“So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.” - Spark Capital | Start Santo Politi on why Spark created their Start@Spark seed program. Since I believe that there is no such thing as too much seed capital I am happy...

“So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.” - Spark Capital | Start Santo Politi on why Spark created their Start@Spark seed program. Since I believe that there is no such thing as too much seed capital I am happy...

The WSJ recently ran a story titled “It’s a Great Time to Start a Bank” which talked about a couple of recent local banking startups. It’s definitely true that when the existing players are on their backs it’s a good time for innovators. But it was disappointing to see the WSJ article focus about bank startups that look pretty much exactly like the banks we have had for the last hundreds of years: you take deposits from some people and make loans to others. What it is really a good time for i...

The WSJ recently ran a story titled “It’s a Great Time to Start a Bank” which talked about a couple of recent local banking startups. It’s definitely true that when the existing players are on their backs it’s a good time for innovators. But it was disappointing to see the WSJ article focus about bank startups that look pretty much exactly like the banks we have had for the last hundreds of years: you take deposits from some people and make loans to others. What it is really a good time for i...

I got quite a few comments on Friday’s post about starting a disruptive bank that questioned how such a bank could make money without lending, especially given that many bank accounts advertise that they are “free." The answer has to do with the fact that there is no such thing as a "free” account, there are just accounts with hidden fees, which come in three guises: first, being grossly overcharged for certain activities (like automatically moving some money between accounts to cover a payme...

I got quite a few comments on Friday’s post about starting a disruptive bank that questioned how such a bank could make money without lending, especially given that many bank accounts advertise that they are “free." The answer has to do with the fact that there is no such thing as a "free” account, there are just accounts with hidden fees, which come in three guises: first, being grossly overcharged for certain activities (like automatically moving some money between accounts to cover a payme...

Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee. Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee redu...

Another announcement from last week that got strangely little attention was Amazon’s introduction of EC2 Reserved Instances. Now reserved instances in the cloud may sound like an oxymoron but it is simply guaranteed capacity. You pay an upfront fee for the guarantee that your instance will be availabl and then a lower ongoing usage fee. Amazon clearly has a ton of usage information on EC2 available that let’s them price this fairly aggressively. For instance paying a 1-year guarantee fee redu...

I am a huge fan of getting stuff out and then improving it over time. Sure, people complained about the lack of cut & paste, but it sure would have been a huge mistake to delay selling the iPhone over that. With OS3, all the really big omissions will be taken care of: Cut & paste, search, landscape keyboard & MMS (personally I use the first two heavily on my Blackberry and found the keys on the vertical keyboard way too small on the iPhone for fast typing). But that is not the big news. The b...

I am a huge fan of getting stuff out and then improving it over time. Sure, people complained about the lack of cut & paste, but it sure would have been a huge mistake to delay selling the iPhone over that. With OS3, all the really big omissions will be taken care of: Cut & paste, search, landscape keyboard & MMS (personally I use the first two heavily on my Blackberry and found the keys on the vertical keyboard way too small on the iPhone for fast typing). But that is not the big news. The b...

More and more ISPs block port 25 and it’s a pain to begin with to figure out which smtp server to use, especially on a laptop that’s moving around a lot. Initially I had configured Susan’s machine to send via gmail, but despite having her DailyLit email address in the “send as” account configuration, when connecting via SMTP gmail sent all the mail as coming from her gmail account. So last night I signed her up for AuthSMTP. It took all of 10 minutes to pay, add her email address and then con...

More and more ISPs block port 25 and it’s a pain to begin with to figure out which smtp server to use, especially on a laptop that’s moving around a lot. Initially I had configured Susan’s machine to send via gmail, but despite having her DailyLit email address in the “send as” account configuration, when connecting via SMTP gmail sent all the mail as coming from her gmail account. So last night I signed her up for AuthSMTP. It took all of 10 minutes to pay, add her email address and then con...

So Google dropped any pretense of Chrome being anything other than a full fledged entry into the browser market by introducing extensions. At the same time Microsoft has released IE8 as the latest installment for Internet Explorer and something tells me that automatic upgrades are on their way. Welcome to the latest installment of the browser wars. This wil ultimately be good news for endusers as it spurs innovation. In the meantime, it means even more of a nuisance for developers as there ar...

So Google dropped any pretense of Chrome being anything other than a full fledged entry into the browser market by introducing extensions. At the same time Microsoft has released IE8 as the latest installment for Internet Explorer and something tells me that automatic upgrades are on their way. Welcome to the latest installment of the browser wars. This wil ultimately be good news for endusers as it spurs innovation. In the meantime, it means even more of a nuisance for developers as there ar...

Following my successful switch to a MacBook, I also moved Susan to a Mac last night. She now has an Air with what I hope will be a great setup. All her email runs through gmail which syncs with both her iPhone and mail.app. Contacts and calendar are also kept in Google and sync’d to iPhone via push and to Mac address book and iCal via a program called ‘Spanning Sync’. This means that not only is all her key info automatically backed up to the cloud but cloud, MacBook and iPhone are all in syn...

Following my successful switch to a MacBook, I also moved Susan to a Mac last night. She now has an Air with what I hope will be a great setup. All her email runs through gmail which syncs with both her iPhone and mail.app. Contacts and calendar are also kept in Google and sync’d to iPhone via push and to Mac address book and iCal via a program called ‘Spanning Sync’. This means that not only is all her key info automatically backed up to the cloud but cloud, MacBook and iPhone are all in syn...

Shortly after graduating from college, I was the youngest founding team member of a management consulting firm in Germany. After rapid growth and landing some top tier clients, the firm got embroiled in a controversial project to help the city of Berlin with its application for the Olympic games. I will at some point post more detail on this since it was a huge lesson on many fronts. One of the key take aways was how incredibly different a story looks from the inside. I was reminded of this b...

Shortly after graduating from college, I was the youngest founding team member of a management consulting firm in Germany. After rapid growth and landing some top tier clients, the firm got embroiled in a controversial project to help the city of Berlin with its application for the Olympic games. I will at some point post more detail on this since it was a huge lesson on many fronts. One of the key take aways was how incredibly different a story looks from the inside. I was reminded of this b...

I believe it was Caterina Fake who coined the term “Biz Dev 2.0” to describe a strategy of making APIs available, letting others integrate and then turning the most promising of these into commercial relationships. I have recently seen two potential pitfalls of this approach. First, if you expect to be paid, you might want to consider asking for a credit card early on. Simply having something in your T&Cs that says that charges will apply for commercial usage may not be good enough to be able...

I believe it was Caterina Fake who coined the term “Biz Dev 2.0” to describe a strategy of making APIs available, letting others integrate and then turning the most promising of these into commercial relationships. I have recently seen two potential pitfalls of this approach. First, if you expect to be paid, you might want to consider asking for a credit card early on. Simply having something in your T&Cs that says that charges will apply for commercial usage may not be good enough to be able...