Startups

I was at dinner the other night with a group of entrepreneurs. One told the story of a 27-year-old whiz kid whose company will likely exit for $500M – $1B – the business now being less than two years old. You can imagine the effect that this had on the brilliant, hardworking 35+ entrepreneurs in the group, who have had their share of hits, but not at that magnitude and not that quickly. More

Duh. But how? I only know of four viable methods: A simple core built-in feature, where by using the product, users invite / share it with others. This used to be mostly about email address import, although these days Digging, Tweeting, and of course, spreading on Facebook are very popular Users embed the product onto their own blogs / pages / sites Users create original content that gets picked up by GoogleBot, gets SEO’ed, and then brings in other users via Google search. More

Can older people be great entrepreneurs? Marc Andreesen has a great post on this age-old question. In part I, he’s digging through the data. Some of his observations are powerful and worth summarizing: "Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement. More

The option pool shuffle: beat the game and raise your valuation: Summary: Don’t let your investors determine the size of the option pool for you. Use a hiring plan to justify a small option pool, increase your share price, and increase your effective valuation. Focus on your share price, not your valuation Summary: Focus on your share price and the number of shares you own — metrics like valuation and percent ownership can fool you. More

The Google / YouTube looks like a win-win all around. Well, almost. Acquire the future of video on the Internet for roughly 1% of your market cap. Get $500M in escrow to protect against copyright lawsuits These are lawsuits that Google would probably have to defend YouTube against anyway, even if Google didn’t own YouTube. More

The Vast.com (developer) Preview is finally available! If you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to, here it is, in a nutshell – we are building a search service that extracts classified ads from across the web, structures them, and then makes them available via an open REST API for commercial and non-commercial uses. More

"We’re a movin’ on up,(We’re a movin on up.)To the east side.(Mo-vin on up.)To a de-luxe apartment,In the sky-.Mo-vin’ on up(Mo-vin on up.)To the east side,(Mo-vin on up.)We finally got a piece of the pie."   That’s right, Vast.com is moving! If you have a Web 2.0 company somewhere in SOMA or Mission and would like to sublease about 2000-3000 square feet of space, please contact me at [myfirstname]@[mylastname].[com]. More

I like Venture Capital. I really do. And even in the current bubble, Vijay, the World’s Most Desperate Venture Capitalist is a little exaggerated. But what am I supposed to do when I put a job posting on Craigslist and get the following response? “My name is XXXX XXXX, and I am a Principal with XXXXX, a venture capital firm based in XXXXXXXX. More

At some point when you have a startup, probably when raising money, you’ll HAVE to get a corporate lawyer. Most are hideously expensive and infuriating. A few tips: Don’t just go with the lawyer that the VCs upon. These lawyers will work with the VC on a hundred financings and with you on only one. More

Let’s get serious. Nobody works eighty hours a week. Not eighty real, productive hours. Look closely at workaholics (and I’ve been one, and worked with ones), and a lot of the time is spent idling, re-charging, cycling, switching gears, etc. In the old days this was water-cooler talk. In Silicon Valley, it’s gaming, email, IM, lunches, and idle meetings. More