Paper Chase
These are the first 100 questionnaires from the Cringely (NOT in silicon Valley) Startup Tour. Yes, I printed them out and stapled them together. Sometimes a man just has to do such things, even in the Internet Age. It helps me to get a visceral sense of an editing job that lies ahead. Throwing piles of paper around and feeling their heft brings a much greater sense of reality to this job. These first 100 total somewhere between 900 and 1000 pages and there are close to 200 questionnaires still to go!
The purpose of this post is to encourage those nominated companies that have not yet sent me their questionnaires to do so as soon as they can. I still have days of reading ahead of me but there will eventually be a cut-off.
As always I am bob@cringely.com.
There are many great companies I have yet to hear from. So if you have a friend whose company was nominated, bug him or her about getting their questionnaire in. It really matters.
These first 100 questionnaires ranged from 6-24 pages in length with most around eight or nine.
One questionnaire was reformatted in landscape mode. You know who you are. What the heck was with that?
The first 100 show an interesting geographic distribution (below). I was mildly surprised to see nothing from the Dakotas. But nothing from Utah? Idaho? New Mexico?
If Texas appears sparse it is because of the scale: there are 10 nominated companies in Austin, alone, so they look at this scale like a single pin.
So is this map an artifact of the earliest responders (these were the first 100 questionnaires to be submitted) or does this represent fairly the current distribution of business innovation in the USA?
Bob,
You have a massive evaluation and summarization job ahead of you. Do you have any guidelines and scoring sheets to help in this endeavor?
It’s more subjective than that. These are all good companies but we have to pare them down somehow. So it comes down to selecting a mixture of broad and narrow markets and leaning in the direction of interesting people. If there is a trend I am seeing it is companies too narrowly focused and — as a result — missing (it seems to me) the heart of their own market. And maybe it’s the Great Recession, but these companies are much more modest in their ambitions than I would be in some of their positions. But to get back to the heart of your question, I have seven people who are helping me decide, so there are some checks and balances. And there’s always next season, too. I intend to be doing this for at least the next five years or until the RV is paid-off.
Interesting observation that
“If there is a trend I am seeing it is companies too narrowly focused and — as a result — missing (it seems to me) the heart of their own market.”
Maybe this is something you should look into in the series, it might partially explain why so many start up’s fail rather than the usual excuses. Maybe your friends at the Kauffman Foundation may be able to shed some light on this?
Anyway will be looking forward to your tour, and I hope it’s shown outside the US as startups everywhere have a lot in common when it comes to personallity and marketing. These are the places where I suspect it often goes wrong (or right) but I’ll supsend judgement unitl after you’ve taken the camper for a spin. Just a good idea is never enough! I saw this after being layed off here in Australia from a startup that got eaten due to the GFC.
I agree with Neilio, it would be intriguing to see you tour a company with great potential and moderate achievement and sit down with them around their used conference table and have a, “why the heck aren’t you guys kicking ass and taking names?” kind of conversation. Perhaps one of your VC (I trust you’re bringing the good kind) Panzas would be able to help them develop a winning strategy. Leave a cameraman behind and use some of the reality show spin-off royalty to help pay for the RV (or at least gas if you’re on PBS).
I’m sure this has been asked before, but it is only down to USA companies, eh?
Where is Edmonton on the map?
No Canadians this time. NEXT season.
Bah, come on Bob, tell him the truth. Edmonton isn’t even on the map
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- Ben (in Vancouver – hey look, there we are!
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What the hell are these comments that keep popping up, and why should I care?
They’re like spamers. Just trying to get links to their page all over the internet so they will be more likely to rise to a higher place in searches. Fortunately they’re short and designated by the “[...]” so your eyes can be trained to ignore them. With more moderation they could be filtered out, although I wish the deletion could be automated.
It is still very hard to come up with the next magic wealth anything. We should spend more design time on how to manage the little bit of money that does come in. How the company proposes to do that is the winning design.
I have forwarded your site to my friends who has nominated companies, and bookmarked your site. its really very good.
I think your map roughly shows the distribution of people across the USA, with maybe a little overemphasis on California. This would mean there is no real hotspot for innovation, which goes against common wisdom.
+1. I clicked through the RSS to make this exact point.
The Texas figures serve as a counterpoint to that argument. Austin has less than 5% of the state’s population – it’s smaller than Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth and San Antonio. But it has something like 90% of the state’s submissions.
I’m extremely curious about a couple of pins on the map in my neck of the woods, or back-woods. I wonder if there’s a way to figure out location based on the startup nomination lists?
I’ll be going through them I guess.
[...] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Paper Chase – Cringely on technology [...]
Great contest! I think everyone focuses too much on the tech startup activity in Silicon Valley (probably for good reason too), but we shouldn’t have to move to CA to start a tech business! Question, is there a list of the companies from the map? Or is that staying secret until the contest is over?
Sometime back I was asked to confirm the email which a questionnaire could be sent to, but have not yet received one. Upon checking my Junk mail, I don’t see it received one either. Any suggestions?
Send me your address and I will make sure you get a questionnaire.
ma@cringely.com
Thanks for the reply, Just receive your questionnaire.
Any update on the contest and who is in the final group?
cheap VPS
Really ? VPS ?