Vesting, unlike no-shop which I blogged about last week here, is one of the most important provisions of a term sheet. Vesting is about who owns the company; it is about what happens when founders leave; it is about control. The no-shop is gone when the deal is closed. Initial vesting is with you for the first four years of a company’s life. Initial vesting is a BFD.
Technorati tags: vc, equity, entrepreneurship, startup
Ryan Campbell (via Alex Bendig):
There is just something wrong with sitting alone in a cubicle next to the men’s bathroom under a harsh fluorescent light and thinking that it won’t affect the resulting code.
Technorati tags: programming, office
From a marketing perspective, one useful thing blogging teaches you is: people do what they want to do, not what you want them to do.
So you never try to change people’s behavior. You just try to align your behavior with theirs.
Jeff Bussgang (via Paul Kedrsoky):
And so there’s the conundrum: what’s an entrepreneur to do in the context of a fundraising process when time is their enemy, but the VC’s friend?
This touches on two very real misperceptions that I think people have about business.
1. Protect your ideas. If you have a good one, don’t tell anyone. WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. If you have a good one, the first thing you should do is get some feedback from people that will tell you it is a stupid idea. At the end of the conversation, you’ll most likely have ten other ideas to pursue.
2. Perfect it before you show anyone. Perfect it before you talk about it. There is no such thing as perfection. Get a little piece out there and see what people think. Build in the direction where people are receptive.
Technorati tags: startup
Clarence Wooten (via Brian Oberkirch):
So what makes the creation of Web 2.0 businesses different from the Web 1.0 startups that preceded them? I believe, three things separate the two:
1) open source, 2) blogging, and 3) social networks.
Technorati tags: vc, investing, funding, bootstrapping, web2.0
Scott Allen (via The Road Less Travelled):
Today’s hot trends are tomorrow’s hot opportunities. If you’re thinking about starting a business this year, here’s my list of the best new business ideas for 2005.
Technorati tags: opportunities, business
Zollars’ thinking was simple. “Those are the four basic expectations a customer has when they hire a trucking company,” he explained. “And if you fail to follow through on what customers expect they can’t possibly like you.”
Needless to say the results of this simple study were like a cold slap in the face. In 4 out of ten cases Yellow had failed to follow through on one or more of the fundamental things their customers expect.
“How can they say ‘our customers like us,'” Zollars thought. “We let them down 40 per cent of the time.”
So, here is my short list of Web Services Rules To Live and Die By:
- Allow the users to easily get all of their data out of a web service anytime they want.
- Don’t hold users captive and let them remove themselves from the service.
- Always shut down a service that users rely on in an orderly and professional fashion.
Excellent pointer on Slashdot on how to build your ENTIRE business on Open Source. You can either read it online in different sections in InfoWorld, or download the whole report in PDF format. Go for it!
Ken Dyck 