Not a ton of news to report this month but didn’t want to leave anyone hanging (assuming there are folks out there who are still following this story…). A few stats to get you started: Members: 492 Completed Q&A: 768 Good News: We keep chipping away at feature tweaks (mostly based on member feedback) We’ve continue…
I have a new obsession (more on that below) and have been scouring the Web to see who else is already working on it (there’s always someone). The bad news is, in terms of running code, versions of the idea have been “in market” for years. The good news is that these products were developed continue…
Continuing on the “messaging” theme I started in on a while ago, here’s a deeper dive on the role of contacts and contact management, a.k.a. “Personal Relationship Management” (thanks to Om Malik for pointing me to a topical post by Tristan Louis). Here’s how Tristan defines it: “…provide me with a high level contact overview continue…
You know how it goes: as soon as you start paying attention to something you start to see it everywhere. For the past several months I’ve been working with two different companies (both still under wraps) in the “messaging” space. I was already aware of a few related efforts, including Xobni and Xoopit (plus Seattle-based continue…
Askablogr turned 3 months old on the 18th, but I’ve been distracted by a few other projects recently so am coming to this report a few days late (for clarity, the stats to the right are from March 18-April 18). One thing I promised to do after our Mashable writeup was to read out again continue…
I’ve written many times about how much I respect and admire Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, so I was caught by surprise by a flurry of blog comments yesterday expressing outrage over the obvious similarities between our “apply” questionnaire at Founders Co-op and the YC application form. We absolutely modeled our questionnaire on theirs, continue…
Paul Graham (of Y Combinator fame) has a great post up on the growing funding gap between angel investors and institutional VCs. In his words: “There are companies that will give $20k to a startup that has nothing more than the founders, and there are companies that will give $2 million to a startup that’s continue…
Since we announced Founders Co-op a few weeks ago my calendar and brain have been randomized way beyond historical norms. In addition to my usual advisory and consulting stuff I’ve been meeting with all kinds of folks across the local startup ecosytem: prospective investment candidates, fellow entrepreneurs, angel investors, mentors for our portfolio companies, etc. continue…
I was describing to a first-time entrepreneur the other day why we don’t do ad-supported deals at Founders Co-op, and she wondered out loud why so many first-tier VC firms are willing to make these kinds of bets. My answer at the time was that they have (much) more capital to work with and can continue…
Since we announced Founders Co-op a few weeks ago I’ve taken over a dozen meetings with prospective entrepreneurs (and declined meetings with quite a few more). A handful of these meetings were with founders who hoped to rely at least in part on ad or sponsorship dollars to make their business idea work. My glib continue…