Found+READ

How to Kill a Great Idea - Jonathan Abrams - Friendster - Social It's not easy being the brains behind one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history. Sure, there are those who describe you as a visionary, but in the same breath they'll deride you as a lousy businessman. Bloggers attack you, call you "a real asshole" and "a very lucky idiot savant." Jonathan Abrams--founder of Friendster, the first online social network, and a pioneer of one of today's hottest trends on the Web--tries his best not to think about these things. And yet the story of how Friendster, once the hottest start-up in America, became the butt of a business joke continues to preoccupy him. If he had invented something as mundane as a brilliant customer relations management application, no one would know Jonathan Abrams's name. Friendster is among the few start-ups that changed the world--but not as its founder had hoped. Statements like that are just one more thing that gets under Abrams's skin. Abrams is not the only one who feels this way.

The Cheap Revolution: Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes I recently read a quote that inspired me and thought, "Why not share it with others?" I've also collected a list of quotes from entrepreneurs and other quotes that are relevant to entrepreneurship. Skip and I included our own at the bottom of the post. I hope one of these quotes inspires you as well. I have not failed. Here are our quotes: Being an entrepreneur is a lot like playing poker - you can fold, limp in, or go for it - Yasmine Mustafa If you kick it around enough, it starts to look like a ball - Skip Shuda What's your favorite quote? Help us reach a 1,000 diggs by clicking here. Related Posts: Our Most Popular Posts:

How to Launch a Business Without Spending a Dime - lifehack.org The biggest mistake I see first time entrepreneurs make is that they spend too much money. They rent an office or retail location, pay big incorporation fees, hire employees, and build an expensive website (just to name a few). And all before they’ve earned their first dollar! Each month their cash reserves get lower and lower while they struggle to make sales to cover their expenses. Luckily, it is possible (and actually quite simple) to start up a business without spending a dime. The first thing you’ve got to do is get past the idea of spending. You can spend money on all that stuff once you are bringing in revenue! Now to actually get started, here are 10 steps you can use to launch a new business, without spending a dime. Get an EIN at the IRS websiteThis one is specific to the USA, but all companies need an Employer Identification Number (EIN). Using this simple format you can launch a new business in about a month, and hopefully make your first sale. Read full content

Advice from young millionaire Gurbaksh Chahal Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Gurbaksh Chahal in his San Francisco high-rise penthouse in downtown San Francisco, Calif. on Friday Oct. 17, 2008. Chahal is the San Jose internet entrepeneur who made a company as a teenager and sold it to Yahoo for $300 million a few years ago.He has a book coming out on Oct. 23 and will appear on Oprah the same day. less Gurbaksh Chahal in his San Francisco high-rise penthouse in downtown San Francisco, Calif. on Friday Oct. 17, 2008. ... more tk SECRET MILLIONAIRE: Gurbaksh Chahal volunteers at St. Photo: Courtesy Fox TV Gurbaksh Chahal in his San Francsico high-rise penthouse in downtown San Francisco, Calif. on Friday Oct. 17, 2008. Gurbaksh Chahal in his San Francsico high-rise penthouse in downtown San Francisco, Calif. on Friday Oct. 17, 2008. Advice from young millionaire Gurbaksh Chahal When he sought venture capital from investors, he skirted questions about his experience (none!) He appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on Thursday. "I can't.

Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive 5 New Jobs of the Web 2.0 Genera Entrepreneurship is a craft. But given the risky nature of starting one’s own business are there opportunities to practice the skills involved? Absolutely. Below I’ve taken five online opportunities that would be a natural extension of a web worker’s daily routine. The experiments: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The web is not only revolutionizing the way we work; it’s also creating opportunities to experiment with what that work might be.

The Valley of My Dreams: Why Silicon Valley Left Boston’s Route No one disputes that Silicon Valley is the global capital of the tech world. But this wasn’t always so. It is the Valley’s dynamism and networks which have given it an unassailable advantage. Silicon Valley has simply left rivals like Boston’s Route 128 in the dust. I mentioned a little bit about my first Columbus Day in California in a previous column. It was a really hard decision which one to pick. I am focusing on what is possibly the largest of these networks, an organization called The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE). Which brings me to Boston. In the 1980’s the Silicon Valley and Route 128 looked very similar—a mix of large and small tech firms, world class universities, venture capital, and military funding. A young professor at UC-Berkeley, AnnaLee Saxenian, wrote a book in 1994 which answers this question. She noted that Silicon Valley had an amazing dynamism about it. This organizational mechanism was in sharp contrast to that of Route 128. Boston, however, is no slouch.

Rondam Ramblings Jonathan D. Nolen - The Open Company Test After writing that last post damning Apple's lack of transparency, I thought it might be a good idea to actually come of with a list of questions with which we might identify an open software company. I don't think it's necessary that a company meet all of these criteria, but the more the better. Open Sourcecode: Do you have access to the sourcecode? True open source is great, but simple access to the source code, even if it’s not under an open source license, is often enough.Open Data: Can you easily get your data into or out of the application, should the need arise? Open APIs: Can your other software interact with the application? There is, of course, a price for companies to pay for all of these behaviours. I strongly recommend that the next time you are evaluating a new software tool you look beyond just the software and think about the company itself behaves. Like this: Like Loading...

Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? Sounds like a no-brainer, but I’d like to try and convince you that it’s not. All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. But all things are never equal. In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of charging customers for your product from day one. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? Consider this company (as always, a fictionalized composite): they have a million dollars of revenue, and are showing growth quarter after quarter. In my consulting practice, I sometimes have the opportunity to work with companies like this. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This approach is fundamentally non-scalable. And what of the product development team? This unit of progress is remarkable in several ways.

Penniless Startup Founders Before starting, I'd like to point out that the tips that follow are only valid in a particular context: Understand that these tips are for the very early stage Your first business goal is to get out of the very early stage as soon as possible. Lots of these tips concern petty little details. However, together these details matter when at the very early stage, when you're fighting for survival. You have no money and aren't interested in loans. If you have no money, this is probably your first venture. You're starting a software company. Everyone values the dollar differently. Eventually, you should aim at moving out of consulting, as it doesn't scale. Don't hire an accountant to prepare invoices for you. There are plenty of examples of ways not to spend money when you're just starting out and have none of your own. Be smart about the commercial bank account you choose I've dealt with a few different banks over the years. Get a business account with a variable monthly fee Minimize your rent

Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog Business Intelligence (BI) is the gift that keeps on giving. For years, startups have popped up, promising better insights and faster decision making capabilities, consistently resulting in new waves of highly valued companies. Take a look at the past decade, which has seen massive consolidation as well as a hot new set of public companies. Increasingly, BI has been recognized as a strategic tool by the world’s most successful and nimble enterprises which run their businesses on metrics and use BI tools to rapidly make data-driven decisions. However, despite the steady progress in technology, there is still a problem with BI. Take a second to think about your life on the web. It is this massive gap between the power of web search and the inflexibility of corporate BI that led Ajeet Singh and Amit Prakash, the founders of ThoughtSpot, to sense an opportunity. This is a big idea and a huge technical challenge.

How Experienced Developers Can Handicap a Lean Startup Inexperienced developers have one big advantage: they haven’t been programmed to work for perfection and they’re not afriad to make mistakes. –Neil Callanan, Founder of FitFeud Summary Start-up success depends on rapidly figuring out what customers will actually buy, a process that often requires quickly hacking solutions and other bad software practices for the enterprise. Life as an Enterprise Software Engineer I learned most of my technical skills in established (i.e. non start-up) companies doing what most engineers do every day: I solved problems. I also learned that there are wrong ways to solve problems, that cutting corners on scalability, security, etc. ultimately lead to even bigger problems later. For example, anyone who has worked in enterprise software has struggled with poorly designed databases that didn’t scale as the application grows. Problems, problems, and more problems. Problem Solving in the Enterprise Life as a Startup Hacker From Eric's Presentation at Web Expo 2009