» 2011 » July

Week 5: Meet Jason Shen

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 …

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Naughty or Nice?

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 …

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Biz Dev For Dummies Pt. II

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 …

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Producing Returns

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 …

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Survey week – and a list of cool tools!

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 …

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Beyond the Consumer Valley

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 …

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Virality for Zombies

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 …

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Motivation Boosters

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 …

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Understanding Design

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 …

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The Customer Is Always Right.. Right?

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 …

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