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Beg, Borrow, or Steal (Okay, Maybe not) Your Way into O'Reilly (Pt. 2)
The SF O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo was a defining moment for me, and for my startup. True, I was just a noob there. I thought I knew what I was doing with my social networking app. But from the workshop...
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Working the Workshops
There are tons of informative sessions at Web 2.0 Expo. I especially like the Day 1 workshops. Maybe it’s the no-break, three-hour block . . . the fewer tracks . . . or the reduced traffic, since a...
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Lessons Learned — Scaling Social Systems
My charter with Venture Files is to contribute to and promote entrepreneurship and the startup scene around DC in general. Now, as I’ve warned, my posts may reveal my bias towards the Web 2.0 world....
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What's a Social App Developer to do?
To Mike Lazerow, CEO of new-age ad agency BuddyMedia, Facebook is the future. Big brands trying to reach the world’s 500,000,000 social network members are ringing his phone off the hook, because his...
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DC Needs a Fred. Any Takers?
Profiled in Sunday’s New York Times, Union Square Ventures‘ Fred Wilson is a legend of contemporary venture capital — a title previously reserved for West Coast luminaries like Moritz and Doerr, and...
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Investor-Entrepreneur Dialoguing
The blogs and twitters of prominent angels and early-stage VCs around the country point up the contrast between the old-school, opaque nature of entrepreneur-investor relations, and the kind of...
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Pony in the Pile
This week’s Interact 2008 conference — all things interactive media — began upbeat enough, with Ted Leonsis‘s inspirational keynote signaling an ‘anything’s possible, mix-and-mashup’ world of...
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Chapter 11, Pt. 1: To File, or Not to File?
It’s a timely topic, but when asked to detail my experience with Chapter 11, the line that came to mind was from the end of ‘Misery’, when James Caan is lunching with his agent: “Gee, if I didn’t know...
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Chapter 11, Pt. 2: Hard Lessons from the Chapter
This is a continuation of the series that began with Chapter 11: To File or Not to File Convinced that we could get all our creditors’ cooperation without formally filing for protection under Chapter...
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Startups Need Management, Too
Prospectors joining the dot-com gold rush in the ’90s were mainly coming from large organizations seeking to capture some of the new wealth. But along with the promises of stock options and casual...
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Get a Management System — Now
This is a continuation of the series that began with Startups Need Management, Too All the warnings about the forthcoming next nuclear winter for startups drive home the need for a management system....
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Startup Layoffs — The Unkindest Cut
Last week, Seesmic let seven of its 21 employees go — a full third of the company. Were they in a crisis? Depends on how you look at it. CEO Loic LeMeur had raised $12M, a Series B $6M of which came in...
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Startup Layoffs, Pt. 2 — Two Perspectives
There are two sides to every story, and two unenviable roles to a firing. While I don’t expect newly aroused sympathies to change anything, awareness of each other’s perspective can help make the...
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Monetize . . . or Die?
A few months ago, my pitch to Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) for their GAP funding program was turned down. I actually thought I had a fighting chance, having worked with the good...
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Not All Team Players Pulling Their Weight?
Are all your team members equally pulling their weight? It comes up all the time — I’ve had the issue myself — and it was common enough for a few startup CEOs to throw together an ad hoc session at...
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Damn the Economy — Full Speed Ahead!
Random-sampling the mix of entrepreneurs who made it to OpenCoffeeDC earlier this week, the wretched economy has deterred um, let’s see — no one. Gotta love that entrepreneurial spirit! Optimism still...
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Creative Ideas for Capital
A great side-effect of entrepreneurs’ optimism in tough times is creativity. At our OpenCoffeeDC last week, discussions got lively when talk turned to bootstrapping — not just self-funding, but all...
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I Love Social Networking, But . . .
As the song goes, it don’t pay my bills. So I signed on with a startup that does. Hopefully, I can do both (time permitting). But talk about two different worlds . . . Hardware, not software....
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Bubble, bubble, bubble – In Private Equity not Web 2.0 (Classic)
This is the first in an ongoing “Venture Files Classics” written by former Venture Files Editor Steven Fisher. The selections are chosen for historical reference as well as a notorious ability to be...
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Term Sheets Series Introduction (Classic)
We continue our Venture Files Classics Series – posts written by Steven Fisher prior to Venture Files joining Technosailor.com – that are either great analysis pieces, or have offered some level of...
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