Vital Statistics

When: September 9th - 12th, 2010
Where: Bloomington, Indiana
What: “The Combine is a display of talent, entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s an event about tech, specifically the people, ideas and environments that drive technology.”
Featured Speakers: See below
Ticket price as of writing: $199 (buy yours) 

Lucky for you, the guys at SproutBox love the town of Bloomington, Indiana, and work hard and pull their connections to draw some of the internet’s top innovators closer to home.

For the first time, they’ve put together a technology conference in Indiana that startup founders are excited to go to. It’s called the Combine and is designed in the spirit of another “midwest” conference called Big Omaha. Since you’ve probably never heard of that either, just picture all the talent, creativity, and innovation of SXSW, but in a setting where you can spend some time getting to know interesting people, instead of spending all your time fighting the throngs of people.

Just check out the lineup of this year’s speakers. Did you ever think you’d find a group of people like this just an hour south of downtown Indianapolis? And I wouldn’t be surprised if they added more before the event.

The price might seem steep to all of you starving founders trying to make something happen, but I promise you there isn’t a better value this close to home.

Mark Hill of Collina Ventures presenting at Hackers and Founders - Indianapolis

Sometimes just learning a new word can completely change the way you operate your business. Just one little word can have that much power. In this article that word is “Market Launch.”

The next time my investors ask me when we’re going to launch I will have two answers for them. One will be our “product launch” and the next will be our “market launch.”

This clarity is going to make my life so much easier.

First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.

Anyway, some of my big takeaways:

“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”

“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.” 

“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”

“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”

I wrote a response to a post on Smaller Indiana by Doug Karr about the 21 Fund and their mission.

In particular, I was responding to this quote: “(Steve Hourigan) shared that the benefit of the fund really isn’t the money as much as it is the education that they could be providing companies with the right resources.”

My comment:

“I really enjoyed this post and your commentary on the 21 Fund, although it has left me confused about what the 21 Fund’s mission is - but I think that’s the point. Their mission isn’t what I thought it was or what most people think it is.

I’d be interested in hearing more about what “education” the 21 Fund is providing. I think the industry of educating entrepreneurs is already oversubscribed. I shudder to think how many productive hours have been wasted teaching a group of “entrepreneurs” the different ways to finance a startup. I say wasted because most people who consume this knowledge will never end up starting a business or are years away from using it.

Financing a startup is just one of those subjects that comes up a lot. There are plenty of others like which corporate entity to choose and how to hire your first employees.

This type of entrepreneur education feels good but it doesn’t move the needle. This type of generic education is a Google search away and the doers, the people who start businesses and create value from nothing, don’t usually get their entrepreneurship education from sitting in a classroom.

Most of the education someone needs when starting a business is very time sensitive and subject specific. For instance with Pocket Tales, my biggest issue today, June 9th, is redesigning our application UI. We also have a lingering issue of hiring a tech lead, and that is actually a place I think the 21 Fund could really help the state of Indiana.

How can we better match technical talent, whether it’s software “technical” or medical “technical,” with business talent to form stronger founding teams?

How can we imbue more people in Indiana with the attitude of “screw it, let’s do it,” instead of training them to sit in classrooms consuming knowledge, further delaying the act of creating until they know all the answers?

As you and I both know Doug, you never know all the answers. You only hope you can find the right answer when you need it, and you don’t have the time or the resources to think much beyond today’s bottleneck.

Just my two cents about most of the entrepreneur education I see.”