TechStars Chicago’s first class of startups: patient-monitoring, matchmaking and marketing
TechStars Chicago, formerly Excelerate Labs, has announced its inaugural class of startups. Read more »
Tech startups are the luckiest startups: A view from outside the bubble
photo: Rani Molla
Starting a company is hard, but it’s a lot harder outside the startup-happy tech culture in the Bay Area as I discovered talking to toy inventors at The Toy Fair. Read more »
Balancing team passion and product-market fit
Entrepreneurs are often told to figure out what the market wants and to follow their passions. Unfortunately, these can be competing directions. Dave Kashen, founder of Quantum Leading, has his own bit of advice for startup founders — don’t settle for what the market wants if it doesn’t intersect with what you’re passionate about doing. Read more »
Lessons from the TSA on how to launch a startup
Can you name America’s largest startup? It’s not Facebook or Amazon. It isn’t even a technology company. This giant startup is the Transportation Security Administration, and its massive scale offers a roadmap for entrepreneurs eager to turn big ideas into sustainable businesses. Read more »
A reminder to talk to your users relentlessly
Remind101 co-founder, Brett Kopf’s dyslexia and ADD led him to create a text messaging service for students. After failing to find an audience, Kopf starting talking to users. In this video, Kopf explains how important that communication was to finding the right business. Read more »
Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea: How to be a good mentor
A good mentor is invaluable for the modern startup founder or tech exec. But what makes for a good mentor relationship, and how do you find one? Get Satisfaction CEO and mentor Wendy Lea explains her approach and what she looks for in a mentee. Read more »
InternMatch CEO: Advice for finding the right advisors
Advisors may not be as sexy as angels in the startup ecosystem, but the right one can provide a ton of value for young companies. InternMatch Co-Founder and CEO, Andrew Maguire, shares his thoughts on finding and working with the right advisors to help any startup. Read more »
Four South Korean startups to watch
Korea’s future as a startup hub is still a work in progress but I see a lot of reasons to be optimistic about companies emerging from this country of 50 million people. Here are four start-ups that caught my attention at the BeLaunch conference last week. Read more »
TechStars NYC 2012: 7 startups to watch
Thirteen would-be darlings of New York’s tech scene are hitting the stage today at startup incubator TechStars NYC’s third Demo Day to present its latest class of graduates. Read more »
Korean startups gear up for the spotlight
South Korea is building a start-up ecosystem, hoping to create some of the innovation that turned Silicon Valley into technology capital. The latest step is a two-day conference next week called beLaunch, which is equipping local entrepreneurs with important lessons and getting them to think big. Read more »
Localmind CEO on how to make habit-forming products
How many apps on your phone do you use on a daily basis? Moving your product from a novelty to a habit is tricky, but Localmind CEO, Lenny Rachitsky thinks he’s found a way to make it happen and open up in this video interview. Read more »
What we can learn from a young boy’s cardboard arcade
The viral video of a nine-year-old boy who built a magical arcade out of cardboard at his father’s auto-parts business in Los Angeles has a lot to say about the spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity that fuels much of what we write about at GigaOM. Read more »
When is €300m not €300m? Ask OP Ventures
Orange and Publicis hit the headlines this week for underpinning a €300m venture fund targeting European startups. But in fact only a third of that money is actually fresh funding that will end up in the hands of continental businesses. Read more »
Can Europe crowdsource its way to startup success?
Europe’s digital commissioner Neelie Kroes has a mixed record of helping the continent’s web entrepreneurs. But now she’s opening up to questions from the floor, with a new initiative aimed at finding ways to get Brussels to do a better job for startups. Read more »
What’s love got to do with it? For startups, everything
After trying to become a social network, the team behind Fab.com pivoted a year ago toward their current model as a design site because it was something the founders were passionate about. It’s another reminder that passion matters and can be what determines success. Read more »
Everything I need to know about startups, I learned from a crime boss
In his early 20s, entrepreneur Donald DeSantis had an interesting mentor — a very successful businessman whose business happened to be organized crime. Despite — or perhaps because of — his seedy profession, the mentor taught DeSantis much about managing risk, acquisitions and networking. Read more »
Portrait of (and podcast with) an artist entrepreneur: Marc Maron
Marc Maron’s popular WTF podcast is more than an entertaining listen; it shows how the artist-entrepreneur can harness the power of Internet distribution and community. In this audio interview, Maron talks about the lessons he has learned and where he fits into the media landscape. Read more »
My resolution: respect the physical world
In GigaOM’s third article in our series on New Year’s resolutions from 12 tech leaders, Coffee & Power co-founder Philip Rosedale explains why he wants entrepreneurs to think really, really really big, and way outside the box in 2012. Read more »
Wahooly, the Klout and Kickstarter hybrid, opens to startups
Wahooly has created a group of 25,000 influential testers and is now opening the doors to startups to apply to engage this group. Startups will create testing groups of 5,000 to 8,000 people, who will share in a pool of equity ranging from 4–6 percent. Read more »
The values-driven startup
Dave Kashen of Quantum Leading calls for a change in startup culture. He believes that when we operate according to our core values and principles, in pursuit of a vision for the future that inspires us, we maximize our individual and collective well-being. Read more »
Startup entrepreneurs are ‘arrogant and psychopathic’
The startup world is littered with stories of bad behavior, arguments, bullying and trickery that few people would tolerate in normal life. But German researchers suggest this might not just be a coincidence — and that perhaps it’s crucial to a company’s success. Read more »
5 tips for entrepreneurs building a patent portfolio
photo: Flickr / adulau
Long hours with your startup colleagues developing a product with cutting-edge features can prove frustrating when those features end up in a competitor’s offering. Nitin Gupta of LawPivot and Eric Hutchins of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP offer tips for entrepreneurs building a patent portfolio. Read more »
Lessons from Billy Chasen’s epic pivot to Turntable.fm
Billy Chasen, the co-founder of Turntable.fm, talked on Thursday night about his pivot away from his barcode-scanning startup Stickybits. It was a tough decision to pull the plug on a mediocre success, but it’s worked out for him. Here are some lessons from his big restart. Read more »
CapLinked hits $10 billion in listed deals, opens to pro investors
CapLinked, an online platform that brings together companies and private investors, said it has eclipsed $10 billion in private deals listed on the platform since it launched a year ago. Now, it’s opening up the platform to professional investors with a new product called DealRocket. Read more »
Top 5 things you should know about term sheets
Many entrepreneurs are in the process of fundraising. However, many are unaware of the most favorable terms for raising money from investors and confused about what terms to focus on in a term sheet. Jay and Yusuf explain how to navigate these sometimes tricky waters. Read more »
NYC SeedStart Media class pushes crowdsourcing, commerce
NYC SeedStart, a New York incubator program founded by NYC Seed along with a handful of VC partners, just graduated its summer class focused on media. The seven startups cover a range of topics, but a few themes emerged like crowdsourcing, commerce and content management. Read more »
Three start-ups to watch: Take the Interview, Re-Vinyl, AppAddictive
DreamIt Ventures graduated its first New York class yesterday, sending 14 new start-ups into the wild. The summer class tackled education, e-commerce and app publishing and a few used video conferencing in interesting ways. Here are few that stood out to me. Read more »
GigaOM Euro 20: The European startups to watch
For years, Europe’s startup community has been painted as the undernourished younger cousin of Silicon Valley. In reality, Europe’s web scene is now thriving. and we’ve compiled a list featuring some of the best and brightest European web startups — what we’re dubbing the GigaOM Euro 20. Read more »
AirBnB gets $112M in new investment
AirBnB, a San Francisco–based person-to-person room-, apartment- and house-rental startup, has raised $112 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Russian Internet investor DST Global, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. AirBnB has raised about $120 million. More details after the fold. Read more »
FinTech startups wield data and smarts
The FinTech Innovation Lab, an accelerator program for financial tech startups, graduated its first class on Friday. This first batch of companies is bringing some impressive ideas to bear on data, analytics and payments and showing there’s room for new approaches in the financial sector. Read more »
Europe’s accelerator bubble is ‘a double-edged sword’
GigaOM readers agree that encouraging European entrepreneurs is vitally important to the long-term health of local startups. But they have differing opinions about the sharp growth of accelerator programs and bootcamps across the continent: will startups end up being fed to the sharks? Read more »
What Sheryl Sandberg shows us about the future of work
The profile of Sheryl Sandberg in the New Yorker this week purports to be about women in technology, but it’s also a glimpses into the evolving state of the workplace in an entrepreneurial and highly connected world -– the future of work for the professional class. Read more »
Admob Founder’s Digital Gnome & Other Notable Startups at TC Disrupt
Former AdMob Omar Hamoui’s Churn Labs, his first venture after selling mobile ad company to Google for $750 million, was one of the early highlights for TechCrunch Disrupt’s Start-up Battlefield, a showcase for dozens of emerging start-ups. Here is Hamoui’s startup, plus three more. Read more »
Young, Experienced Co-Founders Are Key to Success
The key to success in startups is making sure you’re young, experienced and not the only founder. That’s the takeaway from a new survey being conducted by SV Angel of successful startups that have gone on to or are projected to have big exits. Read more »
TechStars NYC Class Shines at Demo Day
TechStars, the pioneering start-up accelerator, just graduated its first New York class today, introducing a strong and polished class with a lot of promise. Here are some standouts from the class of 12, which introduced themselves at a demo day today. Read more »
Are Crappy Startups Wall Street’s Fault?
The Kauffman Foundation claims in a new report that high-paying jobs in the financial sector have drained the prospective pool of startup founders until it’s pretty shallow. It may even be responsible for allowing “potentially weaker” startups to gain funding. Here’s a look at the arguments. Read more »
Britain Woos Entrepreneurs With Its Own Startup Visa
It’s no secret that the political machine in Washington can be slow. The Startup Visa Act was first discussed in 2009, and in the meantime, Britain has managed to pass their own version, despite a change of government, heated debate, and necessary changes to immigration laws. Read more »
5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Getting Mentored
Mentorship is a critical catalyst for passage, transition and development as a pre-entrepreneur. But mentorship, like entrepreneurship, can break down in the nitty gritty details. Larry Chiang offers his advice in avoiding the mistakes many entrepreneurs make when they try to get mentored by a VC. Read more »
Accelerate Your Startup: Develop a Repeatable Sales Model
Different phases of a startup’s lifecycle require different approaches to spending. VC David Skok explains how startup CEOs need to manage their burn rate as they fine-tune their sales process and their sales team to prepare themselves for the next stage. Read more »
Accelerate Your Startup: Get the Right Product/Market Fit
The two most common mistakes startups make are spending too much money and not spending enough. VC David Skok, of Matrix Partners, explains how hard CEOs should press on the startup accelerator pedal when the company is trying to fit its product to the right market. Read more »
