Jeff Holden

Jeff Holden might be an entrepreneur, but he has a big company to thank for his startup inspiration. It was during his 8 years working in Amazon.com’s Consumer Websites division that he became interested in the discovery experience, including the ‘people who bought X also bought Y’ feature. “One thing I was very focused on at Amazon was discovery,” he says. “Enabling customers to not only find things they are explicitly looking for, but serendipitously bump into compelling items they would never have known to look for.”

This kind of recommendation and discovery experience was only possible because of detailed data about the things people interacted with, for example the items they clicked on when they searched or the items they actually purchased – this data is referred to as a “clickstream.” Holden realized in 2005/2006 that there was no equivalent to a clickstream in the physical world – no way to say “people who go to this place X also go to place Y.” “Given the amount of value that has been unlocked on the Web utilizing clickstreams, from Google’s search relevancy ranking algorithm to keyword-based advertising to personalization technology, it made sense to me that huge amounts of value could similarly be found by enabling the real-world equivalent of clickstreams,” he says. “My belief was and is that we can fundamentally improve the way people interact with the physical world around them and increase the possibility of adventure and human connection.” He started Whrrl as a way to create real-life clickstreams, or what they call “footstreams.”

Whrrl is a social location-based game with a simple end goal: to get people out into the world trying new things. Users join Societies, which are interest groups around different topics, and earn Influence Points as they share their adventures and inspire others to try new things. The more points a user has the more Society Rewards they receive from merchants and brand partners. Users can link their profile to Facebook and Twitter, and can interact via the mobile site or through their free iPhone application.

Starting Whrrl four years ago was certainly a challenge. “In 2006, the idea of a footstream seemed ludicrous to pretty much everyone I talked to,” he says. “Of course, today, place-based social networking makes sense to most people, but four years makes a ton of difference in the world of technology.” He had to get people excited about the vision to recruit and raise money, and found people to work with on both fronts (the company is now backed by investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bezos Expeditions, T-Venture, Trilogy Equity Partners and Reliance Technology Ventures). But the challenge of getting people behind his vision was “frankly easy” compared to the challenges found in the mobile ecosystem of the time. “Prior to the iPhone and App Store, getting a consumer product to market was an extremely high-risk and very expensive endeavor,” he says. “You worked with wireless carriers and ultimately had to have a contractual deal with them to make your product available to end users.” He says that just getting their attention was hard, let alone getting their approval – and on top of that once a deal was done you had to build your product for very limited and fragmented handsets. “You often couldn’t utilize all the various capabilities, like location technology, because the economics just didn’t make sense,” he says. “It took literally years from the first contact at the carrier to the product showing up on ‘the deck.’” Lucky for Holden and his team they were able to last into the iPhone era, and the game completely changed.

Holden has learned a lot along the way, and has four key pieces of advice for anyone just starting out. First, he says to use a minimum-viable-product methodology to get to market quickly. “That said, the ‘viable’ piece is critical -you have to create tangible and meaningful value for your customers with whatever you launch,” he says. Second, he advises being very experimental and analytical so you quickly learn what is working and what is not and can then rapidly iterate to double down on what is working and lock in the value. He also advises entrepreneurs to be frugal. “Spend money on things that truly matter and be hard core about not spending on anything else.” Finally, hire stars – people who make you better, people who you want to work with for a very long time. “You won’t win with mediocre people.”

Holden always comes back to the importance of execution, and says that while many startups have brilliant ideas, not many execute on them. “Execution in a startup is much more of an art form than in a big company, since everything is on a shoestring budget and there isn’t an army of people to assign to every little task,” he says. “Lots of startups get some set of ideas to the one-yard line, but never into the end zone. Their vision is not sufficiently realized that meaningful value is created and so they never get the momentum to build something important.”

It’s easy to see that the Whrrl team is committed to executing on their ideas – they released the latest version of their iPhone app in the spring, and recently announced their Society Rewards program in Las Vegas. Holden told GigaOM in August that the Whrrl iPhone app has 350,000 users and is adding 2,000 to 3,000 new users per day, on par with fellow location-based app Gowalla. Holden’s idea, once thought of as ludicrous, is now entering the mainstream – which isn’t a bad place for an entrepreneur to be.

You can browse through their full Q&A sessions at Ask.Sprouter.com/davidhornik and Ask.Sprouter.com/apatzer.

We’re excited to announce this week’s celebrity expert Q&A sessions – Paul Kedrosky, investor, entrepreneur and Kauffman Foundation senior fellow; and Hiten Shah, serial entrepreneur and founder of KISSMetrics.

See below for their bios & session times – sign up to be notified at Ask.Sprouter.com/experts.

Paul Kedrosky - Ask.Sprouter.com/pkedrosky

Live Answers session: Tuesday, August 30th at 2:30pm EST. Sign up to be notified here.

Paul Kedrosky

Paul’s Bio:

Dr. Kedrosky is an investor, writer, and entrepreneur. He is a sought-after speaker; an analyst for CNBC television; a columnist for TheStreet/RealMoney; and the editor of Infectious Greed, one of the best known business blogs. He is frequently quoted in major publications around the world.

Dr. Kedrosky is currently a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, where he is focused on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the future of risk capital. He is also Senior Research Advisor to Ten Asset Management, a southern California institutional money management firm using innovative quantitative techniques in capital markets. He is also a fellow and on the advisory board of the Berkeley Center for Innovative Financial Technology. He is an advisor to various other companies, institutional investors, and venture capital firms.

—

Hiten Shah - Ask.Sprouter.com/hiten

Live Answers session: Thursday, September 2nd at 11am EST. Sign up to be notified here.

Hiten Shah

Hiten’s Bio:

HIten has started 3 companies, ACS, Crazy Egg &KISSmetrics. He enjoys advising startups about metrics, product & marketing. He has online marketing expertise involving search engine marketing, buzz / viral marketing, metrics and community building. You can find out more about him on his blog.

—

Get your questions ready for Paul and Hiten now!

Sprouter: Where did your journey as an entrepreneur begin?

Shahar Solomianik: Although I was trading computer games at age fourteen, and was CTO at a web startup in the first bubble ten years later (1999-2001), I believe the entrepreneur spirit really hit me while I was backpacking in Australia in 2002. At some point I ran out of money, and I had to decide whether to fly back home or try to get a “tourist job”. I did neither. Instead, I used my last pennies to buy some materials and started crafting juggling items — devil sticks, pois and whatnot. I then started selling them from a “mobile booth” (essentially a laundry rack) on the Melbourne Esplanade and in festivals around town. I will never forget my first sale and how shaky my hands were when I took the notes from my first customer ever. For the first time in my life I was actually making my own living, and people were actually enjoying and using stuff that I made. That changed my perspective about what I wanted to do with my life.

S: Tell us about how you got the idea for Vanityvid and how you started it.

SS: Before Vanityvid, our founding team had (still has) Triond, which started five years ago, raised VC money et al, and is now a profitable company. We were browsing through some of Triond’s user profiles one day, when Udi noted that we can look at users’ pics and read what they write but we can’t actually get to know what they’re like in reality. He said he wished that in place of profile pics, there would be profile videos. That’s how it all started.The first instinct was to make it as a feature for Triond, but then we realized we had a much broader vision for it. Vanityvid is relevant to the entire web.

S: What were your biggest challenges starting Vanityvid?

SS: This may sound weird but, as I said, we’re second-time entrepreneurs. After working with Triond’s 200K users and 20M monthly page views, our biggest challenge turned out to be adjusting back to working small-scale. No users, no traffic, no investors, no clear business model, not even a clear product and let alone possible implementations. In comparison to what what we had gotten used to, it was like a sudden downgrade, We always have to remind ourselves that we’re an early-stage startup again.

S: What are the top 3 tips you’d give to early-stage entrepreneurs?

SS: Keep your eyes on the current and don’t look at the rocks. That’s taken from white water rafting. Have you ever done that? If you have, you’ve been probably been told by your instructor that along the river you’ll notice a lot of rocks. Smashing into these rocks is very risky and painful. Yet, the trick is not to look at the rocks. Since the raft will go in the same direction as your line of sight, you need to keep focused on the current. That’s very relevant to startup life as well.

Help other entrepreneurs whenever you can. I’m not suggesting that you should spend a lot of time helping every person who reaches out, or start volunteering at other startups. Still, try to do what you can. Use other people’s services and provide feedback, install widgets on your blog or website, whatever. You achieve two things by doing so: you open your mind to other ideas and markets and you can never tell how that’s going to end up. Also, you never know when other entrepreneurs might end up helping you out. It’s karmic.

Have a solid answer to the question, “Why?”. See, you’re often dealing with what you’re currently doing, how you’re doing it, and where you’re taking things from here. However, the most important question is why you’re doing it. Having a solid answer to the why question will keep you strong in tough times.

S: What do you think can be a game-changer for an early-stage startup?

SS: Making your first sale. Even if what you’ve just sold is not what you’re going to be selling in the future, your company has just changed status – from looking for business, to validating a business.

S: What’s coming up at Vanityvid?

SS: Though Vanityvid runs on top of Facebook and Twitter with a browser add-on, and on top of Wordpress with a plugin, we’ve made it very easy to integrate Vanityvid into any online service that has a user base. And we’re now starting at the search for our first early adopters partners. So that’s where we’re headed next. Having said that, if you’re an entrepreneur that runs an online service with a user base, and you wish to enhance your service’s social features and online identities, contact me – I think I have the right thing for you.

—

Connect with Shahar now on Sprouter at @shaharsol.

For many entrepreneurs, a $125 million investment is more than they’ll ever need to make their business succeed. For Robert Deluce, it was a place to start. The founder of Porter Airlines, a short-haul Toronto-based airline launched in 2006, knew it would take more than a fleet of planes to get them off the ground. “We knew that as a start-up airlines, capital would be crucial to long-term success,” he says. “That has been the downfall of many airlines in the past, so we ensured that Porter got off on the right foot by raising over $125 million in equity.” It was the second-largest equity raise for a new airline at the time, behind only JetBlue.

Deluce knows about the downfall of other Canadian airlines all too well – he worked at airline Canada 3000 until 1995, and watched it go under in 2001. In fact an interest in aviation spans his entire family. “My connection to aviation stems from my parents, who owned a Northern Ontario-based airline called White River Air Services, so I’ve been around planes since I was quite young,” Deluce says. He learned to fly at Toronto Island Airport (now Billy Bishop City Airport) and has been involved with a number of airlines over the years, including Austin Airways and Air Ontario. “I realized that aviation was in my blood and haven’t looked back.”

Deluce saw an opportunity to capitalize on the Toronto City Airport’s lack of scheduled passenger service. “It is one of the best-located urban airports in the world, just minutes from the business and entertainment districts,” he says. “There was an opportunity for us to invest and create a new experience for short-haul flying.” But Deluce had some ideas about how his airline would be different. He felt that the excitement of flying had disappeared, and wanted to make air travel more enjoyable and passenger-friendly. So he made sure that great service and amenities were at the core of the Porter flying experience. “The Porter travel experience is simple, hassle-free and dignified, reflecting the days when flying was fun, exciting and a part of the journey to look forward to.” Porter offer passengers amenities including complimentary beer, wine, and snacks, and extra legroom and premium leather seats. And for business travelers, the lounges have free WiFi and espresso to pass the time before boarding.

Creating a distinct experience was important for Deluce, but so was creating a distinct brand. He invested in a complete brand identity that included color schemes, meal boxes, an in-flight magazine and Mr. Porter, the graphic raccoon mascot. They have a strong advertising presence in each of their markets, but ultimately benefit from the “wow” factor involved with passenger experience. “We benefit from many testimonials and positive word of mouth from passengers because of this,” he says.

Porter’s brand and the flight attendants’ signature pillbox hats have made quite an impression on the Canadian aviation industry. Since the 2006 launch Porter has expanded service beyond their original target of 17 markets. They now fly to Canadian cities including Halifax and Montreal, and U.S. cities including Chicago, NYC and Boston. And the list won’t end there. “We’re always looking at possible new destinations, while weighing the need to continuously improve service to the destinations we already fly to.”

Building the business wasn’t without its bumpy spots. Porter faced some local political challenges, including opposition to a bridge to the island, where the airport is located (there is now a ferry that shuttles passengers across, and Deluce says it’s likely a pedestrian tunnel will be in place by 2012). Add to that the recent recession, and Deluce doesn’t take Porter’s success thus far for granted. “The broader economic uncertainty started in 2008 and impacted everything from government policy to corporate travel and beyond,” Deluce says. “Much of what followed this downturn in the economy created an environment of indecision and retrenchment, but Porter continued moving ahead successfully.”

As an entrepreneur, Deluce stresses the importance of staying true to your original vision. “Make sure you have a solid plan, but don’t be overly restricted by it; make sure that you leave yourself flexibility to take advantage of opportunities as they arise, without straying from your original objectives.” For Deluce, the only direction he plans to move is up. Porter recently bought four new Bombardier Q400 aircraft with an option to purchase six more – this would increase the fleet size to 30. They’re also considering adding destinations including Washington and Philadelphia. Add to that the addition of a new $49 million terminal (which will be completed by the end of the year), and it’s easy to see that despite the challenges it faces from a competitive market, Porter is earning its wings.

—

Noah Godfrey

Ask.Sprouter.com/noahgodfrey

Noah is the co-founder of GigPark, a recommendation service that allows people to discover and share trusted local businesses. GigPark was acquired by CanPages in 2009. Ask him about evaluating growth opportunities.

Shahar Nechmad

Ask.Sprouter.com/nechmads

Shahar is the founder of NuConomy, a leading web analytics and advertising company that was acquired by LIve Person in January 2010. Ask him about raising funding, user-generated content and web analytics.

Scott Rutherford

Ask.Sprouter.com/scottrutherford

Scott is the co-founder of UserVoice, a platform that allows companies to get feedback quickly and easily from their customers. Ask him about building a web startup in Silicon Valley, raising funding, and customer service.

Ryan Kelly

Ask.Sprouter.com/pearanalytics

Ryan is the founder of Pear Analytics, a company that builds search engine optimization tools and software. Ask him about how to drive traffic to your company’s website without spending money on advertising.

Rob Hyndman

Ask.Sprouter.com/rhh

Rob is the founder of Hyndman Law, a technology law firm. Ask him about the creation, structuring, negotiation and implementation of technology transactions and other e-commerce, internet and technology law matters.

Robin Axon

Ask.Sprouter.com/raxon

Robin is a general partner at Mantella Venture Partners, an early-stage fund devoted to building technology companies. He is also a founder of Basecamp Partners, an incubator and accelerator for the development and commercialization of technology innovation. Ask him about any aspect of investment.

Duncan Hill

Ask.Sprouter.com/dhill

Duncan is a general partner at Mantella Venture Partners, an early-stage fund devoted to building technology companies. He founded Think Dynamics, which was acquired by IBM in 2003. Ask Duncan about any aspect of building a technology startup and investment.

As always you can view a full list of experts at Ask.Sprouter.com/experts, and don’t forget to sign up to be notified about our upcoming Celebrity Expert sessions with investor/blogger David Hornik and Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer.

See below for their bios & session times – sign up to be notified at Ask.Sprouter.com/experts.

David Hornik – Ask.Sprouter.com/davidhornik

Live Answers session: Wednesday, August 25th at 1pm EST. Sign up to be notified here.

David Hornik

David’s Bio:

For more than a decade, David has worked with technology startups throughout the software sector.  In 2000, David joined August Capital to invest broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software, as well as consumer facing software and services.

Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group and Perkins Coie. In his legal practice, David represented high tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing, and operations, including the likes of Yahoo!, Evite (Ticketmaster) and Ofoto (Kodak).  Before that, David was a litigator in New York City at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

David has an eclectic educational background. He holds an AB in Computer Music from Stanford University, an M.Phil in Criminology from Cambridge University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

David is currently a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches intellectual property, and the Harvard Law School, where he teaches entrepreneurship and venture capital.  He is the author of VentureBlog, the first venture capital blog, and VentureCast, the first venture capital podcast, and is the founder and executive producer of The Lobby conference, an annual gathering of the thought leaders of the digital media ecosystem.

—

Aaron Patzer – Ask.Sprouter.com/apatzer

Live Answers session: Friday, August 27th at 1pm EST. Sign up to be notified here.

Aaron Patzer

Aaron’s bio:

Aaron is both the visionary and technical mind behind Mint.com, now the leading free, online money management in the US. He designed Mint.com to meet the needs of people who value the immediacy of the web, simplicity and their free time. Prior to founding Mint, Aaron was an architect and technical lead for the San Jose division of Nascentric. Before Nascentric, Aaron worked for IBM and founded two web development and online marketing companies: PWeb and International. Aaron holds an MSEE from Princeton University and a BS in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering from Duke University. He has 10 patents filed or pending. Aaron’s innovation leadership has been recognized by national and international organizations. CNNMoney identified him as one of sixMoney Heroes in the US in 2008, and Inc. magazine included him in a list of the Top 30 US Entrepreneurs under 30. He was named one of just 34 worldwide Tech Pioneers by the World Economic Forum of Davos, Switzerland in 2008. 

—

Get your questions ready for Aaron and David now!

Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer

Balancing your budget may be necessary, but it isn’t usually a source of inspiration. In Aaron Patzer’s case a simple attempt to catch up on personal spending led him to a lightbulb moment. Back in 2005 he was using desktop software to find out how much he spent that month, and on what. “I realized that I was in for an afternoon of tedious accounting-type work: poring over statements, filling in gaps in entries, and categorizing dozens of purchases,” he says. “After a couple of hours, when I couldn’t get that answer I started to wonder if there wasn’t a better way.” Instead of balancing his books that day he began thinking about building what would become Mint.com.

At the beginning he worked alone in a room 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. He paid his first two employees from his savings and once a prototype was ready they secured funding, allowing Patzer to start building a team. “Once I closed my first round of seed funding from First Round Capital, I hired the best people I could find in biz dev, marketing, engineering and product design,” he says. “Knowing we were building a great product that would help millions of people kept me going.” The product finally launched to the public at TechCrunch40 in 2007, and won the competition. Patzer has called that presentation “the most important 7 minutes of my professional life.” Nine months later, in June 2008, the service had already amassed 300,000 users and raised $17 million in capital.

While winning TechCrunch40 gave Mint a lot of exposure in the tech world, Patzer says he owes the initial word of mouth traffic to their personal finance blog, now called MintLife. “We didn’t have any money for writers so we had people write in and talk about their financial disasters, called ‘Train Wreck’ Tuesdays,” he says. “This became very successful because the people talking were not your typical accountants or bank employees, they were everyday people with everyday money struggles.” They created buzz through the blog by having notes that said “Mint revolution is coming” and having readers put a badge on their site or social network so they could receive priority access.

Patzer says that social media and PR buzz are still the main ways Mint.com gets the word out – he spends about 20% of his time doing interviews. MintLife has become one of the top three leading online personal finance blogs and attracts more than one million unique readers per month. “With the informative articles and various infographics/videos it is a means to acquire new users,” he says. Mint also has about 60,000 Twitter followers and almost 60,000 Facebook fans, and Patzer says they continually comment and post about their experiences using the service. “Mint.com has 3.5 million users today and our current success can be attributed to MintLife blog, Twitter/Facebook pages, word of mouth and public relations efforts,” he says.

Solving a common problem has also contributed to Mint’s success. The company provides a free way for people to manage their money online using patent-pending money management software. Users can add their accounts, set savings goals, see where they’re spending their money, and understand how their investments are performing. The company has received many accolades over the years – from being one of Time magazine’s 50 Best Websites in 2008/2009, to winning Webby awards and of course the TechCrunch40 award that kicked off their public launch.

It was in 2009 that Patzer chose to sell the company to Intuit for $170 million, and he cites their resources and ability to scale as the main reasons. “Mint had about 30 employees and with the added resources and larger team that Intuit offers, we will be able to develop the product faster and eventually expand into international markets.” For other entrepreneurs aspiring to such an exit Patzer advises solving a real problem. “When I founded Mint there were a ton of startups in the social networking space, and in streaming music,” he says. “I found something that was a real problem for me and I knew for millions of others, and I solved it.”

Patzer was no stranger to the startup space when he began building Mint. He previously founded two web development and online marketing companies and held positions at Nascentric and IBM. He maintains that his entrepreneurial endeavors really began at 8 years old, when he would build intricate and original K’NEX models and they have his dad sell the designs back to the company. He’s obviously learned a lot through his many endeavors, and says one simple factor contributed to his business success: stone-cold, iron-willed determination. “It is going to be long hours and a lot of hard work, but if you have confidence in your product, you will succeed,” he says.

These days balancing his personal budget is a lot easier, both because of the tool he built and the success he’s found along the way. But when it comes to money, Patzer still describes his spending style as “Über-Frugal” but says he lusts after exotic travel. But regardless of his financial situation Patzer says that he’ll continue to expand Mint, and help people balance their own budgets. “I will continue to innovate to always save people money.”

—

We’re also thrilled to announce the launch of the Sprouter Answers feature, Ask.Sprouter.com. As an entrepreneur when you have a question about running your business it can be difficult to know where to get knowledgeable answers, and our new Answers site allows entrepreneurs to tap into expert knowledge and get real-time answers to those burning questions.

Watch a quick video tour to learn more about our new features, and read on for more info about the changes!

Homepage

The new homepage gives a clearer picture of what Sprouter is and what we have to offer entrepreneurs. The dynamic questions/answers show how entrepreneurs can connect with other startup founders through the Sprouter community, and it showcases our features and initiatives, including our Sprouter Weekly publication and the new Answers site. New members can now sign up for a free account quickly and easily using Twitter and Facebook connect.

Redesigned Sprouter homepage

Community

We’ve kept the features you’ve come to love in the Sprouter community, including Topics, Events, and Filters. But we’ve redesigned your logged-in view to make it easier for you to engage in the community. Your navigation bar is different, with your home page, the Answers section, Events and Topics along the top left. You can see a clear snapshot of your following/follower counts, and access your account settings through the Gear icon. The icons on the top right of your page help you stay on top of all your activity – your private messages, new followers and the questions you’ve had answered in the Answers section.

New logged-in view

New Notifications

Sprouter Answers

We want to make sure that as an entrepreneur you get knowledgeable insight on your burning questions. That’s why we built Sprouter Answers – to connect you with the expertise you need to succeed in your business.

Ask.Sprouter.com hosts a panel of carefully selected entrepreneurship experts who are available on a regular basis to answer questions. Experts are available for live Q&A sessions, and entrepreneurs can also leave them questions when they’re offline. It’s easy to submit your question – either submit it on the Answers homepage and we’ll direct it to the appropriate person, or select a specific entrepreneur from the Experts homepage and ask the question on their profile page. All questions are anonymous, and users are notified when an expert has answered their question.

Since we want to make the site accessible to all entrepreneurs you don’t need to be a Sprouter member to ask a question – simply enter your e-mail address and we’ll notify you when your question has been answered. Existing members can click on the “Answers” tab on their homepage to visit the new Q&A site, and non-members can simply visit Ask.Sprouter.com.

The site is launching with an exciting panel of entrepreneurship experts including renowned entrepreneur and investor Dan Martell, lean product development expert and founder of Flowtown.com; and Ryan Holmes, founder of popular Twitter client Hootsuite.com. See a full list of experts at Ask.Sprouter.com/Experts.

New Sprouter Answers site

Example of an Expert Profile

Q&A Examples

We’re really excited to debut these additions to the Sprouter community, and to connect entrepreneurs everywhere to the expertise and knowledge they need to succeed.

As always we want to hear your feedback on the new features – either leave us a comment on our Get Satisfaction page or e-mail us at support@sprouter.com. Look forward to hearing from you!

The Sprouter Team

Sprouter.com/Sarah

Sprouter.com/Erin

Sprouter.com/Grant

Sprouter.com/Vince

At Sprouter we’ve always been dedicated to listening to the community and making changes and feature additions based on your feedback. That’s why we closely monitor our GetSatisfaction page and respond to every e-mail sent to support@sprouter.com. Community feedback led us to add features like Twitter integration and the Find Your Friends feature, and the response has been great.

Recently we surveyed the community on what you want Sprouter to be – how you use it currently, the changes you’d like to see, and the features that would make it a must-use resource. We’re happy to share that we’ve taken that feedback and incorporated it into the community and some exciting new features that we’ll be debuting next week.

Thanks to everyone who gave their two cents about the Sprouter community – our company is made for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, and we always want to stay true to that vision.

We look forward to your continued feedback as we roll out the changes next week, and we hope you’ll take a minute to invite your peers to join Sprouter and help us spread the word to your networks.

The Sprouter Team

Sprouter.com/sarah

Sprouter.com/erin

Sprouter.com/grant

Sprouter.com/vince

Alexander Straub

Alexander Straub may be in the fashion business now, but he started out doing something less Vogue and more Yellow Pages. In 1996 the German entrepreneur started Mondus, an online B2B marketplace for small and medium-sized enterprises. At the time he was still a PhD engineering student at Oxford University, but soon left to pursue the company full-time. “We left university without a PhD and made Mondus very successful in Europe and the U.S.,” he says. Mondus sold to Seat Pagine Gialle, a European Yellow Pages giant, in 2000 – one of the largest European transactions of its type at the time.

After his Mondus exit Straub became a general partner at Lazard Technology Partners in NYC, and was the lead investor in 20 technology companies. But it was after reading research about developing similarity algorithms for real world objects by Dr. Daniel Heesch that Straub found a new passion – visual search. “My ideas around the subject evolved to build a Google of pictures with relevant links,” he says. It led Straub and Heesch to found Pixsta, a visual search engine.

The company quickly evolved to focus on fashion when the team launched Empora to realize Pixsta’s unique technology. “Fashion lends itself perfectly to the task and I decided to focus on apparel photography as a starting point,” he says. “The quick stock turn in fashion lended itself to apply the technology in this online mega category.” The site is a fashion search engine – users can search thousands of brands and stores at once and filter by price, design, colour, and other factors. The site’s standout feature is the ‘More Like This’ feature. It uses visual search technology to return similar items. “We essentially solved the key issues in online fashion shopping,” Straub says. These include navigation and demand creation via immense choice; coping with painful ‘out of stock’ pages by delivering relevant replacements; and helping users purchase desired items in their price range.

Straub, now Empora’s Executive Chairman, says the challenges he faced while starting Empora are the same as the challenges every other entrepreneur faces when starting a business. They include working with teams within a newly forming large corporation; applying technology and moving it from research papers to applicable code; and capitalizing on build technology. And, of course, introducing a new concept to the market. “Finding markets and consumers to know about this great way to shop fashion visually – 99.9% of the world’s population has not used a visual search engine, however the 0.1% love it. It’s our task to bring it to the remaining 99.9%.”

Straub is no stranger to the acquisition and investment process, but he was recently on the other end of the exit equation when Empora acquired FashionFreaux, a multilingual fashion and design social network, in July. “FashionFreaux are essentially the early influencers,” he says, adding that the site has trendsetting members in over 90 countries. Straub said it’s easy to see how Empora will help the members hone their style. “Each of them will benefit from the fashion search engine to better navigate fashion and decide how to build new real-world style and get product inspiration.” FashionFreaux will use Empora’s search technology to connect its street style content to items available online, while the social network will showcase users on Empora’s street style channel. “We realized that fashion search is about people, product and content,” he says. “Street style is a huge inspiration for any age group and has almost superimposed itself on traditional forms of product display and advertisements.” Next the company will focus on internationalization, capitalizing on their growth and delivering their technology to the world.

Working as an investor and serial entrepreneur means Straub has many words of wisdom for those just starting out. “Go and find great ideas and global ambition. Never give up, always build great teams and find partner you can trust and feel like they are brothers and sisters,” he says. “Anybody else shouldn’t be with you.” And if there’s one thing Straub’s resume advocates, it’s action. “Be action-oriented and know that you are the entrepreneur with the vision to develop the company forward.”

—