TechCrunch 50

I’m up at Techcrunch 50 today, along with a gaggle of other folks from the media, startup, and investor community. Lot’s of companies, but truth be told not a lot that I find that interesting.

I sat in on some of the sessions, which are a Demo-style “pitch then sharpshoot” format featuring a panel of know-it-all [...]

The Death of Stealth Mode

Stealth mode is pointless because everyone has figured out that it’s faux scarcity with a PR objective. Just go into alpha release and skip the whole stealth mode shtick.

If you’re starting a company and want to stay in “stealth mode”, make sure you understand the impact of your Form D filing and factor [...]

Brilliant Seed Engineers

Adriana sent me this post with the disclaimer that it’s long but well worth the read, and I concur. Basically the gist of it is that you are only as good as your ability to hire good, and your ability to hire good is a function of your ability to hire brilliant seed engineers. I’ve [...]

Dilbert on Experience

If you look at the great achievements in history, they are usually accomplished by younger people. Those people continue to acquire relevant experience throughout their careers but their successes do not continue at the same rate. For anything important, experience probably has a strong negative correlation with success. If that weren’t true, all [...]

TechStars

Seeing as how I am in Denver/Boulder with increasing frequency these days, I decided to get involved with a local organization supporting entrepreneurship. TechStars is a fantastic Boulder-based organization that takes in 10 promising teams and provides seed funding and more importantly mentorship as they move through the early stages of development through fundraising.

There [...]

Backing Stupid Ideas

As managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Guy Kawasaki funded all the really smart ideas he could find. None hit it big.

Is there a rim shot and laugh track to go with that statement…

Kawasaki is right about a number of the points he makes through this article. A lot of companies [...]

Open the Spigit

"spigit is a platform that provides professionals the ability to showcase new ideas and innovations and in the process build their professional network. Companies and Entrepreneurs can obtain feedback-contributions-ratings from employees, partners and customers. Through our proprietary simulation they can build and refine an idea, find the right resources to contribute, [...]

Founder Blues

I didn’t need to be a genius to see t where things were headed. This week my “partners†canned me. The official reason is “termination without cause,†which is important only because it ensures that I will receive a substantial number of shares (and small amount of cash) in the company, [...]

Cambrian House - Crowdsourcing Gets Real

Up until now a lot of the talk about wisdom of crowds has been theoretical in nature, lot’s of sites like Digg claim the title but in reality a very small percentage of the user base ends up steering the market. Cambrian House is a company that aims to put crowdsourcing to work, literally, but [...]

Top 10 VC Lies

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