger class of people who have made the business world go around for many years: They’re well-educated, quite intelligent, and clearly don’t give up without a fight. It’ll be interesting to see how much more the tech industry goes into turbo-drive as more of these types enter the fray.

Now Out Of Beta, Tykoon...

NYC-based financial services startup for families, Tykoon , is exiting its private beta and is launching its first mobile app for iPhone . The company, which aims to change the ways kids think about and use money, is more that your typical allowance tracker application – it’s a platform for earning, saving, giving and spending, the latter which includes kid-friendly access to a curated and controlled Amazon store. The company was co-founded by two experts in the payments and financial services business, Mark Bruinooge and Doug Lebda. Bruinooge spent 10 years in the industry, including time served as the head of e-commerce strategy as well as digital marketing at Bank of America. Co-founder and Chairman Doug Lebda, meanwhile, founded LendingTree.com, and served as its COO for several years following its acquisition by IAC in 2003. Bruinooge explains Tykoon’s goal as “improving financial literacy by giving kids a real platform that allows them to learn through real experiences.” What that means is kids can earn cash and rewards by performing tasks or chores, or by meeting certain goals set by parents (e.g., make honor roll). Parents also learn about finances, too, in a way, because they use the service to set up what these tasks and goals should be, then dole out the money and rewards upon completion. While that aspect of the service is similar to some other allowance-tracking programs, one interesting thing that Tykoon is offering is the curated shopping experience it provides for kids. The service includes access to a customized version of the Amazon store which has been curated for “kid friendliness.” (There’s nothing inappropriate or impractical there.) Parents can also further customize the shop by enabling or disabling the categories their kids can see. As kids earn money, they can then choose to spend it in the online store, or can request a cash-based payout from mom or dad. Currently, the app is targeted towards 8 to 12-year olds, but the addition of a bank-issued, preloaded debit card is planned for Q1 2013, which will extend the platform to teens. Bruinooge says the company is already in talks with MasterCard, Visa and banking partners on this, and the result will be something similar to the Visa Buxx card. During the beta period, which began in August of last year with around 650 families participating, the company refined the Tykoon’s visual experience from that a virtual, customizable room (kids picked out wallpaper and a pet!) to that of a utility with a dashboard and app tray for access to the platform’s various features, including the Wishlist, Tasks, Badges, Friends, Store, Savings and Goals, and more. In addition to learning about earning, saving and spending,  Tykoon also helps teach children about giving through a donations feature, which allows them to give money to charities like World Wildlife Foundation or Habitat for Humanity, powered by Network for Good. The iOS app, launched last night, now allows both parents and kids to log in via password and PIN-protected accounts, and includes a nifty feature for snapping photos of kids’ wants (i.e.,”buy me that!!”) for adding items to the wishlist. The company also plans to introduce an Android app around September, and will add more social sharing options, primarily for wishlist sharing, early this summer. The web service and application are free, as Tykoon earns affiliate income from the Amazon purchases. In the future, Tykoon is looking into corporate sponsorships and a value-added premium model as additional sources of revenue. Interested parents and kids can sign up here , and the mobile app is available in iTunes here . Tykoon previously raised $1.4 million in funding last fall from Doug Lebda, RRE Ventures, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Bach, and G. Kennedy Thompson.