Here is the list of the best startup & launch events that I’d like to attend in 2013. Practically I may attend only YC and 500 demo days , but if you are looking to build your 2013 list of silicon valley startup events  to attend, here’s a good place to start.

The format of this post is hard to get right on the blog, so here’s a handy Google doc of the 2013 Silicon Valley startup event list.

I have a question which I am trying to get answers for from multiple people, but I am not sure I have the answer yet.

The average US technology startup raises a seed round of about $150K which lasts them 12-18 months. Most Indian startups look to raise a seed round of $250K which lasts them 12 months or less. Why is that?

Let me give you more clarity on both numbers.

The average YC company gets $25K from YC and a no cap convertible for another $125K. Most (>39% in the latest batch apparently) raise money before 18 months of graduating from YC, but many still have the money last 18 months. The average company has 2-3 people in 12-18 months until they have product-market-fit in the US.

The average Indian company gets by further along by bootstrapping and is not much further along (in terms of product-market fit) than the US counterpart. They raise $250K (per pocha below) $200K (1 CR) and that money they claim will last them 12 months. The average Indian product startup has 6-10 people in 12 months.

The money that’s spent is primarily on acquiring customers and payroll.

Even though we have more people in the Indian product startup, we have more-or-less the same payroll costs.

But most startup plans (business plan or execution plan) I see keep aside 40% of their raised capital for “marketing” costs. For customer acquisition – SEO, events, or “viral campaigns”, etc.

So here’s my hypothesis:

1. We need more money because paying customers are *much* harder to get in India than US. Most US startups spend ZERO in marketing (out of pocket costs) for the first 18-36 months from my personal experience.

2. We need more people because most of our startup founders are “generalists” not “specialist and generalists” who cant really code or run a digital marketing campaign or close a sale. They have to “hire” a CTO, CMO and Sales head to do that.

3. We need more money because cost of doing business in India is a lot more than US.

I dont know the answers, but I am very curious what entrepreneurs in India think is the reason product startups need almost twice as much money which lasts 2/3 as less than US counterparts.

I took 11 active seed and early stage funds (Accel, Blume Ventures,Venture East, India Innovation Fund, Ojas, Seed Fund, India Internet Fund, Nexus, Helion and IUVP/Kalaari) and 4 top angel networks (Mumbai Angels, Indian Angel Network, HBS angels and Hyderabad Angels) in India to understand their pattern of investing in pre-revenue startups.

Of the VC funds, the norm is about 10% of their portfolio over the last 2 years (typically 3-6 companies) that were funded were pre-revenue.There are exceptions such as Seed Fund (30%-40% pre-revenue, because of their incubator Seed Farm, Nexus (over 50% pre-revenue fundings) but they are truly exceptions and India Internet Fund (very few investments so their % are skewed to 40% and they incubate companies).

Pre-revenue companies getting funded by VC’s in India is the exception not the norm.

Of the angel networks, only MA and IAN funded more than 10 companies over the last 2 years. Both funded less than 3 companies each year that were pre-revenue.

Pre-revenue companies getting funded by angel networks in India is also the exception not the norm.

Then I took the 10 active seed and early stage funds in US (First Round, Khosla, KPCB, Sequoia, Accel, Benchmark, Emergence, Google Ventures, Founders fund, Union Square) and the 4 most active angel networks (Band of Angels, Investors Circle, Golden Seeds and Alliance of Angels).

Of the VC funds, the norm is about 20% of their portfolio over the last 2 years (typically 6-10 companies) that were funded were pre-revenue. Higher than their Indian counterparts but still an exception not the norm.

Pre-revenue companies getting funded by VC’s in Silicon Valley is also the exception not the norm.

Of the angel networks, Band of angels is the exception at nearly 30% pre-revenue. Others are higher than India, but at the 15-20% mark.

Pre-revenue companies getting funded by angel networks in Silicon Valley is not high, but better than India.

I had a chance to talk to at least 1 investor in a phone conversation from each company above, so these are not just website observations.

So who’s funding pre-revenue companies in India and US.

Accelerators and Seed-funds such as YC, Tech Starts, 500 startups.

So if you are pre-revenue, dont waste your time going to angel networks or VC’s. Spend time building your product.

On Wed I was at the NASSCOM Emerge 50 jury panel. Out of 360+ technology companies in Startup, Innovation and Growth areas, the team had selected 50 who they felt were awesome. Our job as the jury panel was to select 10 from the 50.

There’s one part of about the Indian entrepreneur that struck me as their unique value proposition.

Survival.

That’s it.

You survive after starting your company, beyond the first year, you deserve an achievement award.

The mortality rate of technology startups in India (based on actual data from our Microsoft Accelerator database of 3918 companies, all startups including services and products) is a whopping 49% within the first year.

That number blows my mind.

Nearly half of the companies fold within 1 year.

Nearly 20-30% are walking dead.

Closing companies in India is an absolute pain as we all know.

So when I heard company after company saying their revenues after 2-4 years of existence were between $100K and $250K per year, one part of me was sad.

Growth was literally non-existent.

The other side of me was thrilled. They survived to tell the tale.

Survival among Indian technology companies is a Unique value proposition.

Imagine that.

My 2012 goal was a year to dial back. Write more, focus and attend fewer events.

So far, that’s been good, and I am on track to write 100 blog posts for the year.

At the beginning of this year, I thought 100 was a good number. So I focused on that metric and started writing in earnest.

Halfway into the year, I realized the number was meaningless. I mean 100 blog posts of poor quality was still as good as not writing at all.

So I wanted to write 100 quality posts.

How do you measure quality of a blog post though?

Is it the number of people reading it – either visitors or RSS feed readers? Or the number of people commenting on it? Or # of people retweeting on Twitter, or sharing it on Facebook? Or getting the post on Hacker news or techmeme? Or is there some other measurement?

So I decided I should have a few role models. Bloggers I really admire for their quality, consistency and insights.

1. Horace Dediu of asymco tops that list. Sharp, analytical and always thoughtful, he’s such a delight to read. If you dont read his blog posts you should.

2. Jean-Louis Gassée of Monday Note is a close second. I met him a few years ago when he was running Be. He’s also a very astute observer, does deep analysis and his posts always make you think.

3. Chris Dixon was the founder of Hunch (among other things). He writes about startups, entrepreneurship and his simple style of presenting facts in consumable bite-sized chunks is admirable.

4. Jason Cohen of A Smart bear helps put key questions entrepreneurs have in the forefront and his tips are always practical, simple to experiment and usually provides insights after careful consideration of a few possible outcomes.

5. Niel Patel of Kissmetrics writes mostly about marketing techniques. I really like how he dissects a topic which he’s looking to provide some advice on. He’s got a very prescriptive style which helps you understand formulated thoughts in a cohesive easy to read way.

There are others that write more infrequently and long form articles, but these 5 are by far that I consider to be the best in the business. The way I define them to be quality is the amount of effort that goes into their post and the way they frame their arguments.

When I started to focus on writing blog posts in Jan, the average blog post would take me 1 hour to think though and about 30 minutes to write. The new posts from July are taking me 2-3 hours to think though and 1 hour (or longer if you include edits) to write.

I am still unclear about the metrics to measure quality blog posts. I’d love some help from you if you believe you have figured it out.

There are 3 main things VC’s claims to provide – money, connections and strategic advice. For the last 3-4 decades that’s worked fairly well for them since they have made good money from the management fees even if their returns have not been spectacular.

If a VC firm rises a $50 Million fund, and has a management fee of 2% per year, with 2 partners, 2 associates and a swanky office, they still get to take over $250K per year in salary and upside on exits.

The work was primarily evaluating companies and entrepreneurs, providing strategic board advice, governance to existing companies and networking.

That model assumed investments in about 10-15 companies and among the 2 partners, (7 board meetings per person), so time was tight, the only advice that could be provided was “strategic” in nature, or “connections” to folks.

There were a few top tier VC’s who would help recruit key employees or help in closing key deals, but those were rare.

What if however VC’s were entrepreneurial in nature?

What if they needed to provide marketing advice, help in structuring sales compensation and help determine product direction besides other “strategic” input?

That’s what Andreessen Horowitz is doing right now. They created a executive briefing center, staffed it with a seasoned pro (disclosure: Mark Cranney is a good friend, and others in A16Z were colleagues as well) in sales who is helping drive sales opportunities, hire sales professionals and helping entrepreneurs develop sales compensation models.

This is what YCombinator is doing as well, with their hiring of key technology folks not just the traditional “VC” material.

They can do this because their fund size is large and the founders have already made a lot of money, is the common criticism I hear from valley VC’s.

If other VC’s dont do this however, they are going to be disrupted.

VC’s everywhere have to go beyond their comfort zone, hire more professionals in technology (how about a CTO who can help invested companies with technology hiring, scaling etc.) marketing (strategic content marketing plan, etc.), sales (hiring, sales compensation, building and scaling a sales team) and operations.

What would that mean?

Lot more involvement with portfolio companies, multiple touch points besides the CEO alone and closer involvement with the companies. They’d still be busy: as much or more than they were before. This would also mean they would have to get a mile deep and few inches wide as opposed to a a inch deep and a mile wide.

VC’s would make less money in their annual salary, since the management fees would remain the same, but more people would be involved in the firm, which lowers the amount of money per person. Their chances of success with their portfolio companies should improve, which means they would make the same money as they did before, but with more of it coming from carry (the right incentive anyway).

They would possibly have to invest in fewer companies, since they just wont have the time to spread themselves thin. The problem is that VC’s  still think 1 in 10 companies is a hit, 2 return money and 7 go bust. I think to improve those odds, they will have to focus more on picking those that have some early traction, and are going after a proven market. All other VC criteria remain the same.

Short post – mostly thanks.

I took a conscious decision to blog more and attend fewer events this year. So far, I am keeping the blog end of the bargain.

I have found that to have the discipline to do something frequently you have to get people to help support you. Three people have done that by consistently commenting frequently and most importantly giving me alternative perspectives and made me think.

Ravi Srinivas, Vikram Janardhan and Sangeetha Bajaj – thank you very much.

Thanks you to I look forward to writing half baked posts, just so I can get some reaction.

There are many things I like about Silicon Valley. The things that need work though, is that it chases the shiny new thing faster than the fashion industry. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that, but its the me-too”ness” that bugs you after a while. Kinda like Bollywood.

Take storytelling for instance. Every incubator and startup now has a “storyline” that they adhere to. Similar to Bollywood.

The Bollywood stories are boy-meets-girl variety garden romance, or the 5 different variations of someone’s been wronged.

Silicon Valley now has their “storyline” – “I was doing <something inane> and I faced <this really silly problem> so I decided to build <this toy> because I am passionate about <something they really are not passionate about>.

Take this from ex Admob founder Omar

“The idea originated when my wife was shopping for a coffee table. She spent of bunch of time browsing the web, collecting her options in a gmail draft, and then sent me an email of blue links that I was supposed to click on one by one to form an opinion. By the time I got to the fourth one, I had forgotten what the first one looked like, what the prices of any of them were, and certainly had not checked reviews or anything else that would help me give her a more informed opinion. At the same time, my family was planning a vacation with a group of friends, and all of our decisions from hotels, to activities, to areas to visit, were all being made in roughly the same way.”

The pez dispenser story is so 1999 was my thinking, but every startup’s got the same story going. Scratch your own itch is what its called.

Here’s another one from Pair

We had a problem. We had just moved to Mountain View, but our girlfriends were still in Canada. We tried using text message, and Facebook to stay in touch, but we really felt like there should be a better way to stay in touch with our partners. We realized that we were sending over 90% of our messages to a single person using tools that were designed to send messages to everyone you know. There didn’t seem to be a better way. So we made one 🙂

There’s nothing wrong with it per se, but its very cliche and sounds construed and fake.

What’s your take? Is it lame or does it really “make the company more human and personable”?

How do you figure out which events matter and which dont in your startup?

Some events in your startup journey are obviously huge. First version of product shipped. First customer payment. First hire. First funding (maybe). Others are more innocuous. They slide by many times without any fanfare. Like the first time a customer logs a complaint. There are many cynics who might say

“Yes, because if every second of your <startup> life isn’t documented then it doesn’t really exist, right?”

Yet those same cynics might not understand that most entrepreneurs dont know which seconds are important and which ones are not. Most of these are better evaluated in hindsight.

What if you could “record” your startup’s seconds? Automatically?

You actually can, if you use the Cloud – since everything in on the cloud its easy to record.

What’s needed is a “black box flight recorder for startups“.

It helps you “login” to all your cloud services and automatically categorizes these events into buckets.

Then it helps your figure out what triggers something.

It can be a huge help for incubators.

It could also help create a framework for decision making.

So, please – build one already.

There are 2 interesting links today that are worth reading. One from Pando daily says Angel List is helping match 600+ potential hires to startup companies each week. That’s a huge number.

“Rather than operating like a normal job board, it matches people who failed to raise money or whose startup didn’t work out with companies that have yet to raise money.”

Second, an article on LinkedIn about how recruiters now use LinkedIn as their primary sourcing tool.

“LinkedIn enjoys a vast sweet spot between those two extremes, helping fill high-skill jobs that pay anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000 or more a year.”

Search agencies now get less than 2% of Adobe’s business in the Americas. (Compared to 20%)

I love it. Larger companies are going to LinkedIn to bypass recruiters and smaller companies are being introduced by more effective job boards. Granted this wont work for 100% of the companies, but it will work for 80% of a certain type of roles.

So what happens to the traditional recruiter?

The same thing that SaaS did to enterprise sales people. The quality sales people who built relationships will be enormously successful. The mediocre ones will be relegated to a inside sales position with vastly different jobs. They will focus on nurturing their prospective employees instead of spamming them with job descriptions.

Hiring for startups will never be the same again for sure.