More Thoughts On Domain Names

May 23, 2014

I wrote earlier about how we were considering other domain extensions for new business ideas, using something like .guru as the domain name extension instead of .com. We registered two .guru domains this week for two new ideas we’re working on and we setup google apps email accounts for each of those domains. However today […]

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Finding & Poaching Our First Employee

May 22, 2014

In 2008, after over a year of bootstrapping our business, we were still only the original founders working in the startup. By that point, we needed to build a website to sell our software. None of the founders were interested in developing an ecommerce website. For the founders, that kind of development work was not […]

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Respecting our Student Commitments

May 21, 2014

When we started our company, we were all students at Georgia Tech. We were not all at the same point in our programs. I was the furthest along towards my degree. Others were 1-2 years behind me. We all had various scholastic demands on our time too that ebbed and flowed differently in the calendar […]

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Founder Vesting

May 21, 2014

One mistake we made early on as entrepreneurs was to not implement founder vesting. We used a lawyer with no startup experience to organize ourselves. We overpaid, and we ended up with a terrible operating agreement. Luckily the agreement we had, along with a super majority vote of the founders, enabled us to allocate future […]

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Timing Marketing Communications

May 19, 2014

Tonight Urvaksh yelled at me again for the time of day at which I post on this blog. His point is that no one wants to read what I post when I post late. And when they see it in the morning they do not have time to read it during their morning rush. He […]

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Starting with Product Management

May 17, 2014

I have written before about how a new startup integrator has joined our team. He will be learning all aspects of our business over the rest of the year. Our idea is to have him go deep on particular aspects of the business until he has great understanding of the business. As I have been […]

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The Downside of Selling Tombstones

May 16, 2014

Earlier today I was talking with an entrepreneur about a startup idea. The idea was to provide a service for an event that only happens rarely in someone’s life. It struck me as a huge difficulty. The cost of customer acquisition is the largest and most painstaking cost of most businesses. If your product or […]

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Letting Go and Focusing on One Startup

May 15, 2014

One of the biggest defining moments for any entrepreneur is the moment of letting go and deciding to focus all time, energy, and resources on one startup. The common holdouts before letting go are: Day jobs paying the bills Schooling Other startup ideas which had been brainstormed and worked on in parallel It is hard […]

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Just Throw Money At It

May 13, 2014

I ran across several articles today (like this one) that basically said the city of Newark wasted $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg had donated to its public schools. My immediate thought, without knowing any details about this particular situation, is that most problems can not be fixed merely by throwing money at them. As an […]

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How Important is Owning the .com Domain?

May 12, 2014

When I first started building companies in 2006, it was universally believed that the .com extension was the only commercially viable domain extension. So we searched for a name that had an available .com for registration. I am now working with new entrepreneurs on new ideas and this time I am questioning the importance of […]

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