8220;We were basically the online suggestion box for product development. It’s only talking about people who are developing products–which is a very narrow corridor–and most of the people who are building stuff, don’t have a lot of money. “So Marcus says it allowed them to to tell investors, “‘Intuit and Nokia, they’re starting to test our product. If you read the recent announcement that UserVoice riased, $800,000 this program will help you learn the small changes that allowed them to do it. Marcus Nelson, the company’s co-founder,

Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals ” in which he defined “Techies” as people who are not just “early adopters” but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent.  Normals Normals (or “Muggles” as Catarina Fake called them) are people who, unlike Techies, don’t just use products simply because they’re infatuated with them and with showing the world how cool it is that they’re using the latest tech product.  They They use products because the products solve a need they have.

Very few people fund individuals.  I Product :  You should build a product or a prototype.  I’m You cannot be just a biz dev type, salesperson, marketing genius or whatever and divorce yourself from product.  Great Great companies are built by having great products.  And This is part of my ongoing series Pitching a VC . Last night I attended a DealMaker Media (whom I love because they always host such great discussions) panel on raising angel money moderated by Dan Gould and with panelists Rob Hayes (First Round Capital, more seed or A round than

He has a really interesting background as a product manager and now an entrepreneur. Tell me a bit about your background. Like many product managers, my background is fairly eclectic. That's where I learned I enjoyed interacting with customers and working with development teams to build and launch products. From there, I became the first non-founder employee at an e-commerce startup called BITSource, which was the first electronic software distributor delivering electronic volume software licenses to corporations. Visible networking is turning into a really great opportunity to get to know people better, get to meet new people, and have some interesting conversations.

Have you noticed how some entrepreneurs look at getting funding as the ultimate sign of success? Not only is funding not the finish line, but the mistakes you make when you get investors can cost you when you finally do get to the finish line and are ready to sell your company. Brandon has done stints as an operator at all stages of the funding cycle, and at Soros Private Equity, investing over $70M in technology deals. Brandon Watson came to Mixergy to talk about how he raised money for his startup, how he grew it, and why he had to sell it. The two most powerful points

Steve Gilison worked as a market researcher and product manager at a startup where my company, TechEmpower , did the software / web development. Of course, I immediately gave him the whole spiel on Visible Networking and Steve was totally game to make our networking visible. Remind me about your background Steve? I have about 11 years in the technology sector including roles doing market research, sales and product development. My focus has been marketing strategy and product development. It was great to hear from a long, lost colleague the other day.

Most often I'm being brought in the early stage, Start-up or Expansion (as the company looks at new product lines). Business Strategy I support the leadership team to: provide input on short and long-term business vision, strategies and plans to help define business priorities, work closely with operational leadership to review and influence the product road map, review and provide input on some investor presentation materials, business proposals, participate in new business, partnership or investor meetings on a limited basis within time constraints, advise the leadership team on

Despite the fact that fund size and fund returns are generally inverse related, all of the incentives are to raise bigger funds: As fund size grows larger, fund managers essentially ends up with guaranteed wealth.    A general partnership that has a total of $500mm under management (over 2 or even three funds) generates $10mm per year in fees before making its first investment.   The number of partners Saturday’s TechCrunch had an article with the title above…  the “end” of traditional VC has been something that we (and many others) have been predicting for a while.  

In the second post I argued that as of September 2009 the pace of VC investments has increased rapidly (at least for software / Internet investments – the only sector on which I’m competent to comment), but only for those remaining VCs who have new enough funds and aren’t plagued by “the triage problem.” Consumer spending is 70% of the economy and will continue to be stretched – We can look all we want at tech innovation, VC funding cycles and hot M&A deals, but ultimately growth and therefore investment must be underpinned by revenue.  In the first post in this three part series I described why I believe the VC market froze between September 2008 – April 2009 .  In

The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations. How are you funding this? What level of funding do you currently have? I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. If I’m being asked to do startup software development, I’m going to push fairly hard on key questions that the startup needs to have answered before