The Startup Battlefield competition at our Disrupt events is like a mini startup school. The dozens of chosen startups that go through the Battlefield training process end up with solid presentation skills, hard-earned pitching prowess and newfound courage.

And also, lots of public visibility, which is great for getting users, hiring top employees and luring clients and investors.

The Battlefield has gone so well that our current staff has been getting overwhelmed by the record number of applications. We need help, so we’re creating a new position called the Battlefield Editor.

We’re looking for a bright, talented person to help manage the entire process, from bringing in applicants to picking the 30 finalists and getting them ready for the Disrupt stages in San Francisco, New York and, this year’s addition, Berlin. In this position, you’ll also get to give out a huge trophy and a big cardboard check for $50,000 to one lucky startup, as they debut to the media and the investor world. Battlefield winners and finalists have included huge success stories like Mint and Yammer among others.

Are you already in the Startup Whisperer role at a popular accelerator and think you can take your show on the road? Read TC every day, just finished your MBA and want a more meaningful job than McKinsey? Can you find the Next Big Thing? Send your resume and a letter explaining your interest here.

Job Description

TechCrunch is looking for someone to oversee the Startup Battlefield process in all its phases — including applicant recruitment, applicant review and final selection (working under the direction of TC’s co-editors), finalist training and rehearsals, and finally stage management at Disrupt. The role’s title is Battlefield Editor. In addition to those responsibilities, the role will focus on expanding our network of angels, incubators, VCs and accelerators to recruit a stronger pool of Battlefield applicants, strengthening our rehearsal program, and developing the Battlefield franchise, both online and offline, for applicants and alums.

The role requires a strong writer who can post on TechCrunch about Battlefield matters, as well as manage many threads of communication with the many parties who make up the Battlefield. The core of the job is a strong ability to work with relatively green, unlaunched startups and prepare them to present brilliantly on the TC Disrupt stage before a group of highly distinguished judges. That preparation process takes enormous focus and commitment. Beyond that core requirement, the role will also work to help expand the Battlefield franchise in a variety of ways, including improved ties with Battlefield alums.

Candidates should have deep experience in the Silicon Valley startup world and direct experience working with startups and investors to help shape new ideas and prepare them to pitch investors. They should possess very strong personal and written communication skills, outstanding organizational skills, a high capacity for detail work, and a very patient and winning attitude.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week, representatives of many of the world’s leading cities – including London, Boston, Mexico City, Barcelona and Christchurch – came to San Francisco to learn from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs about how to make their cities smarter. One of the people behind this LLGA Cities Summit was the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, formerly the chairman of Technorati and now one of the world’s leading pioneers of smart cities.

Citing innovative urban data startups like MotionLoft and QuickPay, Hirshberg believes there are now huge opportunities for entrepreneurs with products that can make a city smarter. We are just at the beginning of this thing, he told me, before explaining that the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities lie in the development of crime, healthcare and traffic data – particularly in terms of making this data “predictive”.

But smart cities are about more than just making money, Hirshberg believes. In the Sixties being a citizen meant we protested, he told me, while today the good citizen builds APIs that make a city more habitable. And that’s why, he insists, we have to make what he calls “smart architectural decisions” to enable the right level of anonymity in the 21st century city. Otherwise, he warns, the smart city of the future will be too smart about all of us, thereby destroying the privacy of its citizens.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Troy Carter is one incredibly interesting guy. As Lady Gaga’s manager, a tech company co-founder, and an investor in companies like Uber, Votizen, and Summly, he sits in a particular unique seat at the crossroads of Hollywood and the Silicon Valley.

Troy shared all kinds of knowledge in an interview at Disrupt NY 2013 this morning, largely focusing on one belief: if your product is no good, getting a celebrity involved won’t help anyone.

This comes, of course, as the trend of getting celebrities involved in tech projects (either as investors or featured users) is at an all-time high. Will.i.am invested in Airtime. Justin Timberlake is trying to fix Myspace. Ashton Kutcher has put cash into dozens of companies. The list goes on and on (and on).

Here’s the gist of what Troy had to say on the topic:

When people started coming to us about getting involved, they started by just asking ‘Can you get your client to tweet about this?’

Thats the wrong approach. A celebrity can’t add rocket fuel to a bad product.

Troy isn’t saying that celebrity involvement is inherently bad, of course. You just need to pair carefully, and play to the strengths of both the startup and the celeb:

You can’t just use a celebrity for the sake of celebrity. You have to have a clear strategy for the product, and know exactly what sort of audience you want to reach

As for what Troy says celebrities can actually bring to the table: it’s all about the audience. In fact, the differing types of audiences between actors and musicians leads Troy to think that musicians might actually be better to bring on board:

This dedicated audience is one of the things that musicians have that differs from actors. Actors play different characters, so you have to build a new base around each new movie — with few exceptions, most actors don’t have a fan base that just follows them around. With musicians, the fan base just goes everywhere they go.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon is pulling a Netflix today, in the sense that it’s now touting the release of its original programming as the “most watched” TV shows on the Amazon Video service since launch on Friday. Netflix previously issued the same statement about its original show, “House of Cards.” But it’s not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, here. When Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos said that its new political thriller was the most-watched piece of content on the site, it was a few weeks after its release, not days.

It was also more remarkable because, in Netflix’s case, it was a single series, as opposed to a collection of content that includes more than half a dozen comedy pilots and six other children’s shows. Plus, Netflix’s content library includes many more blockbuster titles and big-name TV shows for an unknown property like “House of Cards” to compete with, again making Netflix’s news, generally speaking, a “bigger deal.”

That being said, count me in as one of those who took some time this weekend to peruse some of what Amazon Originals had to offer. (Hey, New Year’s Resolutions, remember?)

I didn’t get through much, to be honest – just the pilot of the Silicon Valley-based “Betas,” which you may find yourself either loving or hating. The series is well-liked on Amazon so far, with 4.4 out of 5 stars – and I can certainly confirm it’s a step up from Bravo’s reality show about startups. Still, it’s rough to watch and downright awkward at times, as it turns stereotypical ideas about startup culture and young founders into fodder for humor – like when the hot girl at the bar broadly refers to all these startup types as “aspeys” - apparently shorthand for those without social skills.

It portrays one of the characters as precisely that, too. He often drops pronouns when he talks for some odd reason, and basically loses it while others in the shared workspace engage in some sort of Nerf gun war as he’s trying to work.

Oh, ha ha.

But there are some funny moments as well, some of which are a bit too NSFW to describe here. (Check out Moby’s cameo, for example).

And…I’ll leave it at that.

In terms of the children’s shows, it was much harder to get a feel for them, as the ones we watched were decidedly unfinished works. Cartoons were not animated, Jim Henson’s puppet show was barely puppeted and so on.

In testing these, ahem yes – I secretly replaced my toddler’s iPad with a Kindle Fire and watched for her response – she actually seemed well-enough entertained with the selection, though she got bored with Tumbleleaf (which I found too treacly, to be honest). She enjoyed Teeny Tiny Dogs for a bit, and really enjoyed Sara Solves It, likely for its now-familiar style mimicking much of today’s educational programming for kids, where problems to solve are integrated into the shows’ story lines.

Amazon has taken a different route with its original programming. Instead of funding the development of shows outright, it has left the greenlighting option in the hands of consumers, saying that it will determine which pilots are picked up based on user feedback.

But with news that the shows made up 8 out of 10 of the most streamed episodes across the video service over the weekend, and that thousands of customer reviews have led to more than 80 percent of ratings reaching 4 or 5 stars, it may be difficult for Amazon to say no to any of the new programs.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is announcing another major win for its powerhouse of talent—— Ken Coleman, enterprise tech veteran, is joining the firm as a Special Advisor. Coleman is a Silicon Valley pioneer and former chairman/CEO of ITM Software, and a trusted mentor to countless IT companies and entrepreneurs, including the firm’s founder Ben Horowitz. Coleman joins fellow special advisors, former Washington D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers at the firm.

Coleman has vast experience as an executive at some of the early technology pioneers in Silicon Valley. He is currently the chairman of publicly traded Accelrys, the developer of a scientific enterprise software for lifecycle management. Coleman was also the founder of ITM Software Corporation, an enterprise software company for which he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer from 2001 to 2006.

Previously, from 1987 until 2001, Coleman was a senior executive in Sales, Services and Marketing, at Silicon Graphics, which Horowitz calls the Google of its day. Prior to joining Silicon Graphics, Coleman was Vice President of Product Development at Activision. He is also member of the Board of Directors of MIPS Technologies, Inc., a licensor of microprocessor architecture, United Online, an Internet service provider, and City National Bank, a commercial banking institution.

It was at Silicon Graphics where Coleman became Horowitz’ own mentor. Coleman actually hired Horowitz out of college for a summer internship that ended up being Horowitz’ first job in Silicon Valley. The rest of his career was deeply shaped by his experience at Silicon Graphics and the mentorship Coleman provided, explains Horowitz in an interview. “He taught me everything I know,” he says.

For the firm’s portfolio companies, Coleman will help CEOs navigate the many challenges that CEOs face at all stages of growing a company, and developing a billion dollar business. While the former executive has considerable experience in enterprise technologies, he will be advising a broad spectrum of startups in various industries, including consumer.

The value add of bringing Coleman on is multi-fold, says Horowitz. Coleman understands the process of starting something from nothing, as well as being able to scale a startup into a business and then build upon that.

Coleman tells us, “I can help startups get through many phases of growth. For example, when a company wants to go from $50 million in revenue to $100 million in sales, the structure and people have to change. I have lived through these growth changes.”

He adds that he’s especially excited about being part of the Andreessen Horowitz team, and the ethos that the firm promotes in helping founders build great businesses.

There’s no doubt that Andreessen Horowitz is a network within the firm with each hire it makes. The firm recently added Chris Dixon as an investment partner, and brought on Twitter marketing exec Elizabeth Weil to help portfolio companies with business development and marketing strategies. Special advisors expand on this network as well.

“We modeled Ron Conway, Ken Coleman and Michael Ovitz in creating a valuable network for entrepreneurs,” Horowitz says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On Friday, veteran journalist Bill Moyers did a segment on Silicon Valley that gives a very different perspective than we get from most mainstream media coverage of the world-renowned tech industry hub, and it’s been fueling some good conversations this weekend.

Called “Homeless in High Tech’s Shadow,” it’s a very interesting look at the growing homeless problem in the South Bay of San Francisco that’s happening in stark contrast to the growing wealth in the same area. Instead of another breathless look at the Google cafeteria that offers free gourmet food for all employees, we meet a former worker in that same cafeteria who was laid off as the company tightened its hiring policies and is now living in a tent. Instead of gleaming footage of the high-tech machinery that produces silicon wafers, we meet a former National Semiconductor employee who is now homeless at the age of 54 with “nothing” to her name.

It’s a visual look at what the Associated Press reported last month in an article about Silicon Valley’s wealth disparity:

“Food stamp participation just hit a 10-year high, homelessness rose 20 percent in two years, and the average income for Hispanics, who make up one in four Silicon Valley residents, fell to a new low of about $19,000 a year— capping a steady 14 percent drop over the past five years”

The Moyers piece argues that the offshoring of tech manufacturing has played a big part in this current situation. While the issue of homelessness and wealth disparity is very complex, and the people profiled here may have more issues at play than the losing of their jobs, it’s hard to deny that the loss of middle-class type manufacturing jobs has an impact on the US. It’s interesting to see how Silicon Valley is no exception, despite how sunny the general economic outlook here is.

Again, it’s hard to get a comprehensive picture of all that’s happening in a six minute video — for instance, a small but significant light at the end of the tunnel could be the growing “Maker movement” taking hold in tech and beyond, and that’s one key thing that Moyers’ segment does not mention. But in all it’s a very well done look at an issue that often goes unseen.

Either way, it’s something you should watch — it’s all in the video embedded above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Finally, our secret is out. Today, Deborah Perry Piscione’s much anticipated new book Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Can Learn From The Innovation Capital Of The World is being published. As Piscione told me, the real secret of Silicon Valley lies in our absence of hierarchy.

In contrast with New York, she told me, Silicon Valley is obsessed with “ideas” rather than with “greed” or “power”. And this love of ideas, Piscione insists, is why it’s the west rather than the east coast that is really driving innovation in the United States. I’m guessing that not everyone – particularly those up and down the eastern seaboard – will agree with Piscione. So expect Secrets of Silicon Valley to spark a much-needed national conversation about how best to innovate in an economy in which too many executives still crave stability and fear change.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There has been a lot of buzz about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which made its chart-topping debut in bookstores on March 11th.

Many reporters, thought leaders and others have weighed in on the book and the larger movement being born out of it, especially from established women in Sandberg’s generation and above, and that’s been fascinating to watch.

But we at TechCrunch wanted to hear from a different perspective. So we assembled a small group of Generation Y women who are part of the Silicon Valley’s rising new guard — people that are arguably the perfect target audience to hear and respond to Sandberg’s message that women should “lean in” to their careers even as they start to think about building their own families and personal lives.

It was a big honor to be joined in the TechCrunch TV studio this week by four very accomplished women for an in-depth discussion of Lean In: Leah Busque, the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, the startup that has built a platform for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; Ashley Mayer, the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm Box; Megan Quinn, the Google and Square alum who last year made the leap into the venture capital world as a partner at Kleiner Perkins; and Pooja Sankar, the Stanford MBA and former Facebook engineer who is now the founder and CEO of educational Q&A platform Piazza.

We’ve split our discussion into four parts and in this first segment, we talk about the element of fear that Sandberg describes as one of the primary barriers women face when leaning into their careers.

Sandberg writes in the book:

“Fear is at the root of so many barriers women face….Without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment—and freely choose one, or the other, or both.”

Tune in above to see whether we agreed with Sandberg’s thoughts on fear and how we’ve confronted fear in our own careers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners. Follow him on Twitter @glennkelman.

At a recent wedding in San Francisco, a friend who runs engineering for a successful, pre-IPO company started talking about a member of the latest generation of newly minted millionaires. This acquaintance of ours had started one company and then, before that company had ever made money, sold a big stake to a venture investor, only to start another company in the same area.

“Has he even done anything yet?” my friend said and then, looking around, “When did that stop being a requirement?”

This wasn’t jealousy. Silicon Valley has always showered so much money on the deserving and undeserving that it would be hard for any one of us to say which group we ourselves belonged to. But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.

Today, not shipping pays pretty well. Five years after Peter Thiel said the simplest predictor of a startup’s success is whether a founding CEO pays herself less than $100,000 – $125,000 per year, the typical founder of a company that hasn’t yet released its first product earns, according to private salary surveys, nearly $200,000 per year.

And that’s just the beginning. Until the advent of secondary sales a few years ago at companies like Groupon and Zynga, where key employees get cashed out early by venture capitalists, you had to wait till your company got bought or went public, because the investors wanted to make sure you didn’t make money before they did.

Now, of course, you can cash out as soon as the startup has made any significant progress. The rationale has been that this relieves pressure on the company to sell out prematurely, giving the early folks enough money to live well while they build their company for long-term greatness. But many just quit. How many startups would be doing better now if all their early people still had to work there for a big payday?

The broader trend of generally increasing pay, at least for young engineers, has had even more profound consequences on Silicon Valley’s culture. Before most computer science graduates ever walk across a stage to get their diplomas, they’re set for life. This is especially true in 2013, which will be the first year in which most companies pay top engineering graduates in Silicon Valley $100,000 or more per year in salary.

young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.

For the companies, for Redfin, the engineers are worth every penny. And for the engineers, the money is nice to have. But how many engineers hired from Stanford or Berkeley in the past year will ever feel the savage need to make something happen, to bust out of the matrix, to push the limits of their abilities?

The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses. Many now remind me of middle-aged men, collecting expensive Scotch or taking up John-Kerry hobbies like kite-surfing and racecar-driving at the age of 24.

What changes these folks isn’t just the money. It’s the cosseting, which can permeate the most minute interactions between engineers and their mentors. If you as a manager have spent all day wooing new hires, you aren’t likely to turn around and tell a young engineer on your team how much more she is capable of, even if this is just what she needs to hear.

This is why Silicon Valley’s War for Talent hasn’t always been good for the talent. After all, the only way to get much better at your craft is to be challenged in ways that make you uncomfortable. Yet not many people in high technology are uncomfortable these days.

The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business. In the recent laments against the proliferation of amateur-engineers, Ph.D. programs are often cited as the solution, but the true training ground for software’s elite has always been a high-performance startup.

When I came to Silicon Valley, I came for the boot camp, I longed to be broken and built back up bigger, better and faster. I earned $32,000 per year in my first job at a San Francisco startup; adjusting for inflation, this is still less than $50,000.

Almost every day, our head of products gave me the best advice a young person can get: “Just go figure it out.” If I’d told him terrorists had taken over the men’s bathroom, he’d have said the same thing. I took on the challenges he gave me for many reasons, but the inescapable one was that I needed a raise.

Our CEO at the time liked to swing by my desk and say “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. God help you if you’re that link.” Whenever I wanted to show him one of my projects, he liked to stop me at the threshold of his office to ask, “Wait… Is it sweet?” And then, because it often wasn’t quite sweet enough, I usually turned around right there.

My first year at that startup was the most harrowing of my life. But it also made me resourceful and tough, which is probably the most underrated quality of an entrepreneur. After a life of all A’s for often-mediocre work, it gave me high standards. It was just what I needed when I later co-founded my own company.

None of that would have happened if my startup had been like lotus land. But now many startups are.The perks offered by profitable, public technology companies such as Google are well-known; what’s new in the past few years is the emergence of the private, venture-funded company that offers yoga classes, on-site haircuts, a chiropractor, massages, laundry and dry-cleaning, as well as “an executive chef who prepares local, organic meals, available for dining at the office or to go.”

I’ve been asked about the same perks at Redfin. We want the absolute best talent, so of course our pay is competitive; we cater lunches, and our offices are pretty nice. But the problem I have with perks isn’t just the money; it’s the symbolism. After all, when evaluating a Redfin job applicant one of the big questions I’m trying to answer is “when did she do something hard?”

It could be something you put yourself through for fun like running a marathon or far more serious like fighting in a war. It could be the grinding repetition of preparing for a piano recital or the grit required to dig ditches or paint houses for a living. It could be raising a child all by yourself.

Maybe some of these examples sound preposterous to you, but they’re what the rest of America does every day. Looking for candidates who have visited that hard place in themselves at one point in their life isn’t some Marxist fantasy of mine. It’s how capitalism works best.

Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet. Products don’t just walk out the door on their own. Sooner or later, to ship something amazing, you have to dig deep and bring out your beast. A horse running wild is a rare sight, but it takes your breath away every time.

[Image: The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope (detail) by Henri Rousseau]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham just published a blog post suggesting a new way to handle handshake deals, i.e. verbal commitments for investments and other transactions.

That kind of commitment can be a necessary prelude to a more formal agreement. Graham writes: “Things can happen fast in the startup world … so both investors and founders need a way to reserve space in a transaction.” However, he notes that these deals also fall through:

Handshake deals are not unique to Silicon Valley of course. They tend to arise wherever trust is sufficiently high and speed is sufficiently important. Diamond dealers apparently use them a lot.

Unfortunately, things don’t work as smoothly in Silicon Valley as among diamond dealers. This is not a closed community of pros who deal with one another day after day. Many participants in the funding market are noobs, and some are dishonest.

To try to avoid confusion, or at least to clarify who is at fault when a deal falls through, Graham is proposing “the handshake deal protocol.” It starts with a concrete offer, with an amount to be invested, a valuation or valuation cap, and an optional discount, followed by these steps:

1. The investor says “I’m in for .”
2. The startup says “Ok, you’re in for .”
3. The startup sends the investor an email or text message saying “This is to confirm you’re in for .”
4. The investor replies “yes.”

Didn’t follow the steps? Then you don’t have a handshake deal. Graham said that the Y Combinator team is starting to implement this, and that he’s hoping it spreads throughout the Valley.

To me, it seems very Silicon Valley to try to standardize an informal process. It sounds like some investors benefit from that ambiguity, so individual entrepreneurs might not have the power to resist. YC, on the other hand, could make a difference. By creating a clear process and a (digital) paper trail, the incubator can now track whether investors are breaking their verbal agreements, and if they are, those investors might find that they’re no longer as welcome at Demo Day.

And some investors may just be glad that the protocol doesn’t involve any real handshakes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch