February 2010
5 posts
Moving...
This blog is moving… Most people won’t see this message, because http://blog.shedd.us has been repointed to the new blog. However, if for some reason, you are reading this, please browse on over to http://blog.shedd.us to read the updates. Thanks!
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How much equity?
I wanted to republish here one of my posts from PSUstartups.com, the blog on Penn State startups that I’ve maintained. This post was originally published on March 30, 2009, as we were in the midst of figuring out the equity stakes for FanGamb (now Three Screen Games). We were hunting for advice on how best to figure this out amongst a team that hadn’t worked together before and we...
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Legal Innovation for Startups from Legal River →
Legal River, a LaunchBox Digital company, recently launched a Terms of Service generator and a similar tool for creating Privacy Policies.
Along with their new StackOverflow-style Q&A forum, I think these are great moves for the company. Granted, there are many nuances and details that must be considered and each company is different, there are also a number of common legal questions and...
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Accelerating Accelerator Growth
It’s amazing the recent growth in accelerator programs around the world! In the past few days, I have come across several additional programs that I am adding to the list:
New York, NY - The Hatchery - http://www.hatchery.vc
Singapore - Joyful Frog Digital Incubator (JFDI) - http://jfdi.asia
Multiple Locations - The Founder Institute - http://founderinstitute.com
University-Affiliated
...
January 2010
25 posts
Y Combinator and TechStars Officially "Seed...
Per an article on the Techvibes Blog, Bootup Labs, “along with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and TechStars’ Brad Feld have agreed to drop the ‘Incubator’ term for good in favor of ‘Seed Accelerator’.”
“Seed-stage Accelerator” is the term that I’ve long used for these programs and it’s good to see that the programs are now going...
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Time Horizon Does Matter →
Very thought-provoking post on how the time horizon of investment strategies can have an important impact on investment decision making.
Dear MBAs who want to work at startups - from This... →
Love the post. This is fantastic advice for anyone who wants to work at a startup and for MBAs who are ready to move into the 21st century as far as networking. Every entrepreneur who’s deeply engaged in running the business has problems to solve and trying to figure out how to get a new employee excited about working on those problems takes time away from other tasks. If someone came to me...
VeloCity - University of Waterloo Entrepreneur... →
Interesting new summer “dormcubator” program for students from the University of Waterloo:
The VeloCity Entrepreneur BootCamp (VEB) will enable top student entrepreneurs to fast track the launch of their technology-based startups. Selected students will be mentored by some of Canada’s most experienced and successful entrepreneurs. They will live rent-free at VeloCity and will...
TechCrunch: Exploding Term Sheets Prompt Y... →
If you didn’t catch the recent TechCrunch post on Y Combinator’s decision to sync its application deadlines with other seed accelerator programs, beyond the decision, there was one other key bit of information at the tail end of the post:
This session’s application includes one other notable change: startups are being encouraged to submit their applications as early as possible....
Get Philly in Fast Company Magazine →
Fast Company is releasing a 5-part series on great cities for start ups. So far, New York City, Boulder, and the latest, Seattle, have been published. That only leaves 2 spots and Philly should be one of them. Innovation Philadelphia asked Fast Company how Philly could get noticed because, well, it deserves to be. To get our great city included, send your thoughts and ideas on Why You Should...
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Inspiring Action in 2010
If you haven’t read Thomas Friedman’s NY Times Op-Ed on making 2010 the year of innovation, you should. Friedman raises a number of interesting points around how President Obama has allowed the grassroots movement that carried him into Washington to disperse and that Obama should focus on inspiring long term economic development through entrepreneurship and innovation. All are great...
Life as a Healthcare CIO: Stress Acceleration →
“Just as a parachuter accelerates at 32 feet/second/second until reaching terminal velocity, there is a point in our existence as humans that stress acceleration will take us to terminal velocity in the quality of our lives.”
Interesting stuff and very true - where do we go from here?
tgethr - From internal to everyone →
Inkling Markets, a Y Combinator company, released a collaboration product that they built for their own internal needs. Lots of great stuff starts this way - Ruby on Rails was famously extracted from 37 Signals’ Basecamp product. Good to see more companies taking products that work for them and making them available.
DreamIt Ventures now accepting applications for... →
DreamIt 2009 was a fantastic experience - tons of great speakers, awesome companies to work alongside, and smart mentors to learn from. Plus, it’s right in the middle of Philly’s very vibrant startup scene. You should apply!
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Getting Accepted
There are lots of great advice posts on the application process to seed accelerator programs like Y Combinator, TechStars, and DreamIt Ventures. (And many others.) I was recently advising someone interested in applying to one such program on what we did right at Three Screen Games that helped us get into the Philadelphia-based DreamIt Ventures program. I figured the thoughts might be useful to...
NYC SeedStart 2010 →
NYC Seed launches its own formal startup accelerator program for 10 teams this summer. Adding it to my running list of accelerator programs.
Why should you start a company in Philly? →
Philly Startup Leaders founder Blake Jennelle started a great commentary on the startup community and eco-system in Philadelphia on his blog earlier today. Inspired by the Fast Company articles on other startup hubs (Boulder and New York City), Blake provides his thoughts on why Philly is a great city to start a company and wonders if Philly will be featured in one of the remaining articles in...
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Backupify - Secure Online Backup for the Cloud →
I setup Backupify the other day. (They’re giving away free accounts until the end of January.) It’s an interesting service - they provide an automated backup interface for your personal data in the cloud to a repository on Amazon’s S3 cloud.
It’s certainly an interesting offering and a useful one at that. Too many people just figured out how to backup their desktops and...
Philadelphia featured in "Top 6 Colleges with... →
ReadWriteWeb posted their list of the Top 6 Colleges with Entrepreneurial Programs, which was derived from lists from both Entrepreneur Magazine and The Princeton Review - the ReadWriteWeb list features the six programs that made the top 10 in both lists.
Philadelphia was prominently featured in the list. Drexel University took the silver medal spot as #2 and Temple University tied with the...
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More help for startups
Through lots of great comments on my earlier post on accelerator programs for seed-stage startups and some more comments over on Hacker News, I’ve been able to expand the list of programs.
Here are the most recent additions:
Additions to Seed-Stage Startup Accelerators
Ann Arbor, MI - SPARK Business Accelerator - (http://www.annarborusa.org/start-ups/spark-business-accelerator/)
...
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Why is the user experience for adding Facebook...
A friend linked me to a random promotions app on Facebook the other day and it stopped me in my tracks for a moment. Unlike most apps I’ve seen, the first screen was something very interesting - it was actually inside the application itself and was not the not the lovely “Allow Access” screen that Facebook users are accustomed to.
This made me wonder - pretty much most of the...
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CarPong - Connecting Drivers →
New web service that lets you send messages to other drivers and find notes written to you based on license plate number. I’ve long thought that it would be interesting to be able to communicate with other drivers based on license plate, but never really thought about it as a Twitter-like service as CarPong has implemented it.
Lots of “helpful” messages to sub-par drivers - I...
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Collaborative Team Facebook Development
For as much as has been written regarding developing Facebook applications with Rails (which isn’t that much considering the staggering popularity of Facebook and Rails), there is even less written on developing Facebook applications in a team environment.
There are a couple of potential strategies. One of the few articles out there describes the challenges in developing apps as a...
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Rails Facebook Development - Sharing some code for...
The next version of FanGamb will be a Facebook app. It’s not a 1:1 translation of the current game to Facebook - we’ll be incorporating many of our game design learnings from running the first version of the game for NFL/NCAA football this fall. Since FanGamb is a Rails app, we’ve been working on setting up a collaborative development process around building Facebook apps in a...
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UK Government Calls for Food Labels to Show Carbon... →
It’s very interesting and exciting to see that the UK is going to begin asking manufacturers to label food products with the carbon impact. I’ve often thought that it would begin an important shift in consumer purchasing decision making if consumers could see more visibly the carbon footprint of the products they purchase. In order for consumer behavior to truly shift to making...
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Help for Startups! - A semi-complete list of...
This is a post I’ve had a running draft of for some time. I’m happy to be getting it out of my draft bin and out onto the web!
Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital spoke at DreamIt Ventures this summer. During his talk, Josh mentioned how he expects to see an increasing number of DreamIt/TechStars/Y Combinator-style locally-focused “seed stage startup accelerator”...
Getting back to blogging...
It’s been about two years, nearly to the day, since I last really wrote a blog post. I’m trying out some of the services that have come along to make blogging easier and more fun. Hopefully, with all of this great technology, I’ll be able to keep up with my blog this time around, despite the crazy life of a startup…
Speaking of the startup, that’s what I’m...