Lessons Learned
I was reading in Xconomy yesterday the Taylor Yates description of his trek to Silicon Valley with his MIT Sloan classmates and I couldn’t resist sharing with the Boston community...
Last month, IDEA: Northeastern’s Venture Accelerator hosted Investor Insights, a biannual event featuring a panel of venture capitalists and angel investors. The forum provides...
Has there been any other company in the Boston area that has created more buzz than HubSpot over the past few years??? Dharmesh Shah was the latest guest for Eric Paley's...
Last night, in the ninth installment of the Founder Dialogues series, Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of Cambridge-based SaaS company HubSpot, recounted his entrepreneurial journey...
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned within the world of pricing is that even though your price remains the lever that has the highest impact on your revenue, the subject is one...
One of the truisms of entrepreneurial startups is the importance of focus. Starting a company to compete against huge, well-capitalized companies is daunting enough. So focus...
As a typical startup founder I am often faced with difficult situations. Well, “often” is probably an understatement. ”Always” is more like it. As Steve Blank said in his Customer Development...
Watching friends and family members undergo treatment for psychiatric conditions inspired John Moore to create RxApps, a health management platform...
Time – and how you use it – is the most important consideration for a Founder. This is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my 20 years as an early...
Now that we’ve wrapped up the inaugural session of the Boston Startup School and prepare for our next class, I thought I’d take a minute to reflect and share some...
In 1999, my internet start-up was valued at nearly $100M. I thought I had it made. Like many of my contemporaries at the time, I rented a nice apartment near the beach...
You’ve just closed your seed round. Other than starting to build, hire, and take over the world, there are a bunch of mundane things to do right away. The following is a...
There are many companies that are competing to be the “operating system” for small businesses. The theory is that with the advent of the cloud in the digital age, small businesses...
Recently, on my way to work, I wrote our team at BuySellAds the following email: Tomorrow, I want each person to email me, privately, 1 thing that I can do to make their...
This is the fifth and last blog post in a series on trust. I’ve written in the past about trust between a VC and an entrepreneur (“When Entrepreneurs and VCs Break Up”), between...
I had to write this post right away, before I forgot some of the details or lost my train of thought...
This is the fourth post in a blog series on trust. I previously wrote about how trust is critical in the VC-entrepreneur relationship (“When Entrepreneurs and...
I'm not sure if many of you know this, but I stumbled into entrepreneurship completely by accident. As a young man, I was a few years out of the US Air Force and spent...
A prime component of being an entrepreneur is sharing your experiences and soliciting advice from those who have been successful. Which sounds helpful all around...
Online challenge and engagement marketing website CampusLIVE has come a long way since 2008...
TripAdvisor may be one of the most fascinating companies I know and so I was excited to dig into their business model as part of my series on scaling. This is a company that took $4 million...
I’ve been writing a blog series about trust. I started with a post on how VC is a “trust business” and I highlighted why trust between an entrepreneur and a VC is important...
Take a second and think about your fellow employees—those whom you manage, your peers and even your managers or mentors—do you know what their strengths...
I have been thinking lately about how hard it is to scale start-ups. The Lean Start-Up movement, as exemplified in Eric Ries' book The Lean Start-Up, has appropriately focused a great deal...
This is the second post in a blog series on trust. Last week, I wrote that VC is a “trust business” and I highlighted why trust between an entrepreneur and a VC is important...
We met with some of our large investors recently, and one of them mentioned: “VC is a trust business.” He was saying that he trusted us. I’ve been thinking...
Boston isn’t known for its consumer-facing websites. However, Waltham-based Care.com offers a notable exception. Founded by a team of Upromise executives...
In the wake of the Pinterest round valuing the company at $1.5B from the Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten, it is hard not to notice that social and ecommerce have...
Last week the National Venture Capital Association (where I am on the Executive Committee) and Thomson Reuters announced the 2Q12 fundraising data for venture firms...
Last week I wrote about some of the common factors that have led great VC firms to stumble or even fade from existence entirely. I wanted to follow-up with some...