THE DREAM IN ACTION

staying power – n. the ability to endure or last. Some startups today seem like they’re cool features or tools (insert twitter tool here) but I just don’t see how some of them will be around in a year or 2 when their budgets dry up. I could be totally wrong and maybe Twitters tool [...]

For anyone who studies customer development you know that feedback is at the forefront of any successful product. In order to build a product or service that customers will actually want and hopefully pay for. If you’re not asking for customers to pay, you likely want their time and attention. I see this blog as [...]

Someone who I don’t talk about often on this blog but that I do have a lot of respect for is Mark Pincus. Mark is the CEO of the company that makes virtually games, specifically Farmville…yea you’ve probably played it. The game has 20 million active users as of last week. Mark is one of [...]

In a recent interview with Peter Kim of the Dachis Group, (one of hundred’s he’s done over the last 2 weeks) Gary Vaynerchuk summed up his hard work and much of his business philosophy by saying, “Talk and things happen.” I’ve been watching WineLibraryTV for probably about a year. Gary is nuts and I won’t [...]

As described in their new release, “GetGlue.com is a social recommendation network for interests like books, music, and movies. GetGlue.com offers a stream of suggestions based on user interests, friends activity and things that are popular with everyone. Users can also add GetGlue to their browser to more quickly build their taste profile and get [...]

In a recent project, I’ve been trying to sign-up venues here in Chicago to be on Foursquare. It’s been a fun experiment in sales and a wake up call to the difficulties of door to door sales pitches. Below I’d like to share some of the findings of the experiment (in the last post) and [...]

I came upon this video from @reecepacheco, a fellow surfer stuck with no waves (he’s in NYC). I grew up watching Rob Machado surf and even saw him in a contest once at Oceanside Pier. He’s amazing and his career has really been an interesting one. He was once very close to top being the [...]

The ActionsTalk Story When Blake and I started ActionsTalk back in early 2008 we were filled with the excitement that comes with a new venture. We hoped that ActionsTalk would become a valuable service for the “non hub” startup communities. We worked to bring deserved attention to startups who weren’t necessarily getting into the limelight [...]

Back in March of this year I made it out to New York City and I had the pleasure of meeting AJ Jacobs for a drink, well a coffee and we met at a vegetarian joint called Blossom. At the time I was planning to write a book (delayed, not canceled) and his advice was [...]

Recently Mark Suster discussed the topic of VC seed investing and when it can be a bad thing on his blog, Both Sides of the Table. This reminded me of a conversation I had with another experienced entrepreneur offline who said… “First time entrepreneurs shouldn’t be picky. If someone is offering you venture money it’s [...]

In a recent project, I’ve been trying to sign-up venues here in Chicago to be on Foursquare. It’s been a fun experiment in sales and a wake up call to the difficulties of door to door sales pitches. Below I’d like to share some of the findings of the experiment and some of the suggestions [...]

In an effort to support Blog Action Day‘s Climate Change initiative I’d like to introduce you to the SurfriderFoundation. The Surfrider Foundation is a non-profit environmental organization dedicated to the protection and enjoyment of the world’s oceans, waves and beaches, for all people, through conservation, activism, research and education. Being from San Diego I grew [...]

Today the Finnish government announced that it will become the first in the world to make broadband internet access a legal right of every individual in Finland. They’ll start in July of 2010 providing every person one-megabit of broadband connection with full intention to increase that to 100mb by 2015. This is an enormous first [...]

Last month I wrote a post called ‘Qualifiers’ about the importance benefit of grad school, specifically an MBA. I was exploring the idea that having an MBA as a qualifier of your success with my friend Daniel and he shared that a more accurate name for the concept I blogged about was ‘Signalling’. In fact [...]

Image via CrunchBase This is a really cool recap of Mint’s success directly from Aaron. If you enjoy this post please continue the conversation over on Christine.net where it was originally posted. I reblog this solely because I didn’t want you guys to miss this. It’s that cool. As some commenters will note, this is [...]