True Founder Camp: Founders, Speakers, and Drinks afterwards

“A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” – Eric Ries

True Founder Camp brings together a remarkable set of speakers, with personal experiences and ideas that are both practical and inspiring — This year Chip Conley spoke of building a corporate culture, while bringing his company back from near bankruptcy. Jesse Schell blew away everyone with his talk on the future of gaming. Eric Ries mixed lessons on continuous deployment with discussions about lean startup methodologies and customer development. And that was only half of the speaker program.

I don’t want to give short shrift to the speakers. They rocked. I would have taken a day to fly down from Seattle just to see them (I guess I did), but the other founders were the real draw for me.

“Awesome People Dropping Mad Knowledge” – Soren Macbeth, StockTwits (@sorenmacbeth)

True’s decision to hold Founder Camp every six months is inspired. Regular contact builds trust between the founders. It means we can talk openly about success or failure in a way that we can’t outside of “The Family.” It makes people who appear inaccessible seem like friends, and it transforms discussions from feeling like cold-calls into conversations that you pick up right where you left off.

It is a phenomenal group. Do you want to talk to Hiten Shah about metrics? How about Om Malik or Tony Conrad about PR? Or maybe you want to listen to Chris Cunningham and Michael Burke from appssavvy talk about social media and ad sales (and get your mind blown). Spend 30 minutes with Brian Wong from Kiip and you can soak up enough positive energy to last a month (and be reminded of why you are in this game in the first place). Really, this barely scratches the surface.

“All the options suck. What would you do?” – founder to founder
“You have got to talk to these guys. Come with me.” – founder to founder
“Reality: Worst game ever” – Jesse Schell

Being a founder is rewarding, but isolating. Every day you face important decisions under extreme uncertainty. Unless you have consciously built out a broad network, your founding team is making every decision alone. I’m sure we are all beautiful and unique snowflakes, but someone else has been where you are and can help. Founder Camp is a great place to find these people. If you don’t know who they are, someone you know does, and they can pull you into the right conversation.

Founders are surrounded by success stories. Even the stories of failures always seem to end up in success in the end (what’s up with that?). But when you are in the middle of it, it’s hard to see the positive outcome, no matter how many feel good stories you hear.

Jon Callaghan said “companies fail, people don’t.” At first you wonder if this is some feel good homily. But then you absorb the experience of other founders, people you have come to know personally, and you understand that truer words have never been spoken. Every startup is a struggle, and lots of them fail. Some quietly, some with fireworks and rockets. Trite stories about people who fail and then go on to succeed don’t mean much when you are in the middle of it. Having other founders who you know and have come to trust affirm the truth — that helps.

“Who is your customer? Seriously, who writes the check?” – founder to founder
“You will never deploy that in a production setting.” – founder to founder
“That’s your customer? You do not want those customers, trust me.” – founder to founder

Pre-launch, it’s easy to operate in a bubble with nobody pushing hard on your assumptions. Then you meet the sledgehammer of the market. When you build a relationship with other founders, they get permission to call you out when you start drinking a bit too much of your own Kool-Aid. It’s a great reality check, and it only happens if you know each other well enough to get past the superficial encouragement and move on to real support. Every founder needs this kind of exchange, but most of us don’t know where to find it.

Founder Camp – It’s like startup founder social networking on steroids and an awesome speaker series, all wrapped into one intense day, with drinks afterwards.

Every day should be this good.

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* Thanks to my co-founder Matt Trifiro for proof-reading and copy-editing this

* Follow Founder Camp on twitter: http://twitter.com/search?q=#truefc

* All quotes are from memory, and have been passed through a sanitizer

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This post was written by John Wedgwood, Former CTO & Co-Founder of 1000 Markets and Bixbe, a True Ventures Portfolio Company.