Silicon Valley
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No one in the entire world is as good at summarizing the state of the technology business through slideshow presentations as Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.
Mary Meeker's Latest Incredibly Insightful Presentation About The State Of The Web
“In the Studio,” How Bizeebee’s Poornima Vijayashanker Fell in Love with Building Software
Editor’s note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil “In the Studio” continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford’s graduate CS program to become the second employee at Mint.com, and after spending some time at Intuit (which acquired Mint), now has her own company focused on building software for the small-medium business market. Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer. Growing up in a household where electronics were regularly taken apart for fun, she started coding toward the end of high school and ended up majoring in CS for her undergraduate degree.
In a new post for Forbes , contributor and Founder of Ironfire Capital Eric Jackson compares Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to Silicon Valley entrepreneur Kim Polese . Polese was the “It” girl of Silicon Valley circa 1997 according to Jackson. She founded Marimba, lunched with then Vice President Al Gore and was the only computer industry executive on Time Magazine’s list of the 25 most influential people in America that year. After the bubble burst, things didn’t go quite as well for Kim (as it did for thousands of other people) or rather she just didn’t have the banner year that was 1997 and she stayed out of the spotlight. However, Jackson draws many similarities between Polese and Sandberg as women who may only hold that “It” status temporarily. He warns Sheryl that she too could wind up in oblivion (or his definition of oblivion), despite a few great years so she should stay out of the press and put her head down at Facebook.
Forbes Writer Warns Sheryl Sandberg To Keep Her Head Down So She Doesn't End Up A Has-Been
Do You Want the Good News First?
I’VE spent the last week traveling to two of America’s greatest innovation hubs — Silicon Valley and Seattle — and the trip left me feeling a combination of exhilaration and dread. The excitement comes from not only seeing the stunning amount of innovation emerging from the ground up, but from seeing the new tools coming on stream that are, as Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos, put it to me, “eliminating all the gatekeepers” — making it easier and cheaper than ever to publish your own book, start your own company and chase your own dream. Never have individuals been more empowered, and we’re still just at the start of this trend. “I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,” said Bezos. Thanks to cloud computing for the masses, anyone anywhere can for a tiny hourly fee now rent the most powerful computing and storage facilities on Amazon’s “cloud” to test any algorithm or start any company or publish any book.
Early Startup Time Wasters
A major difference between launching a brand new startup and working on one that’s a year or two old is quality of shot selection . Every day begins with 1,000 doors in front of you: which door do you go through to make the most progress? Shot selection is choosing what to focus on at the expense of other forgone opportunities. It’s one of the most critical skills in running a startup.
Finnish teenagers performing digital ennui in 1996 2006. Reuters. We're there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we're living in it . "The third generation of data and voice communications -- the convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data access, intelligent networks, and pervasive computing -- will shape how we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep up with our children, and write poetry in the next century." That's Steve Silberman reporting for Wired in 1999 , which was 13 years ago, if you're keeping count.
The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal
The following is a guest post by Brian Balfour , Co-Founder and CMO of Boundless . You can read more of his writing on his blog at BrianBalfour.com . Stories about the growth of "hot" startups such as Facebook, Instagram, AirBNB, and others have created a belief that if you build the right product, customer acquisition will be easy. Don't be fooled.
Building It Is Not Enough: 5 Practical Tips On User Acquisition
Kickstarter Sets Off $7 Million Stampede for a Watch Not Yet Made
But he couldn’t even get a foot in the door, let alone secure any money for what he called the Pebble watch. So he turned to Kickstarter, a site where ordinary people back creative projects. Backers could pledge $99 and were promised a Pebble watch in return. Less than two hours after the project went up on the site, Mr.
Only 10% of venture-backed entrepreneurs are women. Yet women control a majority of consumer spending, are over 50% of the US population, and go to college in greater numbers than men. However, this dearth of female-run startups could be about to reverse in dramatic fashion, with nascent signs of a boom in female-centric startups founded by women and targeting the female market. Companies such as LearnVest, BeachMint, and BirchBox are leading this gold rush, which arises from two trends. First, VCs are finally understanding the scale and power of building products for women. Second, more and more women are stepping forward to start companies, encouraged by a new woman-friendly attitude in the VC community.
The Age of the Female-Centric Startup
Ben Keighran was just 22 when he packed up and moved to Silicon Valley. He’d already founded his own mobile messaging business, bluepulse, back in Australia at the age of 19. But it was in Silicon Valley that he thrived. In 2007 Keighran raised US$6.5 million from US investors, and was named by BusinessWeek magazine as one of America’s top entrepreneurs under the age of 25. He then left bluepulse in 2008 and spent two years making angel investments and performing advisory roles in San Francisco.
The Young Ones | Australia Unlimited
On a recent Thursday night I stood motionless and perplexed on the dance floor of a San Francisco club. As I looked around, 300 or so people danced and darted back and forth to a free open bar while laser lights shot overhead. Cellphones glowed, like a video of luminescent jellyfish, as people snapped pictures and slung moments of the evening onto dozens of social networks. What made the evening so perplexing was that the party I was attending celebrated Path, a mobile social network that just two months earlier was essentially written off in Silicon Valley.
Disruptions: The Sloshing Sound of Tech Valuations - NYTimes.com
Salesforce's happy workforce - Fortune Tech
Marc Benioff has the mind of a fox and the body of a bear. He's also a super salesman who's built a Bay Area giant that employees love for being prosperous and good. By David A. Kaplan, contributorLindsey Turrentine, editor-in-chief of CNET Reviews, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer, Flickr founder Catarina Fake, Cisco Systems Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior, and CNET Executive Editor Molly Wood on CNET Women in Tech panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (Credit: James Martin/CNET) LAS VEGAS--Even though women have taken great strides in technology, a panel of top women in the industry suggested that great role models could help them gain more. Those role models shouldn't be merely top executives, said Cisco Systems Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior, one of the highest ranking women in the industry. Young women considering pursuing careers in tech need to see accomplished women in a variety of jobs. "We need to have successful role models at every level," Warrior said during CNET Women in Tech panel at the Consumer Electronics Show here this afternoon.
Women need more role models, tech leaders tell CES panel | CES 2012 - CNET Blogs
BBC News - Ex-Apple boss Sculley sets record straight on Jobs
Former Apple boss John Sculley said he enjoyed a great working relationship with Steve Jobs during 'the good times' Apple's former chief executive John Sculley is perhaps best known as the man who first mentored and then clashed with Steve Jobs, leading to the late co-founder's exit from the firm in 1985. Mr Sculley was ultimately forced out himself by Apple's board in 1993. Since then he been an active investor and director in several tech companies including Audax Health.Big business is traditionally slow business. But if you want to up your velocity, why not go back to the future? That’s what Google did when it set out to rediscover its start-up roots – and find the holy grail of business speed. Kristen Gil, VP of Business Operations, explains how.