I'm sure this is both true and reasonable for some companies that did notes with absurdly high caps earlier (which many have) and are now raising more money. Nothing to see here.
"In 1999, Nguyen sought to catch the burgeoning unified messaging movement by the tail by founding a company to develop an Internet-based solution. Onebox.com was a hit with host service providers and users, and within two years, Nguyen parlayed his ascending reputation and Onebox.com's buzz into an $850 million merger with Phone.com."
The pro move for non-technical founders who have financing before a technical co-founder is to hire an employee as a 'technical founder' - but with a comp package that has more (greater than 0) salary and less equity than a pre-financing co-founder.
effective trial strategy does not involve any super-secret coca-cola formula strategems - the secret is exactly as described in steveblank's post: this lawyer is very effective b/c he manages to apply strategy at all in a trial setting and his opponents typically do not - mainly because it's hard.
working backwards from your goals is the best advice i've heard in a while. in the particular case where you've raised a lot of outside capital it can be pretty easy to forget how big you are supposed to get and how quickly you are supposed to get there to put yourself solidly in the success category.
several of my pakistani friends say that their parents used to go to kabul in the 70's for a break because it was much more cosmopolitan and progressive than pakistan. it's important to remember that the more recent troubles are modern, not a contiguous thread from the middle ages.
I immediately wondered how the Rodney King case would have been different if it was affected by a law of this kind. Does anyone know if the video footage would have been inadmissable?
On a different note, I have spent a lot of time in developing countries, and some of the most consistent hallmarks are ridiculous bans on photographing anything government-related. Laws like this in the US make me worry about the country sliding backwards into dysfunction.
I learned from this (surprisingly interesting MSFT history) that Bill & Paul didn't formalize even a simple partnership between the two of them, let alone incorporate for about the first 2 years, during which time MSFT was operating and bringing in revenue.
WRT buying out: get to a point where you both agree it's a bad fit, and that he has better prospects elsewhere, then 'buy him out' for a token - seriously, like $1.
independent of this article making a very good point, i appreciated the grouping of 'java applets' with html5 as an example of 'cutting edge' tech on the web!
By far the most important aspect of this potential deal has been totally overlooked in the articles and comments I've read so far.
ITA powers Kayak & Bing/Farecast and has the direct relationship with the airlines. ITA is foundational to travel search in a way that Kayak or Bing/Farecast is not.
i find a very helpful concept here is the 'appropriate level of abstraction'- when making some assertion, make sure that the language you use and the claims that you make are specific enough to be compelling, but abstracted enough to be 'not a lie'.
A real benefit I have found in not tracking bugs is that the constraint makes you much less cavalier about introducing complexity in the first place, which is totally a good thing.
Among many other things, I thought it was interesting to 'anchor' the fashion vertical around $40CPM as a comparison to LinkedIn (business/recruiting vertical), reportedly around $80CPM.
The best thing about this post was the case-study description of the full, 'first principles', customer development-type approach to landing page optimization including lessons learned from face to face selling, and a handful of very specific surveys and customer conversations. Usually, these kinds of case studies focus on either landing page opt. or customer development, but don't put it all together.
Just revoked Twitbet access to my account after it autosent a Tweet for me without any [edit: enough] warning or pause for approval. Please don't do that.
marketplace for people to sell the art they create with aviary tools; this model is potentially inclusive of consumer products like cafepress, business logos like 99designs and virtual goods like imvu developer community.
Exactly like unit testing - Eric Ries likes to talk about customer validation as an additional step added to TDD or testing in general - for example a new feature: to constitute progress, first it has to work, then it has to matter.
i feel pretty strongly that making an explicit hypothesis about who the customer is (it's okay to be wrong!) completely solves this problem, because if you know who you are trying to reach, it's obvious. if you say: "im making scheduling software for film festivals" it's trivial to find an email or phone number and call them up and find out if you correct. if it's a consumer niche, find a forum or a blog and email someone.
i thought it was sub-optimal when someone used the word 'boomerang' in a tweet mentioning me, and next thing i know heykiki (which i had not heard of before) @'ed me with a non-relevant link to a search results page for boomerang-throwing classes. i would not do this.
ya - my take on web spreadsheets is that there is this awesome combination of a) being really hard to build well, and b) dont solve a specific problem that people want to pay for (applications are too generalized)