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authentic nCent team fist-bump Here at nCent Labs we spend a great deal of time thinking about how to unlock collective talent and appropriately attribute value within communities. These are the building blocks of efficient incentive markets. Why We Need nGage Campus Founders The field of incentive design is both broad and interdisciplinary, touching , , and even . However, applications of incentive to is an emergent field of thought inquiry. Making enough progress to support market growth will require a whole new generation of independent thinkers. These are mainly long term issues and questions. Our “meta” solution is ! Economics Sociology Computer Science Biology design blockchain nGage We are currently laser focused on growing a founder network on college campuses. The goals for this project are: To promote an entrepreneurial “founder” driven view of technical development of blockchains in general and incentive markets on blockchains in particular To build an nCent Global Campus network that will between students across the globe, and connect mentors with practitioners implementing incentive compatible designs in the market facilitate connections and knowledge transfer To to be more inclusive of diverse backgrounds and interdisciplinary viewpoints in guiding the development of the blockchain community expand the pipeline of talent How Does nGage Work? We will get back to you with an invitation. There are special prizes for referring your friends to apply! Apply to be a Founder here . This requires you and a co-founder and 10 total members. Everyone in the group will be able to recruit new members with a unique link from our campus nGage page. The only requirement for validated members at this time is that they should submit their email on the Campus Founder page, and follow the nCent Nation telegram group ( ) Recruit your friends to join your chapter. https://t.me/ncent Post a photo of your first meeting and we will send you a box of swag. We will also cover the cost of pizza and soda for your meeting (restrictions may apply). You will also be connected with our nCent Worldwide Campus Founders Network. This will have special offers and deals on many products and services, educational and curriculum content, special dev seminars and classes, early access to pre-release tools, opportunities to be a hub for grants and other airdrops on campus, and potentially tickets to nCent sponsored meetups and events across the Globe. We also have travel grants available to help select students to attend our annual conference, Receive Swag and nCent Global Campus Resources! nSpire.network whiteboarding in progress (on blackboard) Why are We So Excited About nGage? We are fired up to get student attention about the power of incentive markets and - we know there is an entrepreneurial hunger out there and we are eager to what the community will build with our tools and platform nCent Even if there is no short term economic payoff, we think getting smart college kids involved with our platform will be mutually beneficial. This is our way of “paying it forward” and we could see a world where that positive karma results in numerous internships, startups and other opportunities for these talented students down the road We want to have numerous “use cases” ready to go when our main net launches. (Some of our current use cases include , , , and even ). We cannot possibly do it all alone. The fervor and community spirit of young people in College is unmatched and unstoppable — we want to be inspired by YOU! employee referral programs volunteering projects online auctions dating apps Learn more by emailing me directly at kk@ncnt.io or visiting campus.ncent.io . To stay in the nCent loop, hear me tweet and join our international telegram channel . — PS the .edu/student email address that refers the most people to sign up on our website will get extra swag (we are currently weighing sunglasses, water bottles, or notebooks, but if the referral count is >50 will likely be all 3!)

Introducing nGage: the nCent Labs Worldwide Campus Founder’s Program

Niko Bonatsos is one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. A cursory glance of his LinkedIn profile suggests he’s maybe not what you would expect from a typical investor. Why? He loves working with first time founders, as opposed to those with an extensive track record, and frankly he doesn’t care whether you went to a school like Stanford or not. It is fair to say that he has a gift for identifying the next big thing. His contrarian investment philosophy and love for investing in “annoying and controversial” apps led him to YikYak’s Brooks Buffington and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, at a time when others might have dismissed their respective apps as fads. It is hard to argue with his approach. In chatting with Niko, you get the feeling that he also cares about the founders he works with. It is not just about making money. He has been in their shoes. He empathizes with their struggles. Niko was kind enough to chat with us, at CampusKudos, about his own startup failure, what made him invest in YikYak and much more. You can listen to the whole convo . here Below are some highlights of our conversation, edited and paraphrased for brevity and clarity. Can you tell us about your first startup myLinkPower? Why didn’t it work out? What would you have done differently with your first startup? At the time, we thought we were taking on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be one of the first teams to build on top of the LinkedIn platform when LinkedIn released its API back in late 2009. Our goal was to build a network for the power users on LinkedIn — to help them connect more easily. It did not work out. It was a huge failure. The reason why it didn’t work out was twofold. Building on top of someone else’s platform was a huge mistake. The platform risk was devastating. The rules to use LinkedIn’s data were very rigid. Today, LinkedIn has almost entirely shut off access to its data for other developers. We had a culture problem. We hired two types of people — people who worked their butts off and others who worked forty hour weeks. In the early stages, you cannot have the latter. The 9-to-5ers need to be managed, and the people who work all day do not have time to manage them. This can be demoralizing. You mention you love working with first-time founders. I’m used to hearing that VCs prefer working with founders with a track record. Can you tell us why? I love working with first time founders for a number of reasons. They don’t have any legacy or baggage. This is especially important in the consumer space since it is hard to predict what the next big thing will be. Prior experiences and bad habits can dramatically slow you down. Often times, you might lack the creativity, imagination and free spirit to imagine the “new new.” You must experiment like crazy until you stumble upon it. I love working with first time founders who are learning animals and will become domain experts in just a few years. They are passionate about succeeding in their own way and solving a specific problem. I enjoy this and try my best to work with these types of young founders. I read that you love investing in early products that upon launch are perceived as stupid, funny, controversial and maybe even annoying. Those are not words one would expect to read. Could you elaborate on what you mean? In the consumer products space, it is really hard to create awareness for a new product. If you have to create awareness on your own, it can be very expensive. If you are a first time founder, you might lack resources and people who will pay attention to you. As a result, it can be really helpful if you have a product that others perceive as controversial. If it is controversial, they will start talking about it. If they start talking about it to their friends, the press will hear about it. If the press hears about it, they will write a story. If it is really controversial, there will be more headlines. More headlines leads to more users. With more users, the product will become less controversial as more mainstream use-cases emerge. With all this, a company has a good shot to raise capital and have access to resources to drive even further adoption. That’s a great segue to your personal investment into YikYak. How’d you connect with Brooks Buffington at YikYak? I met the YikYak team in their very early days, when there were only tens of thousands of users. I discovered the app just by searching through the app store. I came across YikYak and decided to cold email Brooks, one of their founders. Niko’s first email to Brooks at YikYak When we started talking, what really impressed me was that Brooks was cracking jokes the first time we ever chatted. He was not stressed out or nervous at all. He was very authentic, and he shared insights and metrics that were very impressive. So, I flew Brooks and Tyler out to California to meet with me. When we met, the app had traction at a few high schools and a handful of college campuses. There were three things that really struck me. I loved a couple of Tyler’s insights. Tyler asserted that, in the history of social media, the same people create the majority of content, which gets all the “likes.” Everyone wants to be like those individuals, and, if you are not one of them, you feel embarrassed to share and create content. With YikYak, everyone is treated as an equal from day one. This is true since every user is anonymous. The intensity of engagement from college kids was super impressive. College students were spending numerous hours each week with the product. Students were literally requesting for size of the feed to increase, so they wouldn’t have to stay up late at night scrolling as much to catch up with each post. Brooks and Tyler were genuine and good guys. They were very serious about stopping incidents of bad behavior. Despite the fact that high school students account for 80–90% of YikYak’s growth, Brooks and Tyler decided to essentially ban all their high school users. College students were apparently more mature about how to use the product. This was a very bold move. Today, YikYak is a household name among college students in America. It is how college students find out what is happening around them on campus. It is a go-to information source. How do you determine which apps are BS or the next big consumer product like Snapchat? What did the General Catalyst team see in Snapchat when others might have thought it was a fad? It is a combination of a few factors. First, if the product has launched, we will look deeply into the metrics. Is there something that is ten times better than anything we’ve seen in the market before? We will also spend a lot more time with that particular product and company. Second, we assess if the product is differentiated. We view this not from the lens of a VC, since we tend to be early adopters who see hundred of products each week, but rather from the perspective of a typical consumer. The best way to tell, if something is differentiated, is by word-of-mouth. What words do people use to describe the company or product? Do they get excited? Emotionally engaged? These are signals that there is product differentiation. Third, we look for special founders. While Evan from Snapchat could not foresee the Selfie revolution, he laid out an impressive vision of building the fastest camera app out there. He wanted to build a more humanized communication platform. With a snap, you could communicate your location and your feelings, all at once. In addition, after ten seconds, it disappeared just like how we typically communicate. This was unlike everything else in social media, where things left a trail and continued to exist. You mention on your LinkedIn, “Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.” How do we make opportunity universal? In the Internet era, access to knowledge is easier than it has ever been. Anyone with an internet connection can have access to all of humanity’s knowledge. For me, I’m constantly looking to find the next big thing, and I believe it probably will not come out of Silicon Valley. As a result, I’m always looking through the app store and reading a lot of different articles. I personally have around ten Skype convos each week with people from around the world. If you are somebody who is really excited about working on something and you do a little bit of content creation or have an online presence, opportunities will come your way. Check out to meet amazing professionals and check out other podcasts with and many more. CampusKudos.com Hiten Shah Kindly recommend or share this article if it was interesting :)

YikYak’s Investor Niko Bonatsos Loves Your Annoying App and Lack of Experience

A conversation with Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah It’s not every day that I get a chance to chat with someone who has raised over $15 million in venture funding (and also happens to have 2,845 times more Twitter followers than I do). Hiten Shah is a master marketer and serial entrepreneur. He has launched three successful startups, including a consulting business right out of school, a self-funded SaaS startup called Crazy Egg, and venture-backed KISSmetrics. He’s a self-described professional problem solver. That simple, he tells me. You can tune in to listen to our full conversation. Anyways, here’s 5 things I learned from our conversation. HERE #1. There is no reasonable excuse for not getting customers today. Today, Hiten believes it is easier than ever to reach people. He told me, “There is no excuse to not get customers (at least a few) for something today.” Why? Everyone and everything is online. Often times, he witnesses teams put time and energy into beautifying and building the “perfect” product, only to find out that the market does not need it or want it. Image Credit: Clinkle Homepage I’ve been there. We built a Tinder for Jobs app. Turns out, employers didn’t need or want it. For more info on that epic failure (I mean learning experience), here’s a Medium article I wrote about it: . 99 Problems But a Bit Ain’t One: Why My Startup Failed #2. I would figure out distribution and marketing before I even have a product. How do you market something that doesn’t even exist? Crazy idea… just talk to people. If you know you are going to build something for a certain market, just go out and talk to friends, friends of friends, even strangers. Everyone uses the internet. In almost any industry, you can even just start blogging about your product idea. If your writing is damn good and timely, you just need to get a few people to read about it and many more will follow. You can be a “nobody” in a random country, and you can still get attention if you put a well-written article out there. Image credit y Business2Commnunit As a tangible example, read about out . how Mint.com Founder Aaron Patzer did the same and sold his company for $170MM #3. Get off your @$$ and get to know your customers. How do you really understand a potential customer? It is just like anything else. You have to be around them and talk to them. For B2B business, try to shadow customers or attend conferences. Go to their parties. Hang out in the lobbies of conferences and talk to the attendees (especially useful if you can’t afford a ticket). Image Credit: Business Insider For B2C products, there is a not a huge difference in strategy. Hiten suggests you need to do one of two things: Go even deeper in your understanding of your customer. Build a ghetto version. You can’t always trust what consumers say they’ll do. So sometimes, you just have to build a janky version to see for yourself. We ourselves are trying to heed the advice of simply getting out there. Here’s our story of . How We Got Our First 5,000 Users By Daring to Leave Our Desks #4. You still need a great product. Hiten acknowledges that, of course, you need a great product, because there are so many options out there today. Nevertheless, you need to understand and think about how you are going to get customers first. This serves a dual purpose. You’ll have marketing ready when you are ready to launch, and you’ll build the right product in the first place. After all, the product is for them. Now that Hiten has started building products, he follows a simple framework that he says any good business needs. It’s pretty simple. Great Product + Great Distribution = Good Business Great product. You need a product people love, and something people will tell their friends. Great distribution. Otherwise, nothing works, nothings grows. There was a time when he believed that he could build a great product and then figure out marketing. He rejects that mentality today, warning against “building product and then figuring out the market.” #5. On raising money, you have to show not tell. So you want to raise money? Just know, gone are the days where a pretty PowerPoint is enough. You need to get some traction before approaching investors. You have to show not tell. Image credit: Gawker Investors want the product and team already de-risked before they invest. At the end of the day, investors can be pickier with more and more startups looking for funding (and the cost of getting a prototype out there lower and lower). Oh and if you hear a story about someone raising money with just a pitch deck and a vision, it is probably because they’ve already done “it” before, meaning they have a track record of success. You can also learn to show not tell in the way you actually pitch. Here are some tips from Brad Feld, investor and co-founder of Foundry Group and Techstars, on . Show Don’t Tell — Especially In Video Pitches Altogether, here’s my biggest takeaway from chatting with Hiten: “Your greatest competitive advantage is your ability to understand your customer better than anyone else.” Kindly recommend or share this article if it was helpful :) OR… And, of course, check out ! Helping students and 20somethings find career happiness by meeting professionals (like you)! CampusKudos.com

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