So it’s interesting (thinking outloud as I prepare to write this post...), I have recently decided to return to the days of fully committing my entire life to building a start up. Now don’t misunderstand, I have been on this entrepreneurial journey for nearly 8 years now, yet many of those years I have had a day job to be able to support myself. Well, recently I decided to follow Paul Graham’s advice regarding half-hearted efforts and quit my day job, never to return again and go full throttle on my own biz. Now, I’ve done this before, and yes it sucks at times, cause you find yourself broke a lot of the time, you tend to see all the “rest of the world” getting up at 7am rushing to work, and every once in a while you have a moment of insanity and are tempted to jump back into the rat race, only to snap out of it cause you realize that you are not one of them; you’re an entrepreneur (whether it hurts or not). Sure those stable paychecks are nice, yet that’s about it. You end up spending most of your work day on your Blackberry working on your own stuff and lunch breaks at meetings with your own teams. You even sneak out for bathroom breaks to get on a call with a developer who you’re trying to motivate and manage. And again, nothing to do with your day job. This was my experience at my most recent attempt to work at a cushy corporate job. Yep it even sounds gross.
So here I am, I’m 29 going on 30 years old, have spent all my 20’s pursuing a dream, failing, yet loving just enough of my mini successes to have evolved into who I am today, a freaking entrepreneur. Love it or hate it, you are who you are, and this you cannot deny at the end of the day. I am a hard headed, risk-taking, crazy S.O.B, who is the captain of his own ship and will simply always be like this.
So here I am, its 5:15am, I have just finished a night of creating a business brief for a start up idea that I am increasingly excited about. I have nowhere to be in the AM, no boss but myself and guess what, I’ll be up in a few hours, rolling out of bed checking my Blackberry, warming up the PC, and going at it all over again…
This time it’s my way, and I’m loving every minute of it.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sent to Me by a Mentor of Mine...M.M
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
"As for the future, your task is not to forsee it, but to enable it."
from The Wisdom of the Sands by Antoine de Saint - Exupery
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
"As for the future, your task is not to forsee it, but to enable it."
from The Wisdom of the Sands by Antoine de Saint - Exupery
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
SkillSlate Raises $1.1 Million in Funding!!!
SkillSlate Raises $1.1 Million in Funding
Investment co-led by Canaan Partners and First Round Capital
New York, NY – October 20, 2010 – SkillSlate (http://www.skillslate.com), a website for easily finding individual service providers such as tutors, dog walkers, and personal trainers, today announced the closing of its first round of institutional capital, co-led by Canaan Partners and First Round Capital, along with participation from a number of prominentNY-angel investors, including Jason Finger (Founder &Former CEO of SeamlessWeb), John Caplan (Founder & CEO of The OpenSky Project), John Goldsmith (Board Member of Gerson Lehrman Group), Kal Vepuri, Josh Abramowitz, and Matthew Grodin.
SkillSlate helps consumers find individual service providers online, enabling users to search thousands of business profile pages complete with pictures, prices and reviews. These one-person businesses often provide great service at highly competitive prices, but, until SkillSlate, have been hard to find online. Many individual service providers lack a web presence – and are thus underrepresented in search engines,where 82% of people look for local services. SkillSlate’s technologyensures service providers’ pages surface highly in search engine queries, driving greater web visibility for their services and helping more potential customers find them.
“Fifteen percent of the US workforce is individually employed, yet they are underrepresented on the Internet. SkillSlate gives individual service providers a way tomore effectively market themselves to consumers. With the support and guidance of Canaan and First Round Capital, we can now move forward in executing our vision,” said Bartek Ringwelski, co-founder of SkillSlate.
SkillSlate allows consumers to easily filter through individual service providers to find the ones that exactly match the criteria they’re looking for. To build out these filtering tools, the company has taken a focused approach with regard to both service type and geography, ensuring there are a sufficient number of service providers for consumers to receive relevant search results in their area.SkillSlate is currently focused on the greater New York metropolitan region, but plans to expand nationally in the future.
“Although individual service providers tend to be less expensive than companies, finding them online isn’t easy. Search engines tend to favor larger, more established companies, while classified sites don’t give consumers any specific criteria about the people providing services,” saidDan Ciporin, Venture Partner at Canaan Partners. “SkillSlate makes it easy for consumers to find detailed information about service providers by emphasizing pictures, prices, and reviews. Equally important, SkillSlate gives these self-employed individuals the search engine visibility they need in order to be found where a vast number of consumers are looking.”
SkillSlate recently re-launched its site with 3,500 service providers in 10 service categories throughout the New York City area. The company will use this round of funding for technology development and to expand its service category breadth and depth.
“Skillslate will provide value to both buyers and sellers of local services by reducing friction in the discovery and quality assessment process. Their unique approach solves a real problem for both sides of this large and inefficient market,” said Phineas Barnes, Principal at First Round Capital.
About SkillSlate
SkillSlate allows consumers to easily find local individual service providers like tutors, dog walkers, and personal trainers. SkillSlate aims to empower the more than 16 million individual service providers in the US to more effectively market their services directly to consumers online. SkillSlate provides detailed professional and personal information including pictures, fees, and reviews within a searchable, sortable directory where consumers can find service providers that fit their specific needs.
About Canaan Partners
Canaan Partners invests in visionary entrepreneurs and provides them the networks, insights and operational guidance required to build high-performance technology and healthcare companies. Founded in 1987, the firm has raised eight funds and completed more than 78 acquisitions and 53 IPOs. With $3 billion under management and a worldwide footprint, the firm is committed to catalyzing the growth of innovative digital media, communications & mobility, enterprise and clean tech companies. Among its successes are Associated Content, the people’s media company; VOIP equipment supplier Acme Packet; CommerceOne, the company that pioneered B2B ecommerce; DoubleClick, the leading online advertising solution; Match.com, the most popular online dating site in the world; and SuccessFactors, the global leader in on-demand performance and talent management solutions. Other Canaan investments include 3Crowd, Active Networks, blip.tv, Blurb, Cardlytics, iYogi, KABAM, Lending Club, ON24, OpenSky, Prime Sense, SOASTA, Tremor Media and Zoosk. Canaan maintains a presence in California, Connecticut, India and Israel. For more information visit www.canaan.com.
About First Round Capital
First Round Capital is a seed stage fund dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build remarkable companies. Often providing a company’s first outside capital, the team at First Round likes to take an active role and work with the founders to launch a new product or service. First Round Capital invests nationally and has offices in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.
Investment co-led by Canaan Partners and First Round Capital
New York, NY – October 20, 2010 – SkillSlate (http://www.skillslate.com), a website for easily finding individual service providers such as tutors, dog walkers, and personal trainers, today announced the closing of its first round of institutional capital, co-led by Canaan Partners and First Round Capital, along with participation from a number of prominentNY-angel investors, including Jason Finger (Founder &Former CEO of SeamlessWeb), John Caplan (Founder & CEO of The OpenSky Project), John Goldsmith (Board Member of Gerson Lehrman Group), Kal Vepuri, Josh Abramowitz, and Matthew Grodin.
SkillSlate helps consumers find individual service providers online, enabling users to search thousands of business profile pages complete with pictures, prices and reviews. These one-person businesses often provide great service at highly competitive prices, but, until SkillSlate, have been hard to find online. Many individual service providers lack a web presence – and are thus underrepresented in search engines,where 82% of people look for local services. SkillSlate’s technologyensures service providers’ pages surface highly in search engine queries, driving greater web visibility for their services and helping more potential customers find them.
“Fifteen percent of the US workforce is individually employed, yet they are underrepresented on the Internet. SkillSlate gives individual service providers a way tomore effectively market themselves to consumers. With the support and guidance of Canaan and First Round Capital, we can now move forward in executing our vision,” said Bartek Ringwelski, co-founder of SkillSlate.
SkillSlate allows consumers to easily filter through individual service providers to find the ones that exactly match the criteria they’re looking for. To build out these filtering tools, the company has taken a focused approach with regard to both service type and geography, ensuring there are a sufficient number of service providers for consumers to receive relevant search results in their area.SkillSlate is currently focused on the greater New York metropolitan region, but plans to expand nationally in the future.
“Although individual service providers tend to be less expensive than companies, finding them online isn’t easy. Search engines tend to favor larger, more established companies, while classified sites don’t give consumers any specific criteria about the people providing services,” saidDan Ciporin, Venture Partner at Canaan Partners. “SkillSlate makes it easy for consumers to find detailed information about service providers by emphasizing pictures, prices, and reviews. Equally important, SkillSlate gives these self-employed individuals the search engine visibility they need in order to be found where a vast number of consumers are looking.”
SkillSlate recently re-launched its site with 3,500 service providers in 10 service categories throughout the New York City area. The company will use this round of funding for technology development and to expand its service category breadth and depth.
“Skillslate will provide value to both buyers and sellers of local services by reducing friction in the discovery and quality assessment process. Their unique approach solves a real problem for both sides of this large and inefficient market,” said Phineas Barnes, Principal at First Round Capital.
About SkillSlate
SkillSlate allows consumers to easily find local individual service providers like tutors, dog walkers, and personal trainers. SkillSlate aims to empower the more than 16 million individual service providers in the US to more effectively market their services directly to consumers online. SkillSlate provides detailed professional and personal information including pictures, fees, and reviews within a searchable, sortable directory where consumers can find service providers that fit their specific needs.
About Canaan Partners
Canaan Partners invests in visionary entrepreneurs and provides them the networks, insights and operational guidance required to build high-performance technology and healthcare companies. Founded in 1987, the firm has raised eight funds and completed more than 78 acquisitions and 53 IPOs. With $3 billion under management and a worldwide footprint, the firm is committed to catalyzing the growth of innovative digital media, communications & mobility, enterprise and clean tech companies. Among its successes are Associated Content, the people’s media company; VOIP equipment supplier Acme Packet; CommerceOne, the company that pioneered B2B ecommerce; DoubleClick, the leading online advertising solution; Match.com, the most popular online dating site in the world; and SuccessFactors, the global leader in on-demand performance and talent management solutions. Other Canaan investments include 3Crowd, Active Networks, blip.tv, Blurb, Cardlytics, iYogi, KABAM, Lending Club, ON24, OpenSky, Prime Sense, SOASTA, Tremor Media and Zoosk. Canaan maintains a presence in California, Connecticut, India and Israel. For more information visit www.canaan.com.
About First Round Capital
First Round Capital is a seed stage fund dedicated to helping talented entrepreneurs build remarkable companies. Often providing a company’s first outside capital, the team at First Round likes to take an active role and work with the founders to launch a new product or service. First Round Capital invests nationally and has offices in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.
A Half-Hearted Effort by Paul Graham
This comes directly from Paul's http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
18. A Half-Hearted Effort
The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.
Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.
Does that mean you should quit your day job? Not necessarily. I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company, and that in the back of their minds, they know it. The reason they don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a bad investment. [12]
I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have succeeded if they'd taken the leap and done it full-time, but didn't. I have no idea how wide this band is, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless progression has the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number of people who could have made it, if they'd quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. [13]
If that's true, most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don't devote their whole efforts to them. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world. Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough.
In other words, starting startups is just like everything else. The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about that.
18. A Half-Hearted Effort
The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.
Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.
Does that mean you should quit your day job? Not necessarily. I'm guessing here, but I'd guess that many of these would-be founders may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company, and that in the back of their minds, they know it. The reason they don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a bad investment. [12]
I'd also guess there's some band of people who could have succeeded if they'd taken the leap and done it full-time, but didn't. I have no idea how wide this band is, but if the winner/borderline/hopeless progression has the sort of distribution you'd expect, the number of people who could have made it, if they'd quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it. [13]
If that's true, most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don't devote their whole efforts to them. That certainly accords with what I see out in the world. Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough.
In other words, starting startups is just like everything else. The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough. To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about that.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Man in the Arena - Awesome Quote by Theodore Roosevelt
Man in the Arena
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Friday, September 24, 2010
Entrepreneurial Overdrive
Entrepreneurial Overdrive - This is a characteristic that I believe every successful entrepreneur must possess. It’s the ability to reach that extra inch when you are tired or feeling like giving up. Its that extra sales call or line of code that you write at the end of a long week or while you’re dying to keep your eyes open. Its waking up on a Saturday, opening your laptop and getting at it, even before you brush your teeth.
Its not caring about spending half of your paycheck on getting that new logo designed or spending a weekend shacked up in your basement writing PRDs, fueled by pizza and beer.
In my mind it’s the only way to get things done. Cause in business excuses don’t matter, nor does anyone really give a crap why it didn’t get done. It just must get done. And especially when launching a start up, the momentum generated by getting things done is so VERY, VERY, VERY important. I have found that once you are at a standstill its incredibly hard to keep going. Its why coaches preach momentum to their team all the time. As an avid sports fanatic I see the change in momentum in games all the time. Loosing momentum will loose you games.
This is Entrepreneurial Overdrive.
Its not caring about spending half of your paycheck on getting that new logo designed or spending a weekend shacked up in your basement writing PRDs, fueled by pizza and beer.
In my mind it’s the only way to get things done. Cause in business excuses don’t matter, nor does anyone really give a crap why it didn’t get done. It just must get done. And especially when launching a start up, the momentum generated by getting things done is so VERY, VERY, VERY important. I have found that once you are at a standstill its incredibly hard to keep going. Its why coaches preach momentum to their team all the time. As an avid sports fanatic I see the change in momentum in games all the time. Loosing momentum will loose you games.
This is Entrepreneurial Overdrive.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Its True about True Ventures...They're cool guys
So, I had a cup of coffee this morning with a guy from true ventures, and was definitely surprised at how cool this dude was. I mean, I have met and know a ton of VCs in the web space and many, not to generalize, are so full of themselves that its a breath of fresh air to meet some that are not so pretentious and full of sh%t. This guy was actually listening to what I had to say and provided some very relevant feedback; actually feedback that that actually solved some of the issues that I was currently tackling on my Incubator55 research platform. It was awesome. The interesting thing is that us young entrepreneurs tend to forget that getting funded is like getting married, and its not entirely only about the money. In our case, its a matter of time, and funding is a way to accelerate things drastically. Its like marrying a hot women who's a pain in the a#s to deal with. Once you tie the knot you are stuck and getting out is a messy ordeal.
Now that we are in the process of exploring funding its very important to us to partner with the RIGHT fund, who will be mentors and innovators, not just a pile of cash.
Check out
or Follow them :
Now that we are in the process of exploring funding its very important to us to partner with the RIGHT fund, who will be mentors and innovators, not just a pile of cash.
Check out
or Follow them :
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