As I made my way from Milwaukee, WI to Madison, WI for my freshman year of college in fall 2004, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.  I’d know for awhile that I liked working for myself: I’d been a soccer referee since I was 12, which allowed me to make my own hours and make more money than any 12 year old should be able to earn.  I’d been fairly bored with high school because we learned boring theories instead of practical ideas that would help me later in life.  My biggest take away from high school was “more practice, less theory.”

All of these thoughts took a backseat in my 18 year old mind when I received a letter from the University of Wisconsin notifying me that I’d lost the student football ticket lottery.  I was devastated.

After moving in, I’d been thinking about how to find tickets, but I didn’t have to look very far.  One of my friends invited me to a party my first night at college.  I was about ready to call it a night and walk home when I heard a guy screaming into his cell phone.  He hung up and was so mad that he slammed his phone on the ground, breaking it.  He got even angrier because he said he didn’t have the money to get a new cell phone.

Something in my brain just clicked and I said, “hey, do you have football tickets?”  He looked at me really strangely, but said he did.  I responded, “well I don’t have them, but I’d buy you a new phone for your tickets.”  I wasn’t really expecting anything, other than maybe some choice words, but to my surprise, he got excited.   The next day, I tracked the broken cell phone guy down via a friend in the frat, bought him the money for the phone and made the exchange.

I was pretty excited.  It only took me one night to get my football tickets.  All was right in the world.  I told my story to some of my new friends and quickly realized that there were a ton of kids who were in my same predicament.  I agreed to help them find tickets.  It pays to be in the right place at the right time.

Enter Exchangehut.  I first remember seeing flyers and spray paint stencils for the site a week into my freshman year.  I checked it out, signed up and was user number 1117.  Exchangehut was a ticket exchange that worked like the stock market.  Buyers could input a bid price and sellers could put in an ask price, creating the market.  When the prices matched up, a sale happened and both parties were contacted.  I used the site to help 4-5 friends buy tickets and quickly saw how useful the site was.

As the year went on, I became one of the more active users, I realized that the site had limitations and thought about creating a competitor.  I wrote up a simple business plan, but got discouraged because I was having trouble finding a programmer to write the new site.  I put the project on the back burner and went on with my summer.

I was in the right place at the right time again a month later.  The owner of Exchangehut was selling the site via an auction because he was graduating.  I quickly shot an email back, did my research and put in a bid.  I excitedly talked with my friends about how I was buying a business and to my surprise, one of my best friends from high school said he was too.  I said “what business” and we both said “exchangehut” at the same time.  He was a computer engineering major and we decided to merge our bids.  A month later, we were the proud owners of a 2000 person tickets and textbooks website at age 19.

We ran the site until 2008, growing the site to 150k users across 8 college campuses.  We learned a ton and needless to say, I was hooked.  I loved coming up with ideas for the site, promoting the brand and working my own hours.  I was making more money each week working on average 8 hours per week than my roommates were making bartending and waiting tables full time.  I loved the freedom that came with being able to work from anywhere.  I got to travel places and meet interesting, creative people.  I enjoyed meeting people who though “how can we fix a problem” not “why can’t we.” We sold the business to our ad network in summer 2008, but I knew I was going to start a new business.  This isn’t to say it was easy.  We put in long hours, answered angry customer emails and calls and continued to go to class.

Like many entrepreneurs I know, I keep a business idea list.  I had over 200 ideas on my list and after selling, worked on cutting them down to 10 that I thought were promising and would be fun to work on.  All that stopped when three professors I had gotten to know independently told me that I had to meet a student named Jesse Davis.  At the same time, two of my friends said that Jesse was working on something cool and needed a partner.

I met Jesse in one of the libraries on campus and he pitched me his idea.  Jesse’s pitch went something like this:

“I just read Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and couldn’t get through it when I got to US Marine Justin Ellsworth’s story.  He was killed in action in Iraq and his family wanted access to his Yahoo! email account.  Yahoo said no.

After a long court battle, a judge ordered Yahoo! to turn over the contents of his email accounts to his parents.   It shouldn’t take months to gain access to a deceased person’s email account.  Also, what if I don’t want my parents looking into my Facebook account or other sites I might have? Friedman ends the passage by saying “someone sort this out.”  Let’s create a system for people to store their last wishes for their digital assets, which are any online account or file on their computer, and let’s allow them to input their passwords so that their survivors have access.

I immediately thought back to ExchangeHut.  In 2005, we hired a programmer to help us make improvements with the site and at one point, I realized that our programmer has all of the usernames and passwords to the server, database, credit card processing, affiliate programs and everything else that was necessary to run the site.   Like programmers like to do, he used a random password generator, so there would be no way we’d be able to guess his passwords if he were to get hit by the proverbial bus.  We ended up having our programmer write down every password on a piece of paper and I stored it in our safe deposit box, just in case.  Jesse’s idea would have solved this problem.

I was looking for a project, Jesse was looking for a cofounder with some experience and we hit it off.  Two months later, we founded Entrustet.

I was sold on Entrustet because we had a chance to create a solution a real life problem.  The death of a loved one is an incredibly stressful time and we thought we could help give people peace of mind that their digital assets would be dealt with according to their wishes, and that survivors wouldn’t have the burden of having to guess what the deceased person wanted done with their online accounts.

We’ve been working on Entrustet since November of 2008 and launched in March 2010.  In our first year, we spent under $20k starting the business.  We were able to spend so little because we hustled and were located in Madison.  We’ve stayed in Madison, even though we’ve had opportunities to move to Silicon Valley, New York, Boston or Austin.  Being located in the Midwest has given us some advantages that are often overlooked by people on the coasts.

It’s incredibly cheap to live and work in Madison.  Our office is located across the street from the state capital and we pay $200 per month.  I pay $400 per month to live in a nice apartment four blocks from the office.  On the coasts, we’d have had to pay 5-10x more.  While the talent pool is not as deep, we’ve found talented employees who cost a fraction of what they would on the coasts.

Madison is small enough that we’re able to get in contact with anyone we want to relatively easily and Madison has groups like MERLIN Mentors that help new startups by pairing founders with successful entrepreneurs who server as in informal board of advisers. Everyone in our company walks to work and we’ve become active in the startup community by starting Capital Entrepreneurs, a founders group with over 60 tech companies in the Madison area.

I’m a huge believer is pursing your passion and starting starups has allowed me to pursue mine.

                          

We went to home depot and bought two 8×4 foot tile boards for a total of $20.  We had the guys at Home Depot cut our boards into our desks’ dimensions and taped them down with double sided tape.  It was a cheap investment that’s been a unique addition to our office.  Check out some pictures:

Do you have anything unique in your office that helps you work better or more efficiently?

                          

It’s been two years since I started Capital Entrepreneurs, an organization to help Madison entrepreneurs connect. I’ve been blown away by how fast CE has grown and how quickly time has gone by.  On our two year anniversary, here’s the story of how we got to where we are today.

In April 2009, I was a month short of gruduating from UW.  I had just started my second company, Entrustet, with my business partner Jesse Davis.  Many of our friends were taking jobs outside of Madison and the two of us were going to be staying in Madison to startup Entrustet.  We both had been a part of the UW entrepreneur scene and had received support from other students, professors and the university itself, but since we were graduating, we were worried that we would not be able to take advantage of the support system any more.

I realized that most people make new friends after college via their job, but since Jesse and I were the only people in our company, I worried that we’d get isolated.  I knew that there were other founders in town who were graduating who likely felt the same and wanted to do something make us more like coworkers, even though we were all working on separate businesses.

I’d been to most of the startup focused meetups and events around town and thought that there was a niche for a group that was specifically for founders that could compliment the existing networking events like High Tech Happy Hour and Madison Magnet.  I wanted to create a place where founders could get to know each other, hang out and talk freely about their problems, dreams and goals, without having to worry about getting pitched by attorneys, insurance agents, accounts or the press.  I wanted a place where ideas flowed freely and entrepreneurs would feel comfortable both asking for help.  I wanted it to be free and without structure.  I wanted Madison’s entrepreneurs to be a community of friends, not a disparate group of people who just happened to start companies.

At the end of April, I talked to a few of my entrepreneur friends and asked them what they thought.  Everyone loved the idea, so I started to look for a venue that would give us a private space for free, along with some other enticement to get our business.  Our friends at Brocach gave us a space in their upstairs bar, along with a nice food special and we set our first meeting.  I invited all of my friends who met two simple rules.  They were:

1. The founder or first employee of a Madison business
2. Were not a service provider like an attorney, accountant, insurance agent

Our first meeting was right before graudation in May 2009.  Around 10 founders showed up.  We introduced ourselves, had beers and talked.  It was great.  We decided to do a second meeting that next month.  I quickly realized that Madison entrepreneurs were doing some amazing things, but that the rest of the community had no idea.  So I started a website.  It’s a simple blog that gets updates whenever a CE company gets press, sends out a press release or the city itself makes news.  It also includes a list of member companies, resources for Madison’s startups, along with info on how to join.

Since May 2009, CE has grown slowly, but surely each month.  The second meeting had 12 founders, the 4th 17.  It just kept growing.  One year later, CE had 34 member companies and 60 registered members.  As we grew, service providers wanted to attend to meet the entrepreneurs.  We decided service providers could sponsor CE and attend ONE meeting per year.  At that meeting, they are not allowed to sell their services, just answer questions and get to know the entrepreneurs.  They also have to pay for our bar tab.

We were lucky enough that Neider and Boucher, Michael Best, Boardman Law Firm, Marquette Golden Angels and Venture Investors agreed to be our first sponsors.  Sponsorship worked out great for CE and the sponsors.  It was a great way for entrepreneurs to get to know service providers and for the service providers to get to know us.  It was also a great way to attract new, high growth clients.

CE continued to grow, but I was a little worried when Jesse and I got selected for the Startup Chile program.  Forrest Woolworth stepped up and ran CE while I was gone and did an amazing job.  Over the last year and especially in the last six months, CE has started to take off.  We now have over 75 member companies and 120 people on the email list.  We’ve been featured in Techcrunch, Read Write Web, Madison Magazine and tons of other publications.

Member companies have been featured in the NY Times, The Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Techcrunch, Mashabale, Forbes, BBC and hundreds of other influential blogs, newspapers and magazines.  CE companies have created over 300 full and part time jobs during one of the worst economies in recent history.  We’ve raise over $15m in funding.  Spinback, founded by CE alumni Andrew Ferenci and Corey Capasso, was acquired.  Spill, founded by CE alum Heidi Allstop was selected for Techstars.  My company, Entrustet, was selected for Startup Chile.  CE members have been instrumental in helping start the Forward Technology Conference, Build Madison and other entrepreneurship initiatives in Madison.

Madison’s startup scene has grown significantly in the past few years and I’m excited and proud that CE has been a part of it.  I can’t wait to see what the Madison startup scene looks like in another year!  I’d like to thank everyone who’s helped make Capital Entrepreneurs what it is today.  It would never have been a success without all of your help!

                          

So how has working in the “digital death” industry changed me and my worldview?

I no longer take anything for granted.  I’ve read so many stories of people dying unexpectedly that I’ve realized how special life truly is.  Jesse will say from time to time “Isn’t it ridiculous that we’re alive?  Think about all of the things that had to go right for us to be here today. It’s amazing.”  It really is true.

If the average life expectancy is 80 these days, it means we only have 29,200 days on this Earth.  Before Entrustet, sometimes I thought days were boring, or were simply impediments in time before I got to do something I really wanted to do.  Now that I’ve been working on Entrustet for almost two years, I never take a single day for granted.  It’s one of my 29,200, and only if I’m lucky.

Dealing with death has caused me to care even less about what other people think.  You only live once, so do what makes you happy.  In the whole scheme of things, rejection isn’t that big of a deal.  Seize your opportunities and take your chances with alacrity.  You never know when you won’t have the ability to take them in the future.

I’ve become even less materialistic.  You can’t take your possessions or your money with you when you die, so I’ve come to realize that I don’t need things or to make $1b (unless we get hyper inflation!).  When I read about people on their deathbeds, they all say they regret not spending more time with friends and family or taking a trip to a foreign country or taking the opportunity to work on the things they loved.  They never say they wished they had bought a bigger TV or a nicer car.  I’ve realized that it truly doesn’t take much (money) for me to be happy.  I know I can live well on a small amount of money.

It’s strange that I’m dealing with these issues as a 25 year old, but I think I’m lucky.  Most people push the idea of death down the road and many people don’t end up following their dreams.  I’m glad I’m realizing these truths now, not when I’m 50, 90 or not at all.  Sometimes it takes a near death experience, but for me, all it’s taken is being near death.

Please watch Steve Jobs’ speech to Stanford’s graduation class.  Jobs was diagnosed with an extremely deadly type of cancer and miraculously survived.  He’s an authority on how to live before you die and his speech is where I got the title for my post.  Do yourself a favor and take the time to watch.  You only live once, make the most of it!

                          

I have stayed in a hostel in Santiago for the last nine days until I found an apartment yesterday.  When I went to take a shower the first day, it was great.  Nice bathroom, high pressure, plenty of hot water.  After 14 hours of traveling, it was exactly what I needed.  The next morning, I went to take another shower and everything was great again.  After about 5 minutes, the water got cold.  Frigid.  I had to get out.

Some days, there was no hot water at all and I skipped showering, some days I had the same hot shower as my first day.  You never know how good you have it until it’s taken away from you.  Luckily for me, I only lost hot water, not something more important like this young Packers fan. Because I knew what it was like to lose hot water, I got really good at washing my hair as quickly as possible.  I took my chance to shower with hot water with alacrity.  Big word, I know, but my Mom’s been saying that to me since I was 3 to get me to do things, so I had to use it here.

It’s easy to think that you’re living your life to the fullest, but you truly don’t know how good you have it until you lose it.  You can try to live like you’re dead as Dave Winer suggests in his yearly Thanksgiving post, but it’s much easier said than done.  For me, it’s easier to take a step back every once in awhile and think about all of the things I have: health, great friends/family, ability to travel, flexibility to start my own business, rather than the things I don’t have.  If you have a few basic things, you’re pretty much set.

When opportunities come up, seize them.  Take the trip, learn the instrument, start your business, go talk to people.  What’s the worst that could happen?  Live for opportunities and experiences, not things.  When you’re looking back, you’ll remember your experiences and the people you made your memories with, not the things that were around you.  Control what you can, let the rest roll off your back.  If Entrustet‘s taught me anything, it’s that in the long run, we’re all dead.  Don’t diminish what you have, because it could be taken away at a moments notice and when you have the opportunity to do something awesome, do it.  You won’t regret it.

                          

It’s been 70-80 degrees and sunny every single day with low humidity.  The weather reminds me of Palo Alto so far.  Santiago is a huge city with about 6m residents.  It’s in a valley, so there are some problems with smog, but I haven’t had a problem yet.  There are a few days when the mountains are a bit obscured, but for whatever reason the smog doesn’t seem to get down into the valley and has not bothered my lungs.

Santiago sort of runs west to east and as a general rule, the farther east you get, the better the neighborhood.  We’ve only explored comúnas (districts) Providencia, Las Condes, Vitacura and a bit of Nuñoa and the downtown around our office.

Eastern Santiago very developed and clearly first world.  If it weren’t for everyone speaking Spanish, I could be in any other mid to large city in the US or Europe.  The center, where our office is located, is a little older and really busy, but still nice.  There’s people everywhere during the day.  It’s filled with shops, restaurants and businesses.  We’re not sure what it’s like at night, but people have told us it can get rough downtown.  There’s got to be at least 6-7 universities headlined by Universidad Católica and Universidad de Chile, so there’s lots of young people seemingly everywhere.  We haven’t checked out the Western side and everyone’s told us to stay away.

The metro is modern, efficient and cheap.  It costs about $1.25 to use it and you can get just about anywhere you want using it.  There’s wifi everywhere, probably more than in Madison.  There’s public wifi hotspots all over the place.  People eat dinner between 830-1030 and go out to bars/clubs at 12-1, which stay open until 6am.

Not many people speak much English, but they love it when we speak Spanish, even if it’s bad.  Our goto phrase has been estoy tratando de hablar español, pero hablo como un niño de cinco años, which means I’m trying to speak Spanish, but I speak like a five year old.  That usually gets a laugh and then we’re free to practice.  I can still understand pretty much everything people are saying, but I’m still struggling to speak quickly.  I can tell I’m already getting better though.

Everyone here looks younger than you’d expect and I have a feeling it’s because Santiago is a walking city, the weather is awesome and the food is really healthy.  Chilean food uses awesome ingredients, has correct, non American portion sizes, but is sort of bland.  We’ve had a bunch of chicken/rice, pork chop/mashed potatoes etc for main courses.  There are tons of Peruvian restaurants in Santiago and we’ve found that it’s the place to go for a good meal.  It’s like Chilean food, but with more spices.  I had some top notch ceviche last night.  If you’re in Madison, go to Inka Heritage to get a feel for some of the stuff we’ve been eating.

Chileans excel at making sandwiches.  They use really good, fresh bread, avocado, tomato, fresh wet cheeses, lime mayo and all sorts of fresh goodness.  If I wanted, I could survive on the diverse array of Chilean sandwiches.

The fresh fruit and veggies are awesome and cheap.  I bought medio kilo (1lb) of fresh strawberries for about $1.25 from a fruit stand and really flavorful avocados cost between $.10 and $.20.  It makes buying a much worse quality avocado for $1-$1.5 seem insane in the US.  I can’t wait to start cooking with these ingredients once we get an apartment.

I’m not a fan of fruit juice in the US, but the juice here is unreal, cheap and is sold everywhere.  So far, my favorite is frambuesa (raspberry), followed closely by frutilla (strawberry) and piña (pineapple).  It costs about $.50 for a really big glass.  The raspberry juice tastes like the fresh raspberries we used to get out of my grandma’s garden and put on top of schaum torte.  My family probably only gets this part, but you’ll have to take my word for it.

jugo de piña

Dominó is how fast food should be.  They are everywhere here and always busy.  They sell sandwiches and hotdogs, but use really fresh, good ingredients.  It’s still cheap and fast, but it doesn’t taste like fast food.  Dominó would do really well on any college campus in the US.  My favorite thing from Dominó so far is a hotdog with crushed avocado, tomato, cheese and a little mayo.

I’m much less hungry here than I was in the US.  Part of it is that it’s warm, so my body needs less food, but I think another part of it is that all of the food is very healthy and therefore more filling than in the US.  I bought an orange soda yesterday and there were only four ingredients: carbonated water, sugar (not high fructose corn syrup), orange juice and I forget the last one.  Even being here a week, I already feel healthier.

I’ll have more blog posts coming about the Startup Chile program and some of the interesting people we’ve met so far.  I promise my next post will have lots more pictures.  I had problems with my iPhone for a few days, so I’ll be sure to put more in next time.

                          

Introducing Two People

I like to keep it really simple.  Here’s a mock introduction between my business partner Jesse Davis and our friend/Madison entrepreneur Steve Faulkner of Real Time Txts.

To: Jesse Davis, Steve Faulkner

From: Nathan Lustig

Subject: Introducing You

Jesse, meet Steve Faulkner.  Steve is, among other entrepreneurial endeavors, the founder of Real Time Txts, a service that texts subscribers free drink offers at local bars in real time.  He also wrote an awesome article about Madison entrepreneurship that was featured in Techcrunch.

Steve, meet Jesse Davis.  Jesse is the cofounder of Entrustet, a website that allows you to decide if you’d like your digital assets transferred to heirs or deleted when you die.  He is also active in the Madison startup scene and Capital Entrepreneurs and writes a great entrepreneurship blog.  Jesse is interested in connecting with you to see if there is a potential partnership for Real Time Txts and Entrustet.

I wanted to connect you guys so you could figure out how to make it happen.  I’ll let you take it from here.

Thanks,
Nathan

Key Points to Remember

1. Use the format above to introduce both people to each other
2. Include links to each person’s business, unless the person is well known
3. Include a sentence at the end to say why you’re connecting both people to each other
4. Include a sentence that tells the two people you’ve just introduced that it’s up to them to take it farther

Responding to an Introduction

It’s fairly straight forward.  Click reply all and thank the introducer for making the intro.  Introduce yourself to the other person and go from there.  It’s important to include the introducer in the first reply so that they know that you’ve actually responded.  If I’ve taken the time to introduce two people, I want to know that they’ve actually taken the next step to connect.  After the first email, feel free to leave the introducer off further conversations.  Here’s a sample reply:

To: Jesse Davis, Nathan Lustig

From: Steve Faulkner

Nathan, Thanks for intro.

Jesse, many people have told me that we should meet as well.  As Nate said, I’m the founder of Real Time Txts, a service that sends people texts about free drinks at Madison area bars.  Do you have some time this week to chat via phone or meet up for coffee so we can discuss a potential partnership?

Thanks,

Steve

I hope this helps!  What do you think?  Do you use this format or do you have a different format that works well for you?

                          

Introducing the Entrustet music video “What My Assets Will Become” a cover of All the Things I’ve Done by The Killers.  Daniel Thompson plays the piano and with Rob Howard on the camera.  I hope you enjoy…I know we all had a ton of fun with it.

                          

There really wasn’t a good, free, entrepreneurship organization that was limited to founders.  To fill the gap, I founded Capital Entrepreneurs, an invite only meet up for founders of startups.  We meet up once per month at a bar in Madison, grab drinks and talk about our businesses, ideas and how we’re moving forward.

Here’s some Capital Entrepreneurs stats from the last year:

• Grew from 10 companies at the first meeting to over 65 now
• CE companies raised over $7.5m in funding
• CE companies were featured in The Washington Post, New York Times, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Lifehacker, BBC, Fox Business and tons of others
• There have been 15+ partnerships and services exchanged between CE member companies
• We’ve started the CE incubator that has six early stage companies sharing office space right off the Capital Square.  Entrustet and Hardin Design and Development are anchor tenants.
• Started the CE Angel List to help connect startups and investors in Madison
• Instrumental in creating Google Fiber effort in Madison

Best of all, it’s been something that we all look forward to each month.  It’s lonely starting a startup.  In the early stages, you might only see one other person (your cofounder) each day for months at a time.  Founders groups like CE help create a scene and allow you to commiserate with others in your situation.  You also get “coworkers” and if you’re lucky like we are in Madison, most of the startups will be located close together to facilitate lunches and happy hours.

The awesome thing is that it’s been really easy to get Capital Entrepreneurs started and it’s been incredibly successful, moreseo than I ever envisioned back in May 2009.  If your city doesn’t have a good founders group, I’m here to give you the steps to take to replicate the success that we’ve had with Capital Entrepreneurs.

Your startup group should have the following characteristics:

1. Exclusive to Founders – No attorneys, accountants, people searching for jobs, consultants etc.  These are all nice people, but do not belong in an entrepreneurship group.
2. Private Email List – People like to keep their emails private.  Use BCC to send out invites
3. Open to new members – You’ll never grow if you exclude startups
4. Free – Do not charge admission
5. Website – Create a website and post updates
6. 1-2 people should control it – If there’s more, it gets too complex
7. Sponsors – After you’ve been going for awhile, you’ll find that attorneys, accountants and others will want to be invited.  We started offering sponsorships where service providers can attend one meeting per year as long as they do not try to sell their services.

Step 1

Survey the existing startup groups in your city and try them all out.  There are 6-7 entrepreneur and young professional groups here in Madison.  All are valuable, but none provided exactly what we wanted to do with Capital Entrepreneurs

Step 2

Reach out to your network.  I emailed all of the founders that I had gotten to know, about 15 of them, and asked if they were interested in a meet up specifically for founders.  I got a good response and moved forward.

Step 3

Set up a wordpress site.  I bought the Capital Entrepreneurs domain name and installed wordpress.  I created a members page that includes everyone’s logos and a 2 sentence description of their business.  The home page is a feed of press that our member companies gets and we have a contact form so that new businesses, press and other can get in contact with us.  We later added a resources page that lists some service provider sponsors to advertise to our members, along with a list of helpful articles and resources that came from Entrepreneur 101.

Step 4

Find a location.  We’ve been fortunate that we’ve had a regular meeting location.  The great guys at Brocach let us have a private room upstairs, give us free appetizers and run us a tab for drinks.  I called 5-6 bars in town to find the one with the best deal and you can too.  Try to find a place that will not charge you fees.

Step 5

Pick dates and time that people will be able to come to.  We’ve picked Wednesdays or Thursdays from 7-9pm, as we are a somewhat younger crowd and most of the people walk to the events.  Pick a time that works for your members and your city.

Step 6

Send invitation.  Shoot emails to all of the people who’ve expressed interest and tell them that they should forward the email on to any other startup founders.  Make sure that everyone understands that it is for founders, not service providers like attorneys, accountants or for people searching for jobs.

Step 7

At the first meeting, make sure to introduce everyone so that everyone is comfortable.  Explain that this will be a monthly event and that it is for founders.  Keep it casual and then schedule the next monthly meeting at the end of the event.

Overall

Overall, you want to create a place where founders can come to meet up, exchange ideas, get to know each other, without the burden of talking with service providers are those handing out resumes.  Once you get a group together, make sure to keep emails private and set up a twitter handle and website where you can post updates about group members.

If you follow these steps, you’ll likely be able to replicate what we’ve done in Madison.  I think cities of just about any size can benefit from founders groups.  Even if the groups are small, they can be fun, easy ways to connect with your fellow entrepreneurs.  If you’d like help starting a founders group in your city, please feel free to contact me.

Are there good startup groups in your city?  Have you started one?  Would you go to one if there was one in your city?

                          

For those who do not know, SXSW stands for South By Southwest, which is a combination Technology, Film and Music festival held each year in Austin, Texas.  It is one of the biggest in the US, if not the world and brings some of the smartest and most interesting people together to listen to panels, network and go to parties.

I was lucky enough that my first time going to SXSW also included the added experience of launching Entrustet into beta, with Jesse giving a talk called “People Die, Profiles Don’t.” I met some great people and attended some really interesting sessions and will share my best of SXSW.  Check out our Entrustet blog for more info on what we did at SXSW.

Entrustet

We launched our beta version early in the morning on Friday March 12th, a day before our panel.  Everything’s been going really well and we’ve started to get some good traffic and user sign ups.  Our panel got some traction, especially online on Twitter.  Our stat that over 285k US Facebook users will die this year caused a stir and was used by our friends over at The Digital Beyond at their panel on the 16th.

More and more people are asking the question “what happens to my digital assets when I die?” and this attention is starting to reach a critical mass.  Everyone from Guy Kawasaki to the American Bar Association is starting to think about it.  Hugh Forrest, the founder of SXSW raised this question in an interview with NPR:

Yeah, we did one session on that last year and we create this virtual presence more and more with our new technologies. What happens to that presence when you pass away? Do you will that on to someone else to essentially keep on your virtual existence or how does that work? And there are lots or there are some services that help you with that process now.

Now, the other session you mentioned was My Right to Delete, which is, again, in this brave new world we live in, the things we say or do often get onto the Internet and it’s impossible to get rid of them. How do we move on, if and when we want to move on?

Gizmodo is dedicating an entire week to looking at what happens to your digital assets as people pass away, including an article called What Happens Online When We Die? and many other publications have been writing about this issue.  The Digital Beyond’s panel was well attended and Adele McAlear’s blog Death and Digital Legacy has been gaining strength.

I believe that 2010-2011 will be the year that consumers really start to think about what happens to their digital assets when they pass away.  What do you want done with your Facebook?  Your email?  How will you protect your family photos or all of your blog posts?

Panels

I went to some great panels this year.  My favorite one was about Seed Combinators and featured a who’s who of entrepreneurship forces.  The panel included Paul Graham, Naval Ravikant, Marc Nathan, David Cohen and Joshua Baer and they spoke about their efforts to create successful seed combinators across the country.  I think that Madison, WI has to potential to have a very successful seed combinator and am going to post about it in the next week or so.

Another great panel talked about Social Media in China.  In China, websites are not able to sustain themselves on “advertising” as a business model, so they have had to create innovative business models in order to survive.  I hadn’t realized how big TenCent is (1.5B in revenue, 40% profit margins) and all of it is based on virtual currency and virtual goods.  The Chinese version of Match.com charges $450 for 6 months, equivalent to 1 months salary for the average Chinese citizen.  Like match.com, the service matches you up with potential matches and you go on dates.  After the date, you call into their call center and rate how you thought the date went, what you liked and didn’t like about the other person and if you want to date them again.  The next day, the service calls you back and tells you what the other person thought of you.  It gives you the chance to improve your dating skills and cut through some of the awkwardness.

Another dating site allows you to create an avatar of yourself and go to a virtual “dance club” where you dance with potential partners.  You talk, exchange personal info and get to know each other.  The site makes money when the people buy drinks, gifts and other virtual goods for each other.  After awhile, if you like the other person, you can meet up in person.

Advertising has been a crutch in the American Internet space that is being removed as we speak.  I think you will start to see more innovative business models, like Mint.com and others come to the US in the near future.

I also attended Student Startups to hear about others experiences starting a business in college (nice job by the panel, including Ellen Chisa), The Third Coast, by the founders of Crowdspring and many others.  If I had to do it again, I would attend more core conversations, rather than panels, as there is more give and take and you have a better opportunity to interact with the speakers.

Food, Parties, Fun

I could write an entire post about each of these topics, but a short recap will have to do.  I had some amazing food in Austin, but the best came from a food cart called Texas Picnic.  I had one of the best pulled pork sandwiches I’ve ever had and their white BBQ sauce on their chicken was unlike anything I’ve ever tried.  I’m somewhat of a BBQ connoisseur, so that is high praise.  The Whole Foods we went to was the biggest I have ever seen, with a crazy amount of selection.  If I had unlimited money I’d shop and eat there all the time.

The parties were really fun, with the highlight being the Mashable party.  We had to wait in line for at least an hour, but we made the best of it, creating a new check in location on Gowalla that served as the unofficial Entrustet Launch party (8 people checked in).  We grabbed some beers from the liquor store across the way and made friends with the people around us and had a great time.  The Thrillist party on our last night had some great live music, although we missed the DJ.

I also met some great people who I hope to stay in contact with in the future.  One of the interesting people was Geoff Hamrick, a 19 year old entrepreneur from North Carolina.  Geoff and his partner George have a cool site called Group Story that lets you share photos and collaborate to create photo books.  They’ve got a really cool idea going.

Overall SXSW was a great experience.  I will definitely be back next year and hope to see many of the cool people I met this year again and hear about their successes in the year apart.  I learned a ton, including some lessons that will lead to direct improvements in Entrustet.  It was a week well spent.