avc — I had the pleasure of spending all day yesterday, from 9am to 6pm, listening to pitches from the finalists selected out of the mini seedcamps from all over europe this year. Seedcamp is Europe's premier startup accelerator. It is like Y Combinator, Techstars, Seedstart, and many other programs of this...
markpeterdavis — I just finished reading Stumbling On Happiness by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. Despite the connotation of the title, the book isn’t much of self-help read. Rather, it’s a somewhat depressing (yet extremely interesting) deep dive into the fallacies of the human mind that mitigate our ability to predict what will...
thegongshow.tumblr — Myspace was a juggernaut back in 2005/2006. To understand the importance of Myspace back then, remember that YouTube built its audience on Myspace’s back. Then Myspace ceded their lead in social networking, in part because of a strategic mistake to keep their platform semi-closed, instead of opening up like Facebook,...
blog.guykawasaki — Let me confess: I’m addicted to Twitter and email, and my addiction increases the more I have to do something important like write a book. Luckily, I stumbled across two applications that really help. I explain how they works here at the American Express Open Forum. If you’re have a...
continuations — Rob Kalin from Etsy has referred to customer support as marketing and Etsy has significantly enhanced its customers support team to cut down response time dramatically. Danny Meyer in his book Setting the Table and the actual operations of his restaurants also makes helping the customer central to the experience. ...
avc — I want to let everyone know about an opportunity to showcase your startup at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC in late September. On Sept 29th in the late afternoon/early evening, the Web 2.0 conference will have 30 startups demo their products/services to the attendees and a number of investors.The way...
continuations — Saw Inception on Sunday evening and loved it despite (because?) some its glaring flaws. It is a spectacular mashup of some of my favorite movie elements: philosophy, action, heist, stunning imagery and more action- all on a huge IMAX screen (the way movies are meant to be seen). The...
avc — Every successful social media system I have ever been involved with has to tackle the problem of spam. It is one of signs that you are successful. When the spammers start targeting you, it is a sign you have arrived.Over the years Disqus has had to fight comment spam and...
bothsidesofthetable — Social Proof in Action … Yesterday I wrote about the benefits of using social proof and authority in raising venture capital. If you didn’t read that yet it might be worth having a quick skim as a primer. Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decisions” and is also...
thegongshow.tumblr — Starcraft 2 comes out tomorrow, and it got me thinking about how much time I sunk into the original Starcraft when I was a kid. It was easily over a hundred hours, I can’t quantify it exactly, and I wonder if that time was productive or not in my education....
avc — Today on MBA Mondays we are going to talk about another form of costs; Sunk Costs.Sunk Costs are time and money (and other resources) you have already spent on a project, investment, or some other effort. They have been sunk into the effort and most likely you cannot get them...
bothsidesofthetable — I recently read a book I’d highly recommend to every reader of this blog called “Yes, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive” by Robert B. Cialdini who is also author of a very well received book called “Influence” (which I plan to read). “Yes” was given to me by one...
theequitykicker — I’m taking a bit of time with the family over the next three weeks and don’t expect to be posting much here. Just thought I’d let you know
avc — AVC regular Charlie Crystle asked me this question yesterday in the comments: Fred, it might be helpful to some of your readers to explain when a startup should seek angel vs seed/early stage VC. If I need $250,000 to get to 100 customers, or $1 million to get to X, and I...
avc — A couple months ago, my friends at Sony sent me a new device called the Sony Dash. I brought it home and gave it to the Gotham Gal. She is using it as a bedside clock radio and not taking advantage of very many of its features. But my son...
avc — Mark Suster has a great post on calculating valuation and the things that VCs can throw at you to make the deal better for them (I guess I should say us) than it actually looks. Go read it. It's complicated stuff but you should try to wrap your head around...
thegongshow.tumblr — I’ve had three or four people recently mention the idea to me of offering office hours. So, I’m writing this to solicit some feedback. I’m happy to offer office hours (in either Boston or NYC or both) if that’s something people think is valuable, but I really hope I’m already available...
continuations — I am on the road in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. It is interesting that OSCON is here again after being in Silicon Valley in 2009. In 2009, I happened to sit down at lunch next to a development officer for the city of Portland who said he was attending because...
bothsidesofthetable — Back in 1999 when I first raised venture capital I had zero knowledge of what a fair term sheet looked like or how to value my company. Due to competitive markets we ended up with a pretty good term sheet until we needed to raise money in April 2001 and...
feld — Last week there was a kerfuffle over Standing Cloud’s use of the Papyrus font for their logo. It was kind of cute and endearing and my pals at Standing Cloud reacted with appropriate contrition over offending the font police. Today I came across a brilliant McSweeney article (thanks to @daveschappell) on...
markpeterdavis — I had a fun day yesterday - I have grown to really enjoy public speaking. For those interested, the presentation that I delivered to the members of the VANJ is embedded below. A special "thank you" to the leadership of the VANJ for having me. How To Raise Venture CapitalView more...
thegongshow.tumblr — I’m reading the WSJ this morning (dead tree version, because there’s not much else to do on the shuttle to NYC). In it Facebook’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan, described a novel anti-fraud method I had not heard of before. When Facebook detects that you are transacting with FB Credits in...
avc — I'm doing a keynote presentation today at the Geo Loco Conference in San Francisco. In putting together the visuals for my talk, I wanted to show my Foursquare checkins from my recent trip to europe on google maps. So a little googling around led me to this post which explains...
bothsidesofthetable — Yesterday I wrote about the importance of choosing happiness. Today I want to write about a related topic: not taking the little things in life for granted. I promise not to turn this blog into a personal self-help blog! But today is a special day and I’m thinking about this topic...
thegongshow.tumblr — I once took a fiction writing class taught by an author named Adam Johnson (who is quite talented). He talked about how he borrows techniques from his favorite works and authors. He never borrows just the superficial layer… in other words, he’d never steal an analogy directly or borrow a...