The True Meaning of True Founder Camp

This week, we are hosting our third Founder Camp for the True Ventures portfolio. Founder Camp at True is a bi-annual gathering of all the Founders in our portfolio featuring guest speakers and discussions covering a wide range of topics focused on helping our companies better build and grow their businesses.

This year’s Founder Camp is focused on “Building Long-Term Value” and includes speakers such as:

• Chip Conley, Entrepreneur and author of Peak: How Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow
• Maynard Webb, CEO of LiveOps and former COO of eBay
• Jesse Schell, CMU Professor and a former creative director at Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio.
• Matt Freeman, CEO of MediaBrand Ventures and former CEO of Betawave
• Scott Dietzen, former CTO of Zimbra and former CTO of BEA Systems
• Eric Ries, Lean Startup Evangelist and former Founder of IMVU

This marks my first Founder Camp at True and curious about what this week’s experience had in store for me, I spent time asking various True Founders new and old about why they were attending this year’s Founder Camp.

From my discussions, Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics most looks forward to the “ability to interact with other Founders and share stories candidly” while Luke Gotszling from About.me was excited about “the interaction with new people across a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets.”

For Brian Wong of Kiip, he’s looking forward to his first True Founder Camp because of “the power of being able to meet and interact with every True Founder in one place.”

The best story came from John Wedgwood of Bixbe who has attended each of the previous two True Founder Camps. John explained that at the first Founder Camp two years ago, everyone was initially tentative about sharing their experiences and worked to keep space between each other. However, by the end of the first day, everyone had warmed up to each other and was more comfortable sharing information about their day-to-day challenges and triumphs.

“That experience”, he said, “has continued year after year and in-between Founder Camps via the internal True Founder email list.”

What it comes down to is that events like this greatly enhance the bond and trust within our portfolio and facilitate discussion within the tight-knit Founder community. Though our portfolio spans the gambit from consumer web to enterprise software to hardware – everyone is facing many of the same problems in their businesses such as where to find new talent, how to best scale their business, and when to hire outside contractors.

The bigger message is that taking money from True isn’t just about the money or the sponsoring partner – it’s about joining a select group of like-minded entrepreneurs working together to help each other to succeed. It’s about the ability to tap into the collective wisdom of 133 Founders across 70 companies who are going through the same issues day-to-day. Most importantly, it’s about joining something that is much bigger than just one person or one company.

So what is True Founder Camp?

It’s an event designed to bring our portfolio together for a day of collective learning and discussion. It’s an opportunity for our Founders to meet, bond and spend a day learning together.

But even more so, it’s really just one big geeky True family reunion.