I believe this is the best post I’ve seen on startup funding since the creation of Venture Hacks: Raising money for a startup is an inherently risky proposition. You step up to the plate knowing that the odds are slim and that, for every story of success on TechCrunch, there’s […]
startup advice
60 posts
(that’s almost $12 billion) This is a BIG DEAL, for the UK, and for Cambridge. Rory Cellan-Jones is moaning about how terrible it is (“looks like a sad day for British technology – and for Cambridge in particular”) – and I wanted to put across a very different perspective. NB: […]
I’ve encountered many managers who are in love with the IDEA of supporting their team, but not the REALITY. Typical examples: “My team are great. I push them hard and they deliver great stuff on time” (in reality: the team resents the bullying, self-aggrandizing jerk) “I’d do anything for my […]
TL;DR – notch reckons “it’s a scam” (I wouldn’t go that far – “scam” is a strong word, I reckon they’re just too naive/ignorant/foolish/arrogant to realise what a huge mistake they’re making) My gut feeling is: this would be a terrible investment. By comparison, the middleware companies that sell for […]
All in the same market/need/desire space: First product: FAIL. Second product: FAIL. Third product: looks set for success “Our last version was just Tian and I late at 3am practically crying that everything in the food world we were building sucked. So we asked ourselves what could we do well […]
From the fascinating APPsterdam experiment / movement (“persuade a load of startups to move to Amsterdam for the Summer, instead of the more expensive California, and create an ad-hoc startup hotbed”) – http://mur.mu.rs/?p=243: “You might think companies that have gone out of business are no threat to you, but if […]
Yes! Yes, yes, YES! Next time anyone in the UK hears an investor ask about patents (hint: they probably are ex-3i staff – and no, that isn’t a good thing), send them this: 10 Myths about patents “Myth 3: Nobody would invest in startups that don’t have patents. Fact: The […]
Background A month ago, PC Gamer reported that “The idea that crunch wasn’t all that productive was raised, but there was enough experience in the room to shoot it down. “. I found that unacceptable, both as a concept, and as something for the media to report without challenging it. […]
This (“NESTA: Investing in Video Games”) was last month, but I’ve been too busy to write it up till now. The most interesting things that I noticed at the event: Index is interested in spending SEED money on games companies [Ben Holmes] Index can now “write cheques” up to $1m […]
Recently I had reason to contact a bunch of UK games studios. I thought the hard bit would be to find the names of all those out there. Actually, the hardest part was navigating their websites to do the outrageous thing of daring to send them an email… Here’s a […]
One of those things that most business people don’t talk about unless prodded. I’m not sure why, but I assume it’s one aspect of the fear “don’t burn any bridges; don’t let anyone think you can be nasty; don’t let anyone see you’re human”. None of which are healthy, long-term […]
(From an aside by one of LinkedIn’s founding team (interesting blog post on what it was like raising the first Series A funding for LI)) This is one of the hardest things for “old style” European VC firms and Angels to get their heads around, IME. And it’s entirely true, […]
I don’t normally call-out individual investors, but this tweet from Max Niederhofer underlines something I’ve been thinking about for a while: I’d like to see a culture of equity investors admitting (publically) their missed investments as often as they big-up the ones they made. Biggest angel investing screwup of mine […]
…if you: finish it and design it and build it and test it and refine it and launch it and sell it and market it …for me. This was the tempting offer whispered in my ear this evening by a hard-up web-developer at a networking event, once we were alone, […]
I reckon this is just a case of indie developers (finally) starting to understand the concept of “marketing” in a bit more depth than the 101 stuff. With my PR hat on, this is great stuff: highly contentious (and potentially dangerous) quotes – and yet, nowhere near as career-damaging as […]
I had a serious customer-support problem with Skype recently, relating to money they’ve taken from me. It’s proved excessively difficult to get a response from them – surprising, considering their size, their brand, and the fact it’s a paid-for service. It raises some interesting questions over Customer Support / Community […]
We’re starting a new client project, and the client uses Mercurial exclusively, all through BitBucket. BitBucket has a stupid user-accounts system, that demands you invent a globally-unique username. Oh dear lord – how amateurish are you guys? Aha! BUT! … they have a (very subtle) link to let you use […]
Startup CEOs are often advised to do this, but few people explain how the heck to do that, and its far easier said than done. Ben’s got a great approach: actually do each of the jobs yourself, for real, before hiring people into them. This resonates with my own experience, […]
When I log into LinkedIn, I now receive 3 pages of spam. That spam is “every tweet by every person I’ve ever met”. Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – […]
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll have read my thoughts on the Science part of Marketing, and how much money this makes you. As I explained recently to an Accountant, we don’t have a “business plan” for my current company, we only have a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet […]