The Web Startup Success Guide (Part 1):
Case Study of Mint.com

By Guest Author Bob Walsh

[Bob Walsh begins a series of excerpts from his new book, “The Web Startup Success Guide”, with a case study of personal finance startup Mint.com and an interview with the company’s founder and CEO, Aaron Patzer.]

Bob: Let’s start with how you decided that Mint.com was something you wanted to do.

Aaron: I had started a couple of businesses back in high school, building web sites and doing online marketing. When the Internet was quite new, I guess, it was back in sort of the 1996–97 era. And that’s how I put myself through college, went to Duke and then to Princeton. >>>

The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 3)

SM: You are a $300 million fund, but is your structure a standard 2 + 20?

GT: We don’t discuss the actual structure of our fund, but it is identical to our historical structure. When we started, [we were] circulating the idea that we would raise Trinity 10 with an identical focus to our other funds. >>>

Social Gaming on the Rise, and Lessons for Would-be Entrepreneurs

By Guest Author Saad Fazil

Social gaming is changing the way games are marketed and distributed. Rather than relying on big publishers and distributors such as Electronic Arts, studios are leveraging the power of social media to virally spread their games. In order to better understand how they have built sustaining businesses, I talked to the CEOs of some of the top social gaming companies. You will see that all of them have different yet successful strategies. >>>

The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 2)

SM: You are saying the early venture capital industry was performance driven? You could not get a lot of management fee-driven income with $31 million.

GT: Yes. The mentality of the people who entered the business in the late 1980s, the early 1990s and when I entered it in 1996 was that you joined the industry because you had the privilege of working with brilliant people who were working on innovative, novel things. >>>

Postcard from Paris

In Paris for a few days, my favorite city.

Paris seems melancholy, perhaps even a bit scared. The economic crisis has knocked the wind out of the city that depends so heavily on tourism. Cafés, restaurants, boutiques — the lifeblood of Paris — the chief contributor to its incredible ambiance, sit empty.

Here are some pictures … Place des Vosges … a Basque perfume shop … a florist … restaurants in the Marais, two-thirds empty. >>>

Entrepreneur Journeys Book Review: Finding Niches Within Niches

Peter Christensen of GeekStack reviews EJ2 on his blog: “I was very excited to hear about [Sramana’s] new book Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction. It’s a book full of interviews with entrepreneurs who have successfully bootstrapped their companies from a kitchen table to millions of dollars of revenue or an acquisition. I like this kind of book because it goes into more detail than a typical blog post or article, and the interview style is more human than the usual business book third-person style. So I went into the book with high hopes, and those high hopes were met…a good read for anyone interested in entrepreneurship.” >>>

The Future Of Venture Capital: Trinity Ventures Partner Gus Tai (Part 1)

Gus Tai is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures and joined the firm in 1996. He focuses on consumer-enabling technologies and services and enterprise software. His past investments include Blue Nile, eSurance, Photobucket and Sygate. He has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard and an MS in engineering and an MBA from MIT.

SM: Gus, as far as I remember you entered the venture business in 1996. What was it like, and what were the rules of the game? Why did you enter the venture business?

GT: I entered the venture business in 1996 after several years of observing it. I probably knew more about the business than most people outside of the industry. >>>

From Startup To 500 Million Dollars: VistaPrint CEO Robert Keane (Part 7)

SM: Earlier you explained how you made a transition from your core business to a much wider variety of businesses. One area that seems like an obvious opportunity for you is in the software-as-a-service business. SaaS does carter to a lot of small businesses with various solutions, including email marketing and CRMs. Have you considered that from a strategic perspective?

RK: You are absolutely right. The company that is the market leader in email marketing solutions for small businesses touts themselves as a software-as-a-service company. We have a product which is functionally equivalent. >>>