One big component to their success, however, is out of our control. We work hard to recruit talented founders that we believe in, but when they get to the accelerator, how they approach their time is up to them.

At Mix & Stir, we’ve identified five key elements that are critical for founders to make the most out of their time. While these are based on our own experience, the advice extends beyond our program. If you are a startup founder getting ready to kick off with any accelerator program, here are a few key pieces of advice to help make sure you get everything out of the program that you can.

Be Proactive

Incubators and accelerators have different approaches, but structured programs usually include some mix of mentorship, pitch skills and networking. It’s important to realize that, even in the most highly structured situation, making the most out of this opportunity is up to you. Incubators can provide amazing access to talent and connections, but it’s up to the founders to make that access matter. Use your time wisely.

Get clear on what skills and talents your startup needs and look for people who can help in those areas. Reach out to mentors and network as much as you can. Connect with the other teams in the program and get to know who they are and what they are working on. Step up when you can to help other teams. You’ll find the folks who will do the same for you.

Play it Long

Relationships are critically important. They take a long time to build but can be quickly damaged. This is as true with mentors and investors as it is in your personal life. Mentors need to know you are credible before investing significant time or resources. When you find an advisor that clicks with your team, build that relationship. These relationships can last far beyond the accelerator session, so approach them with that in mind.

Also, understand that mentors are looking for fit just as much as you are and they need to have confidence before investing significant time in your startup. A bad recommendation can negatively impact a mentor’s own reputation, so they need to have real trust in you before going to the next level or recommending you on to other potential connections. The process requires time and commitment, proceed accordingly.

Prove that you are good to work with and committed to building a successful business and you may be surprised at who steps up to help you move it forward – but if people have doubts on your ability to follow through, or if you have a lot of meetings but never integrate any of the input you get, it will be hard to get people on board and even harder to keep them there.

Listen Closely

You will get a lot of feedback – endless amounts actually. Some you’ll agree with and some you won’t. That’s fine. The key is to listen thoughtfully and engage. Your job is to identify the important themes coming through the questions and act on them without losing your focus.

If you continue to hear the same questions over and over though, pay attention. If people are constantly asking you exactly what your product does, don’t blame it on your audience, realize that you are not connecting. You may be missing important pieces of the story, you may be burying people with detail, or using too many insider terms. If no one gets your brand or people are constantly questioning your business model, think hard about it.

Also, realize that, when you are answering questions, potential investors or mentors in the room are listening to the way you respond and considering what it would be like to work with you in the future. A founder who pivots so much that he or she loses their own vision is just as much of a concern as a founder who doesn’t acknowledge valid questions. On the flipside, a founder who can confidently handle a challenging question, answering from a deep base of knowledge, can really make an impact.

Make Decisions

It’s your startup and your job is to move it forward. There are unlimited opportunities for more user insight and concept refinement. Don’t get so buried in the potential to do everything that you get stuck and spin your wheels.

Identify the big questions you need to address – and be willing to commit to a decision and move forward. Set milestones and hit them. Not all your decisions will be right but it’s better to make the hard decisions and learn from the outcome. Every team needs someone who pushes them forward when the direction is unclear.

Get from idea to value proposition to concept as fast as you can, so you can start user testing– and don’t get hung up on the fidelity of the early prototypes. Even getting rough prototypes or pencil sketches into users hands can provide valuable insights and help teams move their products more quickly to the next level.

Since there is no chance whatsoever that your v1 is going to be perfect, take the pressure off yourself and figure out what you need to do to make it real – and remember it’s better to solve one problem really well, then to partially solve a long list of problems.

Build Something You Believe In

Between the networking, team dynamics, feedback and pitching, you can look forward to being very busy. It will be fun, frustrating and tiring all at the same time. There’s one secret that can make all the difference.

If you truly believe in what you are doing, if you care about the problem you are addressing and you really want to solve it, the rest comes more easily. You’ll make decisions faster, your team will be more aligned, you will connect with mentors in more genuine ways. You will be far more credible.

It doesn’t mitigate the hard work, timing and focus needed, but it will give you an internal compass to guide you along the way. You will be better able to see what changes really improve your offering and what takes you off track. Once you connect with the soul of your product, your story will have more impact and so will you. Never underestimate how far you can go with an idea you really believe in.

Eric Persha is the CEO of Mosey, a new online and mobile destination for curating custom experiences – and a 2012 Mix & Stir alumni. Over the last year, Eric and the talented Mosey team have been working hard to build their vision. They just recently launched a major product update and opened up Mosey to the public. In between investor meetings and the craziness of their first public launch, we were able to catch up and hear what the last year has been like for this growing startup.

Congratulations on launching your new platform! We’re really excited to see where Mosey is headed. Can you give folks some background on what Mosey is all about?

Mosey is our way of answering the question, “Hey, I’m coming to your town. What should I do?” It’s a place for people to create, share and experience their own custom adventures – created by friends for friends. Check us out at www.mosey.com.

People can use Mosey several ways:

Mosey can be “The best 4 hours in ‘your city’” –  a timeline of places and fun activities curated by your friends, travel experts or even local celebrities or brands.

Mosey can also be a library of custom curated experiences where you can find Moseys that your friends have posted or completed, or explore the best activities in an area. Search by city and filter on your interests – then you can save the Moseys you’re most interested in.

Mosey is also a network of people connecting to share local knowledge and their worldwide experiences. It’s a place to follow friends, brands you love, people that inspire you and local trendsetters. We want you to come share your epic night out or a relaxing weekend afternoon with the Mosey community.

It’s a cool and surprisingly useful concept. Can you tell us a little bit about how Mosey got started?

Sure, Mosey came out of a grad school project at the California College of the Arts MBA in Design Strategy program and then, after graduation, we joined up with the Mix & Stir Accelerator. We were very excited to find an incubator that understands and encourages the role design plays in the product creation process.

By the end of the MBA in Design Strategy program the Mosey team had an MVP that barely worked, but was an excellent talking point for our vision of what we wanted to create. We took that prototype to a much more functional level in the first month at Mix and Stir. The prototype allowed us to validate the behavior that was at the core of the product, but it didn’t allow us to do much else. We went from 0 to 1000 users pretty quickly and used the initial user base to help create the product you see today at www.mosey.com.

Mosey was part of Mix & Stir’s first summer program last summer – can you speak a little about what that experience was like for you and your team? 

We came into the Mix & Stir program weeks after completing the CCA MBA in Design Strategy program, and it was the perfect gel to keep the team together and working toward our vision of Mosey in the future. Without the organized Mix & Stir schedule and their timelines/deadlines, it would have been complicated to keep moving the process forward.

Mix & Stir also created critical relationships with Mosey advisors, legal resources and investors that would have been pain staking without the program’s leadership. Mix and Stir was our forcing function to get Mosey through the summer and the delicate steps of launching a prototype and listening intently to our customers.

You and the team have been working super hard this past year, what has surprised you most about what it’s taken to get Mosey to the point you are today? 

The most important element of our success now and in the near future are the relationships we have built. We have great relationships with organizations like SF Travel, The Bold Italic and The America’s Cup, all of which have lead to each other in some form. It is very important to realize that you must create a product that is not just beautiful and fun to use, but one that also generates significant value for the people and partners that use it. Because of the value that Mosey creates for our early partners, it is easy for us to build a long lasting relationship and easier for them to recommend and share Mosey with their friends, contacts, etc.

Looking back at all that’s happened this past year, what are the things you are most proud of?

Our First 500 users. Because of our team’s attention to design, detail and user experience, it was hard for our team to launch something that we were not incredibly proud of to start. We did anyway and we learned so much from the experience. It made us stronger, more intelligent and more aware of what we could do.

I’m also proud of how the team has morphed and changed over the course of the last year. We are now a full-time team of seven, but when we started Mix and Stir there was only one full-time member and the remaining 6 were still working other fulltime jobs. We all worked incredibly hard and took the leap of faith into doing Mosey full-time at the correct time for our role at Mosey, and to support the rest of the team.

It’s fantastic to see Mosey grow like this. Any advice for next class of founders? 

Learn to listen. If people are not responding to your message, it is not because they don’t get it. If people can’t tell the story of your product to someone else better than you can tell it to them, you need to change something. Also, know the difference between a friend nodding their head and someone that is truly excited about what you are doing, they are incredibly hard to decipher.

If you have something good, it will continue to gain momentum. Sometimes you need to take a step back and recognize how much momentum you’ve harnessed in such a short period of time, and celebrate the small wins.

Where is Mosey going from here? And what can people do to help? 

Get creative with how you use Mosey. We see the product as a platform for human creativity and story-telling and we are always amazed at how creative people can be with it. Also, sign-up for Mosey. Share Mosey with your friends. Oh, and make some Moseys!

Also, just reach out if you want to chat. It is important to take the time to talk with people because behind all of this technology it is still about people, and the best way to connect with people is by sitting down and chatting. We are always willing to take the time to do that, so don’t hesitate to reach out. You can follow us on Facebook, or find me at [email protected].

 

Vipul’s most recent initiative speaks to the scale of his vision. He co-founded Topsy Labs, which currently operates the world’s largest searchable index and analytics platform for Twitter and other social data. It’s an incredibly powerful platform, giving people and companies instant social insight on a global scale. Vipul likes to think big.

We recently got to catch up about life as a founder and where he sees opportunity in the future of big data.

You’ve had an amazing career so far. Prior to Topsy, you co-founded Cloudmark, now a leading technology provider to the world’s largest mobile and telecom companies, so you’ve had the chance to start and grow several successful companies. What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned in your experience as an entrepreneur?

Well, one of the most important lessons is teambuilding. When you start out, you can get from an idea to an early product by yourself – but getting from that early version to a business requires a team. That means finding talented people in areas that you know very little about. You get a great team and great things start happening automatically. That was a very important and surprising lesson for me.

My background was open source software and I worked independently a lot. When I started my first company, Cloudmark, we were able to turn it into a large business. It was the kind of people we brought in along the way that defined the shape of the business and what we could achieve.

The lesson learned for me was finding and recruiting people outside of my expertise. It’s simpler for me to recruit engineers because I am an engineer – but I had to recruit people for business development, sales and marketing. Those are very important roles when you’re building a business.

What particular qualities do you look for when you’re hiring for one of your companies now?

One of the most important things I look for is attitude. With startups, you’re running into problems on a daily basis and those problems can basically end your company. Finding people who have both the attitude and the motivation to overcome problems and find solutions is really important.

Another key item is competence. You want to find people who are very competent and love what they do. If they have a combination of those things: a great attitude and competence, that’s usually a good hire.

Sometimes it’s hard because you meet people who are very competent but don’t have the right attitude, or are have a great attitude but they don’t have the right competence and you have to pass on them. It’s something that took me a while to understand and conceptualize but I follow it religiously now.

Any other lessons you’ve learned along the way that new founders should be thinking about?

Yes, founders often neglect how their products will be distributed. It is arguably the most important aspect of business for a startup – even a sensationally useful product won’t distribute itself.  Sometimes it’s necessary to change the product to something that will distribute with less friction, for instance: to build in viral mechanics, or to command a price that justifies the advertising and marketing costs needed to acquire customers.

Distribution deserves a lot more of founders’ creative cycles compared to new product features in the early phase of the company, but new founders don’t often spend as much time there. If you nail distribution, a lot of other stuff will fall into place.  If you don’t, you’ll likely have to spend expensive dollars on it later or pivot your business.

Lastly – founders need to be obsessed. Obsession is critical.

Startups are fragile. They can fail in so many ways when they are young and it takes focus that borders on obsession to keep them going.  As a founder you’ll end up having very little life outside the startup in early days, so make sure this works for you. In my experience, obsessive founders tend to convert ideas into successful ventures.  There is a set of life philosophy that encourages life/work balance, I think this can be a trap. Just accept that you have to work a lot to get a new venture of the ground. You have the freedom to create what you want; create something you love where you can channel your obsessive energies.

Things are changing so fast in the field of real time data. Where do you see the big opportunities opening up right now?

There’s a massive opportunity in real time data and social data. Products can now enable hundreds of millions of consumers to create new data sets. If you look at Twitter, our index has 250 billion tweets in it, which were created by a community of 200 million people around the world. If you look at what it is, a mobile app has enabled this massive dataset to be created. Foursquare is another recent example, all this check in data was just indexes before. An app and a platform enabled the creation of this dataset.

I think there is a great opportunity for startups enabling communities of people to create large amounts of real time data for each other’s consumption. I think we’ll see creative ideas for solving problems and for enabling communications between people who generate large data sets.

Another area opportunity where Topsy plays is doing analytics on data sets and extracting insights. During the last five years, it has become possible to look at data in a massive scale. Storage is becoming cheaper, computing has become cheaper and there’s a lot more data available. You can look at data at a scale that is orders of magnitude larger than what was possible before. I see a class of entrepreneurs that can analyze this data, come up with new insights and build products on top of that.

There’s a lot of interesting work going on in an area called data integration – where you take multiple different data sources and connect them together to find new insights. As more different data sources become available, we’re going to see more and more payback there. For example, hedge funds are using the data from financial markets and combining it with data from social sources to get a new level of insight into what’s happening in this industry. Data integration is another big opportunity.

You mentioned financial markets as one industry with big opportunity. Are there other industries where you see big potential on the horizon?

There is a lot going on in enterprise marketing, especially sales and customer support. This is an area I am particularly close to. Across industries, big data has become an important concept in industries ranging from financial and economic sciences to medicine.

At Mix & Stir, we are always looking for companies that are bringing a design driven approach to technology.  Where do you see the integration of design and big data having the biggest impact?

From what I am seeing, combining data and design is really very new. We are starting to see early systems that are doing that – a lot of it is still in research and development. There should be some exciting products coming out in the next few years that take this R&D into new products. 

One good example is a company called ESRI that’s doing a lot of visualization with geographical data. They are doing some great work, in particular with geo-visualization. They have their own datasets and we’ve been working with them on social datasets. One of the things you can do with the combination of design and datasets is to take complex information and present it in a way that insights are easily accessible. The work they are doing is really very cool.

If you were a young entrepreneur starting your career now, how would you shape it?

Collaborative phenomenon, system networks collaboration, data analysis, artificial intelligence – I’d be very interested in focusing on those areas.

Mobile is definitely a place where I think there’s big opportunity. Five years from now, we will have amazing mobile apps. A lot of stuff that we do today on our computers, we will be doing on mobile – doing things differently and better. If I were to start a company today, there’s a very high chance it would be mobile.

I think mobile is a real democratization of computing platforms because more people have the devices. There are number of cool apps but there is such a huge opportunity. There is a huge opportunity in enterprise systems that are mobile friendly or designed with mobile in mind.

Thanks so much Vipul, this has been a great conversation! Any last words you want to send out to people considering their own startup right now?

Just do it – that’s my advice. It’s a great time for it. Mobile and social are great opportunities. There’s so much innovation happening, it feels like the early days of web. It feels like mobile is at the same place.

So many more people will have access to the products founders are building today. There are billions of devices. So many more people are connected compared to 10 years ago. It’s a really very exciting time to start a company.