Dan Shapiro

I had an inspiring coffee meeting with an early stage startup today.  They have a clever and differentiated product, revenue traction, and great headway on their seed round. It’s a B2B business and the CEO’s an experienced salesperson.  He knows exactly which businesses need his  ...

Hacker News is an interesting lab for job postings. It’s a target rich environment, so you know the right people are reading. Unlike many sites, you can’t pay to rank higher or show your headline in blue.  There’s no category search.  The rules are simple: if Y Combinator  ...

Chris Zacharias, founder of imgix.com (and Y Combinator grad), recently wrote an interesting blog post that postulated a different funding strategy.  Instead of pricing his round at market, he priced it significantly below.  He claims this gave him access to a group of high-quality  ...

There’s a startup in Seattle I’ve been tracking for a while. They’re a part of Techstars (where I serve as a mentor) so that’s not particularly unusual. But I’ve been keeping a particularly close eye because they’re working in a product area that overlaps  ...

I want to buy some clothes.  From From Holden (not a typo).  And I can’t.  Because they’re full of Kickstoppers. More and more, I’m seeing exciting, fun projects on Kickstarter that make me think they’re being run by the cast of Community.  Clever, well meaning,  ...

Much as I did before, I’m running a live, world-writable spreadsheet of my notes on the pitches from Techstars demo day 2012. Things are just getting started as I write this now and the lineup of companies looks strong. You can follow along in realtime (questions & comments very  ...

This blog post was originally published in Xconomy, after which I promptly forgot about it and left it to languish in my drafts folder until today. There is no love like a first time entrepreneur’s love with nondisclosure agreements.  They are a romantic dream: secret pacts bonding two  ...

Welcome to StartupVille! It was a few mint juleps in to the evening when Joe Heitzeberg and I started talking about the common experiences of startuphood.  “I just maxed out one of my credit cards”, Joe told me, consulting his iphone nonchalantly at 1 in the morning.  “I  ...

(apologies in advance: the content of this blog post is for startup financing geeks) I was having drinks with a dozen founders who should know better. “So YC company valuations are up around $10mm.  And some are $20mm+.” “What!?” I exclaim.  “That’s crazy!  ...

When I founded Ontela with my friends Charles and Brian, we were all sick of big companies.  There were a lot of things we wanted to do differently, but one of the big ones was to build a company that wasn’t a faceless bureaucracy.  (Hindsight: good goal) A company where everyone was  ...