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“Protect Your Dilution” – Justin Floyd

Posted on Thursday, Jun 21st

The phone rang this morning, just as I put the last piece of peach in my mouth. It was a scheduled call with Justin Floyd, Founder of SmartFundit. Rene Bonvanie mentioned the company during our recent interview. What followed was a hilarious conversation that started with a very “British” guy, introducing himself, and my saying,

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Salesforce.com’s Incubator: René Bonvanie (Part 5)

Posted on Sunday, Jun 10th

Bootstrapping has emerged as a very popular trend recently in the Valley as more entrepreneurs are bypassing Venture Capital. Here I ask Rene about the roll of boostrapping within the Incubator, and also get introduced to SmartFunded. SM: Do you have examples of partners who have been able to bootstrap and avoid VC funding? RB:

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Salesforce.com Playing VC

Posted on Wednesday, Apr 11th

I wrote a piece earlier called Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy Again? In that, I made the point that given where the Internet is today, bootstrapping companies has suddenly become very easy, and gobs of venture capital are no longer required to build the vast majority of businesses. Now, many of the larger companies are actually

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innerTee: Hybrid Web 3.0

Posted on Friday, Mar 30th

innerTee is a design community and customized apparel service. It offers users the ability to create highly customized screen printed apparel using artwork that has been submitted by members of the innerTee community. It compensates artists for submitted artwork that is approved for use, and promotes their work on the innerTee site, as well as

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Web 2.0 & Bootstrapping

Posted on Tuesday, Mar 20th

Peter Rip wants to puncture the web 2.0 bubble. In truth, the web 2.0 phase has been a boon for entrepreneurs, not necessarily for VCs. And now, is it surprising to see a VC crying: grapes are sour? I just wrote a piece called Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy Again? In this piece, I have explored

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Turn Around Series: Jerry Rawls, Finisar (Part 3)

Posted on Saturday, Mar 10th

To support the company initially, Finisar relied on providing consulting services. It’s a very common way that companies bootstrap themselves. I have done it myself. SM: What kind of Consulting did you provide? Like System Integrators? JR: Well, actually, the first customer would be Raynet themselves, but we would have to get others soon enough.

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Is Bootstrapping Becoming Sexy Again?

Posted on Friday, Mar 9th

Gone are the days when entrepreneurs boasted at cocktail parties about how many million dollars they have raised for their startups. That was so very nineties! Yes, times have changed. Entrepreneurs seem to have become savvier. In the last 2 months, I have worked / spoken with several sets of entrepreneurs who are perfectly happy

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6 Startup Lessons For 2007

Posted on Thursday, Feb 8th

Interesting article about hyper-segmentation at Read/Write Web: Let us take a look at the social networks available for parents; in this category alone we have Cafe Mom, Maya’s Mom, MothersClick, MommyBuzz, MTV’s ParentsConnect, Famster, and Minti. The niche for parenthood seems to be taken. Yet, it can further be broken down to, say, “Grandparents”, “Stay

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