Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

2 preamble issues having read the comments on TC today: 1: I know that the prices of startup companies is much great in Silicon Valley than in smaller towns / less tech focused areas in the US and the US prices higher than many foreign markets. I said both in the article but felt compelled to provide a statement up front for the skimmers.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward. So no whinging about what a long post this is!

Writing

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2010

Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup. So I thought I’d write a piece on how to not suck when you give a presentation.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

Everyone seems to be in such a rush to get shacked up these days. Swing by their offices to make it easy for them to say yes and promise not to take up more than 30 minutes for the update (and stick to it). Like it or not – finance is a major job function in any company – startup or public company.

Invest

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 3, 2011

I would love to see Tara follow up with blog posts on: why she believes this is the case & what we can do about it. The truth is I have been thinking a lot about the topic, I just haven’t been writing about it. We need to start encouraging it in our youth. AWS helped lower the cost of starting a company by 90%.

Entrepreneur

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2015

Let me start the post with three statements. Many people with ADD don’t work well in corporations & with bureaucracy, people with ADD have a bias towards action, people with ADD often speak up & take action and have strong bursts of creativity. I can’t write a blog post and then wait 3 days to publish.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 20, 2013

So I thought I’d write a piece on how not to suck when you give a presentation. Many of them have their iPhones and laptops ready to command their attention the moment that you start sucking. Stories have starts, middles and ends. I They all start to blend together. Show some energy! Get out of your comfort zone.

Slides

SoCal CTO

MARCH 3, 2011

I talk to roughly 2 or 3 new startups every week who need advice from an experienced CTO. But the reality is that I engage with about 5 new startups each year which means that I end up working with less than 5% of the startups where I provide these free consulting sessions. Do you have a Startup Founder Developer Gap ?

CTO Hire

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 14, 2010

of all statistics are made up. I’m writing this post to make sure you’re all on that same playing field. Here’s how I learned my lesson: I started my life as a consultant. I had to read each report, synthesis it and then come up with our best estimate of the markets going forward. I say it deadpanned.

Statistics

SoCal CTO

MARCH 3, 2011

I talk to roughly 2 or 3 new startups every week who need advice from an experienced CTO. But the reality is that I engage with about 5 new startups each year which means that I end up working with less than 5% of the startups where I provide these free consulting sessions. Do you have a Startup Founder Developer Gap ?

CTO Hire

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 27, 2021

Shots on Goal Being great as a startup technology investor of course requires a lot of things to come together: You need to have strong insights into where technology markets are heading and where value in the future will be created and sustained You need be perfect with your market timing. I’ve definitely been wrong on market value.

Funding

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 30, 2011

So I’m not suggesting to startups that you define bad market positions to get noticed. Repetition, repetition, repetition – You need to take every opportunity to ram home your key messages with people so they really start to remember your unique market positioning. It is simple and easily explained. Is it good policy?

Startup

SoCal CTO

MARCH 12, 2012

I've recently received several emails from people looking for a technical cofounder for their startup. I promised I would write this post with some thoughts and ideas on the topic. Make sure you go through the 32 Questions Developers May Have Forgot to Ask a Startup Founder. Here's an example of that kind of email.

CTO Hire

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 5, 2010

Great content again in September that meets at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. If you asked me to tell you a list of three of the best decisions in my life, I can certainly tell you that regularly writing is one of them. Why You Should Write. It's human nature," he writes.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 27, 2014

I started in 2007 with a thesis that my primary investment decision would be about the team (70%) and only afterward about the market opportunity (30%). I was telling him that it was much easier when I started because there were fewer deals, life was less public and somehow the world seemed to be spinning more slowly. I don’t.

Venture Capital

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

I started with a Top 10 list for Nivi (at VentureHacks), but I couldn’t cram it into 10 so it became a Top 11 list. So sticking to my definition of “attributes for success&# it had to be my Top 11 +1 rather than a Top 12. This is exactly the reason I like people who present to me to start with their personal bios.

Entrepreneur

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 6, 2010

There are definitely times where a more narrowly defined question makes sense and where you want to guide the person you’re talking with to a narrow boundary to illicit a certain type of response. We started presenting our company and talking about our views of the industry. He started opening up.

Startup

InfoChachkie

APRIL 16, 2012

Article first published as Steve Blank Discusses Origin And Future Of Lean Startup Movement on Technorati. I recently spoke with Steve Blank, author of the new book The Startup Owner’s Manual. He is credited with pioneering the Lean Startup Movement in 2005 via the publication of his bestselling, Four Steps To The Epiphany.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2011

I just had to line up behind him. We then started talking about Dave McClure. At first I was cynical about his ability to have 500 startups (or some fraction of that which is still larger than any VC has). I started to realize that Dave is able to do it because he approaches VC differently. I appreciate it. Show Notes.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

about their marathon 4-hour sessions to get to zero inbox or somebody else claiming email bankruptcy ( definition if you don’t know it already ). You’re writing a freaking blog post! The same kind of tasks that a startup team has. I met for coffee with one of my favorite “startup advisors” in LA.

Email

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 18, 2013

I have started thinking about what the future might look like and I’ve started imagining what I call, “MMOV” or massive multiplayer online video. Maker’s talent started commenting on it and sharing it. Why would it? Sure, the revenue & margin will be significantly lower than traditional TV.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 3, 2010

Paul Graham and the folks over at YCombinator have done much to reenergize early-stage entrepreneurship and encourage the creation of many new and innovative startups including DropBox, Posterous, Loopt, Justin.TV, Scribd and many others. See definition: ad hominem. I only read HN comments when I want to get upset.&#.

News

TechCrunch LA

JULY 21, 2020

When Upfront Ventures partner Kara Nortman first met Natalie Portman a few years ago to talk about ways their non-profit organizations All Raise and Time’s Up could collaborate, she never realized they’d eventually be partners on a sports franchise. “We’re venture capitalists. ” Nortman said.

Writing

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

I must admit I discuss this very frequently with portfolio companies but hadn’t thought to write about it. Although the carriers made a lot of money initially by selling dial-up Internet services, customers never took their software because, well, it sucked. PR Malloy (@diddly_do_indy) June 13, 2015.

Outsource Development

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 19, 2021

If you need to know how to do something, just look it up online. My message today is to avoid the consultant stigma by signing up to do the job, not just talk about it. My message today is to avoid the consultant stigma by signing up to do the job, not just talk about it. But certainly the Internet doesn’t do the job for you.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. My first startup was no different. I’ve started writing up some of those sales & marketing lessons and I plan to continue to build that section out over time. Startups are the art of the possible.

Sales

InfoChachkie

DECEMBER 10, 2012

Divshot's Founders conceived of their innovative web development solution, which automatically generates professional-grade code during the wire framing process, during a Startup Weekend event in Kansas City. No matter how you end up on the front page of a major news site, getting there is just the first step. Engagement.

News

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2010

So I started experimenting with multiple Tweets. I’ll finish writing around 1am and that’s a dumb time to Tweet because few people in the US are online. I try not to “double Tweet&# every day and I vary the time of day just to shake it up a bit. In fact, that is what I plan to do for this post.

Blogging

SoCal CTO

APRIL 2, 2013

What's Going to Go Wrong A lot of founders don't really understand Lean Startup principles. They look at the following high level definition of Lean: and they interpret that as write up an executive summary with your ideas and hand it to developers to build. What's going to go wrong?

CTO Coach

SoCal CTO

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

I recently got together with Aaron Shechet and an early stage startup to discuss the direction the company might want to take. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, graduating in 2003 with Honors in Economics. While at UC Santa Barbara, I started a café which served over 1100 dorm residents.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

So why is online video such an attractive market to build a startup? These markets represent about $600 billion of total spend between them, leaving tons of opportunities for startups to disrupt and grow large. That is the definition of Disruptive Technology. As I point out frequently, people want to consume video.

Company

SoCal CTO

MARCH 10, 2010

In some cases, part of the definition of minimum is going after technical risk as much as you are going after market risk which is often the focus of lean startups. But what inspired me to write this post was his title “Perfection by Subtraction.” Here’s what I mean… You start with some list of product features and functions.

Product

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 14, 2010

Over the years I collected (or thought up) a series of short-hand phrases to remind me of life’s lessons that are applicable to business. One of my favorite ones is “what you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail.&# The definition is kind of obvious. Tags: Startup Advice. I chuckled.

Startup

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar ’s startup Imbellus , a company designed to assess human potential and ultimately change the way we teach children. How does one come up with the right idea to start a company? We led a $4 million investment along with Thrive Capital, GLG and Sound Ventures.

Design

socalTECH

APRIL 14, 2011

I ended up passing on the Twitter investment, but I put out a blog post at the time--I was working for CBS--asking if someone would want to build it, and a kid named Soren MacBeth emailed me back saying he'd build it, which started the idea of StockTwits. Because of that, I indirectly ended up with a good amount of shares in Twitter.

Ideas

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 26, 2015

If a deal has a lot of support and no strong detractors it will often but up to the sponsoring partner to know what he or she wants to do with the deal. I thought to write a bit about this because last week I was asked by Jonathan Triest to agree to a short interview for his series called Carpool VC. ” Some firms are collegiate.

Venture Capital

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

Having time to think about “leadership” at most startups feels like a luxury. The reality of most startups is about survival. If you have a team of 10 people then by definition 90% of the time spent on activities is not put in by you and on a team of 100 it’s 99%. It’s important to get buy in.

Startup