The annual Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration does not just energize and educate Cornell’s aspiring student entrepreneurs, it also gives highly accomplished entrepreneurial alumni an opportunity to come back and share their journey. The celebratory event held on Cornell’s Ithaca campus, April 14-15, included a startup showcase, tours of Cornell’s eHubs, Cornell Venture Challenge Finalist presentations, keynote speeches, and panel discussions. Leland Pillsbury was honored as Cornell’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2016.
This year alumna and serial entrepreneur Susan Danziger gave one of the keynote talks during which she shared insight gained from a career of building successful ventures.
Danziger’s most recent venture Ziggeo is “the leading asynchronous recorded video technology” that Danziger describes as a simple way to capture video from an audience, a community, or customers. Her prior ventures include Fox Meadow Media that connected international authors with publishers, DailyLit, the first books on phone read via serialized installment, and a number of women’s networks.
Drawing upon her experience in those multiple ventures, Danziger laid out three key talking points that she titled: “launching a C+ startup”, “making a deal with the devil”, and “reaching the magic number 30 every single day”.
“To be a successful entrepreneur, I had to unlearn a lot of what I learned at Cornell. I had to learn that I didn’t want to launch an A+ startup. My goal was to launch a C+ startup,” said Danziger.
While perfectionism served her well at Cornell, Danziger realized that perfectionism is actually contrary to a key tenet of starting a venture—which is to first develop a minimal viable product, or MVP. MVP, as explained by Danziger, enables an entrepreneur to launch something very basic in order to quickly learn if there is customer interest. She cited her experience in her first company DailyLit, in which she had no idea if others valued being able to read books by phone. This service was launched ahead of the Kindle, so it was a very innovative idea at the time. She began the service by offering just two book titles to assess customer interest.
“We could easily have spent years in our basement creating the perfect site with lots of different features imagining what people would want, and launching books that we thought people would want to read. But instead we launched a really simple site. It did not take us that long and then we could get feedback and iterate on it.”
Having more precise information about customer preferences enabled Danziger to incorporate some features sooner– such as when they wanted the next installment in a series. The MVP methodology and what Danziger terms her “C+ methodology” saves valuable time and money. The latter can be applied in a variety of ways, according to Danziger.
“Not only in startups, but in general, we also realized that the C+ mentality extended to the business model. You try something to see if it works, if it doesn’t you try something else … and also with ad campaigns.” Danziger sees trial and error and adaptability as a great approach in a business, whether large or small.
Danziger’s final talking point addressed the pros and cons of venture capital funding.
“In the media, startups are glorified when they raise venture capital. You see they are getting into fabulous offices…They have the ping pong table…You see the founders jetting around the world,” Danziger stated. But she explained further that there was a “flip side of that”.
“I believe as you take money, you should do it consciously and know that you may in fact, be making a deal with the devil,” she cautioned.
She acknowledged that venture capitalists are often “the smartest people in the room” – they know the competition, potential partners and customers. But she wanted the audience to understand that self –funding is an attractive alternative and she and her co-founder gave great consideration to the vc funding path that they felt would take away some of their independence.
“We had a great life up until then. We could make our own decisions, call our own shots. We weren’t beholden to anyone…All of that would change taking VC money because, all of a sudden, you are accountable to your investors.” Providing reports to their investors would be on additional stress on Danziger and her team.
“I wanted the luxury of being able to prove our business model in the time that we wanted,” she explained about her decision to not take VC money for Ziggeo. She had some family priorities at the time. She also noted to the audience that Spanx, founded by Sara Blakely, became a billion dollar company without taking VC money. VC funding is not a requisite for great success, according to Danziger.
“Make a conscious decision to whether you absolutely need or want the money,” somewhat qualifying her cautionary advice – also asserting that she is not saying “not to take money.” In fact, she encouraged those starting out to have meetings with investors because of the experience and valuable network they bring. Their other portfolio companies potentially could be partners or customers.
To fund Ziggeo she came up with creative ways to develop the startup instead of taking outside funding. Through her network she came in contact with her future co-founder, and she bartered living space in her basement in exchange for programming. That was how she completed the first iteration of Ziggeo, and also brought her co-founder on board.
“Using creativity you can go a long way. Giving you time to figure out your business model and running your startup without making a deal with the devil,” summed up Danziger.
Her third and final point addressed the critical importance of networking that often brings valuable contacts to the startup. She shared her personal strategy for networking.
“I always have a notebook with me… and I make it a point every single day of reaching 30 points of contact. And those points of contact are not necessarily 30 different people. It might be somebody I meet today. It might be a follow up note to the same person. It may be somebody from my childhood or that I knew from Cornell. But each day I have to reach 30.”
Danziger achieves this ambitious daily goal through a variety of activities. She uses online groups such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and also arranges various events to meet people and then sometimes creates a network among them. On this day, it included addressing an audience of a few hundred at Cornell and encouraging them to connect with her via Twitter, @susandanziger. She promised to connect back.
