annajohnson

I like Jason Calacanis. He's done a wonderful job with TWIST, the This Week In network, the Open Angel Forum and the Launch conference. I find him to be very funny and entertaining, passionate about entrepreneurship, tough-minded and determined to succeed, forthright and honest about his opinions, and someone who isn't afraid to make hard decisions. I do wonder about the future of Mahalo, though. Unlike some of Jason's other ventures, it seems as if Mahalo - now version 4.0 - has struggled to obtain a unique and strong identity, let alone sufficient market traction, so far. If it can be the best how-to video site on the Internet, great, but given Google's recent stance on how-to content sites (i.e. the 'farmer' algorithmic change), not to mention all the other companies vying to be the best how-to video site on the Internet, the company certainly has its work cut out for it. On the other hand, these are precisely the circumstances that sort out the real entrepreneurs from the wannabes and from Jason's comments above... I wouldn't count him or the Mahalo team out.

I agree... but for a totally different reason. I thought it was an incredibly bad joke considering that Brisbane, Australia has just been hit by the worst floods since 1974. The CBD and many suburbs are literally awash in water. It's a national disaster: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-reports/gallery-fn7... So... I was relieved to see the piece had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of Brisbane, Australia!

Green tea contains caffeine... so I'm confused too.

Why Are There So Many Articles on Why There Are So Few Women in Tech?

Okay, I'm being facetious. But as a female entrepreneur and founder of a growing tech startup, I would much rather read about the women who ARE building tech companies than endless articles on the women who aren't (i.e. articles about why so many women don't work in tech or start tech companies, etc).

That's not to say such articles don't make some relevant points. But are they really helping or hindering the situation? Which kind of article would inspire more women to get into tech... another article lamenting the lack of women... or an inspiring article profiling some of the women who have, or are, building wonderful tech companies?

I know which kind fires me up (and of course I get inspired by ALL entrepreneurs - men and women).

My husband and I quit full time jobs to build our second startup, whilst also having two kids to raise (8 and 6 years old). I don't feel like it's hard at all. I'm pretty disciplined, so I guess that helps. Perhaps I also see the world differently. But overall we're happier, we spend more time with our kids than when we were in jobs, and life is great.

I would also point out that the 'family business' is nothing new. Sure it may be somewhat different when you're building a business to scale, but there are plenty of examples of family businesses where the parents work huge hours and are also raising kids. Heaps of examples come to mind where the parents are literally managing the store 6 or 7 days a week, and somehow looking after children as well.

If you see 'having a family' as a barrier then it will be a barrier. Personally, raising kids and building a startup has never been an 'either/or' choice. In fact, since I love my kids and also love building a company... nothing could be better than having a life where I get to do both.

Very inspiring - thank you. Yes, it strikes me that Ed was not squandering his time at all. He was making the absolute best possible use of his time as he amassed more and more insights and understandings that he was able to channel into his ultimate calling.

"This is why Asia is winning, by the way." Winning at what, exactly? What a loaded statement... with absolutely no substance. Also, I'm not all that familiar with the U.S. college system, but if you were highly interested in math and science wouldn't you go to a different kind of university than a liberal arts college (i.e.one with a bigger focus on math, science, engineering)? So what is the relevance of comparing U.S. liberal colleges with 'Asia'?

Where are the lessons? In any case, I'll be getting that book. I loved Alan Sugar on the U.K. Apprentice. He doesn't suffer fools, that's for sure.

I can't speak for England or Europe but here in Australia it's typical for judges to 'award costs' to the winning party. In other words, the judge determines whether or not it's appropriate for the losing party to pay the legal costs of the winning party. It is not mandatory for judges to award costs but it is so common as to be expected.

In principle, awarding costs is 'fair': if Party A has caused Party B to incur legal costs in enforcing their legal rights then it's only fair for Party A to compensate Party B for their legal costs. A positive consequence of 'loser pays' is that there is far less litigation - and certainly less spurious litigation - in Australia than there might otherwise be.

On the other hand, while the practice seems fair in principle it can be very unfair - and financially crippling - in practice. You can imagine a situation where Party A is actually in the right, tries to appeal the judge's decision, but can't do so because they are financially in the hole because of having costs awarded against them!

So, while I still favour the idea of awarding costs, other mechanisms are needed to account for situations where parties are appealing decisions and the like.

That is a REALLY cool tool, thanks for sharing.

Good point. I have certainly used this approach with words that seemed similar but had radically different degrees of frequency. Having said that, it's also a 'psychological hack' in that it helps me make a decision over which word to use. Somehow, knowing that one word is used even slightly more often than another seems to give me more confidence in using that particular word than if I simply flipped a coin... unless, of course, the number of searches is the same for each word! (Uh-oh, gotta think for myself again...)

Not this woman. Ever since I was young I wanted to build a big business (i.e. NOT a 'lifestyle' business) and also raise a family. I never, ever saw it as an 'either/or' decision and maybe that's why I'm doing both.

Facebook's funding timeline: "Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004; Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005; Round three: $27.5 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company." Source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet

Tim certainly knows a thing or two about marketing. After reading all the claims I'm definitely intrigued. But, I'm also skeptical, since the claims seem so outlandish. So... I think I'll wait until the book comes out and flick through it in the bookstore.

Great article that provides invaluable insights into Mailchimp's experience with the freemium business model. We are using a freemium model with Domainer Income (http://www.domainerincome.com). Now, we are still in the throes of improving many aspects of the site and conversion funnel, etc but with regard to the freemium model itself, it occurs to me that we have - and anyone deploying a freemium model has - quite a few variables to play around with that will impact the 10:1 ratio as well as overall conversions, sales, profits, renewals, etc. For example, my experience and observations suggest that you really need to provide overwhelming value in the paid version to get people to upgrade. 'A little bit better' won't cut it. Also, you can experiment with the actual free/paid service you provide. One thing we're about to do is give everyone who signs up for a free membership a trial of the premium service before they are 'dropped' back to the free account. These are just two examples. On the other hand, having said this, I am also developing a theory that you really have three target markets: freebie users who will never upgrade, paid users who want the value-added services of the paid version, and a group in between that will upgrade if they perceive enough value in doing so. How big is the middle group, what will it take to convince them to upgrade, is it cost-effective to try to persuade them? These are all fascinating questions!

As others have noted, the point was not that university graduates are, by definition, smart or morally virtuous - merely that university courses require you to submit papers, do written exams, etc where it's made very clear that copying someone else's work is not acceptable.

You'll benefit from familiarizing yourself with - and using - certain tools. Here is a list of keyword tools:

http://www.kikabink.com/news/7-top-keyword-research-tools-fo...

And here is a list of competitive analysis tools:

http://www.kikabink.com/news/top-16-free-web-analytics-tools...

Is the question really: am I better off completing college, spending a few years with a big company (or a startup) and then starting my own company... or is it: what do I want to achieve - e.g. build my own company in the xyz industry - and what is the best way for me to achieve that? If you know that you want to start 'a' company but don't know exactly what kind of company or what industry, etc the question may then become: what would I like to learn about and what will enable me to learn about that? The answer may well be to go to / stay in college and then work for a company or two in order to develop business skills and work out what kind of business you'd like to build. On the other hand, if you know exactly what you want to start, and have the skills and resources to 'just do it', maybe you are better off dropping out of college. Personally, I am almost a textbook example of Vivek's advice precisely because I wasn't sure what kind of business I wanted to start back in my high school and university days. I will say this, though, even if you stay in college or work for another company, I recommend starting some kind of business on the side. Not only will you learn skills you won't learn at college or in a big company - and you may stumble on the business you really want to commit to - but it will also help off-set the socialization (i.e. to keep that nice, high paying job with benefits) that can arise in a big corporate environment and that may stop you from ever taking the entrepreneurial plunge.

I don't think there's anything suspect about Ron Conway's misspelling of 'entrepreneur'. He probably just banged out the email without doing a spell-check. Let's remember it was a private email. Had he intended to have it published he probably would have taken more care. I can't speak for Ron, of course, but I will say that I frequently write the word "entrepreneur" (i.e. in blog posts, emails, etc). I'm not sure why - maybe it's the way I touch-type - but I often miss the second 'r'. I typically don't even notice until I do a spell-check. All in all, I think it was just an innocent mistake.

Good question. To go from a purely conceptual model such as this to one with real empirical substance you would have to be precise about such concepts as confidence and success and how they are quantitatively measured. I think a group of smart psychologists could pull it off, as long as they were open about their definitions and quantitative scales, so people could accept or reject their thesis accordingly.

I think this is terrific news and I'm really pleased to see Mark Z. setting up a foundation and investing a significant amount of money in such a worthy cause as education. Having said that... am I being too cynical... or is it just a coincidence that this announcement should come just before the release of The Social Effect movie which, from everything I've read, paints Mark in such a bad light? Is the $100 donation announcement an example of Facebook PR in damage control? It doesn't detract from the good the $100 million will (hopefully) do, of course, but the timing is interesting...

Spot on. As much as we'd like to move to the U.S. the biggest barrier is that small matter of a green card! We actually love Australia, and Melbourne is a wonderful city, but we do face certain disadvantages building a startup from here. We're still doing it of course and, interestingly, in our particular niche (tools for domain name investors) Melbourne actually has a few global players (e.g. Trellian, Flippa). Down the track I see us having some kind of U.S. presence. There's always a way...

I really enjoyed that article. What strikes me is how driven and hard-working Michael Arrington is. Actually, 'compulsive' comes to mind. Which prompts me to think that successful entrepreneurs aren't motivated to succeed... they're compelled to succeed.

Do a search on the Internet and you'll find more arguments - from highly credentialed doctors and nutritionists along with plenty of unqualified 'diet fundamentalists' - for and against the idea that gluten is the culprit behind so many health issues. Personally, I really DO feel fine on a largely Mediterranean diet complete with plenty of bread and pasta. I'm also fit and actually underweight (according to BMI calculators). I feel great health-wise and am a positive, up-beat, happy person. So I certainly see no need to stop eating gluten. And here's what I don't get about the idea that a paleo diet is the key to a long life and overcoming the obesity crisis: why did the obesity crisis only come about in the last part of 20th century, hundreds of years after most people (in developed nations at least) had abandoned paleo diets?

Funny, I thought I was about to get a lesson in what words I should be using in our advertising copy. Was the most powerful word 'free' or 'you' or 'sex' or something else? Oh, and then I re-read the article title: 'perspective' and then the article itself. I guess I approached the article with my own very skewed perspective...

The success of a venture is going to have much more to do with WHO starts the company than whether or not there is one or more of them. Look at history and we see all kinds of successful companies that were started by sole founders on the one hand and more than one founder on the other. Maybe there is a statistical likelihood of a company being more successful if there is more than one founder... but no entrepreneur in their right mind is going to base their decisions on those kinds of stats. So much depends on the unique circumstances that you find yourself in. I particularly like this quote:

'But Grieselhuber argues that entrepreneurs should worry less about having "everything perfectly meet other people's criteria," and instead focus on, to quote Nike, "just doing it."'

It also occurs to me that while 'bad' teachers can often still hang on to their jobs (I've had more than my fair share), very few bad entrepreneurs can still hang on to a business!

I guess the point I was trying to make was that some people are very good at teaching (or blogging) even though they may not have necessarily done what they teach about. For example, I've had great teachers - politics teachers, English teachers, professors in law school, etc - who didn't practice what they taught i.e. my high school politics teacher wasn't a politician, my university film studies professor didn't make movies, my law school professors were not practicing lawyers or judges (in fact my contract law professor was brilliant yet had only practised law for a year before turning to academia), etc. So it is conceivable that someone could teach or communicate something of value without having the personal experience of practising the profession they're teaching about.

Having said all that, when it comes to someone making grand statements about what constitute the keys to success, etc this may not be something that you can truly and credibly teach purely based on persoaln observations or academic study (as would seem to be possible regarding subjects such as politics, film and law to repeat the examples given above).

This seems more like someone attempting to teach or make statements about what it takes to successfully climb a mountain. Mountain climbing is one of those subjects - to which I would definitely add building a business - that can't really be taught by someone without personal experience. These are subjects where the 'lab' is the real world, so unless someone has been in the real world, they really don't have helpful lessons to offer.

Here's another take on this: those who are good at teaching, teach and those who are good at blogging, blog. In other words, some people are actually very good at teaching or communicating ideas, even though they may not 'do' them.

"Lesson: Deeply care about what you’re working on"

This was one of the lessons-learned that resonated with me. My husband and I lacked passion for the first startup we co-founded back in the late 1990s and although we were profitable and did sell the business, I know that had we cared deeply about it we would have been 100x more successful. When you care deeply about something you do all the 'little' things that make ALL the difference.

More generally, I would like to thank Paul for his post. In fact, it may just be mandatory reading for anyone starting or planning to start a business. Even if you don't agree with Paul's assessment of NewsTilt's demise, it makes for a great case study, precisely because it inspires us to think about what went wrong, what should have been done, etc. In fact the combination of the post and this thread is precisely the kind of discussion I find so instructive.

Good point Alex. If TC's real objective is not so much to recover any money but to make it clear to the world that FG screwed TC over (as well as issue a warning to everyone else not to mess with TC!) then I'd say: mission accomplished. No need to rack up even more legal fees unless there is a good chance of recovering both any damages and the costs of the lawsuit.