Tweet If you are like me, you like the new startup community formed at OnStartups.com. Lots of questions from people looking into creating or advancing their startup, and lots of good answers. However, a promise from Dharmesh, the founder, was that “startup stars” would participate: I have a long list of exceptional entrepreneurs I know [...]

Tweet If you are curious about maybe one day doing your own startup, you should know about a new discussion site called Answers OnStartups. It uses StackOverflow’s software but focuses on the art of starting your own company. The only previous decent online forum covering that topic is the Business of Software forum of Joel [...]

Tweet Below is a question from an entrepreneur, edited to protect the innocent (if you are a member of TheFunded.com, you can read the complete thread): Q: An investor has been pressing me to invest and needs A DECISION IN THE NEXT DAY OR TWO, plus he is reminding me to stop publicizing my site [...]

Tweet Good programmers don’t need marketing. Great applications sell themselves. I used to think that way too. When I was an R&D engineer, I wrote the code. I made the product. I thought that sales and marketing were basically overhead. Then I switched sides, worked with sales people for a while, and witnessed how hard [...]

Tweet Today I joined a group of European entrepreneurs on their visit to Sun, hosted by the Sun Startup Essentials program. We were treated with a one hour Q&A session with Scott McNealy, chairman of Sun. He was very engaged, passionate and very willing to give advice, answer straight questions and address difficult issues. I [...]

Tweet Attending the Founder Institute is great for the brain: every session contains nuggets of wisdom and tricks that we can all apply to our current projects. This week, the topic was market research. The discussion included a two-box metric to find out if you have a real market or a niche. At some point, [...]

Tweet Time to celebrate! We just recorded the one thousand Fair Job: a social member website is looking for a website programmer. While we are at it, it’s also been about 1,000 days since we embarked on the Fair adventure. Yes, about 3 years ago, we came up with the concept that you see today. [...]

Tweet If you are like 99% of software developers with a great idea, you don’t live next to Google headquarters in Mountain View or drive by Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto on your daily commute. But Silicon Valley still rules the world of Internet startups, so you should probably check it out. Don’t expect to [...]

Tweet If you read this blog regularly, you know that I am a big fan of entrepreneurs. I believe that everyone should get a chance to pursue their ideas, even if they don’t live in the right place (Silicon Valley) or don’t have the right friends (VCs or rich angels). If you are smart and [...]

Tweet Y-Combinator started sending rejection e-mails last night. TechStars was notifying 475 companies last week with the same bad news. If you are like almost everyone else, you didn’t make it. Now what? Exactly what did you lose by not making it to one of those two prestigious startup accelerator programs? Money You didn’t receive [...]