Why I Don’t Like Board Observers
This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. I wrote recently about the role of Advisory Boards in startups, which I expected to be a bit controversial. People love their advisers and I don’t blame them. It’s just that many companies waste equity on advisory boards, pick the wrong advisers or set up advisory boards [...]
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 [...]
2010 VC Funding Outlook for Startups – Prepare for Winter (Part 3/3)
In the first post in this three part series I described why I believe the VC market froze between September 2008 – April 2009. In the second post I argued that as of September 2009 the pace of VC investments has increased rapidly (at least for software / Internet investments – the only sector on [...]
The Big VC Thaw – Why The Market is Moving Again (part 2 of 3)
In my previous post, The VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) I wrote about the reasons why the VC market came to a screeching halt in September 2008 and remained largely shut until at least April 2009. There are now signs the VC market has gathered pace meaning it’s a great time to be [...]
Using the Cloud to Design Your Startup Computing Infrastructure
Now that the wireframe is done for the startup, we are looking at the backend architecture for what we want to accomplish. The idea of using the cloud to cut down on costs is nothing new, and my new startup will be heavily leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to keep [...]
Special Immigration Policy for Startup Founders
Eric Ries over at Startup Lessons Learned has an interesting proposal on his blog about having a special immigration policy for alien immigrants to stay if they start a new company. Eric was recently at Government 2.0 where the proposal was made by Paul Graham. This raises some interesting questions about how immigrants and small [...]
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 [...]
Should You Wait for the Archos 9 or Buy the Archos 5 Now
As the buzz and lust over gadgets continues unabated, the Archos Company is on a smart track to deliver smaller touch screen media players that can do a lot of other things along the way. With a small store, and a small group of core dedicated developers, Archos is leading the way to small pad [...]
Gist Opens to Public Beta Today
Gist is one of the most valuable tools that I use to manage my day to day information, along with a few other systems, Gist provides the backbone support for many of the things I do. Gist helps me keep track of what is important and what is not important and can be deferred to [...]
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 [...]
Should Founders Be Allowed to Take Money off the Table?
This is part of my ongoing series “Start Up Advice” but I’d really like to call this post, “VC Advice.” If a company has reached a level of success, has been around for a few years and you believe the company has potential to break out into a much bigger company then you should let [...]
The Best VC Meetings are Debates not Sales
This is part of my blog series “Pitching a VC.” I’ve sat through a lot of VC pitches and having been CEO of an enterprise software firm for many years I’ve also sat through many customer meetings with sales teams. There is one classic mistake that I see across both types of meetings – “the [...]
