Tag: Entrepreneurship

A long time from now, with any luck, I will be very old. I will look back on my experiences as a young father: in the delivery room, first steps, first words, first days of school, ice skating rinks, hot dogs, board games, bicycle rides, dinners, friends' houses... all of it. I have a feeling,… Continue reading My trip to NYC with Lily →

After the success of The Future of Diablo Valley conference, for which I chaired and did the bulk of the organizing, I was approached by a friend in the local sustainability community. She asked me if I'd like to help organize a conference focusing on green tech in Contra Costa County. I enthusiastically said yes!… Continue reading Taking advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act in Contra Costa County →

This winter break has been a big one for Shovels. Despite having my kids at home, trekking out to Hawaii, and getting swept up in the Southwest chaos getting to and from Disneyland, I put a lot of deep thought into Shovels. This exercise brought out some gut-wrenching paranoia, deep frustration and confusion, and then… Continue reading Platforms versus point solutions →

I like B2B data businesses. I learned how to write web applications by building Toofr.com (now FindEmails -- they kept my "oo" logo after I sold it). Toofr found email addresses for business contacts. I wrote a book, The Parallel Entrepreneur, about my experience building, running, and selling Toofr while I kept a day job… Continue reading Business evaluation: Alumnify →

If you read this blog, I mean really parse through it and find my stuff from 2017 and 2018, you'd be surprised to know that I'm eagerly, enthusiastically, passionately fundraising for my startup this time around. Yes, me, the guy who wrote Don't make a mountain of a Sand Hill (Road). I wrote that. I'm… Continue reading I’m fundraising this time — and here’s why →

This has been a wild year. I guess I'll start from where I left off on that children's book I wrote about a year ago. Coming into 2022, I was doing really great. I sold MightySignal to Airnow and was enjoying the process of moving into our new and improved house. I'd spend my evenings… Continue reading Climate tech is my next big thing →

TL;DR I'm now working on https://www.shovels.ai. I’m going to evaluate a business that I’ve already started working on. Perhaps I should have done this earlier, but for better or worse, this project has evolved far faster than expected! To back up a bit, I’ve been looking for a good idea for a while. I was… Continue reading Business evaluation: Shovels →

Here's a bit of contrarian advice: Be nice to your competitors. In fact, befriend them, because you just might make a pile of money as a result. I've always taken this road and it has never backfired. I'm going to describe a bunch of examples here and then generalize the approach for your own situation.… Continue reading Why it’s good to befriend your competitors →

I recently read this great short article about how to evaluate ideas by Jared Friedman, a partner at YC. In it he describes a recurring theme across the thousands and thousands of startup pitches they see. They call it SISP, or "a solution in search of a problem." It's an idea that has no practical… Continue reading Business evaluation: Clime →