I’ve tried to think a lot about what to leave a potential reader with in my last blog post, since these are the ones prospective applicants are most likely to see when landing on the blog. If I were in your shoes, what would I want to know? In fact, what did I want to [...]

Your Startup’s Most Valuable Asset: People “Ideas are cheap. People are precious.” Wise words from True Ventures partner Jon Callaghan, who is also the source of most of the other gold nuggets I’ll be sharing in this post. I can’t tell you how many times this message has been reiterated all summer: great relationships are [...]

18% of U.S. GDP is generated by venture-backed companies. 10% of jobs come from venture-backed companies. And nearly 50% of all job growth comes from venture-backed companies. These are just a few of the (pretty extraordinary) statistics on startups from this week’s reading, Mastering the VC Game by Jeffrey Bussgang, an entrepreneur-turned-VC at Flybridge Capital [...]

“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship, you’ve waited too long.” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn One of the themes of the week was quantity of iterations over quality of iterations. In other words, get the first version of the product out the door ASAP rather than wait to perfect it. Both Jeff Veen, founder and [...]

Fundraising from VC firms is a nebulous and murky world for most entrepreneurs, and a lot are not so trusting of it. Some entrepreneurs recommend bootstrapping (doing it on your own without outside money) to avoid the messiness entirely. But the truth is there are reasons people do seek out VC funding, and they’re pretty [...]

Can I just say, one of my favorite things about Silicon Valley is the vibe. I get a lot out of the atmosphere in Mountain View–it’s practically electric. The place is bubbling to the brim with ideas and activity. Sit down in Red Rock Coffee (by now a frequent haunt of mine) and a majority [...]

Hiten Shah is the founder of KISSmetrics, a web analytics tool that focuses on funnels (which a lot of other analytics tools are clunky about dealing with). It’s a cool tool, I’ve messed around with it just a bit so far. Hiten spoke to us this week and said something that made an impression on [...]

Why is a physics major working in sales and marketing? That’s a good question, and one I’ve gotten several times over the past year. I like that I’m different and that I’m taking an unorthodox route, but I certainly didn’t plan for it to happen this way. When I applied to college, I wasn’t very [...]