Yesterday, Salesforce announced the launch of Desk.com, a new social help desk product built by the Assistly team, which was acquired last September. We have been following the progress of San Francisco-based Assistly, syncing up every few months with founder and CEO Alex Bard since their creation and participation as a San Diego startup showcase…
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A veteran of the startup world as creative lead at Threadless, Digg and others, Jeffrey Kalmikoff has been leading up the product team at San Francisco-based startup SimpleGeo. I got a chance to sit down with Jeffrey while at South by Southwest to discuss his role, experience, and share his advice for any entrepreneurs looking…
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We hosted the Startup Mixology Conference in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago with the goal of having a fabulous line-up of speakers breaking down the various ingredients that go into starting and running a new venture. These ingredients included prototyping, marketing, funding, rainmaking, selling, etc. We succeeded, and now we are excited to share…
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Web standards are often formed with great intent to change the way we interface with the web, but lack of adoption by the giants in technology can make or break these standards. In the last decade there have been multiple initiatives to implement microformats for the web such as Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, Google’s Recipe Search, and…
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Bootstrapping – the startup metaphor for a self-sustaining business that proceeds without external help. This is a story about bootstrapping – real bootstrapping, like, live with your parents, and rent a crappy office bootstrapping. It’s holding out on paying yourself until you start making money, on the way to a multi-million dollar revenue business bootstrapping….
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This is a guest blog post written by Tyler York, CEO of Trisse. A few months ago, before we started working on Trisse, my co-founder and I created a 99 Designs submission for a side project called Stash.ly. We never ended up implementing the project, but we learned a lot about how to work with designers…
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If you are like me, once you have a grasp on how to leverage social media, and the narrative is set for whatever your objective, you start to run wild with different ideas. There’s something about having some success thinking outside the box that makes you want to stay there. That’s a good thing. After all, there is nothing wrong with having a…
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After I wrote “The West Coast Deal” I started getting thank you notes and congratulations from entrepreneurs. Many of them founders of companies who have been futilely seeking funding in DC. And that’s when I realized I had done the startup world a major disservice. That’s when Mr. Cranky kicked in and I thought it…
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Location based services have been hot for a few years now, motivating people to check-in to collect a badge or other virtual good and compete with others. One of the leaders in the space is Gowalla, an Austin based startup led by founder and CEO Josh Williams. Josh is an entrepreneur who has had other…
Read MoreEntrepreneurs good or bad, we all make mistakes. Some take their lumps over and over while others learn more quickly from their mistakes. Scott Walker, the founder of Walker Corporate Law Group, has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and has seen lots of mistakes get made along the way, so he shared five of the…
Read MoreAs CTO of Threadless, Harper Reed helped grow the community-based company that prints designs created and chosen by users from 2 barely functioning servers to over 45 devices. He also helped Threadless produce a revenue of over $20 million. Reed has since moved on from Threadless and is working on his own secret startup. Harper…
Read MoreAs Co-Founder and CTO of FeedBurner which sold to Google back in 2007, Eric Lunt has experience building a successful tech startup into a business. Eric’s new venture, BrightTag, looks to ease the pain that publishers have with inserting ads, metrics and other includes into a web property. BrightTag creates a simple system that can be controlled…
Read MoreOver the past 10 years, Tomer Yogev has worked with several startups, owned his own small business consultancy, and spent time in venture capital. Recently, he launched TandemSpring, another small business consultancy. In this video interview, Tomer explains how the individual can be more important than their idea or execution, and techniques for moving past…
Read MoreBuilding trust, tapping into an understanding, and selling products? These things are seemingly incongruous, but they are the ingredients of the model MightyNest is built upon. MightyNest is distinguishing itself from other online retailers by offering the best products available. How do customers know they are the best? Based on the pledge the company makes…
Read MoreNew mobile apps are popping up everyday, almost as fast as websites did during the first Internet revolution. If you are developing a mobile app how do you stand out in the crowd? This is a question that developers, designers and marketers are faced with. Obviously, it all starts with the app itself. If your…
Read MoreThe Pivot. It’s a term that has been used a lot lately in the startup world as it was popularized by the idea of a lean startup which was championed by Eric Ries and Steve Blank. In it’s simplest form, a business should pivot, or change something about it’s direction, if the current business model…
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There are a number of startup accelerator and incubator programs in the United States. We are fans of these programs (not to be confused with... Read More
Two months after the iPad 2 debuted in March, around 40% of users surveyed said their iPad was their primary computer, up from around 30%... Read More
With our Startup Mixology Conference coming up next week followed by our classic Tech Cocktail DC Summer mixer which will showcase a handful of early-stage... Read More
Coming off of one of our biggest Tech Cocktail mixer events in Chicago this past week, which showcased 14 early-stage start-ups, we thought it would... Read More