DEMO’s visits to London and Boston show California is great place to launch
I’ve been on the road lately, in a continued effort to find and meet with the best companies around to launch new products at the DEMO conference, and have been developing some cool ideas for DEMO’s next conference in March. I’ll share more about those ideas in future posts.
First, here are a few thoughts, after wrapping up a trip to London this week, and Boston last week.
In each of these places, there are hordes of… Continue Reading
Start-up studies: A pop quiz
There’s a classroom exercise that the Stanford technology venture program hits its students with each year: If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible? STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig discusses the query and how budding entrepreneurs responded.
What about you, EC readers? How would you answer? Sound off in the comments below.
What rehab taught me about making bad investments
(Editor’s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.)
For as long as I can remember, I have been an enthusiastic participant in sports. To be clear, I’m not a great athlete (in fact, I’m the only one of the five Flybridge General Partners that wasn’t a varsity athlete in college). I’m just good enough to participate passionately and aggressively like the prototypical weekend warrior.
During any… Continue Reading
10 lessons in bootstrapping a business
(Editor’s note: Clate Mask is co-founder and CEO of Infusionsoft. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
There are two ways to build a business: Raise a bunch of money or bootstrap. When I was in business school, there wasn’t much attention given to the bootstrapping notion. The “MBA way” of growing a business is to write a business plan, raise money and then execute the business plan. But I think that’s almost always the wrong approach.
We bootstrapped Infusionsoft… Continue Reading
For Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, failure is an option
Silicon Valley is known the world over for its acceptance of failure as a rite of passage. Technology legends from Netscape founder Marc Andreessen to Apple founder Steve Jobs have all experience failure, revived their careers, and then gone on to change the world.
In other places, failure means disgrace. But according to futurist and Stanford engineering professor Paul Saffo, in the tech-obsessed valley, “the spires of success are built on the rubble of failure.”
This religion… Continue Reading
Do you have what it takes to be a founder?
(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)
When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves the following series of questions:
Are you comfortable with chaos? (Startups are disorganized)
Are you comfortable with uncertainty? (Startups never go per plan)
Are you… Continue Reading
VC will ride out of the downturn on health care, fintech and online ads
The first quarter of 2009 saw venture capital investments hit a 12-year low, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopwers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). While investors are still wary about making new investments as the economy slowly begins to correct itself, venture capital will no doubt reemerge as the preeminent source of financing in the technology and life science industries.
Ultimately, a shift in the way consumers use the internet will serve as the… Continue Reading
Sustainability: The ‘must have’ holy grail
(Editor’s note: Bernard Moon is vice president of the Lunsford Group. He contributed this story to VentureBeat.)
When I was a kid, Atari dominated the gaming scene. Sure, Mattel’s Intellivision and Coleco’s Colecovision had their loyalists, but to the general public, when you mentioned video games, Atari was the name that sprang to mind.
The company maintained that status for years, but as competitors like Nintendo and Sega became part of the industry, Atari quickly fell from… Continue Reading
Zynga’s Mark Pincus: I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America
(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. Mark Pincus is the CEO of social gaming company Zynga . If these notes are a bit scattered, it’s because it’s paraphrased and Pincus is doing a stream-of-consciousness style talk.)
So Pincus starts his talk by outlining his pretty conventional career right out of college — he went into banking. Then to business school. Then he said he hadn’t really succeeded at any… Continue Reading
Zappos CEO Hsieh: How to build a company culture that delivers happiness
(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. This is paraphrased. Tony Hsieh is the CEO of online shoe company Zappos, which is in the process of being acquired by Amazon.)
Hsieh: Basically in college I was working at a pizza business. Then I started a company called LinkExchange and sold it to Microsoft for $265 million. The reason we sold it was because the company culture went totally downhill.
When I got… Continue Reading
Friendfeed co-founder Buchheit: Most interesting part of Facebook is that it’s not Google
(I’m live-blogging from Startup School, a daylong program from startup incubator YCombinator held at Berkeley today. This is paraphrased, but I’ve embedded a video below courtesy of Alexa Lee if you want to watch it in entirety.)
Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and co-founded FriendFeed before it was acquired by Facebook, is giving a talk entitled “They told me to wing it and that it would be cool.” He has a few slides and is basically making up… Continue Reading
VentureBeat-DEMO meetup in London — see you at the Sanderson Hotel
VentureBeat is coming to London!
We’re hosting cocktails on Wednesday, Oct 28., at the groovy Sanderson Hotel in London’s Soho from 6 to 8pm. I’ll be in London to moderate at the Symbian mobile conference SEE next week, but wanted to take the opportunity to meet up with local technology entrepreneurs, too. We’re meeting for casual conversation at the Hotel’s Long Bar Courtyard, where we have a private table area reserved with a hostess. Register here.
If… Continue Reading
Book review: “The Web Startup Success Guide”
(Editors’ note: Alain Raynaud is the founder of FairSoftware. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
If you’re an entrepreneur launching a start-up, there are plenty of places online to find advice – some good, some bad. Given this plethora of information, can a book about starting your own web startup still provide value in 2009? If that book is “The Web Startup Success Guide,” the answer is a resounding yes.
Despite all the information scattered around the Internet, Bob… Continue Reading
D.light: Bringing light to the developing world
At first glance, the Kiran solar-powered lamp made by D.light is just plain cute — it would look right at home in an Apple store. But the real news is that it could save people in the developing world a substantial amount of money, and spare the atmosphere millions of tons of carbon dioxide by replacing kerosene lamps in countries where they are still the primary source of light.
The Kiran (the Sanskrit word for “ray… Continue Reading
Auto racing and start-ups aren’t that different, really
(Editor’s note: Will Herman is an entrepreneur who has founded or held senior roles at several tech companies. This column originally appeared on his blog.)
When beginners attend auto racing or high performance driving school, they learn that drivers tend to go where they’re looking – and where they look is usually only 10-15 feet in front of their vehicle.
I see this all the time as I’m riding my bike. While cycling on the right… Continue Reading
Getting the most out of a bootstrapped IP budget
(Editor’s note: Cecily O’Regan is a registered patent attorney and member of the Intellectual Property & Technology Group at Greenberg Traurig LLP. She submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
Building an IP portfolio can be expensive. And pursuing international rights can be a daunting expense for a young organization – – especially if it’s self-funded.
But there are ways to keep overall costs down during a company’s early stages – and this frugality (and a well thought out… Continue Reading
How to throw a kick-ass launch party (on the cheap)
(Editor’s note: David Goldenberg is co-founder of PigSpigot.com, a user-generated greeting card site. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
After a year of planning and development, our company recently launched in beta mode. We were thrilled with our product, wanted to celebrate the people who made it work, and were ready to start spreading the word about the site. So we decided to host a launch party. And not just any launch party; we wanted to throw… Continue Reading
Demo ‘10 begins in Boston — calling all awesome startups
It’s been a few weeks since Demo took San Diego by storm, and I posted a few days ago about a few of the cool things that happened to some of the demonstrating companies.
More on that in a sec. But here’s a reminder that we’re gearing up to do it all over again with DEMO ‘10, March 21st-23rd in Palm Desert, CA.
The applications are already rolling in, which means it’s time for myself and other… Continue Reading
Are you creating or stealing customers?
(Editor’s note: Michael Greenberg is COO of Loyalty Lab. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
It’s easy to think that your start-up is centered in a green field or blue ocean, but typically, that’s not the case. Only the lucky few are truly creating new customers out of thin air. Most have to steal them from someone else.
This is a fact that few entrepreneurs want to hear. But smart start-up owners know when to face… Continue Reading
The VC gender gap – Are VCs sexist?
(Editor’s note: Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This column originally appeared on his blog Seeing Both Sides.)
I find the preponderance of males in VC an annoying and stubborn phenomenon. When I first entered the start-up game as an entrepreneur in the mid 1990s, I didn’t think much of the “VC gender gap” as there were plenty of women executives around. In fact, between one-third and one-half of the executive teams at my… Continue Reading