Peter Rip (via alarm:clock):
I think there is a real Entrepreneur Bubble these days in Internet software. Step A is seductively easy – buy some servers, write some code. Just understand that 10-100 other teams around the world are doing the exact same thing. How will you sustainably differentiate yourself? What will you do when 15 other similar sites appear in the next 12 months?
Y Combinator is now accepting applications for the 2006 Winter Founders Program. The WFP is like our Summer Founders Program, but takes place in California. It will run from January through March 2006.
This is the Startup Wiki for discussing and collaborating on all aspects of the startup life.
Kevin Hale of the ever-excellent ParticleTree is at Paul Graham’s Startup School in Cambridge, and taking very extensive notes. Kevin, thanks for this.
Let’s compare notes. Here’s our tally of the diverse ways the culture, the economy, and entrepreneurship’s own history are combining to make this a great time–the best time, in fact–to be building a business.
3i (via alarm:clock):
The international venture capital and private equity industry has a language all of its own. To help beginners we have created a guide to the jargon.
Apple started in a garage. Dell started in a dorm room. Starbucks started with a single store. Nike started out of a car trunk.
Frank Ross (via Dane Carlson):
There are lots of reasons in favor of going into business for yourself (be your own boss, work your own hours, etc). But there are also a variety of reasons why people don’t go into business for themselves. Some common obstacles are…
Paul McNamara (via Anthony Cerminaro):
Entrepreneurs in early stage companies can spend many months, and sometimes years, developing a new product. For many, the moment when the product is finally ready to go to market fosters feelings of great accomplishment and great anxiety. Can I make my sales projections? Will the company scale? Do we have what it takes to be successful?
Ultimately, these questions boil down to one: how to accelerate revenue formation. In this article, I want to share with you five proven revenue accelerators.
JetBlue launching a shuttle between New York and Boston is a brilliant move, for subtle reasons. It’s not really that they need a share of the NY-Boston market, although that would be nice. It’s not that they want to strengthen their JFK hub by feeding in passengers from Boston, although that would be nice, too.
Here’s my theory. They’re launching this because Delta and USAir consistently make huge profits from the Boston shuttle … profits which subsidize their other loss-making routes. By forcing down prices in the shuttle market, eliminating those excess profits for their competitors, they’re going to make it harder for those airlines to accept losses on other routes elsewhere which compete with JetBlue.
Ken Dyck 