The Real Seed Of A Startup Is A Need
With all due respect to the genius that is Jessica Hagy and Indexed, the seed of a startup is *NOT* cheap technology, disgruntled workers, and an anemic economy. While that portion of the Venn diagram represents the ideal soil for starting a company, the real seed of a startup is a need. Every successful startup [...]
Observations on my own Startup
Starting a company is a hard thing to do, you will make mistakes, you will have wins, and you will have your good days and your bad days. Over the last year I have been working on my startup to take it to the next level, crossing the 40,000 a year gross line might seem [...]
Now We Know Why The City Never Sleeps
Now we know why The Citi Never Sleeps: they are busy censoring their customers. If you are a Citibank customer and they dislike your blog, you may just get in trouble. (Disclosure: I do have a Citi account… so am taking a risk by writing this post.) That’s just what happened to fabulis, a social [...]
What Can You Learn from the 4-Hour Workweek?
A couple of years ago I read the popular book, “The Four Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. It was recommended to me by my friend, Net Jacobsson, who was trying to do some basic Life Hacking. If you’re not familiar with the term it’s basically trying to help all of us who are deluged with [...]
Maybe it is time for you to do a startup
This message over on FriendFeed from Mo Kargas caught my attention this morning because I am hearing it more and more from friends, family, and people who I follow in social circles on the internet. There is a common running thread through the opinions of many people I know that work, and that is a [...]
Save Your Spin for Someone Who Cares
Handling PR with VCs This is part of my series on How to Raise VC but could equally be filed under Startup Advice more generally. I recently got a phone call from an entrepreneur whom I respect and who runs a company that I hope will do great things one day. He had pitched me [...]
Are Business Plans Still Necessary?
This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice. I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0 craze. There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 wares. [...]
Who Should you Hire at a Startup?
This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. There are people who tell startups that they should hire the most senior people that they can find. I’m not one of those. I believe that you should always hire people are are looking to “punch above their weight class,” which means to hire people who [...]
Should Your Startup Have an Advisory Board?
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. Many startup companies hire advisory boards. It’s very tempting. It’s mostly done by first-time entrepreneurs who want to persuade (bribe?) prominent industry luminaries to be closely associated with the company. It’s done partly in hopes of gaining their wisdom but it’s also done to portray the [...]
I met with an investor, what happens next?
This is part of my ongoing series, “Pitching a VC.” Getting a meeting with a prominent angel or VC is difficult enough. Some advice on how to do that was covered in this link – Getting Access to a VC. This post covers the day after. I spoke about the topic on Fox Business News [...]
Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters
This post is part of my series “Startup Lessons” Elephants, Deer and Rabbits – Some thoughts on start-up segmentation Nearly all of the mistakes I made at my first company I fixed by the time of my second company. This is the only mistake I repeated twice and it is a mistake that I see [...]
Don’t Drink Your Own Kool-Aid (Surviving TC50)
This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons” Tonight I was reading a good blog post (here) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch 50. Worth a read on how to maximize the traffic that [...]
Do you need a Powerpoint deck for a VC meeting?
photo courtesy of Atlanta Braves This is part of my ongoing series “Pitching a VC.” The “Triple Play” of VC Presentations A large part of my series has been outlining what the typical VC PowerPoint presentation should look like. Some readers have commented that in today’s world you shouldn’t even need a PowerPoint presentation – [...]
You’re most vulnerable right after you win a deal
This is part of my ongoing series, “Start-up Lessons.” Recently I wrote a blog post about how I hated losing, but I embrace it. My starting line with every entrepreneur is that everything I learned about being an entrepreneur I learned from F’ing it up on my first business. I even put that in the [...]
