The Intricacies of Customer Development
As a former student of Steve Blank’s, I am a big fan of his startup philosophy. Ideas rarely survive contact with customers, and often one of the most important things a startup can do is talk to customers. The problem is that there are good ways of talking to customers, and bad ways of talking to customers. There is a kind of art to interviewing people in a way that lets you extract meaningful information avoids many of the common biases that as a founder you will likely be prone to. Such biases are generally a manifestation of a very...
read moreAmazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads
Late last month, Amazon announced its intent to acquire Goodreads, a social reading service at which Kyusik Chung (InSITE ’08) serves as VP of Operations and Business Development. Since launching in January 2007, Goodreads has grown to over 17 million users, 23 million reviews, and 525 million books cataloged. The company seeks to increase user engagement with books by allowing users to recommend books, compare what they are reading, keep track of what they have read and would like to read, form book clubs and find new books in genres...
read moreInSITE Georgetown Fellows take 1st Place at VCIC
InSITE DC Fellows and Georgetown MBA students Sara Zulkosky and Sherief Khalil teamed with three Georgetown MBA colleagues Neal Foley, Ryan Hill and Selman Altun, to claim the International Championship this past weekend at the 2013 Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at UNC. The team analyzed startup companies, interviewed Entrepreneurs, structured a deal and negotiated the terms. After a question and answer session with the panel of venture capitalist judges, they were voted the team that did the best job playing the role of...
read moreNY’s top VC’s and startups bowl for InSITE
On Monday night, the InSITE fellows hosted the first ever ‘Kingpins of Silicon Alley‘ at Bowlmor-Union Square, an InSITE fundraiser and friendly competition for the entrepreneurial community in NYC. It was an amazing night of fun, games, meeting old friends and making new ones, informal pitches and exchanging business cards. Most of NY’s top VC’s and Angels were there (RRE, Union Square Ventures, IA Ventures, David Tisch, Tribeca VP, Greycroft, Flybridge, NYA, Contour Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Canaan, Boxgroup),...
read moreInSITE Project Update: WeeSpring
Can you imagine the frustration new parents experience when considering what baby gear to purchase? A frustration that is certainly not alleviated by going to the usual retailers such as buybuy Baby or Babies “R” Us, but rather exacerbated by their litany of options. weeSpring is a social shopping network for expecting and new parents. It allows expecting parents to view and share product reviews with their friends, through a rating system of love, regret, have or want. By centralizing the advice and exchange process through a social...
read moreInSITE Project Update: Applique
This semester we teamed up with Applique, which is trying to transform the mobile application development space. Applique has developed software that allows non-technical users to “drag-and-drop” common plug-ins and design features into their own app so that making a mobile app is as easy as PowerPoint. Applique allows users to develop their own apps at a low cost and as quickly as they are needed. Right now, developing an application requires technical know-how, is costly, and can take months. Of course, the field is never...
read moreInSITE Fellows Launch Street Beacon to Re-Invent NYC Payphones
Once a staple in New York City communications, the payphone is living a much lonelier existence these days. Outside of emergencies (like Hurricane Sandy), payphones have essentially become urban clutter — rarely used and crowding scarce public space. To hopefully solve this problem, earlier this year New York City challenged techies and designers to reinvent, reimagine and repurpose the city’s 11,000 payphone kiosks. The way New Yorkers consume information has changed, and the City challenged the tech community to design a...
read moreShanghai Spring Break Trip
Last week my Facebook feed became clogged with “last spring break EVER!” posts from all across the globe. In the meantime, I was in a class – in Shanghai – as a part of Columbia Business School’s Global Immersion Program. We visited multinational financial institutes, manufacturing and production companies, real estate and mining firms, the ecommerce giant Alibaba, etc.; we also met with local alumni and admitted students, went to an acrobatics show, sang karaoke, and ate lots of dim sum. It was an incredible learning...
read moreHello World! : InSITE Boston Chapter Kick Off & Spring 2013 Company Announcement
On February 12th following rapid ramp-up of fellow and company recruitment, InSITE’s Boston Chapter kicked off for the spring of 2013. Through the recruitment period we got to speak with many exceptional people and organizations leaving us even more excited about the Boston entrepreneurial ecosystem and the role InSITE can play in it. We settled on 25 fellows and 5 companies for our spring 2013 program. Thank you to everyone and every company that applied. Our fellows come from different schools at Harvard and MIT. They have an amazingly...
read moreInSITE Breakfast Series: Ben Siscovick – General Partner, IA Ventures
Last Thursday, InSITE Fellows Brian Ballan, Lee Cooper, Frederico Lourenco, and Jack Chao met for breakfast to chat with Ben Siscovick, General Partner at IA Ventures, who was kind enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to chat with us. After each of the InSITE Fellows introduced themselves and shared their backgrounds, Ben told us the story of how he ended up in the venture capital industry. As a former student at Columbia Business School, Ben realized after his summer internship that investment banking wouldn’t be a good...
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