Thanksgiving 2009
Thanksgiving 2009: to be self-employed in a downturn is a wonderful opportunity–I don’t have to worry about getting laid off.
There is a Bootstrapper Breakfast This Friday at Red Rock Coffee
We are meeting in Mountain View at 9am at Red Rock Coffee for a Bootstrapper Breakfast: it’s the fourth Friday of the month. Take a break from the four day Thanksgiving weekend and join us Friday for a Bootstrapper Breakfast in Mountain View at Red Rock Coffee. It may be a more intimate session for
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Updated Home Page, Let Us Know What You Think
We’ve streamlined our home page and highlighted our advisory services, our sales and marketing support, audio and video for some recent presentations, and our Bootstrapper Breakfast events. We welcome your feedback and suggestions. The workshop page now highlights a September 2009 talk at SF BAY ACM “The Limits of I’ll Know It When I See
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Early Bird for Jan-2010 “Idea to Revenue” Ends Next Week
Just a quick reminder, the early bird rate ends next week for our Jan 12, 2010 Idea to Revenue workshop in Redwood Shores, CA. If you are in formation or the early days of your startup this is a good opportunity to spend four hours on your business with your team members. We help you
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Veterans Day 2009
A thank you on Veterans Day 2009 to all of the men and women in our armed forces who make this Silicon Valley oasis of rationality and innovation possible. Veterans Day 2009 “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us
Ben Foden on “Creating Genuine Connections with Social Media”
Ben Foden has been working with us part time; the following is a blog post he developed on creating genuine connections with social media.
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Social Media for Startups: “Less is More”
There has been a lot written about various aspects of social media: what tools to use, how disruptive it is, how to develop and/or demonstrate expertise. Here are four rules of thumb we follow. To establish a reputation you have to be visible or reasonably well known, but it’s more important to be known for
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Marc Andreessen’s Entrepreneurial Insights Rescued from Bit Rot by Jed Christiansen
Marc Andreessen started a new VC firm, Andreesen Horowitz, in July but has yet to explain why he deleted his excellent series of articles on entrepreneurship from his site. I am glad that Jed Christiansen has rescued them from bit rot. Two posts that are definitely worth reading: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4:
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Six Simple Suggestions for Using LinkedIn
I use LinkedIn very differently than many of the folks I meet when I am out and about in Silicon Valley. I normally only link to people I have had shared success with. I do not link with folks who I have just casually met. I believe it’s important to keep track of folks I
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Quotes for Entrepreneurs – October 2009
These quotes for entrepreneurs are added as I find them on http://www.twitter.com/skmurphy and then collected into a post at the end of the month. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
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Amazon High Memory Instances Will Enable More EDA Apps to Move to the Cloud
Sometimes paradigms do shift. Amazon announced today that its Elastic Cloud Computing now supports high memory instances: High-Memory Instances Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications. High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25
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George Grellas on Insightful vs. “Window Dressing” Advisory Boards
George Grellas offered some great advice on the difference between insightful and “window dressing” advisory boards on Hacker News I have reprinted here with his permission
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Feedback from Sat-Oct-24 “Getting More Customers”
We had a good “Getting More Customers” workshop today, here is the feedback that we gathered and a heads-up on some plans for 2010. We added three numeric ratings to our feedback form this time (which shrank the space for comments). Numeric Ratings (1 Poor to 5 Excellent) Importance of Topic: 4.75 Content: 4.75 Quality
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4 Steps to Prepare for a Startup While You are Still Employed
Someone with the label selfemploy posted the following question (note the fact that he is in Bangalore appears later in the thread, I have included it in the body of the question) on Hacker News earlier this month. As the recession continues to affect not only in Silicon Valley but many engineers around the world
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Sean Murphy Joins eMobus Advisory Board
Sean Murphy joins the eMobus advisory board. He has been assisting the eMobus team on strategies for pricing, new customer acquisition, leveraging their cloud computing infrastructure, and effective differentiation of their services.
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Administrivia Revisited
A blog post from October 2006 “Administrivia in Startups” made the following points I had lunch with Sylvia Nessan, a veteran of Synopsys, CoWare, and several high tech startups and she made an observation that I thought was worth writing down: the founding team, and CEO in particular, don’t pay enough attention to how much
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Expert, Editor, Diplomat, Vandal Hunter
Marc Smith proposes four key roles for managing a wiki or other social media platform: domain expert, diplomat, editor, and vandal hunter.
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8 Tips for Evaluating Funding Alternatives
Many entrepreneurs planning their first software startup get stuck on funding and ownership issues. Here are some simple rules of thumb that may help you reframe an issue: Revenue, especially break even revenue, is never dilutive of your ownership. The right co-founders, while dilutive, substantially increase your chances of success: they give you a smaller
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Growing the Pie in EDA, Part 3: Add MATLAB
With Synopsys announcing Synphony, a high-level design compiler that reads in MATLAB M code and generates RTL and some other useful outputs, and Mathworks listed in Gary Smith’s ESL 2009 Wallchart, I wonder if it doesn’t make sense to define MATLAB as an ESL language and Mathworks as an EDA player. Harry Gries provides a
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C. Kent Wright’s “Nectar in a Nutshell” Has Some Great Quotes
I saw a quote by C. Kent Wright “To sway an audience, you must watch them as you speak” and decided to purchase one of his quote collections “Nectar in a Nutshell.” It was first published in October of 1944 and my copy is the “fifth impression” from 1945.
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