Facebook IPO Lessons
Like most people, I had the opportunity to review Facebook’s IPO filing yesterday and admit that, like Apple’s recent earnings announcement, this is pretty damn impressive. Here are a couple of lessons worth reinforcing: 1) People’s view of what is normal and acceptable in emergent online activities is constantly evolving. What Facebook deserves a lot [...]
Breakfast Rules
Recently Mark Suster wrote a great post on how to use people’s time wisely. I could not agree more. As anyone in Boulder will tell you, the best thing about Boulder is the humility of its community. Everyone is open to meeting anyone else. It’s one of the things I love the most about being here [...]
The Web is Back
This morning SlideShare launched a complete rewrite from Flash to HTML5, and a new mobile web app. You would think that as the world’s largest social content network, with 60M monthly unique visitors (you too can be unique) this would be a big deal. Here’s Liz Gannes from All Things Digital: SlideShare Does Biggest Redesign [...]
Evernote Celebrates Birthday by Joining the Billion Dollar Club (Really?)
Evernote has recently celebrated their third birthday. I also recently had my 21st birthday – it feels good to be able to legally grab a drink finally. (Hey, if Evernote can lie about their age, so can I…). Joke apart, I have no idea why a company would pretend to be half as young as [...]
Founders: The Bubble Clock is Ticking
The incredible valuation of the LinkedIn IPO can only be interpreted as one signal: the Bubble Clock has started ticking. So long as it continues to run, we will live in a reality distortion where valuations are insanely high, capital is cheap, and smart businesses can leverage that to hyper growth. When it stops, we’re [...]
Coradiant acquired by BMC software
On the heels of yesterday’s acquisition of Tungle, BMC Software has announced today that they have acquired Montreal’s Coradiant, which was co-founded by Year One Labs partner Alistair Croll. We are happy that Montreal has managed to win something in the last few days. The price is currently undisclosed, but the back of the napkin calculation tells [...]
So, Mr. Bootstrap took venture funding, huh?
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of bootstrapping. Instead of putting together a pretty pitch deck and hitting Sand Hill Road (or 300 W. Sixth Street, as the case may be) I’ve long preferred the model where you open up the IDE, build something valuable, find a few people [...]
Spanning Cloud Apps Raises $2 Million Series A Round of Venture Funding From Foundry Group
Spanning Cloud Apps, the makers of Spanning Backup for Google Apps, today announced that the company has secured $2 million of funding from Foundry Group, a Boulder-based venture capital firm. Launched in September 2010 and spun out of Spanning Sync, Inc., Spanning Cloud Apps will apply the resources to continue to build on the company’s [...]
Startup Festival coming to Montreal – Why it’s important
I know that David just posted about the upcoming Startup Festival, but I thought I would add my own thoughts: I have definitely been getting the feeling that the whole “startup conference” format is getting a little stale. The same formats in the same cities with most of the same speakers. The real benefit of [...]
Year One Labs — The Perfect “Incubator”?
I abhor the term “incubator”. I remember in fifth grade when our teacher brought in a chicken incubator to show us how chickens are born. We waited and waited and waited a while longer still. All the little Chickens were dead, it turned out. We weren’t quite sure why but most of us thought that [...]
