I am enjoying the blog of Harvard Assistant Professor Noam Wasserman and if you are a founder, entrepreneur, or venture capitalist you may appreciate his research into founder frustrations. He covers economic concepts of stewardship theory and agency theory from a startup’s point of view. Past topics: Founder-CEO succession Co-founder issues Hiring and scaling challenges Communicating with investors Building a board of directors Entrepreneurial compensation Case studies Graphs, charts, hard data, and real stories. Enjoy! Tags: startups…
Category Archives: Business
Linuxcaffe serves up coffee and Ubuntu
Linuxcaffe is a small Toronto café with free WiFi, organic food, and lessons in Python and Ubuntu with a view of the park. You can burn any of over 80 linux distributions, rent a laptop, and become a member of the café with benefits such as hard drive backup privileges and web hosting. It’s serving the community in unique ways and has become a geek tourist landmark. I especially like the membership features of the café similar to what I proposed in my elements of an ideal café blog post a few months ago. Photo by mtl3p Tags: internetcafe…
Continued interests
I’ve been digging into a few new areas of interest over the past few months I feel still need improvement in search, discovery and tracking. I’ve spoken about most of these topics in my podcast series with Om, but it’s worth mentioning again in text. I’m interested in continuing my work in these areas and perhaps helping to solve some existing problems. Feeds We have RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0, the world is starting to understand how syndicated content makes sense, but I don’t see a lot of future thinking for handling multiple locations, personas, and personalized content. Advertising is…
Seeking new horizons
I am leaving Technorati to pursue new opportunities. I submitted my resignation letter this morning and I will be a free agent on March 1. I joined Technorati in February 2005 excited about changing the world of weblogs and introducing people to a new kind of search. Almost a year later my passions at work have eroded and it’s time to find new horizons. Valentines Day is the perfect time to rekindle lost flames. The company has accomplished a lot in the past year, emerging from what many people viewed as a commodity space into a market leader. The Alexa…
Startup round-up
Om and I discussed the latest startup companies that caught our interest in our latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions. We talked about some companies presenting at the DEMO conference as well as companies who are bootstrapping to deliver an interesting new product with a different approach. The startup round-up podsession is 22 minutes in length, a 10 MB download. A full transcript is also available. Tags: podcastsmallbusinessstartups…
Site redesign complete!
I’ve been a bit quiet over the past week while making some changes under the hood of this website. This morning I unveiled a new site design I hope will convey a more professional look and experience for everyone viewing my pages in a web browser. I wanted to add more visual structure to each post to match what I try to accomplish in my markup. I wanted to help visitors discover new sections of the site and click around a bit to learn more. I also wanted to improve the friendliness of search and commenting. I worked with…
Dog.com buys Fish.com for $1 million
Chris Andersen: “The owner of Dog.com just paid $1 million for Fish.com, in hopes of starting what amounts to a new Pets.com.” Online shopping for your pets is big business again but this time the company is focused on selling smaller items such as dog treats instead of 50 pound bags of dog food. Is the fish food market worth a $1 million domain name? Graphic by Wired News Tags: dogspetsfish…
The story of PriceGrabber part 3: Small ball
This post is part 3 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 and part 2 before continuing. We’ve all seen the overconfident hitter come to the plate, take three home run swings, and look back at the catchers mitt every time he fails to connect. Given a small team with limited resources I prefer the BIlly Beane approach of playing small ball to bring in the wins. Landing small business development deals in succession can establish a small player and bring in the revenue needed to swing for…
Entrepreneurial sellout podcast
The latest episode of OnPodSessions, When to sell out, is now available for download. This week Om and I talk about large companies acquiring startups, what they are looking for, and how various startups position themselves. The selling out podcast is 23 minutes long and a 10.6 MB download. Last week I read a blog post and PowerPoint presentation by Joel Toledano of Yahoo! Search’s business development team. The presentation and blog post was a follow-up to an entrepreneurial event organized by CalTech and MIT. I felt like the presentation suggested small companies need approach Yahoo! about being acquired and…
The story of PriceGrabber part 2: Funding with a zip
This post is part 2 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 before continuing. PriceGrabber was created in 1999, at the height of the Internet boom, with only about $1.5 million in seed money. The company was able to raise a sizable amount of capital using the tools it had created for the general Internet marketplace of expert users and enthusiasts. By tracking exceptional deals from merchant crawls performed multiple times a day PriceGrabber was able to turn bubble-worthy goofs of other companies into seed money for a…