Tweet Inventions are hard to come up with. If there was a method to find them, it would be patented. Many people have heard the story of how the Mac user interface was born: Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and was shown some basic window-based computer. It was a short demo. When he went home, [...]

Tweet My post on how to land a job at Google hit a nerve: 10,000 people read it in a day. I posted it on Hacker News, where it got reasonably popular, got picked up by Reddit, and for some reason became the most controversial item of the day — although it wasn’t meant to [...]

Tweet Can I pay you to delay your tweets by say, 60 seconds? Why? Because some people will pay to read your tweets before everyone else. Sixty seconds is not long, but it’s the difference between free and millions of dollars of revenue. Here’s how it works. Imagine a new premium Twitter client. It costs [...]

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 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 If you have been reading startup advice long enough, you surely noticed two trends repeated ad nauseum. Iterate Quickly Also known as “kill ideas fast”, this advice is saying that your idea is probably not worth the pixels it’s displayed on. Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution matters. You’d be better off with [...]

Tweet Today we are excited to announce an enhancement to the way you create projects with FairSoftware. Many of you asked us for a more flexible way to add co-founders early on and offer more flexibility on the allocation of shares, since you haven’t always found all your co-founders by the time you have your [...]

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 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, [...]