From Investment Banking to Startup

August 10, 2013

Some of the best startup founders are those that leave behind lucrative (and tough-to-get) jobs, like investment banking, management consulting, medicine, prestigious law firms, and BigCo leadership positions. They leave those careers behind with: An understanding of what makes BigCos great and how they are organized An understanding of their market Great business experience in […]

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A Culture Fit Twist for Startups

August 8, 2013

An essential element of a strong hiring process is a check for culture fit. This includes checking against the company’s core values, involving a sufficient number of existing employees, using written essays that prompt the prospect to speak write about culture related items, and equipping everyone with a veto power based on culture. I recently […]

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Documents for a Friends & Family Convertible Note Round

August 7, 2013

Today, I continue the thread of discussion on raising money in an early stage startup. In 2009 and 2010, we raised $400,000 in a Friends & Family convertible note round. The investors in that round included literal friends and family as well as several established angel investors, with check sizes ranging from $4,000 to $100,000. […]

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Raising Money Blitz

August 6, 2013

Shortly after launching our first product in 2009, we had an all-avenue blitz to explore raising money. We wanted to explore all options so that we would be able to make the best choice. We also wanted to keep many lines in the water because we did not know which lines we would ultimately be […]

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Pivoting from Rural NC to Tech Startup

August 5, 2013

I grew up in rural North Carolina. I had no engineering mentors. I had no entrepreneurial mentors. My parents are accountants and on the sliding scale of risk-taking versus playing-it-safe in a career, my hometown and upbringing was naturally more geared towards play-it-safe careers. Looking back, it is interesting to realize how I pivoted from […]

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Fun Friday: Video Game Innovation with Microsoft’s IllumiRoom

August 2, 2013

Ok @Microsoft, this is the coolest thing you’ve ever done, put all your eggs into this basket asap: https://t.co/TRXFx3gSmU — Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) July 26, 2013 Following up on yesterday’s post about the importance of video games to math, science, and computational advancements, today I share an interesting innovation by Microsoft that improves the video gaming experience. Some […]

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How Video Games Influence Computing

August 1, 2013

Video gaming is influential in our market. Due to video gaming demands, graphics processing unit (GPU) chips advanced at an astonishing rate in computational performance over the last decade. Early games had simple graphics and did not need much computation to display the game on the screen. Then graphics became complex, but were still all […]

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Survivorship Bias

July 30, 2013

In one of my posts last week, the term survivorship bias was used and I made a note to discuss the term in its own post. It’s an important concept for startup leaders to understand and can influence decision making, particularly for product management, market analysis, and setting business direction. Survivorship bias basically is a […]

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Atlanta Startup Village #10 Recap

July 29, 2013

Tonight’s Atlanta Startup Village was awesome with 347 registrants! The growth of the event continues. Here’s a recap of tonight’s companies: DynoForms * mobile forms product * built a mobile form in 4 minutes * B2B focus on companies with 10 to 3,000 employees * $10/mo per user * provide services per form * all […]

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Culture First Stages

July 28, 2013

Yesterday, I wrote a more lengthy post about “culture first culture.” Since I posted it last night, I’ve updated it substantially today with new thoughts and edits. Company culture is on my mind a lot this year as we are growing our headcount. In the process of making edits to the post today, I found it […]

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