article thumbnail

Be Coachable

Austin Startup

I have been responsible for organizing and wrangling mentor groups for the Longhorn Startup Program for UT Austin undergraduates when I as an instructor there. The better universities, like GA Tech and UT Austin, are leading the charge in making entrepreneurship part of the curriculum at the undergraduate level.

article thumbnail

Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. If they don’t, there are a new breed of lean startups who understand this deep in the bones ready to take their place. 12comments: Dougvs said.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The Economics of Fundraising — TNSTAAFL

Austin Startup

However, the easiest way to avoid dilution is by learning to be what I call “ramen lean”. Focus on finding good-neighbor funding sources that add value by helping your company to grow in verticals where the angel/VC has both capital and subject expertise. It is worth looking into. Check out their website to learn more.

article thumbnail

The curse of prevention

Startup Lessons Learned

It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Take your typical scalability bottleneck.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups

Startup Lessons Learned

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases.

article thumbnail

Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions

Steve Blank

Reply Thomas Finsterbusch , on May 7, 2009 at 2:24 pm Said: I’m a PhD Student in CS at UT Austin, and Austin too has all the crucial resources necessary for startups (VCs, angels, law firms, top talent, etc.).

article thumbnail

SXSW Pitch Finalist: Passbase

Austin Startup

All SXSW Pitch events take place at the Hilton Austin Downtown. The founding process extremely challenging and when things get hard you need people to lean on both for advice and support! Winners in each of the 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Awards Ceremony , at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 15. Hard question.