Funny

Get Inspired: Worf (Star Trek) Would Have Made A Great Entrepreneur

19 hours ago by Derek Andersen

Tell me how many times you’ve been rejected and I’ll tell you whether or not you’re going to survive the startup gauntlet. Colonel Sanders is said to have been rejected over 1,000 times over 9-years as he perfected his fried chicken recipe that would go on the feed and fatten thousands of Americans with the KFC franchise.

As the Chief of Security on the USS Enterprise-D, Worf takes abuse from what seems like every angle possible. He gets talked down to by the captain, Klingons, children, a pregnant woman, even Geordi La Forge (WTF Geordi?!). All the while he maintains his cool calm demeanor and carries on with what he needs to do. Below is a compilation of his greatest moments of trial and it’s a good reminder for entrepreneurs feeling beaten down. In fairness you could also say that he would have made a great yes-man at a big company, but that kind of ruins my blog post. Dang.

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Events

Common Event Problems You Can Avoid

19 hours ago by Todd Allen

So you’ve got your new company.  You want to have an event and show off and introduce people to what you’re doing.  You want to have an event.  It’s not really that hard, but there are five things I’ve noticed around town that you might want to think about while planning your shindig. Read more →

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Watch Out Scoble Is Angry About GlassMap’s Facebook Sharing

21 hours ago by Derek Andersen

Scoble seems to be getting more and more angry as the year progresses – and we’re only to February! Now it’s about GlassMap and their automatic Facebook wall posting. If he’s right about what GlassMap is doing then I full heartedly agree. If users want to create viral loops they need to do it in a way that directly enhances the product experience and they have to do it in a way that makes users want to share the product. Think about what DropBox does – each time you share you directly improve the product (ie – more space for my account). What GlassMap appears to be doing is probably wrong, but more importantly it is extremely lazy product development. Scoble’s video rant below.

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Startups

The Law of three for creating faithful users

1 day ago by Jay Marcyes

For a content site, be it a tech news site like this one or a social networking site like Twitter. Attracting–and keeping–users is the hardest thing they do. Scaling? Hiring? Securing funding? That’s all cake compared to getting millions of people to use their product, which is the new baseline for success.

In all my internet travels, I’ve seen a lot of content sites come and go, I’ve even tried my hand at one of my own, and one thing all content sites have in common is how they turn a random visitor into a loyal user–and also how they lose that same user later down the road. I call this pattern the law of three:

  1. A user has to visit a site three times to become a loyal user.
  2. A user needs to find three interesting things each visit.
  3. A loyal user is lost if they don’t find three interesting things three times in a row Read more →
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New York

Meetup.com Yearly Revenue Tops $30MM

1 day ago by Derek Andersen

Exclusive: Meetup.com is one of my top seven websites for two reasons. First, they have simple and effective tools to manage and update a like-minded community. Second, they are one of the best sites to help you move from the online space and into the real world. When you sign up a group you have to check a box that says you will have real world in-person meetings. Meetup is also a poster child for the NYC tech scene and tech companies that emerged from the dot-com ashes. Now ten years since the site was conceived and under development, Meetup.com is printing money every single day. I conservatively estimate they’re doing somewhere between $25MM-$30MM each year and here’s why. Read more →

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Events

Startup Grind Needs You! Calling Seattle, Boulder, Boston, and Chicago.

2 days ago by Derek Andersen

We have taken Startup Grind far and wide and now have thriving communities in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. Now we want to take it to the next level. We’re looking for community leaders in Salt Lake City, Chicago, Seattle, Boulder, Boston, and others around the US and internationally. If you’re looking to help lead the startup community in your area then drop me a line at: derek at startup.com and lets get you on the team.

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Silicon Valley

Good Luck Getting A Job At Pinterest Unless You Work At Facebook.

2 days ago by Derek Andersen

Want a job at Pinterest? Good luck with that. According to sources we’ve spoken with inside the company they are getting about 100 inbound resumes each day. All open jobs are engineering related from iOS, to front-end, software, and DevOps engineers. They’re focused on hiring top Silicon Valley talent going after Stanford, Google, and Apple engineers. I have also been hearing that they’re hiring from Facebook as fast as they can. With the Facebook office recently relocating just outside of Palo Alto, and Pinterest’s office down off University Avenue in Palo Alto doesn’t seem like a hard sell. A few years ago Arrington wrote about engineers that run from startup to startup cashing in along the way. Pinterest is the latest hot startup and the engineers are running as fast as they can to get in. With about 15-employees and a $200MM valuation from last October when they only had 4-5MM monthly users, the upside is still tremendous.

 

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News

The Beginning Of The End? Hacker News Adds a Bookmarklet.

3 days ago by Derek Andersen

Bookmarklets are all the rage. They’re simple to build, easy to use, and give users a good reason to add you to their Bookmark Bar and into their top 10-20 sites. Pinterest is driving bookmarklet awareness and usage, but I’ve seen a number of Beta sites that are using it including our own Commonred and Stash. Now Hacker News has one thanks to Phil Kast. What will be interesting to see is if this contributes to a slow painful death of the core Hacker News community.

To date HN has wisely held off on creating a social sharing plugin for website to easily get more up votes (similar to Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other social site). This has helped it maintain the quality and core developer audience but also containing its growth. This is by design. Hacker News can drive anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of pageviews to anyone that gets into the top 2-3 spots on the homepage. This number has increased dramatically over the past few years. The value to publishers of exploiting the site for easier ways to get votes is massive. Adding a bookmarklet is one small step in that direction.

Read more →

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Silicon Valley

Steve Blank’s New Book: The Startup Owner’s Manual

5 days ago by Derek Andersen

If you’ve lived in Silicon Valley for more than a few months you’ve heard Steve Blank speak at least once. Whether at the Stanford BASES Lecture Series which he runs or a random Palo Alto meetup, Steve Blank is a staple of the Valley’s startup community. He has been part of 8-venture backed startups, four of which went public. He also penned the book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” which is the blueprint for rapid iteration, customer feedback, and making sure you have identified the customer base and product market fit before you do anything else.

Well he’s back with a new book called The Startup Owner’s Manual. Read more →

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Events

Last Chance to Get A VIP Meeting With Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis

6 days ago by Derek Andersen

Today is the final day to vote for the VIP contest with Milk’s Kevin Rose and Launch’s Jason Calacanis. Both contests have been highly contested for the past 3-weeks. Kevin has been gracious enough to meet with the top 5 companies and we have a heated battle between Runby.me, TINYaddr, Rsrve.me, Boing, A Star Rewards, and SplitP. Read the startup pitches and vote for your favorite ones. Kevin Rose spoke at our Silicon Valley event and Jason spoke at the Los Angeles event in January.

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