ipo

Facebook IPOs As Angels In Heaven Sing

1 day ago by Derek Andersen

Well like everyone else I’m watching the Facebook coverage today. There are some great resources for getting all the latest info. Techcrunch has some and CNN has a pretty cool style slideshow on who is richer as of this morning.

As I reflect on Facebook more than seven years after I first signed up, it’s amazing that they were able to hold out to reach this date. Mark and his team deserve the great financial reward coming their way. This company should have been a Viacom or Yahoo! property years ago but they stuck it out and here we are in 2012. So much for the Palo Alto housing bubble – looks like a new one just started.

Watch live streaming video from nasdaq at livestream.com
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Community

Lean Startup Methods: Hot or Not?

4 days ago by Michael Cayley

Eric Ries is in Toronto today so we are trying to determine where the tires hit the road with lean startup methods between startups and investors.

I am a lean startup fanboy.  We use customer development methods for Cdling and I attended the most recent DemoDay for Ann Miura-Ko and Steve Blank’s engineering class at Stanford.

While still a class, teams were pitching real businesses, some had already received or were close to closing seed financing.

All of these “pitches” included business model canvas slides and they can get over 50,000 views on slideshare! Blank says that no business plan withstands contact with customers.

“We are not trying to be hip.” says Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech. “We are just trying to use the right tools.  For most startups we are not seeing business plans.  It’s not an appropriate tool.” Read more →

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Community

Kauffman Confirms the VC Shakeup that OMERS Predicted

4 days ago by Michael Cayley

Storm Coming

The Kauffman Foundation just released an indictment of the way big investors (like pension funds and foundations) place their money with venture capital firms.  In a report entitled, “We Have Met the Enemy … and he is us.” Kauffman calls into question some of the VC world’s most accepted ideas.

“To fix what’s broken in the LP investment model, institutional investors will need to become more selective and more disciplined investors in venture capital funds. The best investors will negotiate better alignment, transparency, governance, and terms that take into account the skewed distribution of VC fund returns.” says Kauffman in their report.

To that end, Kauffman says its new approach to venture capital investing will be:

  • Invest in funds of less than $400-million (mc: like FloodGate, USV and 500Startups?).
  • Develop a small portfolio of direct investments in startups.
  • Directly co-invest in later round deals.
  • Shrink the size of their allocation to venture capital. Read more →
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Startups

Can This Founder Become The Martha Stewart Of Asia?

May 4, 2012 by Derek Andersen

I first met Dina Yuen in a coffee shop in San Francisco in early 2011. She was an early member of Commonred and as was typical operating procedure I would meet with any of the first 5,000 users that emailed me. I was shocked upon meeting her to hear of an insanely ambitious idea: she wanted to become the Martha Stewart of Asia. The goal was shockingly huge but I quickly realized that Dina was the type of person that just might be able to pull it off.

Asian Fusion is a media company that bills itself as a one stop shop for all Asian related topics. They have recipes, travel recommendations, fashion, etertainment, and more. My favorite series they publish is the MVA – Most Valuable Asian. I hope to someday be featured.

Read more →

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Startups

How One Silicon Valley Startup Used Twitter to Recover From a Robbery in 7 Minutes

May 2, 2012 by Derek Andersen

Well it turns out Silicon Valley isn’t full of dirtbags after all. Zach Klein the founder of DIY and former founder of Vimeo, tweeted out this morning that their San Francisco office got robbed last night when someone broke a window and stole their computers. But a startup can’t slow production just because they don’t have any equipment for a week or so while they order it.

Within two minutes Path founder Dave Morin had tweeted the message out to his +300K followers and as they say the rest is history. People started chiming in from everywhere. VCs and founders offering office space, equipment, and more. Within 7-minutes the team had the four computers they needed to keep work going this week. Lets just hope their code was on Github. Read more →

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Silicon Valley

Circle’s People Discovery App Puts Emphasis On Design And Networks

April 26, 2012 by Derek Andersen



First Look: I’ve wanted to write about Circle for months and now my chance has finally come. Circle is a location aware iPhone app that released a few weeks ago that helps you find people to meet in the networks that are most meaningful to you. When I sat down with CEO Evan Reas a few months ago, I was immediately struck by how beautiful this application is.  Hawthorn Labs, the parent company behind the app, has always had great design, but this app takes it to the next level. Read more →

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Startups

Advice on Advice

April 25, 2012 by Guest Contributor

***This post was written by Perri Gorman the founder of Archive.ly and the founding member of the NYC Chapter of Startup Grind*** 

 

Advice is a funny thing.  We seek it. We get lots of it. And yet it is unbelievably overwhelming and confusing.

Most advice comes from personal experience.  So I’ll chime in here with my own two cents.

I’m working on a new startup that incorporates the culmination of all my years of experience as a professional and yet, with startups there is something new to learn everyday.  One of the ways I learn is through talking to people I respect and trust.  (Ok, I am also newly addicted to lynda.com for all the things I wish I had learned in college.)   Read more →

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Startups

High Pinterest, NBC Nightly News Features Silicon Valley’s Hottest Startup

April 20, 2012 by Derek Andersen

NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams featured red hot Pinterest tonight on the national news showing off their Palo Alto office and some of the users of the site. The interview also features Robert Scoble and some footage from our Startup Grind fireside chat with founder and CEO Ben Silbermann in February.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Startups

Madlibs for Pitching

April 16, 2012 by Joel Fernandes

Good reminder to get focused on your core idea and keep your startup pitch on message. Via Founders Institute.

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acquisitions

Instagram Co-Founders Are Young, Widely Praised, And Very, Very Rich

April 10, 2012 by Guest Contributor

***This post was written by Peter Delevett and appeared at WireTap in the San Jose Mercury***

 

When word broke Monday morning that Facebook was buying a tiny San Francisco startup for $1 billion, many asked: “Who are these guys?”

Instagram, which makes a wildly popular app to turn mobile-phone photos into mini works of art, has a staff that barely tops a dozen. And at the top of the org chart are a pair of co-founders just a few years removed from their Stanford undergraduate days. Read more →

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