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Sunday Video: Feld on balancing love of work with love of family
Brad Feld, an early stage investor and entrepreneur, shared a series of personal stories to a group of Standford University students in October, in part illustrating how his fulfilling life as an entrepreneur has come with challenges, too.
As a follow up to Willis Jackson's post on Saturday, "Why our community needs Startup Spouses," I wanted to share the video below in which Feld reflects on an episode he and his wife had that led him to readjust his habits and schedule in order to strengthen his marriage.
"I was involved with this person that was more important to me than anything else I was doing," Feld said, "but who also respected and valued my level of commitment to the things that I did as an entrepreneur and as an investor and the way that I wanted to live my life, and I respect the way she wants to live her life.
"But the intersection of that was important. We had to understand what that meant in the context of living our lives, and me personally living my life."
Check out the five-minute video below to hear how Feld changed his life to better balance his love of work with his love of family.
To watch Feld's full hour-long presentation, "Great Entrepreneurs Go Out and Do," which I highly recommend, visit Standford University's Entrepreneurship Corner. Also, if you aren't already, I encourage you to read Feld's blog at feld.com.
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Why our community needs Startup Spouses
About the Author: Willis Jackson is the founder of ShownHome, curator of Startup Digest, organizer of Startup Spouses and a contributor for Silicon Prairie News. For more on Jackson, see the note that follows this post.
The sort of interaction facilitated by events like Big Omaha (above) isn't always easy to come by, especially for the spouses of people involved in startups. That's why Willis Jackson believes Startup Spouses is so valuable.
When I first started out on my entrepreneurial journey, it was almost impossible to find people to talk to. I spent three to five hours a night combing through Google search results for three consecutive weeks because I was determined to get connected with people that could understand what I was going through. At the end of my search, the only event that seemed like a good fit for me was KC Roundtable, which at the time had a website with a big SQL error dump in the main frame of the page. I wasn't sure if it was an active group, but I didn't have any other options. I reached out to them and it turned out to be a great thing for me, but more on that in a minute.
Fortunately these days it is much easier to get connected if you are just starting out. We are starting to see groups form that allow people who are further along to push themselves and one another. The great people I know help to make sure that StartupDigest is full of events, Silicon Praire News helps to expose people doing awesome things, and we have gotten to the point that talking about the strength of our community and the connections between people in it has some real value. Still, I feel like we can do much more.
Dealing with the transition from the corporate world to the startup lifestyle is an emotional process on its own. However, when you add in a spouse, having to deleverage, and a family that doesn't understand, trying to keep things together becomes even more stressful. The thing that has kept me coming back to KC Roundtable is the overwhelming sense that I finally have a place to vent my frustrations where people could realistically empathise with me. Discovering that I wanted to start a company but being trapped in a corporate job was a tough life to live, and commiserating with a group of my peers really helped to take the edge off. Of course, the group has more benefits than just that, but that was the most important thing for me.
Anyone that has had to make this transition will tell you the stress on your significant other, spouse, life partner, girlfriend or boyfriend can be as bad if not worse than it is on the startup person. My wife is risk averse. She liked owning a house. She has had to place enormous faith in me to feel comfortable with where we are today, but some days it is really hard on her. I want her to have a place where she can get the same feeling that KC Roundtable gave to me: that there are people out there that have done this before, they ended up OK and they can understand her when she needs to vent.
"I want her to have a place where she can (see) … that there are people out there that have done this before, they ended up OK and they can understand her when she needs to vent."
That isn't the entire story though. Our community has grown in size, but I believe we need to improve the strength of our bonds between one another. The benefits to doing so are many, including growing to the point where our community is self-sustaining. I want the community to help identify me as a person. One of the best benefits that we can provide to ourselves is to build in a support structure for our families. This unique benefit would allow us to better retain our best entrepreneurs, technologists and creatives. And perhaps most importantly, it is an opportunity for us to give something back to the people that support us the most.
The first Startup Spouses event is taking place in Kansas City on Feb. 16 at Red Nova Labs. You can find out more about Startup Spouses on Meetup. Get involved in the community discussion in the Startup KC Facebook group or by following the #startupkc conversation on Twitter.
Image credit: Big Omaha photo by Malone and Company. Photo of Jackson by Malone and Company.
About the author: Willis Jackson, a regular contributor to Silicon Prairie News, is the founder of ShownHome, a startup building software to save real estate agents time by making it easier to schedule showings, providing accurate showing recommendations for buyer agents and identifying truly comparable homes for seller agents.
Jackson's other activities include curating the StartupDigest for the Silicon Prairie region and organizing Startup Spouses.
Jackson can be reached by email at willis@shownhome.com or found on Twitter at @wfjackson3.
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Weekly Startup Links: '25 Startup Ideas for 2010'
Every day I comb through my Google Reader reading sites like Hacker News and others, and star articles that are especially interesting about startups, entrepreneurship and miscellany. These are some of my favorites:
If you have any startup-related links you'd like to share, shoot me a note!
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Prairie Moves: Jim Duval, Matthew Kirk, HelloQR and more
What is Prairie Moves?
Published Tuesday and Thursday (one day late this week), Prairie Moves keeps our readers informed about career moves, media coverage, product development and more from the companies and individuals we cover on Silicon Prairie News.
If you or your company would like to submit one of the items below for our next Prairie Moves post, please email editor@siliconprairienews.com. And if you have suggestions on how we could improve these posts or any of our coverage, please contact danny@siliconprairienews.com.
Mergers & Acquisitions
Career Moves
- Jim Duval, formerly with TitanTV, joined Syncbak (Marion, Iowa) as VP of Product Development - twitter.com
- Matthew Kirk joined SocialVolt (Kansas City) as Chief Scientist - Press Release
- John Hobbs, currently a developer at What Cheer, named a partner with the company - twitter.com/whatcheer
New Tech
- Legal Sonar (Kansas City), a site that bills itself as the best place to find Kansas City attorneys through your mutual connections, launched - legalsonar.com and Legal Sonar blog
- Phenomblue (Omaha) released beta of HelloQR, a free QR code generator that allows users to create, share and track QR codes - helloqr.com and Nebraska Creative
- QA Graphics (Ankeny, Iowa) Mobile Energy Efficiency Display Android app released - Android Market
- Hatchlings 2 (Des Moines), a virtual egg hunt, beta went live - hatchlings2.com and Brad Dwyer on Twitter
- To My Face (Des Moines), a site that helps users collect and analyze targeted, optionally-anonymous feedback, launched - tomyface.com
- The Big Plate (Lincoln), an exclusive, membership community for entrepreneurs, artists and innovators to connect, collaborate and create, launched - thebigplate.com
New Creative
Product/Business Development
Mentions
Startup America Partnership
StartupIowa, Startup Missouri, Startup Kansas and Startup Nebraska : "States ‘starting up’ with Startup Fair and launch events (Video)"
Startup Iowa
Kansas
Fiber Watch
Recognition
- Ben Milne of Dwolla (Des Moines) and Geoff Wood of Silicon Prairie News named to the Des Moines Business Record's "Forty Under 40"
- Drew Davies of Oxide Design (Omaha) named one of Graphic Design USA magazine's "People to Watch in 2012"
- Sioux Falls, S.D., Ames and Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Omaha named by Bank Technology News as one of the "10 Best Cities for Data Centers"
Blogged
Misc.
Image credits: Photo by Marcel Oosterwijk via Flickr.
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Meet AgLocal, the online market for local meat picked to pitch at SXSW
AgLocal is one of 48 companies chosen from more than 670 entrants to participate in the SXSW Accelerator March 12-13 in Austin, Texas.
With South By Southwest Interactive and the fourth annual SXSW Accelerator on the horizon, a Silicon Prairie standard bearer has emerged. It was announced on Monday that AgLocal, a startup based in Overland Park, Kan., was chosen from more than 670 companies as one of the 48 that will participate in the Accelerator on March 12-13 in Austin, Texas. AgLocal will compete in the "Innovative Web Technologies" portion of the Accelerator.
Co-founded by Naithan Jones (left) and Jacob McDaniel (below), AgLocal is a marketplace that connects independent farmers and producers with the demand of local businesses and consumers. Through a website and mobile app, AgLocal aims to provide producers better local options for selling their product and to supply consumers with cheaper, higher-quality meat, thus bringing "power to the meat lover."
We've given brief glimpses of AgLocal in recent Prairie Moves posts, and we intend to provide a more complete picture of the startup once that comes into focus. But for now, we caught up with Jones to get a snapshot of the startup at an early stage in its rapid development. As it turns out, the Accelerator invitation is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of early milestones for AgLocal.
The company was founded in May of 2011 but has ratcheted things up a notch in 2012. "In the course of six weeks we're up to eight employees and two interns and interviewing to fill roles …" Jones said in an email earlier this week. "So ya, I'd say we're growing."
More growth is in the crosshairs. AgLocal plans to launch a private, pre-alpha test product in Kansas City to a select group of users early this month and do the same in San Francisco in early March. Jones said the startup plans to be in 3-5 cities by the end of May and 30 by the end of the year.
Jones played it close to the vest regarding certain SXSW details. "We may or may not launch the full on BETA product there," he said. "You'll have to stay tuned to find out." But he was far more forthcoming about other aspects of SXSW and the company's direction. Below are excerpts from an email interview with Jones conducted earlier this week.
On what inclusion in the Accelerator says about the progress AgLocal has made so far and the potential people see in it …
Naithan Jones: I believe what it says is people are moving more and more towards the web and mobile devices as an acceptable replacement to the usual way of doing things, as opposed to just a novelty. …
Startups are quickly getting with this change in consumer behavior because it becomes easier to disrupt or augment other older business models, and it favors the consumer. In our case, we see the carnivore buyer community and producers (farms) as viable because of the sheer size of the market and the ability to address it in better ways. Consumers are getting increasingly expectant of the transparency and subsequent power that technology is giving to their buying choices. This is why we're doing it; it's to use our service to give "power to the meat lover."
On what the exposure and feedback AgLocal gets at the Accelerator can mean to the startup going forward …
NJ: SXSW is absolutely huge for us. All of us at AgLocal are longtime tech startup fanboys (laughing), so we've all followed the successful launches that came out of SXSW over the years. For the festival to say that AgLocal is one of the 50 best ideas out of 700 or so submitted says a lot. When I look at it as the founder and CEO, and get very transparent, in that all founders and early employees thrive from the feedback to their creative output and work ethic. Startups are like a new car engine coming off of the assembly line. You know it starts with a spark, the idea. Then the energy from the spark ignites the engine; that's the initial feedback. Then momentum follows that. SXSW is a good byproduct of our efforts to date, but it's just a beginning place. Now we have to go out and actually, you know, execute and deliver a great product like we've promised.
"SXSW is a good byproduct of our efforts to date, but it's just a beginning place. Now we have to go out and actually, you know, execute and deliver a great product like we've promised." - Jones
On how AgLocal is looking to differentiate itself …
NJ: Well, first let me say this, I know we aren't necessarily the first to sell farm to table using the internet, so we get that the base concept itself isn't that sexy or groundbreaking. We see the existing sites as generation one validation, and we only want to build on that and further the concept in much the same way that Facebook took over for MySpace. We want to be generation two. So what IS new or interesting here? A couple of things. One is that we can fill a niche for the lack of consolidated service into one giant sized market (in this case meat) to consumers who are ready for something cool and new. We'll do this by establishing a macro brand (AgLocal) that will act as a conduit for all of the micro brands (the farms). The old way of doing things is dying, and we have to look at how the upcoming generation is doing things. Peer validation and openness, is the new economy. …
Our approach to user experience is to see it as an ecosystem, in that it's as much people-powered as it is feature-powered, and the technology matches and facilitates this. This is our approach to creating a user-powered web and mobile marketplace that gives the power to the users … the meat lovers.
For more from Jones on AgLocal, see the video interview below.
Image and video credits: AgLocal graphic from aglocal.com. SXSW Accelerator logo from sxsw.com. Photo of Naithan Jones courtesy of Jones. Photo of Jacob McDaniel from linkedin.com. Video from WvIngthMedia on YouTube.
