Armed with $50,000 in seed capital Shane Reisers' Startup Genome is mapping innovation around the world

Maps are used often in marketing to find where the best customers are, used for demographics, figuring out where innovative companies are happening, and hot spots for certain companies. 

Startup Genome is a really helpful tool to the community. We want to remind you guys that we shoot this show daily, 1PM Pacific Standard time.

5:34 Meet Shane Reiser, the founder of Startup Genome. He was the CEO for startup weekend for a while. He joined them kind of early in their journey, back when they first got their grant. Along the way, he had the chance to train many volunteers around the world, and noticed many of them were mapping, whether it was through advanced software or simply drawing out on whiteboards. From here, Shane began to develop his idea for the software.

Startup Genomes been around for a little less than a year. He’s still one of Startup Weekends most active volunteers, 

Startup Genomes depends on local curators who actually live in the specific cities to curate the data and approve submissions. 

8:40 Shane says the startup scene in Omaha is pretty good, Silicon Prairie News, three main cities, Demoin, Iowa, Omaha, Nebraska, Kansas City, Missouri, and Saint Louis is starting to get roped in. 

In LA, meetup.com tends to be a big catalyst for startups. In Omaha, Silicon Prairie News does most of the promotion on their local events calendar. Shane mentions that Big Omaha is a big conference event, which is probably the best startup conference. It’s a great conference because it’s small enough that it feels like it’s an intimate environment, and gets national attention as well. 

11:07 Shane hasn’t always been able to work on his laptop on the go, when he started working in the startup world, he has been, and is loving it. Startup Genome is a side project of his, he works for Dwolla, and heads over their to work sometimes. Dwolla is essentially a payments network, lets you send and receive money directly from your bank. Fees are just 25 cents for each transaction. They have an API that can be looked into, and can be hooked onto different apps. Dwolla is in Desmoines, Iowa, and announced around 3 weeks ago, they announced their series C, sixteen and a half million from Andreessen Horowitz. Most of the transactions are through their API, not through web and mobile apps. Dwolla’s headcount surpassed 40 headcount wise, soon to hit 50. 

14:30 The mission of startup Genome is to create the worlds most up to date, accurate, and accessible database of startups and players in the startup community. They’re also implementing really cool visuals. They started by importing a bunch of data, sucked down a lot of data from Crunchbases data, which was hard, because their data integrity wasn’t the highest. Their policy was good, but their data wasn’t the easiest to work with, so they had to clean out a lot of locations and corporations that weren’t in their planned grid. Startup Genome is building a network of volunteer curators to own the data for their city. They’ve got 275 volunteers around the world, and growing, and the goal is to crowdsource and curate the data, for a more accurate and usable database..  

17:41 When Startup Genome was first started, they launched every city at once, pulled all the data in, put out all the maps. A lot of data was out of date, so they shut down all the map, and only opened the map back up when a curator came and fixed the things up. 

19:11 They just received a grant from the Copen foundation, and are able to bring out a full time developer, which is really cool. The maps are powered by a software called Leaflet, and the map data is actually using Open Street maps instead of Google maps. 

 

20:31 Everyone has a different definition of what a startup is. Startup genome has different filters, like date, employee amount, etc. They built filters around the data points. 

Shane’s definition of startup is a group of people in pursuit of a repeatable business model which can be scaled. 

26:33 Amul is a big believer that startups will change the world, specifically technology and small teams. 

29:15 He got to know the Copen guys when he was working startup weekend. They offered their advice, and after a few months, after seeing Startup Genome launching new features and being serious, they invited Shane to come down and apply for a grant. 

30:00 Shane doesn’t take Startup Genome as a fulltime project because he loves to work for Dwolla and really believes in their cause. Shane believes everyone should have one side project, and lessons from one can be applied to the other. 

31:45 Shane’s learned from Dwolla that user engagement is tough. His job is to keep Dwolla users engaged, and to double engagement rates by the end of the year. Another issue is gaining a customer’s trust in the beginning, because people are comfortable when giving away information like social security number, bank card numbers, etc. One strategy Dwolla uses is to reward ten dollars of transaction credit for each friend referred. 

37:38 Complete user experience refresh, combine everything into one digestible experience. Implement functions that lets you see who the best in the community from the outside, where they’re investing in, flow of capital, industry pie charts, etc. They also have a big project to automate as much data as possible, by building crawlers that will essentially automatically update company profiles. 

40:39 Can certain people export data out? Curators can export the data for their city at any time. 

44:22 Represent.la is doing a similar thing for LA. They talked to them, and got them to include Startup Genome in their site as well. Shane cares more about creating the best database than visitors to the site. 

46:00 Cohen foundation gave Startup Genome 100,000 dollars, which is a 6-month budget based on hiring a professional developer. The plan after that is to potentially build on a revenue stream.

47:25 A revenue stream Shane got very excited about was a certain accelerator in a certain nonprofit in a certain university came up to him and told him they would love to tag people and companies in your system and get a white label view with all the charts, lists, maps of all the data we care about, basically providing them a service to track your alumnis. 

Amul suggests Shane send out a test batch of cold emails, and see how it goes. Ignore the percentage of recipients who get annoyed at the email and focus on the ones who are happy to receive your email. Many people in the startup community are very generous and friendly. 

52:12 What does Shane think of startup weekend and hack-a-thons? Shane thinks it’s very much about the experience and education if setup correctly. He’s met many of his best friends through it, he loves doing it, loves to volunteer, because it’s personally rewarding to see people learning new skills. It’s really about teams and community building. You have to get developers, designers and business people all at these events, because their skills should work together. 

57:27 What are some ways to identify things that probably won’t work? Shane says it’s important to simplify into something that can actually be built and tested in a short amount of time. How can a startup weekend or hack-a-thons prevent bad ideas? Shane says it’s really again, about the teamwork, and great teams can find those better ideas and execute them. 

59:27 Shane shares a great story about how he got hooked onto startup weekend. He organized the first one where he was living in Des Moines, Iowa. He thought it was a lot of fun, wanted to try another one. Clint, from startup weekend headquarters suggested that Shane fly up to New York and facilitate the one there. It was an embarrassing experience from him, but for his third event, he went to New York again and felt much more confident. A girl emailed him, and she said she didn’t really think startup weekend was for her, because she didn’t think her skills would really help there. (She was a writer for Nickolodeon.) Shane told her to just come to the event and watch the pitches, and if she felt inspired by a pitch, she should join a team or whatever. She introduced herself that day and wasn’t really having too much fun. When people started pitching, she jumped up and pitched this idea, which ended up getting enough votes to start a team. The next day, she was leading her team (almost like CEO), and the day after, she was much more confident and really happy with her ideas. She was really grateful for this opportunity and this event had a huge impact on Shane. It felt great for him to see people’s wonderful experiences with this event. 

Startup weekends definitely predominantly male. Shane wishes it was more even, because of the different perspectives. It’s funny to see “five dudes building a product, and their target market is females.”

It was great talking to Shane! We can’t wait to hear about the updates to Startup Genome that is targeted to launch next month.