THE DREAM IN ACTION

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I’ve been studying a lot about raising a seed round of funding for a startup. Once your prototype is out and some traction is shown, if you’re going to need capital you gotta work very hard to get it. Here is the first of a multiple (probably 3) part series on the core things I’ve [...]

Last night I jumped on an SWA flight with 5 buddies headed towards Denver, CO. This weekend is my bachelor party, where we’ll be in Denver 1 night, camping in Estes Park 2 nights, and Ft. Collins the last night for a brewery tour crawl. This is no doubt going to be one of the [...]

Over the past month or so I’ve had a similar feeling as I had back in April 2008. At the begging of April 08 I was evangelizing the use of Twitter. It wasn’t popular, it was “nerdy”, Ashton, Oprah, and Tila Tequila were not yet dominating the service but I saw value in it and [...]

I don’t normally post a bunch about WordPress hacks, but since this caused me trouble for so long I thought I’d go against that norm. These 3 plugins have really made the menu on this blog simple and easy to manage. I highly recommend adding them to your plugin army and make WP that much [...]

For as long as I can remember I’ve always found myself envying and analyzing people who are very successful. I’ve studied their personality traits, their career paths, and anything else that I feel might reveal a common denominator that I may be able to learn from. I’ve come to the conclusion that success is about [...]

In my humble opinion, I believe that Umair Haque is one of the most innovative thinkers of our time. But, to be consistent with his own arguments, that doesn’t matter. What matters for Umair is ‘awesomeness’ and he gets that through his ability to deconstruct complex thoughts. Innovation, he claims is not enough for success [...]

Last week I drove back up to Milwaukee for the first time since my move in early August to speak at Web414. I was asked by the founder of Web414, Gabe, to share my experience of failing at a startup (SocialDreamium), a topic that people usually shy away from sharing. The main reason that I [...]

Kanye Interupts Taylor Swift You may be aware that a few nights ago Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift in her VMA victory speech to claim that Beyonce’s video should have one instead. It was one of the most obnoxious acts by a celebrity in recent memory and really seemed to show his true colors. I [...]

I recently hoped to find an iPhone app so that I could pull up TV schedules really easily. I search the Apple app store for “tv schedules” and found 3 options (screen shot below), of which had reviews but they really weren’t enough to find out which app was actually the best. I needed more [...]

Eight years ago, I was a SR. in high school and I woke up to my alarm clock set to 91X, the local San Diego rock channel. The only problem was that on this particular morning they weren’t playing ‘Crawling’ by Linkin Park or ‘How you remind me’ by Nickelback, they were just talking, and [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the best way to start a company. As my co-founder, who’s the technical half of our venture works his ass of on the code, I have been working on the design. When I say design, I mean the design of many different aspects of our company. [...]

What I’d like to see more of in Chicago is… 1) VC’s and Angels who blog – so that they communicate what is interesting to them and so that they are more accessible or even appear more accessible to the areas entrepreneurs. 2) An increase in the understanding that failure won’t kill you – in [...]

I am a huge fan of Mint.com for managing and aggregating my accounts, I have the Mint.com application on my iPod touch (getting an iPhone soon) and use it all the time. I also use ING Direct for much of my savings accounts. I love the functionality ING provides of being able to split separate [...]

Many of you followed the process of starting, building, then closing SocialDreamium. I’ve been learning and exploring over the past 3 or 4 months and I’m back on the startup bandwagon. I’m cofounding a startup that’s focused on social commerce (announcement soon) and I’ve been working on setting up that company. In the process of [...]