City Taxes

May 21, 2013

Each year, every business in Atlanta (including startups) is supposed to register with the city to pay business taxes. Registration costs start around $200, if your business does not have much Georgia revenue, and go up from there. My guess is that many early startups are blissfully ignorant of this requirement. However, avoiding registration can […]

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Recognizing Perverse Incentives in Standard Business Situations

May 20, 2013

In many standard business situations, business leaders are stuck relying on service providers that have perverse incentives. The structure of the situation gives the person or firm you’ve hired a natural incentive working against your interest. Examples include: A buyers real-estate agent would prefer you pay more than less (percentage-based commission) A litigation attorney would […]

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Company Dashboards

May 19, 2013

Company dashboards are a great way to share information and are increasingly popular within startups. Key metrics from across the organization are displayed for all to see, helping set the company’s pulse. At AccelerEyes, we project our dashboard onto a wall in our office. We drive the projector with a cheap laptop running the Chrome […]

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Co-founder Alignment on Finances

May 18, 2013

Co-founder alignment on finances is important. Just as many divorcees cite disagreements over finances as a root source of the fracture, startup co-founders should also look to avoid those fundamental disagreements. There is a wide spectrum of approaches startup founders can take towards finances. Some may live high on the hog, oft quoting the phrase […]

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Someday Your Competitor’s Lawyers May Read Your Emails

May 17, 2013

Someday one of your competitors may sue your startup. If that happens, you’ll have to figure out how to put up a defense. Part of the early litigation process is called discovery. During discovery, each side is required to produce certain documents (often including all of your emails) for the other side’s lawyers to examine. […]

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Product Launch Experience Before Starting Up

May 16, 2013

At tonight’s ATDC Entrepreneur’s Night, I had a lot of fun telling some stories of the highs and lows we’ve experienced over the last 6 years building AccelerEyes. During the Q/A portion of the talk, there were two related questions that have prompted tonight’s post: In hindsight, what would you have done differently? If you […]

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Reasons I am Grateful for Atlanta

May 13, 2013

I’m grateful to be part of Atlanta. It’s an awesome city and has a great mix of ingredients. Today I want to share some of the reasons I love this city. Georgia Tech – one of the largest (the largest under some definitions) engineering schools in the nation; top 5 programs in most disciplines; great […]

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What Sustains Your Startup in Tough Times?

May 12, 2013

Tough times happen in startups. Every aspect of doing business is a potential problem:  lack of leads, lack of a good product, lack of market awareness, employee in-fighting, platform risk, deals gone sour, legal problems, regulatory problems, problems at home creating problems at work, the ultimate empty bank account, and many others. We’ve experienced several […]

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Bait-and-Switch Video Production Sales Story

May 11, 2013

This week our marketing people were befuddled by the same ruse I had fallen for several years ago. An inbound call came in from DMG Productions. They talked about how the technical computing market is so interesting and how they wanted to feature AccelerEyes in one of the pieces they are (supposedly) preparing about our market […]

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A Story of Pitching Sequoia

May 10, 2013

I spent the first half of 2009 pitching VC firms around the country. I’ll tell more about that at a later point. Today, I’ll tell a short story about pitching Sequoia. With surprising ease, we landed a face-to-face pitch with Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia and lead investor in Dropbox and other awesome companies. […]

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