ABOVE: Barry and I are already worrying about how they are ever going to get the spray-on-snow off all that glass!
ABOVE: Yep, the clock is still ticking! This may seem like plenty of time but I am now mentally making adjustments. We must take off the weekends and adjust for the 14 days we are home for the Christmas break! Jon has announced that he is going to adjust the clock to increase the pressure some more. Arghh!
ABOVE: Horray! For my birthday I got a pair of noise-cancelling headphones from my beautiful (patient, understanding, amazing, hard-working) wife Emma and a bottle of gin from the guys. I must confess that was at the end of the week, the gin bottle still remains unopened! I am sure we will get around to trying it one evening but right now there is just too much clear thinking left to do.
This week was all about the final round of mentor meetings - 35-40 mentors during the week. This time there was a bigger bias towards VCs. Focus is important in any business, especially one like Rainbird which is a powerful platform with traction in most sectors. We started the week certain that we needed to focus but still unsure where. The week ended with much more clarity where we stand (more on that soon).
The mentor process really is invaluable, although Mentor Fatigue is a very real condition. Each mentor comes in for a single morning where as we do this for 10 days. It is harder to sound as excited at the end as you were on your first encounter - but this is an important skill to master! These are all dynamic, successful people who are being very generous with their time - and we appreciated meeting them all.
They were pretty much all helpful, although is not always always obvious who will add the most value until you actually meet.
Mentoring is at the heart of Techstars. It is a golden opportunity to be able to position your business to someone new, every 20 mins, every morning - for a week - and then another week - adjusting as you go. It drives the thinking, delivers clarity (despite the conflicting advice) and helps you to gain confidence around your model.
The real take-away for me was this: Most mentors will not tell you what you should do. They will challenge you and make you focus on what matters. Perhaps most importantly for us, they made us think about what sort of company we wanted to be. You have to decide yourselves.
ABOVE: 20 minutes goes in a heart-beat. You have to be careful not to talk too fast but the most important thing is to listen.
ABOVE: This was the healthiest breakfast of the week - porridge with seeds and blueberries. I did lapse from time to time and grab the occasional bacon roll, but the porridge really helps keep the energy up!
ABOVE: On Wednesday, some of the team went to a networking event at the Emirates Stadium to watch the football. Not being into football (Dom asked if that was the game with the round ball) Dom, Ben and I stayed at the office and worked until midnight. I continued to work on the new website while Ben and Dom made some really significant changes to Rainbird's core inference engine. The work is really significant and makes Rainbird much faster and more powerful. It enables us to support all types of data and will make connecting to external large data services easier. This was a really important breakthrough and the refactoring should be done in a week.
ABOVE: Thursday again involved us sitting in a circle (note the virtual cohort member on the left) as we each went through our highs and lows for the week. This week's Founder's Story was Duedil CEO and founder Damian Kimmelman. He has an amazing story and he is a fantastically honest and compelling presenter.
So, after Friday's final session of mentors, week four is over. Sometimes it feels like we have been here for four months, and at other times - just four days. Time distorts at Techstars.
ABOVE: On the train back home writing this blog (yes, this is an arm-bending selfie!).
