Month: October 2005

Chris Sacca:

Many people working for a relatively large corporation might bristle at the prospect of speaking face to face with 500 hackers with an average age of 22. I had exactly that opportunity this past Saturday as an invitee to Paul Graham’s YCombinator Startup School held in Harvard’s Science Center. Hands down, it was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career.

Joseph Anthony:

How do you know if you have what it takes to start a business? There’s really no way to know for sure. But I do find things in common among the emotional and family fabric of people ready to consider an entrepreneurial venture.

Paul Kedrosky:

First-mover advantage, in all but the rarest circumstances, is a myth. For every example of someone winning a market by being first, there are ten (twenty?) examples of people failing and being supplanted by a late-comer, whether in technology (Google) or elsewhere. It is something about which all venture capitalists should remind themselves once a week or so.

alarm:clock:

There has been a surprising amount of noise since the Web 2.0 conference from people who are opposed to the Built-to-flip startup model. Commentators seem to view flippers as detrimental to the Web ecology and as modern snake-oil salesmen. There are also sighs that we saw this in Web 1.0 and it was the flippers who were responsible for bringing the house of cards down. One blogger went so far as to accuse Business 2.0 of being a mouthpiece for the flipper agenda.

We think that the built-to-flip mindset is natural and healthy for the following reasons…

Bob Walsh:

As a micro-ISV you have to wear a stack of hats: developer, tech support person, marketing, sales, etc. But the hat most micro-ISVs forget to wear is CEO. A very good CEO spends most of their time worrying about their organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. (A very bad CEO should be worrying if they’ll end up in a cell after the trial with Tiny, the 300-pound biker, but that’s another story.)

Jeff Cornwall:

Venture capital fundraising for the first three quarters of 2005 is already ahead of total fundraising for all of 2004 according to a new study released by the National Venture Capital Association.

Robert May:

Detail-oriented. That’s what almost everyone says they are, in a job interview. The devil is in the details. Everyone is concerned about overlooking important details. Now, Michael Levine is arguing that details don’t get the attention they deserve.

Anita Campbell:

Eventually someone prodded me to go up and ask Richard Branson a question. So I sidled my way up to the front with the press, and managed to squeeze in one question. Now, I know you are dying to know: given her one shot to ask Richard Branson a question, what profound entrepreneurship insight did she ask about? Well, the journalists ahead of me had asked some great questions, and as I did not want to repeat them I asked something a little unusual about current culture, since he seems to be such a clued-in guy. I simply asked him if he’d ever read blogs. With a kind of half-chuckle he laughed and said, “No, I don’t believe I have.”

Naveed Ahmed to Evan Williams:

I think to be a successful entrepreneur only 3 things matter:

1] A clear vision of where your company is going.
2] Genuine desire and passion to create amazingly great products/services.
3] Strong conviction that your product/service is going to make a positive difference in your customer’s life.

Joi Ito:

Got an early exclusive look at a fascinating survey by ACNielsen about online shopping worldwide.

The study of 21,000 web users in 38 countries, to be made public later today, found that online shopping habits vary radically by country.