This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons” I’m not going to cover in this post the obvious post-show marketing tasks such as following up on all those business cards you grabbed, communicating with all those people who registered at your site and leveraging your new found fame to score venture capital.  I’ll I know you’re thinking that you have your head on straight but I promise you the experience of finding yourself in this maelstrom will leave any first time entrepreneur spinning. Tonight I was reading a good blog post ( here ) from Sean Powers with Alistair Croll on preparing yourself for the TC50 “bump” – the rise in traffic that a company gets from presenting at TechCrunch 50.  Worth

This is part of my ongoing series “ Start Up Advice ” but I’d really like to call this post, “VC Advice.” Let me start with a couple of stories. A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and is running a high-profile, early stage company in NorCal.  He’s We exchanged ideas when I was an entrepreneur along side him in NorCal in 05-07 and my point-of-view on founder / VC relationships 8221; If a company has reached a level of success, has been around for a few years and you believe the company has potential to break out

2006 was the last time I went out to raise venture capital.  I Many had the typical investor-friendly terms where entrepreneurs would get screwed and not even understand how they got screwed until many years later.  This There was one firm that offered me an entrepreneur friendly “vanilla” term sheet and that was True Ventures , which is why I believe they are attracting great early-stage entrepreneurs.  They This is part of my ongoing series “ Pitching a VC “. There’s a great meme developing this morning on the need to simplify funding

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. Having been through this all before myself I would like to tell a cautionary tale that can happen to the best of us: The Yo-Yo life of the tech entrepreneur.  TechCrunch ran my article yesterday as a guest post but I wanted to have a copy here for anybody who missed it and for future readers of this blog.  This

Within 2 months, the entrepreneurs were profitable. From the company's About page: "We started out as GotVMail Communications in 2003, after identifying the need for an easy-to-use virtual phone system for entrepreneurs that wouldn’t break the bank. ... As And that’s exactly what our service does for entrepreneurs like you: gives you the tools to propel your small business forward." If you like my interview, please vote for it on my favorite news site. --Andrew Andrew

How he came up with the idea for Goodreads But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. So then they started going to these niche sites. Andrew: Before we get started, I want to introduce you to Haystack. Here's an easy way to vote for this interview on Hacker News. --Andrew Andrew

When I sent out 300 invites in early 2006 people thought I was crazy.  The power to me was that I had already been blogging about my personal life and my children as well as separately about my startup.  And Facebook continued to innovate while all this time I have continued to wonder WTF LinkedIn was up to.  I’ve been thinking a lot about comments lately.  I recently wrote a post about how to get access to people at conferences and how to connect with people on social networks . 

A reminder that it is important for all entrepreneurs is to remember to be careful about “deal drift.”  I Let me start with a story.  When We ended up agreeing a term sheet for $16.5 We had people hearing through the grapevine that we were about to raise money and new investors started calling us to get in on the I think the perfect saying to have as a reminder is “time is the enemy of all deals,” or as my wife is all too tired of hearing me say, “Don’t pop the champagne until the ink is dry on the contract and the money is in the bank.” So, where does this all come

On December 2nd, 2006 I wrote the blog post published later in this post when I was CEO of startup Koral about my experiences in pitching VCs.  This blog post ended up on Valleywag (which had much bigger presence back then). The Original Post (after the jump): Venture Capital, By Mark Suster (December 2nd, 2006) Can After my company was acquired by Salesforce.com I was asked to stop blogging and they took over my blog as an asset in the sale of the company.  My blog was wiped out. 

I call it the entrepreneur thesis.  I’m I’m not talk about the age old debate amongst investors whether you back entrepreneurs, markets or products (or as people like to hedge – product / market fit).  I’m It’s entrepreneurs I back.  I’m It’s what I call the “entrepreneur thesis.”  My I was going to save this post for a while but the Patzer Problem meme has forced my hand. I