Archive by Author

Occam's Razor and the current state of venture

Jun 2, 2009
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

I have made many posts in the past about focus and doing more with less, and as I continued on this path it reminded me of Occam's Razor, the idea that the simplest explanation to any problem is the best explanation.  Of course Occam's Razor can get more complex but over the years it has [...]

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Inspirational video for entrepreneurs

May 12, 2009
in Entrepreneurship

Jonathan Kay from Grasshopper sent me a great video on entrepreneurship.  First I love the inspirational message.  Secondly, I like the use of a viral video to cleverly promote his virtual PBX numbers for entrepreneurs.  Take a look and hopefully it will brighten up your day. What I love about the message is that entrepreneurship [...]

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Pioneers get arrows in their backs

Apr 29, 2009
in Entrepreneurship, On Demand

Pioneers get arrows in their backs – I have experienced it firsthand from an active investor's viewpoint and written about it in the past.  Being early in a market is great but being too early can be deadly.  Just like the settlers in the westward migration, entrepreneurs who are too early will get arrows in [...]

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Growing your business in a recession

Apr 14, 2009
in Entrepreneurship

I read a great article by James Surowiecki in the New Yorker the other day titled "Hanging Tough."  In the piece, James gives a historical perspective on companies that thrived and grew during previous recessions by increasing spending on on advertising and R&D.  While I am not advocating that companies go out and blow their [...]

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Cover the basics before you raise capital

Apr 2, 2009
in Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

No matter how many times I told my friend that he needed to get a deck together for a potential capital raise and model out some thoughts on market sizing and financials, I ran into resistance.  It was not because he didn't think it was important or that it mattered.  It was because he was [...]

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Hybrid clouds are coming

Mar 18, 2009
in On Demand, Open Source

Amazon has taken off with its cloud compute infrastructure but there still have been some limitations from an enterprise perspective.  Mainly, some enterprises are concerned about keeping their data private, about reliability, and storage costs over time.  Any enterprise looking at potentially leveraging the cloud would love to have a hybrid solution which allows them [...]

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Targeted television advertising is finally here

Mar 4, 2009
in Digital Media

I have written a few post about the future of television advertising (10/2004, 11/2006, and 12/2006).  Yes the web has taken over and yes video on the web is advancing rapidly but that does not mean that the $60b spent on television advertising will disappear overnight.  What is needed for the industry is a way [...]

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Taking advantage of the horrible environment

Feb 20, 2009
in Entrepreneurship

My expectations for 2009 are that things will get worse before they get better.  On the portfolio company side, I would rather have my companies growing at a lesser rate getting closer to breakeven than growing too aggressively and burning lots of cash.  Once your house is in order (see some earlier posts I made [...]

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Cisco raises another $4b in cash and looking for acquisitions

Feb 10, 2009
in Investing/Markets

Ashlee Vance from the Bits Blog has a nice piece on why Cisco raised another $4b of cash through a debt offering yesterday even though they have $30b in cash.  "As word of Cisco’s debt sale hit Wall Street, the standard chatter surrounding possible targets began anew. As usual, companies like EMC, NetApp, Sun Microsystems, [...]

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Best iPhone Photo App – Phanfare Photon

Feb 4, 2009
in Digital Media

It is great to see my friend Andrew Erlichson getting some rave reviews for Phanfare Photon, his iPhone photo app.  According to ReadWriteWeb:"Phanfare's Photon is currently the best photo sharing and photo management app on the iPhone. It is important to note that Photon puts less emphasis on social feature than other services like Radar, [...]

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