Motorola started a venture capital program in 1999 and since has invested over $500 Million in 175 different companies. As one of the most active investors out there, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital Group has had companies in its portfolio with resulting IPOS and even acquisitions. Some recent investments include Cleversafe, ViVOtech and Canvas. Surprisingly, out of the 175 companies invested in, Motorola has only acquired four.
In this interview with Reese Schroeder, Managing Director of Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Reese shares Motorola Solutions’ thesis on investing. It’s not a try before you buy model, but rather looking for companies with a strategic fit. With a constant pipeline (the team is currently looking at around 1,000 opportunities), hear what Motorola Solutions is looking for. Reese spells out exactly how he wants to be pitched and shares where he sees entrepreneurs mess up when they walk in his door.
My first inkling that I was an entrepreneur was at about age six. I loved sawing wood and hammering nails. I found some boards in a shed and went to work. As other kids came over, I assigned them tasks – I think we were trying to build a go-cart. As they were all sawing and hammering away, I thought – they’re working for me.
And then there’s Caine’s Arcade. Have you seen the Caine’s Arcade video yet? Here’s a nine year old who loves arcade games, has a skill with cardboard, a very loving dad and a lot of creativity. Caine turned his Dad’s auto parts store into Caine’s Arcade, outfitted with a variety of homemade cardboard games. Despite having no customer, Caine worked at it every chance he got and waited for someone to walk in the door. Then one day filmmaker Nirvan Mullick happened upon Caine’s Arcade and became its first customer. More importantly, Nirvan decided to create a wonderful film, and both the arcade and film have gone viral.
Since then, the Caine’s Arcade Foundation has raised over $170,000 to help foster entrepreneurship and creativity in children.
Steve Shank founded Capella Education, one of the first online universities, in 1992 when the Internet was not yet well-understood or widely embraced. With traditional educators questioning the entire concept of online teaching, Capella had a lot to prove. In this interview, Steve talks about bootstrapping the company to build a disruptive innovation, which he defines as a fundamental change in the marketplace. Patience was key for his success as it took seven years to demonstrate viability in the market. Today Capella has 34,000 students from across the US and 53 countries.
Steve Shank is one of the ten founders featured in the Nightingale Conant audio program How They Did It: Real World Advice From Today’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs.Listen to audio samples at here or order the program for a 20% discounted price for friends of Bob
Michael Alter, CEO of SurePayroll, shares three crucial lessons in this video interview on the sale of his company to Paychex for $115 million. Here are the highlights:
Your Company Is the Product
As managers, leaders and owners of companies, we spend all our time producing and selling things: products, services, processes. We think about how to create, position, price, brand and sell. But what happens when we try to sell the whole enchilada? It turns out the best process is the same, on a larger scale – the company becomes the product, and the same sales and marketing elements apply.
A radical example – recall the sale of ICQ’s Instant Messenger to AOL way back. The owners of ICQ proudly told the world that prior to selling to AOL for $425 million they had not taken in one dollar in revenue.
Make Sure Your Product (The Company) Is Fully Baked
Michael is brilliant on this point – because price isn’t the whole story. It’s easy to say you should sell when it’ll get the highest valuation. But what does that mean? Any smart buyer has a plan for making your maximized outcome her bargain price, from which she can later brag about what a steal she got when she underpaid for you. Michael said that for his 12-year-old venture, the decision to sell was not about flipping the company for a quick profit. With 30,000 customers and 160 employees, much was at stake. Even in the face of selling the company and turning the keys over to someone new, Michael said you have to ask, where do you want the company to go from here?
Go In With a Bigger Plan
This doesn’t just mean a plan to sell. Michael said that seven years ago SurePayroll got an offer but declined. The decision to wait proved to be the right choice. A sale process acquires momentum and picks up speed as you go along. It gets hard to change course. Your plan has to remain global and future-oriented even while you are packaging your company up with a pretty little bow on top. Michael took a global look at SurePayroll and saw that with big differences in client base, SurePayroll would not go through significant change following the purchase. Paychex had a strong presence with traditional payroll customers, while SurePayroll catered to online use by small businesses. He accomplished the shareholders’ goals for sale while taking care to insure SurePayroll’s ongoing viability.
It’s always emotional when exiting a VC-backed company. Investors don’t go in without eventually wanting a way out (sorry Warren B., I love Berkshire Hathaway but VC aren’t built for forever as a holding period). Great founders don’t flip and don’t treat their creations lightly. But sale is a common outcome.
I am excited to announce a new audio program with Nightingale Conant called How They Did It: Real World Advice From Today’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs. Over the past year I had the honor of traveling around the heartland to conduct 10 in depth interviews with company founders for this new multi-disk audio program. I think the outcome was amazing and I hope listeners enjoy the stories from these entrepreneurs, each of whom fought through huge challenges, took great risks, experienced breakthroughs, and accomplished amazing feats. Special thanks to Raj Soin, Steve Shank, Dave Becker, Dane Miller, Bonnie Baskin, Brian Sullivan, Joe Mansueto, Mark Tebbe, Howard Tullman, and Jim Dolan for sharing their expertise with me and entrepreneurs everywhere.
Listen to audio samples at here or order the program for a 20% discounted price for friends of Bob.
When we visited University of Maryland at College Park for the Entrepreneurial Bash, I met up with Ara Bagdasarian , Co-Founder of Omnilert, a mass notification system widely used on college campuses. Ara started Omnilert after his first idea to develop a real estate texting service failed. Inspired by an article about a student murdered in her dorm room, he saw a burning problem: a need to communicate safety information to students. At the time most people were not using text messaging. Despite that, Ara created a prototype for messaging students and set out to see if his idea could pass the critical test of any new business: will a customer pay for it? The answer was yes, but even after securing his first customer the road was not easy. In this interview hear how Omnilert created a superb reputation and how they continue to stay ahead of competition. Ara has great advice for entrepreneurs and lives by the belief that “our customers are our investors”.
Healthcare Marketing Expert Peter Cunningham and his wife suffered the tragic loss of their young daughter, CeCe, due to sudden unexplained death by epilepsy. Peter could have retreated, mourned, and just attempted to survive. But he didn’t do that. He and Sarah decided to create the CeCe Cares Pediatric Epilepsy Foundation, a national organization dedicated to reducing the emotional trauma and financial burden associated with pediatric epilepsy.
I realize we all know caring and committed individuals who form nonprofits. Peter’s next decision is the amazing part. He created the CeCe Bear, a stuffed teddy bear for kids. In its first year, the Foundation donated 2,000 CeCe bears to 10 of the leading pediatric epilepsy centers in the US, while providing grants to six families in need. This year his goal is to distribute teddy bears to children in 25 hospitals and provide financial grants to 20 families. To kick things off they are launching the inaugural Bear Bash on Saturday, May 12th in Chicago featuring an 80’s tribute band… the Spazmatics. You can donate or learn more at www.cececares.org.
Since launching How They Did It, we’ve met many wonderful entrepreneurs determined to change the world, sometimes with non-profit work. Take a lesson from Pete – and figure out your teddy bear – the thing that will inspire the world to take action.
Props to Jason Calacanis, leader and moderator at LAUNCH in San Francisco, for a high energy event that not only featured tons of startups from all over the world, but also hosted Israeli president Shimon Peres as keynote speaker. I happened by chance to be in San Francisco in time for the opening event on May 7, 2012.
The first set of presentations:
Alltuition – www.alltuition.com – One site that includes a view of all colleges, integrated and transparent view of the financial aid and loan process, plus a list of all major loan shops and their fees. Nice to see that Alltuition won as best overall 2.0 startup.
Vocre – www.vocre.com – Multilanguage conversations in real time.
Budge – www.bud.ge – Handheld program for health improvement. It even has a “Nag” mode where you can get a text or email exercise reminder (if that fails to motivate Budge will even call you at a certain time). Even better, a Budge customer, April, got up on stage with the company founder to do 10 pushups.
Hadza – www.Hadza.com – Simultaneous consumer video dashboard – one place that combines all video shot at the same time, geo-located. So if 10,000 people film the superbowl halftime show from the stadium, and another 100,000 film from bars and homes, you could aggregate to see and hear what occurred at the same point in time from multiple viewpoints.
Robin – www.magnifis.com - Your personal assistant, ala Siri. They presented a voice control demo of navigation, traffic and parking availability. But this could apply to all kinds of things…ask Robin to find your ultimate personal match for example. A beta version is running in California now, with a live version working in Israel, where the bus company allows riders to ask questions and get insightful answers.
While I was at the event I got the chance to chat with some company founders as well:
My Toybox – Founder Florian Spathelf launched in Germany and has not yet reached 1,000 customers. But they have big ambitions. My Toybox is targeting moms with young kids, especially ages 2 to 3 years old. We talked about the challenge of his target audience aging out – and how to be more of a lifecycle service for parents, so that the company still has value as the child gets older.
Bizplay – www.bizplay.com – Founders Pascal Lindelauf and Bob Groeneveld have done something interesting – launched a service that helps retail business owners display content on screens – like a flat panel monitor in a store checkout line. Big companies and institutions like hospitals already have great solutions like Rishi Shah’s ContextMedia, which delivers content on diabetes control and treatment. The small retailer doesn’t have that. Bizplay launched in the Netherlands and are now ready to take the rest of the world by storm.
BeCouply – www.becouplydates.com – The cute couple Becky and Pius, founders of BeCouply, are the outsourced concierge for couples – a driver picks you up, takes you to dinner and a show – hires the babysitter – whatever it takes to be…couply.
RonaStar – www.ronastar.com – This cloud-based enterprise platform was launched 6 years ago by my friend Stephen Meade. What’s amazing about Steve is the range of his startups, which includes Cenoplex (former President Bill Clinton is helping in order to see adoption of audio insertion on all cell phone platforms). Another of Steve’s startups is My WetRock, a company that could help save millions of gallons of water, just by plunking one down in your toilet tank.
Pricetag – www.pricetaghq.com – Founders Arturo Sheimberg and Andres Garzon have launched a quote building application. Let’s say you have a tech team and have to build a quote with multiple deliverables, variable costs and input from various team members. Here’s the low cost SaaS solution that’s far better than a spreadsheet.
My friend Patrick Spain sat down with me to talk about the process of launching, growing and selling HighBeam to Gale/Cengage all in the span of 6 years. (Full disclosure – I was on the board of directors at HighBeam). Patrick’s first CEO job was at Hoover’s, which was a fledgling publishing company at the time he moved to Texas to join. Ten years later Patrick had grown the company to an IPO with a multi-hundred million dollar market cap. After leaving Hoover’s and moving back to Chicago, he bought the assets of Infonautics, which became the kernel from which HighBeam grew. Highbeam is one of the biggest article and research sites online.
While at HighBeam, Patrick created Newser along with Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff. In this interview Patrick shares how he ran both public companies (which he says has its downsides) and private. He also gives his thoughts on the mistakes entrepreneurs make in addition to the best quality an entrepreneur can have: patience.
When I interviewed the 45 founders featured in How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America, I tried to total up the amount of value each had brought to the world. They all started from zero. I am not sure of the exact number for their company valuations, but I can tell you that on publication day the number one name on the list was Dane Miller. He had just taken Biomet private for about $12 billion.
Dane founded his company in tiny Warsaw, IN, where Biomet still continues to produce things like artificial hips and knees sold worldwide.
I’m thrilled that we were able to sit down with Dane and catch up. I had to ask him more about the amazing story about implanting titanium in his arm to prove a point. The world thought stainless steel was the safest material for the human body, but Dane knew better. So he tested it out on his own body, by having a surgeon friend implant a small piece of titanium in his arm.
Would you do that? How far will you go to prove yourself?
Dane left the titanium in his arm for ten years to prove the point. Today, thirty years later, what’s the material used worldwide by everyone in the industry? Titanium.
Watch this video where Dane briefly talks about titanium, how to keep good people, and how to keep humble.
Better yet – join us in Chicago on November 17 at the Great Lakes Entrepreneurial Bash to hear Dane and four other amazing entrepreneurs live and in person.
Robert Jordan is an Inc. 500 CEO and founded Online Access, the first Internet-coverage magazine in the world. After the sale of Online Access, Jordan launched two companies: RedFlash, an interim management team; and interimCEO/interimCFO, a worldwide network for interim, contract, and project executives. 
