Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 28, 2010
Today we had another episode of TWiVC – you can watch the episode here. This was the first episode where Jason wasn’t on the show, which gave me the chance to have another VC on the show to discuss deals. This week’s guest was David Travers from Rustic Canyon Partners. Rustic Canyon is an LA-based, but geography-agnostic VC that is currently investing from a $200 million fund.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 28, 2010
Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. These should be carefully selected, with a proven track record, willing and available to help, and be completely trustworthy. Make sure they are willing to check their egos at the door. Let’s talk specifics.
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deal architect
APRIL 24, 2010
On the innovation blog Indonesia and volcanic power Hubble at 20 MIT Tech Review – Top 10 technologies More innovation from left field (from Egypt and Togolese Republic).
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 27, 2010
Business plan competitions are the air guitar championships of the startup world. This is the case when the requirements of these events don’t actually include building a real business or product. I mean, you don’t have to build an actual business—you can just mimic the movements and demonstrate something that looks like a startup on paper, without any of the necessary risk taking, lessons learned or even a fraction of the effort—all the stuff that investors like to see.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 28, 2010
As Fred Wilson likes to say, often the best content for blogs is in the comments. In this case, it was in an email I got from Boaz Fletcher in response to my post Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers. Boaz made a very interesting observation: “As for learning how to code, I think good storytellers make the best programmers. I used to freak prospective employees out by having them write a story for me instead of the “what’s wrong with this code?
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 28, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week! Understanding and the Meaning of Color Within Design – [link].
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
blog.wepay.com
APRIL 28, 2010
« Greek Billing Services: Collecting Fraternity Dues WePay just got its first commercial! » 6 Things a Non-Engineer Should Know Before Founding a Web Startup By Rich Aberman Despite the obvious look of shock and panic on the faces of my WePay teammates, I recently committed my first lines of production code. Although It took over a year and a half for me to contribute to WePay’s code base, and it’s still not particularly substantive (a few lines of html on the exterior of our site),
Berkonomics
APRIL 28, 2010
Second to visionary leadership, this is your most important job. . Many of us go through the motions of hiring to fill a position, trying to use our intuition and skills to find the best candidate for the job. Sometimes we use consultants or recruiters; many times we use internal talent to fill most positions. . And over the years, we students of business success have learned that there is a science to the hiring process that continues through the life of an emplo
Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli
APRIL 27, 2010
Skip to content Follow: RSS Email Twitter Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli On building profitable web applications Home Contact me Creations Blog Books Entrepreneurship & Startups General Online experiments Programming tips and tricks Startup tips and tricks Tags incompleteness , lazyness , simplicity Is the incompleteness of your application hiding behind the term ‘Simple’?
deal architect
APRIL 27, 2010
Last week I wrote that while some companies still cannot make it past the starting line, a number of early cloud adopters are pacing themselves towards 100% in the cloud. Now, let's be realistic - you cannot get there with. Tags: Cloud Computing, SaaS.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 26, 2010
If I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, “One of these days, I’m going to start my own company,” I’d be rich. If this day ever comes for all these people, we will be overrun by startups. Yet I don’t lose any sleep over either of these possibilities. Most people procrastinate from time to time, but I suspect that the challenge here is somewhat deeper than that.
Steve Blank
APRIL 29, 2010
I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School since the fall of 2004 and in a joint MBA with Columbia since 2005. This Tuesday I finished the lectures for this semester and my students are now working hard on their final project. A lot has happened since I first authored and taught the class. Four Steps. Back in 2004, Jerry Engel the head of the Entreprenuership program at Haas Business School at U.C.
Seeing Both Sides
APRIL 29, 2010
My book , Mastering the VC Game, is officially available today (and 40 pages of excerpts are available for free if you want to preview it), yet I'm kind of grumpy. I've gotten nice reviews (see AVC , Boston.com and YoungEntrepreneur for a few examples) and TechCrunch , BusinessWeek and Upromise have done really nice excertps. But I confess I'm a bit of a perfectionist (when I'd come home with a 95% on a test, my parents would ask me what happened on those 5% points - I wonder if that has anythi
deal architect
APRIL 24, 2010
The New Polymath, my upcoming book, got some nice blurbs this week from execs and authors - Maynard Webb, ex eBay; Ben Fried, Google; author Don Tapscott; Daniel Hamburger, Devry; Dave Duffield, Workday; Linda Avey, co-founder 23andMe; author Tom Davenport; Tags: The New Polymath.
Venture Chronicles
APRIL 26, 2010
- Here’s an update on the potential for hydrogen in energy production. Nothing terribly surprising but it does sum up the major hurdles that are being crossed in developing this technology. - Facebook may not be Skynet but it is getting smarter and that’s bad for Google. yeah, it’s a parallel web that allows data in/out only through authorized channels.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 27, 2010
Oh, boy. Here we go again. Another post on job hopping. This will be my final word on the topic. I promise. My goal here is to move the debate forward, add my POV but not inflame things any further. Inflaming was never my goal. Let’s see if I can achieve that. My WORD of the day is “loyalty.&# It’s one of the angles that people who were angered by my original post the most found so offensive.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 29, 2010
As an entrepreneur, one of your most important tasks is to keep your team motivated, despite the many challenges that are part of every startup. Motivational efforts need to cover a wide-ranging gamut from effective communication meetings, leadership role model actions, inspirational talks, to team building activities, and a lot more. There are many books written on this topic, starting with Motivating Employees for Dummies , so I thought I would try to approach the subject from the other end.
Steve Blank
APRIL 26, 2010
Entrepreneurs see things before others do. They recognize patterns, form hypotheses and act long before all the data is in. Von Clausewitz described this as seeing through the “fog of war.” When their hypotheses are wrong we say they were hallucinating. When they are right we call them visionaries. (The best entrepreneurs pivot on each hallucination until they get it right – then we call them practitioners of the Lean Startup.).
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 29, 2010
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, April 29, 2010 Video update on the Startup Visa Act The Startup Visa Act continues to gain momentum on Capitol Hill, thanks to grassroots support of all of you. Without lobbyists or PACs, were getting the word out in DC and nationwide that we have an opportunity to act - this year - to create jobs right here in America by supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 25, 2010
In the continuation of the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater , I asked them a few questions about which web sites, books, and blogs they consumed at the beginning of their journey when they knew nothing about programming. It turns out that Nate and Natty spent most of their time simply searching for what they were looking for.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 30, 2010
The Internet and social media have totally destroyed the meaning of the word “friend.” On MySpace, teenagers bond with hundreds of friends before they are sixteen, and on Facebook, other people claim thousands, all without having ever met most of them. Top Facebook users proudly proclaim their “whale” status, with 5,000 friends or more. On the other hand, we shouldn’t confuse online friends with real friendships.
Rembrandt Communications
APRIL 28, 2010
Have you ever had a disagreement with a boss, client or co-worker over the use of certain words in a PPC campaign, SEO press release, e-mail, newsletter, Web site page, or other, marketing piece? If you are trying to get the most out of your marketing, SEO and PR campaigns, you’ve probably run into this [.].
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 24, 2010
It’s tough to keep up with the whirlwind of online products aimed at small businesses, and tougher for small businesses to decide where to focus their attention and budgets. A few days ago, I learned about an interesting new program from Google – focused on helping small businesses create photos of their business that would be published in the Google search index.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 30, 2010
In March, I went to DC with Dave McClure, Eric Ries, Shervin Pishevar, and a bunch of Geeks on a Plane to discuss, advocate, and support the Startup Visa initiative. As part of the effort, we did two videos about the trip – one staring me and one staring Shervin. Ben Henretig of Micro-Documentaries produced them – they have some striking images of DC along with plenty of commentary from me and Shervin about why the Startup Visa is important.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 24, 2010
Cloud computing is all the rage in the startup world these days. Yet I find that most business people still don’t understand it, and I defy even the technologists to define it in ten words or less for business people. Many say it’s just marketing hype applied to old principles that have been around for a long time. A typical definition (from Wikipedia) is that “cloud computing, is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other dev
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 26, 2010
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, April 26, 2010 Lean Enterprise Institute webinar, April 28 I can barely write, as Im still recovering from the amazing but overwhelming Startup Lessons Learned conference last Friday (great summary here ). Ill follow up with a more detailed post later, but for now let me just say: thank you to everyone who participated, spoke, sponsored or helped organize.
BeyondVC
APRIL 30, 2010
As I have stressed over the years, it is imperative for board members and their management teams to have open dialogue. If you are a CEO, I encourage you to share more rather than less information. One of the best tools that a number of our CEOs use is a weekly email summarizing by department what their goals are and what they have accomplished during the week.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 27, 2010
Thanks for all the feedback and comments on the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater. In the last post, titled Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers , I foreshadowed some of the tools that Nate and Natty chose to build Everlater. Now that you know how they got started, here’s what they ended up choosing. Everlater is built on Ruby on Rails , postgreSQL and is hosted on Engine Yard using a passenger/nginx combination.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 25, 2010
I've said for a while that people learn so much more from failure than they do from success. This post from Keith Nowak is definitely worth a read. "I once read a characterization of startups by Dick Costolo, co-founder of FeedBurner, as going down many dark alleys only to find they are dead ends. In my opinion, dark alleys need to be navigated anywhere there are unknowns and a large possibility of making mistakes.
www.paulgraham.com
APRIL 28, 2010
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2010 The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself thequestion: what do you wish someone would make for you? There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organicallyout of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, aregoing to be necessary to some class of users other than you.
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 26, 2010
strategy |?strat?j?|noun: a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. Many Internet startups reside in new market segments that are still evolving and have yet to be fully defined. In our case “crowdsourced creative services&# is a new category in an old (and very large) market. It could be defined as a “alternative method for sourcing creative services, in which the buyer accesses an online community of providers and requests that community to collectively
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 26, 2010
If you are a senior Java developer anywhere in the US and are interested in moving to Boulder, I’d like to hear from you. There was a nice article in Bloomberg Businessweek last week about Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups. With the combination of the new startup activity over the past few years combined with the rapid growth of a number of medium sized companies and renewed hiring from some of the outposts of major tech companies based here, we’ve clearly entered another cyc
The Startup Lawyer
APRIL 27, 2010
CoHabitat will be the host of the May 2010 Dallas Startup Happy Hour. The Dallas Startup Happy Hour is the talk of the startup community in Dallas. Check out the coverage in the Dallas Morning News here: [link] As a result of the events, several startups have found a) employees, b) co-founders, c) angel investors and d) had a few free drinks. What : Dallas Startup Happy Hour.
www.paulgraham.com
APRIL 28, 2010
Want to start a startup? Apply for funding by March 3. November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes throughseveral rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take justenough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the nextgear. Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few areoverfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.
Up and Running
APRIL 27, 2010
A line from Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero–No Limit : She knows there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all. Once upon a time at a venture competition, the evening before the event, there was a judges’ meeting in which we all introduced ourselves to each other. You can guess most of our summaries: founder of this, investor in that, and so on.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 25, 2010
I got anxious just reading the book You, Me & The U.S. Economy. Last Thursday, I had a beautiful dinner at Susan and Richard Casey’s house. The Casey’s co-founded and run Square 1 Bank and have become good friends over the past few years. During dinner we had a wide ranging conversation about a bunch of things “not-tech.” On my way out, Susan handed me a book titled You, Me & The U.S.
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