Startup founders need inordinate amounts of passion to succeed. Passion is the self-created drug that inspires startup founders to press on during tough times. Since the startup roller coaster goes from incredible highs to suicidal lows in a matter of moments, it’s important to leverage passion as a driving force. But when is there too […]
The Startup CEOs Role: Decision Making
Ben Horowitz has a great post on his blog titled: How Andreesen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs. One of the key elements of their evaluation is decision-making. Here’s just a quick snippet from Ben’s post: Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed […]
Hiring a Chief Editor for a New Montreal Tech Startup Site
About 2 months ago I put out a suggestion that we bring Montreal Tech Watch back to life or something similar to it. The site helped people a lot, and I’d like to see that happen again. I’d like people to be able to discover the startup ecosystem in Montreal, find jobs, find co-founders, share […]
How To Pitch Your Startup to a Complete Stranger
Don’t. That’s my first reaction when I think about how to pitch a startup to a complete stranger. But that’s not the entire story. I get pitched a fair amount from people with startups or startup ideas. Oftentimes they’re interested in learning about how to raise financing. I try my best to read all the […]
Read Early Exits – Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors
If you’re an entrepreneur, working at a startup, or thinking about starting a company, you should read Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors by Basil Peters. Basil is leading the charge on demonstrating the values and benefits of early exits. He’s definitely showing people — with concrete examples — that early exits […]
Removing the Stigma Around Early Exits
Early exits are typically defined as those in the $15-$30M range. The average Web startup exit is in that range. Entrepreneurs and angel investors generally love early exits. Venture capitalists generally do not. And the reason is simple — If a startup manages to exit in that range with only a small amount of capital […]
Goals for 2010
Marc-Andre Cournoyer (ex-Standout employee, current CTO of SocialGrapes) doesn’t blog as much as he should. That’s a shame cause he’s a great guy, kick ass programmer, startup founder, and worth listening to. But he did write a post entitled Goals in March 2010 that got me thinking a lot about my own goals. I wasn’t […]
Startup Founders Can’t Live in Silos
The “classic” founding team for a startup is one business guy and one tech guy. Sounds logical but the model is flawed and risky. The risk is this: If either founder feels like they can live in their own silo (either business or tech), the startup will flounder and the likelihood of failure increases significantly. […]
Hiring a Ruby on Rails Developer for a New Startup
So here’s the scoop — I’m starting a new company. I can’t tell you the name (don’t have one), and can’t tell you what it’s about (not ready). I also can’t tell you who is involved (except for me, of course). I can tell you that it will have a strong mobile component. I realize […]
Enterprise Software Should Be Fun
Where does it say that enterprise software has to be boring, complicated and painful to use? Dave Concannon asks a much less rhetorical question in his blog post: Can Game Mechanics make Serious software “sticky”? There are two things I loved about Dave’s post: He talks about being addicted to MUDs. (Who wasn’t right? Hell, […]
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