Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 19, 2010

Yesterday I wrote a post about the " Urgency Addiction ” and how many people start important tasks late and then motivate with a huge wave of productivity and inspiration driven by deadlines and commitments to others. “A study by Microsoft showed just how lethal interruptions are to productivity. Tags: Startup Advice.

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advice consulting entrepreneurs investment 301

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JUNE 8, 2010

I’m going to save that for a future blog post. Get your product/market fit working before you ramp up your costs (or raise too much money). Key take aways: the CEO has got to be committed to leading PR personally or it won’t be successful. And market your brand, not your personality. He says this is a mistake.

peer-to-peer 279

peer-to-peer advice VC board 279

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MAY 11, 2010

I haven’t written a blog post in a week. And for the last few evenings I decided to get through email rather than blog. It was interesting for me to read Fred Wilson’s email bankruptcy blog post this morning. He ends up spending personal time trying to get through email. I live in email hell.

advice 265

advice VC entrepreneurs creativity 265

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JANUARY 18, 2011

I always try hard to make this blog a place where you can learn lessons rather than an advertisement for portfolio companies. I first met the founder of Pose, Dustin Rosen , when he was a junior person with an LA-based venture capital firm called The Mail Room Fund. We started uploading images of ourselves to our blogs.

investing 303

investing investment VC media 303

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 20, 2010

What Apple proved, and what I suspect is the issue with web content, is that monetization was a product problem. Because plugging a computer into your TV is still just too goddamn hard for the average person. 3) Remix, Comment, Blog, Tweet. They say that paywalls are stupid and that its just not monetizable. Cable is easy.

venture capital 314

venture capital creativity sustainability capital 314

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JANUARY 25, 2010

Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals &# in which he defined “Techies&# as people who are not just “early adopters&# but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent. They use products because the products solve a need they have. He is both. Blah, blah, blah.

advice 348

advice entrepreneurs sustainability pitching 348

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 28, 2010

Recently I wrote a blog post about how I hated losing, but I embrace it as a way to learn, improve and increase my win rates. Or frankly, maybe they just believe that your competitor has a better product. For simplicity, let’s call this person inside your new potential customer, “the enemy.&#.

consulting 309

consulting advice VC support 309

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SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I was reading Chris Dixon’s blog tonight. I came across this blog post about getting a computer science degree as the best degree for getting into venture capital or working at a VC-backed start up. Ask if you could shadow different functions like marketing, finance or product management. Tags: Start-up Advice.

VC 337

VC peer-to-peer advice consulting 337

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APRIL 21, 2010

Finally, a lot of people asking me about typos on my blog. I also talked about Virgin Money , a product that I have used to lend friends money in the past. Leverage: with teachers not having to have in-person classes you can build a more cost-effective model and teaching can be targeted more to your individual needs.

venture capital 265

venture capital peer-to-peer capital ventures 265

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 19, 2009

Some readers of this blog also pointed out that “pivoting&# can be disruptive on the employees of an organization. But when the right entrepreneur comes along they think, ‘I’ve got to join this person now. You’ve got less than 6 months’ cash in the bank and your product isn’t really fully baked.

entrepreneurs 288

entrepreneurs advice leadership angel investing 288

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NOVEMBER 25, 2010

I keep my competitors as friends and those that didn’t choose me or my product as friends, too. It’s one of my favorite blog posts. I had planned to blog about it at the time but I waited 2 days and the whole world blogged about it so I didn’t pile on. Quite the opposite. I don’t hold grudges.

consulting 333

consulting advice collaboration VC 333

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

I keep my competitors as friends and those that didn’t choose me or my product as friends, too. It’s one of my favorite blog posts. I had planned to blog about it at the time but I waited 2 days and the whole world blogged about it so I didn’t pile on. Quite the opposite. I don’t hold grudges.

consulting 328

consulting advice collaboration VC 328

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 10, 2010

SHORT : Whether you know the person or not – if you’re asking for help, a favor or an intro – keep your email VERY short. Ask me something very narrow that I can answer without typing a whole blog post length response. Fred Wilson nailed this in his “double opt in&# blog post. Most of us want to help.

advice 332

advice entrepreneurs investment investing 332

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 25, 2010

Personally, I’m incredibly psyched about the scope of the vision and feel very lucky to be working with such a promising young team. I’ve always believed in small, private groups—dating back to when I first started blogging. Believe it or not, the average person doesn’t want to talk to 5000 people.

investing 273

investing investment disruption venture capital 273

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MAY 15, 2010

StackOverflow is a free Q&A site for software developers, blending functionality from wikis, blogs, forums, and social voting (similar to Digg/Reddit); 7.1mm unique visitors per month; new funds will be used to build out engineering team and build out product. I first discovered it from Dharmesh Shah’s blog OnStartups.

VC 285

VC financing finance capital 285

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JULY 25, 2010

I recently read a book I’d highly recommend to every reader of this blog called “ Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive &# by Robert B. Obviously I’m assuming that you have a great product and/or strategy. From there Rob decided to make a small investment.

strategy 293

strategy venture capital SaaS investment 293

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MARCH 5, 2010

My personal favorite and best fit for GRP Partners was Thumbtack. Marco Zappacosta served up an cogent, business focused and nicely demo’d pitch of their product. – and provide a way to facilitate a match between vendor and person needing service. The game then interacts with the physical world product.

education 254

education pitching VC media 254

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MARCH 6, 2010

Since I answer this all the time anyway I thought it might make an interesting blog post. I get to do a deep dive on their business model, product roadmap and competitive positioning. My job doesn’t involve the daily grind of customer complaints, product outages, business partner / channel problems, hiring / firing, etc.

VC 312

VC consulting entrepreneurs creativity 312

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2009

Turns out everybody likes to produce content and take part in the “conversation.&# Massive uptake of user-generated content including blogs (e.g. People rightly recognize that comments on blogs are just a form of a stream and thus the growth of open commenting platforms like Disqus and IntenseDebate. Then came blogs.

peer-to-peer 286

peer-to-peer real estate media networking 286

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 1, 2009

To understand this in great detail see this very important blog post by Henry Blodget on the unemployment rate in the US and its impact on the recovery. My personal views? So if I am unnecessarily concerned in this blog post (great!) Tags: Pitching VCs Start-up Advice VC Industry startup technology vc venture capital.

VC 269

VC startup advice innovation 269

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

Justyn Howard, founder of Sprout Social has a blog post that he’s written about his experiences of migrating from scrappy tools to more efficient ones (i.e. In the scrappy phase it’s fun to be the person who set up QuickBooks and to watch every penny that goes out the door. Penny wise, pound foolish. I Love Scrappy.

culture 333

culture construction startup advice 333

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MARCH 2, 2010

After a few days of controversial blog posts I thought I’d try something more light hearted today. But for me personally the extra overhead of this means that I can’t do it 100% of the time. My 2 cents: If I feel that I know the person well for whom the introduction is being asked (e.g. I like that.

advice 255

advice investment investing VC 255

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AUGUST 18, 2010

It’s as good as it gets in personal productivity / life reflection. I know that would be surprising to many readers since keeping a blog somehow convinces people that I’m a time management or productivity ninja. That’s why productivity wasn’t tough for me as a CEO. I’m not.

mentorship 374

mentorship creativity energy entrepreneurs 374

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DECEMBER 1, 2009

If you’ve read my blog for a while you’ll know that I’m a fan of starting businesses in a non-traditional way. Well, duh, if you have 3 equal co-founders you personally have just diluted by 66.66% and you haven’t even raised a penny! You may be introverted and need the more externally facing person.

startup 289

startup advice entrepreneurs creativity 289

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JUNE 28, 2015

I’m not trying to say my picks are great and other products aren’t and I’ll certainly forget some. But this is just a reflection midway in June 2015 of the some of the products I love, enjoy or use frequently, and am not an investor in. Uber – The second most profound application for me personally has been Uber.

communities 317

communities innovation development ventures 317

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DECEMBER 14, 2009

I wanted to also post the series here to have it as a resource on my blog for future entrepreneurs who stop by. It’s the person who never gives up – who never accepts “no&# for an answer. Tags: Entrepreneur Advice Start-up Advice Startup Advice. If you haven’t spent time over there you should.

entrepreneurs 338

entrepreneurs peer-to-peer advice VC 338

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JANUARY 21, 2010

I recently read a post over on VentureHacks titled, “ Top Ten Reasons Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers &# written by Scott Walker (who blogs on legal issues for entrepreneurs ). Your contractor wrote a great V1 of the product and it helped you get angel funding. I also am a very loyal person. the link is here.

startup 318

startup advice entrepreneurs VC 318

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JUNE 3, 2010

It’s a very product that allows you to do visual search of eBay, ETSY, Match.com, AllRecipes and several others sites. I don’t do advertising on my blog, but I thought it was worth mentioning Ryan in particular because he has an alternate model for doing a startup. It’s a cool product and worth checking out.

VC 214

VC founder advice ventures 214

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

I recently wrote a blog post here in which I argued that the best VC meetings are discussions and not sales pitches. A few weeks ago I sat through two very contrasting presentations and wrote this blog post right afterward. We started by talking about this person’s background. He had spent many years at Yahoo!

pitching 288

pitching VC advice strategy 288

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JUNE 18, 2010

An investment doesn’t guarantee your product will suddenly be on the investor’s price sheet. Diverse search results include stream updates, blog posts, news articles, photos, videos (versus Twitter/FaceBook1 only). Tags: This Week in Venture Capital. Paul discussed his perspective having been at SAP Ventures.

VC 225

VC social gaming venture capital networking 225

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 25, 2009

This is part of my blog series “ Pitching a VC.&#. This involves a person who leads a PowerPoint presentation in which the presenter feels more comfortable racing through pre-practiced slides and rattling off charts & bullet points than having a discussion. They might even like to challenge some of your assumptions.

VC 275

VC peer-to-peer pitching advice 275

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

You can always tell during this discussion whether the entrepreneur has logged into their products, talked to their customers, read all the news stories and gotten all of the back channel info on the competition. Let’s talk about your product or let’s look at your financial projections. Unfortunately.

entrepreneurs 286

entrepreneurs advice pitching VC 286

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

Fred Wilson said as much on his blog also. That is true of all my blog posts. It is what I love the most about debates and one of the things I love most about blogging. I suspect Mr. Wadhwa used hyperbole in his TechCrunch blog post to get more readers to look at his work. So it is with entrepreneurship.

entrepreneurship 289

entrepreneurship entrepreneurs advice VC 289

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NOVEMBER 8, 2010

I have personally always felt a sort of cognitive dissonance regarding Hulu. I have made many of my arguments in a blog post I wrote on The Innovator’s Dilemma , a concept that is critical for both innovators & incumbents to understand. Tags: Tech Market Analysis.

incumbents 292

incumbents innovation media disruption 292

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 22, 2010

Hard to get into a deep product conversation about the iPad case when the lone Apple product you own was given to you by someone just to use for work.) However, a read of his blog depicts well considered intentionality, and I respect that. Tags: It's My Life Venture Capital & Technology.

mix-use 240

mix-use venture capital collaboration opportunity 240

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AUGUST 30, 2010

Seth Levine of Foundry Group addresses this important topic this morning on his blog with a post, “ Has Convertible Debt Won ?&# If you’re the “first money in&# usually there is still product risk, market risk, financing risk and execution risk. Tags: Raising Venture Capital Startup Advice.

finance 319

finance financing entrepreneurs advice 319

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JANUARY 16, 2010

I tend not to go into heat when I hear the latest buzz on the tech blogs about the latest gadgets. I actually wrote a long blog post about this but I’m trying to get TechCrunch to publish it before putting it on my blog. I loved the product that much. Social networking meets online personal health management.

health 278

health entrepreneurs sustainability technology 278