March 2010
1 post
I Can't Believe It's not Twitter
Corporations are increasingly becoming omnipresent on social networks from Twitter to Facebook. As a result, a slew of startups are making it easier for companies to manage their social networking campaigns. One I like in particular is Spredfast. This is a completely web-based platform that allows companies to monitor, manage and measure their voice across MANY social media channels including...
February 2010
8 posts
The Mighty Tungle
Canadian startup Tungle.me solves one of the most annoying business problems: scheduling. Scheduling meetings with those external to your organization (meaning you can’t just look on Outlook Exchange and see their availability like you can with colleagues) is a time suck. Not only do you have to go to your Calendar tab and look for available times, make time conversions and block off...
Polyvore Sings
Ex-Google Exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is now the CEO of 3-year old startup Polyvore, also based in Mountain View. Polyvore is a social shopping site that lets users assemble and display collections of items from clothing to furniture. The site collects both ad revenues and referral commissions to larger sites like Saks and Nordstrom.
The site has become fairly popular with the following metrics...
Rent The Runway Raises $15 Million For The Netflix... →
Stick It To 'Em
Remember my post about how startups need to focus on building a niche and not jump around in their early stages? What I was speaking to was a specific instance at my former startup: a client wanted an on-premise deployment of our SaaS application. I was particularly shocked when our CEO wanted to move forward with this and re-develop a version of our software for this big brand name client who...
My Rented Closet
Introduced in late 2009, Rent the Runway (RTR) offers women everywhere the opportunity rent and wear designer dresses which may have previously been out of their budget or not suitable to repeat usage. The cost for rental ranges from $50-$200 for 4 nights.
The nascent company has already solved for common hurdles for the clothing rental business: they’ve partnered with a dry cleaners for...
The Death of a Startup Part II
I last spoke about the Use of Funds that may have led to my (not my persay, but the one I worked at) recent startup’s death. Another cause I want to highlight:
Product Management
A product built in its infancy, particularly by a fledgling company, should be neatly trimmed and concise. It should focus on core functionality that is unique and offers an edge from larger players in the space....
The Death of a Startup Part I
The startup I was most recently working at just went bust. Along with it’s passing, I find myself trying to pinpoint the key reasons for failure. The first and most obvious reason:
Use of Funds
With limited access to capital, a startup must make judicious decisions with money. Every penny should be spent with caution. For a Web early-stage startup, the bulk of expense is likely...
January 2010
11 posts
Adaptation Disadvantage?
One of the key benefits of running a startup is flexibility. Unlike a huge corporate giant, a startup is agile with limited layers of authority to get approvals. The one major constraint that a startup does face is obviously access to capital. That in and of itself can be a huge hurdle to flexibility, but a startup can at least make more rapid decisions.
To me, this is one of the biggest...
The New Exit Strategy
With a lagging equity market, IPOs have become the less attractive exit strategy for venture capitalists. In 2009, an anemic 4 tech VC-backed IPOs occurred (versus 28 in 2007). This has not only dried up the amount of VC activity and capital available to tech, but has modified how tech companies are looking to grow.
Recently, Elevation Partners has committed to offer up to $100M to Yelp to allow...
Startup Metrics from Dave McClure →
“While venture capitalists as a group loosened their purse strings toward the end...”
– Scott Austin, editor of Dow Jones VentureWire on the downturn in VC investing
“acquiring companies while they are young, relatively inexpensive and can easily...”
– Jeffrey Kaplan, Seeking Alpha on Salesforce.com’s acquisition preferences, timely as the behemoth is raising $500M debt
What is the right type of pricing for SaaS? (Early...
In a recent post on ReadWriteWeb, Bernard Lunn examined 103 SaaS companies to see their approaches to pricing. The results were somewhat surprising - only 24% of companies had full pricing transparency.
From an early-stage startup perspective, pricing transparency can be a critical mistake. As the environment for a young company changes, it needs to be as flexible as possible to adapt prices -...
Funding rejected by a VC? It's OK
Click here for article
Top 10 VC Blogs
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/14/top-ten-vc-blogs-q409/
“The guy buying software and hardware for your average company probably looks a...”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/technology/start-ups/04venture.html?ref=start-ups
Startups, be prepared: Questions VC's ask →
April 2009
5 posts
2 tags
Phases of a Startup
1. Inception
Is working with the A-team enough? Selection process of the team is critical. What core values do you share as individuals? Trust, commitment, goals. How do you define success?
2. Growth
3. Unfortunate Setback
4. Rejuvenation / Re-birth
5. Transition
2 tags
"Overcoming Adversity & Taking Risks"
Lessons learned from Stanford Technology Ventures lecture by Jackie Speier & Deborah Stephens:
1. A Blue-haired lady. Identify one person in your life that believes in you - no matter what. When you’re losing, this person will buck you up.
2. Don’t network. Build relationships. Building a relationship is actually caring about someone.
3. Like the dollars, but Love the cause....
5 tags
Peeking in on Tweets
The recent outbreak of the swine flu has taken over Facebook, Twitter and blog posts everywhere.
The hype over the swine flu really represents the unharnessed potential of social media sites to find out what people are talking about. Sure, resources like Google Trends and Technorati consolidate trends and rank the most popular topics across these mediums, but more specifically, these sites...
3 tags
Neat Websites
I intend to use this as a running list of websites I think are kind of cool.
Distracted much? Control how often you frequent any website (particularly Facebook, Gmail and Twitter) with KeepMeOut.com
Is Twitter blocked at work? Be clever and disguise tweets as an Excel spreadsheet.
3 tags
Wait doesn't Facebook already do that? (For free)
I recently interviewed with OrgSync, an Austin-based start-up company that develops integrated software for student organizations on college campuses. Think of it as a cross between Blackboard and Facebook. The starting salary for a position with this start-up was staggeringly low, but the VP I spoke with tried to remind me that of course the equity of OrgSync was more valuable than the near-term...