Dan Shapiro's Blog

This article first ran as a guest post in Geekwire. For a long time I’ve felt like I must be either the first or last entrepreneur to discover the ABC series Shark…

Dream of striking Kickstarter gold, but lack inspiration?  I’m here to help.  Don’t forget to hook me up with a few freebies when you get your assembly lines rolling. Optimal Notebook Lightweight,…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…