The most important founder skill that nobody talks about Much has been written about the skills a startup founder should possess: intelligence, drive, charisma, integrity and so on. Even luck. But I am surprised that no one ever...

3 Startup Lessons I Learned the Hard Way Over the past decade, I’ve spent most of my professional life building startup businesses. In thinking about what I’ve learned, I realized that the most...

Marketing for M&A The conventional wisdom in M&A is that ‘companies are bought not sold’. But companies that market themselves to strategic buyers — in a subtle way — can attract the right buyers at better valuations. How can executives and their boards engage in Marketing for M&A...

Three Big Mistakes New Entrepreneurs Make Backupify has now raised a total of $5.6M. My fundraising success has led to many entrepreneurs reaching out to ask for advice. I see a common set of mistakes that people make when they think about raising money, based on my conversations with other entrepreneurs. Below are the three...

A seven step approach to agile marketing In the past, I’ve discussed the benefits of applying agile project management to marketing programs without actually discussing the details of how it works. Here is the agile process I frequently use for managing marketing projects. Keep in mind, that this is not great for projects with...

Focus One of the things that appears to happen when you sell a venture funded startup is that you receive a license to give advice to people. As I have not yet received such a certificate in the mail, you would be well with your rights to suggest that I shove off, but I do have a few observations...

The Boomerang for Gmail Launch: 0 - 70,000 Downloads in 30 Days We launched Boomerang for Gmail on Wednesday, August 11 at 10:30 PM. After 30 days, we went from a total of 55 downloads to over 70,000. Here’s what happened and some of the lessons we learned. Timeline: * Before Launch: 40-50 visits per day, (total: 55 downloads) * Launch Day (8/11): 3,524 visits...

Octane: Doron Reuveni, CEO & Co-Founder, uTest One of the core goals of VentureFizz is to provide a platform where we can learn from other successful entrepreneurs - both their successes and failures. Octane is our new series, where we will interview local entrepreneurs in a Q&A format. We are hoping this new series will provide some great information...

WebInno 27 Breakout Session - Self-Funded Success Stories When I received an email from WebInno organizer David Beisel asking if I would like to be on a panel featuring local “Self-Funded Success Stories” for WebInno 27 I was immediately psyched. Last summer, BuySellAds.com was a main dish presenter at WebInno; winning the audience choice award that night...

Lessons Learned From Startup Bootcamp 2010 On Saturday, MIT hosted Startup Bootcamp to provide a diverse group of lessons to hopeful founders and those teetering on the edge of jumping into a startup. The tagline for the event was actually "Starting a company is easier than you think." The videos will be online soon as well if you want...

Searching for Greatness vs. Avoiding Mistakes I was having coffee a few weeks back with a friend who is at a large, very successful VC. We were chatting about one of the senior partners at his firm, one that I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know (but not as well as I would like). I’ve never really been able to articulate why I’ve enjoyed...

Startup Bootcamp Video - Robin Chase (Zipcar / GoLoco) Startup Bootcamp is a one day, free event at MIT where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists give talks on how to start a company. This year's event is being held on Saturday, Sept, 11th. Click here for the additional details. Speakers (so far) for this year's event include...

Selling Out I’ve been thinking lately about how founders should decide when it is time to sell their startups and how to put aside the different incentives that often drive these decisions. Large VC funds have a strong appetite to fund entrepreneurs that want to swing for the fences. This was evident...

Keeping the Fire Burning This post was conceived and co-written by Ed Tekeian (former VP Engineering at Brontes), a brilliant engineering leader, great all-around guy, and one of the key reasons our product saw the light of day. (also the only year-round surfer in New England I know) Looking back, one of the things...

3 Warning Signs That Your Product Sucks How do you know if your startup is solving a critical problem? You can survey your users, conduct user interviews, and run a/b testing experiments to try to get your answer. No matter what method you use, parsing out reality is really hard, especially for entrepreneurs (see Reality Distortion Field...

We Love Boston Entrepreneurs: Jason Henrichs - PerkStreet Financial In the second of our series on Boston entrepreneurs we interview Jason Henrichs, COO and co-founder of PerkStreet Financial, a Highland Capital funded startup. Richard: You’re one of those few entrepreneurs that has also sat on the other side of the funding table. In fact you’ve switched from entrepreneur to VC...

Fizzlosophy: Advice on building out your sales plan as a startup Building out the sales plan in a startup is always difficult...you have a small client base and very little predictability in your deal sizes and sales cycles. Here are a few tips for having success early in a growing company: 1. Get in front of Prospects - Early and Often! Nothing is more important...

Optimizing your Customer Acquisition Funnel This blog post focuses on how B2B companies can optimize their customer acquisition funnels using a customer-centric methodology to analyze and remove blockage points. Acquiring customers in the B2B world involves using a variety of marketing and sales steps with the goal of converting...

What happened to AltaVista and Yahoo? From innovator to imitator to forgotten Paul Graham of Ycombinator wrote an excellent blog on "What happened to Yahoo?". It reminded me of what happened to AltaVista, the first and most popular search engine. Yahoo thought they were a media company, not a software company. Simple, yet deep implications. AltaVista was hatched inside DEC, a hardware...

Revealing Insights Last week, SAIC announced that they had signed a definitive agreement to acquire our portfolio company, Reveal Imaging. This is an extremely positive outcome for the company, its customers, employees and shareholders and represents an import waypoint on a fascinating and successful entrepreneurial...

We Love Boston Entrepreneurs: Dharmesh Shah This is the first in a series of interviews with some amazing entrepreneurs in the Boston area. These folks have been selected because they are not just building a business but giving back to the entrepreneurial community in some way. They might be sharing their hard-won experiences on a blog, funding startups...

Lessons Learned from Ben Fischman (video) Ben Fischman is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Boston area. He was the founder of Lids and then became the CEO of Retail Convergence (SmartBargains, Rue La La). This is a fantastic video from MIT World that features his story on both companies. There are lots of lessons...

Want to succeed with your startup? Be like Tiger Woods I like to boast that I’ve never had a real job. I started my first startup right after graduate school and have done nothing but startups for 10 years. Has it been exhilarating? Yes. Has it been non-stop fun? No. Has it been incredibly rewarding? Yes. But what has enabled me to last 10 years? Acting like...

Founder Dialogues featuring Mick Mountz of Kiva Systems (Video) On June 22nd, Eric Paley of Founder Collective hosted his second Founder Dialogues event. This event's guest speaker was Mick Mountz, CEO and Founder of Kiva Systems. We are excited to have the video from this event down below. Kiva Systems, based in Woburn, is a developer of...

8 Startup Lessons from Constant Contact I was fortunate to have the opportunity to interview Gail Goodman last week at the Momentum Summit at MIT Sloan. Gail is the CEO of Constant Contact, an email marketing company that was founded during the “boom days” of the Internet, made it through the post-bubble apocalypse, and is now a publicly...

Tips on Investor Pitches Hey there, New England entrepreneurial ecosystem. In this, my inaugural blog post on VentureFizz, I’d like to offer some simple, practical advice about the ‘investor pitch’. For the purposes of this post, let’s use Content and Delivery to categorize these tips, since a good presentation stems...

4 lessons startups can learn from the German soccer team I spend most of my waking hours working on my startups (currently Pixability.com), but every few years in the summer, I get a bit distracted by the World Cup for a few weeks. This year, I picked up Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski – mainly to calm my nerves before the...

From Minimally Viable To Maximally Buyable Product I’m a big fan of Eric Ries and the lean startup movement that he’s championing at Startup Lessons Learned. I think many of the fundamentals behind the lean startup are things you likely have been practicing for a while. But, seeing it articulated so well and establishing a common vocabularly...

A Father's Influence Each Father’s Day I reflect on my father’s influence on my business life. What advice did he give me, and how well did it pan out? Dad graduated from law school during the height of the Great Depression and went to work for a big “white shoe” law firm in New York City. In his first job he earned...

Everything I needed to know about start-ups, I learned in high school First off, I want to thank Cari Sommer, founder of Urban Interns (a very cool company in NYC), for giving me the spark and title idea for this blog post. I've come to realize that I learned a lot about start-ups in high school (and a few episodes of Saved By the Bell)...