Currently Obsessed

I’m a mentor for TechStars and am very excited about the next cohort of companies. The competition was fierce this year (way up from last year). As a result the companies and teams look amazing. Obviously this means a lot of great people didn’t make it in. I was pinged by two such teams this [...]

My friend Sheryl of Greenopedia was just accepted to Startup Chile, which provides office space, a little seed money and an adventure in Chile, without giving up any equity. This seems like an incredible opportunity for any seed stage internet company. This was the first I’d heard of the program and honestly I felt like [...]

Seattle 2.0 I’ve been nominated for “Best Startup Technologist” in the Seattle 2.0 Awards for the 3rd year in a row…. This proves that there is a very serious bug in the nomination software which has remained unfixed for three years. If you know any good tech people, please refer them to the kind folks [...]

I’ve had the good fortune of working with great engineers and I’ve hired somewhere around 40 to 50 of them in last 5 years. Since I believe that having second-rate people will kill a company, I’ve put a lot of thought and effort into figuring out how to recruit great engineers. I’m talking about the [...]

Perhaps my New Year’s Resolution should be to blog more since I haven’t posted here since July!  This post diverges from the regular tech and startup material (for more of that, see my recent guest post on the 500Startups blog, “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Conflicting Advice“) And so 2010 comes to a close. Another year has passed [...]

Doing a startup?  Think carefully about the differences between technology, product and business. The startup world is full of incredibly smart people who design new applications that “change the world” but lack a clear business model (product, but no business).  It’s also common to see highly educated people create beautiful code that few users actually [...]