Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Driving around America for nine weeks and more than 10,000 miles, I’ve had a chance to see how our economy does and doesn’t work. The startups I visited were all good companies — reader favorites, after all — so they tended to shine. And their glow was generally green and even a bit altruistic, yet still based in for-profit philosophy. These are the kind of companies that create industries, build or renew cities and industrial centers — companies that create jobs in the kind of abundance needed to keep our nation prosperous. Yet in terms of government policy, it is as if they are unknown. The Obama Administration just successfully passed important small business legislation, for example, that has no value at all for tech startups. This probably shouldn’t surprise us: former President George W. Bush was clueless about this stuff, too.

The good news is that none of this really matters a lot: tech startups will continue to happen in great numbers no matter what Congress and the White House do. The bad news is neither institution would know a tech startup if they saw it and there probably are ways that government could help but won’t.

The new small business legislation intended to support startups is based entirely on debt — getting banks to lend money to small companies. But the only kind of debt that most tech startups know is credit card debt. Little tech companies grow by selling equity, not borrowing money. Short-term debt goes on plastic at 18 or 23 percent because no bank has — or will — lend to real tech startups in any significant amount.

They’ll finance new Burger King franchises, but lend money for electric cars or new kinds of data storage or — shudder — software? Forget about it.

Presidents Obama and Bush didn’t know this, Fed chairman Bernanke doesn’t know it, nor does Treasury secretary Geithner. None of these men have a minute’s experience with tech startups, yet our economy is almost entirely dependent on those startups for real recovery.

So since these distinguished bozos don’t know what to do, I’ll just throw out a couple ideas I came up with this summer on those long drives from town-to-town with the kids and Mary Alyce asleep in the back of the RV.

While equity is fine, debt is better: banks should lend to tech startups. They don’t because they can’t tell a good one from a bad one. They should because doing so would be good for both the economy and America. The way to do so is by lending not to individual companies but to baskets of companies. If banks don’t have the confidence to create such baskets themselves, heck, I’ll do it. I’ve visited enough startups to tell with a 85 percent certainty whether they have what it takes to succeed.

But even lending to a basket of companies that has a near-100 percent chance of delivering 3-5X on each loaned dollar, the banks still won’t do it because they are cowards lacking any — any — moral fiber whatsoever. They won’t do the right thing even if I make it low- or no-risk, because they don’t know what a right thing looks like anymore.

This is where there becomes a true role for government — to require that banks lend to those baskets of tech startups I put together. Make lending to tech startups a condition for even having a banking license.

While this make seem a wild-ass idea, isn’t that the essential nature of licensing? IF you want this privilege THEN you assume this obligation.  And with tech startups representing only $20 billion in a $20 trillion economy, what’s the big deal?  That’s the very chump change that can lead us out of recession and deflation and back toward world leadership.

Still they won’t do it.

Why?  Because it’s too simple, yet not at all simplistic. But even more so because larger companies and institutions will lobby against it without even knowing why they do so.

So given that these no-brainer solutions are going to inevitably be ignored in favor of slap-dash programs that will benefit only special interest groups and not America with a capital A, I’ll throw out one last idea that just might make the cut, because it relies entirely on greed and self-interest to succeed. Those are two commodities we appear to have in limitless amounts.

We have here a syllogism, so stick with me:

1 — Since the Reagan era and the Laffer Curve we’ve time and again relied on tax cuts for the rich to stimulate our economy, the idea being that the money saved from taxation would trickle down to the rest of the population selling Big Macs and handing out shopping carts at WalMart.

2 — Alas, Laffer was wrong, in large part because rich people save most of their money, they don’t spend it, and spending is what expands (or in this case re-expands) economies.  Hence the liberal idea of tax cuts just for poorer people who will actually spend their tax savings buying Big Macs and stuff at WalMart.

3 — Yet rich interests always win in these things because they are smarter about buying influence.  This is a simple reality that is unlikely to change, so forget about the poor people.  But cutting taxes for everyone is grossly inefficient as economic stimulus compared to cutting taxes for the non-rich.

4 — Rich interests have also shown an amazing willingness to do the most arcane and complex things to avoid paying taxes.  Remember the tax shelters of the 1980s?  Sheesh!

5 — Here’s the boffo payoff: the logical solution to restarting the economy, then, isn’t any of those crazy ideas like flat taxes or taxes on consumption.  What will actually work is a short-term tax (or tax credit — they are the same thing if you squint) on savings.  Forget about accelerated depreciation — make all non-reimbursed expenses of any kind 100 percent deductible in the current tax year.

It’s ass-backward, I know, but it would work.  Give rich people a short term incentive to spend like poor people, then phase it out over time.

If we are metaphorically in the same position as FDR in 1938, this wacky policy would please the right while giving a financial boost equivalent to World War II but without the war.

Recession over.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Shortly after our Startup Tour began this summer, Heath Ledger died. No, not Heath Ledger the actor, who died a couple years ago of an accidental drug overdose — Heath Ledger, my four year-old Garmin NUVI GPS who spoke with an Australian accent. My Heath had been going quietly insane for some time. This is his story.

It seemed like nothing serious at first — a forgotten route, a missed turn, some confusion about where home was. Heath was still Heath but maybe a step slower than in his youth. Then he started routing us gratuitously, sending us to places we didn’t want to go. After that came the endless loops, which with a driver like me sometimes aren’t noticed until the third lap. Heath, in advanced age, was experiencing dementia. It’s not supposed to work that way (this is digital of course — perfect) but it was.

Drive across America visiting little companies in little cities and your GPS becomes you best friend. Only this best friend had forgotten my name.

Time for a new Heath.

Bought on sale for $134 at Best Buy somewhere in Illinois, my new Heath is a NUVI 255 with a bigger screen, faster processor, and overall badder attitude than the Heath he replaced. After 10,000 miles and almost 200 hours of driving together, I know this new Heath very well. And I don’t always trust him.

It’s like playing a video game so many times to where you come to understand the flow of the game and how it functions on a level maybe even the programmers didn’t consciously know or intend. That’s how I understand this new Heath, my driving partner and sometime enemy. He doesn’t lose his mind like the Heath he replaced, but he doesn’t always like me, either.

Indulge me while I explain my understanding of Heath’s routing algorithm.

To my new Heath, faster means faster and shorter means shorter no matter how stupid the route turns out to be in human terms. So if you tell Heath you want the shortest route and there are many possible choices but one is 40 feet shorter than the others despite having 60 percent more turns and stops, Heath will save the 40 feet. Same for faster, even if faster requires cutting a corner by taking a one-lane dirt road in your 34-foot RV. The speed limit in his database says 65, after all, even if you can only go 30.

Heath has done both of these things to me.

One of the joys of GPS, of course, is its nonjudgemental nature. Heath rolls with the punches no matter how many bonehead turns I make. But even in his compensation for my mistakes he mocks me, pulling a fast one by, essentially, maintaining two sets of rules.  His jabs are subtle.

You see Heath has two routing modes that I don’t know what they call in Kansas where Garmins come from, but I call the two modes smart ass and dumb ass.

Smart ass mode is invoked whenever I make a wrong turn. “Recalculating… As soon as possible turn around and go back,” says Heath. Or he’ll say, “Recalculating,,, As soon as possible make a U-turn.” In smart ass mode, you see, Heath questions my judgement, undermining me in front of my children.

But Heath never second-guesses himself, because if he isn’t recalculating Heath never looks back. He doesn’t even appear to know there is a road behind him.  In this mode Heath is like an Italian Formula One driver who throws away his rearview mirror because what‘s behind him doesn’t matter. That’s dumb ass mode where Heath could backtrack half a mile saving half an hour but won’t ever do that. I first realized this in some small town when I got off the freeway for gas and — rather than put me right back on the highway a hundred yards from the pump — Heath guided me slowly through town before putting me back on the very same highway.

As the expression goes, familiarity breeds contempt. Ask Heath for a handful of distances, like how far it is to the nearest Mexican restaurant, and he’ll instantly spit out half a dozen places within a few miles. Not so fast: those distances are as the sombrero flies — un-routed. That 5.7 miles to Dos Perros in Durham, North Carolina could in fact be 10 miles or even 20. All you can know for sure is that it isn’t 5.7. Not even close.

GPS helps us eventually find places while, at the same time, putting us in our places. It’s a love-hate relationship, at least for me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

So the phone rings at a big publishing company in New York. “How long is a book? ” asks the caller.

“Well it varies from book to book and genre to genre,” explained the publishing company receptionist.

“This is a novel. How long is a novel?” the caller asked.

“That varies, too, but many of ours are around 80,000 words,” the receptionist said.

“Thank God, I’m finally finished!” said the caller.

By the same token, how much money does it take to start a technology business? I’ve just spent the summer with more than 30 startups and can tell you the amount varies greatly — more than you could even imagine.

In the simplest sense how much money it takes to start a technology business depends mainly on how much money you have, because it generally takes it all. But all can vary a lot.

The most money raised by any of the Startup Tour companies we visited this summer was $70 million. The least was $5. There were plenty in the $1+ million range but I’d guess the median was around $40,000.

There are plenty of companies that claimed to have not raised any money at all, but that’s not true. The founders of those companies generally went without pay for six months or more, so their companies were self-funded with significant dollars. That makes the $5 company all the more amazing, because it really did start with just $5 — for business cards at Kinkos — and was profitable before the end of its first day in business.

Remember these are companies outside Silicon Valley. Most of the companies we visited this summer had never even met a venture capitalist. Most were funded by family and friends. A surprising number relied on government funding, primarily in the form of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.

If there’s a role for government in encouraging tech startups, SBIR defines that role. For those unfamiliar with the SBIR program, federal agencies that spend more than $500 million per year on outside research are required to set aside a small percentage (I think it is two percent) of that money for research contracts with small businesses. The two-phase contracts are for $100,000 and $600,000 to develop technologies of interest to the government. But while the government gets use of the technology, they don’t get to own it or even have equity in the developing company, so from an entrepreneurial standpoint this is ideal.

From what I have seen, the SBIR program is modest, yet extremely successful at encouraging innovation. Perhaps it should be expanded.

Yet that’s about as far as federal success in this area goes. None of the startups had done business, for example, with the Small Business Administration or with SBA lenders. For technology at least, this more traditional program is a non-starter, probably because it is hard to explain to a bank the value of software.

A lot of what we looked at was software, but home equity loans also funded a robotics company and a solar company and probably other companies we didn’t even realize were built on housing bubble money.

The point is that it doesn’t take a lot of money — certainly not Silicon Valley-type money — to start a very fine company. The trick is to either do-it-yourself or do-it-offshore, with the offshore model oddly in decline, probably since there are so many out-of-work engineers in the USA.

One of the more surprising conclusions of the summer is that many of our companies saved so much time by not looking for money that they ended-up not needing the money they might have raised.

Let me explain this last point in more depth. If you spend three months writing business plans and visiting VCs before you have a prototype, then you are three months late (and $X behind) before the first line of code is written or first piece of metal cut. Yet you had to eat during those same three months. Better to go for 90 days on savings or on a 30-second pitch to your rich uncle than to waste three months looking for VC money.

Get a good prototype and the money may come looking for you.

And certainly six months is enough time to know if your idea is going to work or not. So six months of income is the most you should expect to raise or spend from savings.

I don’t care if you are inventing a frigging immortality drug, the same funding rules apply, at least outside Sand Hill Road.

We visited a very promising pharma startup, for example, that had so far spent only $30,000. Yes, a lot more money would be shortly needed for large animal and human trials, but the preliminary work was done, their basic IP was protected, and no equity was burned in the process.

It’s painful for them now, but in the end each of these companies will be glad they were so careful with their spending.

Not that they all were so careful. Home equity money circa 2006 was so abundant many of our founders made stupid mistakes. But to make our list they also recovered from those mistakes. And when you look at the dollars that actually bought the right stuff, they generally came down to that same $30-40K.

So how much money does it take to start a technology company? Less than you think. Maybe even less than you have.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Cringely (Not in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour is less than two weeks from being over yet where is all the video? It’s coming, I promise.

We have so far visited companies in New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and are now in Texas. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina are yet to come. We’ve driven 8,700 miles with about 2,000 to go.

That’s a lot of driving. And there’s the problem. It is hard to shoot video all day and evening, write a blog, be a husband and dad, drive an average of 300 miles per day and do a fair job of editing video segments for the web. Something had to give. And that something has clearly been the video.

Fortunately, I don’t think it will matter much in the end. We’re starting to hack away at the more than two terabytes of video shot so far and will begin posting segments shortly. Once they start they’ll continue through the rest of the year because I’ll be editing, not driving.

This whole project began last summer when we had such a good time driving our RV across the country that my young and lovely wife said, “Let’s find a way to do this again next year but this time get paid for it.” And so we did. But the difference between last year and this is not just the money, it’s the work we’ve had to do to earn the money. TV no longer holds any glamor for my kids.  This has been no vacation.

But it has been an eye-opening experience. I’ve worked on-and-off in tech startups all my adult life, but that didn’t prepare me for an intimate look inside dozens of startups. The role of these companies in our economy and culture has been way underestimated. The general media have little sense that these companies even exist and the tech media, for the most part, doesn’t understand the details. This project is something that has never been done before and may go a long way toward helping America rediscover one of its own greatest strengths. I hope to be doing Startup Tours for many summers to come.

Just don’t ask me to drive.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The machine pictured here is a Sony XDCAM EX, a 1080p tapeless HD camcorder.  It is a so-called “prosumer” model that lists for $7800.  I bought a pair of these cameras (new in the box) at the beginning of July to use for shooting this summer’s Startup Tour.  Many video professionals think these are the best HD camcorders you can buy for under $20,000.  The video is stunning — clearly network-quality or, indeed, feature film-quality.

If only they both worked.

The cameras came from  Abel Cinetech in New York City and we paid about $14,000 for the pair. The cameras worked fine for a few weeks until one froze-up in Boulder, CO.  We couldn’t get the camera to boot.  We sent it in for repair and Sony checked it into their system on 8/4. I spoke to one of their reps a few days later and was told they were waiting for parts but the camera would probably be repaired by the end of the next week.

I called that Friday and was told the parts were in and the camera was being repaired — and that I should call again in a few days. So I called back Tuesday, then Wednesday when we were in Portland and was told essentially the same thing again — they were working on it and it would be a few more days.

I called again this past Monday and was told that they needed more parts from Israel which they were expecting sometime around September 16th. The guy I spoke to was very direct and said that considering the last time they ordered parts they came in a few days late, as well as factoring in repair time — I was looking at it being ready a few days after the 16th.

At this point I started asking for a replacement, explaining that this was a new camera and that we had already spent so much on rentals (this camera rents for $100 per day).  My priority was getting it back ASAP, which  could be achieved by having it replaced. The guy suggested I speak to a manager and it might be possible to get a replacement.

I spoke to a manager named Sylvia on Tuesday of last week who said that they don’t have loaner cameras in the service department, but that it might be able to arrange something with another department. Silvia said she’d talk to the engineers and get back with me later that day. I haven’t heard from her since… In fact, I asked for her direct number at the end of the call and she declined, saying that she was going to send me an email with all of her contact info…. That never arrived either.

I suspect Sylvia isn’t a manager at all, but rather some support rep they put on the phone to appease me.

So I contacted my salesman at Abel as well as the sales manager. They both have been working with Sony, but all I have so far from them is a promise made to them by Sony that the shipping of the part to the service facility would be ‘expedited.’ They are still working on the situation, however and I’m told they will get back to me.

Although this is a warranty repair and thus free, I asked if I could perhaps, for a fee, have the repair expedited. All they could offer was that warranty repairs were given priority anyway, and that if I included a note with the camera requesting expedited repair perhaps they would do so if they had time. I included such a letter detailing how important the camera was to the production and requesting expedited repair.

At no point did Sony contact me about the status of the repair, even when it was delayed. Also, at no point did anyone at Sony offer an apology, even when I expressed to several people just how displeased I was.

These are great cameras when they work, but when they don’t work they are simply $7,800 bricks.  Sony clearly doesn’t care about its prosumer customers.  Interestingly you can get customer support on the weekend for Sony’s cheapest consumer camcorder but not for this baby.

Tell a friend.  Tell them that Sony makes fine prosumer camcorders but doesn’t support them worth a damn.  Tell them that Sylvia is a liar.  Tell them to expect to pay $3000 to rent a $7000 replacement camera if they need a repair.

And tell them to do what I probably should have done in the first place, which was stick with Panasonic. 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A maverick is an un-branded range cow or steer. It is also the name used for sports teams at Minnesota State University — Mankato. That’s where the Cringely Startup Tour stopped recently to visit Maverick Software Consulting and find out where’s the beef. This Maverick (the consulting company) has come up with an amazing business model for software consulting services — one that employs American programmers yet meets or beats the cost of using programmers in India or China. But it is much more than just a price-competitive service: Maverick Software Consulting also gives prospective technical employers a newer and better way to directly recruit good programmers.

Maverick was founded by Martin Hebig and Chuck Sherwood, both former Mankato students. As computer science students in the 1990s, both men worked part time for a partnership between IBM and the University. Mankato provided office space on campus and hired students to work for IBM testing the then-new OS/400 operating system. The students gained real work experience while IBM got its testing done for less money.

It was a good program that ran for several years, but then the faculty sponsor retired and with him went those IBM jobs.

“I always thought it was a great idea, ” Hebig recalled during our visit. “I wanted to figure out a way to get something like that rolling again. I had been seeing more and more companies sending work offshore when the idea came to me: why couldn’t we set up an office close to the University, hire students, train them and have the students do the same work that was being sent offshore? We could price the work about the same or a little cheaper, students would be in the same time zone and the company could hire the students when they graduate.

“I contacted one of my clients I had worked with as an independent consultant and they liked the idea. We worked out the details and opened our first office at Minnesota State University – Mankato. Four years later Maverick has a total of four offices (the other are the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin – Madison, and Iowa State University) and 74 student employees.”

This isn’t rocket science. The students are testing software, recording bugs, and doing middleware development mainly for a single client — Thomson Reuters. Reuters, in turn, has gone on to hire as full time employees more than 90 percent of the Maverick student consultants as they graduate.

Each consultant works approximately 20 hours per week during the academic year and 40 hours per week in the summer making $10-13 per hour. That amounts to an average 3000-hour tryout over two years for the would-be Reuters programmers. No wonder the company hires so many of them, because with that much exposure Reuters truly knows what it is getting.

Maverick isn’t hugely profitable but it is profitable… and has been since its first week of operation. Required capital has been minimal. Turnover is minimal, too, because these are often the best-paying student jobs on campus.

It’s a model Maverick hopes it can bootstrap across the nation, eventually having an office at every school with 150 or more CS majors, generating with a single manager nearly $1 million in annual revenue per office.

That‘s several hundred potential offices and a lot of pizza.

So how do you protect this great lifestyle business? With yet another refreshing business idea — honesty.

“We understand that any company could try and do what we are doing, ” Hebig continued. “Because of this we have transparent finances with our clients. They know everything about our business (cost for office space, cost for T1 lines, cost for students and the margins that we make, etc.) We show them that we aren’t making a ton of money doing this and that it would be difficult to do it much cheaper. Plus, we bring our experience, training and automated process that makes us very efficient at what we do. ”

While Maverick looks only marginally profitable on paper, the business has no debt, is completely bootstrapped, is keeping dozens — eventually hundreds — of jobs in America. And if they can scale the business the way they think they can there’s nothing that says the founders won’t soon be paying themselves a bootload of money while remaining mavericks — unbranded.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Update — Those who want to meet the Cringelys can come to Graphic.ly, an electronic Comic Book startup, at 1601 Pearl Street, Suite 200, Boulder, CO.  This is at 4PM on Saturday. If you can. please bring a small unwrapped toy for my kids to distribute at local hospitals and shelters.

And yes, I DID have the RV checked-out and serviced before we left Charleston.  Stuff happens.

Bob

That’s the catalytic converter from my RV.  It literally fell off when I hit a puddle during a rainstorm last week in St. Louis.  It dragged for a quarter mile or so before I got a clue there was something wrong.  When I took this picture I’d already found a piece of string and tied the cat to the door handle.  There was no similar piece of string for the tailpipe hanging out the other side of the bus.  It dragged the last mile to the RV park.

When anything goes wrong at an RV park, men instantly appear.  You never know their names, they just start to help.  It’s some Americana throwback that rubes like me find very useful.  In this case the samaritan wanted to go further than I did, though.

“Looks pretty bad,” he said. “Want to cut it off?”

“Cut it off?  How?”

“I’ve got tools.  Let me fire up my grinder and we’ll have that off in a jiff.”

I declined.

Later, when another camper came out to complain about my attempt to asphyxiate his kids with my generator exhaust, he said, “I know you.”

Remember my picture is on the side of the bus about 10 times life size.

“You’re from Plane Crazy.”

I sure didn’t see that one coming.

But if you live in or near Boulder, Colorado, know that the Cringely’s are coming and we’ll be around this weekend.

If someone can suggest a place to meet on Saturday afternoon we’ll do just that.  Remember to bring a toy for my kids to give away (not keep) and Mrs. Cringely will allow you to admire her muffins.

Can anybody suggest a good location?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Anarchist Leader, Age 4

As we cross America on our Startup Tour there are any number of assumptions I’ve made about both new companies and child behavior that are being challenged. My kids are clearly anarchists and determined to topple me from power for one. As for the companies, I’m amazed over and over again how little money it can take to start a good business and how many founders find themselves running companies almost despite themselves. A good example of both lessons is Front Porch Forum (FPF) from Burlington, Vermont.

Here is part of my interview with FPF CEO Michael Wood-Lewis. I’ll be back to say more when he’s finished talking:

“My wife and I moved to Burlington, VT from the big city in the late 1990s looking for a small city with a great sense of community. We landed in a neighborhood known for just that kind of thing. But in 2000, after a couple years, we still had yet to connect with the neighbors.

“One evening at dinner, we wondered “whatever happened to neighbors welcoming new folks with a plate of fresh-baked cookies?” Two years and still no cookies!

“My wife is a public school teacher and take‐charge kind of gal, so she baked cookies and took them over to several neighbors, and, at my genius suggestion, she used china plates instead of paper so when they returned the plates, we could interact again (maybe they’d even bring over more cookies!). Well… we never saw the plates again. Not entirely true… we found one at a yard sale the next summer. At 25 cents it was a bargain.

“Now these neighbors were not -­ are not -­ bad folks. It’s just that everyone was so busy and cultural expectations have shifted in this generation. We were just strangers who lived next door. There’s no social contract there.

“So, our second attempt was to create an online forum for the neighborhood.

“We used fairly primitive tools to build it, and made fliers and dropped them in 400 front doors. In short order, 25, 50, 75 households signed up and people started using it. Over time, it became obvious that we had something worth sharing. And at the same time, 2006, I was leaving my job, so Valerie and I decided to launch Front Porch Forum, offering an enhanced version of what we had been doing in our one neighborhood, but now across 100+ neighborhoods in our region.

“Today, Front Porch Forum (FPF) serves 25 northwest Vermont towns and 18,000 households subscribe, including 45 percent of the state’s largest city. People use it for the simplest things, e.g., finding lost cats, borrowing ladders, recommending plumbers, reporting car break‐ins, organizing block parties, debating local politics, etc. But it’s all done with clearly identified nearby neighbors, so it has a magical effect of turning familiar strangers into real neighbors over time and gets people more engaged in local goings on. More than 90 percent report becoming more involved civically since signing up with FPF!”

Wow, what a story! (This is Bob again.) Here we have a 10 year-old startup that was six years old before the founders even began to think of it as a startup. It has taken almost no money, has really primitive technology (text-only e-mail with three ads at the top of every issue), yet has greater market penetration than the local daily newspaper whose owners like to think their media property is worth millions, right?

Front Porch Forum isn’t another Craigslist for two vital reasons: 1) each edition covers just a single neighborhood averaging 300 homes, and; unlike Craigslist, FPF forbids anonymity.  You are responsible for your words.

If only more Internet communication was that way.

There is a lot that could be improved about Front Porch Forum and I’m sure it will be, but the company’s strength has been its simplicity. No VC would wait six years to decided whether his investment was even an investment, yet — and here’s the clear lesson — that’s what it takes sometimes.

The tortoise doesn’t always win but he always finishes.

We’re well into our Startup Tour, visiting young companies so far in New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri.  Today we head to Kansas City and the Kauffman Foundation, one of our sponsors. That I’ve been slow to post the promised tour videos or write about these companies comes down to air conditioning failure, driving 4,000 miles, air conditioning failure (again), swiping a tree and tearing-off our retractable steps, air conditioning failure (yet again), and hitting a pothole so deep that our exhaust system literally fell off in the road.

Ah, the RV lifestyle!

We also learned a great truth about Travelocity when booking hotel rooms for the camera crew: did you know that when they take your money and promise you three rooms for two nights in St. Louis that promise means nothing? Sometimes those rooms turn out not to exist and the only recourse to being homeless in the rain at 11:30 PM is getting your money back in 12 business days.

But the startup companies we’ve visited so far has each been a joy and a surprise in a different way. I’ll start writing about those tonight as we finally get to rest for a couple days in Kansas City.

Or if you can’t wait for that and happen to be from Kansas City, drop by the Kauffman Foundation this afternoon at 3PM and meet us all for ice cream in the parking lot. And if you think to, please bring an unwrapped toy that my kids can take to local hospitals and homeless shelters. That’s their startup venture this summer.

See you at 3PM.

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation‎
4801 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO 64110
(816) 932-1000
kauffman.org‎

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Just a week into nominations for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour we have 200 companies signed up to vie for the 24 positions. My hope to reach 600 in eight weeks, then, is very possible if I keep up the pressure and perhaps define the rules a little better. That’s what this column is for.

Non-U. S. companies are out. We’ve had a few Canadian companies enquire and one even claimed to be from Vancouver, WA instead of Vancouver, BC. No, that won’t do. This is a U. S. competition, but that doesn’t mean the next season won’t be international. In fact I can almost guarantee it will be.

Remember this is for TV as well as for the web so I might use a Canadian company or two as examples of how things are different for startups than in the U. S. but the 24 finalists will all be companies whose intergalactic headquarters are in the U. S.

While foreign startups are out of the running this time, companies based in Silicon Valley and other tech hotbeds definite are not disqualified.  I know this seems to go against the spirit of the competition, but I want the best startups I can find and if a few of those are San Jose or Boston that’s okay. My kids have never been to Boston.

Next, I’m sorry you don’t like the web site, but pouting doesn’t help, either, and it’s simply not attractive. We’re making changes to improve the site daily so let’s concentrate more on the potential of this competition and less on your personal disdain for certain kinds of javascript.

No multiple submissions! Before you nominate a company look to see if it is already there. And submitting in multiple categories won’t help, either, so stop it.

Now about those categories, I came up with the original six but there have been suggestions that maybe I’m being too strict, that perhaps there should be an education category and possibly one for finance. I am open to these changes, but only if there is real demand, so speak up in the comments section for this post.

Finally, there are some companies that want to nominate themselves but they are still in stealth mode and feel they dare not. Here’s what I suggest for you guys. if you believe your company is something really special and if you are fairly confident that you will be out of stealth mode six months from now (next September-October when the TV series starts to air) then contact me directly at bob@cringely.com and maybe we can still do something together.

I am willing to sign NDAs and will keep your grubby secrets until next fall. But you have to understand that each company I visit costs me about $20,000, so if you are going to change your mind about publicity next fall then let’s just forget it.

There’s always another startup.