TechStars Rocks!
Wow! What can I saw about the TechStars investor pitch/demo day except that it was fantastic. The teams were extremely well prepared and every single one of them really nailed it. We had about 50 private investors and venture capitalists in attendance to see the 10 TechStars teams go through what they’ve been up to this summer. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been somewhat of a TechStars groupie this summer – I’ve spent many hours with the teams giving feedback, advice and lending a sympathetic ear. I’ve seen early ideas and kluge demos turn into the seeds of real business ideas, real prototypes and true products. The journey has been amazing to watch. For me this was the best part of yesterday – the progress that each of these companies has made this summer is truly remarkable. …
August 17, 2007· 2 min read
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. _ …
July 20, 2007· 5 min read
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). …
July 13, 2007· 7 min read
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) … …
July 9, 2007· 1 min read
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 experiment of starting a business as it was about the idea itself (something lost on many of the comment authors on our TechCrunch posting, but not lost on anyone who actually participated). …
July 8, 2007· 1 min read
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 causes, but it’s almost universally true. …
July 3, 2007· 3 min read
Peripheral vision
One of the great challenges of business in general and smaller, fast growing businesses in particular is figuring out the balance between near term focus and long term vision. While all companies become slaves to the calendar (striving for quarterly sales targets, specific product release dates, etc.) too many never look up to see where they are really headed. I’m not talking about making sure you have the latest IDC report on your industry on your bedstand, I’m talking about having a meaningful understanding of your business, you competitors and spending real time focusing on how and where you are going to take your company. …
June 19, 2007· 2 min read
Random ramblings
A few things that individually aren’t a full post but that I wanted to point out. First – there are a lot of idiots on the internet – at least 409 of them (the fact that this number matches the most annoying accounting/tax regulation is pure coincidence, I’m sure…). Second – My dad’s take on my assessment of the patent situation (including where he disagrees with me – thanks for reading dad!). …
June 7, 2007· 1 min read
The start-up office revisited
A little while back I wrote a post on how much I love start-up office space. It’s messy, it’s small, it might not have a window and it might smell a little bit funny, but it’s the best office space you’ll ever have. I received a bunch of emails, comments and pictures from people with whom the post resonated. I really liked the following picture sent to me by Darrin Husmann who has a start-up company making intelligent irrigation systems with offices in both Oklahoma City and Baghdad (“Strange how war can bring two people from across the world together to work on sprinklers, eh?”). …
June 6, 2007· 1 min read
Patent sanity
Brad has a nice series running on patents which I’ve enjoyed a lot (I think the existing patent system is completely hosed, totally ineffective and open to blatant abuses of power – see this post from Jason for the perfect example). Well today, there’s a glimmer of hope that change may be on the way as the administration and it’s head patent policeman Jon Dudas announced the intent (note the gap between intent and action, but at least it’s a first step) to reform the patent system. While I generally like the idea of requiring patent filers to include more information on why their invention is ‘novel’ the gem for me in today’s announcement is the idea of opening up patents to more of a peer review. What a novel idea – have people who are actually in a particular field help determine whether an idea is truly novel and therefore patentable. In a system where the average patent is looked at by an examiner for about 7 hours before being approved (and where the default behavior seems to be “assume this is novel until proven definitively otherwise) far too many patents which are both obvious and not particularly original are being issued. …
June 6, 2007· 2 min read