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…
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…
Following up on my last post on Solutions in Search of a Problem, today’s post is about the best way to avoid that trap: engaging your prospective customers *before* developing your product. Too many first-time entrepreneurs are unable or unwilling to sell their vision without an actual product to back it up. As a result, continue…
Maybe I’m just cranky because the Seattle weather has been so terrible recently, but I’ve seen a bunch of ideas recently that I would classify as “solutions in search of a problem”. This is frustrating, not just because these aren’t deals I feel comfortable investing in, but also because the founders behind these ideas are continue…
I’ve written before about the need for visionary founders to break their idea down into achievable chunks, but I was missing a referencable framework for the idea. After serving as a judge in their business plan competition, last night I attended an awards dinner put on by the University of Washington Center for Innovation and continue…
Great post today from Om Malik titled “Why Small Really Is Beautiful“. His argument is that bootstrapped (or “lightly financed”) companies can deliver both more fun and better financial returns to their founders than venture-backed ones. I’ve tried it both ways, and I can’t agree more. Boostrapping is stressful as hell, but if you love continue…
As a companion effort to my recent deep dive on messaging, I’ve been trying to get smarter about the online collaboration / groupware space. Unfortunately, the closer I get to it the muddier it seems. I’ve now fallen back on the penultimate refuge of scoundrels, the 2-by-2 matrix, to try to create some order in continue…