THE DREAM IN ACTION

 Think back to pre-Facebook and pre-MySpace days…even pre-Friendster… Nobody understood the idea of a web friend or a social network. Then those companies came on the scene, people understood them and began to find value in them. Then the niche social networks came, the good ones provide great value for those involved and the ones [...]

For my Blog Action Day post I decided to make a loan on Kiva.org. I’ve talked about Kiva.org a bit before. Kiva.org is an organization that facilitates micro-financing in (predominantly) 3rd world countries. Think of Kiva.org as a place that allows you to be a VC with only $100 bucks! Kiva.org has a selection of [...]

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 [...]

Lots of schools have similar programs already.  They just don’t have huge companies.MSOE will pay for your patents, and still rarely anyone takes them up on it. Why? Students aren’t fundamentally trained to think about growing a business using their engineering skills.  Initiatives like KEEN aim to change that. We’ve actually laid a much better [...]

Well, not exactly. But did you know that… Students create interesting idea using university resources. Students create a company and have an exclusive license to use the technology, which they made at their institution. Institution gets bragging rights and extra revenue for the school. For an entrepreneur to promise a large amount of ROI 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 [...]

As I continue on my quest to better understand venture capital the question arises of, what is the difference between angel investing and venture capital? I’ve found there are many; involvement, who’s money, what stage, what size, required performance post investment, type of person, etc. The differences are practically endless so I’ll try to address [...]

Reading BeyondVC, the blog of venture capitalist Ed Sim, I came across an interesting quote in a recent post, “companies are bought, not sold.” I want to go into the logic behind this quote because I think it talks to a critical misconception in the start-up and VC worlds, that you can aim at being [...]

When I started this blog I primarily wanted to focus on start-up entrepreneurship and web 2.0.  I’ve done that and I’ve learned a ton from the web, from people seasoned in the industry, and from my own entrepreneurial start-up experiences. However, I’ve realized that I’ve missed one critical piece of this pie, the money! I’ll [...]

As much as I’m a fan of Seesmic and and of the entrepreneurial process, I thought I would post this video that highlights both. This is Loic’s explanation of how he went about raising money for Seesmic and how he will continue to go out evangelizing Seesmic. There is a lot to learn from this [...]