Coming off a week of working out of 4.0 Schools as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, I am struck by how much I have learned about operating a business over the past five years since leaving the classroom.
Been reflecting on this and asking myself:
Given all that a first-time founder with zero business background needs to learn in order to be successful, how might we condense all of this and explicitly front-load it in order to rapidly accelerate someone's development as a business person, instead of hoping they'll just figure it out because that's what we all had to do?
Here's a first stab at explicitly modeling and coaching one minor but important technique critical for success in early stage entrepreneurship: the art of the e-intro. I'm writing this from the perspective of the coach, not the entrepreneur, because I want to highlight how important it is not to assume first-time founders know how to maneuver through the implicit social norms of startup culture.
Note my deliberate effort to follow up and "check for understanding" (yes, you can take the teacher out of the classroom but I'm still forever a teacher) - this is admittedly tough to do, because you run the risk of being patronizing or overbearing. Even writing this post feels a bit patronizing, but I ran it by the people who are a part of this story, and they assured me that they would have benefitted from reading this to learn, hence, I write on.
The Three B's: Blurb, BCC, Boomerang
One of the companies I worked with last week, Vidcode, is building a business to address the pipeline problem in software development. I had a contact at Google to whom I wanted to make an intro. I asked the co-founders to send me a blurb (3-4 sentences that summarized their company and what they were hoping to get out of the connection) that I could pass along in my e-intro, and used it as an opportunity to recommend that next time they wanted an intro, they could proactively offer to share a blurb with the connector, in order to increase the likelihood that said connector would follow through.
I then explained that sometime in the past couple years, "moving you to bcc" has become an industry standard in responding to e-intros, and that not adhering to this convention may subtly indicate you're new to the game and make it less likely to be taken seriously. It took me a few email exchanges with VCs to pick up on this back when I started, and because this convention does not exist in the education realm, it's especially important for first-time education entrepreneurs to be aware of the "accepted" way to address a new connection from the get-go.
Lastly, Boomerang (or similar email plugin). I basically proselytize Boomerang by explaining that most likely the person to whom you have just been introduced is very, very busy. Making sure that first-time entrepreneurs don't interpret radio silence as lack of interest is key. If there was one takeaway I left with the 4.0 Launch cohort, I hope it was "Boomerang every outbound email" and if no initial response, always followup.
The Check for Understanding
It's one thing to explain these techniques. It's quite another to followup and make sure that what you taught is actually sticking. Here's exactly how I did this:
To: Alex, Vidcode co-founder
From: Me
Subject: another lead
Spoke with the head of [local school board] the other day - he mentioned that one of his schools would be interested in learning about Vidcode. Wanted to double check that you'd welcome the intro and sales opportunity before I made it. Please let me know.Also, were you able to connect with Tara [original person I e-intro'ed them to last week]?
To: Me
From: Alex
Re: another lead
We haven't heard back from Tara yet. I'll shoot her another email tomorrow AM to touch base?