Today’s guest blogger is Corey Blahuta, the Austin Managing Director for vcfo, Inc. He can be reached at cblahuta@vcfo or (512)345-9441. For more information see: www.vcfo.com. My company, vcfo, hosted a great event last Thursday where a panel of experts discussed a variety of alternative financing strategies. It struck me as funny to call these “alternative strategies” as they are neither risqué nor new, they are just a bit different than the traditional path of [...]
So you’re starting up a technology company, bootstrapping it, and you think that someday you might take on additional capital. Which lawfirm in Austin should you use? This is the dilemma facing many young companies these days. I thought it would be interesting to throw some ideas out there in this post, and then see if we can get some replies and start a little dialog going. I think there are two schools of thought [...]
If you missed the Austin Technology Council’s Strategy Session on Sales and Marketing, here is a sample of what you can find on YouTube from that event. In this session Sam Decker, Jay Hallberg, Sarah Russ, and Tim Hayden discuss the best way to get noticed by analysts and the press. -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf8LGfDyNZw
Friction Kills Websites If I have to fill out a long sign-up form, answer a questionnaire, wait for a return email to validate my logon, etc, the chances of me completing that process go down by the second. It’s called friction, and friction kills. Flickr has a sign up process which is not too bad, but after sign up there is very little friction. There is almost nothing there; upload a picture, view some pictures, [...]
In a previous post I wrote about Network Economics, which is all about networking users together. The next dimension of Web 2.0 to understand is Distributed Economies. The new laws of Web 2.0 economics say that if you can massively distribute microchunked things, you should see increasing levels of returns. It’s all about networking peers together. A good Web 2.0 platform will mediate the connections between peers, and add value to it (hopefully without adding [...]
As I start to look past the news, and try to perform some analysis on the web strategies of some of the companies that I tend to be interested in (and write about), it’s important to understand some of the basics of strategy in a Web 2.0 world. People sometimes use the term "network effects" when they mean "lost of eyeballs" but network effects is more of an economic principle. The Wikipedia credits ethernet founder [...]
