On Tuesday, July 12, I attended StartupRoots and met Manish Shah from Rapleaf (next blog post–stay tuned!), who referred me to Steve Newcomb’s essay on team building, which led me to googling “cult creation,” which led me to a blog entry by Jason Shen, who turned out to be a San Francisco start-up guy, whose blog inspired me so much that I [...]

Breaking rules Entrepreneurs are, by definition, rule breakers. They have little respect for the status quo, the conventional, and what the general public considers ‘right’ – as a result, they have pushed the human race forward across the millennia: Aristotle, Da Vinci, Ford, Jobs… the torch being passed from one era to another. In the [...]

I’m still digging into the biz dev here at Kiip, testing out different tactics and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Here’s an update of what I’ve found to be helpful: Be Persistent Unlike that awkward phase in dating when you try to act cool and hold off from texting the other person back for [...]

True Ventures puts a phenomenal amount of support into the True Entrepreneur Corps program, and I have been trying to figure out how to describe the relationship between the VC firm/program and the TEC interns. For me, it seems a lot like a VC investment. Before we joined the program, each of the interns went [...]

Yes, it is finally that time – it is survey week, and that means all of you wonderful visitors get to participate in a survey for being such loyal readers of the TEC blog! Over the years, I have been an avid participant in focus groups, survey panels, feedback forums, and much, much more – and [...]

Having spent 6 weeks in the Bay Area, I now have much better orientation than the vague sense of the environment than I had coming into this summer.  There are a lot of engaging people, and some reasonably simple ways to meet a wide swathe of them.  In addition, it is possible to get exposed [...]

I briefly discussed virality in my previous post, but I thought this deserved a bit more detail. Most of what you need to know can be found in David Skok’s virality blog post, but it’s quite complex for someone brand new to the concept. Virality is best explained through example. Say there’s a zombie virus [...]

There’s nothing I love more than watching a good interview. Programs like Inside the Actor’s Studio, Charlie Rose, and Fresh Air on NPR are some of the most fascinating shows on the air to me. There’s something really awesome about hearing successful people talk about a time when they weren’t such big celebrities and hadn’t [...]

Though I only have 2.5 years of programming experience and have never undertaking an intense large-scale engineering project, programming has always made sense to me as a concept – you identify a problem, put it into a pseudo-code format that’s accessible, and then solve it using your language of choice, often (for beginners like me) [...]

Or Skepticism About The Lean Startup Method Last Friday, I had the great pleasure of visiting SchematicLabs to do some beta testing on their Soundtracking app (thanks for the invite, Vishal!). I was able to play around with the app, and afterwards the entire testing group met up so that we could throw some ideas [...]