Archive: June, 2010

Design The Founder Conference T-Shirt and Win 2 Tickets

Tweet The Founder Conference 2010 is going to be big! (More on that later). If you want to get in for free because you are on a budget (like all founders), here’s a way: design the t-shirts for the conference, and get 2 tickets (presumably, for you and your co-founder) free. Plus you’ll earn the [...]

How My Startup Went IPO And Skipped VC Funding (A Story)

Tweet My startup needed to raise $500K to expand our marketing efforts and get the word out. Raising the money was quite easy: I issued some new shares and listed them on StartupIPOs.com. It’s a marketplace for accredited investors. Startups that need funding list their offerings, and people buy their shares. The price is set [...]

Will You Be a Great Entrepreneur? How I Can Tell From Your Resume

Tweet Being an entrepreneur is quite popular these days, in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Everyone thinks they have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. As part of my work with the Founder Institute in Paris, figuring out who will build a great startup is a big topic. Your resume can tell. I know, it [...]

Stanford Expo a Welcome Change to Web Startups

Tweet Last Thursday I attended Stanford Design EXPE, where a dozen teams of students present the result of their 9 months of innovative work in relation with a corporate sponsor. The twist is that all projects must build a hardware prototype (I guess because it’s linked to the Mechanical Engineering department). For me, it was [...]

No One Told Me What Being an Entrepreneur Really Means

Tweet There are lots of myths and dreams attached to starting a company. Will you be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg? Will you negotiate million dollars rounds of financing with cool VCs? This is what starting a company really means: e-mailing 100 strangers a day, every day. For the foreseeable future. That’s it. [...]