It took me a while to warm up to it but I am loving Quora more and more. There is a wealth of information and connections on it. I can’t believe how much time people devote to answering questions on it. I wanted to draw your attention to one post from Antone Johnson a startup [...]
This week I was contacted by someone with a common question about starting up: My question is regarding intellectual property in the tech field and VC start-up: You wrote that at the pre-funding stage, all you need is a couple of slides / mock-ups. Even if you don’t know your target customer directly you can [...]
Legal River, a graduate from Launchbox Digitalreleased some free tools yesterday that might be of interest to your startup. In partnership with a local law firm they have released a generator for Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy. These are two required elements for anyone offering a web service. I gave it a test [...]
Dec
17
I met with an entrepreneur this week who is building a web service that tackles a very big problem. In his case, there are diverse customer needs. Every customer needs something slightly different. One of the big challenges will be to come up with a standardized set of requirements that best fits those needs. The [...]
I was speaking last week with a VC that was telling me his fund is no longer backing 1st time CEOs. In his particular case it makes sense. They’re late in this current fund and it’s not the time to take flyers or excess risk. Still, it got me thinking about what you can do [...]
Aug
04
So, just before our family sat down for dinner yesterday, the door bell rings. I answer and a young lady is out front. I’m expecting the usual sales pitch for something I am not interested in. Anyway, she proceeds to tell me about her band “Your Favourite Enemies“, she shows me their new CD which [...]
I’ve been doing the startup thing for over 10 years now. For all of that time, I’ve been in senior roles – leading finance, corporate development, partnering, operations, support, etc. across a handful of great companies. Along the way, people have asked a flattering, yet natural question: when will I found a startup of my [...]
Fred Wilson’s post yesterday on what drives consumer adoption of new technologies generated a ton of really useful comments. I mined those to produce a simple checklist that you can use as entrepreneurs and investors in assessing consumer applications: Simplicity Purpose / utility Entertainment, experience, sex appeal, wow factor Potential for complementary apps (your own [...]
Jun
04
Startup Accelerators seem to be all the rage these days. Highly visible programs like YCombinator, Techstars and Launchbox Digital have really shone a spotlight on this space. I recently came across a series of interesting posts on accelerators (see bottom of this post for links). In some respects, these accelerator programs are just incubators under [...]
May
19
As with most good things in life, timing plays a big part. This is certainly true when it comes to exploiting market opportunities. Back in 1998, I was a partner in an online music site called Techno.ca. At the time, it was easily Canada’s (if not North America’s) #1 site to find great club music. [...]
Nov
03
Over the years, I have worked with several web and new media services shops. The common complaint is “life would be great if it weren’t for these darn clients”. It’s true that clients can be frustrating, especially when your work is creative. Maybe they don’t get your vision. And they likely cannot make informed choices [...]
Aug
21
Bootstrapping is the fine art of building a company with little or no external funding. Some of today’s biggest tech companies including Apple, Dell and Microsoft were started this way. Bootstrapping really boils down to two things: spending less and starting revenue generation as quickly as possible. Lets look at each side. Spend less
Jul
10
It’s hard to build a great startup. To build a high growth company that can deliver your shareholders 5x or 10x returns requires a potent mix of a great product, a great team, some serious execution and some luck. In addition, you need love and lots of it. Your startup needs to be surrounded by [...]
I was catching up on The Economist yesterday and was reading an article on IPv6. If you haven’t heard about IPv6, here’s what you need to know. Today, we access the Internet using an IP address scheme known as v4. There is a limit of 4B unique addresses on this scheme and it’s near capacity. V6 provides nearly [...]
Jun
22
When does a company stop being a “startup” and become something else? When is the “start” phase over? When do you stop moving “up”? Is it when you have 50 employees? 100? 1,000? Is it when you have $1M in revenue, $10M? $100M? Or is it when you become profitable and can sustain your business [...]
