We Make a Living Caring About Your Company
Last week, at Ultra Light Startups‘ January Entrepreneur’s Forum Managing Director Todd Barrish of LaunchSquad’s New York office, joined Rachel Honig of G.S. Schwartz & Co, Karl Schmieder of MessagingLab and Lloyd Trufelman of Trylon SMR for a panel about “PR, Branding and Buzz.”
Moderated by BizBriefs‘ John Adams, the panelists tackled strategies for startups that included what to look for when hiring an agency to DIY tips. Ultra light startups face the unique challenge of building themselves and their image from the ground up, which can make navigating public relations especially tricky. Graham Lawlor, Ultra Light Startup founder, noted that “PR clearly is something important to know about if you’re an ultra light startup” and just launching whether on your own or through an agency.
Barrish introduced LaunchSquad noting that “we make a living caring about your company,” emphasizing that public relations — whether for a young startup or a mature brand — is ultimately about creating a unique, intriguing story, understanding your business model and distributing your story in a targeted, strategic manner.
Offering advice to the entrepreneurs, Barrish noted the importance of creating a consistent, compelling story that can be carried across markets. “The first thing you can do as a small company is create that message and understand how you’re talking about yourself to your multiple audiences.”
The Ultra Light Startups’ Entrepreneurs Forum is a monthly meetup of about 100 entrepreneurs to participate in discussions of interest to individuals starting lightweight tech ventures. The meetings feature 60-second elevator pitch introductions from the attending entrepreneurs followed by pizza and networking and an interactive panel discussion.
Watch the panel in its entirety here:
Trekking Around With First Round
First Round Capital recently organized their first NYC Startup Trek, in part to commemorate the opening of their New York office this quarter and also explore the city’s incubator and co-working spaces. Partners from the early stage venture capital firm, which has already made investments in over a dozen NY-based companies, set out to meet with entrepreneurs and startups in their natural habitats to hear their ideas and discuss questions about technology, community, and investment. A couple of us out of LaunchSquad NY joined the trek and orchestrated some publicity around the event.
The day started at the NYU Poly Incubator at 160 Varick and followed with visits to Sunshine Suites, TechSpaces, New Work City and The Incubator at Rose Tech Ventures – a total of 8 different spaces throughout the day. What resonated most about the trek was the attitude towards First Round – many of the over 100 companies we visited were surprised and delighted at FRC’s grassroots approach to make themselves more available and approachable, seeking out the City’s most promising startups where they already are.
The trek ended at last week’s monthly New York Tech Meetup, where Charlie O’Donnell, FRC’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence, got up on stage for a few minutes to talk about the trek and play this video that we put together:
Read more of the great coverage in the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch blog, CenterNetworks, and Charlie’s personal blog.
For background info on First Round Capital from Managing Partner Josh Kopelman, check out this video from Allen Stern:
Mochi Media acquired by Shanda Games
As the Internet evolves as a platform for both casual and console-quality games, tools like those that LaunchSquad client Mochi Media provides to help analyze and monetize these games are becoming tremendously valuable. That’s why Shanda Games, China’s largest operator of multi-player online role-playing games, announced today that they will acquire Mochi.
Mochi Media has been at the forefront of providing game developers tools to track distribution and usage analytics, enable version control and live updates to distributed games, and provide monetization via micro-transactions and real-time insertion of pre-game and in-game ads. As a result, the company’s network of games grew by leaps and bounds and now reaches more than 100 million people each month.
We’re thrilled for founders Jameson Hsu and Bob Ippolito, marketing gurus Josh Larson and Ada Chen, and the unbelievable Mochi team. The company will continue to operate as a separate brand developing the same products and services for developers, publishers and advertisers as before. But they’ll have a much deeper well of experience and technology to draw on as they continue to evolve our offerings as well as create new ones.
Keep a close eye on Mochi and this space, the opportunity is massive and we’ve only scratched the surface on how it will be addressed.