This week has been very productive (and it’s only Tuesday morning): First on Monday, VentureBeat published my guest column on the winning pitch at the Founder Conference. It’s worth watching the video and reading the analysis, if you ever wondered why no one calls you back after you pitch your idea. Then this morning TechCrunch [...]
I’m posting the videos of the Founder Conference here on my blog until we revamp the Founder Conference website… By the way, if you want to be the first one to know about the next Founder Conference, there is a sign-up form on the right. Should you join an incubator such as Y-Combinator, the Founder [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Attending the Founder Institute is great for the brain: every session contains nuggets of wisdom and tricks that we can all apply to our current projects. This week, the topic was market research. The discussion included a two-box metric to find out if you have a real market or a niche. At some point, a [...]
If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am a big fan of entrepreneurs. I believe that everyone should get a chance to pursue their ideas, even if they don’t live in the right place (Silicon Valley) or don’t have the right friends (VCs or rich angels). If you are smart and have [...]
