And Another One

As I’ve assembled my new team under 2ndF, we’ve got our first big trip ahead of us. We will be heading out to Seattle and SF/ Bay area Monday through Friday. The objectives of the trip are to engage with the community to a) learn about how they are building their ecosystems and b) to engage with funders around deep tech and early stage investment opportunities in the Triangle. As a function of having the whole team out traveling I’ve taken a couple of pages from the GDC and AddressDoctor playbook and reinstituted the Trip Report. I thought I’d share this with other founders and founder teams as a good tool for capturing travel experiences.

The Trip Report is a daily log of meetings had while traveling. It typically includes what was the meeting; who was there and any insightful knowledge gleamed from the meeting. It might also include follow-ups from the meeting. Each team member is required to complete a Trip Report daily while traveling. This usually happened for me at the end of the day or first thing in the morning before the next set of meeting began. The report is then shared out with the rest of the company so that everyone can get the jist of what was done and help shape any additional follow-up.

I can say that some people HATED doing these reports but they were a integral part of how we made sure that every trip was driving value against the cost of the trip. It also ensured that as a team we were accountable for not wasting company resources by not having multiple meetings daily when traveling afar. I also think that these reports helped make sure that team members gathered their notes and followed up on the key elements of a meeting before their memories of the meetings got fuzzy and things were forgotten.

I’m looking forward to the trip this week and further I am looking forward to reading the team trip reports to see how they are looking at achieving the objectives and moving us forward towards helping with the inclusive growth of the Triangle technology ecosystem.