Editor’s note: Cherian Thomas is founder and CEO of Cucumbertown, a recipe-publishing platform.
Cucumbertown raised its first round from the Valley a month ago and during the course of this journey, I realized that, as a first-time entrepreneur without any solid Valley footing, my run toward raising funds as a non-American co-founder was somewhat unique. → Read More
I just gave up all parenting responsibilities this weekend to Mark Cuban. Meaning, my kids and I watched eight straight episodes of “Shark Tank”.
For the past two years, people have been begging me to watch “Shark Tank”. One friend of mine, who has co-invested with me on two deals, has given me two pieces of advice in life. One is: “you never know what someone is worth until they declare… → Read More
Leadership in management is the art and science of getting others to do what they don’t necessarily want – or don’t understand why they’re being asked – to do. Doing it at a startup is accomplishing all of that in the face of uncertainty and with little resources. Now imagine doing that without the war chest supplied to you by VCs as you bootstrap. Good times, but also a pain in the ass. → Read More
An entrepreneur receives lots of contradictory advice from really smart, experienced people. For example, you’ve probably been told to be both persistent and flexible; to have a clear vision you pursue relentlessly, and yet also to change your vision as the market changes. Simple, right?
This same tension pervades career advice. Some will tell you to think about where you want to be in ten… → Read More
Patience is one of the seven virtues, the lesser-known cousins of the seven sins. And indeed, “patience is a virtue” – or so goes the saying. But another saying states that “fortune favors the bold.” So which one is it?
It’s not that patience isn’t valued; it’s that no one else is actually all that patient. Whether you are growing a business or chasing a girl or trying to… → Read More
Ah, the internet – how you hijack our vocabulary. A few years ago, “embedded” had connotations of journalists following soldiers. Today, it’s most associated with YouTube clips. Similarly, a pivot was something that I vaguely recall my basketball coach talking about. Today, it’s the repositioning of a company and without a doubt, 2011 was the year of the pivot. → Read More
I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book, and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and ”I Was… → Read More
Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.
Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small… → Read More
Alright, in my last post I argued that bootstrapping is just as over-rated as raising venture capital. But for those who decide to pursue fundraising, here are some things entrepreneurs should avoid when raising capital.
For all of the talk about how much excess capital there is, it’s actually hard to raise capital because very few projects fit the VC profile—even though many VC-funded… → Read More
In the wide world of startups, we mostly like to think of ourselves as go-getters, ass kickers, “in all the way” sorts. We also like to think of ourselves as iterators, tinkerers, rapid iterators who test unceasingly. But the combination of those two traits can lead to one of the most dangerous cycles in startup – half measure syndrome (HMS).
Interestingly, HMS starts off as something very… → Read More
I hate Woody Allen. Here’s why. Because if you’re Jewish and a little neurotic then it has become a cliché that nerdy neurotic Jewish people describe themselves as “Woody Allen-esque” thinking it will attract women. They do this on dating services. The idea is that they will then attract some waif-like Mia Farrow-ish (or the 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan) blonde who will… → Read More
One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring. What they need to understand is that there’s a big difference between “hiring” and “talent”. I’m continually surprised how rarely I see people put down their strategy for talent compared to hiring. It’s so prevalent, in fact, you’ll often see on a company’s priorities a bullet of “hiring”. And… → Read More
Entrepreneurship requires balancing unbridled optimism with delusional foolishness. Most entrepreneurs are mocked and misunderstood until they are wildly successful, at which point the chorus changes from “good luck with that ‘business’, pal” to “I always believed in ya, buddy!”
There is an undeniable appeal to the notion of bootsrapping your company to success without venture… → Read More
Company founders are the quintessential cheerleaders, promoting their vision and company every chance they get. But that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily the best at two core functions: selling and fundraising (and many are bad at both but excel at other functions, like technology).
While generating revenue and raising capital require a lot of the same traits, in my experience those… → Read More
I loved talking to the skankiest prostitutes at three in the morning with a camera crew around me, fires burning in the street, sad, abused people clinging to scraps of life for their pleasures, bailed out prisoners and the drug dealers waiting for them to be released, homeless addicts with nowhere to go and they only weren’t freaks if you saw them at three in the morning .
In short, I loved… → Read More
What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.
How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features… → Read More
If you’re asking which startup to build, not whether to build, you probably have several half-baked ideas and don’t know which one to devote yourself to. Or you have no idea at all.
It’s easy to get trapped and excited by the startup world we read about through the looking-glass of TechCrunch. Too many entrepreneurs focus their time on building things they think are cool or could be the… → Read More
Entrepreneurs are always in “sell mode”, but that doesn’t mean they need to be BS-artists. Most entrepreneurs aren’t born liars, but we’re brought up in a system that rewards bad behavior and taking the easy way out by lying instead of being truthful, something that eventually catches up with you.
If you’re an entrepreneur, here are 5 common lies you’ve probably told. → Read More
We’re seeing people move away from finance and law and towards a culture of building things. It’s great to see more people seek careers in technology. The problem, I find, is that so many people approach the transition poorly. The first, and I suppose seemingly easiest claim and means to justify your place in the startup world, as someone who has no experience, is to call yourself a product… → Read More
Editor’s note: Guest writer James Altucher is an investor, programmer, entrepreneur, and author.
Don’t BS me. Everyone wants to sell their startup. We all pay lip service to building a billion dollar Groupon but in general that’s a lie. Even Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to sell Google to Yahoo for $1 million within ten seconds of starting their company. And Yahoo said, “No”.
As soon… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
I’m in Seattle this week. Seattle should be the envy of any non Silicon Valley tech community in the country. Great lifestyle, great cost of living, motivated people and only the crap weather on the negative side.
They have had their… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement” as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while… → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted.
By definition, if you are reading this you read blogs. But should you actually write one if… → Read More
Startups. We know the mantra: Team matters. Is this philosophy exaggerated? Overrated? Cliché? No. Team is the only thing that matters. Whatever you’re working on now it’s irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation.
Why? Either you’re in an interesting market or your not. If you’re in an interesting market and if you start to prove value then you’ll have the world gunning… → Read More
For the next four days if you’re in the tech industry you’re going to hear a non-stop stream of information about SXSW. It’s the time of year when many new startups are struggling to rise above all the noise and be heard. And when everybody is shouting it becomes overwhelming.
I’m actually in Austin at the moment. It turns out this is “the year of group messaging” and since I’m a shareholder in… → Read More
Austin, TX
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Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
