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 simple problem: we are by nature egotistical. We...
Read MoreInSITE Breakfast Series: Christian Rudder of OKCupid
Christian Rudder ambles into the Eventi looking as if he sprang directly from the collective mind of a YCombinator graduating class: Teal hoodie, moppish hair, intense caffeine craving. The 30-something Harvard math grad is one of four co-founders of OK Cupid, and one of two that still remain with the company after its sale to Match.com in early 2011 for $50 million. (The other, Sam Yagan, is now CEO of Match; Rudder is OK Cupid’s general manager.) Rudder is also the man behind OK Trends, the stupidly successful blog that poked and prodded at the dating site’s data and yielded...
Read MoreWHAT’S FRED WILSON THINKING?
There is disagreement over what makes a VC successful. But there is definitely consensus on one point: Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures and an early investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Etsy, Zynga or Tumblr, is one of the best. I don’t know any entrepreneur who wouldn’t want him on his board. So when Fred speaks, the InSITE fellows listen. And yesterday, in the seventh annual fire chat with fellows and alumni, we listened again. There are 2 trends that Fred is thinking about right now: · ‘Pervasive computing’ revisited · Machine Learning Pervasive...
Read MoreInSITE Fellows Winter Reading List
We’ve compiled a list of our favorite top 10 Books and Blogs that we wanted to share with our readers. Enjoy and Happy Holidays! 1. Book - Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston A collection of interviews of well known founders of technology companies, including Apple, Flickr, Paypal, Yahoo!, 37Signals, etc. 32 lessons compressed and bound in 1 book. This is truly a gem; some of us ended up highlighting the entire book. 2. Blog – AVC by Fred Wilson AVC is your go to guide to New York’s entrepreneurship and VC world. Fred Wilson’s post are not only thoughtful and insightful but...
Read MoreInSITE Fellows CVC talk with Jeff Bussgang
Last week, a few InSITE fellows and myself had the distinct pleasure to attend a Columbia Venture Community talk organized by Joe Rizk (@jfrizk, InSITE ’12) speaking with Jeff Bussgang (@bussgang), who is a General Partner at Flybridge Venture Partners. Jeff has an extremely impressive resume and was all too happy to share his thoughts on where he sees tech moving, entrepreneurship, VC, and his love for Stephen Colbert. I was incredibly impressed with his humility and focus on the entrepreneur (which is a theme I have been continuously seeing with people who are successful in this...
Read MoreThe hottest international startups at the Worldwide Investor Network conference
It is tough to raise money if you’re an entrepreneur. But it is even tougher if you’re an international entrepreneur based outside of the US. There are over 300 international accelerators and incubators producing thousands of promising startups each year, which go largely unnoticed by US investors. Many of them are currently looking to expand into global markets but don’t have the global network or access to international capital to do so. This is what World Wide Investor Network (WIN) is trying to change. WIN is a NY-based organization focused on bringing the best and most innovative...
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