Will Herman’s post yesterday on the challenges of co-CEO’s reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest. Many businesses run loose and fast in their early days. And lets face it, the kind of people who are drawn to starting companies often aren’t process people – they are creative thinkers. While that’s part of the fun of early stage companies, don’t forget that there’s a side to what you are doing that needs to be properly documented and orderly. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg who has founder problems – I’ve seen many business partnerships with the best intentions disintegrate, where their founders who were no longer seeing eye to eye, had to work out (or not…
Posts By / seth levine
Last chance to submit to TechStars
I’ve blogged plenty about TechStars (see how much I love TechStars here) so I won’t drone on again about what a great experience the program is . . . but it totally rocks and if you’re an entrepreneur with a great idea I’d strongly encourage you to apply. The application deadline is this Saturday (for both Boston and Boulder).
VCIR Winter 2009 is up and running
Cross posting from the VCIR Blog. We’re liveblogging VCIR today – I won’t post everything here, but you can follow the action over at the VCIR Blog. We’ll be posting live from VCIR today. You can follow the action here at the VCIR blog (David Cohen already has a post up about the media panel that kicked off the morning session). You can also follow the action via the VCIR Winter Twitter feed. A few stats on this year’s conference. We have just under 300 attendees at this year’s conference. They are roughly split 1/3 venture capitalists, 1/3 company executives and 1/3 service providers. This is generally comparable to last year’s attendance which was approximately 320. We’ve added two company…
How to get your company into VCIR
Todd Vernon approached me last week to tell me that his perception – and that of a number of people in the Denver/Boulder community – was that the VCIR company selection process was a complete black box. This was eye opening to me (being involved in the process for years, I thought we had done an ok job letting people know how things work) and as I thought about it I realized that we really haven’t talked a lot about how we find companies for the conference and what the vetting process looks like. The reality is that the process is pretty well thought out and (I hope) very fair. We have a large number of people on the selection…
Start your business now! (revisited)
I wrote a post a few weeks ago listing out the reasons that right now is a great time to start a business. A few days ago TechCrunch came out with their TechCrunch 2008 Year in Review (their first paid report). The post that summarized the report had a preview of some of the data they write about and included the following graph that does a great job of showing why the current market can work in your favor. Have at it!
What vs. how
The distinction of "what" a company does vs. "how" it does it has come up recently in a bunch of different contexts and it got me thinking about this idea as a useful distinction for companies to consider as they talk with customers, partners, media, etc. The idea stems from a tendency that companies have to focus not on what they do, but on how they’re doing it. In my experience this tendency is particularly true of technology companies and very prevalent in early stage companies – who in both cases are often heavily weighted towards technologists in their staffing (and therefore thinking). It’s easy to understand how companies fall into this trap. They’ve developed a new bright shiny object…
Glue just keeps getting better
In case you still haven’t signed up for Glue (see my compelling post on why you should be coming here) let me give you two more reasons: Josh Elman and Bob Frankston. Josh is the "platform guy" at Facebook (and is helping push a greater degree of openness at FB) and Bob is the co-creator of VisiCalc (and will be talking about how he’s thinking about the web as a platform). Both have signed up to give keynotes at the conference (along with David Heinemeier Hanson and Mitch Kapor both of whom I wrote about in my previous post about the conference). You can see the latest agenda here. Note that we’ve also added a handful of new workshops and…
WSJ Venture Capital Blog
I’ve been enjoying Scott Austin’s Venture Capital Dispatch. It’s a great source of information, easy to read and is a great summary of information for those of us who don’t have time to read the Journal every day. Thought it was worth a pointer.
Techstars Beantown!
I’ve been a *huge* fan of Techstars since first meeting David Cohen just over two years ago and have not been bashful about my love of the concept in previous blog posts. For those of you not familiar with the program, Techstars brings together teams of entrepreneurs from across the country to participate in an intensive 3 month summer program to jumpstart their businesses. It’s heavily mentor and experiential driven – the teams work extremely closely with the program’s mentors to advance their businesses and the summer program is filled with guest speakers that cover an array of topics of specific interest to building young businesses. Since launching in 2007 we’ve had 20 companies through the program (of which 12…
Seattle Techstars meetup
My partner Chris Wand and I will be in Seattle tomorrow and are hosting a meetup about Techstars (in case anyone missed the event a few weeks ago that Brad held there). Info can be found at www.techstars.org/meetups.