Netizen: entrepreneur

Showing posts with label entrepreneur. Show all posts

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Venture Capital Segmentation

Image by Zach Klein via FlickrChris Dixon's is a good blog to follow if you want to keep abreast developments in the fast churning VC industry. He is an entrepreneur and one of those angels that you will read about a lot, people who are changing the face of the game.

Chris Dixon: The segmentation of the venture industry: Venture capital has only existed in its modern form for about 35 years. ...... “customers” (entrepreneurs) have flocked to more specialized “products.” ...... segmentation by company stage. ..... The segmentation of the venture industry is healthy for startups and innovation at large, even if at the moment it might be uncomfortable and confusing for some of the people involved.

I like his conclusion here. He says, and I agree, that the churn has been healthy and the segmentation has been welcome.

Chris Dixon: If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough: My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. I applied to hundreds of jobs: low-level VC roles, startups jobs, even to big tech companies. I got rejected from every single one..... I had a strange resume .... I probably got rejected by someone once a day last week alone

And I am thinking the guy still has a strange resume.

More Entrepreneurs Should Blog

OnStartups.com: Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started: If you asked me to tell you a list of three of the best decisions in my life, I can certainly tell you that regularly writing is one of them...... Writing on a regular schedule takes a lot of discipline, just like going to the gym or practicing a new martial art. ..... If you keep yourself dedicated to writing on a consistent schedule, those important values will carry over to other facets of life including startups. ..... By putting yourself out there and making yourself open to meeting as many people as possible, serendipity is much more likely to happen. ..... The majority of good things that have happened to me in business can be traced back to my writing

There are more great VC bloggers than there are great entrepreneur bloggers, and I have long wondered why. I have also long felt that situation needs to be rectified.

Social media is so essential. You need to do your own getting the word out. Most of your communication will be small group and perhaps intense. There will be a lot of in group communication. That is why social media is called social media and not mass media.

Updates that can sound bizarre to strangers are necessary staple to intimates.

But then there is also the matter of reaching out to people you might not be able to meet in person. Long form blogging is my favorite social media platform. It allows you to dip into far flung conversations. Meaningful participation becomes possible.

The VCs just have done a better job. I feel like I am half way to becoming a VC myself just from reading the many VC blogs. I have a pretty good feel of the churn that is going on in the VC industry right now.

Even former entrepreneur VCs will tell you, the real action is in creating companies, not in funding them. "All I do is write checks," Fred Wilson once said, which is an understatement, but it is the half truth.

I would go so far as to say every tech entrepreneur ought to blog. None of the top ones do. And I wonder why.

The list is not all that big. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress/Blogger, and FourSquare, and I think you are all set. If you are active on those five platforms I think you are really into social media. And you are reaching out to people you need to be reaching out to.

Regular writing is like working out for the mind. When you blog regularly, you read your news differently. You also read more.

Monday, March 15, 2010

AnyClip Is Live Now

Sex scene from A Boy and His Dog

I just received an email: AnyClip.com is now live. Nate (@innonate) and his team must be proud. A lot of people know Nate as the guy who runs the NY Tech MeetUp. But he is at heart an entrepreneur with one foot clearly in the venture capital world. The NY Tech MeetUp podium just helps him dig deep into those two worlds. What I personally find most appealing about him is his strong belief that New York City can make it on the tech map of the world. (The State Of New York Technology) It also helps that we are both hard core Barack people. (Reshma For Congress)

I enjoy movies. I like watching clips from here and there. This site looks custom made for someone like me. I hope they keep adding movies to their database.

I have been pushing for Morgan Grice to be part of the AnyClip team. I think she has watched every movie made in the past 50 years, and she was Editorial Chair of The Harvard Crimson. She is not a coder, but AnyClip has plenty of those. I doubt she is outmatched in movie passion by anyone currently on the AnyClip team.

The site is in beta. It will go through a few iterations. A welcome jack up in traffic is going to create obvious server issues, for one.

One strong point AnyClip has is this is not a startup hoping to monetize at some future date. It is already closely integrated with Netflix and Amazon. It is a good idea to have a business model from day one.

Nate, my man, you are going places.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Call Out The Sexism

Dancers and Flutists, with an Egyptian hierogl...

Image via Wikipedia

You Can't Launch the Next Generation of Startups Without Women - ReadWriteStart The current startup system essentially excludes the untapped pool of innovators who aren't developers - for example, women who want to launch Internet startups...... Women tend to take the entrepreneurial plunge later than men typically do, once they've had some professional and life experience.......... a study done in the U.K. in 2006 showed that women over 40 were more likely to start a new business than any other age group. ...... the Internet and the startup culture have been dominated and shaped by the vision and appetites of young men and old boys from the start. ..... a sharp rise in women-in-tech groups and activities lately, undoubtedly a response to this inequity. ...... revisit the startup system and create structures that foster innovation coming from a more diverse group of people (age, origin, gender)....... eak). Women tend to present their projects in terms of their value to users and society ...... women could benefit from mentoring that would teach them to conceptualize and present their concepts in technology terms and money terms. ....... today, non-technical entrepreneurs are just as likely to come up with viable startup concepts as programmers are ...... Investors need to start looking at paper projects again, and not dismissing non-technical founders. There need to be mechanisms that facilitate team building, like matchmaking resources for projects and developers.

If it is sexism, call it sexism. Don't overlook it, don't call it something else. Definitely don't call it meritocracy. If you are at a tech event, or a meeting, and some guy makes a sexist comment, then call him out. If you are a quiet bystander, you are an active participant. Tech entrepreneurship is a cutting edge thing, and there can not be room for sexism on the cutting edge. Sexism is not a problem for women to deal with. It is as much a problem for men. Our startups don't realize their full potential if we keep putting up with sexism.

If you don't have the time, inclination, penchant or patience for a long, drawn out argument, just call the guy a pig and move on.

Shirky: A Rant About Women: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks ...... We’re in the middle of a generations-long project to encourage men to be better listeners and more sensitive partners, to take more account of others’ feelings and to let out our own feelings more. Similarly, I see colleges spending time and effort teaching women strategies for self-defense, including direct physical aggression. I sometimes wonder what would happen, though, if my college spent as much effort teaching women self-advancement as self-defense. .... we live in a world where women are discriminated against ...... Institutions assessing the fitness of candidates, in other words, often select self-promoters because self-promotion is tied to other characteristics needed for success. ....... To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments ........ the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction. ......... Not caring works surprisingly well. ........ it would be good if more women see interesting opportunities that they might not be qualified for, opportunities which they might in fact fuck up if they try to take them on, and then try to take them on. It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.

Friday, August 28, 2009

CubanSpeak: Controversial Take On Entrepreneurs

Success & Motivation: What Entrepreneurs Should NOT Do Mark Cuban

If you got a billion dollars, and you claim you have people pitch business plans to you every day, I believe you. But I don't have to take the rest of the rant.

Cuban's blog post tells me it is as hard to be an investor as it is to be an entrepreneur. How do you figure out which horse to bet on? Even the obvious ones are not obvious, or Yahoo would have bought Google when Google offered to be bought not long after launch.

If you want to keep your money safe, keep saying no. You will have your treasure minus the inflation. But if you are wanting to grow your money, or even grow it like crazy, then not being able to find that dark horse must really itch.

And as for tall talk, only a handful of companies engage in paradigm shift products and services in each generation. It is hard to spot them, it is hard to get in once you do spot them. But a young Steve Jobs always talked in terms of changing the world, and changing the course of world history. He did deliver. He invented an industry.

How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? That is harder than picking the winning stocks on the stock market. You need instincts, instincts that deliver.

On Business Models: Free Is Not Always Good
Free Is The Future: Picking A Fight With Mark Cuban