Author Archives: Richard Forster
Christmas Day 2011, the day I had to grow up
The chairman of our family, my dad, Norman Forster, officially retired on Christmas Day 2011 at 2.00pm, aged 87. That was the moment I had to finally grow up. My mother and wife were downstairs cooking Christmas lunch and I went upstairs to check on my father, we knew the time was approaching but were [...]
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Ideas are just a multiplier of execution
You often see the clichéd expression “ideas are worth nothing it’s the execution that counts.” I fully agree but came across a great chapter in “Anything You Want“, written by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers. The chapter is entitled “Ideas are just a multiplier of execution” I’m going to copy and paste this from the book: [...]
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Bored Of Directors – Another JLM comment nugget
I’ve adopted JLM as my online mentor. His advice is priceless and he disseminates it through his comments on AVC. Here’s another cracker on Board Meetings, it’s a comment he left on Fred Wilson’s blog here : Every Board has to have a leader, appropriate committees, charters Board, ethics, nominations, audit, etc and it has [...]
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GigaOM – “The Meme of the moment”
“One of the secrets of entrepreneurship is to have that unconventional, fundamental insight that the rest of the world hasn’t and be in the position to act on that insight. And by the time the rest of the world figures it out, you are king.” – Mike Maples Jr., managing partner of Floodgate Capital via GigaOM [...]
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When Free becomes ‘bait and switch’
I opened up my Spotify app yesterday to discover that as a “free” user I was now only entitled to play a track 5 times and to avoid this I should upgrade to a premium account. I would consider doing this if Spotify gave me access to every single band and track that I like [...]
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Don’t bet the farm on someone else’s platform
Twitter’s @rsarver released an announcement giving new guidance to developers on the best opportunities to build on Twitter. Basically it says don’t build a Twitter client that consumes the Twitter stream. Existing clients will be fine as long as they adhere to the Twitter TOS. So Twitter have figured out that their value is in [...]
From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned
Just watched the slideshow below by @drewhouston and @asmith Very good overview of start up experiences and some great tips on how to grow your user base. From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned View more presentations from Adam Smith
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Monetising Disqus
The Techcrunch switch from Disqus to Facebook got me thinking about how Disqus competes and earns money. Mark Suster has suggested that Google should buy them which undoubtedly could be a nice financial outcome but it’s probably a little early for the visit to the “pay window” (attributed to JLM). I’m a huge fan of [...]
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