If you are starting a new business, you have to pick the right name. There is a lot that goes into figuring out what is “right” — including is the name unique, is it memorable, is it descriptive of what your business does and provides, and so forth. But one thing many startups ignore is how the name will play out across the internet and its various manifestations. Becoming master of your domain (ok, you know I was going there, sorry) isn’t easy, and it has gotten a lot harder.

When I first got my domain (strom.com), the internet was still shiny and new, and largely undiscovered large tracts of land ripe for the picking. Getting my domain took a matter of minutes, and didn’t cost me anything. Then the land speculators moved in, and we have the mess that we are in now. Why didn’t I pick strom.net or for that matter davidstrom.com while I was at it? Don’t know (My full name is in use by a photography firm now.) I did manage to flip a domain that I owned for all of a day or so and made some coin, but that nothing like being-able-to-retire kind of dough. Sigh.

I have said for years that the best domain names are aurally-pleasing, meaning that you can say them to someone and they can remember the name and more importantly, remember how to spell it without you having to spell it out for them. (If you have to insert hyphens or extra letters, that spells trouble.) But that is just the first part of your domain.

When I wrote about this topic back in 2006, the number of top-level domain extensions — the second part of the domain after the dot — were limited: besides the usual stuff of .com, .net and .org to choose from, we could also select various country-specific extensions such as .uk and .fr. Since then, ICANN, the standards body that sets the rules, has introduced hundreds of extensions, from .store to .xyz to .info to business-specific ones like .travel. I have owned for many years webinformant.tv, which was a fan favorite for a while (the extension refers to a South Pacific island which has reaped some small rewards), just like the countries of Anguilla and a territory in the Indian Ocean have done for .ai and .io respectively.

But the domain name is just one aspect of your internet identity. There are also social networks, where you want to coordinate what you use for your domain name with the user account that will be part of any future communications. Given the millions of user accounts on these services, that is a much harder name space to find something that hasn’t already been taken.

This means you need a better search tool, and there are several places you can go. No single tool does it all — are you surprised?

My favorite and initial go-to for this research is Knowem.com. It allows you to search through 500 popular social networks, along with over 150 domain extensions, and the entire USPTO Trademark database. You can quickly figure out what has been taken, and what is still available. The domain extension search is focused on the country-specific ones, which it arranges by continent. It only shows you whether or not a domain is available.

Second best is Google’s own domains.google — this allows you to search 300 domain extensions if you want to find something a bit more unusual. It also shows you the current market rate for a particular available name, which may or may not be accurate, depending on which registrar you end up using to buy the domain. For example, both strom.tech and strom.store are each available for $1000/year. I will give both a hard pass.

If you want to do further research on just the domains, I would also use  Domainchecktools.com. It provides deeper research into about-to-expire domains, which again may or may not be accurate. Some of this info can be obtained from the internet command whois, which shows you sometimes who owns a particular domain and when it was purchased and when it expires.

Then there is the entire world of whether or not to use a domain broker to hold your cash until the domain record is transferred over to you and which registrar to use to handle your domain and whether that should be the same as the ISP that will handle your actual web and email services. I prefer to have separate entities just in case I want to move the domain independently with the actual content, but will leave that for another day.

Once again I have had the honor of being one of the judges in the Enactus collegiate entrepreneurship competition. Back in 2015, the national finals were held here in town, so I got to participate in person. Of course, this year it was completely a virtual affair.

I have been involved in another competition: the Microsoft Imagine Cup. Back in 2012, I flew to Sydney to be one of the judges for their final competition, which I wrote about here. It was a blast, and I got to meet some very smart students from around the world. Not to mention that I got to climb to the top of the Harbor Bridge too.

The Enactus competition now goes on to their own World Cup held later this year. The teams come from colleges both well-known and ones that you have never heard of, and the team sizes vary from just a few students to dozens. This year the US national champion was the team from the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, which has had success in earlier years. They had an interesting project to help eye patients in India obtain inexpensive glasses, and I didn’t give them top marks because due to the pandemic the project only really got in gear last month.

There are two things the judges evaluate: first is a short video that the team puts together, which contains both their pitch and an introduction to the team members. These are professional quality and include the requisite drone fly-by of the campus with a background of dramatic music.

The second element is the written report that reviews the financials and explains how the project or projects meet the four major tenets of the competition:

• Entrepreneurial leadership, where the team identifies a need and shows how they can take personal responsibility and manage risk and change
• Innovation and improvement
• Apply business principles such as a workable plan and model.
• Have a measurable and sustainable positive impact, both socially and economically

The Whitewater students’ business plan didn’t match up with their video, which is why I didn’t give them the highest marks. Apparently, I was in the minority.

The two teams that I preferred were from North Central College located in the Chicago suburbs and Southern Adventist University (SAU) near Chattanooga. Also in the final four was the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, which I have actually been to and have known about as one of the major computer science powerhouses.

North Central’s team (which you can see here) ran a web storefront for Guatemala coffee and chocolate sales as one of their projects.  What I liked about this project was how they built upon last year’s efforts and what they did to pivot to deal with the pandemic. They had to work hard to replace in-person sales with some innovative alternatives, such as building their own campus-based store and selling their products to farmers’ markets, using Facetime walk-throughs and Zoom demos of how their stuff was sourced and made, making donations to non-profits and creating private labeled products. They were able to significantly boost their sales and not only cover the additional costs of these efforts but also increase their profits. The storefront will ship product across the US or you can come pick things up at the campus store.

SAU’s team had a series of projects, but their centerpiece was another web storefront selling soap made in Zambia. This store only ships to nine locations there. They now employ 360 people and made some US$5,000 in revenues last year. They had other projects such as local STEM instruction for women and creating a marketing toolkit for non-profits as well.

It is great that Enactus was able to continue their competition during a very difficult year, to be sure, and under some very stressful circumstances as universities went to remote learning and other circumstances. And if you have a moment to watch some of the video presentations on the Enactus site link (warning: it is a miserable website, ironically), you too will be inspired and have some hope for the youth of today.

One of the tech industry’s dirty secrets is enabling an entire class of bottom-feeders called the patent troll. These are lawyers that exist solely to sue other

 firms and bleed them dry from the threat of patent infringement. A new documentary is out by Austin Meyer (shown here), who suffered from one troll purely because he uploaded his app to the Google Play store. The troll claimed his patent covered such activity, which is just utter nonsense. As shown in Meyer’s movie, almost all defendants settle patent cases to avoid the costs of discovery and a protracted legal battle. There are several thousand troll-based lawsuits filed annually, and the number is increasing.

Sadly, what these trolls do is also perfectly legal. But what gets my goat is that the trolls don’t actually make anything: it isn’t like they have a competitive product line that they are trying to protect with their lawsuit. They are really just racketeers, extortion con men. Many of these firms, like Virnetx and Uniloc, are companies that you never heard of, and are getting rich from these troll payouts.

For example, several years ago Virnetx beat Apple and now gets $300M a year in royalties because Facetime was claimed to infringe on secure network communications patents it held. That took years to work its way through the courts in eastern Texas.

Wait a minute. Why Texas? Isn’t Apple’s HQ in California? Yes, but until recently, trolls could file wherever they pleased. Many of the patent cases are tried in eastern Texas, because the area’s court system is especially friendly to trolls. For example, in the small town of Marshall, Judge Rodney Gilstrap oversaw more than a quarter of the country’s patent cases in 2015, reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Marshall figures prominently in Meyer’s movie, where he takes us literally on a tour of the empty offices across the street from the county courthouse where these patent cases are tried. All these offices are quite representative of these shell companies that are the trolls.

One delightful tidbit that he missed was that hotels in Marshall are so commonly frequented by lawyers that one even purchased a subscription to the electronic court-records system Pacer. You have in-room Wi-Fi, now there is in-room legal records search. How convenient. Earlier in May this year the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a defendant should only face patent litigation in the state where it’s incorporated, which for many tech businesses are either in California or Delaware. Meyer tells me that that hasn’t really stemmed the tide in Marshall, so probably that hotel will keep their in-room Pacer subscription.

Not all trolls succeed. In one case, Uniloc was defeated when a group of gaming companies showed the flaws in their argument in a case that was decided by an internal review by the US Patent office earlier this year. Uniloc is one of the more notorious trolls, but this is a minor setback: they have a huge collection of judgements from other cases. Uniloc was who sued Meyer, btw.

One of the issues mentioned in Meyer’s movie is how once the trolls identify a potential victim (not too small and not too large, so that the firm will be motivated to payout rather than fight), they are often hit repeatedly by other trolls. The typical lawsuit will cost several million dollars. Another issue: trolls sue people that use the patented idea, no matter how ridiculous the patent may be.  

Patent trolls isn’t a new topic, indeed there is another documentary by Lex Lybrand called The Trolls that came out last year that documents his experience, when his crowdfunded company was hit by a troll. And John Oliver did one of his HBO Last Week Tonight shows on patents a few years ago. (He illustrates his points with several great Shark Tank snippets.)  Meyer is also featured on Oliver’s segment.

Meyer has several suggestions for improving the patent process, and many of them have little hope of happening, thanks to trial lawyer lobbies and other market forces. But if you want to see how broken our patent system is, the movie is well worth your time.

Meyer’s movie, The Patent Scam, is now available for a fee to download and soon will be on Netflix and other streaming services.

Over the past several years, St. Louis has been recognized by a number of national publications as one of the fastest growing startup locations in the country. Having lived here for more than a decade, I have observed this first-hand, working as a volunteer mentor to dozens of new ventures as part of the IT Entrepreneur’s Network (ITEN). I had a chance recently to interview many of the founders of new companies and thought I would provide a few insights into why my adopted city has taken a leadership position in the startup world.

One reason is certainly an expanding ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. There is a critical mass of mentors, potential founders, funders, and startup-oriented resources that continues to feed on itself. Ten years ago, there weren’t many organizations or resources for startups. That has changed dramatically.

Another reason is that the cost of living here is low, especially when compared to both coasts. “It is less expensive to make the mistakes that you are inevitably going to make, and the range of people invested in your success is huge,” said Mark Sawyier, who launched his company Bonfyre in 2011. “The only thing you know for sure about your initial business plan is that is wrong. You have to be flexible and adaptable and have a greater appreciation for getting advice. The way a business responds to failure isn’t a single moment in time, but how they can retain what they have learned from that experience and move on.”

The coasts do offer some advantages, however. “Coastal investors are more comfortable with a SaaS model than their midwestern counterparts. But they also need you to be at a certain level of scale,” says Chris Deck, who has run his own ecommerce venture for almost 20 years. “The challenge to being in St. Louis is that the model to raise funds from the tech perspective is different, and you spend a lot of time talking about metrics that aren’t applicable to the SaaS business model.” Some startups have a hybrid hiring model, and ended up having salespeople based in the Bay Area just for this reason, but still have the remainder of their staff here.

Another reason why St. Louis is rising is because it is getting easier to find local talent. While that used to be more difficult, many of the founders I spoke to no longer had that issue. Sawyier said, “There is this misconception that there isn’t any local talent in St. Louis. That is not true at all. It amazes me that people are always surprised at the concentration of IT-related organizations around the area. These businesses are continually creating talent and new opportunities.”

One way to track the growth of the ecosystem is in the number of co-working spaces around the region. When I first arrived, there were none, now there are at least 20 and new ones are popping up regularly. Most of the spaces are operating at near capacity, and what is more important than the number of offices is that many companies have outgrown their initial space and have moved into new offices, with some even buying their own buildings.

Another is the sheer dollars that local funds are investing in startups. The amount has risen over the past several years, and while it isn’t at the level of a Austin, Boston, or Sand Hill Rd., it is enough to motivate many founders to relocate here for their business.

One of the ITEN programs that I have been involved with is called Mock Angels. A founder pitches his business as if he or she were appearing before a group of VCs, and afterwards they comment on the pitch and what can be improved. The theory is that this helps refine the pitch so when a real VC is at the receiving end the founder will be prepared and get funding. This isn’t unique to St. Louis: they can be found in other places. But what is different is that the Mock Angels do more than just carp about the slide deck. What I have seen is that these meetings are a good jumping off point for many founders to receive intensive mentoring from the Angels: one startup ended up talking to 20 different mentors to get a better take on what to do next.

As an example, let’s look at the story of Focalcast, a startup that provides live collaboration among tablet computers. They began by being accepted into the Capital Innovators accelerator program and moved to the St. Louis area. Then they came to ITEN and graduated from Mock Angels, and then got an Arch Grant and additional funding from the Missouri Technology Corporation. With each agency, they improved their pitch, refined their product offering, interacted with potential investors, mentors, and other specialists. “We couldn’t have gotten as far as we did without all this support from the various St. Louis programs,” said Devin Turner, their CEO. “All of them were instrumental in our success, and we have enormous respect for the St. Louis startup ecosystem. Each of these programs complements the others and works well for startups. We think St. Louis is a pretty special place and is a really great place for a young company to be located.” Turner’s pitch was torn up at his first Mock Angel session. “But we ended up working with one of the participants who went from saying that our business model didn’t make any sense to being a big advocate and a huge help for us to go to market and raise funds.”

As another example, look at Amanda Patterson, the CEO of a health-care training-related startup called The Call List. She received a great deal of mentoring from the folks she met at ITEN. “I was able to refine my business plan and introduce myself to people in the healthcare community that could apply my technology. When I first applied, I thought of Mock Angels as more of a gateway that I needed to pass through so I could apply for venture funding, but I realized that it is a way to develop a sustainable model and to train me to become a better business leader. Even the mentors that were the most negative about my pitch had useful thoughts that helped shape my business.”

Another company that benefited from the local startup scene is Label Insight. They provide a database of food ingredients for a variety of vendors. “Before we came to St. Louis, we were mostly working out of our garages and on our own,” said Anton Xavier, one of their co-founders. “We really needed to put our company on steroids and grow into a real viable business. We found St. Louis an ideal place for this growth, and the second we came into contact with the startup ecosystem here, we flourished and were able to escalate our growth.”    

St. Louis has really blossomed as a startup mecca. When I first got here, it was a rare week that had any startup-related event, and it was easy to attend most of them and get to know the community. Now there are numerous events each evening, a testimonial to how rich a community we have invented.

You can check out the Tech Startup Report from ITEN here if you want to read more about ITEN’s services and the St. Louis tech startup scene.

Oh no, not another startup business strategy book! But Sean Ammirati’s debut, The Science of Growth, is a meaty and useful manual for any entrepreneur that is looking to grow their business and learn from the mistakes and triumphs of the past. Ammirati and I worked together several years ago at ReadWrite.com, and now he is a Pittsburgh-based VC and business professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He offers plenty of wisdom here.

Many business books don’t have much to say after you have read their first chapter. The Science of Growth has a lot of useful takeaways, including exploding the myths of the first mover and always having a big launch event. He also explains why the best technology or getting the most VC funding doesn’t always make a company successful.

The book takes pairs of companies and looks at why Facebook, Google and McDonalds succeeded while Friendster, Yahoo and White Castle didn’t. Ammirati delves into four key prerequisites for growing your business: the founders should share a core vision, the basic idea should be scalable, it should solve a real problem and provide a solid first interaction. He then compares a set of ten paired companies to show how they differ.

For example, Facebook was later to the market and took longer to grow its first million customers than Friendster but had a more focused approach and created a better initial experience for its customers. McDonald borrowed money to finance its growth while White Castle didn’t. Google had a clean home page while Yahoo’s was cluttered with categories. WordPress was easier to install than Movable Type to get started with blogging. And so forth.

The book catalogs some major movements that were critical to companies’ growth. Twitter is largely credited with launching at the 2007 SXSW show, but it used clever marketing to bring attention to its then seven-month old product by paying for video monitors that it placed in the hallways to attract conference goers. Airbnb got a boost when Denver residents listed their spare rooms for Democrats who wanted to come there to hear Obama’s 2008 convention speech. WordPress took advantage of the moment in 2004 when Movable Type started charging for its blogging software.

For those who want to learn from the mistakes of the past so their businesses can find future growth, this is essential reading.

Rich and Amy Hansen and their 71 Mustang

It is ironic that I found myself enjoying “A Faster Horse,” a recent movie about the making of the 2015 model Ford Mustang directed by David Gelb.

I am not a car person: I view a car as basic transportation and not a statement about my lifestyle or whatever. But the movie shows how hard it is for businesspeople to collaborate on complex projects, such as designing a completely new version of the classic American muscle car that has sold more than nine million units over its 50 year tenure.

Too often those of us deeply steeped in high tech forget that the industrial revolution happened many years ago and people were collaborating without emails, Sharepoint, the Internet, or What’s App. While the folks at Ford have all of those tools and more, what is interesting is Gelb’s perspective on how the various work teams had to pull off this major redesign. You see the early sketches on paper, computer modeling, clay models and then the various factory pieces coming together with the 2015 Mustangs ready to sell last fall.

Speaking of car sales, wanna guess how much that first 1965 Mustang went on sale for? The answer is at the end of this post.

There were several scenes in the film that were my favorites. One is a meeting to deal with a crisis: the drivetrain parts are off by one millimeter, and this gap is making the car not very reliable and not very drivable. The team gets together for a meeting to try to close the gap: meanwhile the production line is stalled until the work around can be implemented. This is collaboration at its best. What is amazing is how this small a gap could have torpedoed the entire project.

There are lots of meetings around the speakerphone as the engineering team tries to figure out ways to shave weight and increase fuel economy, all while adding styling and new features to the 2015 model. They are actually pretty interesting, even for this non-car guy. Again, it is all about working together to solve the particular problem. At one point, one of the engineers isn’t happy that some issue would have been fixed by spending $1.34 per car. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, until you realize that Ford will be making hundreds of thousands of Mustangs, and this $1.34 increase is taking a lot of profit off the table down the road.

My favorite other scenes are about this father-daughter team Rich and 13-year old Amy Hansen. Over the past four years, the two worked on renovating a classic 1971 Mustang (pictured above) and have it finished just in time to drive it across country to the new Mustang launch party in North Carolina. I was jealous of them not because they produced a beautiful car, but because the kid really knows her stuff and was deep into the project. Again, this is another useful note on collaboration. Certainly, there are many dads of teens that wouldn’t even consider working with their daughters on classic cars. Now this kid has some solid skills even if she just uses them to change a tire and oil.

If your startup is going to host a movie night, consider this flick. It shows you what is needed to pull together and produce a great project, even if it is a car.

By the way, that 1965 Mustang sold for somewhere around $2,750. The restored classic cars are now going for $30,000 or more in good condition. Even accounting for 50 years’ worth of inflation that is a pretty good investment.