This is part of my ongoing series “ Start-up Lessons. ” This is a very important post to me because I find myself giving this advice all the time and if you don’t follow the basic advice here you can cause yourself much heartache down the line – even if your company ultimately becomes über successful. Sometimes they’re working full time at a company or sometimes they’ve already left their employer and they’re bouncing around ideas with friends.  These 8221;  If you want to subscribe to my RSS feed please click here or to get my blog by email click here .

This is part of my ongoing series Startup Lessons Building companies is hard work.  I I started my first company in 1999 in London at the height of the dot com craze.  We We also had facilities in Dublin, Ireland where our company was initially founded. We went through the euphoria of massive exposure at the time of our launch due to an article that ran in the Financial Times.  We We were unprepared.  Our

If you’re a startup and you don’t have a close relationship with a few law firms you’re really missing one of the most important relationships that any entrepreneur can have. When to get a lawyer - If you plan to be a venture or angel backed technology company (what I mostly write about) the best time to start meeting and getting to know lawyers is long before you ever start your company.  I recently read a post over on VentureHacks titled, “ Top Ten Reasons Entrepreneurs Hate Lawyers ” written by Scott Walker (who blogs on legal issues for entrepreneurs ). 

One of the topics that came up in my post Mobile Internet Apple Facebook was around open vs. This issue comes up at the start of almost every new startup company in a variety of forms. In this post, I want to look at just the question of when it makes sense to use Facebook Connect, Twitter Oauth, OpenID, Yahoo Browser-Based Authentication, Google Friend Connect or basically any of the other authentication mechanisms. Example What do I mean? closed platforms. I’m constantly struggling with trying to figure out the best way to pull together solutions,

I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up . I used an image from Roger Smith that describes the varying roles of a CTO as the company matures. However, I’ve now begun questioning how and what an early-stage / startup CTO should Most often at the earliest point in the life of a startup, the dominant need is certainly to produce product to get something in the market, get funding, etc.

For me I’ve stated publicly that 70% of my investment decision is the team and most of this is skewed toward the founders.  I’ve watched people who went to the top schools, got the best grades and worked for all the right companies flame out. It’s the person who never gives up – who never accepts “no” for an answer.  This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful .  I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs.

This is part of my ongoing series called “ Start-up Lessons .” I came across this blog post about getting a computer science degree as the best degree for getting into venture capital or working at a VC-backed start up. BCG, Bain, LEK – they’re all great), a few years at a start-up or a few years somewhere like Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Apple.  8221; I

This is part of my ongoing series, “ Startup Lessons .” You start a company 50/50 with a good friend.  If 99.99% of companies do not become the next YouTube.  In Or maybe it’s not a good friend but you’re a business guy and hooked up with a technical guy you know through the network and you think you’ll work well together or vice-versa. 8221; Yesterday I wrote a blog post ( here ) in which I urged people to not have too many founders.  Best

Recently I’ve been debating with a number of young startup companies that are raising money in the next few months, “what is the right about of capital to raise at a startup?” It places undue pressure early in the company’s history to “do big things” when sometimes what is warranted is more prudence.  It Google suddenly This is part of my ongoing series on Raising Venture Capital . 8221;

This is part of my ongoing series “Start-up Lessons” 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 So many companies suck at managing their booths.  If Worth a read on how to maximize the traffic that comes to you site since much of it will be fleeting. Their post links to a great post by Jason Calacanis ( here ) on how to make the most of your booth experience at the show.  So