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 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 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 [...]

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 A few years ago, a friend of mine founded a startup with a long-time colleague who was a great salesman. It turned out that the Web 2.0 business my friend was running didn’t actually require those sales skills and so after a few months he had to let this person go. That could have [...]

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 [...]