Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A slightly shorter version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch ). As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativit

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 2, 2011

Back in the 60’s, JFK make a bold proclimation that we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The details of exactly how this was going to happen were a bit sketchy, but having a big hairy audacious goal galvanized the innovation community into achieving something spectacular. In today’s world, one of the bottlenecks we have to innovation is the lack of software development talent.

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Berkonomics

JANUARY 24, 2011

Reduce the emotion; reduce the threat of lawsuit. You’ve certainly experienced the angry outburst from an associate or employee who has just learned of an event that the person took as “unfair”, no matter how rational the explanation by the decision maker. Most emotional responses to decisions in business are generated not because the person making the response feels the decision was unwise, but rather unfair.

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For Entrepreneurs

JANUARY 13, 2011

An interview with Lesley Young, who was the VP of worldwide Sales for MySQL, and then head of sales for the MySQL division within Oracle. Few products are as well known as the ubiquitous MySQL database. The company behind the database was also one of the great success stories in the Open Source world, and [.].

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 18, 2011

What a sweet feeling it was last week to see the launch of the photo sharing site Pose , whose application targets shoppers of apparel. If you don’t know it and own an iPhone (soon Android) please check it out. What I’d like to do is tell you the story of how the investment came to be, what my thesis is / was and share some thoughts on macro trends.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 23, 2011

One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask about when they raise a little bit of money or are getting close to launching their first product is whether they should hire a PR firm. There is obviously no black-or-white answer, but I’ve tried everything from working a large international agency, to hiring in-house people to doing it myself.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2011

If you want a very quick primer on all the stuff nobody ever tells you about raising venture capital check out this video where Mark Jeffrey & I break it down on This Week in VC. A summary of what we discussed is below: Not 100% in order of the video, but close. All of this is covered in more detail on the TWiVC video above (and much of it is covered in text on this blog on the “ Raising VC &# tab). 1.

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 1, 2011

This year, I’ll attend my 10 year college reunion. My oldest friend, of 25 years, is getting married. My parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. I will be competing in my third triathlon and aiming to break 2:30—10 minutes faster than 2010. I will start the year on the board of a yet to be announced investment and as an observer on four other companies.

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 24, 2011

Yesterday, First Round had its annual CEO Summit. One of the cool things about being a fund that works with so many early stage companies is that bringing the whole portfolio together in one place results in a lot of collaborative learning opportunities. One of the topics that was discussed in a breakout session was recruiting. From what I've seen, most companies simply don't get enough people in the top of the funnel.

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JANUARY 28, 2011

Texting has become an integral part of mobile communications for most people--so much so that it has replaced a lot of voice calls. Why call when you can just send a quick text? Yet there are signs that texting's days are numbered. To be clear, the desire to send and receive short messages isn't going away--but the need to send them via the SMS protocol may become extinct.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2011

I recently filmed a show for This Week in Venture Capital in which I talked about how to prepare for a VC meeting: whom you’ll meet, who should attend from your side, what materials you should bring and how you should run the meeting. I wrote the summary notes in this blog post. That notes only told part of the story. Bijan Sabet – investor & board member in some small companies you might have heard of like Twitter, Tumblr, Boxee & OMGPOP – took issue with the whole n

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 20, 2011

I was having a chat with an entrepreneur who I really like and who I try to mentor from time-to-time. He has an interesting business and one that has a viable shot at being an innovative & profitable business. One problem. He’s struggling to raise money. This is extra frustrating in an era in which all you read about is how frothy the VC / funding market is these days.

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 12, 2011

Let’s face it: Sales are the bastard stepchild of the startup world. While everyone was buzzing about the Verizon iPhone, there was a short mention (Thanks Peter!) about a New York company called Salescrunch that we funded. It was an order of magnitude smaller funding than what Formspring raised to take yet another crack at the Q & A Holy Grail, and much less than what Klout raised to measure influence in the Twitter ecosystem, so it didn’t get a lot of buzz.

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financing

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JANUARY 9, 2011

Five years ago, I started nextNY with the idea that it would be participant driven--that the community would take an active role in managing itself. I think that we've done a decent job with that, and we have a number of examples of individuals who have used it as a leadership platform, but it isn't as much of a leader factory as I had hoped. With that in mind, I tried to come up with a structure and set of incentives to make it easier for new up and coming faces in the crowd to step up and make

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 5, 2011

I’m sure danah and Alice can talk about this more intelligently, but I was thinking yesterday about the way people grow up and how that affects their perception of strangers. dahah has written a lot about “ stranger danger ” and how it relates to use of the internet and I’m a big believer that we’re making younger generations fear the outside world to their own detriment.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2011

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”. The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 3, 2011

In Where Good Ideas Come From , Steven Johnson writes about expanding your possibilities simply by moving forward: “Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original star

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technology

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2011

It’s clear that if you use Twitter wisely it can have an impact on how you physically experience your world. You have to put effort into building meaningful connections and contributing back but if you do the rewards can be handsome. Here’s my story. Every year I spend the December holidays in Annapolis with my in-laws. My second son Andy’s birthday is December 28th so we spend his birthday Back East every year.

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JANUARY 18, 2011

When I first bought my iPad about two weeks ago, I took quite a bit of ribbing. It was my first Apple purchase since my original Classic iPod. I'm a PC guy through and through. Its what we had in our house back in 1987 and I used PCs through my finance career as well. I didn't get an iPhone mostly because I didn't want to switch my Sprint coverage, which I've found to be excellent in NYC.

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Berkonomics

JANUARY 17, 2011

It can take 18 months from initial concern about a critical employee to getting a replacement up to speed. This insight is not mine, although I have experienced it several times with key employees since becoming sensitive to the concept. An old friend, Dick Tanaka, gets credit for this one. He observed that the process we follow to be humane in our handling of underperforming employees, manage the risk of future lawsuit, finally then move to separate the employee, define the open position, rec

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This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 11, 2011

I was having a great conversation with Jason Schwartz the other night about Quora --how the current Quora community feels a lot like Twitter did in the early days. Conversation is of high quality and it's really easy to find thoughtful contributors. We both agreed that the overall quality of what we find on Twitter is down from where it was. Don't get me wrong, Twitter is still a big part of my communication infrastructure and a valuable resourse, but I now have to use a myriad of tools to use t

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JANUARY 21, 2011

NYC - Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

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JANUARY 4, 2011

I feel like some kind of a social media-enabled product wiki should be able to help with this, but until then, I’ll do this here. About a year and a half ago, I bought a used Trek 1000 for like $250. I would say that it was about two or three years old at the time. I used it in my triathlon and 4-5 days a week as my commuter bike. Basically, I’ve beat the hell out of it.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2011

Lately the topic of leadership & teams has been coming up a lot in my daily life. Some investors are team focused, others market focused, others seems to look for product / market fit. I’m in the team centric sphere so every investment decision I make first & foremost centers on this plane. Only then can I even care about product, market or their nebulous “fit.&#.

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Berkonomics

JANUARY 9, 2011

How many of us have “hired” independent contractors over the years, a bit worried over the gray area between employee and contractor as defined by the IRS? I’ve experienced the results of a wrong decision, and the IRS and state agencies are not forgiving in their pursuit of penalties, interest and most damaging, assessing a company with both the employer and employee taxes when reclassifying the person as an employee.

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