I’ve been messing around with email/communications ideas for a little while now, and one of the threads I’ve been tugging on lately is the concept of “ambient” social interactions, exchanges that take place in the context of other online activities (as opposed to in the inbox / IM window). There are lots of interesting ideas continue…
No matter what business they’re in, the first and hardest problem for any early-stage Web company is distribution. Everything else about doing business online gets cheaper and easier every day, but with an ever-accelerating proliferation of new sites and services, it only becomes more difficult for each new offering to acquire an audience of loyal continue…
A big chunk of my time goes to meeting with early-stage entrepreneurs. My goals for these meetings are: to get to know the founders as people, to learn about their product and business strategy, and to talk about whether and how we (Founders Co-op) might be able to help them. At some point in these continue…
Between summer season family commitments and some great new developments at Founders Co-op, I missed my 5-month Askablogr update, so I decided to run a little experiment. In previous months I took an active role as community manager, welcoming each new member with a personalized question and looking for ways to unblock members who seemed continue…
I had lunch with a friend yesterday who’s become a big fan of Twitter, and he asked me if my views of it had changed since I set up an account. My response was that, if anything, I’m even more of a skeptic than I was before, but that my reasons are really more personal continue…
Om Malik had a great quote yesterday in his post titled “Can Serendipity Make you Rich?“: “If someone can become the Dolby of the web — remove the noise and give us clear sound — then they are going to make a lot of money. And when I say sound, I mean data that is continue…
A little while back I posted on BATNA, one of the few useful concepts I took away from business school. The topic is on my mind again because I’m currently participating in several unrelated early-stage financings (acting variously as advisor, counterparty and peanut gallery), where a strong BATNA can be the difference between a full continue…
Yesterday’s PE Week Wire included an interview with Marty Pinchinson, a co-founder of Sherwood Partners (a.k.a. “the undertaker” for VC-backed companies). The whole interview is great, but a few quotes in particular stuck in my head: “Everyone comes up with this cockapoo about startups. It’s not about being smart. It’s about being around long enough.“ continue…