Yet, every good accelerator I’ve seen has ultimately got more expressions of interest from more good mentors than it can use.

In my discussions with mentors, I’ve discovered the following reasons why mentors are eager to get involved:

1. Giving Back:  Other than Gordon Gecko, everybody likes to give a little back every now and then.

2. “Keep the saw sharp”:  The good accelerators can be quite selective with the teams they admit.  This means that the entrepreneurs are unusually talented and/or the business ideas have unusually high potential, and these two factors, individually or often jointly, often make for a fascinating mentoring experience.  Mentors learn more from mentoring these talented teams than the mentees recognize.

3. Deal Flow:  Mentors are often potential angel investors.  They may not have formerly been actively investing, but generally they have the means to make occasional angel investments and they’re generally interested in doing so.  They just may not know how, or put the time into, attracting interesting deal flow.  Mentoring provides an opportunity to discover great investment opportunities.

4. Job Flow: Many mentors don’t need to work, but they’re bored not working.  If they’re between gigs, there’s a good chance that by mentoring, they’ll find interesting work opportunities.  This happens far more often than one might think.

5. Street Cred:  Telling people you’re a startup mentor has cache in the startup community, especially if the audience understands the learning that effective mentoring requires.

6. Networking:  Imagine debating strategy with other seasoned entrepreneurs.  There are many ways to skin a cat, and debating alternate strategies with other experts is a good way to learn from them and build relationships with them.  Since I’ve been mentoring, the growth in the breadth and quality of my professional network has been immense, and this has been echoed by many many other mentors.

7. Increase the quality of your life:  I believe that if you’re a successful entrepreneur, there’s a high chance that entrepreneurialiusm is a major passion in your life.  If that’s so, what could be better than being part of community that creates more and higher quality opportunities to spend time strategizing about exciting business opportunities with both talented aspiring entrepreneurs and accomplished end expert entrepreneurs?

On Tuesday, November 9 in Copenhagen, Startupbootcamp is having its annual Demo Day.  Alex has gathered 10 of the best startups from around Europe, immersed them for 3 months in deep mentorship with some extraordinary and experienced entrepreneurs, and prepared them to pitch at Demo Day.  I’ve spent some time mentoring some of the companies and have been pretty impressed.  I can’t wait to see all the teams put their best foot forward.

Demo Days are always inspirational to me.  They’re sort of like a revival for startup junkies.

If you’d like to join me, you can register here.  I hope to see you in Copenhagen!

The demonstration of the power of a vibrant entrepreneurial community was not lost upon the rest of the world, either.  As news of TechStars, its results, and its community-transforming effects spread around the world, TechStars’ founder David Cohen began to get large numbers of inquiries asking if TechStars could help create something similar in their community.

At the end of last year, David asked if I would help lead the effort to help grow other entrepreneurial communities.  I thought about it briefly before giving a resounding “yes!” answer.  Here’s why I jumped at the opportunity:

Rarely in my career have so many things that I’m passionate about been so coincident in a single job, and I’m very excited about this opportunity!

Bring on the entrepreneurs!

Never mind that this quote might not actually belong to Goethe…it is nevertheless the spirit with which I entered the Firecracker 50.

I’ve done this event for the last 2 years, and use it as a warm-up for the Laramie Enduro. I always register in the winter, well before serious training is underway., to avoid getting shut out because of a sell out. This year, it was only months later, in May, that I realized how uncommitted I was to preparing for this race, and I started looking for a partner so I’d only have to do ½ of the distance. Or, perhaps I’d sell my entry and bag out entirely.

A few days before the race, a friend of mine, damn him to hell, encouraged me – in the spirit of Goethe’s above quote – to just go for it. Go for it, he said, and you’ll have a ball! He was right, I erroneously thought, and I committed to do the race solo.

I noticed Goethe at work: instead of ambivalence, there was focus. I was not afraid, I was excited. I paid attention to my nutrition, rest, and sleep. I reviewed old race notes. I gained confidence: I was going to kick some ass. Commitment was cool.

The first 25 mile lap was good. I completed it in 2 hours 50 minutes, 10 minutes faster than my previous best. This was especially remarkable since I’d only put in about 10 hours on my mountain bike all season.

However, I knew I was in trouble, as not only had I not been training much, but also I’d thrown up a bit during the lap and just couldn’t force any nutrition down. Nutrition is the cornerstone of any endurance performance. And sure enough, I bonked at the beginning of the second lap, and spent the next three hours suffering. I thought only about some variation of one of the following themes: “I’m so bonked”; “Damn this is hard”; “I should just quit”; “If I were going any slower I’d be going backwards”. Not once on the second lap did a positive thought such as “this is fun” or “I feel strong” or “this sure is a pretty ride” enter into my head.

I’ve never been deeper into or more alone in the Cave of Pain. The second lap was the hardest 4 hours – yes 4 hours! – I’ve ever spent on a bike.

Perseverance is good, but it’s not so good to be the last one on a sinking ship. The morning after, I’m not sure if I’m a stud or an idiot for finishing.

In any case, for the rest of the weekend, I’m committing myself to eating pizza and ice cream. Bring it on, Mr. Goethe.

There aren’t enough hours in the day, and I’m always looking to improve how I spend my time. Here’s Ben Cashnocha’s “information diet”/routine.

I love being an entrepreneur – the challenges and the rewards fit my risk profile and personality. But it’s not a lifestyle for everybody. Here’s a great writeup about common entrepreneurial lifestyle struggles.

We all know that Nancy Pelosi has no integrity…and she’s been caught, on record, lying.

There’s a famous 70-year long longitudinal study of Harvard men, called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s a fascinating study because such studies are rare, and this one was conducted extremely thoroughly. Here’s one researcher’s attempt to ferret out of the data just What Makes us Happy – it’s very interesting reading.

I always thought of Roger Ebert as simply a movie critic. But apparently there’s quite a bit more to him: here’s an excellent short essay by him on death, and life. Wow.

I liked his comments on what makes a good entrepreneur:

• The ability to identify problems and come up with a solution. It’s an “innate gene”: it’s an unescapable, always-present way of life.
• Failure cannot be part of an entrepreneur’s vocabulary; even when it is unjustified, entrepreneurs are always confident.

Subsequently, Mr. Zell identified what separates good entrepreneurs from bad: the ability to execute. He called the ability to execute the most “underrated driver” of successful businesses.

More here and here.

Given that:

• Twitter’s buzz is approaching the same stratosphere as Facebooks’;
• Bloggers’ number one pastime these days is pontificating what Twitter’s business model is/will/should be;
• The optimal business model for Twitter remains unclear;
• Growth is exploding and that Twitter is rapidly becoming mainstream, wherein both people and companies are relying on it every day as an integral part of their commercial communications;

It is hard to imagine a more fun and challenging job! The stakes are big, the way uncertain…this is such cool opportunity that I couldn’t help but spend my lunch hour thinking about what I think Twitter BizDev should do.

If I were Twitter BizDev, here is how I would start:

• Explore charging for commercial use of the service. For example, charge Dell to use the service; perhaps fixed costs for reserving a name, and variable costs for each tweet sent or read by followers. This is the most obvious revenue source, but it is also filled with landmines: introducing the friction of not being a costless system is hazardous to the explosive growth of Twitter and its “information wants to be free” culture, so such commercialization must be done cautiously and subtly.
• Continue to develop paid placement. What Twitter has done to date (recommend paid-placement followees) is perhaps just proof of concept. I can imagine very sophisticated follow recommendations, which usually would need to be voluntarily pulled by the user from Twitter, but could also very occasionally be pushed by Twitter. For example, if I ever tweet about pasta, Twitter has the opportunity to make me aware of time-sensitive and geo-proximal restaurant tweeters and tweets.
• Continue developing and offering free non-commercial use of a comprehensive API. Do everything possible to continue the explosive growth of the use of the API. Selectively begin to charge for commercial use of the API: extract only a small portion of the rent for a few of the most profitable users of the API. Do this slowly and un-aggressively as per above.
• Explore partnerships with anybody who realizes revenue from text messages. The adoption of Twitter increases those firms’ revenue, and there is no reason why Twitter shouldn’t attempt to capture some of that. I recognize that in many of those situations, Twitter has little leverage, so even though it is creating revenue for these companies, it will have a tough time capturing any portion of it. Perhaps there are ways to create leverage?
• Search, baby! Twitter is rapidly becoming the ultimate source of data for real time searches, and it is this data which is which is the most exciting and begets Twitter being used in the same sentence as Google. It is why Google and Microsoft are going head-to-head in their rumored fight over acquiring Twitter. Assuming Twitter chooses not to sell just yet, there are 2 tactics for monetizing search that should start to be developed:
  • Facilitate commercial 3rd party exploitation of the crown jewels, by allowing Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, OneRiot, Lijit, et al to fully index tweets, and charge them for use.
  • Develop an enterprise market awareness subscription business: for example, Dell could subscribe to a daily Dell report.

All of these directions must be explored with a light touch, learning as much as possible with each deal. This is because, as mentioned above, it is paramount that nothing is done to dampen Twitter’s explosive growth. Secondly, the perspective must be one of a very thin haircut across a broad audience: the network effects are so dominant for Twitter that pricing any entity out of the market really diminishes the value of the entire ecosphere (as well as enables competitors). There is a lot of organizational learning that must happen not just around how to maximize revenue, but also about what the optimal mix of revenue and resulting friction is.

If you were Twitter BizDev, what would you do?

Today’s post-du-jour comes from Will Price, whose mentor has a great perspective on failure. The money quote:

“…the key is to get up in the that batter’s box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional homerun out of every 10 at-bats and you’re going to be the best hitter or best leader around.” – John Donahoe, CEO eBay

The NYT has an interesting summary of the discussions about IPTV at The Cable Show last week.

Also, in the NYT’s technology section, is an interesting article about Internet-enabled STB’s.

Change is a comin’ to the cable industry.