Gust
JUNE 19, 2012
Blog. Thoughts on startups by investors that fund them & entrepreneurs that run them. Subscribe by email. RSS Feed. Invested Interests. Who Makes the Money on an Inevitable Shoe Dropping? Last weekend I caught Mashable announcing that Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover in the U.S. , something I’ve expected since I first bought a Rocket ebook reader about 10 years.
Gust
JUNE 17, 2012
Money to build the business is the number one challenge for most startups. Don’t believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and professional investors will throw money at you. In reality, only 3 out of 100 companies who apply are successful with Angels, and the success rate with VCs is even lower. A large percentage of startups never apply to either.
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Gust
JUNE 5, 2012
Nothing tells a truth better than a good story. Especially when it’s true. Read Mark Suster’s Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why on his Both Sides of the Table blog for a good read and a good lesson. He tells the story of his baptism by fire in startup-dom, a series of negotiations including office rent, sublet, getting people on board, getting the media to care, dealing with recruiters, dealing with the tech prima donnas, and (a favorite of many) “dealing with pesky VCs.&
Gust
JUNE 3, 2012
Many entrepreneurs I know feel guilty about not quitting their day job when initiating their startup, worrying about not giving their all to an employer, juggling the multiple roles, or even a legal conflict of interest. I’ll try to offer some guidelines to address these issues, but I generally recommend you keep the day job until your new company is producing real revenue.
Gust
JUNE 10, 2012
I come from a high-tech software background, and only a few years ago, it would cost at least a million dollars ($1M) for a team of professionals to produce any commercial software product. Now, with open source software components, and low-cost development tools, the same job can be done by one good hacker for a few thousand dollars. Even for low-tech startups, the scope of information available on the Internet, and its global reach, has had a similar financial impact on the many other challeng
Gust
JUNE 24, 2012
Face reality. As an entrepreneur, you should assume none of your customers is like you, yet I find that most entrepreneurs assume just the opposite. Customers don’t have your technical base, the passion, and interest in your solution. In fact, even if they did, they couldn’t find you in the clutter. An underrated portion of every startup effort must be about communication and marketing.
Gust
JUNE 19, 2012
Last weekend I caught Mashable announcing that Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover in the U.S. , something I’ve expected since I first bought a Rocket ebook reader about 10 years. And in January I saw that digital music overtook physical media for the first time in 2011, something I expected since 1998. In both cases what surprises me is not that it happened, but how long it took.
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