Raising money is hard, and there’s no way to screw it up faster than going around asking, “Hey, could you introduce me to some investors?” It’s sort of like when, on the second day of school, a goofy freshman asked me if I could introduce him to any girls.

Reason 1: Not every investor is the right investor for you

Asking for introductions to “investors” marks you as someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing. An investor/company match is very specific, and if you want to find your fit, you’re going to have to figure out what you’re looking for.

Most investors specialize in certain fields. Some will invest in early stage companies, some later. Some will invest in entrepreneurs they’ve just met; some will only invest in people they’ve known for years. Some require a track record and grey hair; some like betting on smart people straight out of college. Some invest big, some small. Some do just a few investments a year, some do hundreds.

Furthermore, investor styles differ. Some give you tons of room to maneuver; some like to work closely with you. Some offer tons of help and advice; others are just about the cash. Some will want regular updates; others don’t like to be bothered.

Before you start looking for investors, figure out what kind of investors you want, and what kind of investors will want you.

Reason 2: It’s lazy and rude

Somebody has to be the matchmaker. That means thinking about your startup, then comparing it to every investor your contact knows and decide if it’s a fit. The right person to do that (or at least take a first pass at it) is you, since you know your company best, and only you know who you’ve already talked to. You do this by researching your contact on Linkedin to figure out who they know, then researching those investors to see who’s a good fit. Check their website, their portfolio, their blog – get a sense of what they look for, and cross them off the list if they already have competing investments.

Sound like a lot of work? It is. That’s why you should do it, not your friend.

Reason 3: They’ll give you a crappy introduction

Asking for an introduction from someone who doesn’t know you well yet never works. If you haven’t pitched your contact and sold them on how awesome you are, there’s no way they are going to convince an investor to take a chance on you. That’s because they’re going to have to tee up the intro, and if the nicest thing they can say about your company is that it “sounds interesting”, the intro isn’t going to go anywhere. You want them super-jazzed about what you’re doing, and more importantly, you want them to be able to deliver a summary of your company in one or two sentences. So give them the pitch and ensure they love it.

Note that this all implies that you can summarize your own company in one or two sentences. This deserves an article of its own. Actually, it deserves a book of its own, and that book is “Made to Stick.” If you’re stuck, go read it. But I digress.

A great investor intro is about conveying enthusiasm. So you need to sell them, then give them simple tools to sell the investor.

The right way

Step 1: Do your homework. Before you meet your contact, have an explicit list of 1-4 people you would like an intro to. And this is definitely about people – it’s better to ask for an intro to Bob Smith than it is to ask for Acme Investors.

Step 2: Pitch your contact first. Treat them like an investor, even if they’re not. Good first-pitch rules apply: don’t teach them; tease them. Show them just enough to get them to want more. Be sure to hammer your one or two line summary a few times so they know it.

Step 3: The ask. Say, “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d really appreciate introductions to A, B, and C. Can I shoot you an email with a one paragraph summary of the business that you can forward along?”

Step 4: The reach. NOW is when you say, “And are there any other investors you can think of that I should be talking to?” You’ve done your homework, they know about your business, it’s OK to ask them to ponder a bit to see if you missed any one. And it’s easy for them to say, “No, your list is great” – you’re not obligating them to come up with any one.

Step 5: Followthrough. Immediately after you step out of the meeting, send separate emails – one for each invitation request – that say something like:

Hello <contact>! Thanks for taking the time to talk today. Your perspective on the business was really helpful. I appreciate you offering to connect us with <investor> – feel free to forward this email to <him/her>. I’m including a brief description of us below.

<<brief description of business>>

Again, do one per investor, so they can easily forward each one to the right person, hopefully along with a little note that says you’re not a bozo.

Fundraising is hard

Look, I’ve been there. Fundraising is daunting. Actually, terrifying. You want to be able to just get it done, so you imagine that it’s possible to just ask around, meet some nice people, wow them with your charm/business plan/demo, and get on with building your company. And sometimes it is.

But it’s usually not. And the teams that invest the most in fundraising seem to have the best results. (Well, the teams with huge traction or great resumes have the best results, but if you’re killing it on those fronts, you’re already cashing investor checks). If you’re a new team with a demo and a dream, you’ve got a lot of work cut out for you.

So don’t shy away from it. Learn your network’s network, ask for smart and specific intros, and you’ll meet your dream investor soon enough. Happy fundraising!

[Editor's Note: This editorial was first posted on Dan Shapiro's entrepreneurship blog.]

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Hi Mike,

I’m one of your customers.

We don’t really know each other. We’ve chatted at a few events, you’ve covered some of my antics, but I’m mostly just a guy who reads TechCrunch a lot. I find it’s a pretty good place to see what’s important in the industry. And you and your team do some damn fine reporting on things the world wouldn’t know about otherwise.

I am product guy, not a media critic. But I’m a big believer that economic incentives shape behaviors in subtle and unmeasurable ways. And I think your decision to make investments in startups is going to make TechCrunch a worse product.

I can’t tell you exactly how. Are you going to be a little more likely to ignore competitors to your companies? Cover them, even when they’re not newsworthy, to show you’re not biased? Feel compelled to pull or throw punches, either to support or prove you’re independent of the companies you deal with?

I don’t know. But I think it’s going to happen, it’ll be subtle, and it’ll make TechCrunch worse.

I’m not making demands or threatening to leave. Just making a request, from one product guy to another: journalistic independence is a great feature. Please don’t cut it.

Best wishes,

Dan Shapiro

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Dan Shapiro's blog.]

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There is no love like a first time entrepreneur’s love with nondisclosure agreements. They are a romantic dream: secret pacts bonding two economic entities together as one, if only for the transaction. Promises of futures together and sweet nothings exchanged.

Now let’s talk reality. First…

NDAs don’t stop leaks.

Theoretically, a nondisclosure agreement commits the signing parties to… well, not disclose stuff. Practically, it gives you theoretical standing to prevail in a lawsuit where you sue someone for disclosing your secrets.

But that’s a giant stinking load of donkey dung. It’s almost never going to happen that you actually sue someone for disclosing a secret and prevail. It’s just too hard, too complicated, and frankly too easy to lie your way out of getting caught. How are they going to prove they didn’t just think of the idea themselves, or hear it from a different, third party that wasn’t covered by an NDA? Remember that if you have 99 people sign an NDA and 1 person doesn’t, that person can publish your idea in the Wall Street Journal – and to add insult to injury, when they do, the other NDAs all become invalid since they only apply to confidential information.

NDAs: terrorist threats

So forget winning lawsuits. What about threatening lawsuits? Well, you can threaten a lawsuit for any reason, and you can generally file lawsuits for almost any reason. But having an NDA with someone is a very good way to make that threat more annoying. You can file a suit that you have no intention of consummating, and if there’s an NDA in place, they will be forced to take it more seriously – and that’s a pain in the rear. NDAs are a force multiplier in legal blustering. If you like legal blustering, get lots of people to sign NDAs. It’ll make your sound and fury signify a bit more than nothing.

If you’re not the legal threatening type, there’s still some value to an NDA. They don’t know that you’re not a crazy legal Quixote, so they might think twice before leaking. Maybe. But I find deceptive folk make a habit of being deceptive, and honorable folk respect these things with or without paperwork, so I don’t see a terribly great amount of benefit to it.

When NDAs get signed

There’s one and only one reason that NDAs get signed: when one side or both have a great deal of leverage in the negotiation. You see, whichever side makes a commitment not to disclose is basically opening themselves to NDA terrorism. Usually NDAs are exchanged before … Next Page »

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Where are app stores going next? For the past few years, the app store model has spread through the wireless ecosystem like wildfire. There have been a few big winners and lots of…well, losers is probably too strong, but let’s say there are a lot of app stores that have yet to reach critical mass.

App stores can be measured by the three Ds: Distribution, Developers, and Downloads. How many devices have the store, how many developers are building apps for the store, and how many consumers are getting enough value to actually download something from the store? This is what makes it so hard to break in—it’s an outrageous amount of work (and marketing) to line up distribution and developers so that you can get a critical mass of downloads.

Yesterday in San Francisco, Intel threw its hat into the ring. Building on its announcements at the annual Intel Developer Conference, Intel announced the full release of its “AppUp Platform”—a new app store for notebooks and mobile devices. AppUp is a storefront that’s neither hardware nor OS dependent. Although it is being launched for Windows, it will support the MeeGo Linux platform (developed jointly with Nokia) when it launches, and it will be available across netbooks, phones, and a forthcoming zoo of in-between devices. It supports a variety of runtimes—Adobe AIR and C++/Win32 natively, with wrappers available to enable Silverlight, .NET, and more. [Editor's note: The author contributed content to the AppUp conference.]

But Intel’s first target is the massive installed base of netbooks, estimated to be over 100 million strong. Conference attendees were quick to ask, “Why netbooks?” Intel answered with projections of over 500 million devices that would be capable of utilizing the AppUp platform within five years. That’s a huge revenue potential that would dwarf what Apple and Google have been projecting for their respective platforms.

And Intel wasn’t ignoring the app store out of Cupertino, either. Demos at the session highlighted a simplified process to get iOS apps running in the AppUp store. That has to be tempting to Apple developers—an ability to leverage their development investments across a much larger market.

A fascinating development along with the AppUp launch is that Intel is welcoming alternative storefronts. That means a company can create a custom user interface with all or some of the AppUp apps, using Intel for transaction fulfillment. Adobe, for example, is launching the Adobe AIR Marketplace—a storefront that highlights AIR apps (and only AIR apps) in the AppUp marketplace. They decide what to carry and what to highlight; Intel handles the dirty work. Intel even allows “shopkeepers” to charge app vendors for premium placement, and collects the proceeds on their behalf.

Does the world need another app store? It’s tough to say. On the one hand, it will be a nightmare of marketing for Intel to get mindshare amid a sea of alternatives. On the other, I would be loath to bet against Intel’s marketing muscle—and they are targeting a massive market with a unique value proposition.

Will they nail the three Ds? I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out.

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In this envelope, I have your Company Culture.

“We work hard, but value work/life balance.

We’re a team culture and we believe in individual empowerment.

We give back to the community, and have strong ethics.

We hire only the best people, support diversity, and promote growth and leadership in our employee ranks.

And more than anything we value our customers, our stockholders, and our employees.”

That’s right—you’re GE! Or Wells Fargo. Or Zillow…

Company Culture is a very serious matter, put together after much employee feedback and deliberation, and carefully designed to capture the key things that make your company great. It’s also a load of well-mixed fertilizer.

The Rule of Company Culture: It’s what makes your company different, not what makes it great.

Hire the best, teamwork, ethics… all meaningless platitudes. Real company cultures are made of four things:

1. Polarizing decisions
2. Excesses
3. Quirks
4. Dysfunctions

Polarizing decisions are what happens when a company decides not to compromise between two equally compelling but opposing imperatives. Every company strikes a balance between work and play; that’s not company culture. Company culture is investment banking’s mandatory 95 hour work weeks or Jackson Fish Market’s 12 weeks of vacation. Every company has a balance of teamwork and individual contributorship—culture is ruthlessly pitting your people and teams against each other, or firing your best people because they’re not effective team members. Other balances include great benefits versus lean operations, customers versus stockholders versus employees, and cheap products versus innovative quality products. If you find yourself saying “we can do it all,” that’s great! And you’re right, sort of. Your attempts at balance are admirable and may be successful, but do not constitute a corporate culture. That only comes from taking a stand on one end of the see-saw.

Excesses are aspects of culture that happen when companies take an indubitably good thing to its extreme. For example, every company tries to hire great people. But some will leave a position open for nine months, miss deadlines, and work its existing employees in to borderline revolt before hiring someone who’s even the tiniest compromise. Every company should give back to the community, but there’s a line between a matching gifts program and Ben & Jerry’s that’s not easy to miss. “Openness” is great—do the employees see the detailed company financials, and get notified when cash reserves are running low? Corporate culture is what occurs in the margins when someone asks, “Well, I know that’s good, but isn’t it a bit much?”

Quirks are the safe, friendly, harmless, and most companies screw them up too. A quirk is some point of weird distinction, neither wonderful nor terrible, that is distinct to the company and integral to the employee experience. Casual Fridays are policy; Dress Like Raymond Day is a quirk. When the company picks up your nighttime MBA, that’s a great benefit—but when TeachStreet (a company that helps people find local and online classes) gets its employees together to learn how to build kites, now that’s a quirk. It’s not to say that corporate mandates can’t make great quirks, although the best ones often arise spontaneously from the teams themselves. But great quirks take their power from the team, their distinctiveness, and the culture itself.

There’s one more aspect of corporate culture that’s important if you’re measuring rather than designing: the Dysfunction. A dysfunction is the mirror image of an excess—not enough of something that’s important. Every company has problems, and most of the problems are present to some degree everywhere. Those aren’t dysfunctions. A dysfunction creeps in to the corporate culture when it’s distinctive and impactful—much like a positive culture trait. Typical dysfunctions include management and employee antipathy, severe lack of ethics, and disregard for customers. You know them when you see them. One thing that may not be obvious—sometimes a dysfunction is a direct causal result of the company culture. Backstabbing and rumor-mongering may be the price you pay for rewarding individual initiative and achievement. A general lack of spending discipline may be the unwanted side effect of generous benefits and an employee-first culture.

The great corporate cultures are a simple mix: a few polarizing decisions or excesses, with a handful of quirks mixed in. Preferably quirks that reinforce the rest of the culture.

Later, I’ll post a bit about some examples of company cultures and guidelines on how to be deliberate in creating one.

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You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer.

Its assault began with little fanfare—the first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination. Yet here we stand in a world where Clark Kent couldn’t find a place to pull on his Supersuit if the fate of Metropolis depended on it.

The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?

For those looking over their shoulder, here are the three keys that will lead us to the next genre killer:

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.

2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming, but 50″ plasmas aren’t going—the 2″ experience just doesn’t compare. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email—at least not until someone solves the keyboard problem.

3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature. For example, the camera GET is two megapixels, autofocus, and flash. It’s no coincidence that this is about the quality level of a cheap disposable camera.

Following these rules, let’s break down the likely victims:

Point-and-shoot cameras—The writing’s on the wall.
There’ll always be a place for high end single-lens reflex models and the like. Enthusiasts will want the very best, regardless of cost or size. Most consumers, however, ask for two things from their camera: make it small and make it cheap. The GET for camera phones is being crossed as we speak, and then comes the end of the mass market digital camera. Who’s going to pay $250 for “just a camera” when their carrier just put one in their pocket for free? Danger level: critical.

Landline phones—The signal is still keeping busy.
The latest innovation often destroys its predecessor—CDs killed records, and DVD decimated VHS. The most obvious target for the phone, then, is the landline. But while the dial tone is clearly in decline, a tradition of reliability and security in case of emergency are keeping it alive. Burglar in the backyard? Hope you can get signal for 911. Extended power outage? Your touchtone telephone will be up and running, even as cell sites go offline and your phone battery dies. Installing an alarm for your house? Neither cellular nor VoIP are approved alternatives for trusty old copper. The GET for landline replacement is high reliability, and until carriers can guarantee it, the wires are safe. Danger level: moderate.

E-mail—Just a flesh wound.
SMS has revolutionized the way we communicate, but it’s still hard to beat … Next Page »

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