Greg McAdoo discusses evaluating startup companies for investment at Sequoia Capital
At StartupSchool 2008, Greg McAdoo discusses evaluating startup companies for investment at Sequoia Capital.
This is the last video that I will feature from this series. To watch them all, head over to omnisio.com and watch the rest (The 'listen to your users' video by Paul Buchheit is particularly good although it is very similar to his SS2007 speech).
The basics of online personal branding
It is no secret that you have to be in charge of your own online personal brand: The image and message you convey to the world will stay with you forever.
If you put anything on the internet you can safely assume that it will be searchable and viewable forever.
With employers, vendors, friends, and potential co-founders all googling you, you need to be very aware of the all of the different channels in which your life is being streamed out over the internet (and off the internet).
Manage your privacy settings
Taking disqus for a spin
I have been quite impressed with Disqus.com lately. Their technology allows bloggers to permit commenters to use the same login ID across all the blogs that use it (and then present aggregate views, etc). Essentially, it is a blog commenter aggregator and authentication service.
Now when I troll around commenting my mind off on other blogs, I don't have to login at every corner. It solves a problem that needed to be solved.
Indeed, this move by disqus has really neat implications: This is one of the first applications where other websites have so freely passed on authentication and large chunks of data to a third party.
One of the big missing features in Disqus is a comment importer (i.e. Do you see my old comments? No... Exactly. I could not import them). Once they have this feature, this killer app will go serial killer app.
How to get, and how to respond to press for your startup
Mike Arrington, techcrunch godfather, on how to get and how to respond to press for your startup.
Gimme20.com: Seeking your input for a quick survey
I am working on the re-launch of a web community and know your opinions would be invaluable to this project. Would you participate in a quick, confidential survey? The survey will take no longer than 5 to 7 minutes of your time:
Thank you in advance for your thoughtful input and feel free to pass along this email.
Gimme20 Background (for which I am an investor):
Gimme20 (http://www.gimme20.com) is a social networking website focused on health and fitness, where people meet friends and attain their goals together. Gimme20 mixes together health and fitness tools, content and social networking:
1. Tools on Gimme20 help one set goals, build workouts and track progress; more tools and widgets will be added soon.
2. Content (articles, photos and video) is being organized around the following categories: Fitness; Diet/nutrition; Wellness; Injury/rehab; Community; and Health tools.
David Heinemeier Hansson on creating a profitable company
You'll recognize him as the creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and a Partner at 37Signals.com. Time will tell whether his Occam's Razor approach to features will keep the money flowing in.
Some great insights to the subscription based model (something that I think is excellent).
We need FriendFeed for the Enterprise
Friendfeed, is awesome. In a nutshell, in enables you to produce a feed of all your activity online from various disparate systems. Moreover, you can aggregate the activity feeds of all of your friends, or special feeds in 'rooms'.
It's a Facebook activity stream on crack.
For example, check out my feed that is pulling information from my blogs, delicious, LibraryThing, twitter, Google Talk amongst many others.
But how can the business world capitalize on activity feed technologies?
Why should you care?
Activity feeds are going to be a key technology going forward for managing employees, because they enable management to monitor people based on results and actions, rather than time. It could be one of the missing pieces to make results oriented work environments more marketable.
I have joined the Ascent for Alzheimer's 2009 team to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
My fiancee (Lindsay Snell) and I climbing to raise awareness and money to support research for Alzheimer's disease or related dementias (The Alzheimer's Society of BC does much more, but I've requested my funds raised go solely to research) . The climb represents the mountainous struggles that families face with this horrible disease. I know -- my family was one of them: I watched my vibrant mother June Willms fade away....
It's an incredible challenge to reach Africa's highest peak at 19,340 feet - and I'd appreciate your support to help me achieve my goal.
You can help me by making a secure online donation to the Alzheimer Society of B.C. using your credit card.
Click on the link below to support for curing the disease, and for this blog:
http://my.e2rm.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=1870600
Thanks for your support!
Jordan @ Sumolabs
9 tips for negotiating
Negotiating has a bad rap. "Negotiation" conjures up images of a "coke'd out" business man from the 80s aggressively and maliciously winning a deal by screwing the other party at the table.
The reality is that negotiation is much more 'touchy feely' than that. Furthermore, it is not applicable just in the business realm but in every facet of your life.
Take, for instance -- deciding which restaurant to with your friends: Everyone has different positions and underlying interests on what, where and when they would like to eat. Or, perhaps you are negotiating with your spouse to decide if a re-location it doable for both of you.
So, without further delay, here are my top 10 tips for negotiating based on the book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
