As was reported in TechCrunch today, we've just signed a deal to sell our startup Socialize to ShareThis.  Although having a successful exit is a dream for many entrepreneurs, I find myself feeling a wide range of emotions and thoughts.  I'd like to share some of them in this blog to provide an honest assessment of what it's like to work tirelessly on a startup and then sell it.

The first thing I want to say is that often upon a sale, you'll hear everyone involved talk about how "pumped" or "excited" they are.  The truth of the matter is that it's much more complex than that.  There is absolutely a sense of excitement.  But I've asked for, and gotten, permission from ShareThis to speak honestly about the wide range of feelings and to speak to the complexity of it all so I can provide a more thoughtful and honest assessment than one typically sees in these situations.  Think of it as a peek under the covers of an acquisition.

My incredible wife gave birth to a beautiful daughter earlier this week. 6lbs, 6oz. Mom and baby are doing great. No name yet (we have to get to know her first!). A few pictures are below.

• Visitors: We can't wait to introduce Baby DROdio to our friends and family; mom & baby are recovering at home. We'll let you know as soon as we get a handle on everything.

• No gifts, please! We are taking an "agile" approach to parenting. For those of you who aren't techies, that means we are taking it step by step, and we will purchase baby items as we learn the needs of our baby. We don't want to start out with a room full of boxes of baby things that we don't know whether we'll need or not. However, we'll happily take any of your tried & true hand-me-down clothing that you no longer need (reduce, reuse, recycle!).

If you really really want to get us something (and you're really stubborn even though we don't need anything!), we would ask that you get us a Munchery Gift Card. This is a food ordering service that will allow us to have freshly prepared food delivered daily for the first few weeks, and that would help both of us cope. (Since Sue is the one who usually feeds us, I especially would appreciate this, since I'll be responsible for feeding her!) To make sure it arrives at the right place, use email address "us -at- danielodio -dot- com" for the gift card.

That's it for now, more updates to come!

Tesla stock is down almost 10% today, after its 2012 earnings report became public.  Tesla missed its projections and investors hammered the stock in response.  So what did I just do?  I just bought a lot of TSLA.  Why did I do it?  Because I'm betting on Elon.

There's a SeekingAlpha analyst report that's very bearish on Tesla stock.  The author writes:

I judged the NFTE Quarter Final competition at a local San Francisco high school today.  NFTE is an organization that teaches entrepreneurship to students in high school and younger. One of the pitches today was made by 9th grader Simran Pabla around a pilot program she's running at her school:  A business called Ready4Rain, which offers umbrellas to students so they don't get wet when they're going from building to building between classes.  You can see her full pitch to the judges here. I was so impressed with her that I later interviewed her in the school's cafeteria.  Here's a 9th grader who's currently running a pilot program for a startup concept she had.  And she's not alone.  Jocelyn Hernandez has sold over 20 of her custom iPhone cases at $40 each via her company, Functional Couture.  And Mariana Ponce has sold over 100 of her Corny Cups at $2.50 each.  In the past, I've done talks with Stanford MBAs, UVA McIntire business school students, and Georgetown MBAs and I consistently find that many of them are terrified to take the leap to becoming an entrepreneur by actually doing something, and not just talking about it.  Consistently, high school or younger age kids are willing to take more risks than college students.  It's almost like some switch gets flipped at some point in college that causes many students to stop seeing opportunities to be entrepreneurial, and become afraid to try jumping into the ones they do see. The interview above with Simran is great, partly because she's so honest about her motivations.  She simply saw an opportunity to solve a problem, and went for it.  She has no mortgage to worry about.  No kids to take care of.  Nothing to keep her from simply jumping to solve the problem she saw in front of her.  She just proves how simple it is to become an entrepreneur when it's what you really want to do. So, kudos to Simran, Jocelyn, Mariana and their NFTE colleagues.  I hope they never lose that risk-taking spirit.  What may just seem to be a high school competition is actually an opportunity to effect massive change through entrepreneurism.  The great thing about "creating something from nothing" is that nobody cares how old you are when you do it.  There's no reason any of these ideas couldn't morph into huge, real businesses.  All these kids need is the will to do it, and the means to try. If you're interested in volunteering for NFTE (something I love to do), drop me a comment below and I'll introduce you to someone who can help you figure out how you can really add value to the program.

Coin is a new startup that's trying to replace traditional credit cards. Its YouTube video has 6.8MM views. When you Google the word "coin" they show up as the #1 search result -- not only that, but news story results fill out much of the first page of search results. Not bad for a startup with a product that won't even be available for another 6+ months.

What did this startup do to have such massively successful launch? And why is it coming from a small startup vs. an established company in the space?

In the world of product launches, many companies rely on Paid Media (i.e., ads) to launch new products. But startups don't have the huge ad budgets that big companies do, so they have to get creative by leveraging Earned Media (i.e., you, on Facebook, talking about it). Just like Lockitron did last year, Coin has touched a nerve, hitting its $50,000 crowdfunding campaign goal in under an hour, according to this Forbes article. The founder was quoted as saying:

We've been using the "lock & unlock your door with an app on your phone" solution from Lockitron for two years now.  In fact, here's a blog I wrote in 2010 with a video showing how it works.  As early adopters, Paul, one of the Lockitron founders, was great about coming by our office to fix the early version of Lockitron whenever it had trouble.  We were happy users of Lockitron version 1.0.

And that's all I heard about Lockitron for two years.  But it turns out Paul, Cameron & team have been super busy.  Today they launched a new version of Lockitron in a really smart way.  It's so impressive that I'm going to spend a few minutes dissecting it, because we can all learn from what they've done.   I'd also like to invite anyone from Lockitron to give more detail on my observations in the comments section below.

The first and most obvious thing they did was use a Kickstarter-type approach to their launch.  When you visit www.Lockitron.com you see what I've taken a screenshot of above.  (I'd be curious to know if they're using a while-labeled Kickstarter-type service, or more likely, just taking the best from Kickstarter's approach and doing it in-house).

As I've outlined in the screenshot, they set a goal which (purposefully or not) is now massively oversubscribed.  It makes you feel like you have to get in on the action.  

Over on my entrepreneur + tech blog, I post about an area I'm very familiar with:  Technology & startups.

Now, I'm embarking on a much bigger challenge:  Fatherhood.

Yep, I'm going to be a dad.  Here's a picture of our daughter, who will be joining us sometime in late October 2013:

Getaround is a car sharing service like Zipcar, except that it uses people's private vehicles instead of a fleet.  It's a bit like AirBnB for cars.  Getaround is part of the "collaborative consumption" movement, which believes that if we could share things we don't use most of the time it would be better for us in a lot of ways.  Sharing cars means less cars on the road, which means less pollution, and generally less "stuff."  

I'd never used Getaround and a few weeks ago I was trying to figure out why.  I pinged Jessica, one of the founders, and told her that what I'd realized was that I didn't want to have to go to someone's house and "borrow" their car.  The thought of actually interacting with the owner of a car was awkward enough that it had kept me from trying the service.

Jessica told me about a new type of rental they now have called "Instant," where I can use the Getaround mobile app to rent a car instantly and unlock it with my phone, meaning I wouldn't have to meet the owner or wait for approval.  (This dovetails really well into my recent blogs about the power of mobile and apps to transform businesses, and how Fortune 1000 CEOs are going to get fired for missing it.)  Getaround Instant was exactly what I was looking for, so my brother-in-law Dal and I decided to give it a try.

I had a few hiccups that Getaround is still working through (for example, Getaround verifies a driver's driving history with the DMV in real-time, and since my last name has a hyphen in it, but the DMV doesn't account for hyphens, my rental request initially broke Getaround's booking system.  But both Jessica and Matt were very proactive at resolving these speed bumps).  Overall the process was incredibly smooth:

Achieving strong product/market fit as a startup is arguably the most important thing a startup needs to get right, as early on as possible. One big barrier to doing that successfully is often finding customers that care enough about what the startup is doing to spend time helping the startup optimize its products for the customer's needs.

This gets especially hard with the Fortune 1000. Startups and behemoth companies couldn't be more different -- like oil and water. A startup lives in dog years, a large corporation in glacial years. Not only that, but corporations have to protect their existing revenue streams, which usually happens with a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. But therein lies a dilemma: A profitable business today may become irrelevant tomorrow. History is littered with mega companies that failed to adapt: Kodak, Blackberry and Nokia, to name a few. Even the obscenely profitable Microsoft just axed its CEO for missing innovation in mobile.

So how does a big company spur innovation while not jeopardizing its existing business? Time Warner came up with an innovative program called Media Camp. Big props to Balaji Gopinath, the VP of Emerging Technology for Turner, for originally championing this concept at Turner Broadcasting.

My startup, Socialize, went through Media Camp at Turner last year, and we also participated in a Warner Bros TV program called the Brand Innovation (a big thank-you to our investor Chris Redlitz for turning us on to that one). These experiences allowed us to get an investment from Time Warner as well as sign a commercial agreement with them. That was invaluable to us as a startup, but it's also given Time Warner the ability to become very forward-thinking around social & mobile. It's truly been a symbiotic relationship.

CEOs are busy.  It's easy to be distracted with competing priorities coming from all directions.  But there's one darkhorse mega-trend that I believe will catch many CEOs by surprise, and even cause some of them be fired by their boards for missing it:  The Mobile Crush.

Two years ago, I did an in-depth screencast describing why I believed mobile would be way bigger than most people realize.  And now the crush is starting in earnest.

There's a great quote by Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga in an article today by the New York Times: