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 you have been reading startup advice long enough, you surely noticed two trends repeated ad nauseum. Iterate Quickly Also known as “kill ideas fast”, this advice is saying that your idea is probably not worth the pixels it’s displayed on. Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution matters. You’d be better off with a [...]
Recently, I was contacted by a major TV show, looking to do a segment on what it looks like to be an entrepreneur building a startup from scratch. I am talking major TV show, with an audience in the millions, not some local news channel. So I e-mailed a few entrepreneurs I know to see [...]
Aucadia.com is a community website aimed at musicians and fans where the fans can get involved with the bands they love. It’s such a cool project, we had to find out more from Robin and Owen Spottiswoode, the two co-founders. Alain: Tell us about your product and maybe where the idea came from, or why [...]
When you just found a great idea for an app, the first step (after the initial excitement subsides) is to gather feedback from as many people as you can. That’s what we just made really simple now on FairSoftware with our new feedback widget. Once you setup your idea and enter a description, the community [...]
Below is a question from an entrepreneur, edited to protect the innocent (if you are a member of TheFunded.com, you can read the complete thread): Q: An investor has been pressing me to invest and needs A DECISION IN THE NEXT DAY OR TWO, plus he is reminding me to stop publicizing my site and [...]
