Fred Wilson put up a post today that grabbed a slide from a recent presentation Mark Suster gave at a Founder Showcase event. The chart (and Fred’s post) back up with numbers the qualitative argument I was making in my recent post on Pattern Recognition (I wish I had these data when I wrote my…
Someone asked me this week for some qualitative data on the factors that lead Boulder to emerge over the past 5 or so years as one of the country’s top markets for start-ups. It’s a great question and I know that there are many other cities that are trying to follow Boulder’s example. I thought…
For a long time my hometown of Boulder, Colorado has been known as a great place to live but more recently Boulder is taking on a reputation as a great place to start a company as well. And the rest of the country is starting to take notice (see BusinessWeek, HuffPo and the NY Times)….
Today’s guest post comes from Ted Rosen, a partner at the law firm Fox Rothschild. How to write an effective company “teaser” is one of the most common topics I’m asked about by entrepreneurs and I think Ted has some excellent thoughts on how to prepare a company summary that hits the right points but…
This seems like an appropriate topic against the backdrop of my recent post on becoming more of a data driven organization. When you expose data, you expose not just those areas of your business that are doing well, but also those that aren’t. And this brings up an interesting question: Does your organization embrace failure…
I had planned to title this post “If you have a data intensive business, don’t forget to look at your data.” But when I thought about, really all businesses are (or should be) data-intensive. And as a result all businesses should be obsessed with the data their systems generate. Measure. Track. Analyze. Adjust. Years ago…
Someone at a meeting I was in a few weeks ago made a statement to the effect that he valued management (sales management in particular) following this mantra. I couldn’t disagree more. While it makes for a great VC cliché it seems to me that it’s not a good plan to set an expectation with…
I’ve received a few lengthy emails recently that contained the following: IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE READ THIS SECTION While I suppose one could argue that this encourages the reader to skip over the rest of the email, I disagree. I think it’s brilliant. Each email was full of information – the kind that takes…
I’ve generally avoided political issues on this blog, but this isn’t something I can keep my mouth shut on. Yesterday Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the New York City Marathon in 27 years. Born in Eritrea on the east coast of Africa, Keflezighi moved to the US when he as 12 (more…
I’ve had this running debate with a handful of friends – I’d love to throw it out there for comment. The questions at hand are 1) whether companies should offer a “free trial” period for their software/web service; 2) if they do, how long should it last; and 3) what information should you ask for…