About a month ago, I came across a great post by Paul Graham that discussed great cities and how their culture affects the ambitions of the people within them.
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
- New York tells you, above all: you should make more money.
- What I like about Cambridge is that the message there is: you should be smarter.
- As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
Here in Boulder I would say that the resounding message is: you should be more healthy. It’s apparent everywhere you look; people are active, they eat healthy, and they have a keen focus on sustainability. But below the surface I think there is another message that is equally powerful among a smaller subset of Boulderites. Within the tech/startup community there is a clear sense that you should be more collaborative. The Foodzie team has been in Boulder for only a month, but already it’s clear how willing the people in this community are to help.
How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you’d be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.
No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.
When I read this, I instantly began thinking about our transition from Greensboro, North Carolina to Boulder, Colorado. Looking back on our time in Greensboro, I can’t say that I’m entirely sure what the message was, or even that there was one. As an early-stage tech startup we felt alone, and although we closely followed and reached out to founders, bloggers, and other techie-types in San Francisco, Boulder, and New York we still felt like a silo. We realized that although we were surrounded by many great people, very few actually shared our interests or cared about the things that we were passionate about.
So here we are in Boulder, Colorado… a hotbed of natural and organic foods, and one of the the most collaborative and exciting places for a young, tech startup. There’s no way to tell what the future holds, but we think we’ve found the right place for Foodzie.
I chatted with a fellow foodie, Laurie Aaronson yesterday and in our discussions, she shared with me one of her favorite food sites I Dream of Cake. I Dream of Cake is a cake shop in San Francisco, where they produce the most unbelievable cakes I have honestly ever seen (I probably spent a half an hour completely in awe, browsing around the site).
Each team member at the shop is accomplished in areas of painting, sculpting, illustration, graphic design or textile design, which allows them to create masterpieces you’ve never seen in the form of cake. There’s not much left to say but check out these pictures and remember that all of these are EDIBLE CAKES and from what I’ve heard taste incredible. Check out the works of art below and visit their website idreamofcakes.com where there are plenty more cakes that will make you double-take.
In a little over a month’s time the Foodzie team has left our corporate jobs behind, sold a car, put a house up for sale and moved from North Carolina to Colorado. As we discussed in our post, Better in Boulder, the reason behind all of this is that we were selected to participate in a program called TechStars.
Without a doubt, TechStars has helped to change the trajectory of our company. Over the past month, we’ve had the fortunate opportunity to meet and work with some of the most proven entrepreneurs and business people in the country. As a result, we’ve been able to refine the concept behind Foodzie and accelerate the development of our marketplace.
I’d like to share this video that highlights many of the great moments we’ve had here at TechStars over the past 30 days…
I also want to take this opportunity to thank the other TechStars companies for all of the energy that they contribute, the TechStars directors and mentors for the tremendous insight they provide, and Andrew Hyde for capturing many of the great moments that we’ve all shared over the past month.
The Foodzie team had a chance to sit down with Andrew Hyde, the community director here at TechStars, and talk a little bit about our experience so far in TechStars and how we are enjoying Boulder.
Being involved in a startup requires sacrifices and for me the lack of time I have to do anything but work means I am cooking a lot less. It’s tough because I enjoy it so much, but I’ve also learned to adjust my cooking style to fit my new lifestyle. Unfortunately I can’t make trips to the store everyday, or whip up a different complex meal every night. I need recipes with more portions so they last me 2-3 days, recipes that reheat or freeze well, and of course…still taste great.
One of my favorite recipes that I’ve dug out and look forward to preparing again this weekend is a Roasted Vegetable and Four Cheese Lasagna, which fits the “entrepreneurial criteria”. It’s layered with grilled eggplant, roasted tomatoes, butternut squash, fresh pesto and a combination of feta, ricotta, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses. It turns out the best this time of year when I can wander around the farmers market and buy all my fresh produce (except for maybe the squash). If I have the extra time, I prepare a basil pesto from scratch, but if not (which will be the case this weekend) I look to some wonderful prepared pestos that have that “fresh from the garden” flavor. A couple basil pestos I enjoy are Bella Cucina’s Basil Pesto, Basiltops Pesto Perfectto and Loredana’s Casalinga Pesto.
Roasted Vegetable and Four Cheese Lasagna
Ingredients:
12 lasagna noodles
2 cups butternut squash, peeled and diced
1 eggplant, sliced in 1/2 inch slices
5 tomatoes, halved
1 (1 pint) container ricotta cheese
8 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
2/3 cup basil pesto
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce
2 cups mozzarella cheese, shredded
1 cup Parmesan cheese, freshly grated
Preparation:
Preheat oven to 350º. Prepare lasagna noodles according to package directions; drain and set aside.
Place diced squash on a baking sheet and roast in preheated oven until browned and tender, about 30 minutes.
In a sauté pan over medium-high heat, sauté eggplant slices, turning once, until browned on each side and tender, approximately 10 to 12 minutes; set aside.
Meanwhile, place tomatoes skin side up on a separate baking sheet; place in oven with squash during last 15 minutes of cooking time. Cook tomatoes until tender and wrinkly. Remove both tomatoes and squash from oven when done; set aside and let cool.
In a medium mixing bowl, stir together ricotta, feta, pesto, eggs, salt and pepper until well combined; gently fold roasted squash into mixture.
To assemble lasagna, spoon half the tomato sauce into the bottom of a 9×13-inch baking dish; place 4 lasagna noodles over sauce. Arrange a single layer of eggplant slices over noodles and top with half ricotta mixture. Cover ricotta mixture with another layer of 4 lasagna noodles; arrange roasted tomatoes evenly over the noodles and spoon remaining ricotta mixture over tomatoes. Sprinkle with 1 cup mozzarella and cover with remaining 4 lasagna noodles. Pour remaining tomato sauce evenly over noodles and sprinkle with remaining 1 cup mozzarella and 1 cup parmesan.
Bake uncovered lasagna in preheated 350º oven for 30 to 40 minutes, until cheese is golden and bubbly.
I wish there had been some product left in the bag for this picture, but there’s good reason why the bag is completely empty. I shared these gluten-free crackers with my friend Andrew Hyde, who is on a gluten-free diet, and he devoured the entire bag in about 30 min. Poor guy hadn’t tasted anything that resembled a cracker in about 4 years. But if he hadn’t done it, I probably would have - they were really that good.
There are gluten-free crackers out there, but finding those with that nice cracker texture is tough - really tough. Most that I’ve tried use a rice flour substitute that usually leaves a “gummy” texture in my mouth. Totally un-cracker like. These Skinny Crisps were crunchy, crispy with a hearty, nutty texture. This variety in particular is dusted with cinnamon, which makes them the perfect substitute for a graham cracker.
In our search to find the best products for Foodzie, one thing we try to do is talk to as many foodies out there as we possibly can. I’ve wanted to learn more about the needs of people on a gluten-free diet, to better understand how we can help them on Foodzie. Brett Jackson, one of the TechStars mentors and founder of Generation Think Tank, introduced me to his mother Jan who has celiac disease and sticks to a gluten-free diet. Jan was nice enough to share with me some of her favorite gluten-free items, one of which were these fabulous Skinny Crisps, produced in Lyons, CO.
I took out three particularly prescient excerpts that resonate with the Foodzie team.
Process:
Process is the means by which your team communicates. Whether this is via a wiki, email, or the hallway, any team larger than one needs to define a means to share information. This is not an argument for specifications, documentation, or a whiteboard filled with do’s and don’ts. You just need to agree how you’re going to share information.
When your second engineer decides, “Yes, I’m going to capture my design decisions in a wiki”. That’s process. When your third engineer starts tracking bugs on that huge whiteboard in the meeting room, that’s process. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t even have to be universally agreed upon on, it just has to be stuck in a place where every can see it.
Release:
At some point, you’re going to need to fake being done. You’re going to need to release something which barely looks like your pitch because you don’t have product until a neutral party stares at something.
Fact #4: You don’t have a company until you have a product
Product is not pitch. Pitch is the three sentence idea which gave you the credibility to hire the people. The people argued about the pitch, they created process to refine and develop the pitch, and that changed it. The pyramid wobbled hither and fro during all of this… maybe it fell completely over and you scrambled to stack those layers up again. Good job, there. You still don’t have product.”
Culture:
The hierarchy I describe is not a model for how to build a great product; it’s a picture that describes the culture of your company. That’s what you’re really building in 1.0. A lasting, interesting culture which, if you’re lucky, continues to produces great products.
I grew up in Maryland and thus spent many summer days as a child with my dad at Camden Yards rooting for Cal Ripken and the Orioles. As a kid, nothing was better than an afternoon with my dad, enjoying all the (very overpriced) hot dogs, cotton candy, peanuts and Cracker Jack I could cram into nine innings. But since then, my taste buds have become a bit more refined and as an entrepreneur, my wallet a bit more tight. My cash reserves for good meals are limited, so I have all the more reason to be picky about where my food money goes.
Today we headed down to Coors Field for a little baseball action with some old TechStars alum from last year and our pals from this years teams Ignighter, TripDoor, and BuyPlayWin. Of course in baseball there is plenty of downtime, which is time that I usually like to fill snacking on good food. To my disappointment the selection at Coors Field was just as it was in Camden Yards 15 years ago, mediocre popcorn, hot dogs, nachos, peanuts and a few ice cream stands here and there. Now I am all about the classics - baseball wouldn’t be baseball without hot dogs and peanuts, but…for the hundred stands that serve hot dogs, it wouldn’t hurt to take 5 and fill them with a little diversity. The good news is that AT&T Park in San Francisco and many other stadiums across the country (Rockies are you next??) have done just that. Peter Meehan from the New York Times reported on a few of his discoveries during his visit to AT&T Park:
By the seventh-inning stretch, I had sampled a peppery clam chowder served in a bread bowl dotted through with tender bits of clam; a fried catfish sandwich in a crisp, Cajun-accented crust; and a homey bowl of jerk chicken over rice, with a healthy dash of jalapeño hot sauce.
Peter recounts his journey across the country, tasting his way through baseball stadiums in a recent article in the New York Times entitled Buy Me Some Sushi and Baby Back Ribs. From what he found there is hope for all us foodie fans out there who crave something a little more gourmet when we spend an afternoon at the ballpark.
The best entrepreneur blogs – and often the most successful ones — do more than just promote the entrepreneurs or their projects. Star power can draw attention, but it won’t sustain it if the blog doesn’t “give.”
Give is a broad term. You can give tangible tools and information to help build a business. Or a motivational story that inspires someone to try an idea. You can give a laugh. You can give food for thought. You can give debate. You can give of yourself, and if you’re interesting enough, people will come back for more.
The “food for thought” part has my emphasis added… you’ll get used to my horrible sense of humor soon enough.
Our blog isn’t mentioned in the article of course, but we hope that our blog provides you with value. If you there is something you’d like us to write about, never hesitate to tell us. We as authors crave an audience. So if you have questions about food, entrepreneurialism, or even what hair gel we use - shoot them our way and we’ll do our best to tackle the topic.
Don’t miss some of the blogs listed in the article linked above. Why is this post titled ‘Saturday Links‘, as in plural? Cause we’re meta, baby.
Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to sit down with Brad Feld, a Director of the TechStars program and a great mentor to our company. At the tail end of our meeting, Andrew Hyde the Community Director for TechStars dropped by and posed a couple of questions to Brad about this year’s TechStars companies, and also asked us how the first three weeks have gone.
