Takeaways: Secret Truths from Leading a Startup

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Preface

This is a book of practical insights for people with big business ideas.

It packages my own experience, my successes and failures, and translates them into rules for other aspiring business founders. These rules outline steps to help ensure a smooth launch and successful management of your own company.

My three years in Silicon Valley were an education for me as I cofounded and served as CEO of my own startup. This relatively short time span was dense as my business evolved quickly and we reacted nimbly as a matter of survival. In less than 1,200 days, we developed a concept in startup school and sold our company to a global corporation for millions of dollars.

It was indeed a best-case scenario—preceded by three years of struggle and challenges turned into opportunities.

This book is short, because your time is limited. My hope is that it can serve as a quick reference of insights from someone who has been there. As you stand at difficult crossroads along the way, open these pages and find comradery in my journey.

These rules are what I needed when I faced daily decisions and was stumped by my inexperience. Lucky for me, I had access to some of the most successful entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors in Silicon Valley. Their insights gave me courage to make gutsy decisions I would have otherwise avoided and to take chances that contributed to the ultimate success of Loopd.

Takeaways: Secret Truths from Leading a Startup is designed to help you make faster and better decisions. To simplify the book, the rules are organized in parts, with big-picture topics you will surely encounter:

Business Growth

Corporate Culture

Product Development

Marketing

Operations

Sales

Fundraising

Exit Strategies

These rules extend beyond mere theory. They include my personal experiences and real outcomes from my own startup experience at Loopd.

As a new business owner, you are juggling many balls—often for the first time. To add complexity to the already overwhelming challenge, outside forces will make you pivot and adapt beyond your perceived capabilities. I hope these rules enable you to make the best possible decisions when the ideal choice is unavailable.

Keep this succinct guide in your backpack, and good luck on your venture! If I can clarify or add deeper insights to any of these rules, feel free to contact me.

Best,

Brian Friedman

Managing Partner

Rolling Thunder Ventures, LLC

brian@rollingthunderventures.com

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Brian Friedman’s Story

I still marvel at the fact that Loopd began as a simple drawing of a wristband on a scrap of paper. The success was surely not a result of our rudimentary sketching but can instead be attributed to our love for the social mission driving the concept.

By focusing on the passive exchange of information (without the distraction of smartphones), my cofounders and I simplified and streamlined the ability of people to connect with one another. Our lucky startup location in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area fueled the technology and design that allowed the elegant evolution of Loopd.

Before pursuing entrepreneurship as a career, I nurtured a deep passion for product and graphic design. Attending high school at Holderness School in New Hampshire, I participated in the fiercely competitive winter sports program. While there, I worked toward a career as a professional snowboarder until one life-changing conversation with a coach.

On the side of the mountain, he said, Brian, you can be a snowboarder for the next ten years, or you can be a snowboard manufacturer for the rest of your life.

Something sparked my imagination that day, and I pivoted—not away from adventure sports entirely, but from athlete to engineer. I wanted to build products that promoted the joy and thrill of these activities to a broad range of people around the world.

For the rest of my high school career, I explored early product ideas related to my outdoor activities, from a water bottle that could transform into a misting tool for mountain bikers to a wake bike that would make BMX an aquatic sport.

During high school, my father was an invaluable partner and resource. He started several successful companies, and, under his guidance, I would write various business plans and enter local pitch contests around the Boston area on the weekends.

Unsurprisingly, I was the youngest entrepreneur at these contests by at least a decade, but that didn’t deter me. I still remember the electric excitement as I crafted new concepts and wrote pitches to share my vision with the crowd. In retrospect, I see how these contests laid the foundation for my future launch of Loopd, when at last I could bring a revolutionary concept to life.

After high school, I attended Lehigh University and channeled my passion for inventions toward a study of materials science and engineering. Although this was a slight detour from business and entrepreneurship, I recognized the need to supplement my drive with concrete skills about physical products that could disrupt the technology landscape.

The curriculum was challenging, but I enjoyed learning about the building blocks of plastics, metals, and ceramics. During a design course, I became intrigued by the inextricable partnership of form and function and resolved to create something that optimized both. Throughout my studies, I always focused on using my skills as a materials scientist and engineer toward a larger business goal; anything less would have been unsatisfying.

A Successful Mentor Recommends a Leap of Faith

In the spring of 2013, at age twenty-one, I applied to an entrepreneurship program in the heart of Silicon Valley at Draper University. This unique program was founded by Tim Draper, famous venture capitalist of DFJ Ventures. It consisted of a seven-week, intensive residential program for pre-incubation and concept-generation experiences for future entrepreneurs ranging from age eighteen to twenty-eight.

I heard about Draper University from a mentor, a highly successful entrepreneur in the Washington, DC, area, who also happened to be the father of a college friend. I knew that his recommendation alone justified this leap of faith on my part.

Most of my engineering classmates at Lehigh did not share my strong drive to start a venture. The majority of them accepted positions as technical sales reps or research associates in corporate labs, but I could never get excited about any of those options for myself.

I believed that my experience at Draper University would cultivate my creativity and jump-start my ambition in the company of like-minded individuals. Still, even after submitting my resume and completing my interview, I was doubtful that this was the right track for me.

The idea of startups has intrigued me since I was born. My dad ran a successful trade-show company on three continents, and he inspired me to take a chance with the confidence to pursue big ideas for myself.

During my freshman year at Lehigh University, I started a technical entrepreneurship club called CREATE. This group supported students and encouraged them to pursue their ideas and take them from the paper stage to actual development. After this small experiment in entrepreneurship, I was addicted and committed for life.

I also knew that I would eventually start my own company as a way to add my personal innovation to the world around me:

Entrepreneurship to me means taking courageous risk by designing new creative solutions that haven’t existed before. Passion and vision fuel pure motivation to launch lean impactful solutions that alleviate and remove the world’s flaws. Growing up, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur; however, I didn’t know what it meant until I started my first business.

When Draper University accepted me for the summer program, it was this long-held belief that pushed me to follow my calling. I finally allowed myself to begin dreaming about anything and pursue the possibilities. Upon arrival, I immediately felt welcome in this new community. Positive energy permeated the campus, and passion, creativity, and drive became standard. When launching a company, you must believe unswervingly in yourself, your mission, and your purpose. Draper University made all of this possible; it was an epicenter for serendipity unlike any other entrepreneurship program.

While at Draper University, I met my future cofounders, Allen Houng and Sambhav Galada. They both had extraordinary technical minds and were trained as both computer scientists and electrical engineers. Allen hailed from Taiwan and Sambhav from India, yet despite our different backgrounds and cultures, our desire to create a company unified us with force.

Three weeks into the seven-week program, we participated in a one-day contest called BizWorld. During this event, I created a new concept for connecting with people physically while using new smartphone and cloud-based technologies (also known as Internet of Things). This BizWorld contest at Draper University was an abbreviated version of the longer elementary school education program where students learn about entrepreneurship by designing and selling friendship bracelets.

During our BizWorld day, I saw well beyond a simple friendship bracelet. The night before, I had watched a video of the Budweiser Buddy Cup, a simple idea that gave people the ability to exchange Facebook information by tapping glasses. The next day, my team was tasked with creating and selling our own unique friendship wristband concept.

My friends and I had recently talked about how people were becoming more virtually social and physically antisocial as a result of smartphones. Upon hearing the BizWorld challenge, I immediately recalled the Budweiser video and recognized an opportunity to invent a simplified communication device (initially called BuddyBand). This band would allow smart interaction with a simple handshake, fist bump, or high five.

I wanted to use technology to promote physical connection. Sambhav and Allen shared the same vision of a digital wearable that could bring people together, and we agreed that this was our new path. In comparison with other projects I was considering, this one was special. It became the idea that eclipsed all the others and demanded my full attention and energy.

While at Draper University, I learned about the newest trends in Silicon Valley, including 3-D printing, space mining, antiaging pharmaceuticals, and blockchain technologies. I also realized that in order to build a scalable business, you need to stay focused and conquer one problem at a time. During the five-hour BizWorld experience, our team made significant progress to develop our initial prototype and business model.

After Pitch Day (and Some Refinement), Loopd Is Born

We presented our digital band idea (renamed LoopBand and then finally shortened to Loopd) on Pitch Day, the culmination of our seven-week program at Draper University. It was recognized as a top-ten idea and was both applauded and criticized by many. The challenges and questions of the expert panel helped my cofounders and me refine the Loopd concept. I was going to start my own company, and finally I would find my way to add my own splash of innovation to society surrounding me.

In the year following that epic day, we raised $1.2 million from Tim Draper, Marc Benioff, Rick Dalzell, and other notable angel investors. Before exiting, we went on to raise a total of $2.5 million from more than twenty domestic and international investors.

Loopd grew in sophistication and purpose. It evolved into a robust analytics platform that measured proximity-based human interactions and engagement. The platform included the industry’s only bidirectional wearable that enabled attendees to exchange contact information, collect marketing materials, and passively check in at speaker sessions.

Using these physical analytics, marketers could harness a more sophisticated understanding of their most valuable business relationships and gain clarity of previously murky return on investment (ROI) measurements. Additional use cases for Loopd were boundless, from allowing healthcare workers to glean patient data instantly to facilitating military ground troop communication to turning handshakes into information swaps.

In the first year, our team designed and built a complete analytics platform, iOS and Android apps, and a bidirectional Bluetooth beacon. We won Wearable Tech Product of the Year and were selected as a top finalist for smart data and enterprise at the SXSW Accelerator. Loopd also earned recognition as a finalist at