Resources & Tools StartCon 2016

Discussion in 'Starting & Running a Business' started by Simon Hampel, 11th Nov, 2016.

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  1. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Founder Staff Member

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    Anyone going to StartCon 2016? November 26th - 27th @ Royal Randwick Racecourse, Sydney

    StartCon 2016 | The Best Startup & Growth Conference in Australia

    Quite a comprehensive lineup of speakers:
    • Andrew Chen - Supply Side Growth @ Uber "Tactical Strategies to Grow Your Business"
    • Jason Crusan - Director of Advanced Exploration Systems @ NASA "Entrepreneurship in the space industry"
    • Elena Verna - SVP, Growth @ Survey Monkey "How to Drive Monetization Through Your Pricing Page Optimizations"
    • Nate Moch - VP, Product Teams & Growth @ Zillow "Expanding Your Audience and Data Footprint to Drive More Growth"
    • Patrick Malatack - VP of Product Management @ Twilio "How Twilio Became The Only Unicorn To Successfully IPO In 2016"
    • Chandini Ammineni - Distribution Partner @ 500Startups "Proven frameworks that accelerate growth without wasting your precious time and money"
    • Sean Ellis - Founder of Growthhackers @ Growthhackers "Actionable Growth Hacking Strategies for Your Startup"
    • Casey Winters - Product Lead, Growth @ Pinterest "The evolution of growth teams & data driven decision making"
    • Herry Wiputra - CTO @ Campaign Monitor "How to scale your engineering team while maintaining quality and growing your startup."
    • Hiten Shah (Live) - Co-Founder @ Kissmetrics & Crazy Egg "Measurable growth marketing tactics that you can immediately implement in your business"
    • Christopher Lowe - Global Tech Media Specialist @ Bloomberg "Connecting with the Bloomberg Network to gain intellectual capital investment for your startup"
    • Matt Barrie - Founder & CEO @ Freelancer.com "How to Not Get Screwed by Venture Capitalists"
    • Jane Lu - Founder & CEO @ Showpo "Growing a community of 16,000+ empowered and engaged female entrepreneurs in 12 months."
    • Annabell Satterfield - Senior PM, Growth @ BitTorrent "How your business can leverage data insights to gain traction and grow your product."
    • Maggie Zhou - ANZ Managing Director @ Alibaba "Driving International Growth for Australian Startups"
    • Ben Sand - Co-Founder @ Meta "Augmented reality and the emerging tech that will change the business landscape forever."
    • Danny Bhandari - Founder @ Tibra "His time at Tibra Capital. Making millions in investment markets leveraging super-fast computer systems."
    • Jason Lenga - Operating Partner @ Tiger Global "Capitalising on unique acquisition opportunites and corporate strategy"
    • Cheryl Mack - Chief Executive @ Startcon "Insights into Great Cities building Startup Ecosystems"
    • Gen George - Founder @ OneShift "Fireside chat on leading a global movement for entrepreneurial women"
    • Sujan Patel - Co-Founder @ WebProfits "How to grow a SaaS business with ZERO marketing dollars"
    • Rand Fishkin (Live) - Founder & Former CEO @ Moz "SEO. How startups can audit SEO to improve web traffic and increase customers"
    • Bill Reichert - Founder & MD @ Garage Technology Ventures "Getting to WOW! How to get customers and investors to fall in love with you."
    • James Posnett - Manager, Listings Business Development @ ASX "Funding Workshop: IPO on the ASX – an alternative to Series B"
    • James Norquay - Consulting Director @ Prosperity Media "Actionable Strategies to grow traffic from SEO & Content Marketing for your Startup."
    • Jonathan Englert - Founder @ AndironGroup "PR Is Dead. Here's What Comes Next."
    • Jeremy Kirk - Founder @ AndironGroup "PR for Startups - The No Dead Monkeys Way"
    • Andy Farquharson - Sales Architect @ Winning by Design "Secrets to Scaling your Sales for Hyper Growth"
    • Dale Beaumont - Founder & CEO @ BRiN "14 Technology Tools to Grow Your Business"
    • Adrian Towsey - Regional Vice President @ Salesforce "Build a Company Culture That Drives Growth"
    • Becca Krass - Director of Marketing @ Salesforce "Design Your Experience So Users Fall in Love"
    • David Kenney - Partner - Corporate Services and Tax @ Hall Chadwick "12 Key Lessons of the Start Up to Unicorn"
    Tickets are $499 for another 4 days.
     
  2. Player

    Player Well-Known Member

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    I am going and looking forward to it.

    @Simon Hampel are you attending?
     
  3. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Founder Staff Member

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    Would like to but I'm not sure I've got time :(
     
  4. Player

    Player Well-Known Member

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    Let me know if you are Simon and we'll meet up.

    I'm going largely as an investor. I am slowly dipping my toes into startups (seed, angel and private equity). I am learning as I take new positions and also think events such as this will accelerate my learning curve. It's all part of enhancing due diligence and so forth.

    I am looking at establishing a decent portfolio of companies over and above property of which I am tiring; a market I cannot see too much upside to in the medium term in Australia. Oooh, better not say that on another popular property chat site :D
     
  5. larrylarry

    larrylarry Well-Known Member

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    Pretty high level stuff. I love the Alibaba story.
     
  6. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Founder Staff Member

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    Yeah, I won't have time to go to the conference this year. I wish it wasn't so late in the year - too many other things on!

    Will try and make it next year.
     
  7. Player

    Player Well-Known Member

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    Here ya go..............

    I thought I’d report back on StartCon for those unable to make it and who may have interest in what went on there. I found StartCon 2016 an interesting two days. It was my first time attending and bear in mind my perspective in being there was as an investor. I did receive some business insights albeit most of those were from the perspective of a startup involved in technology and mostly platform based thereby allowing fairly rapid scaling and growth.


    These notes are by no means exhaustive and I did venture out to see some pitches from time to time. They are my key take away ideas from the speakers who I found of interest. There was much concurrent activity going on……too much in fact. This should have really been a three day event instead of two days which was insufficient IMHO. That was my biggest criticism.


    Matt Barrie of Freelancer fame opened as the first speaker. He was going on about not striving to be a unicorn (the rare 1 Billion pre-exit valuation metric) as this was often camouflage for ridiculous valuations to entice employees with lofty stock options and less pay. He also has a fair amount of dislike of venture capital firms. He only sought funding once before he eventually took Freelancer to IPO. Take away was to aim to be a startup that stays lean as long as possible survives under any conditions.


    Chandini Aminemi of 500 Startups was next and she basically had the message of not spreading too thin and trying to do too many things with too few resources. She considered having one metric that matters (or two at most) would define the true north of the business and focus should be given in that one direction/goal. Growth then becomes a function of execution not scattered activity.


    Maggie Zhou from Alibaba spoke and merely told a story of the growth of the company. My takeaways was that Jack Ma saw the IPO as raising trust rather than just raising money. Also the priorities they foster are Customer 1st. Employees 2nd and Shareholders 3rd.


    Bill Reichert spoke about Getting to Wow to craft a compelling summary of your businesses value proposition. A good communicator engages three body parts: The head (logical). The Heart (emotional) and The gut (trust). Conveying the value proposition.:

    1. Head

    2. Heart

    3. Gut


    Get them emotionally first (2) then be trustworthy (3) and then make it sound logical (1).


    Twenty seconds to capture them



    Patrick Malatack spoke on how to use messaging to improve your customer experience. He is involved in product management at Twillio. He indicated that businesses should communicate with their customers in whatever channel the customer wanted and should be in basic ”human/people” language. He spoke of the development of chats in apps and apps in chats. This can only get bigger with AI, deep machine learning and so forth.

    The ever so humble Mike Cannon Brookes of Atlassian fame spoke on fintech and the move toward portable banking where the customers details will soon become much easier to move from provider to provider rather than having to endure the archaic banking system we have been accustomed to for so long. He wore thongs, a t-shirt and jeans and sported a very unkept beard. Forget about the millionaire next door, this guy is a billionaire……………talk about not judging a book by its cover. Not unexpectedly he admitted to being a big reader and was concerned about the lack of STEM skills and interest amongst students/parents/schools.


    Sujan Patel spoke about growing your startup and focusing more on traffic to your online presence to achieve better conversion. The aim should be to make people fall in love with you (your product/service). He considers that people don’t thank their customers enough and should stay in touch to receive feedback and to have them spread the word. Getting the customers opinion on what their product does for them should give clues about what the headline should be in advertising/branding.


    Nate Moch from Zillow spoke about growth by design. Culture of growth and focusing on key metrics and goals (not tactics) was important. BHAG’s should be five years out. Yearly goals should be worked upon by small autonomous teams that fail fast and are able to pivot and swing quickly when required. Biggest take home (the antithesis to the Aussie mentality for the most part) was that you cannot have innovation without failure. Employees and team members should be made to feel safe with risk.


    Andrew Chen from Uber spoke on what’s next in growth. He suggests to zoom out and see what’s come before (history). Technology changes but people stay the same. He showed how classic strategies (in marketing/copy/tracking) are what appealed to people (who stay the same) and that with technology such as new platforms and smarter execution the growth is faster today. He said that what worked 100 years ago will work today and in the future. He gave examples of advertising in newspapers with special offers and coupons (that were uniquely numbered) to follow/track what newspapers and localities converted more. Today we have the url to track the origin of a buyer. Different, but really the same. He suggested not trying to be too smart. UBER took something simple like transportation and made use of technology to make it easier and simpler…..new platform and smart execution.
     
  8. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Founder Staff Member

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    Thanks for taking the time to post that Player - really interesting!

    Did you think it was worth the time/money to attend?
     
  9. aussieB

    aussieB Well-Known Member

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    @Player Thanks for posting that. What do you think were the take aways for you as an investor ?
     
  10. Player

    Player Well-Known Member

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    The short and quick answer is, No!

    Those who are more inclined to glean technology and growth hacking insights rather than investment opportunity/awareness might benefit, however I would not fly interstate to attend this. Perhaps youtube or google people such as Andrew Chen, Sam Altman (from Y Combinator) or checkout angelist as they have a range of resources for founders and investors alike.

    Unless it's format changes next year and they isolate the pitches from the main sessions, then they will have even fewer people attending. I stumped up $499 as an early bird investor ticket to then be offered 20 % discounts closer to the time. I would not return unless the agenda and method of organisation changed and even then IMHO this is an event that should be priced in the $89 to $149 range. I don't baulk at paying money for things like this and have often received great value from seminars or summits that I've both paid for or attended for free or a nominal price. This was not worth the time or the money to be honest.

    @aussieB by way of investment takeaways there were none that were directly related to investment and the process but rather as indicated in my earlier post above, "I did receive some business insights albeit most of those were from the perspective of a startup involved in technology and mostly platform based thereby allowing fairly rapid scaling and growth".......and on that score insights like that actually help with understanding how the founders think and approach things which can ultimately help with due diligence, so time not entirely wasted but I was expecting more. I did meet a few people however that can be done at free pitch events or meetups as well.

    For those inclined there will be an event next year in Brisbane called Myriad. The price to attend (at varying level) is peanuts compared to StartCon.

    Have a navigate here:

    Home - Myriad

    It will build on the Qld Innovation and Investment Summit that premiered this year in April. I watched the whole thing at home for free live streamed and it was brilliant.........free! I wanted to attend however was ill and was grateful for the fact that I could watch it all from bed.

    I've just bought the basic ticket (two for one as I will attend with a friend) however might go for the investor package closer to the time.

    Here's a link to the youtube play list of most of the talks from last year's event (2015). Matt Barrie is good as well as Mark Bouris and Sean Ellis. They are the must watch ones and the rest make up your own mind from the titles. Just saved you all time and money :D

    StartCon 2015 - YouTube
     
  11. Simon Hampel

    Simon Hampel Founder Staff Member

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    Great write up - thanks!

    I got the feeling their intention was to stack the speaker list with as many big names as possible to justify the high price, but there's probably more value to be had from networking opportunities at these types of events.