Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 17, 2009

With open source software (LAMP stack) and cloud computing infrastructure it just wasn’t that expensive to get your company going and founders just wanted to raise less money. I haven’t met a single founder has hasn’t raved about their experience working with Jon Callaghan, Phil Black or Tony Conrad.

Software Review 283

Software Review Term Sheet Due Diligence Southern California 283

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2010

We used the Y Combinator open source term sheet. You were a VP at a company that sold for $200 million making the founder very wealthy. That founder wasn’t one of your angels. 2 of the 3 were at the founders’ request. We offered them more : $750k-1 million. We took the $500k. is now a VC.

Venture Capital 265

Venture Capital Term Sheet Early Stage Silicon Valley 265

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 6, 2020

We have been advising a lot of entrepreneurs so I thought I’d “open source” some of the advice I have been sharing. There is so much confusion and misinformation out there about the government sponsored “payroll protection plan” loans to companies that the heads of every small business CEO in the country must be spinning.

Programming 279

Programming Affiliate SBA Government 279

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2014

Open source computing, which reduced costs to start a company by 90%. This meant: Less capital to start a company thus the rise of “micro VCs” Younger, more technical founders (not as big of a leap to take a risk on a 24-year-old when it’s $250k and not $5 million. Welcome to the future.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Kansas City Startup Venture Capital 390

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2011

And many of the best women founders. She opened a bakery and a restaurant. On AWS and with open source you can achieve amazing results for $500k. If your first chance at being a startup founder coincides with your first child it’s really difficult for either gender. Please watch this. Every single one.

Entrepreneur 341

Entrepreneur Venture Capital Open Source Social Network 341

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2011

If you don’t want to read that post, the summary is: Open source computing drove computing costs down 90%, which spurred innovation in technology. Open cloud led by Amazon with their AWS services drove total operating costs down by 90%.

Venture Capital 296

Venture Capital Software LP Early Stage 296

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2016

Prior to then the concept of “seed funds” barely existed and as I’ve argued before the seed fund phenomenon was largely driven by: Open source + horizontal computing + Amazon AWS. Angels / seed often wanted to exit early and late-stage wanted more ownership than founders would sell so secondary transactions were common.

Venture Capital 150

Venture Capital Silicon Valley Burn Rate LP 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 10, 2011

The interesting thing about working with angels (the tech founder kind) is that they’ve all run their own startups before so there is instant resonance with what you’re going through, the issues you’ll face and how to best help. Founders need to see eye-to-eye or things will be very difficult. 0:17:06).

Angel Investor 302

Angel Investor Cofounder Southern California .Net 302

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 9, 2010

By then the open-source movement had really developed. We were able to use an open source database (Postgres), open source search (Lucene) and a host of other free components including Apache Tomcat, JBoss. Factual was created in 2007 by Gil Elbaz, the founder of Applied Semantics.

Cloud 343

Cloud Technical Review Database Semantic 343

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2011

Blogs weren’t popularized yet so it was an oddity for me to read the founder of a software company spewing out advice. Joel met his co-founder for Fog Creek software and learned a valuable management lesson. But I loved reading them and so did my team. But if you like the notes check him out on Twitter or his website.

Software Review 285

Software Review Software St. Louis API 285