Bill Aulet introducing
Charlie and Brad Feld at MIT

The Calloway Way: Results and Integrity -- Fireside chat with author Charlie Feld at MIT Sloan

Last week it was a pleasure to sit in an auditorium full of MIT Sloan students who love everything about leadership and know their tech down cold. Brad Feld, the TechStars founder, and mega-entrepreneur is a rock star in this crowd. He was in Cambridge to host a fireside chat introducing his uncle Charlie Feld’s new book on the legendary leader, Wayne Calloway, called The Calloway Way; Results & Integrity.

Wayne Calloway joined Frito-Lay in 1967, stepping up to CEO in 1976. After this he was PepsiCo’s CEO from 1986 to the mid-1990’s. The book’s foreword was written by current PepsiCo CEO, Indra K. Nooyi demonstrating how high female talent has risen since the Madmen days when Calloway ran the company.

In the book, CEO Nooyi explains how fortunate she was to have worked at Pepsi when Calloway was there and explains his leadership mantra. “The Calloway Way … meant getting results with integrity.” As she says, “He understood that … talent is the deciding factor that takes a company from good to great.”

The fireside chat ranged from challenges CEO’s in our digital networked age will face, to Calloway’s sage advice for leaders and how timely it still is. “I think Calloway would be an extraordinary leader today,” Brad Feld said after explaining what an inspirational CEO he had been to so many current business leaders, "more influential than Jack Welch."

Calloway was an early pioneer in leadership theory about how to attract and develop great talent in order to make a company grow. “We aren’t going to run out of financial capital but human capital first,” author Charlie Feld said as he and Brad talked about the book and Calloway's great thoughts on talent.

Charlie credits his own success in business (his company was sold to EDS in 2004 and then to HP in 2008) to the 20 years he spent at PepsiCo learning about leadership from Wayne Calloway.

Brad Feld had more to say on CEO’s and leadership as well, quoting VC Fred Wilson’s 3 lessons for CEO’s from his blog, AVC and his well-known MBA Mondays series, “A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

Brad Feld recent trilogy of books on the entrepreneurial ecosystem is essential reading for this crowd at MIT Sloan. His Startup Communities, Startup Boards and Startup Life teach entrepreneurs how to thrive in a world Wayne Calloway would have welcomed.

Brad and Charlie Feld talked about how you grow a small start-up team or a very large company, leading with Calloway's simple advice. In 1995, Wayne Calloway gave a speech explaining how growth and great talent go hand in hand, "... eventually, a non-growing business withers and dies. Nobody with real ambition goes to work there. The good ideas and good people go elsewhere." “Calloway believed in results, not at all costs, but results with integrity,” author Charlie Feld explained.

My new job -- Director of Publishing at Techstars Boston start-up Litographs.com

I'm really excited to announce I'm joining Litographs as Director of Publishing, one of the #TechStars #Boston startup companies this session. We put the text of books on t-shirts, tote bags and posters. We have many classic books but we will now be taking living authors and helping them get their designs out there and reaching more readers -- my favorite thing!

Danny Fein, his brother Corey Fein and their long-time friend, Jack Neary are the guys at Litographs. They make beautiful … wait … I mean,  WE make beautiful stuff. Check it out.  

Alice in Wonderland takes a fall on our Litographs poster.

I Get Knocked Down:  Still Anything is Possible

It's the Friday morning of Labor Day weekend and I dropped a bunch of teens off at coffee shop in Arlington. They're young, sexy, pretty and handsome, thrilled to be heading into Harvard Square on the bus to knock around. And they are excited, happy, silly. Are you?

I pull away and I'm trying to put my finger on that feeling. It's the feeling that anything is possible.  Anything!




And I'm thinking,  Shit, that's it!  That's what it feels like to be an entrepreneur! That's the feeling you get in an accelerator! You are surrounded by BRAVE, CRAZY, ANYTHING-IS-POSSIBLE people 24x7 and once you've experienced that, it's a bitch to live any other way.

I mean face it, most businesses are all about, "Oh sorry, we don't do that here," or "Oh no, we've always done it this way," or "Why reinvent the wheel?"

Okay, ready, SOMETIMES THE WHEEL NEEDS REINVENTING! And that's what enterpreneurs have -- insane amounts of optimism and the ability to jump on an opportunity and make something happen.

Whether they're chasing a hot girl down the street, chatting up a stranger in a bar, reimagining how a time-honored practice can be completely revamped, they are open to all possibility.

What a way to live! On the edge of possibility, creativity, chutzpah and welcoming new ways of thinking and bringing new products and things into being.  They try things.  They fail on a regular basis.  They are ready to try try again.

Oh yeah! They get knocked down but they get up again!  He sings the songs that remind him of the good times.

And that's what I'm writing about.  Thanks again for all the support.

Congrats to Psykosoft!

If you were at TechStars Boston this past year, you noticed a truly fun, nutty, excellent, international, mega-creative team called Psykosoft, run by Mathieu Gosselin who is CEO but calls himself the "Mad Captain" btw.  He's French.

Psykosoft just got $500K from Atlas Venture -- you know that guy Fred Destin -- and Balderton in London -- they are super cool and that means painting like a master just got a lot easier!  

Here's the serious version with lots of nice links to talk to these guys.

You'll be talking to them for sure, since this is pretty painting software that will work on the mysterious Microsoft #Surface.

PSYKOPRESS RELEASE

PSYKOSOFT, graduate of TechStars Boston 2012, secures $500k seed funding for product innovation and global talent search

June 22, 2012 

Cambridge, MA

Tours, France

Munich, Germany 

Copenhagen, Denmark. 

This press release comes from many places because Psykosoft, the ‘crazy creative software factory’, knows the creative class is spread across the globe.  As the creators of the winning web app, Psykopaint, the international team at Psykosoft is thrilled to announce they have raised a $500K seed round co-led by Boston-based Atlas Venture and London’s Balderton capital with angel investments from executives at Harmonix (Guitar Hero) and Brightcove.   

Psykopaint, the company’s flagship app, is already attracting more than a million unique visitors a month, with a growth path that is doubling every few months.  

Just as Instagram lets you stylize your photos, Draw Something dares you to show off your silly sketches, now Psykopaint lets you paint like a great master, literally in the style of Renoir, Monet or Van Gogh.  

Psykosoft was born in the premier accelerator in Europe, London’s Seedcamp last year and then in January 2012 was chosen to be in TechStars Boston, the very selective Kendall Square accelerator program.  

Psykosoft CEO, Mathieu Gosselin will use this investment to attract a dream team of top talent across the web, who will speed Psykosoft’s development as they perfect new ways to create and paint from photos, focusing on the Apple iPad and Windows 8 platforms, including the new Microsoft Surface.   

In fact, Psykopaint is one of the leading creativity apps already available in the Windows 8 Store.  “We’ll use this money to hire awesome people, make the tablets versions amazing and create other new top secret products,” Gosselin explains. 

As Gosselin has said, “At Psykosoft we’re crazy. We believe in originality, we believe in personality, we believe in emotions … Things that are not usually associated with software, but software is just a means to an end. And the goal is to make an artist out of everyone.”

Psykosoft will put creativity tools, which are fun, original and easy to use, into the hands of users of all ages.  Gosselin, will source the best talent, across the world, in the places they love to work, live, and innovate.  His current team already includes some of the top talent in the field, including an ex-lead developer of Aviary, the exciting suite of web-based creativity apps. 

Mathieu understands how truly creative people work and says wisely, “If you were building a sports team, you’d search worldwide to find the best talent.  Location shouldn’t matter. Amazing people are dispersed like nodes on an intelligent network, they don’t always live near you and they don’t always want to gather in the same stupidly busy and expensive place.  If you are in Beijing, Belarus, Beirut or Bellevue but share our vision, love to create stuff and have talent doing so, I don’t care where you are, I want you!” 

Please contact Mathieu Gosselin for  any questions

Email: mathieu@psykosoft.net 

Phone: +33 6 40 30 39 76

Skype: peutichat

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/psykosoft

Psykopaint (The Web app): http://www.psykopaint.com

Psykosoft (Company site): http://www.psykosoft.net

Mathieu Gosselin self-portrait made with Psykopaint:

http://images.psykopaint.com/gallery/2012/06/fullsize/297407.jpg

http://www.psykopaint.com/gallery.html#/painting/297407

Psykosoft Logo:

http://psykosoft.net/assets/images/branding/psykosoftLogo.png

Psykopaint Windows 8 Screenshots:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5mtoo2dqfms1ofe/UGK905hj2t

Psykopaint Web Screenshots:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ua7nb3a5y68p9gh/qWjjoE4O2O

Techstars pitch video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6LXQnSentg

About Atlas Venture:

http://www.atlasventure.com

About Balderton Capital:

Balderton Capital is one of the largest venture capital firms in Europe, committed to finding and helping talented entrepreneurs build great companies. Based in London, it manages $1.9 billion in committed venture capital. Since 2000, Balderton has invested in over 100 companies, principally in numerous European countries but also in the US and Asia. Notable investments include Bebo (sold to AOL for $850m), Betfair (floated on the LSE in 2010), LOVEFiLM (sold to Amazon in 2011), ScanSafe (sold to Cisco Systems for $183m) and MySQL (sold to Sun for $1 billion). 

http://www.balderton.com

From TechStars in Kendall Square to the Middle of Mitte

A week before Demo Day here at TechStars Boston in Kendall Square and I'm solidly in love with our gang of 12 start-ups, including my e-publishing start-up, Libboo, but also infatuated with what's going on in Berlin and can't wait to be there for the NextBerlin conference.  Yes, I can finally say it, NextBerlin is NEXT WEEK!   And I can't wait to get there and test out SoundCloud co-founder, Alex Ljung's theory, "We don't really live in a country.  We live on the Internet.  The idea of countries is secondary."

But maybe cities are not secondary.  And as for innovations in printing and books, I start my trip by flying to Frankfurt (not far from Mainz where Gutenberg printed his bible and invented moveable type) then visit friends in Alsfeld on the fairy-tale route where you can see a statue of the famous Grimm Brothers' Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) -- and those guys were the original storytelling innovators.  From here we take the train to Berlin where Techcrunch says this week, "There is a chapter in the history of technology startups, or perhaps more a book, that will be dedicated to Berlin," then reports on The Factory, a new building dedicated to start-ups.  (Also check out Henrik Berggren's quick demo of ReadMill on Techcrunch here.)

So I hope to finish up my visit to Berlin with a lot of stories about innovators and why that city is a great place to build companies.  Feel free to leave some comments about any start-ups you think I shouldn't miss.

Follow The Leader

At TechStars you learn a lot of things about being a leader FAST and new CEO's look like their taking some language immersion course at Middlebury -- Arabic?  Russian?  Serbo-Croatian?  Laotian?  No, they are learning fluent LEADERSHIP.  24/7 they are speaking it and geeking it and getting down and dirty with it and getting it down.  Some take to it faster than others.

I've been a CEO and I know it's a tough row to hoe, so I'm pretty impressed with our fearless leader.  Chris is such a natural leader, he's really a bit of a ringer.  He was likely born this way from what I can tell.

Here's what we did last week -- took a long trip to the SXSW -- we drove an RV -- and when we got there -- it rained, very very hard -- and there was ample time for total misery if our leader didn't exert his excellent skills.

For instance, after an exhausting day of attending conference events and being soaked and cold and tired, we came back to our RV park to the comfort of our big boxy home away from home to find it LEAKING.  One bed was soaked and we did not have a lot of extra beds.  Chris stepped up to it.  It wasn't his bed, and in fact,  he never expected to take the best accommodations, and that night he took the worst.

He faced the disaster quickly.  He set up a tent in the downpour, pulled together the remaining slightly damp cushions to make a bed, then slept out in the tent while we all slept inside.  In the morning, he woke like a pirate, in a puddle that was cold and very uncomfortable, feisty and ready to lead our band in a new adventure.

One morning we ordered the 2 taxis required to get the team from the RV park over to the Austin Convention Center.  In the meantime, I lost my phone and then the taxis came and Chris stepped in, deciding quickly that he would let the others go ahead and stay behind with me, help me find my phone and then head over later.  Not a complaint, not a hesitation, never making me feel like an idiot for losing my phone (I was busy feeling that way anyway.)  The result -- no taxi available in the downpour for a long time -- I messed up our morning, but he didn't sweat it.

Did I mention, it kept raining and he slept in the tent a second night, wetter and colder conditions than the night before?

Did I mention he always works harder, starts earlier and stays up later than any of us, so there's no way we can avoid giving our all for such a guy?!

Maybe I forgot to say this guy is fair, decisive, funny, inspiring in ways every leader should be -- but few are?   Well, he is.

Does his go-the-extra-mile attitude make us believe we can do anything and need to match his killer abilities?  YES!

Would we follow the leader just about anywhere thanks to the discipline, consideration and maturity this funny young CEO demonstrates every day?   Uh, that's another YES.

Photo Credit:  Sodahead