The power of partnering
In a lecture to a Stanford crowd, legendary VC Tim Draper was asked about YouTube’s $1.6B sale to Google, and how -in light of the crisis of 2008- such an astronomical purchase price could be justified for a company with no prospect of making money yet in sight, and no real business model. He went [...]
Most overlooked challenges of growing a startup
Most entrepreneurs (and me) tend to overlook these things until they try to do them: How hard customer acquisition is – (“we’ll build it and they will come”) How unattractive an employer you are to the population of highly talented and experienced workers and how badly the odds are stacked against you in the workforce [...]
LivingSocial: the story of making a deal possible
In the last 18 months, no other early-stage startup entrepreneur in the DC area has raised more money than Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial. $49M is a tall figure. And if you want evidence that the #1 attractor of capital is traction, look no further than his company and its meteoric ascent to the “IPO [...]
Attention to detail: Eric Koefoot’s recipe for successful entrepreneurship
Eric Koefoot , serial DC entrepreneur and sales dynamo, sits on more company boards than what I can list here, and for a reason. He was chock full of advice for Fasttrac students this week. To me, it all boiled down to one simple premise: If you want your venture to succeed pay more attention to [...]
Duke Chung's fundraising story
Duke Chung, Co-Founder of Parature and a shining example of entrepreneurship in the DC tech scene dropped by FastTrac TechVenture (an entrepreneurship training program run by NVTC’s Entrepreneur Center) to share with us some stories about Parature and his experience with VCs. I thought I’d recap some of the key insights, as I found them [...]
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