Cruise Ships | Chris Zacharias In July of 2010, I made the decision to leave YouTube. The first thoughts I had were “How am I going to explain this to anyone? How will I tell mom?” To my family, I had the greatest job in the world and the amount of money I was making was unfathomable. They were certainly not wrong in thinking this. Google is absolutely the best place in the world to work and they do pay very well. About 4 months before, I was backpacking through Europe, stopping off in major cities to present our latest HTML5 work at the local Google offices. The decision to leave Google hit me while on a train through the Swiss Alps headed towards Milan. Large companies are cruise ships. Google happens to be the best cruise ship in the world, but it is still a cruise ship. I departed with no plan. Along the way, I discovered that startups are just like backpacking. Now, whenever I interview someone who is working at a large company, I begin by asking them “Have you ever been backpacking before?” Kudos
Startup Marketing Blog - By Sean Ellis Considering Convertible Debt? Don’t Sell Yourself Short Editor’s note: Patricia Nakache is a general partner at Trinity Ventures where she invests in early stage social commerce and entertainment companies. Follow her on Twitter @pnakache. The prevailing wisdom among entrepreneurs these days is that they should initially fund their startups with a $1-2 million convertible note. The logic is that raising a convertible note, even a capped one (as most are), is less dilutive, and perhaps faster, than raising a priced round from an institutional venture capital firm that typically seeks a minimum ownership level. But in many cases founders are shocked at the dilution they suffer when, after having raised a convertible note, they raise their first priced round. Here is an example. The venture investor is also likely to require a 10 percent unallocated option pool post the closing of the round, in addition to whatever options were already granted to make the initial hires. Now let’s consider the alternative.
@andrewchen 2X Entrepreneur Turned Venture Capitalist | Both Sides of The Table Master of 500 Hats Strikingly, BuildZoom and Bitnami Lead Hottest Y Combinator Winter 2013 Startups Tomorrow marks 1 month since Y Combinator Demo Day for the Winter 2013 class of startups, and since I’ve been tracking their progress for awhile now I have a pretty good sense of who has seen sustained interest, growing traffic, and increased audience through social media. The weeks after Demo Day were a strange time, in some ways anti-climactic as companies leave the YC nest but also exciting as they begin to close in on funding rounds which will be announced in the coming months. On 3/25, 4/7, 4/15 and 4/21 we measured of several data points for each company. For this ranking we use Alexa rank (traffic) scaled to product unique visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook followers, and LinkedIn followers to assess who has been gaining the most visibility to customers and the outside world since Demo Day. Of course this is no measure of revenue, but it does give a good sense of which companies have the strongest top of funnel for gaining new leads right now.
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials) (9780060521998): Clayton M. Christensen