Category Archives: Startup

JLM:The Management Team

A JLM post on AVC today which is just as awesome as his comments (which are blog posts really) Here it is, a straight reblog: Congratulations, you have built a prototype. Got it to work. Debugged it. Even sold a few copies. Have some real customers. Now you are ready to scale up and make [...]
Also posted in AVC, inspiration, jlm, Management | Tagged | Leave a comment

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: [...]
Also posted in books, inspiration | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Also posted in AVC, jlm | 3 Comments

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 [...]
Also posted in inspiration, VC | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Also posted in marketing, Tech | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Also posted in Tech | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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
Also posted in marketing, Tech | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Also posted in VC | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

A VC: Marketing

This blog is my scrapbook, it’s primarily for my reference but hopefully some of the stuff here will be of interest to other people interested in the VC and start up world. Fred Wilson wrote a piece on marketing which turned out to be a little controversial.  There were some nuggets in the comments as [...]
Also posted in jlm, marketing, VC | Leave a comment

Learning to Code

Whenever I go to networking events I come across people who have this great idea and just need a technical person to build it for them.  Finding that person is way harder than they think.  Most technical people have either been burnt once in that sort of arrangement or take the attitude that they don’t [...]
Also posted in inspiration, Tech | Leave a comment