How I keep track of information
I get this question all the time from friends and colleagues. Between portfolio companies, prospective investments, our investment themes, my partners, family and other topics that interest me, there’s a lot of information in my universe that I need to track. And this information ranges from blog posts, to tweets to mainstream press articles. It’s a lot to pay attention to (not to mention all of the individual blogs I follow ….). For a while I was using Google Alerts but 1) there wasn’t a great way to organize them (they just showed up when they showed up – as individual “hits”); 2) they seemed to be missing a ton of information; 3) at least 2/3rds of what came through was old news (i.e., someone had made a minor change to a page which caused the Google crawler to mark it as ‘new’); 4) there was no history, tracking, etc; and 5) they were clogging up my inbox. I could go on, but if you’re a heavy user of Google Alerts, I’m sure you’re already shaking your head up and down in sympathy. …
April 2, 2009· 4 min read
Don’t be caught on the sidelines
On my drive in this morning I was trying to think of reasons for you to NOT come to Glue…and came up completely blank. Glue is a unique chance to engage about some of the most current topics surrounding web technology with a national audience. Come talk with George Reese about securing cloud infrastructure (he has an upcoming O’Rielly book on the subject); hear about OAuth, OpenID and how they play into web architectures and services from Andrew Nash (PayPal) and Danny Kolke (etelos); debate the role of XMPP with Peter Stain-Andre, Jack Moffitt and Seth Fitsimmons (3 XMPP heavyweights); rub shoulders with Mitch Kapor (uber-angel/advisor, founder of Lotus Development Corp); geek out about cloud databases with Alex Iskold (AdaptiveBlue/ReadWriteWeb) and Stu Charleton (Elastra); and much much more (see the full agenda). …
April 1, 2009· 2 min read
dotting i’s and crossing t’s
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 work out as the case may be) the details of their split. And while I’m certainly not your lawyer, I’d strongly recommend that even if you are starting your company with your childhood best friend who you just got out of the army with that you put together at least a basic set of documents that will cover not only the formation of the company itself (which most people don’t tend to forget…) but also clarifies who owns what, what – if any – vesting there might be on your founders stock, what IP is owned by the company (and that the work you are doing together is company property, not individual property), etc, etc. …
March 20, 2009· 2 min read
dotting i’s and crossing t’s
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 work out as the case may be) the details of their split. And while I’m certainly not your lawyer, I’d strongly recommend that even if you are starting your company with your childhood best friend who you just got out of the army with that you put together at least a basic set of documents that will cover not only the formation of the company itself (which most people don’t tend to forget…) but also clarifies who owns what, what – if any – vesting there might be on your founders stock, what IP is owned by the company (and that the work you are doing together is company property, not individual property), etc, etc. …
March 19, 2009· 2 min read
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).
March 18, 2009· 1 min read
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. …
March 4, 2009· 1 min read
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. …
February 27, 2009· 1 min read
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! …
February 23, 2009· 1 min read
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 (their product, web service, widget, whatever) and are enamored with how they were able to make it work. Rather than simplifying their description of what their BSO does, they talk a lot about how they were able to make it so bright and shiny (after all they’re proud of the fact that they figured out a new way of doing something). That’s great if you’re showing off to other technologists (at least ones you don’t mind sharing your secret sauce with) but can be confusing (and counter-productive) when talking with customers and partners. …
February 23, 2009· 2 min read
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). …
February 18, 2009· 1 min read