Today the Obama administration effectively shut down Internet poker in the United States by indicting 11 people including the founders of three of the largest sites. The crackdown makes almost no sense. Some form of gambling is allowed in all 50 states – many states like California allow poker rooms. I contend that two things [...]
Pitching the VC and not the Business
April 15, 2011 By 1 Comment
Many entrepreneurs spend a lot of time working on their ‘pitch’ only to fail miserably when they finally deliver it to a venture capital firm. I think many entrepreneurs are so fixated on their delivery they fail to pay attention to their audience. In high school and college I spent a LOT of time participating [...]
Startup Myths: Twitter
April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Have you ever started a company? The who, why, what and where often become muddled the farther you get from the start. Over the course of a startup there are usually several course corrections. Each time a team makes a correction they often alter the ‘history’ of the startup to fit their new course. First [...]
Erasing Houston from Space History
April 13, 2011 By 3 Comments
I was disappointed to hear that the Obama administration decided not to send one of the retired Shuttles to the home of Shuttle mission control – Houston. I was almost angry when I heard that the administration decided to dismantle almost ALL of the existing shuttle related installations in Houston to send them to New [...]
Passive versus Active Check-ins
April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
ReadWriteWeb has a post titled, “2011: The Year the Check-in Dead” that basically argues the check-ins for check-ins sake are dead. I would tend to agree. There was a time a year ago when check-in apps were hot and we began to talk about ShopSavvy as a retail check-in application. In essence each time a [...]
Integrity is worth more than your career
April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Recently I started tweeting startup related quotes at the start of each day. This morning I read a quote by Ryan Freitas the founder of Second Verse. He is quoted as saying, “Your reputation is more important than you paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.” The quote reminded me of a [...]
April Fool’s Roundup
April 2, 2011 By 1 Comment
For those of you who are still wondering, the release of GreyScale yesterday was an April Fool’s joke. When we filed it under ‘April Fools’ I figured everyone would immediate realize it was actually an April Fool’s joke. But some folks didn’t realize we were joking. We got lots of calls and lots of email [...]
Announcing GreyScale!
April 1, 2011 By 5 Comments
I had mentioned on my Twitter account earlier this week that I had a big announcement planned for today. We are pleased to announce the launch of a new startup and an app called GreyScale as well as the associated angel finacing. The idea for GreyScale came to us when we saw the launch of [...]
Twitter Squared?
March 28, 2011 By 8 Comments
UPDATE: Nicholas Carlson reported today that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha (investor in Square) tweeted, “To do two things at once is to do neither.” ~Publilius Syrus. Soon afterward he deleted the tweet. I agree with him. Dumbest Idea Ever: Twitter (after raising more than $360MM) has decided to hire a part-time head of product. Second Dumbest [...]
Foot in Mouth in Technicolor?
March 25, 2011 By 3 Comments
Like almost everyone else I wrote a post about Color yesterday and couldn’t help but write another. The CEO of the much discussed $41M startup gave an interview with Matt Rosoff and explained that Color is not a photo sharing company, but instead “we’re a data mining company”. Wow. If Bill thought his ratings were [...]
