Tweet I had to try a little bit of advertising for the Founder Conference on August 17, to see if I could spread the word beyond our usual partners such as Startup Weekend, VentureBeat, Startup Digest and so on. I had used both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads in the past but it was a [...]
Tweet Steve Jobs. Guy Kawasaki. Paul Graham. They draw crowds every time they speak at a conference. When I put together the Founder Conference (August 17th in Silicon Valley, in case you haven’t heard yet), securing a line-up of great speakers was very important. I am trying to help as many aspiring entrepreneurs build the best startups [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Tweet Yesterday night at the Microsoft campus was a great edition of the Founder Showcase. The evening started with a tell-all keynote on freemium business models from Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote. He candidly shared information that is usually impossible to get, such as how many users convert to paying customers or how much [...]
Tweet I was on the Paris subway, returning from one of the first sessions of the Founder Institute there. Sitting next to me was one of the founders. Something was bothering him. He finally asked: “why do you put so much emphasis on market size? The team, and surely other aspects must be equally important [...]
Tweet I love advising early-stage startups. A question I get frequently is “how to formalize bringing a co-founder on board.” I could write a book on the topic, but it’s really much simpler than that. Here’s how you do it in one tweet: @joe I expect this co-founder position to be worth ~30% equity. My [...]
