"Salting the Monkey": What Bushmen Teach us about Bootstrapping & Finding Money.

As the long-awaited Are You Fundable? is about to be released, here are some excerpts.
(This is not your typical Entrepreneur how-to book.)

How Startups can Survive the Drought and Find Investors

The more you can successfully bootstrap the company, and progress through your own financing or machinations, the more you impress Investors with your ability to deliver. So consider this a test you must pass – whether you get funding or not. If you want to know how to endure “the drought” and go on to find money, think of the Bushmen. Now generally referred to as the San, they live in the Kalahari Desert where there are no camels and few oases with springs or even wells where they can pump water out of the ground. They get rain during one season of year, and conserve what they can with little technology beyond filling ostrich egg with water and burying them in the sand.

For the rest of the time, they find water through alternative sources.

San drinking from a tuber

It turns out that water can come from many places other than a faucet or a pump. After they have run out of watering holes, wet sands and water stored in buried ostrich eggs, the San extract moisture from tubers growing beneath the ground. It is about as close as this desert comes to a water cooler but only a native could find its sublimely subtle shoots and live off the moisture they have to scrape from it. Anyone else would expire, which explains why Insiders – especially the pedigreed variety – has an advantage.

To Find Money and Business: “Salt the Monkey”

Since a real Entrepreneur may require the same ability to survive what is metaphorically a desert, how can they do it if they are an outsider or a visitor to this terrain? While the San have their proprietary ways of storing and finding these tubers, what would a newcomer – a disruptor - do? One famous example is how visiting non-San tribesmen from surrounding areas use other animals like baboons or monkeys in the desert to help them find these sources of water. They do this by trapping the monkeys and feeding them salt so they get thirsty enough to lead them to water.

How they do this is quite astounding. It requires finding a monkey hangout, an anthill, some seeds or any shiny object, twine and the aforementioned salt. First, the visitor drills a hole in the anthill at about crouching height. Anthills are built with a mixture of sand and mucus and have the virtual strength of cement, so making the fist-sized hole takes work. Next, the visitor appears near the monkey and plays with his seeds, making sure to get its attention. With great showmanship that ensures the monkey observes, he places his hand in the amply sized hole and drops the seeds. Then he walks away. The monkey, being a highly curious creature, will head for the anthill once the tribesman has left the scene put his hand in and grab the seeds. However, in making the fist, the monkey finds the hole is not big enough to remove his hand bulging with the seeds. Since the curiosity of monkey so consuming, he cannot let go of the seeds - and so he is trapped.

If all of this sounds eerily like the way you attracted your first customer, sponsor, corporate champion or Investor, so be it. But there’s more - the monkey is yet to do its real work. The patient visitor then walks up to the self-trapped monkey, attaches the twine to its neck and shakes the seeds loose from his hand, thereby freeing the monkey. He then ties the monkey to a tree and hands him the salt. The monkey devours the salt and quickly develops a hellacious thirst. At that point, the visitor undoes the leash and follows the parched monkey to his stored water source, which is typically an underground pond or lake.

That is how you survive the desert and “develop” a champion. With a little imagination, you can see that launching a Startup may not be all that different: you may have to find alternate sources of funding that can sustain you and ways to salt the monkey – that is, getting other people to lead you to the resources needed for sustenance. This is the kind of resourcefulness that tells Investors you belong in the business. It separates the Entrepreneur who will simply feast on the Investor’s money hoping for good fortune and the ones who will use that money to get up and go build a business!  http://bit.ly/1DNYIO4

Job Generation - Like an Investor-in-Residence Program?

According to the New York Times, VC’s spend thousands on Investor-In-Residence programs. Job Generation makes it happen in front of you - and for a fraction of the price. By putting seasoned execs in front of Start-Ups to see what VCs think make them more investible we are doing much the same thing – but the for the benefit of the public.

Sign up for our first Job Gen iEvening event on March 18.

What is Job Generation?

Last week we taped the pilot of “Job Generation” and in March we will roll out our first live events.

So what is Job Generation? It is a variation on Start-Up Presentations to Investors except that we include senior executives seeking leadership positions in the conversation.

The bigger picture – the part that is creating the buzz - is that new business ideas tend to come from young start-ups with little capital and less experience. They are usually energized by real world interaction with savvy execs but are too busy chasing investors to do that.

This is a uniquely informative experience because it brings savvy executives into the conversation at an early stage. Too often these executives are chasing after the same entrenched jobs that everyone else is after - so by putting these two generations of business execs face to face along with VCs, we see a variety of possibilities will occurring: employment, consulting, joint ventures and investment.

More than a "Job Interview"
Job Generation is about about more than savvy execs being interviewed by young Entrepreneur about running their companies. It is telescoping the process than made companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft great - when they raised enough money they hired senior execs that took them to the top. We are starting the conversation now hat these execs are available as a way to increase their chances of raising money or building sales.

Polaroid goes Facebook - Lesson from the Job Generation Pilot

In the first Job Generation, a former exec from Polaroid – a great fallen American business presents to Pixable, a company that generates photobooks from Facebook – where he notes that although the technology is different, the customer base is almost exactly the same, young women. The Pixable founders agree and they want to hire this exec. The VC on the other hand, would prefer they hire an exec with operations experience. The net result is a blend of consulting and strategic rethinking and maybe a hire or a consulting opportunity…….

In this environment have seen roll-ups, consulting arrangement and joint ventures or alliances of one kind or another. After all, only a tiny number of start-ups are investible – somewhere between 2 – 10%. So, to a large extent this is an exploration of what happens to the rest of those start-ups. Often, these are concepts that need further sales or business development provided through a joint venture context. By taking this conversation beyond the purely start-up funding conversation, we allow many more business opportunities to flourish. When business grow through sales, investors find them!

Business Discovery

One thing we learn about what the CEOs bring to the table when they talk to Entrepreneurs is a deeper understanding of the true nature of their businesses. We also have VCs at the table to help the parties understand what each can do to increase the value proposition and make them more investible.

Starting in March we will be doing a regular series of Job Generation events. In addition, all iBreakfasts going forward will still have the typical informative content but will also feature this interaction between Start-Ups and experienced execs as part of the warm-up session.

The Theory Behind Job Generation: Raising the Investibility Quotient

For those who have experienced our “Hierarchy of Start-Ups” presentation, you’ll know the most investible class of start-ups, at lest in sheer numbers re those who have these key attributes:

• 10 Years or more of domain experience in a field

• Identify and industry-specific problem

• Have a team with the solution that the mother company doesn't value

• Have an existing relationship with the natural buyers

If this is you, your check is in the mail! Most start-ups aren't like this but we find that putting them together with savvy execs can get them much closer to this fundability zone - and that is the basic goal of Job Generation.

Job Generation: The next phase of the iBreakfast

As you know the business world has changed!

After 14 years of running the iBreakfast, the iEvening for Innovators, the Web 2.0 NY Conferences and number of associated events, we are changing with it.

Our audience has always been those executives following the Digital Media revolution. Now, in this jobless recovery, what they need are more jobs.

We don’t believe the government or any state organization can make that happen, although they can certainly help. What really makes a difference is when entrepreneurs develop a new market or find news ways to solve persistent problems.

Often these great ideas needed help and our industry has generally viewed capital as the key driver.

We think that has changed. Today, start-ups can launch for a fraction of what they once required. On a relative basis, that means business expertise and contacts are worth more than start-up capital.

So the iBreakfast is launching a series of events and media initiatives to tap this shift. For the most part, they revolve around bringing seasoned execs in front of start-ups as a way to develop new business, employment and investor relationships. As we look back, these kinds of interaction have always taken place. Now, we are going to accelerate the process because we think it is the key to developing a new wave of employment opportunities.

So look out for announcements covering the following:

TV Show – will run to an audience of 50,000 on ours and partner websites
Local TV
Global Talk Weekly Radio Show
Job Generation Events
Business Opportunity Events