Tweet When I co-founded my previous company, I had the hardest time interviewing candidates for sales positions. We went through four different VP of Sales in the first two years. One of them had no qualms about putting complete fabrications on his resume. If you are like many software geeks, you find the company of [...]

Tweet Finding a great idea for your startup or Fair Project is the first step to a captivating journey. Sharing your idea with others is the first step to success. Many software developers I meet are so scared to have their idea stolen that they refuse to tell you anything at all. Reality Check Do [...]

Tweet Few people know that during the dot-com bubble, I tried to start a company about annotating the web, so that your friends could influence what you see. It makes sense to think that the web by itself is too large and needs to be personalized. So I got very interested when I saw Austin [...]

Tweet We all have big dreams. Mine is to help millions of entrepreneurs succeed together using FairSoftware, our website. To get there, web 2.0 experts will tell you that your traffic will increase over time as you keep working hard. It’s true, but this also suggests that the road to the top is through small, [...]

Tweet Earlier this week one of our users posted a software project that I found particularly interesting. We all hate spam. The concept is to provide means from Outlook to generate temporary and unique e-mail addresses, just like one-time credit card numbers avoid exposing authentic credit card numbers when shopping online. What’s new is the [...]

Tweet FairSoftware’s blog has multiple authors. Our FairBlogs users, by definition, have multiple authors. Adding authors or writers to your blog is a great way to get a head start on all the other bloggers out there. But I’m not yet satisfied with how WordPress manages multiple authors. My wishlist: Scheduling: I need an easy [...]

Tweet I’m excited to announce that we have a new member of the Fair Software team. Ricardo has agreed to work with us and will be helping to add features to our service and to make it easier to use. Ricardo and I worked together at a startup many years ago. Back then we used [...]

Tweet TechCrunch’s coverage of our new Fair Blogs has generated quite a bit of discussion on the best way to compensate a bloggers network. My Page, My Ads A popular view is that each blogger should be paid for the pages they write. Essentially, if you wrote the entry, the ads on that page are [...]

Tweet My worst memory of the first startup I co-founded? Writing the final check to the lawyer to close the company. It was in 2000, toward the end of the dot-com bubble. We had done everything by the book to start our company: each of the four co-founders wrote a $1,000 check and our lawyer [...]

Tweet Having a great idea is a prerequisite before embarking on the startup adventure. (While John Nesheim is correct that the Internet has made unique ideas less likely, I’ll respectfully disagree with Paul Graham’s view that great ideas are overrated). But how can you tell that your idea is the right one? In my experience, [...]