THE DREAM IN ACTION

Last week TechCrunch ran an article leaking the news that UberCab had closed our Seed round of funding. Our initial hope was to hold that news off until we could launch a new site (coming soon) along with the funding announcement. We had hoped to completely own the telling of that story, but as we [...]

@heyamberrae recently took on a project to write a book. She’s calling it the ‘Ah-Ha Moment’ and I was honored to write an excerpt for it. I’ve decided to share my excerpt here just before her book comes out but I encourage you to do two things: Make sure the read the rest of it, [...]

I’ve been thinking about how my new startup adventure is going to be different than my role with GE and a few things have risen to the surface. So, I’ve decided to do a series of posts on those topics. You’ll be able to follow the series under the tag ‘corpvsstartup’ here. The first that [...]

Recently, I’ve heard a lot of startup type people say, I’m a product guy. Without to much analysis I’ve always taken that to mean, the business guy, not the developer. I was mostly right with that snap judgment, but as I heard the term/title more and more I decided to jump into the details of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

A few months back I shared an awesome Firefox plug-in called GLUE. GLUE sits inside your browser and picks up data about what your viewing, what your friends are viewing, and shares that information with your contacts. The beauty behind GLUE is that it uses something called semantic technologies, which means that it find the [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the role of community manager with a startup. Would I be good at it? Would I want it? I came to the conclusion: Yes. But why? Turns out I already am a community manager. You may be too. One sign that you may be a good community manager [...]

The online market place will live and live and live. The same ones might not always exist but the concept will always live on the web because of the value that this type of a site adds to its chosen industry; it’s enormous. These are the 5 reason why the online marketplace is hot and [...]

Image by Cia de Foto via FlickrWhen I worked at my consulting job in Chicago about 2 years ago I had a conversation with my boss about how Gen Y will affect the workforce and how our attitudes towards career will affect growing businesses. I’ve had my opinion about it for quite sometime but it [...]

Dharmesh Shah is a self proclaimed coder and introvert who doesn’t like being around people. He stays up into the early hours of the morning, almost every morning, developing software. He went to MIT and sold his first startup for CASH. You may think total techy right? Well, Dharmesh also writes the very popular startup [...]

This slide show made it’s way around the web very quickly and for good reason. It is shocking but it is a collections of thoughts from some of the best VC in the biz. Business owners and investors alike would be foolish not to head the advice given here. You may have already seen this [...]

At BarCamp Milwaukee last weekend I hosted a session on Startups in the Financial Crisis. It was very well attended and turned out to be an incredibly valuable discussion for a lot of people. (Thanks for all the great feedback!) I wanted to revisit some of the content of that discussion to emphasize what a [...]

This week I had a conversation with Jordan Goldman the founder/CEO of Unigo.com. As it is described on their site…  Unigo is a new platform for college students to share reviews, photos, videos, documents, and more with students on their campus and across the country. It’s also the best place for high school students to [...]

Imagine you bet on baseball. The Padres are playing the Yankees and your betting the Padres to win. Not a very safe bet, but the returns are awesome when the Padres come through (assume that happened 1 in 10 times). Then a huge steroids bust occurs, 3 Yankee starting pitchers get canned, and only 1 [...]