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While this victory was more of an amusement than anything else, the $300,000 me and my company won from Google a couple months ago was anything but trivial, and doing contests has been one of the best decisions I’ve made as a rookie startup CEO. If you are like I was (clueless, poor, and no track record), do it. Win or lose, and regardless of any potential monetary prize, a contest could be what gets your startup off the ground.

Here is a brief chain of events that can show you how contests have helped me:

I started my company in 2007; I was clueless and had a crappy team. I outsourced to India and failed. I spun my wheels for the good part of a year.

This past spring, I entered the Berkeley Business Plan Competition, and the Stanford e-Challenge.

At an event mixer, I met Dilpreet, a software engineer turned Haas MBA student, who started helping me with the competition. I also met Jesse Gibbs who helped us with our marketing.

After about 2 weeks, Dilpreet decided he was more useful as a tech guy than as an MBA, and we started work on an entry for the Android Developer Challenge.

Because Android was a hot new thing, and also because I now had a seasoned engineer with 10 years of experience onboard, I was also able to find 2 awesome mobile coders (Phuong and Luis) to work for free.

Somewhere around this time Berkeley let us into their startup incubator. Who knows if it would have happened if I hadn’t gotten a better team together?

We made it to the finals of both business plan competitions, and even though we didn’t win the top prize we got awesome feedback and used it to completely change the main thrust of the company. We even changed our name from LReady into Life360.

Dilpreet got excited enough to quit his cushy six figure day-job and hopped on full-time as my belated cofounder.

Shortly thereafter, we made it to the finals of the Android Challenge and got a $25K grant. This also got us some mentions in big tech blogs like TechCrunch. We used this buzz to get more really good people to work for us for free.

Around that time we applied to O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures Startup Camp. OATV is small, and one of the partners, Mark Jacobsen had also judged us at the bplan competitions. I’m sure meeting Mark before helped a lot (he saw our pitch, whereas everyone else only had a summary).

Startup Camp got us into Foo Camp, and at one of those two events I met tons of exceptionally smart and helpful people including Dave McClure.

A bit later we won $275,000 from Google for getting a first prize in the Android competition. Now all of a sudden we had validation and proof of execution. Finally…a track record!

We followed up with Dave, and he invited us to Startup2Startup. We met some superstars there and it was cool that some of them had actually heard of us. We also found a great coder who hopped onboard to manage our developer API.

We also saw this blogpost on Dave’s site publicizing the Credit Crisis contest. And that’s how we won our iPod.

Anyway, the day after the election, I remained my cynical self and made some sarcastic remark about being surprised that winter was still here, that the world still had hunger and war, and that I hadn’t woken up surrounded by twenty virgins in heaven.  This whole thing was part of an AIM chat with Shawn Collins, my occasional running buddy and graphic designer, and he put me in my place with a simple response:

[12:50] sh0wnxx: why don’t you try to enjoy the excitement of what’s going on before it passes you by. Who cares about 2012 right now or even 2009. Its the day after the election.

He made a good point.  We finally see America rebuking the legacy one of the worst administrations in history, and instead of showing some excitement, I’m still being an asshole.  So, while I don’t think I’ll ever apologize for being a skeptic, I’ll admit, I am excited about Obama, and here is why:

• Obama is a new brand for America: We now have a clean slate to become global citizens and a chance to prove to the rest of the world we aren’t a country of arrogant imperialists.  Electing another stereotypical rah-rah patriot white guy wouldn’t have given us this opportunity.  Think about it…when has the whole world ever been so excited about someone winning a US election?

• We will have a president whose economic platform isn’t built on the sanctity of the free market: The whole financial crisis has made it painfully obvious that  Laissez Faire Reagonomics is exceptionally flawed, yet Republican candidates keep pushing deregulation as the answer to everything.  With Obama, at a minimum, we won’t have a president who will rely on market self-regulation as the lynchpin of any economic policy.

• We have a secular president who will put science first: When Obama made his “they cling to guns or religion”  comment, I think he really meant it—it was some accidental straight talk that he had to take back because of political realities.  For me, it was real hope.  Maybe he spent some time at an extremist church, but it is clear he won’t be making policies within the framework of an extreme-right Christian fundamentalist worldview.   Federal stem cell research here we come…

So I’m not an Obama fan, but because of him, I think we are better off today than we were one week ago.  I hope that my skepticism is unwarranted, and I’m going to give him a chance to get me excited and prove me wrong.

“Democrats are better for the economy because the stock market goes up more when we have a democratic president”

Source: New York Times

Now, I don’t want to get into the debate about which party actually is better for the economy, but I want to discuss why this argument is juvenile and exceptionally flawed.

The image at left, from a particularly insidious NY Times article, pretty much sums up the 2-step logic, which goes like this:

Premise/Assumption: The stock market has historically gone up more for democratic presidents than republican ones

Conclusion: Therefore democratic presidents are better for the economy than republicans

There are quite a few questionable implicit assumptions in the argument (i.e. the more the stock market rises the better the economy is doing), but there are two that particularly bug me:

There is no time delay between policy changes and stock performance

Stock performance is independent of world events

I think that almost everyone will agree that the above statements are obviously false, but anyone who makes the claim in question is building their argument on these very assumptions.  Let me explain… I took it upon myself to do a bit of rearranging of the fancy New York Times graphic so that instead of displaying returns in order of performance, they are listed in order of time:

Source: Modified NY Times Image

As you can see, when the data is organized by year, the story is very different.  While the democrats have had the highest returns, the state of the economy that each president has inherited/left behind has greatly affected the performance of their successors.  For example:

• Herbert Hoover got hit with the Great Depression; not even the biggest liberal would blame him solely
• Nixon had to deal with the effects of the 1973 Oil Crisis
• Bill Clinton sold out at the peak of the dot.com crash

Now let’s extrapolate to Barack Obama; the big crash we had over the past month or two could easily have held off until January, and Obama would be in a similar position to where Bush was when he took office at the peak of the dot.com boom. If that happened you know as well as I do that every liberal would rightfully be saying that it wasn’t his fault.

On that same vein, are Obama’s supporters claiming that he can get the stock market back to 14,000 overnight?  Would it be fair for Republicans to blame Obama if foreclosures rise in 2009?  No, of course not; policy changes can take years to affect the market, and using out-of-context historical stock returns to say one party is better for the economy than the other is just as juvenile.

I’m going to keep a scorecard to stay accountable. Call me out if I don’t stick to it.

First, we have the election and housing bubble—two things I’m very passionate about.  I’ve been ranting about the housing bubble for years (since a number of my old high school buddies making $40K a year started buying $700,000 houses), but now when I talk about being a housing cynic people assume I’m the guy following the “sky is falling” trend.  Too bad I didn’t start my blog a few years ago so I had some proof.

Second, I’m starting to realize that writing a blog could enhance the brand of “me.”  I’m not saying this in a narcissistic way, but as some of my favorite people down in the South Bay (Guy Kawasaki, Dave McClure, Robert Scoble) have pointed out, a blog is a great way to standout from the crowd while showing some intelligence and personality.

Third, it all catalyzed when I saw this contest on SlideShare to do a presentation on the financial crisis.  It was that chance to make a scathing presentation that lots of people would see that I was waiting for, so I spent a Saturday putting together my entry, which you can see below.  I was pretty pleased with how it came out, and I decided it was great material to start my blog with.

So for my first content, here is my presentation on the credit crisis.

If you don’t go through the pres, I can sum it up pretty quickly.

•    These collapses happen all the time
•    People from all walks of life hold responsibility
•    Nearly all politicians are at fault, from all parties
•    Many people did see this coming
•    Democrats, stop just blaming the Republicans
•    Republicans, stop just blaming the Democrats

Hope you liked it..more to come