I’ve read a lot here about how to hack a funding term sheet, or how to navigate the confusing terms and conditions in the legal contracts startup founders must sign. But what about rent? It’s probably one of your biggest operating costs, and in the current […] Read more »
Paul Polak, a Pop!Tech 2008 featured speaker, has been starting businesses since he was 15. He’s now 75, and says he has succeeded — and failed — with more ventures than he can count. Polak’s first was a strawberry distribution operation in his hometown of Millgrove, […] Read more »
This week I was in Camden, Maine, attending Pop!Tech, an annual gathering of thought leaders in technology and design launched in 1996. This year Pop!Tech inaugurated a three-day bootcamp for social entrepreneurs, called the Social Innovation Fellowship Program, the latest addition to Pop!Tech’s year-old startup incubator, […] Read more »
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Someone recently pointed out to me that “a crisis is the ultimate teachable moment.” Startup founders have long known this. Whether you find yourself dealing with a sudden lack of access to commercial loans, the collapse of a funding round, a management change, or even a […] Read more »
Fundraising always demands patience and grit, but passing the hat in the current environment will test your founder’s mettle unlike any time in recent history. Even investors still flush with cash that, only weeks ago, they had planned to put to work, now have grown skittish […] Read more »
I was crazy enough to start two businesses at the same time — OnlyBusiness.com and Polaris Blue. My partner and I run them concurrently, and fortunately both have done well. No doubt we got lucky, but I want to share a concept critical to our success […] Read more »
We’ve written recently about how bootstrapping founders can help themselves navigate a very tight credit market. Now, the implosion of the investment banking industry promises to level what was left of the landscape for both IPO and M&A exits. Startup founders would be wise to reassess […] Read more »
Five months ago I became a founder for the first time. I am not a total novice to the Valley; I’ve been fortunate to work with and befriend some very smart (and now influential) people from companies like Google and Powerset. But I am also a […] Read more »
Last week we offered you one founder’s rationale for taking money from angel investors, instead of venture capitalists. It’s a trade-off of sorts: smaller checks, but they often come with better deal terms. Some readers took slight umbrage at this proposition: “The reality is that our […] Read more »
Lately we’ve been discussing the many reasons why taking smaller, angel-sized investments instead of larger venture capital stakes often makes more sense for startups in a wobbly, exit-bereft market like the current one. Today, Ron Conway, the well-known founder of the Silicon Valley-based Angel Investors LP […] Read more »
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This week, Lookery, the ad network launched last July to serve über-cheap ads into Facebook applications, has announced a new $2.25 million round of funding. It’s a nice sum for the 14-month-old startup, which now sends Facebook some 3 billion ads a month, according to Lookery’s […] Read more »
It’s not a new idea to make hay by seizing the messy business opportunities no one else wants. Innovating the distribution of a technology, rather than inventing the technology itself, isn’t novel either. This is the model that made founder Michael Dell a billionaire. Now, San […] Read more »
With the tech conference season upon us, Found|READ thought some tips for how to master conference marketing on the cheap would be useful. Today’s tips are courtesy of serial entrepreneur Pete Grillo, currently founder of iterasi, a one-and a-half-year-old startup in Portland, Ore., that has built […] Read more »
Founders are notorious for falling in love with their visions. How else could we survive 18-hour workdays or a multitude of setbacks with our optimism still intact? The problem with this is that it’s impossible to predict what the future holds. So, to be successful, you’ll […] Read more »
If you’re a major league baseball fan, you’ve probably read “Moneyball,” the best-selling book by journalist Michael Lewis chronicling the successful statistics-driven management of Oakland Athletics General Manager, Billy Beane. Baseball has long been a game of stats, but Beane’s philosophy gave the tradition a twist: […] Read more »
Last month we offered bootstrapping founders a short index of cost-optimization sites to help cut expenses for things like health insurance, web hosting, wireless plans and electric bills. Many of you wrote in to offer your own recommendations, so this week we’re expanding the list with […] Read more »
Ivan and Abby Kirigin founded their startup, Tipjoy, to give consumers of free content a new way to pay for the stuff they really like: by leaving a tip. While the idea sounds simple enough, what the Kirigins want to do is actually far more ambitious […] Read more »
Clever founders always eke the most out of every buck. But economic conditions being what they are, even the best bootstrappers could use a little extra help. By now you’ve probably heard of web sites like GasPriceWatch.com, GasBuddy and MSNAutos, which help consumers find the cheapest […] Read more »
Founders Gary Swart and Stephen Pieraldi presided over the Venture Capital and Seed Financing Workshop at GigaOM’s recent Structure 08 conference . This week, the pair sat down with Found|READ to share additional lessons from their careers in fundraising. Swart is CEO of oDesk, a staffing […] Read more »
At GigaOM’s recent Structure 08 event, Meebo co-founder and engineering chief, Sandy Jen, joined a panel to talk about scaling your computing infrastructure for explosive growth. Jen also spoke with Found|READ, this time to offer founders tips on how to overcome what she calls the internal […] Read more »
GigaOM’s Structure 08 event offered a terrific opportunity to survey the changing landscape of computing infrastructure. But as with all technology shifts, innovation won’t just belong to the big established players like VMWare, Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Salesforce.com and NetSuite. With that in mind, Found|READ asked […] Read more »
Before he became a founder, Ian Shea spent eight years at DVR maker (and TiVo predecessor) ReplayTV. During that time, the company went through — among other things — a massive restructuring, layoffs, bankruptcy and a turnaround before finally being bought by DirectTV for an undisclosed […] Read more »
During a break at GigaOM’s Structure 08 conference this week, Found|READ sat down with VMware co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum. Dr. Rosenblum developed VMware’s virtualization software while working on a supercomputer research project with his graduate students at Stanford University, where he remains an […] Read more »
We recently spoke with Paul Saffo, the technology forecaster best known for his associations with the The Institute for the Future (which he left earlier this year) and The Long Now Foundation, whose mission is to replace society’s ‘”faster/cheaper mindset” with “slower/better thinking.” Saffo also teaches […] Read more »
We hear often that speed is a virtue in the startup trade. Mike Cassidy thinks speed is the highest virtue, in fact. (Check out his presentation, Speeding Up All Parts of a Startup, which we found via Venture Hacks earlier this week.) As luck would have […] Read more »
We’ve written recently about how to preserve your equity when fundraising. This week we spoke with serial entrepreneur Chris Michel, who explained why founders should not be afraid to give additional equity disbursements — out of their personal stakes! — to reward senior staffers. That’s what […] Read more »
Last October, Found|READ lunched with serial entrepreneur and Lookery cofounder Scott Rafer, who gloomily predicted the technology industry was “no more than five months away from the next bust.” Pessimistic, even for the opinionated Rafer, but then he knows a thing or two about successes (MyBlogLog), […] Read more »
I recently had dinner with a friend of mine, a physician-turned-businessperson-turned-founder. We were discussing the virtues of transferable skills, and I asked him what management tools he brings to entrepreneurship from his earlier career in medicine. He pondered a bit before confessing that radiology skills don’t, […] Read more »
Jim Barnett is co-founder and CEO of Turn, a three-year-old online advertising firm that uses an eBay-like auction to improve the way advertisers are matched to web publishers. Previously, Jim was president of AltaVista, and later, of Overture’s search division, which Yahoo bought for $1.6 billion […] Read more »
Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a three-part series authored by Xobni’s VP of engineering, Gabor Cselle. Read a longer version (co-written with Marie C. Baca ) on Cselle’s blog starting Monday. I run product development at Xobni, maker of an email application that […] Read more »
There are a lot of different words that can be used to describe the venture capital community and its relationship with entrepreneurs. Many of them, however, cannot be printed. For example, I once heard a VC say to an entrepreneur: “It would be easier to build […] Read more »
I’m one of the co-founders of two-year-old startup Marketo, a marketing automation company serving B2B companies. I’m also VP of marketing, meaning I’m under constant pressure to take Marketo’s own messaging to new heights. After all, if we can’t market ourselves like a world-class company — […] Read more »
Editor’s note: For the sake of accuracy, we have replaced the edited questions and answers with their unedited version (save for some minor stylistic changes). We sincerely apologize for any confusion. This week Found|READ interviews software entrepreneur Paul Graham, co-founder of the influential startup incubator, Y […] Read more »
HubPages is an online publishing ecosystem where authors submit useful, informative articles on topics they know and love, and then earn royalties for their contributions through Google AdSense, eBay Partner Network or Amazon Associates. Our site grew quickly after we launched in August 2006, as word […] Read more »
I spent yesterday afternoon in an hours-long strategy session with some former Y Combinator grads. The team is in the final week of preparing their startup for its Beta launch, and they were having difficulty yesterday deciding what the ultimate hierarchy of the pre-launch tasks should […] Read more »
This is the age of Celebrity 2.0. If you have more that 200 Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Yelp friends, you’re a celeb, too! After watching too many big shots ‘step in it’ again and again this week (first at Y Combinator’s Startup School, and I’m sure Web2.0 […] Read more »
Editor’s Note: our readers are familiar now with contributor Ben Yoskovitz’s work. (His company, Standout Jobs was just named one of Canada’s hottest startups. Congratulations, Ben!) This week, on his Instigator Blog, Ben offers a great treatise on how founders can leverage data collecting to make […] Read more »
I went to Y Combinator’s Startup School on Saturday (that’s YC-founder Paul Graham, in case you don’t know) even though most people in Silicon Valley see the material there as “too basic.” My goal is to perpetually learn and apply and to learn as much from […] Read more »
A market collapse, a cash crunch, and an IPO. I experienced it all in 2001. Now that another (even broader) recession is upon us, I offer my hard-earned lessons for “weathering through” uncertain economic times. (I write often about such topics my blog,Market Mine.) Back in […] Read more »
I have spent the last fifteen years starting and running two startups. Currently, I am “on a break” to finish my book, “Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs” and to experiment with an online community for open source and commercial network tools. I often find myself participating […] Read more »
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