Being an entrepreneur is quite popular these days, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Everyone thinks they have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. As part of my work with the Founder Institute in Paris, figuring out who will build a great startup is a big topic. Your resume can tell. I know, it sounds [...]
Last Thursday I attended Stanford Design EXPE, where a dozen teams of students present the result of their 9 months of innovative work in relation with a corporate sponsor. The twist is that all projects must build a hardware prototype (I guess because it’s linked to the Mechanical Engineering department). For me, it was a [...]
There are lots of myths and dreams attached to starting a company. Will you be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Will you negotiate million dollars rounds of financing with cool VCs? This is what starting a company really means: e-mailing 100 strangers a day, every day. For the foreseeable future. That’s it. Of [...]
Yesterday night at the Microsoft campus was a great edition of the Founder Showcase. The evening started with a tell-all keynote on freemium business models from Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote. He candidly shared information that is usually impossible to get, such as how many users convert to paying customers or how much it [...]
I was on the Paris subway, returning from one of the first sessions of the Founder Institute there. Sitting next to me was one of the founders. Something was bothering him. He finally asked: “why do you put so much emphasis on market size? The team, and surely other aspects must be equally important to [...]
Yesterday was the third Co-Founders MeetUp of Silicon Valley, which set a new attendance record of 120 people. 12 startups pitched their idea with the goal to attract co-founders. The quality of the ideas was very high. Another thing I liked is that this MeetUp truly opens my mind: it’s like a giant idea brainstorming [...]
If I am to believe this blog post, HelpAReporter, a web site that helps journalists connect with sources, has sent a threatening legal letter to a free competitor called PRManna: From the blog post summary: I stole his idea (bullshit, his service was a mailing list when I built PRManna, and there are tons of [...]
Do you wonder if your startup could benefit from having a co-founder? Some people are worried that adding a co-founder will slow them down, it will take too much time to discuss everything. They also think they can pretty much figure out everything on their own so why take the risk to add a co-founder? [...]
I hate spam. Opt-out is the minimum that I expect from all decent sites. Opt-in would be nicer. Imagine my surprise when I received the following card in the mail: When I opted-out, I thought I was sending a clear message to the company that I didn’t want them to contact me and send me [...]
