Richard Wolpert(Amplify.LA) @ Bruin Entrepreneurs’ Hack Night — 10/28
Last Tuesday at Bruin Entrepreneurs’ Hack Night we invited Richard Wolpert – entrepreneur, investor and adviser, a.k.a the perfect speaker for young Bruins. He narrated his entrepreneurial career, summarizing his decisions and explaining what stimulated each one. Richard is the managing director and co-founder of the LA-based hands-on startup accelerator Amplify.LA. Its portfolio companies include RadPad, Bitium and Stack social.
The success story begins at UCLA (As most good ones do), where Richard’s interest in programming first sparked. After college, he moved to Cupertino to pursue his first love – a job at Apple. His only regret at Apple was that even though he saw Steve Jobs around, he never got a chance to speak to him. However, Richard wanted to work on a startup and his mentor explained that the best time to pursue that was in his 20s when he had nothing to lose. So he quit Apple after two years and moved back to LA to start a software publishing company for Macintosh. Even though he quit Apple, they hired him as a contractor immediately. He created a Mac consulting development shop but realized that the consulting business was hard to sell because you can’t lock people into contracts. So he transitioned into the publishing business. He developed Touchbase — the first multi-user address book and calendar for Mac and also created Datebook so that the address book and calendar could be synced. Adobe approached him in 1993 with a proposition to buy his company and have him head it. This, he said, was a horrible professional experience because they wanted to sell his product to a competitor, made him stay for another year to earn out. Richard took a year off and then got hired as Senior Vice President for Disney online group. Disney eventually started building an internet group for every division and so Richard left Disney online and started Audiobit, which was like TiVO for internet radio.
His career as an investor began in 2007. He started Angel investing in the late 90s and would make an average of 3 deals a year. Finally, he started Amplify.LA, which helps companies raise their first few millions. Amplify restricts its investments to very early stage tech startups. Richard, however, personally invests in more advanced staged companies as well. Amplify’s application is online but online applications might take a lot of time to get reviewed. They have 50 successful entrepreneurs from in and around LA that serve as mentors and contacting one of them and getting a recommendation gets applicants ahead in the line. Amplify is a little more flexible than the other accelerators available. For instance, both, Techstar and Ycombinator, have a fixed investment and margin. They give 20k for 6% of the company. They also have a fixed time period that ends in a demo-day, where they hope to accumulate funds form a presentation of their product. Richard believes that every company has different potential and different needs and thus Amplify has a more fluid structure. It invests different amounts, demands different margins and provides help for different durations of time for each company.
Richard went on to explore the possibilities of getting funding for one’s company. Investors aren’t purely responsive entities, he explained. They also seek out worthy investments. Virtual reality and augmented reality are hot categories right now. 2 years ago it was quantified self like the watches that measured steps etc. Real-time gaming is coming up in Asia. Payments are interesting because narrow margins equal tough business. Investors also check start-ups for early key-indicators and an all-rounded team.
He encouraged students to be persistent. He assured them that people are willing to talk to them and advise them on their decisions. He was extremely approachable and let his audience know that he wanted to give back by helping young entrepreneurs. He said he always replies to messages on Linkedin and also left the crowd with his email address- richard@amplify.la. Also, he said that it is important to be bold and let your idea get around in order to ask for advice. There’s no point being scared that someone will steal your “unique” idea. “If you’re the only one doing something, you’re either a genius or an idiot. Most of the times, you’re an idiot”.
On that note, the pizza arrived and students broke to network amongst each other. Richard involved himself in more personal interactions with the students proactive enough to approach him and seek specific advice.
Bruin Entrepreneurs’ General Meeting/Hack Nights brings together intelligent, open-minded people who want to change the world through entrepreneurship. Join us as we inspire innovation through talks from our brilliant speakers and idea exchanges/collaborations with fellow community members. Hack nights are for everyone — hacker, hustler or designer! We believe that every person has the power to make a difference.
Thank you Arushi Tainwala for summarizing this.
P.S If you would like to sign-up to either speak at Hack Nights or become a mentor at Bruin Incubator — click here or drop us an email at contact@bruinentrepreneurs.org
