Time is a startup’s greatest resource. Don’t fucking waste it!

Today’s startups take a lot of energy to create and build. Whether it’s spending time working on your market fit, tweaking your pitch deck, or just generally building your product or service. There is a lot of up front time that is needed to put all the pieces in place to give yourself the best chance for success. At the early stage of a business, time is your most precious commodity. It’s one you have the most of, but one you don’t want to waste. So when someone is putting their time to something outside of their business it should be treated with respect. This brings me to the main reason I’m writing this post.

Most events around the startup community do a pretty good job to ensure they are not wasting anyone’s time. These events are usually around something like a pitch competition, hackathon, or just a general event catered to helping startups grow. There are no shortage of these events since there have been more and more businesses being created in recent years as people chase their dreams of a Facebook sized success.

However, what happens when you have found yourself in the middle of an event you have discovered has completely wasted your time? You could easily feel frustrated and disconnected. It’s a very real problem and one that seems to be happening more. We recently got involved in one of these events. I won’t call out what event it was, but I’m sure people close to me will be able to figure it out pretty quickly.

We spent hours and days honing our pitchdeck for a local competition. We got feedback from a number of resources that included CEOs and other tech industry folks that we respected to ensure the message we put together was completely rock solid. Our pitch deck went through many different iterations. This included everything from the color of the deck to a lot of the content. We spent a lot of time practicing and ensuring we had solid delivery. We were sure we put together a great story.

The day of the pitch had finally arrived. We were the first to pitch that day and felt pretty confident we did everything we could to put our best face forward. I got up to the podium and began the nerve racking process of stumbling through our presentation. A slip up here, an “um” there, and after a few more “uh’s” I finally found my rhythm. By the end of the presentation I felt like I had just blacked out right out of that scene in “Old School” where Will Ferrell’s character answered the complex question about economics, but had no clue what he had just done. I had finally come to and we were done.

Throughout the day I watched as company after company did their best song and dance. Some were really well rehearsed, some not so much. However, each one provided the same contribution, their time.

At the end of the day we were all sitting in a room anxiously awaiting word about which 5 companies would be selected to repeat their pitches on the main stage for a chance at an undisclosed amount of cash, some time with a VC, and some other prizes that had nothing to do with building your company.

No, we weren’t selected. But honestly we knew we needed to work on our pitch so we looked at this event as a great way to do that. And it worked. After all of the time we spent putting together (what we thought was) the best presentation, this gave us another opportunity to talk to people outside of our company about the enormous problem we’re working to solve. If nothing else, it was a lot of fun and great to get to know what other companies were doing.

The next day we emailed the organizers. We wanted to get feedback from the Judges. We all felt it was super valuable to get an outsider’s perspective on the problem we’re working on and what they thought about it all.

The response we got? “We don’t have that.”

After looking around to see if I was being punk’d, I let my Co-Founder know that we just spent all of this time working on a deck that we had no outside feedback for.

Now, I don’t begrudge the event organizers. I know what it takes to put together events. It’s not an easy task. This particular event was the first one so we sort of expected that there would be some bugs that needed to be worked out. However, we kind of figured that a pitch competition had some fundamental elements that included getting anonymous feedback about the pitch to the Founders.

This goes back to the title of this post. If you run an event or interact with startups in any way, you should understand that time is a precious resource you should not be wasting.

And to be fair, this is not isolated to just events. There are certain programs that entities put together that don’t take as much time, but are still equally draining when it comes to investing time and resources. The balance has to be to find the event or program that best fits the objective you have for your company.

Events are a very important part of being a new company. You want people to know about who you are and what you do so finding the right event is key. Thinking about what you hope to get out of the event or program and communicating that back to the organizers is important. Ask lots of questions! This is where we failed. We should have been more diligent in understanding what to expect after the event.

Overall, you’re going to find things that waste your time. It’s inevitable and unavoidable. The objective should be to work with your Founders and Advisors to put together a gameplan to understand what kind of events make sense for your company. Chances are you’re going to know this and it may be overkill to have an added conversation with your Founders, but look for events that do two things, 1) build brand awareness and 2) help in some way to move the needle.

If you are reading this and you put together events, work to find ways to provide real value to the startup community.

• Don’t be a one way mouth piece just because you think you put something together you believe has inherent value.
• Be explicit.
• Ask questions before and after the event.
• Don’t assume.
• Ask how you can help
• If your event is sponsored, don’t try to profit on the backs of the companies that worked so hard and spent time to be at your event. If you need to pay yourself, roll that into your budget when you’re looking for sponsorship. An Entrepreneur shouldn’t have to make a decision about what they should pay for this month; your event or something for their business.
• Be humble. Unless you’ve gone through the process of building your own business you have no idea what they go through. Acknowledge that at every opportunity.

At the end of the day everyone wants to see success. The startup community is a very big one. Everyone is going through some sort of struggle and time is their greatest asset. Let’s not waste each other’s time. Deal?