Tuesday, April 13, 2010Rob Go - Senior Associate, Spark Capital
There was some chatter a few weeks ago about the dearth of experienced product managers in innovation centers outside of Silicon Valley. It’s definitely true in the East Coast, and it hurts both very early stage companies (where the founder is usually the product leader) and scaling companies...
Monday, April 12, 2010Eric Paley - Managing Partner, Founder Collective
A few years back, I was chatting with one of my investors at a social event and he was describing one way of looking at startups and VC. He said that until startups are funded, they are basically just fantasies. I responded that startups with VC funding are also fantasies – they’re just...
Wednesday, April 7, 2010Coach Wei - CEO, Yottaa and Chairman, Nexaweb Technologies
What are the unique characteristics of entrepreneurs? It is a subject that I think about from time to time. Over the years, I identified a few patterns and I use such patterns in judging other people whether they are entrepreneurs or not. Here are the patterns that I identified and...
Monday, April 5, 2010Dharmesh Shah - CTO and Founder, HubSpot
As the market improves, my guess is that many of you will likely be thinking about raising funding for your company. With my latest startup, I’m now a venture-backed startup founder (I’ve raised $33 million in three rounds of capital for my marketing software company). So, I’ve got some direct experience...
Friday, April 2, 2010Michael Greeley - General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
I was asked by a reporter yesterday what are some of the things I most fear. When I was a child, my nightmares were that I would show up at school naked; thankfully now I usually remember to get dressed before leaving the house. But the discussion yesterday started me thinking about what are some...
Thursday, April 1, 2010Chris Homer - Co-Founder and CTO, thredUP
Think about the team you have at your startup. In the early days it probably looks something like 3 coders, 2 marketing/business experts and 2 user experience/designers – maybe 2, 1 and 1. This “silo-ing” of skills is extremely common but what's crazy is the rigid set...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010Eric Paley - Managing Partner, Founder Collective
One of the things I most love about startup companies is the ability for talent to really move the dial. At large companies, with established products and process, great talent is more likely to incrementally make an impact than dramatically make an impact. At a small startup great...
Tuesday, March 30, 2010Roy Rodenstein - Co-Founder, Going (acquired by AOL)
Thanks to everyone for the comments on my last post about the raison d’etre of this blog, it’s nice to start seeing a bit of community around my little grain of sand contribution to startups. In the spirit of that post, today I want to talk about the very beginning phase of a startup. I find...
Monday, March 29, 2010Lee Hower - Principal, Point Judith Capital
Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and Fred Wilson of USV have been having a blog debate on whether entrepreneurs should pursue a "lean" or "fat" approach to building software-based startups. Horowitz - The Case for the Fat Startup; Wilson - Being Fat is Not Healthy...
Friday, March 26, 2010Mike Troiano - President, Holland-Mark Digital
I was asked by the Client Services folks to provide some guidance on how to present more effectively to clients. Here are my “Top Ten Presentation Tips,” with an eye toward client presentation of marketing strategy and creative. 10. Have a point. Yea, sounds obvious. So what...
