Dan Shapiro's Blog

Someone’s claiming you’re infringing their patent!  You need to figure out how bad the situation is. Or… your boss has asked you to take a look at an old patent you wrote,…

Modern venture capital is one shining moment of derring-do taking followed by 10 years of risk mitigation. It’s sort of like breaking a mirror.

In this envelope, I have your Company Culture. We work hard, but value work/life balance. We’re a team culture and we believe in individual empowerment. We give back to the community, and…

It was 2006. Ontela had existed for the better part of a year, and I’d been fundraising and networking my little heart out. People kept saying I should be sure to meet…

Recruiting at a startup is fundamentally hard. You need to convince someone – let’s say, for argument’s sake, a senior developer; a smart, educated person who should know better – to bet her mortgage on your future, take a big pay cut, and go back to writing her own build scripts. If you’re in Seattle,…