I have a widget on my site that hasn’t been working properly. It’s called Blogrollr and it’s supposed to be a dynamic blog roll, which is an awesome idea, when it works. I realized that over the past month or so my blog reading has changed quite a bit. I’m doing less Google reader and more Twitter as my RSS. I also have found myself just going directly to the sites that I want to read, sometimes there is a new post and sometimes I have to dig to the archives just because I want more. (Wonder if anyone does that on this blog) I’ve also been following certain startups that I really like, and their founders, a lot closer. I like to have my finger on the pulse and following the founders on blog and twitter is a very easy way to do it.

I looked into what sites I was reading most and here’s the list. There are 3 distinct groups. Investors that I’ve been following closely, who are also extremely accessible (kudos to them). A few stud entrepreneurs, including the founders of foursquare, because I’m kind of obsessed with it right now. And finally, the gurus of customer development.

Investors

I’ve come to the belief that the community in startups often follows the investors. If a community has a solid investor presence entrepreneurs get excited about building ideas that could actually get funded and they build. Example: Boulder, CO can almost single-handedly credit Brad Feld for creating a community there. With his help, the TechStars organization got started and now it’s the 2nd most popular startup incubator in the country IMHO. The investors on the east coast seem, to me, so much easier to access and communicate with than their west coast counterparts. Not sure why this is but I’m pretty confident that it’s going to have a positive affect on the NYC web startup community, in fact it’s already happening. This is the main reason I’ve been reaching out to so many VC’s here in Chicago recently. I want to see the web startup community here grow and I really believe it will start with them.

Fred Wilson
Bijan Sabet
Bryce Roberts

Stud Entrepreneurs

The next group is stud entrepreneurs. Gary V is down right inspiring and I really don’t miss one of his video posts. Sometimes I’ll read his blog not for inspiration but just for a laugh, he’s hilariously motivated! Even if it’s not entrepreneurial advice I think that following and reading what’s going on with startup founders is cool, and worth while. These are people who are doing big things and that I have a lot of respect for, why wouldn’t I study how they think and what they’re thinking about. Like I said, I’ve recently been evangelizing foursquare to friends so in turn I’ve been following Dennis and Naveen’s blogs a bit. Both super smart guys and entertaining blogs. Charlie writes from both sides :), he’s a talented entrepreneur who very recently took a position as an EIR at First Round Capital.

Gary Vaynerchuck
Dennis Crowley
Naveen Selvadurai
Charlie O’Donnell

Customer Development Gurus

Lastly, the customer development guru’s all happen to be out of Silicon Valley. Eric Ries of startuplessonslearned has become a must read for anyone starting a company. After realizing the obvious fact that the product development cycle of the late 90′s early 00′s is broken, Eric began sharing his experiences at IMVU in the customer development process. In short, you can have the best product in the world but if nobody is buying it, it’s worthless. It’s more valuable for an entrepreneur to spend time identifying an appropriate market then build a product, rather than the built release process.

Eric Ries
Steve Blank
Sean Ellis

After writing this post I realized that every blog mentioned here is an individual, I’ve moved away from religiously watching techcrunch and mashable. I think it’s more important to me to know how things get done rather than what’s being done. Enjoy the links!

What have you been reading?

image via lomokev