Blueleaf is building the world’s first truly personal financial planning platform.  It’s a complex product with a lot of features to meet all the different problems that our customer discovery has shown that people want.  Here are ten concrete things we’re doing to get 10,000 sign ups before we even launch our product.

1. Making Potential Users Ask Publicly To Get In

There are two ways to get into Blueleaf: get an invite from us, or get an invite from a current user.  We let in a limited number of users every week, and we choose who we let in based on how much they want in.  Only people who request an invite and follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, or otherwise make it clear that they want in, get in.  This means they have to sign up with us and tell everyone else about us before they can get in.

2. The World’s Strictest Invite System

The other way to get in is to get referred in by a current user.  We’ve developed our own twist on refer-a-friend: rather than limit the number of invites someone has, there are an unlimited number of invites – but we’ve limited the time frames to invite a friend.  We turn on the ability to invite a friend for just an hour or two so that people who want in have to beg everyone they know who’s on to let them in before the window closes.  When we announce that invites are on, potential users need to plead for invites publicly on Twitter and Facebook, privately over IM and e-mail, or however else they can reach current users.  Again, this kicks off a viral loop before the app has even launched.

3. Splitting Up Blog And Library Content

We write – a lot.  We publish something new almost every day.  However, most of our new content isn’t on our blog – it’s in Blueleaf's library of articles about financial planning.  It makes no sense to hide an article about bond funds and bond ETFs on a blog, where it’ll be impossible to find in a month.  We’ve segregated our greenfield content so that someone looking for that topic five years after we publish it can find it easily.  Plus, we can easily update and change this content as laws, tax policy, and the investment environment changes without confusing new or returning visitors. 

4. Having A Strong Point Of View

When we write content, we rarely do six of one, half a dozen of the other.  When we write about Roth versus Traditional IRAs, we don’t do pros and cons.  We say that if you have to ask the question, you should open a Roth IRA.  The vast majority of Americans qualify for a Roth.  They should open a Roth.  For the people who should open a Traditional IRA, we go through the reasons when it would make sense – but we don’t do false equivalence.  On our opinionated articles, Blueleaf’s position is front and center, up front, before the rest of the content to deliver as much value as we can in as few seconds as possible. (BTW, we do absolutely no SEO analysis or keyword stuffing.  That stuff is lame.  We write answers to the questions people ask us, simple as that.)

5. We Don’t Blog About Our Product

The Blueleaf blog has three components: Blueleaf Stories, Blueleaf Thoughts, and (to come) Blueleaf Tech.  Our Stories are the Blueleaf staff writing about their own personal financial experiences so that we can make it clear that we’re making a product that we’re very emotionally invested in.  Over time, we’ll ask our users to contribute their own.  Blueleaf Thoughts are about things we find interesting that we think will also be interesting to our audience.  We want to provide value for everyone who is saving for their financial futures, regardless if they’re interested in our product right now or not.  If we have interesting stuff, we’ll get links and traffic.  That’s it.

6. Link Roundups For Users And Relationships

The other thing we do on our blog is post twenty links every Friday afternoon, comprised of the four handpicked links we tweet out each weekday.  Not everyone follows @blueleafcom on Twitter, so it’s a nice convenient place to have some leisurely reading over the weekend.  However, the real clever thing about link roundups is that they provide Trackbacks to the financial bloggers we want to establish relationships with.  Bloggers click through on their Trackbacks, see the Blueleaf site, and get interested in the product.  This makes it much easier to develop relationships and approach them for coverage as we get closer to launch.

7. Using Facebook And Twitter Very Differently

Instead of using our blog to announce new features, we use Facebook Notes.  Also, Facebook is the only place to get a feed of every new piece of content we post when we post it (there’s no RSS feed for our Article content).  Facebook is Blueleaf's broadcast medium for people who want to keep up-to-the-minute with what Blueleaf is up to.  We use Twitter to share interesting links and we’ll use it as a cornerstone of our customer service as we add additional users.  We’re so big on sharing links on Twitter that we have two accounts for it – @blueleafcom and @BlueleafLinks.  The only thing we do on both?  We’re diligent about responding to anyone who comments on Facebook or @replies to us on Twitter.  

8. A/B Testing The Hell Out Of Everything

We A/B test a lot – we’ve tested calls to action, button colors, button size, headlines, images, and a litany of other things using Visual Website Optimizer and Performable.  But we make sure we don’t end up in local maxima.  We’ve A/B tested radical redesigns of our homepage, and the current page is the one that beat the pants off our old one.  We do this A/B testing so that we can maximize our conversion, regardless if the traffic to our site is a trickle or a flood.  We’re ready to catch all the fish in the sea that just happen to be swimming by.

9. Being Smart About Paid User Acquisition

We’ve tested all sorts of various paid acquisition channels – everything from Google and Yahoo to reddit, Facebook, and directory sites.   We’ve been able to drive down our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to a very reasonable amount – not the blended CAC between paid and free, but our CAC on paid alone is very, very attractive.  Even though I’m the guy who called AdWords “a gateway drug to unprofitable user acquisition”, being smart with small paid tests that get your CAC down to a reasonable number makes potential investors all hot and bothered.  Proof that you can get affordable paid acquisition makes fundraising much, much easier.

10. Knowing Just Who The Hell Is Signing Up

We run every single e-mail we get through Flowtown so we know a bit about who’s coming in through the open door.  Doing this, we can stagger who we let in when and we can have better content for our e-mail newsletters to those on the waiting list.  We reach out to people we’ve identified as potential influencers and we make sure that we don’t let people who are potential investors until the time is right.  (Join the club, folks – not even our current investors have access to Blueleaf.)  Letting in the right people at the right time means that we prime the pump to yield water only when we’re thirsty for new sign ups.

I've worked a fair number of large events - Howard Dean's last rally in New Hampshire after Iowa before the primary, where I brought 1,400 people to Plymouth State University in the midst of a snowstorm and 20 below temperatures, the inaugural Personal Democracy Forum, and Major League Soccer's All-Star Game - and TechCrunch Disrupt has been the most well put-together large event I've ever had the pleasure to work on.  

I've started blogging about startup life, with some thoughts and actionable startup advice for founders and early employees at http://blog.meatinthesky.com.  I'll be focusing on the stuff before product/market fit.  This is the period of the most experimentation and the lowest burn you can do - it's the most perilous part of the startup process, as you're walking a tightrope without a net.

As for the name, see the first post.

And you can follow @meatinthesky on Twitter to be notified of new posts.

Commodity national news is dead.  Newspapers are dying.  The AP wire on Yahoo News (or Google's more heterogenous and more cluttered version) and CNN.com are "good enough" that all other services providing "just the facts, ma'am" provide no incremental value.  Most observers recognize that this leaves a void in the local space, and predictably you see newspapers retrenching into their neighborhoods, fending off competitors like Outside.in, EveryBlock, and ESPN's local sites.

In my last post, I crunched the data to see where Illinois ranked on a variety of metrics related to venture funding for startups. Turned out that no matter how you sliced the data, Illinois came out pretty poorly. This poor showing was a pretty strong indictment of the infrastructure, leadership, and general environment for startups here in Illinois - as far as I'm concerned, whether or not you want funding, being able to get funded is an indication of quality infrastructure and a strong startup environment.

So the obvious question is, if Illinois is so terrible, which states are good?

In my analysis of the data last time, I made two claims: 1) seed/startup funding is the best stage to evaluate, because those are the first dollars a new team is looking for. I believe that new dollars for a new team is the best indication for general environment, given the small dollars involved and the less company-specific nature of seed investing. (Nevada ties for dead last in the startup/seed data, no matter how you slice it, despite the success of Zappos.)  2) per-capita metrics, while a bit flawed due to network effects, are the best option we have, better than aggregate dollars or aggregate deals because per-capita metrics control for the "California is the biggest state, so it should see the most dollars" objection.

So, I re-ran the numbers to see what states had the highest per-capita dollars invested in startup/seed deals[1]. Here are the results for the one-, three-, and five-year spans ending 2007:

As you can see, there's a clear "step" between Massachusetts and California and the next tier. There's more than double the amount of money per-capita in Massachusetts and California in 2007 than there was in Minnesota and Washington state, the 3rd and 4th best on the list.

For the three year period of 2005-2007, just as for 2007 alone, Massachusetts and California dominate, with significantly higher per-capita dollars flowing to seed and startup deals than the next tier of states (from New York to Virginia, which has a range just slightly larger than the difference between New York and California).

Lastly, here's the data for the five-year period of 2003-2007. Delaware is skewed by very high per-capita amounts in 2003 and 2004 (the state had $23.60 invested per capita in 2003 and $49.05(!) in 2004 [2] ), but the rest of the chart is generally in line with the one- and three-year charts. Again, Massachusetts and California are heads and shoulders above the rest of the states.

In all three charts, you see strong showings from New York and Washington, which I wasn't surprised by. What I didn't expect was the strong showing by states such as Maryland and Utah. I know that Maryland may benefit some from federal money, but if that was so strong, we'd expect a stronger showing from Virginia and DC as well, which we don't. As for Utah, I know the Computer Science program in Utah is strong, and there are a number of technology companies in Utah (Omniture immediately comes to me), but still - it's astonishing. There must be something cultural in Utah that makes startups there more palatable than, say, Illinois.

When I talk to entreprenuers that want to start their own technology companies, the first question I ask is "do you have a co-founder?" The second I ask is "how committed are you?" The third I ask is "if you're so serious, why haven't you moved to California yet?" Turns out the data says that I should amend that last question to "why haven't you moved to California or Massachusetts yet?" (This, of course, assumes that you can syndicate a seed deal among angels in Massachusetts as easily as you could syndicate a deal in California. Again, I don't have angel data - see [1].)

Again, comments welcome on the data, methodology, and requests for other cuts of the data.

[1] Now, of course, the data I had was only about VC firms' funding - it was silent on angels. Knowing this was an issue with the PWC MoneyTree data, I've spent a fair amount of time since my last post begging for angel data. [1a] But, in the end, no one could find angel data to send to me. So, at this point, I've given up on angel data. (If you have some, please send it to me.)

[1a] I even managed to get promised an invite to the psuedo-TechStars demo day here in Chicago (it was actually an independent event, put together because so many of the Boston summer cohort had Chicago ties), but I never received it, despite a flurry of e-mails the day of. Many thanks to Brad Feld for trying to get me in; boo to whoever was supposed to send me the official invite. (I had time/location, but I didn't want to crash without an official invite.) I really wanted to get a headcount versus the Mountain View headcount and see who showed up. I was going to take that list and try to determine which Chicago-area angels actually had done deals in the last 12 months. As far as I know, Apex's seed investment in Appolicious is the only one in the last twelve months.

[2] Anyone have an explanation for these two outlier years? Delaware comes in at $0.00 per capita for 2005, 2006, and 2007 seed/startup deals, so I'm guessing just a handful of deals - maybe even just one or two deals - skew this chart, especially as Delaware is a relatively low-population state. The PWC data I got from SSTI is aggregated; I don't have access to the Thomson database with the deals themselves.

So, Chicago's lacking in tech leadership, says a columnist in the Chicago Tribune.  No, it's not, respond the heads of various tech organizations in Chicago and the State.  As someone who's founded a startup here in Chicago, I'm certainly more inclined to agree with the Trib columnist than with the panel.  However, I'm also a policy wonk - so I decided to take a look at the data to see who's right. 

The best independent, objective data I could think of was venture funding data for startup companies[1].  The assumption, of course, is that venture funding is very highly correlated with technology leadership and serves as a legitimate proxy.  The focus on startups is because organizational leadership can most help the smallest of companies and early entrepreneurs as they jump into the deep end.  (However, I've presented the overall data as well to avoid charges of bias.)  Employment figures are fuzzy - you probably don't want to include CDW salespeople in a list of technology employees, for example.  I gathered state-by-state data from PricewaterhouseCooper's MoneyTree Report.  My source of data was the State Science and Technology Institute (SSTI).  SSTI's Venture Capital data site further breaks down the MoneyTree into easy-to-use state-by-state data[2]. 

You can see the data for Illinois at the SSTI page for Illinois.  The data show that Illinois companies have raised roughly $440 million per year since the last bubble year of 2000, which sounds decent, until you realize that Illinois companies only attract, on average, 1.59% of all VC dollars - across all stages - raised in the US.  The average number of Illinois VC funding deals per year for the 2001-2008 period is 70.5, which is just 1.99% of all deals in the States.  (Here's the page for the US data.)

These numbers aren't any prettier for Illinois startup companies.  For the 2001-2007 period (there is no by-stage data for 2008 available on the SSTI state-by-state breakdown pages), Illinois startups raised a total of just $56.7 million, a pittance of just $8.1 million per year.  It's even worse on the per-deal statistics: Illinois had a total of just 32 startup fundings for the entire seven-year 2001-2007 period.  That's an average of just 4.6 startup fundings per year.  The total startup funding across the entire US for the 2001-2007 period was $5.6 billion, with a total of 1,845 deals over the seven-year span.  That's an average amount of $740 million per year and average number of 264 startup fundings per annum across the entire United States. 

That means that Illinois companies, on average over the seven years, raised just 1.74% of the seed money and did just 1.09% of the startup deals done nationwide.  This, despite the fact that Illinois has 4.24% of the US population.  For just the smallest startups that organizations like DCEO and the ITA should be helping the most, Illinois is getting less than half of the dollars and doing less than a third of the deals that you would expect for a state of its size.  (It's still less than half for dollars and deals overall, as well.)

The numbers are just as embarrassing when you look at Illinois relative to the other states in the nation rather than just the United States as a whole:

(Slide 4)

(Slide 2)

Illinois ranks an average of 16th among the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico in startup dollars for the 2001-2007 time period.  Illinois did a bit better and averaged a rank of 13th in startup funding deals for the period. (Illinois' median for dollars was 14th and its median for deals was 11th.)

However, again, these figures favor the larger states over the smaller states; i.e. you'd expect California to be the leader in both categories (and it was) since California has the most people.  To really compare, we must look at the states on an apples-to-apples basis by looking at the per capita figures: 

(Slide 3)

(Slide 1)

It turns out that the per-capita figures are even worse for Illinois than the non-normalized figures.  Illinois averaged just 20th amongst the 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico in startup dollars per capita for the 2001-2007 period.  Illinois averaged a pitiful 23rd in startup deals per capita for the 2001-2007 period.  (Illinois' median for per-capita dollars was 18th and its median for per-capita deals was 24th.)

States that consistently beat Illinois in the rankings include Colorado, Texas, and Washington, to say nothing of California and Massachusetts.  However, even states like Maryland and Pennsylvania consistently beat Illinois' rankings on all four measures - startup dollars, startup deals, startup dollars per capita, and startup deals per capita - year after year after year.  On a per-capita basis, states like Connecticut and even New Mexico consistently outrank Illinois in dollars and deals.

By the way, Illinois' average rank in dollars for 2001-2008 (remember, SSTI has total figures for the 2008 year) - regardless of stage - was 13th, and its rank in deals was also 13th.  Again, the average per-capita rankings - the better apples-to-apples comparison - was much worse.  Illinois' average per-capita rank in dollars raised for the 2001-2008 period was 22nd, and its per-capita rank for deals done (again, for all VC deals regardless of stage) was also 22nd, both barely over the median - a median artifically low due to states like Wyoming and Alaska that see no venture activity, year over year.  Illinois is actually below the median when you exclude the inactive states - shameful.

That's just not leadership.

The data are clear - our technology organizations have failed to do their jobs and changes need to be made to make Illinois more hospitable to technology startups if the state has any chance at competing in a 21st century economy.  

Footnotes:

[1] Let me be clear: I fully acknowledge that one can grow a startup without raising outside funds.  However, I believe that those are exception cases, not the rule.  More importantly, I believe the environment that allows for funding is also the best environment for a bootstrapped startup.  In other words, the plural of anecdote is not data.

[2] Data geeks: I fully acknowledge that the MoneyTree data excludes deals done solely by individual investors (angels); however, 1) this is the best objective data I could find and 2) my guess is that individual investors would only further demonstrate the conclusions I'm about to make.  Feel free to grab your own source MoneyTree data and run it yourself.  I couldn't find industry breakdowns by state, and I believe that the overall data is plenty clear about the conclusions to be drawn.

       

Click here to download:

Illinois_So-Called_Tech_Leader.zip (81 KB)

The goings-on on various econoblogs regarding Rattner supposedly threatening the creditors who didn't go along with the Chrysler debt cramdown is one of the more generally well-written "you people are missing the pot" things I've read in a long while. 

Chrysler, of course, filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization after all the creditors could not come to an agreement.  The Obama administration, by way of the Treasury Department and Steve Rattner (the "car czar"), managed to get the four largest lenders (who had no choice, as they're being propped up by TARP funds), the UAW, and Fiat on board.  But the agreement failed to get enough support from all stakeholders, and President Obama all but blamed the non-TARP debtholders for the bankruptcy filing during a news conference the morning of Thursday, April 30. Of course, the non-TARP guys objected to this characterization.  Later in the late afternoon April 30, Perella Weinberg, one of the leaders of the non-TARP group, came around and supported the administration's plan, but it was too late.   The bankruptcy was set.  A lawyer representing the non-TARP lenders said that Perella Weinberg only came around because of threats made by the administration to bring negative PR to bear by way of their supposed influence over the White House press corps.  Perella Weinberg, of course, denied this.

On Finem Respice, Equ Privat wrote that there was a more sinister threat - that the administration did not just threaten bad PR, but would bring the IRS and SEC to bear upon the non-TARP creditors, their employees, families, alma maters, dogs, and favorite sports teams.  Of course, this could be seen as an abuse of power (as we are all terrified of the IRS and all investment managers are scared of the SEC's ability to "slow them down").  Equ Privat called the purported Rattner threats "fascist".  For this, she was mocked, mercilessly.  The author of The Epicurean Dealmaker, used Looney Tunes to jab at the non-TARP creditors, saying "[i]t's called politics, you fucking morons. Stop being such a bunch of whiny pansies."  The point TED made was that even if such a PR threat was made, there were a lot of people in the government under under a lot of stress, and the threat was just a negotiating tactic anyway.

As Felix Salmon points out, the non-TARP creditors don't have much of a leg to stand on for their whining, coerced or not into a supplicant position at the mercy of the bankruptcy judge.  Their position in Chrysler was a moral hazard one - "of course the Obama administration won't let Chrysler go bankrupt".  Thus, if it won't go bankrupt, as senior secured creditors, they stood the most to gain.  Pretty simple arithmetic.  Problem was that they didn't think the administration would really let Chrysler go bankrupt - albeit a Chapter 11 reorg rather than a Chapter 7 liquidation - and they did, because they had all the post-event actors on their side: Chrysler management, the large banks, and a private actor, Fiat, to act as a savior. 

This was a completely predicatable outcome, and the non-TARP guys treated it as impossible.  They assumed that the sanctity of American bankruptcy law and precedent would strengthen their hands well enough to force a positive outcome for their vulture investment.  The non-TARP creditors are morons, not for whining, but for not seeing this play out the way that it did.

It's called political risk.

Look, we generally think of political risk when making investments in, say, Pakistan or Russia.  But to completely discount the political risk of a vulture investment in Chrysler debt is completely insane.   The notion that a Democratic administration was going to stand idly by as vulture investors were going to cram down the UAW and TARP banks is foolish.  One, there's a legitimate policy argument that the United States needs a Detroit-based domestic automobile manufacturing enterprise for national security.  You can agree or disagree, but it's a legitimate policy position.  Two, the UAW is a powerful union in a swing state.  To put it another way, the UAW ain't UNITE HERE.  Three, it was completely forseeable that the Obama administration would take advantage of the troubles at GM and Chrysler to kickstart their environmental policy goals. 

The idea that the administration would put all of that aside based on fealty to the well-established order of creditors that you'd have in any traditional bankruptcy, as the non-TARP creditors believed, is naive at best and a violation of the prudent man standard at worst. 

Look, in most vulture situations, the non-TARP creditors would be right.  You'd have an orderly liquidation, and the secured creditors would be in the front of the line to receive proceeds.  But not here - the political risk wasn't even close to zero.  It'd be like making a bunch of greentech investments with Dick Cheney and Phil Gramm as President and Vice President.  You have to, at the very least, merely consider that maybe, just maybe, future policy decisions will make your current investment thesis weaker.

The non-TARP creditors were insane to think their hand was as strong as they played it.  It wasn't even a bluff - they really thought they were playing Omaha high low and that they were holding a Wheel.  In the end, it turned out they were playing 52 card pickup and they lost.

One of the best things about Silicon Valley is that almost anyone will meet with you for a cup of coffee provided that you're reasonably intelligent and not an axe murderer.  My intelligence aside, I'm not an axe murderer, so Yokum Taku, partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, was kind enough to meet with me on Friday. 

As people who read Hacker News know, I consider Yokum's Startup Company Lawyer blog indispensable for budding and active entrepreneurs.  There is a wealth of information on all stages of a startup company's legal needs, free for the reading from one of the Valley's most esteemed lawyers.  Yokum most recently helped bring WSGR's termsheet generator to life and drafted the publicly available Series F documents for Adeo Rossi's Founders Institute.  Wilson also drafted YCombinator's "open sourced" Series AA angel financing documents.

In addition to Wilson Sonsini's work, Cooley Godward drafted a set of angel funding documents released by  TechStars and the NVCA also has publicly available venture funding documents, which were led by Sarah Reed of Lowenstein Sadler.

While we did discuss Dawdle, Yokum was kind enough to talk to me about a question I've been asked plenty of times: "how do I get started if I don't get into YCombinator/TechStars/LaunchBox/pick the clone of your choice?"  This actually ended up being a rather fascinating discussion, and with Yokum's permission, allow me to share with you what we talked about.  (Quotes are from handwritten notes I took during the conversation.  No recording was made.)

I presented the following hypothetical to Yokum: you have two people who want to create a startup.  They're convinced it has the potential to be a billion dollar company, and one of the founders was able to convince her parents to seed the company with $50,000.  The other founder has an uncle who's a small-town lawyer who's willing to create and file the paperwork to set up the company for free.  Given this situation, and incorporating Yokum's knowledge of financings and exits backwards and forwards, the question was "what set of documents should the founders give the uncle as a basis to form the company?"

After thinking about this hypothetical, Yokum responded "I don't think those docs are out there."  He volunteered that it would be "better to use [the YCombinator Series AA] docs than anything else [he] could think of", since there's "not much [the lawyer] could really screw up if he was reasonably intelligent."  But Yokum did volunteer that the ideal would be to have an experienced startup attorney at an established firm draft documents for the company given the firm's standard documents.

Surprised, I asked Yokum if he knew of any firm using the open sourced documents since they were available for free for anyone to use.  He said there was not a lot of actual use that he knew of since every investor already has their own set of documents with their preferred terms.  Yokum stated that the documents serve to "give entrepreneurs a chance to look at [sample docs] before getting educated [by] their attorneys," who ostensibly charge for the privilege.  The documents effectively serve to educate startup founders for free rather than actually replace seasoned counsel doing incorporation work.

Given that Yokum's advice was to forgo the free attorney and seek out experienced counsel, I asked "where does a startup founder find this counsel?"  Yokum responded with a list of regions: Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin, Boston, New York City, and DC.  I joked, "not Chicago?" and he responded "well, I was just giving you a list of cities where [WSGR] has offices."  (A quick one, that Yokum.)  In fairness, Wilson Sonsini does not have a Boston-area office.  But upon discussion, I agreed that experienced counsel would naturally arise in areas that had active levels of investment, which Yokum characterized with two things: venture investors, and "companies that 'throw off' rich people to be angels."  Yokum volunteered that he only knew of one or two venture firms in Chicago, and I named a couple more in town.  He then asked about angels, and I had to concede that I knew of no active Internet angels in Chicago or the Midwest as a whole.

However, the list of areas that did have counsel that Yokum termed appropriate was higher than I thought it would be, meaning that there are a number of lawyers at a number of firms in a number of cities from which to choose.  I asked "well, how does someone find such a lawyer?" and Yokum responded, simply, with "an introduction."  He elaborated, saying that even the largest firms still do startup incorporation work, but that not every "bakery and restaurant" needs this sort of counsel.  Introductions provide a filter for hard-working partners to signal that a company is worth representing.  That said, Yokum was very clear: "any [WSGR] partner [in any city] is happy to sit down for coffee and chat" with founders.  Yokum made the further point that any startup "[has] to network to be a successful startup company" anyway, so it wasn't unreasonable for partners to want some sort of filter to meet for coffee.

I then asked "well, where should founders network to get this introduction?"  Yokum, being extremely patient with me, explained his thinking: in any startup hub, there are numerous events where startup founders meet.  Anyone can stick out their hand, introduce themselves to another founder, and strike up a conversation.  Startup founders are generally thrilled to recommend their lawyers to another founder (if they like their counsel), so it's actually rather easy to get a name or three.  Then the new company can do a little internet research and ask the founders they met at the event to do a quick e-mail introduction to the lawyer(s) they might want to represent them in their new venture.  Founders should meet for coffee with those partners before they make a final decision on representation - again, any Wilson Sonsini partner will meet with you as long as you have a warm introduction.  (And although it may sound like just talk, since WSGR is "Google's lawyer and Sun's lawyer", they still do startup incorporation work.  As Yokum quipped, "once upon a time, we did Sun's incorporation paperwork".)

I found this conversation extremely valuable: Yokum acknowledged that any set of open sourced documents wasn't appropriate to use as a "fill in the blank" template, but he also didn't state that only a small handful of Valley firms were qualified.  There are a number of firms in a large number of cities that have partners that not only "do" this work, but have the requisite experience to not make the simple errors that prove costly down the road. 

I personally would recommend Wilson Sonsini to any potential founder given my high esteem for Yokum and his colleagues, but there are partners at other firms in all these regions that may be a better fit for your given situation.  Please note that you are looking for a good fit with a particular partner, not just the "name" of the firm.  Even though each firm's documents are "off the shelf" and an associate - or paralegal - will do most of the work, having a good relationship with the partner is critical for quick and accurate answers to your well-researched questions.

[EDIT: Apparently YC may make their incorporation documents public, which may specifically address this issue by giving the "lawyer with a shingle" a fill-in-the-blanks template that would work: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579872 ]