The founder of two red Beans: how to promote our development by STARTX accelerator

Where does great entrepreneurial innovation come from? Believing in colleges is a very powerful answer. Whether it is Google, Facebook and other ordinary people familiar with the star company or Sun Micosystem, such as a series of leading companies in the field of technology, they were originally originated from universities. It is true that the university, as a non-profit organization, provides an indispensable soil for the breeding of entrepreneurial projects. From brand to network, and cutting-edge technology and young and energetic entrepreneurial talent, are successful start-up companies need raw materials. On the other side, colleges and universities are actively exploring the way of docking between the academic and the industry, which combines the advantage capital and market resources of the universities in intelligence, technology, human resources and industries, thus creating greater value for the society. In the docking process, a variety of patterns are constantly practiced: for example, in many colleges and universities in the United States, have set up a technical patent office; For example, more and more university business schools and Engineering colleges, design institutes to work together, the practice, technology and traditional business; For example, in this paper, the focus on the non-profit hatching model is the use of their own resources, the establishment of entrepreneurial incubator and accelerator, to help early projects to complete the original formation, implementation and development. As we all know, the private sector incubator and accelerator have long been in the field of science and technology venture capital, the previous article of the Y Combinator and Techstar are very good examples (see: YC and TechStars: Incubator can really touch gold? , and college incubators are becoming more mature in the US, both at MIT and Harvard's Innovation Lab, and at the University of California, Berkeley, Skydeck. They provide resources and support to companies created by students and graduates, but most of them are non-profit organizations that exist to educate students and create social values. In order to obtain first-hand non-profit incubator information, my colleague Zuhuarong to North Plus and two red Bean founder Zhao Q interview. Q's team was the first Chinese team to be selected for the Stanford Accelerator StartX. StartX is one of the best non-profit incubator accelerators in the world. The accelerator does not charge any team fees and shares. Since 2010, 134 start-ups have graduated from STARTX, with an average of 2.1 million dollars per company, and many companies have been acquired by large companies such as Apple,yahoo,linkedin. and Q founded the two Red Bean Network is the largest overseas Chinese dating site, since 2011 on the line, not only the rapid growth of users, covering a number of countries, and "non-interference", "Crème" program has deep cooperation. Two red Bean Chong: Selected startx generally need to have what kind of condition? Q: First of all, the founder team has at least one student, teacher or alumni at Stanford University. My partner, Paul Lo, is a computer department at Stanford University., he was Yaho's engineering and technical director before he started his business, and his professional level was very serious. In addition to the most basic Stanford relationship, STARTX has its own rigorous screening process. Pu: Can you explain in detail how startx is interviewing the entrepreneurial team? Q:startx has two rounds of interviews. The first round is only 10 minutes, mainly to ask some of the most basic questions. The second round is divided into technical interviews and team interviews. Technical interview whether the main team has the ability to realize the East project, the team interview mainly examines the partnership between the founder team. StartX is a very powerful point, is a set of interview questions, the mechanism can be very deep things to ask, many questions will be very sharp, such as if you disagree, arguing, who will make the final decision. Pu: What is the difference between STARTX as a non-profit organization and other general accelerators? Q: First of all, STARTX Select the project is to look at people, not the project itself. StartX the ultimate goal is to help enter the startx of entrepreneurs to succeed, as long as you enter the StartX, then lifelong belong to STARTX members, STARTX will always help you. What's more, I feel a big difference from the other accelerators, which is that STARTX has a special emphasis on a sense of mutual help. From the first day of entering the STARTX, we continue to stress: we are a group of arranges that would help each other and call on everyone to mutual. The whole of Silicon Valley is particularly advocating this culture of mutual help, but it is further strengthened here in STARTX. The 3rd is that STARTX does not take up any of the team's shares, which attracts very good entrepreneurs. If the total amount of corporate finance established after StartX is more than 500,000 U.S. dollars, StartX is willing no question ask, unconditional investment financing of 10%, and will not argue with you any term sheet things, of course, you can also choose not to their investment, very free. This is actually a very smart and effective mechanism, first of all the best candidates to train, and then let other VCs to further screen the project, their own with the vote, save a lot of their own time to judge the project. Pu: Do you have any financing now? Q: In fact, before we entered the STARTX has been a round of angel financing, is the founder of the United States Match.com. Our customers and revenues are growing fast and the cash flow is good and may be considered for the next round in the winter of 2014. This is another feature of StartX, that is, the scale of the project will be very different, there are very early projects, there are relatively mature, and we have a company in the same period even seventy or eighty people, and very profitable. Pu: In my impression, in the United StatesChinese dating is a relatively small market, how does StartX view the market for a start-up project? Q: This is in fact a lot of people of a misunderstanding, the United States here are many segments of the dating site, such as jdate.com dedicated to do the Jewish dating site, Chistianmingle.com is a Christian dating site, ourtime.com for people over 50 years old dating sites, and so on, which jdate.com and we are the most similar, has been listed, and profitable. And our goal is not only to do the U.S. market, our ultimate goal is to connect all the single Chinese overseas, there are a lot of users around the world. So the market in StartX seems to have a broad space. Pu: Can you tell me how startx specifically helps entrepreneurs? Q:startx is a great help to entrepreneurs in many ways. First of all, in terms of resources, STARTX will provide many free services to entrepreneurs. For example, the services of Amazon server worth 25,000 of dollars, and payment, such as the general use of stripe or Braintree This payment service, will charge 3% of the handling fee, STARTX will give you 10,000 dollars of free use, and a free 5000-dollar lawyer service, All these costs add up to a maximum of 100,000 dollars. The second is the interpersonal network, because startx the entire network is very large, if you want to know who, you can ask StartX whether can help you introduce, startx own inside have a similar LinkedIn network system, recorded the community inside all the connections resources. The last is StartX will provide a lot of small and fine courses, when you join STARTX, they will have a lot of interviews, will ask you what the recent difficulties are, what confusion, hope to get from startx here and so on, and then, StartX will put some of the needs of the team together, Invite relevant experts to the team guide, will be more customized. Pu: I heard that STARTX will provide the world's first-class tutor service to the entrepreneur, can you introduce it? Q: This piece is very important, and our greatest harvest was from the mentor. Mentors are free, but they are very much in the way because they have a very strict feedback mechanism, and if the entrepreneur is dissatisfied with the mentor, then the mentor won't be able to do it. There are about three mentors: first, each team will assign a formal mentor, a weekly meeting, a meeting time of about one hours to two hours, mainly to discuss the team's own problems, can be a very detailed problem. The mentor's choice is to use a quick match to match the team and mentor, according to the two sides of their own preferences, to conduct a two-way selection. The second mentor is the relatively loose sort of mentor match, called Founder's board, where each team is equipped with four to five, and any questions can be discussed, but the problemThere are no special details because they don't work as well with you as a formal mentor, and many times it's only a few weeks, but it also gives you a lot of advice and networking resources. The third type is expert service. StartX has a number of specialized technical experts, design experts, psychologists, public experts and so on, you have problems can always find them to make an appointment, to their advice. Their mentors are really strong, plus other good services, we've had a 50% increase in revenue over the startx three months. Pu: You've been creating two red beans for three years, what challenges have you faced in the past three years, and how do you overcome them? What do you want to share with other entrepreneurs? Q: There are many challenges to meet (laughter). One of them is when I start a business, basic website programming is not how to, is to learn to use first, but the site I and my partner at that time only spent three months to do it, I basically write more than 10 hours a day code, only sleep 4.5 hours, but at that time did not feel tired, but in a state of extreme excitement, So the entrepreneurial must do their own passion. Another is that the site was released for a while, and my first partner didn't do it, from the front-end technology, back-end, marketing to PR, I have done this site for six months, a period of time has a strong sense of loneliness, the whole person's state is not good, but still boil over, found the current partner, So entrepreneurs must be able to endure the loneliness. Pu: What is the core value and culture that your team is advocating? Q: The first is customer first, our letter to customers are basically within four hours of reply, and we through their own algorithm and the user's report, identify and shield those who have problems, the construction of a trust and security of marriage and friendship environment, this is our most valued. The second is the ego drive, because we are a start-up company, so we particularly want to recruit those who have the same entrepreneurial ideas, such people who work most motivated. The third is to allow mistakes, I like to let others do things, do not do too much interference, and allow others to make mistakes, mistakes is a learning process. Four is the sunlight is transparent, I this personal character is forthright, does not like to beat around the bush, anything will and all people say, such communication efficiency is also very high, we emphasize "be yourself" work atmosphere. Finally, data-driven, many times, our team will be due to the details of a product debate, everyone has their own subjective ideas, as a focus on data analysis of the Internet companies, we end up with objective data as the basis for final decision. As we can see from Q's Talk, the nonprofit incubator in colleges and universities has its own unique advantages in integrating resources and helping and developing the start-up companies. As a non-profit start-up platform, we are also experimenting with different incubation acceleration models in the hope of helping and serving the entrepreneurial teams in Los Angeles and even Southern California. The +u nonprofit incubation project, which will be launched recently, isIs our new round of exploration and experimentation. And StartX's successful operation and development experience undoubtedly gives us important inspiration and encouragement. Believe that not only is the general creation, its experience and try to the domestic university's integration of its own resources, support the development of new technology and entrepreneurial projects, are a good revelation.