Everyone knows of the mythical elevator pitch. You find yourself in an elevator, rocketing towards the penthouse suite of a downtown office edifice, when you realize that the person standing next to you is a powerful and influential investor. She asks what you do, and you calmly deliver your ...
Dan Shapiro
CEO of Glowforge, creator of Robot Turtles, proud dad
The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are ...
I was fortunate enough to be invited to check out the 70+ companies of the current YCombinator batch. With that many companies to keep track of, it helps to take notes! I did this in a public Google Docs spreadsheet, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. A few hundred (at least) people joined ...
Whenever I’ve been involved in fundraising, I’ve hit a frustrating rejection: “Sorry, but I have an investment that could be competitive.” As an entrepreneur, this drives me nuts. I always marshal the same counterarguments: I know what they’re doing, and ...
It’s been seven years since I started my first company. My successes over that course have had a great deal to do with the generosity and wisdom of the startup community, particularly in Seattle – countless meetings, meetups, blog posts, backchannels, and a mind boggling number of ...
I had recently left Microsoft after five years of slaving away as a program manager on various facets of Windows. I’d departed to take a job at Wildseed, a company producing an over-the-top funky handset running Linux, targeted at the teenage market. Yeah, that’s it on the ...
Who’s been a part of a mailing list that’s suffered from poor-quality posts drowning out an otherwise-useful conversation? OK, hands down. Â It seems like it happens to just about every worthwhile mailing list I’ve ever been on: the quality of the posts goes to hell. Â And in ...
Vesting in general (and founder vesting in particular) is an oft-misunderstood tool that has a tendency to really screw up young companies. There are some deep misconceptions at work here that often cause founders all sorts of grief. Most of it comes from the simple fact that stock grants ...
I just got a very nice email from Danielle Fong, the 25 year old middle school-dropout, cofounder and chief scientist of Lightsail Energy. That’s not the amazing part. Lightsail makes regenerative brakes for the power grid. You know how your* Prius takes the power from the brakes when ...
Last week I was speaking on what would have otherwise been a terrific panel. It was Frank Artale from Ignition, Tom Duterme from Groupon M&A, Andy Sack from Lighter Capital & Founder’s Co-op, and me talking about funding & exiting.  The only thing that spoiled it was yet ...