startup

The founders of a new startup called Wigix are calling eBay old school, and don't hesitate to target boycotting sellers incensed by recently imposed eBay seller fees. The name is short for WantItGotIt Exchange, and is modeled after the stock market rather than the competitive bid auction model.

I'm going to be giving the keynote presentation at an upcoming event organized by and focused on student entrepreneurs being held on the MIT campus this Saturday (May 3, 2008) from 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.. Student entrepreneurs from MIT, Harvard, Babson, Olin and Boston University and other Boston area academic institutions will gather to talk about startups. I could not hope for a better group to interact with.

One person took a few hours and about a hundred dollars to build a credibly effective music search engine, and why that experience demonstrated how addressing problems will be a better use of time than building the next Google.

I've been reading startup blogs for as long as there have been startup blogs. I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky.  I'm impressed with his wit and humor.  Some of his older stuff was really good, but most of his newer stuff just hasn't struck me in the same way.  But, maybe that's just me. I'm a fan of Paul Graham.  I'm impressed with his intelligence and ability to really cover a topic well in a way that makes sense and appeals to my analytical side.

I’m still trying to recover from the incredible two days that was the mesh conference, and will be posting updates and links to video, blogs, photos and reviews as I come across them, but in the meantime here’s a cross-post from my Globe and Mail blog in which I try to catch up with two of the many tech deals that occurred while I was en-meshed:

Salesforce launched an incubator for startups.  It is a similar proposition to the Socialtext Coworking space, but has a cost for the startup and is structured as a partnership program.  A BusinessWeek article interviewed me about it.

Before we get too deep into this, let me clarify two things.  When I say without a “plan”, I mean without a formally written business plan – not that you should be clueless about what you want to do.  And, when I say startup funding, I’m talking more about early stage seed funding via angels (though most of these tips should apply to VCs as well).

I’ve been in the startup business for a pretty long time now.  One of the things that I’ve found hardest to do is find and recruit exceptionally talented individuals.  This is not particularly surprising, I think all businesses (big and small, young and old) have this challenge.  However, I think this challenge is particularly acute for startups. 5 Quick Pointers On Startup Hiring