A few weeks ago the New York Times ran a piece about near-record vacancy rates at shopping malls around the country: “Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop. While malls have faced problems in the past, continue…

Disclaimer: Entrepreneurship is all about passion: if you’ve decided that selling to local SMBs is your life’s work, I celebrate your choice. This post is for all the entrepreneurs who are currently evaluating local / hyperlocal business ideas, but might be just as happy doing something else. Hi, my name’s Chris, and I’m an online-local-a-holic. continue…

I seems like every self-respecting entrepreneur these days is building a platform, not a product. Many (but certainly not all) of these “platform” aspirants are smart enough to understand that most true platforms (think Facebook, iOS, Android) didn’t start out that way. Platforms tend to emerge in one of two ways: EITHER: a disruptive new continue…

I took a swing at this idea over four years ago, but in retrospect I buried the lede. It keeps coming up in my conversations with entrepreneurs, so I figured I’d try again with a more direct approach. It’s insanely hard to get people to adopt new behaviors. Almost by definition, startups need customers to continue…

 “Self-provisioning” is the enterprise IT manager’s description for services that users can select, install, configure and use all by themselves. The name reeks of corporate-speak, but the impact is all startup. Combine “self-provisioning” with… – No contract / low monthly pricing — so no procurement officer has to bless it, and…  – User-centered design — so continue…

Happy 2012 startup people! I’m just getting my calendar back together after the holidays and the first event on the books is PIE Demo Day, Tuesday January 17 at Portland’s Bagdad Theater. A little over two years ago, Portland-based creative firm Wieden+Kennedy created the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). This coworking space was the spawning ground for continue…

I’ve written before about the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the elite class of software “makers” and the enterprise customers who most need their help. I was reminded of the problem by Fred Wilson’s post this morning on “vertical accelerators” — specifically the FinTech program in New York. In Fred’s words… “the secret sauce of these continue…

I’m going to catch a ton of shit for this, but here’s the truth: Seattle is a secondary market for software entrepreneurship. But before all you PNW partisans jump all over me, let me qualify that statement: Compared to Silicon Valley, *every* city in the world — including New York, Boston, Austin, Beijing and Bangalore continue…

Over the past few weeks I’ve had my mind blown by several teams, each pursuing very different ideas, but with fundamentally similar views about what a “magically good” software experience feels like. I’ve been trying to come up with a good description for the ideas these teams are pursuing, and the title of this post continue…