I was both pleased and surprised last week to find Seattle ranked #4 on a global survey of startup ecosystems — below Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, but above several much more talked-about innovation centers, including both New York and Boston. The report was a timely validation of a hypothesis I’ve been exploring continue…
I had a great conversation with a Vancouver, BC entrepreneur this morning that forced me to organize several half-formed thoughts about the future of online “specialty” retailing” — this post is the result. Specialty retailing is the opposite of the everything-under-the-sun kind practiced by supersites like Amazon + WalMart.com. “Specialty” means that the merchant focuses continue…
Last Thursday I participated in my first-ever Ignite, a multi-city live event series that operates under a brilliant tagline for the ADD era: “Enlighten us, but make it quick.” UPDATE: I just added the video of my session above. This was not only my first time as an Ignite attendee, I was also one of 15 continue…
My brain is exploding. This will be a short post that foreshadows an (as yet unwritten) longer one but I wanted to point out some great thinking + writing by others, and also offer up the beginnings of a framework that extends / integrates these ideas to (hopefully) make them more actionable. First, the links: continue…
I love the Enterprise Mobile opportunity — arming companies that are playing to win on iOS and Android with product, marketing and business intelligence tools that will give them an edge in the cutthroat and fickle app marketplace. One of my first questions to any entrepreneur targeting this sector is: “is this a head or a continue…
Brad Feld was in Seattle yesterday and stopped by the Founders Co-op offices to talk about his excellent new book, Startup Communities. About 100 people showed up for the discussion: a great cross-section of founders, UW MBA students, venture and angel investors, deal lawyers, journalists and other entrepreneurial free radicals (thanks again to Ignition Partners‘ Michelle continue…
It’s no secret that explosive adoption of “smart” mobile devices is wreaking havoc on the strategic technology roadmaps of half the Fortune 500. Companies that were just beginning to grok the impacts of Social, Cloud + Big Data now have yet another vector of disruption to worry about, and it’s moving faster than all the continue…
I’ve always loved Joel Spolsky’s post on Fire + Motion: it sums up in just two words the basic playbook of most startups (and many big companies as well): move fast and break shit. There’s another pair of words that I find myself repeating all the time in conversations with founders — Scarcity + Urgency continue…
It’s fundraising season once again in Startupland and early-stage founders are feeling the pinch. The starting gun went off on Labor Day — when VC partners returned from their summer holidays, put their kids back in school and started showing up for partner meetings again. The fundraising circuit will run white hot from now until continue…
I started this blog almost five years ago, on November 6, 2007. This is my 365th post and — as of today — this strangely personal collection of ideas, impressions and hypotheses has been viewed more than 200,000 times. I know that’s a drop in the ocean given the 2+ billion connected humans in the continue…