Month: October 2005

Joel Spolsky:

By the time we were ready to start development, we had enough ideas for improvement to occupy 1700 programmers for a few decades. Unfortunately, all we have is three programmers, and we wanted to be shipping next fall, so there had to be some prioritization.

Red Herring (via Jeff Cornwall):

Angel investors are funding more early-stage startups this year than at any point since the Internet boom, a sign this informal breed of venture capitalists may be stepping in to fill a role traditionally played by venture capital firms.

D. Keith Robinson:

Before we got started I did quite a bit of research. I talked to people who’d done something similar and asked for advice. I read books, articles and blog posts on the topics of small business, entrepreneurship, taxes, LLCs, LLPs, etc.

I tried to prepare myself as best I could. In the main, this stuff helped, but there is so much you just have to experience (and hopefully learn from) on your own

D. Keith Robinson:

I imagine many of you have heard about the whole “doing big things with small teams” idea. The first time I’d heard of it was during Jason Fried’s presentation at SXSW. It’s a concept that we at Blue Flavor are behind 100%.

However, we’re finding that, at times anyway, it can be much easier said then done. Especially when it comes to getting our business up and running.

Greg Yardley:

Well, yes – there were a rather lot of businesses there whose main hope for a liquidity event seemed to be ’sell to a larger business’. But I can’t really blame people, since this is a model that’s easy to intellectually grasp:

1. Build something cool.
2. Talk it up with the right people.
3. Wait for Google / Yahoo / Amazon / eBay / AOL / Microsoft to notice.
4. Hope like hell they’d rather buy it than build it.

See, easy – even I understand it.

Dane Carlson:

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, I’ve created this little applet which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

Peter Caputa:

Here’s my primer for viral marketing for blogs:

1. Start a blog.
2. Start conversations through your blog or behind the scenes with other bloggers.
3. Find out what their goals and aspirations are.
4. Help them get there.
5. They’ll return the favor.

Brad Feld:

The overwhelming attempt at pattern matching from 2001 (Bubble this, bubble that) completely misses the point. There were a number of very successful companies founded between 1999 and 2001 that didn’t implode when the bubble popped, with entrepreneurs who kept their heads down, built real businesses, and then started to reap the gains in 2003 and 2004 when the markets became more receptive to younger tech companies, especially ones that had built business engines that generated real positive cash flow (e.g. long term economic value).

Entrepreneur Exchange – Entrepreneur Exchange (via Brad Feld):

A renewable resource for those working with fewer resources.

Jason Fried:

I was invited to present a 10 minute “High Order Bit” at the Web 2.0 Conference. I decided to talk about the concept of less as a competitive advantage. Here’s the rough text (from memory) of my presentation.