Crash Dev is created by Chris DeVore. Seattle-based startup guy + seed-stage investor at Founders' Co-op, Managing Director at Techstars Seattle, Stanford GSB, Yale / Y150
AngelList’sBabak Nivi published a great post earlier today titled “The Entrepreneurial Age“; his thesis statement is as follows: In the entrepreneurial age, physics and information will be replaced by entrepreneurship: the ability to serve a customer at the highest level of quality and scale, simultaneously. We will learn to put entrepreneurship to great use and it continue…
If you like what you read please follow me on Twitter or Subscribe by Email I had a great conversation with one of our Founders Co-op LPs today and thought the core points were worth sharing. (This post gets pretty far into the weeds of venture finance, so if that’s not your bag please skip continue…
Time : Quality : Cost — It’s the optimization problem at the heart of every software development project. Under normal market conditions an effective manager can achieve two out of three, but pushing too hard on any one vector — lowering cost, making the product more awesome, shipping it sooner — inevitably leads to compromise continue…
If you like what you read please follow me on Twitter or Subscribe by Email tl;dr — Talent is the raw material of any successful startup ecosystem. “Middle market” tech companies are a critical — but easily overlooked — component of a high-performance talent market. Every major global tech hub is locked in a fierce continue…
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” – Anonymous “Human empowerment” is a through-line in my life and work — I love projects that help passionate creative people achieve their full potential. And “digital creatives”, makers and artists continue…
I had a great conversation with a venture capitalist friend today about whether there’s a theme to my seed-stage investing. At first I resisted the idea — I think if myself as a founder-centric investor who’s willing to follow the lead of talented teams with much deeper insights into the business problems they want to continue…
Craft beer. Artisan coffee. Chunky knit sweaters. Indie rock. The Pacific Northwest has always over-indexed for offbeat dreamers and hobbyists — some of whose quirky passions “accidentally” turned into global businesses (think Microsoft in personal computing, Starbucks in coffee, or Amazon in online bookselling) and even cultural movements (Nirvana, SubPop Records + grunge music). Today’s continue…
The Startup Genome report that came out a few weeks ago — ranking Seattle #4 among global innovation hubs — was both a good thing and a bad thing for the Pacific Northwest innovation ecosystem. Good, because it shined a light on some of the core strengths in our regional innovation market. Bad, because it continue…
A few weeks ago I published a long list of Enterprise SaaS opportunities being diven by the massive global shift to “Mobile First” customer communications. Most large enterprises have been caught flat-footed by the speed of this transition, and are now scrambling to catch up to their customers’ preference to access digital services via native mobile continue…
I love working with engineering-centric founding teams — makers who can not just envision the future but build it as well. But I had a conversation this morning with another early-stage investor that highlighted a common skill gap in teams like this: even when they have a crisp vision of the future in their heads, continue…