As my portfolio of angel investments grows I’m always thinking of ways I can help them out more. So I’ve decided to run a little experiment using this blog, by creating a very simple job board for my portfolio. Here are a list of jobs at companies I’ve invested in: http://www.instigatorblog.com/jobs/ There’s only 5 jobs […]
A Sense of Duty in Startups
I’ve never read a blog post about duty and startups (although I’m sure they’re out there), but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. Some people (founders and employees) have a sense of duty towards the work they do. Others do not. And that sense of duty is one of the elements that separates […]
Customer Support is the Ultimate Learning Experience
Last week I read a great blog post from the CEO of FullContact, Bart Lorang, about his company’s experience providing customer support. And then on Friday night I had one of the worst experiences ever at Pipa Restaurant in Halifax. I’ll never be going back there. Both the blog post from Bart, and the horrible […]
Design is Purpose Driven and Solves Problems
I’m not a designer. Or an expert in UX or UI. But as a product manager, it’s my job to understand how design (and UI/UX) can be applied to solving problems. (It’s also my job to have an opinion…hopefully an educated one!) A product manager’s job is to understand the problems faced by users/customers and […]
Leadership in Tough Times
The all-time most popular post on this blog is 10 Essential Business Leadership Skills. I wrote that in 2007. It ranks near the top of Google results for “leadership skills” (which is what drives most of the traffic). I’ve struggled from time-to-time since then with my own leadership abilities. Writing ideas down about how to […]
Resurfacing Old Blog Content
The most frustrating thing about writing blog content is that it typically “disappears” after a couple days. Some very popular posts last much longer (I have a couple that are near the top of Google for common searches), but most don’t get a lot of long tail attention. In some cases the content does get […]
How to Avoid the Post-Funding Trough
Yesterday I wrote about how the size of seed investments impacts the likelihood of raising a Series A round. The data shows that raising a seed round under $300k gives you a very small chance of raising a Series A. I’ve always thought that small seed rounds are risky, because it doesn’t give you enough […]
Size Matters in Seed Investments
Tomasz Tunguz has done a great analysis of the likelihood of follow on financing based on the size of your seed round. You need to check it out, and just read his blog in general, it’s awesome. What Tomasz has found from analyzing thousands of deals (from Crunchbase) is that there’s only a 12% chance […]
Connecting Founders
With nine portfolio companies (and one fund), I’ve got about 15 founders that I’ve invested in. And while a few of them know each other already, most don’t. It strikes me as odd how little founders are connected through their investors (and by extension, how little the investors in a company are connected, particularly at […]
Launch Your Startup When You’ve Already Won
The tech industry is overly-obsessed with making noise, being self-congratulatory and too often, focused on the wrong things. We look at PR as a big win. We celebrate financings (although we also spill plenty of digital ink about not celebrating them too; and yet they’re common on tech news sites). There’s a time and place […]
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