AlumniFunder launched in beta this week with a simple mission: Help create a deeper relationship between current students and alumni, while supporting collegiate entrepreneurship and creativity. To do that, AlumniFunder wants to give alumni a platform by which they can invest in innovative projects created by students at their alma mater. Whether it be for a new science lab, natural language… → Read More
If you do a search for “AngelList” in the Apple App Store, you’ll only get four results – and one is an app featuring quotes from entrepreneurs. In other words, there’s not a lot of selection despite AngelList’s readily available API. That being said, in the past an app called AngelList Wings has served as a useful resource for browsing, searching and following early-stage startups, founders and… → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15 countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He founded Commonred (Acquired by Income.com) and is ex-Electronic Arts.
Today is Thanksgiving, a holiday where Americans and a few other countries celebrate and remember everything we have to be grateful for. In the daily… → Read More
If you don’t know about Startup Health and you’re a healthtech investor or entrepreneur (or at all interested in the space,) you need to rectify that. After all, as evidenced by the launch of another solid, differentiated health-focused startup accelerator last week, there is a lot of public, private and entrepreneurial attention shifting to the industry. → Read More
Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 30-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He’s ex-Electronic Arts as well as the founder of Commonred.
A few years ago I asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what I should do with my latest product idea. His reply was simple. “Trust your gut. What does your… → Read More
In 2009, Eric Kuhn created FoundersCard as a way to give entrepreneurs the same kind of elite programs, perks and networking opportunities traditionally reserved for execs of Fortune 500 companies. By offering discounts on hotels, airfare and business services entrepreneurs and founders use every day — and by throwing good parties — its community of entrepreneurs and founders has grown to over… → Read More
“Silicon Valley doesn’t have a monopoly on brilliant entrepreneurs and founders,” Derek Andersen tells me over coffee, “so we want to find them wherever they live, give them a stage and an opportunity to share their hard-won experiences with those who need it and might benefit from it.” That mission statement sounds like it might have come from one of the founders or mentors of Y Combinator, 500… → Read More
Last October, Kimball Thomas and Davis Smith launched Baby.com.br with $4.4 million in backing from an impressive group of Silicon Valley and international investors, including Tiger Global Management, Monashees Capital, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya and Thrive Capital. For SV Angel and Felicis Ventures, this marked the first time that either firm had invested in a startup based… → Read More
At a very fundamental level, the venture capital business is being reshaped. Speaking to a crowd at the Grind work space in New York last week, Fred Wilson addressed this ongoing shift, saying, “there’s two times as much capital in the venture capital business today than we, the professional investors who make up the venture business, can actually put to work intelligently.” Bad for VCs, Wilson… → Read More
The Motion To Dismiss Cancer, a team formed to raise money for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), recently kicked off its annual “Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series,” an ongoing auction that offers anyone and everyone an opportunity to win private meetings with an array of top venture capitalists and startup founders — with all proceeds going to benefit LLS and cancer research. → Read More
While secretly wanting to be an entrepreneur but working at Electronic Arts, I would sometimes sneak out early and jet to Stanford campus to crash Steve Blank’s entrepreneurial lecture series. Steve literally wrote the book on customer development with “Four Steps To The Epiphany” and now he’s back again co-authoring a 500-page reference guide with Bob Dorf called “The Startup Owner’s… → Read More
For entrepreneurs, navigating a career through the Valley can be a lot like competitive sports. Similarities include locker room leadership, a shifting playbook and ongoing onslaughts from opponents. What is perhaps the most important likeness to highlight, however, is the requisite sense of what your place is in the game.
The differences between each role in a company and team are substantial… → Read More
I’m a complete sexist. I want women to look as good as possible. And I’m not the only one. Women want to look as sexy as possible. That’s why they buy hundreds of millions worth of form-fitting Spanx every year. And now Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx is worth a billion according to Forbes. She took Justin Timberlake’s advice. A million is not cool. A billion is cool.
So what happened next? → Read More
The top executives in today’s largest corporations not only travel in style, but they have access to an absurd array of perks while they travel, from awards and complimentary products to discounts on just about everything. On the IPO “road show” for his company VarsityBooks (now part of eFollet.com), serial entrepreneur Eric Kuhn remembers being “amazed” by witnessing firsthand “the rates and… → Read More
VC firm Highland Capital Partners is sounding the horn for their fifth annual “Summer@Highland” entrepreneurship program. The 10-week program aims to provide young, talented entrepreneurs with the environment and resources they need to kickstart their early-stage technology companies. → Read More
You may have heard someone say, or said yourself: “I want to build a business, what should I focus on?” Obviously, the possible answers are nearly infinite. Steve Poland wrote a great post in December that addresses this question directly. I would agree with Steve’s main piece of advice for founders and entrepreneurs: Focus on problems. Start with a space you know, and ask yourself what’s broken… → Read More
On stage at last month’s Le Web conference Shervin Pishevar, a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, stated “The World is a Startup.” It’s an interesting perspective and I think what’s true for the world is also true for countries, states and cities. With developments like last month’s announcement that Cornell was selected to build a new tech campus in New York City, it seems to follow that if “a… → Read More
Intel knows a thing or two about technology and innovation. Hey, that’s why they hired Will.i.am as “director of creative innovation”. (Wink.) Really, in the same way that it’s catalyzed change in the computing industry (and helped bring modern microprocessing to life), in December Intel launched a platform designed to give young entrepreneurs the opportunity to bring their own innovative ideas… → Read More
Back in August, TechStars, the multi-city startup incubator, launched a “reality-documentary” TV series (in collaboration with Bloomberg) designed to give the world a peak at what it’s like to start a business in the fast-paced atmosphere of a tech incubator.
Riffing off video series like this one, Sprinkle Lab, a startup that makes commercial videos for tech companies, launched a series last… → Read More
Over the years I’ve heard many legitimate gripes from entrepreneurs about the way venture capital firms treat them while fundraising. I must confess an imperfect record of courtesy myself, though I do try to be respectful, and to incorporate feedback. For example, I once resolved never to keep entrepreneurs waiting long for me in our lobby, and I think I live up to that.
But I often hear one… → Read More
Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. He previously worked in M&A at IBM.
I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum.
I often get asked “what’s the role of a startup CEO?” Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch “CEO” and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn’t an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times… → Read More
Women 2.0 Labs, a 5-week crash course in entrepreneurship, is somewhat of a misnomer.
Although it is indeed a lab where professionals work in teams of four to develop a startup (or at least the prototype of a startup), it is far from a women’s only club. Of the 20 participants, 65% are female and 35% are male— an eclectic collection of engineers, designers, marketing professionals, and recent… → Read More
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Last week, he wrote about the need to lift restrictions on H1-B visas. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
I’ve got a message for all the Silicon Valley venture… → Read More
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