Check out QuoteTh.is in action over on the Pachube blog. If you’re not familiar with their fascinating work, check it out!
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain (via tigerlilypad)
“If you want to build a strong product, go around asking smart people why your idea won’t work.”
How to Get an Investor (Or, More Specifically, David Tisch) to Talk to You
Dave Tisch is the managing director of TechStars NYC, the elite startup accelerator that was born in Boulder, CO. He spoke at NYU’s Stern School of Management last night about best practices for communicating with potential investors, and I wanted to share the highlights. Tisch dresses like a skater, swears like a sailor, and talks a blue streak. It’s clear that he processes an enormous amount of throughput daily and gets a lot done (the TechStars book is Do More Faster, after all).
Tisch says he gets upwards of 400 emails a day and is often up until 4am battling his inbox. He uses a multi-tiered system for ranking emails in terms of importance and actionability (he actually pulled up his Gmail inbox on the projector and showed the room). The bottom line is: he and his peers like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, are incredibly busy and you should be using the most efficient and effective methods possible when making initial contact and then maintaining the conversation.
And if you stick around until (or skip down to) the end of the post, I’ll also tell you how I messed up and had it boomerang in my face.
The highlights, in no particular order…
Oh baby! QuoteTh.is has a brand new homepage. We worked our quotes off getting this thing built, but here it is. Scroll around and you’ll find examples of QuoteTh.is in action. If you are a blogger or online publisher and want to get in on our beta, there’s a place to sign up for that, too. As always we welcome your feedback.
Lessons from The Lean Startup: The Build-Measure-Learn Loop
(In a series of posts I’m going to go over the core concepts from Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup.”)
Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup, has been highly anticipated. Those who have followed his blog and talks have been eager to see these ideas expanded and assembled in one place. When my pre-ordered copy arrived in the mail, it cut right to the top of my reading list. Now, more than ever, when I hear an entrepreneur outline his or her startup strategy, I ask questions to see if they’re using Lean practices. If not, I give them an earful.
In this series of posts I’m going to pull out the key concepts from the book. This is not meant to be a proper review or a substitute for reading it. It’ll be more of a cliff’s notes. This way I’ll have something to send people when the topic of Lean Startup comes up at a party and I don’t want to seem as geeky as I actually am (at least in the moment). So here goes…
Burning quotes with lasers!
I used a laser cutter to etch this Jorge Luis Borges quote onto a piece of hardwood at TechShop in Menlo Park this summer. It was a gift I bestowed on a fire-loving comrade at Burning Man in August.
It reads:
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Borges also wrote:
Life itself is a quotation.
People sure do love quotes, don’t they? These and many others now grace the walls of the Entrepreneur Center. And yesterday, while interviewing an intern, I Googled the Web 2.0 conference and one of the top hits was Web 2.0 Summit: 25 Memorable Quotes.
Nemonics is Looking for Developer Interns (And we’ll actually pay you!)
We’re looking for some fresh blood to help us over the next several months in web design and web development. Hours and location are flexible. Read on for more info.
(Source: interns2011)
