Glowforge CEO, Wharton Research Fellow, Robot Turtles creator, Proud Dad
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 economic entities together as one, if only…
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 should get a badge for that.” We…
(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! It’s insanely high. And, wait… I thought YC was using convertible debt…
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 impactful. (Absolutely!) A company…
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 pitch. Just a sentence or two, properly…
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 already available for around a thousand…
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)…
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 we’re COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! Let’s have an initial conversation. I won’t disclose any ‘secret sauce’, 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 cups of coffee. Since the very beginning, I’ve…
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 right. If the bizarre appearance and strange feature…