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Entrepreneurship

Staring Us In The Face(book)...

On the eve of the historic Facebook IPO roadshow, I spent some time looking at the 4Q11 IPO data (courtesy of Campton Private Equity Advisors) this weekend. VC’s everywhere are...

No Better Time, Ever, To Be An Entrepreneur

I am often asked “what is new and exciting” by pretty much anyone that knows what I do for a living. And it is a great question that I relish answering – usually. Of late, however...

How Smarterer Grew by More Than 1250% in One Week

We’ve been developing Smarterer for the better part of a year now, quietly building a platform that uses crowd-sourced questions to validate peoples’ social and professional skills.  Like many...

Start Your Marketplace Engines

At NextView Ventures, we have a number of companies in our portfolio which are “marketplace” businesses, where buyers and sellers meet to exchange a good...

Octane: Joe Cronin - President & Founder, Edvisors

Welcome to the latest installment of Octane, our Q&A series with local entrepreneurs.  Today, we have Joe Cronin, the President & Founder...

Ring Out the Old Year….

On the heels of the fundraising data for 2011, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA released the 4Q 2011 and full year VC investment data. It was yet another year when VC’s...

Facebook Hosts a Mobile Social Hack in Cambridge

On Friday I was able to participate in Facebook's mobile-social hack in Cambridge.  More than 60 developers were in attendance for the all day event with several teams hacking...

Thirtysomething Entrepreneurship

As I recently hit the second half of my 30s, I must admit that my views towards entrepreneurship have changed since I launched my first company at 22. Entrepreneurs like myself are...

Five lessons after five years of Punchbowl

Five years ago this week, I was part of a small team (me, Sean, Devin and Gerard) that launched MyPunchbowl.com (now Punchbowl.com). The site...

409A Option Pricing Redux

Last week I had a conversation with an entrepreneur who was confused about option pricing, and no matter how many times I tried to explain it, he never seemed to get his head around...

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses: actually the most important interview question

One of the most clichéd interview questions is “what are your strengths and weaknesses.”  Most of us have heard it so many times that we’ve prepared for it extensively.  Often we...

What is the Best Way to Introduce Yourself to an Angel Investor? Part I

Raising from angels has historically been much different than raising from VCs. Angels have tended to be as inexperienced in early stage tech investing as the entrepreneur who’s raising...

Scaling is Hard

At the onset of 2012, many start-up executives around the world are sticking their copy of Lean Start-Up on the shelf, leaning back, and bemoaning the fact that they have a new...

Octane: Josh Feast - CEO & Founder, Cogito

Here's a nice little treat to kick-off the New Year!  Our Octane series is back!!!  Our guest today is Josh Feast, the Founder & CEO of Cogito Health in Charlestown. Cogito is pioneering...

Popular blog posts from 2011

As we wind down 2011, I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of top blog posts from the year.  So, in no particular order...

8 ways to get into entrepreneurship

Once in a while, someone who wants to get into entrepreneurship will ask me what I think they should do.  As I've said in a past blog post, I like these types of questions better than...

Getting promoted too quickly

“He’s a star. Thank god he’s on the team”.  “He’s not scaling, it’s time to find a replacement”.  I’ve heard that line from too many CEOs about someone on their management...

Before You Start a Business, Plan Your Exit

Not usually the first thing you think of when starting a company, but where you want to end up impacts everything you do.  I sit on the board of ChatThreads, where we are in...

Year-End Top 10: Early Stage Funding

Always lots of ideas from entrepreneurs, angels, vcs about how best to raise Seed & Early Stage capital.  ‘Tis the season for end-of-year lists.  So, if good enough for “Top 10 NFL...

So You Think You Want To Be A CEO: What You Should Do?

If you you think you want to be a CEO, what should you do?  I was talking to a former CEO who had a very successful exit almost two years ago. This a good friend who I have known...

Learn how to code
1.)  Start here:   http://www.codecademy.com/#!/exercise/0.  It’s the basics.  See if it interests you.  It’s a process that’ll take a while, so it’s key to see if it interests you right...
Customer Development and Inbound Marketing in Practice: The Story of Snapshot

I don’t blog a lot about the inner workings of Backupify but our recent launch of Snapshot for Google Apps has been very successful, and it seemed like a good time to use this example...

Five reasons why you should find what you love and double-down on it

You know when you meet someone and at first you don’t really hit it off so well…you don’t seem to have much in common? And then, all of a sudden, you hit on a topic...

Founder Dialogues featuring Niraj Shah & Steven Conine of Wayfair [video]

Wayfair is easily one of the greatest success stories in the Boston area over the past ten...

If you build it, will they come?

One of the most memorable lines in film history comes from “Field of Dreams.”  Shoeless Joe Jackson, a baseball legend from the early 1900’s, convinces an Iowa farm owner named...

HubSpot’s Best Practices for Managing SaaS Inside Sales

Best practices for inside sales managers. An interview with Mark Roberge, VP of Sales at HubSpot, discussing how he blends science and process with the art of selling. HubSpot is a SaaS...

Talking Marketplaces

There’re a lot of marketplace businesses being started out there - I probably see 2 a week these days.  Given the interest in the space I thought I’d share some high level thoughts...

Angus Davis - talking entrepreneurship @ BIF-7 [video]

What does entrepreneurship mean to you?  To Angus, entrepreneurship means... "it's like a pair of eyeglasses, except instead of seeing the world as it is, when you have the eyeglasses on...

Smokey Rooms...

Thought I would share some of the discussion topics at the most recent director’s meeting for the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) which was held in Washington...

Loch Ness, Unicorns & The First-Mover Advantage

When they are asked about the defensibility of their businesses, I regularly hear entrepreneurs cite “first-mover advantage” as the basis on which they will compete and defend their margins. It has come...