Paul Allen – Keynote Speaker, Tech Visionary, Soar.com & Ancestry Founder
If you are an entrepreneur and want to understand how smart VCs are in terms of financial wheeling and dealing, read this summary of the Intermix Media deal by VC Bill Birnhaum.
Like many entrepreneurs, you\’re probably either great at technology or
marketing, but you leave the finance stuff to others. This can be a
costly mistake. Invest a lot of time talking to investors and
entrepreneurs to get an idea for what kind of deals and terms are out
I have almost 250 Google Alerts now on topics, people, and companies,
so I receive emails on my blackberry every time news occurs about any
of these. This is like having a personalized, real-time Burrelle\’s
clipping service that is delivered to my PDA. It is invaluable.
New terms I added today: fairtunes, giftwiki, bango, mobeon
Before I spend time personally one-on-one with entrepreneurs who want (free) advice, I ask them to do several things, including set up Google Alerts.
A reader sent me this link,
which really surprised me. I guess I haven\’t seen TV commercials for a
long time since I use a PVR and skip all commercials all the time. So
it shocked me to learn than 51% of all TV ads include a URL, up from
18% in 1998.
I love blogging.
Last month 23,000 unique visitors came to my web site, mostly to read
my blog. Two weeks ago I blogged about how only 4 students had signed
up for the Internet Marketing course at BYU that I\’m scheduled to teach
this fall. Now there are 32 enrolled.
I love Wikis.
Our FundingUniverse.com
team launched a Wiki last week for entrepreneurs. We have 8 volunteer
editors so far who are going to help us recruit contributors and build
a Wiki that contains thousands of quotes and "success tactics" from the
most successful entrepreneurs of all time. Our hope is that
entrepreneurs will use this Wiki to find new ideas by discovering what
A report shows that early stage funding is increasing.
$1.3 billion in venture capital flowed into early stage companies in
the second quarter up from $830 million in the first quarter. I keep
hearing that VCs are doing more early stage deals, but this is the
first report I have seen that bears this out.
Still, the 750 companies funded by VCs are a tiny number compared to
probably 10-15,000 that are funded each quarter by angel investors
(including friends and family, doctors and dentists and first-time and
serial angels). That is why there is such a need for FundingUniverse.com to match local entrepreneurs with local angels.
According to Angel Investing (p. 146), a book published in 2000 by two Harvard
Business School professors, "In the United States, angels invest in
A fascinating report by M:Metrics on what kinds of cell phone users are attracted by each carrier, and how each carriers\’ users consume mobile content.
I need help from some entrepreneurs and business school professors or students.
I am looking for ten people who will volunteer to be an editor on a new
Wiki for entrepreneurs, one that will identify the best entrepreneurs
of all time and the decisions that they made that led to their success.
We\’ll organize quotes from the entrepreneurs and extracts from
biographies and business histories into a taxonomy or decision tree. So
any entrepreneur who wants to know how to bootstrap, how to recruit
advisory board members, how to get their first sale, how to find a
strategic partner, or how to find an angel investor, will be able to
visit the Wiki, click on one or two links, and then read hopefully
dozens of actual quotes from actual entrepreneurs telling their story
— how they did it.
Our goal is to spark the imagination of entrepreneurs by making it easy
for them to read how others succeeded each step of the way.
I don\’t have time to blog today…I\’m preparing to fly out for the AlwaysOn Network event at Stanford…but I got this email about a very cool \”wisdom of the crowds\” concept where a group of 2,500 or so individuals will build and manage a new business by voting on the plan, who to hire, products to create, how to market them, etc. It\’s really a wild notion. I hope some journalist will pick up on this, interview the creator, watch the creation of this business over time, and write some interesting story about it.
Robert Merrill has a great web site and seems to be doing all the right things to help employers find high tech employees and to help job seekers find great companies. He asked me to mention that there are a lot of good programming jobs available in Utah right now.
I\’m trying to compile a list of 10-20 recruiters in Utah. I\’m going to contact all of them to see if they might be interested in the Team Building Event that I am planning. The more qualified applicants we get for this founders retreat, the more successful it will be.
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