Okay so I am little bit of a geek and have the constant struggle of form over function with the former winning up to now with my iPhone 3GS and the absolutely atrocious service provided by AT&T. Lets not go into that, we all know and we put up with it until Verizon gets a go. STILL no tethering from AT&T despite nearly every other telecommunications provider partnered with Apple in the world giving their customers tethering as a customer would expect.

Fear not, sitting with a friend of mine, @jonmyers over a nice glass of wine, I glanced down and saw that beautiful blue bar across the top of the screen of his iPhone 3GS. His bar was a tad different from the normal tethering bar.

Oh yes, it gets better.

Not only was he jailbroken using Spirit and tethered, his 3GS was also serving as a mini WiFi hotspot for up to 5 people. MyWi is an app that tethers and turns you into a hotspot for you and upto 4 of your friends.

Naturally I could not wait to get home and try this for myself as Jon insisted the Spirit app took literally seconds to jailbreak his phone and was the easiest jailbreak yet.

I had to see for myself. He was right, so here’s how I did it.

First off, I am simply telling you what I did. That is it. This is not a tutorial, nor a guide nor is it anything else other than me telling you what I did last night in the space of three minutes with some software, a cable, my iPhone 3GS, my MacBook and an internet connection. I will provide links to lots of help and where you can tether your iPad so fear not.

What you will need:

1. iPhone 3GS
2. iPhone USB cable (same one you use to sync to iTunes)
3. Laptop or PC – I used a MacBook
4. Downloaded copy of the Spirit App – download from here
5. iTunes 9 or later

So first you are going to jailbreak your iPhone. to do this, follow this simple but very clear tutorial:

This tutorial is courtesy of The iPhone Download Blog – Great site for this tutorial and lots of help

Step 1: Download a copy of the spirit app to somewhere you can find it on your laptop/desktop

Step 2: Make sure you have at least version 9 of iTunes.

Step 3: Back up your iPhone, iTouch or iPad in iTunes, just in case something goes wrong.

Step 4: Launch Spirit.

Step 5: Click “Jailbreak”.

Step 6: Wait just a few seconds until you see this image:

Step 7: Your iPhone will reboot and you should have the Cydia icon on your springboard.

Once you have done that, find the Cydia app on your iPhone and open it up. At the bottom right there is a search icon, click on that and search for “Rock”. You are looking for “Rock 2.52.3″ app. when you find it, follow the prompts and install to your iPhone.

You will now see the icon for the Rock app, open it up and search for MyFi. Follow the prompts and install it.

The app is a trial version and I would say given the functionality of the tethering AND the mini WiFi Hotspot, I am going to send the developer some cash.

And that is it. Time from start to finish – less than 3 minutes.

Here are some links to help if you need it.

• Spirit Download Page
• iPhone Download Blog jailbreak tutorial
• MyFi - Great tutorial to install from Cydia along with how to configure MyFi
• How to install the cracked version of MyFi
• If things go wrong with Spirit

Last but not least, here is a video tutorial on jailbreaking an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

Have fun!

@tonywhelan

Out of everything I write about, this is probably the most important piece of advice I am ever going to hand out. I have a pretty good way to keep you sane….Okhams Razor.

Okhams Razor is the premise that with all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one. I have beat myself up so many times after I have met with someone and they don’t return my calls or don’t answer my emails. It drives you crazy thinking about all the things that could have happened; maybe I fluffed the presentation, maybe he didn’t like the handshake, maybe she has found a better deal; maybe my idea really isn’t that good; maybe maybe MAYBE …you get the idea.

Sometimes, they may just not have gotten round to you yet or they are on vacation or are traveling right now or are ill or one of their children is ill. There are a million and one simple yet highly plausible reasons besides all of the mad ones you conjure up in your mind why they haven’t got back to you.

Point here is this.

When you did everything right, you got good rapport, the information exchange was great, the handoff and follow up promise was in place, the calls are put in along with the ‘so good to meet you email’ and you hear nothing back, follow these three simple steps:

1. Take a breath and recall Okhams Razo

1. Wait just a little bit longer than where you are now (a day or so)
2. Give them a call and see if they received the info.

You will be surprised at how many times the reason is nothing to do with you. I have had people actually happy that I didn’t let the connection go and have been apologetic about not getting back to me.

There are caveats of course. You may have been grin fucked (see the post about Grin F*cking).

I would honestly say that applying Okhams Razor to my encounters has saved me sleepless nights and lots and lots of stress.

Want less stress? Try using the Razor.

I watch Entourage on HBO and there is one character that I love and identify with. Ari Gold is the efficacious entrepreneur. Driven, aggressive, persistent with that killer instinct and an ability to lead and inspire his team. He gets up at 5am, reads the papers whilst he does his cardio, is out the door before his family get up – much to their chagrin – and is then like dynamo all day and into the night to get Vince whatever he needs and to take his business to the next level. His company is one of the top agencies in Los Angeles and his partner is one of the most powerful women in town.

None if this was by accident. Ari has crystal clear goals and goes after them relentlessly day after day after day. If you want to take a look at a really good example of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur then go and watch every episode of Entourage paying particular attention to the agent.

It is all fictional and fun but I can bet that the character was based on a real person. As I say the juice is worth the squeeze and is why the blog has the name it does. When it’s your business and you are going after it, you had better be going after it like a Dog On A Pork Chop.

You want to know how to be a winner, try being like gold.

So, it is 11pm. My day is done and it has been a good one. Startups are as my friend says, smoke and mirrors and I shit you not, nothing could be closer to  the truth. Looking back on today, I realize yet again that it is a certain type of person that does startups. It has lows, but when you pull it out and the planets align, the highs are what make you do it and keep doing it.

Let me explain:

NanoGIANT needs to get to the next level. We have been stealth, done a lot of validation with our nanospheres with various universities across the US and the time came for us to take it to the next level. The next level means, attracting a leader, building revenue paths and going to get the funding to make all of this happen.

The leader…check

We convinced the ex president of Volvo worldwide to advise us and then come on board as our CEO when his citizenship papers come through. He said yes. He and I built the strategic roadmap that we can then present to people with money. Today I presented to the first of them.

=========

I woke up stressed as I had the preso to build before 2pm which was when the money guys/enablers were arriving to listen to my pitch. The presentation was done, I just needed to assemble the slides, discuss and refine with our CEO and off we go. But oh no, business cards. I had business cards with an east coast address as I had been building and talking with east coast people but now we were talking to west coast people so I needed cards with our head office address in Phoenix.  At the same time (today), we  had the bright idea of giving a little gift of a test tube of nanospheres as a take away to the meeting participants.

This was 10am.Here we go.

Plugged myself into some really banging house music and built the presentation, delivering it to the CEO prior to his arrival at 12pm. We grabbed lunch but in the back of my mind I knew I still had to get over to the lab, find some spheres we can give out and then print some business cards if we had a color printer which I wasn’t sure we had at head office. Stress level rising as 2pm loomed. Went over the presentation and I consider myself very lucky that this behemoth of a man had the same vision as me in terms of what we were going to say to the money people at 2pm. We nailed the preso with minimal changes and headed back to the office.

12.45 – Headed over to the lab for some particles I could give to the people in the meeting. Steve, our lead scientist just shone and not only pulled out particles we didn’t have but also gave me a couple of vials of pure opal and some liquid I call PFM – Pure Fucking Magic. “Pour this stuff onto the opal spheres and leave it 30 minutes and watch their faces” he said. Trust comes in strong here. We are an exceptionally tight team of colleagues and friends and I would trust this guy with my life. I left with my bag of tricks.

1.30pm – Walked in the door of our office and immediately downloaded a template for some business card sheets handed to me as I walk in. I have to point out that I know dick about making business cards but I pulled it out and printed a couple with a color printer I never knew we had.

2pm – I made my intro along with everyone else and cool as a cucumber, rocked the presentation to the point that these people stopped the meeting midway, called another even bigger money guy and said “You need to come and see these people ASAP”.

When I handed out the business cards out at 2.03pm, the ink was no more than 12 minutes old.

It was stress like I have never felt in a normal job but I tell you, I wouldn’t have this life any other way.

Smoke and mirrors. You simply do what needs to be done, day after stressful day.

Same thing. Different money guy tomorrow.

I love this!!

NanoGIANT LLC is a company that I work for and after years of research and months of preparation, we are taking our silica spheres public. Here is the press release:
Contact: Tony Whelan
Phone Number: 1 800 380 6266
E-mail: tony@nanogiant.org
Website: http://www.nanogiant.org

For Immediate Release

US NANOPARTICLE MANUFACTURER OPENS ITS DOOR FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES
NanoGIANT LLC announces new standard in monodisperse silica nanospheres – in bulk

Phoenix, Arizona – Breaking into the nanoparticle manufacturing market, NanoGIANT LLC is now producing extremely uniform silicon dioxide (SiO2) spheres. Independent characterization laboratory Particle Characterization Laboratories, Inc. utilizing the Brookhaven Instruments 90Plus Particle Size Analyzer show a Polydispersity index of only 0.005 on NanoGIANT’s 368 nm sphere.

Unlike other narrow particle announcements, the clear differentiators for NanoGIANT are its ability to produce virtually uniform, affordable nanospheres quickly and in kilogram (kg) increments.

“Our ability to rapidly mass produce our spheres cost effectively while maintaining the polydispersity will prove to be a key advantage for our customers,” said Tony Whelan, VP of Business Development at NanoGIANT.

“Nanotechnology is still just scratching the surface of its true potential. Our spheres will allow the transition from research to development for technologies where narrow spheres had previously been inaccessible due to manufacturing limitations.
Our technology will open the floodgates for manufacturing using highly specialized materials. We believe that the cost savings our customers can achieve with our material will revolutionize manufacturing in dozens of sectors.” says Whelan

Sample spheres are available for sale online – http://www.nanogiant.org

Based in Phoenix, Arizona, NanoGIANT LLC is a privately owned research and development company, specializing in the proprietary manufacture of highly uniform silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanoparticles. The company focuses on producing very narrow particles for mass production in the nanotechnology industry.

###

To schedule an interview,  further information, business enquiries, or samples, email tony@nanogiant.org or call 1 800 380 NANO.

Pitching Hacks is here. The PDF is $19 and you can download it immediately. 83 pages. Buy it here.

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I am on a plane headed for Dallas to meet up with two people to then meet another. The two are the CEO and lead investor of a new startup that I have been invited to market and develop. The investor I have only me once but the CEO is the father of two very good friends. The third guy, the one we are all converging in Texas to meet is a scientist who has done some really cool stuff before and has worked with the CEO and who now claims to have perfected a process to create something that is the atom level building block of a number of things we use today. It isn’t new. It isn’t novel, well it is and it isn’t. Point being his process to develop this product is much cheaper than anyone at all on the market.

He says we are going to change the world.
And I believe him.

This, what I am doing right now, sitting on a plane to meet a mad scientist is the stuff books are made of.

I have an objective here and it starts with me sitting in front of him with a blank page. I want to open his head, scoop out the insides and smear them onto a set of slides. A little graphic but you get the picture.

You see beyond all reasoning of people outside of an entrepreneurial mindset lies a basic inability to leap. And believe me, I am fully aware of how HUGE this leap is. It is not that we startup types don’t know the risks. It is that we leap despite the risks. It is exciting. I know that is an over used word but it really is exciting.

You know what. I don’t ever want to be that guy that sits at the bar with the bartender two years down the line saying “remember when that mad scientist guy had that crazy idea and I was thinking about joining the company? Yeah what a good idea that might have been”

This really could be it – again of course but hey, that’s the world I am in.

And I love it.

I get a lot of people asking me why “Dog on a pork chop”?

Well, in the VC arena, it is a common phrase. You sit in front of VCs and they will look you in the eye and say “look, if I am going to give you money, I need to know that you are going to go after this like a dog on a pork chop!”

So there you have it.

It must be frustrating not to know first hand what to expect when pitching to a VC or Angel for the first time. I mean, you can read all you want and your friends, mentors and other people who have gone through it can reenact the experience but what about if you could sit and watch a real pitch to some Angels ‘as it happens’? I say ‘as it happens’ because the show is recorded but there is a show that is on BBC America which originated in the UK called Dragons Den and is as close to being in a pitch yourself as it gets.

It gets intensive when you are doing those PowerPoints. And there are so many of them, to so many people; friends and family, prospective clients, strategic partners, Angels and of course, VCs.

You just want to make it so right and believe me, the way the slides start out are never how they end up being presented. It is a good feeling though, when you see your idea and vision take fairly impressive shape. If like me it is something you are not used to – I was a Technical Project Manager for Cisco Systems, building WAN & LAN networks across Europe, Middle East & Africa. Tactical as they come!! – then you bring people in, read a shed load of books, learn and repeat strategic principles over and over again until they become second nature. I was only thinking the other day if I could go back to an employee at a big company again. My brain is definitely coded differently now but in a good way. The ability to seek out and identify opportunity is something you can never turn off once switched on.

But you can get stuck on ‘over detailing’ the nonsense because you are so intent on making that lasting impression. It doesn’t matter. Really. Let me give you an example and then let you know what Angels and Venture Capitalists are really looking for based on an evangelical proposal from a VC guru you made have heard of, Guy Kawasaki. By the way, if you haven’t heard of Mr Guy Kawasaki, click on the link, have a stroll around his blog and subscribe to his daily offerings. Very good advice and some really useful book and general business information links.

Okay, so building one particular presentation that had two audiences; some angel investors and a major rail system operator in the US, I became so wound up in making sure the presentation looked perfect that I started to stray away from the content (which is something you will tend to do towards the end of the process of building the slide content – at the point when it is almost right) and started to focus on the colors, the photographs, the format of the graphs, the master slide format, the color and shape of the horizontal bars and the bullet points. It started to consume to the point I felt the presentation was never going to be ready. I would sit up, obsessed with making perfect bullet points out of a gif of the logo of my company. And not just one night. Oh no, many nights would I fret about the way the presentation was going to be perceived and the subliminal messages I could give on the attention to detail and professionalism of my company and the people running it. At a certain red eyed point, I had a revelation and I don”t remember whether I got to it myself, or whether my wife came down during the night and beat me across the head or whether my business partner gave me the wake up call in the form of a booted boney foot up my ass.

It’s all relative and bigger in my head.

If you knew what the people on the other side of the desk would be thinking, you – as I did eventually – would not give a flying feck about the shape of the horizontal line on slide 6 and 8. It really doesn’t matter one tiny iota and the cold hard fact is that it is only you that is watching.

So Mr kawasaki has read and listened to literally thousands of pitches in PowerPoint format and so I am going to echo his rules for pitching to any VC or Angel. Only tip I can give on top of this is make the slides clear and easy to read. Understand that they may be sent electronically, passed around after being photocopied and even faxed so make sure the PPT, just like any good logo can be read just as well in black and white.

Guy Kawasaki and the 10/20/30 Rule

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.

The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that Guy sees have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. Guy guarantees it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the he offers an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

On top of that, make sure the slides are neat, clutter free and able to translate to a black and white format. Forget about fancy photos, leave the over designed horizontal rules and above all else:

Don’t sweat the bullets.