Below is my preso. For some reason, SlideShare isn’t picking up my notes, so I have them placed below. It’s not ideal, as the list doesn’t sync with the slides as well. I hope to get the version with notes on SS ASAP.

1. After a day of highly technical presos here at OpenCamp, I want to talk a bit about the “softer” side — the sorts of lessons we learned while building our media company here in Dallas. First, I want to find out: Who works in a startup or is thinking of doing a startup. (Was pretty much 3/4 of the room)
2. A little snapshot of us for those unfamiliar.
3. –
4. –
5. We had advisors and investors who thought that our plan was so innovative that we could take a Keynote preso and some spreadsheets and get VC money. I should have known better, but everyone wants to hear that you can execute your plan without suffering. We wasted 8 months doing nothing but peddling PowerPoints and pitching — a huge waste of time when we should have been building. This adage was true in 2004, and its 10x more so now.
6. Even in the hallways today, I’ve heard people chattering about splitting up equity in ventures they hatched yesterday. Take it easy. Certainly get good legal advice, but I’ve found that making the split early only means you’re going to be wrong. Set up a structure with flexibility, but don’t get yourself in a position where the first person out gets the best deal just because of the snapshot taken the day you had an idea.
7. I can’t stress this enough. And you know it and have read it on countless industry blogs. But you also know that you could just do so much with a million dollars. Fundraising dilutes your equity and sucks away time and energy that could be spent building a business. If you can’t build any piece that will prove something without cash, maybe you should be trying something else.
8. This is the cover of our original business plan. And although we’ve had to make myriad tactical shifts, I’m proud to say that this reads pretty much as right for our business as it did then. Know what your core values are; know what you want the end result to look like, but don’t get too married to any other part of it.
9. This ties into the earlier slides — you can’t learn anything from a product that isn’t in the marketplace. All you can do is dream more about your assumptions and what *might* happen. Once we finally learned the earlier lessons, we surveyed our assets and decided that we could launch one vertical within our local platform without additional capital. From decision to launch was less than three weeks. If only we’d gotten smart earlier.
10. Startups are fragile things, and usually without a lot of resource. You have to pick your shots. Do one thing amazingly well instead of ten half-assed. The latter hasn’t ever made a good business.
11. I thought I was being very wise when I quit my six-figure job and warned my wife “It might beas much as six months before we have enough cash for me to pay myself.” (Pause for laughter.) It was 20 months and then with less than 1/3 my old salary. When you go into the woods for the weekend, take enough food and ammo for a week.
12. The asterisk is that this doesn’t apply if your business *is* the technology. But most people in this room seem to be in the business of distributing content. So while you don’t want to be too promiscuous, don’t get too religious. The pace of technology is such that today’s tool might be tomorrow’s trash. Legacy problems of a platform shouldn’t slow you down.
13. I hate bowing at the altar, but if you’re in the content biz, it’s about your organic results. Period. We did lots of grassroots and social media tactics, but nothing paid as well as building great SEO into our CMS and then filling it with relevant content. If I only had $1 to spend on marketing, I’d spend it on organic SEO.
14. People will go to extraordinary lengths for a cause. If your business is a cause, people will do things like stick around despite missed payrolls.
15. A big part of what we’ve done relates to our content partner model, syndicating from other local partner media companies and blogs. The ones that have consistently been the best partners are the ones who are most like us — young companies trying web-only niche content.
16. This is the ad that Ernest Shackleton used to recruit for his Antarctic voyages. We used it on our help wanted pages. And we made sure, even beyond the extent normal in a small close-knit group, to be transparent about everything — business model, cash on hand, investment prospects. When we missed payroll, people had more than two months warning, and regular updates on progress. So there was no surprise announcement on payday. I think that’s a big reason people stuck around.
17. It’s a big mistake — one that I made — to not take care of your health, family, etc. and not get any recharge. We did try to do little things to take care of our staff though.
18. One of our investors once called us “the cockroaches of local media.” And we did outlive many other companies in our space who started at the same time and with more bankroll. When people ask why, I sometimes answer that we were too dumb to know when to quit. But there is something to be said for hanging on  and toughing it out, especially if you’re just a little ahead of the market.
19. Many startups see a romanticism in just focusing on the product and letting organizational chips fall where they may. But that can be really distracting at the wrong times: tax time; when an acquirer finds a key formula error in your financial projections; when in due diligence you can’t find the disputed cell phone contract.
20. This is one of the best lessons I learned. Always share your story, your passion, your energy with everyone you meet. I picked up our biggest investor over a dinner conversation at a business organization dinner. And an “adversary” hired to do due diligence on us became a great friend and someone I’ve gone on to do business with over and over again.
21. Early stage startups tend to push off dealing with this until funding or sale and it’s a mistake. There are basically 4 types of employee in this kind of company:
    - True believers
    - People who expect to get rich in spectacular fashion on IPO/Sale
    - People willing to endure risk for flexibility
    - People who can’t find work anywhere else
    The trick is that when the situation changes, the individual motivator does not. So what happens when you sell at a modest price to a highly rigid company that might not buy into all your core business tenets? Are you more likely to lose people once things are “safe?”

    Early stage startups tend to push off dealing with this until funding or sale and it’s a mistake. There are basically 4 types of employee in this kind of company:- True believers- People who expect to get rich in spectacular fashion on IPO/Sale- People willing to endure risk for flexibility- People who can’t find work anywhere else
    The trick is that when the situation changes, the individual motivator does not. So what happens when you sell at a modest price to a highly rigid company that might not buy into all your core business tenets? Are you more likely to lose people once things are “safe?”

22. That ties into another lesson. If you have problems within the organization, don’t chalk them up to stress of startup and carry them with you into the new situation. Doing so just risks damaging your new relationships as well as the old.
23. Within reason, whatever your problem, focus on sales. Sales brings cash. Sales brings leverage. Sales increases value. Sales brings a clarity to which problems to focus on.
24. Once you bring in a majority investor or acquirer, you have to understand that it isn’t your company anymore. Your job is no longer to purely defend the original vision, but rather to do what is right for the owner(s). Your role may still be a key leadership role, but it’s different. You’re only one vote among many, and it’s hard to learn that transition.

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Knowing how the kids are all digi-fied these days, I was at first surprised that I was asked to come talk to them about how to get more focused on their web presence. But, as I discovered, we may have erred in calling this generation “digital natives.” Instead, I might call them the “bridge generation.” For while their lives are imbued with technology in a way my parents will never understand, they have been raised in a world where the entrenched media business still operated on old-media models, even while experimenting in the New Media World.

While I was duly impressed with these students’ journalism chops and work ethic, I initially was surprised to find them, in some ways, to have more in common with the stereotypical ink-stained curmudgeons than with the bleeding edge digitalfolk. Then, on reflection, it made perfect sense:

Sure, they may not remember a time before email. And Facebok, YouTube and ubiquitous smartphones are taken for granted. But when it comes to an institutionally-driven media organization, they have no digital role models. Sure, they grew up on SMS, but they’ve not grown up with a digital news service that was much beyond newspaper shovelware. That’s what they know. Grown-ups share news by newspaper, so that’s what matters. In other words, digital is life but analog is business. And for many, The Shorthorn is their first business.

I was befuddled to learn that these so-called digital natives all read the print edition, and that the website is “for alumni who can’t get the paper copy.” But then I realized that students are still at a transition point. For instance, when I polled on device use, none had an iPad. It’s probably unwieldy to pull up a website in class, and they don’t yet have a mobile-friendly template (although I believe they’ll add one soon). Why should they have had one? Most of their role models in the media business didn’t until recently.

Don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying these students are luddites. One of my first slides was about the many things they’re doing right digitally, including embracing open-source technologies and social media. And any old media damage isn’t coming from their teachers — Director Lloyd Goodman and advisor Beth Francesco know where the world is and are pushing their student journalists in the right direction.

I’m just saying that the first generation of true digital natives is in primary school right now. And while the bridge generation will be in the middle of the revolution, it’s their younger brothers and sisters who will really shake up the way media and all other businesses do business.

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• 51 total entries
• 8 entries that I would (generously) consider hyperlocal. Two of those were from my company, which geocodes most of our content. One was a duplicate. Four were only inadvertently hyperlocal; ie: They are pulling daily from citywide sources and those sources happened to hit my area. So let’s call it three truly “hyperlocal” entries for a hit rate of between 6% – 16% depending on your level of charity.
• 8 entries were either national in nature (Obama visiting the gulf) or were hyperlocal items from towns in different time zones, with no apparent good reason (like similar city names) for the errors. So let’s call that 16% false positives.
• 26 were daily Groupon deals. That’s a little over half. Most of those deals were from more than 20 miles away from my home.

Of course, about the time I figured this out, someone pointed out to me that the source of the non-Groupon information is a company run by people whom I know and respect, and with whom we’ve occasionally partnered. So I lost a bit of my appetite for confrontation and decided to filter my frustration into a series of Twitter posts under the hashtag #hyperlocalsecrets, highlighting some of the truisms and bumblings I’ve seen over the last six years. Some other folks have joined in, and there’s an interesting list developing. (See below for ongoing embed.)

There’s some pearls of wisdom in there, along with some media-geek humor. But it’s not a topic I take lightly. Nor do I pretend that the aggregators have an easy job. All I’m saying is be what you are and don’t claim to be hyperlocal when you aren’t. (Pegasus News, for the record, has never pretended to be hyperlocal, although we’re often lumped in with that movement.) Sure, hyperlocal is one of the fifty or so buzzwords that gets industry folk excited these days, but it’s pretty empty when abused.

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