Thoughts, opinions, transcripts, etc.
Someone raised a good question when I presented to a group of new companies at 500 Startups recently: “Are you worried that no one will invest in you now?” My kneejerk, snarky answer would have been something along the lines of, “Nope! And guess what? I don’t care.” But that’s not what I said. I’ll… Continue reading I’m not fundable
Here’s the concept. You don’t quit your day job and then build a startup. You build a startup and then quit your day job. There’s no reason anymore to go full-time into any one thing. If you have the itch to try your hand at starting a business, then you should do it while your… Continue reading The definition of parallel entrepreneurship
In late 2013 I was facing a bit of a crisis. I had just launched Toofr a few months earlier and the service was failing. Earlier in 2013 I found a way to automate email guessing using a hidden API buried inside the Rapportive Chrome extension for Gmail. It worked amazingly well. It was fast,… Continue reading How I made a 5,000% return on a two-day vacation
Ten things I learned in 10 years of doing this It was mid-August 2015, in the conference room we named Battery after a private social club that one of our investors built. This was “Curtis Day,” the day we were trying to close our new CEO, who was with us for a final round interview. I… Continue reading Scripted don’t quit
This is a really exciting time for me. A year and a half ago I moved to Walnut Creek, made some great friends in the neighborhood, got a brown dog and named him Blue, and welcomed our second daughter to the family. Then about a year ago I became CEO of Scripted, the company I… Continue reading What’s next for me
I wrote another post about what entrepreneurs should do to help their venture-backed companies succeed. Here’s what entrepreneurs should know about the psyche of the people they’re taking money from. Again, this is not something I knew or appreciated until I was very late in the game. It’s been said before, but maybe by writing… Continue reading What investors care about