Archives / July, 2007

Setting the record straight

But the limits of Y Combinator’s model remain unclear. A typical young tech company should be spending a little less than $40,000 a month, says Seth Levine, a venture capitalist at Foundry Group. Y Combinator gives companies a fraction of that, leaving entrepreneurs “eating ramen and not paying themselves,” he says. And 6% is a huge amount of equity to give up for such little money, he says. Although Levine has shared his expertise with TechStars, a new Colorado program that’s similar to Y Combinator, he says it’s rare to find a business with serious long-term prospects in such a program. While it’s great to get quoted in the national press, I actually laughed when I read this article in…

Monday morning

As promised – a few thoughts on StartupWeekend now that I’ve had a chance to both get over my disappointment that we didn’t release anything on Monday morning and more importantly time to think about what worked and what didn’t work last weekend. There seems to be no lack of opinion on the subject (see the comments to the “Success and Failure” post on the StartupWeekend website and the mass of comments left on the TechCrunch article about the weekend or just do a Google search for StartupWeekend). Overall, it was a great experience. We had an outstanding group of founders from a broad cross-section of Denver/Boulder technology companies. Andrew did a great job of facilitating the weekend without being…

crunch

i wouldn’t recommend doing this to your wheel. the fall (over my handlebars and very fast, but off the trail and at least not on top of any rocks) was not nearly as painful as the walk to the car (about 4 miles and with my bike on my back – at least it was my hardtail which only weighs about 17 pounds). so much for the HuGi (guess i’m in the market for a new wheel) …

48 hours ago…

Just over 48 hours ago 72 people came together in Boulder Colorado to see if they could come up with a business idea and launch by midnight Sunday.  We started Friday night with a handful of ideas . . . winnowed the list down to the top 3 favorites . . . and picked one to run with.  Here’s the result: The process of working on a business with 70 people in such a short period of time was amazing.  I’ll put up some of the notes I took throughout the weekend in a post tomorrow but you can see a running tally of the experience at www.startupweekend.com.  This was entrepreneurship on steroids and was as much about the social…

You’re burning too much money

I don’t know much about your business but I’d guess that you’re burning too much cash. Ok – that’s an over generalization but it’s also probably true. Businesses – and particularly early stage businesses – have some kind of gravitational pull towards spending too much money. Some of this is just the nature of entrepreneurship – entrepreneurs tend to be optimistic people who believe strongly in their business idea and their ability to grow their company. Some of this is that spending less money by definition means making trade-offs and potentially slowing down. Some of it may be left over exuberance from the internet bubble when businesses were rewarded for spending cash faster and looser. I don’t know all the…