You’ve probably already read Chris Anderson’s new article The Economics of Giving it Away. A nice summary was put also put together by Dharmesh Shah at OnStartups.
I generally agree with the direction that Chris Anderson sees things going. The marginal cost of a web service is getting smaller. The freemium business model makes [...]
Categories: Internet, Startups
Tagged: Business Model, Chris Anderson, Economics, Free, Profitable, Startups, Sustainable
I liked the book Tribes by Seth Godin. It’s short and sweet. A lot of books these days are so long – as if the author had a target word count and was obligated to surround the few key insights with endless examples and explanations. Seth has a way of getting right to the point. [...]
Categories: Startups
The writing is on the wall. No startups will receive angel or series A funding before March 2009.
I know it’s not what we (entrepreneurs) want to hear. We’re optimists. We can visualize that term sheet coming next week. We can each personally justify why our specific venture is more attractive than any of the others [...]
Categories: Startups
Tagged: Financial Crisis, Funding, Investors, Series A, Startup
I’ve been talking with several people working on internet businesses recently, and it’s always the same story: If we build a website that does (insert whatever perceived problem they are solving), then we can make (X dollars) every time a customer uses our wonderful service.
What they fail to think through is the cost of getting [...]
Categories: Internet, Startups
Tagged: Conversion Rate, Customer Acquisition Cost, Pay per click
New Market Strategies for Disruption
New market strategies for disruption are different than low-end disruptive strategies. Instead of simply entering the market with a lower cost, lower performance product, new market strategies involve “coming off the backplane” into a new market.
An example of a new market disruptive innovation is Sony’s portable transistor radio. When originally released, [...]
Categories: Internet, Startups
Tagged: , 4info, Babajob, Baidu, Christensen, Disruption, Google, New Market, Web
Introduction to the Innovators Dilemma
In the Innovators Dilemma and the Innovators Solution, Clayton Christensen creates a framework explaining how established companies, with large amounts of capital and loyal customer bases, are disrupted and eventually replaced by smaller companies with little capital and no customer base. This model of disruption introduces several insightful concepts, but fundamentally [...]
Categories: Internet, Social Networks, Startups
Tagged: Advertising, All Advantage, Anderson, Christensen, Disruption, Flickr, Freemium, Innovators Dillema, Pandora, Skype
One of the coolest things about going to business school at MIT is the General Catalyst Breakfast Series. Once a month, 10 MIT students and 10 HBS students wake up painfully early to go to General Catalyst’s office in Harvard Square to listen to a speaker give their take on entrepreneurship. Last Friday, we [...]
Categories: Internet, Startups
Tagged: Airline, Core Competency, Flight, Internet, Kayak, Lead Generation, Search, Startup
Marc Andreesen, successful entrepreneur (Mosaic, Netscape, Loudcloud) and investor (Digg, Plazes, Ning) provides a nice analysis of the potential effects of a Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition to the likelihood of smaller startups being acquired. His conclusion is that there will be no effect :
The Microsoft/Yahoo deal, if it happens, means very little for the entrepreneurial climate [...]
Ashwin Navin, the president and founder of Bit Torrent Inc. gives a podcast describing how Bit Torrent Inc was started. Bit Torrent was originally an open source peer to peer file sharing protocol developed by Bram Cohen to deliver large amounts of data over the internet quickly. Initial users and evangelists of the [...]
Categories: Startups
Tagged: Bit Torrent, Media, Startup
I’ve recently become a fan of Stanford Technology Ventures podcasts of interviews with entrepreneurs. What a great source for information directly from the mouths of successful entrepreneurs. To hear these points of view, you typically have to go to an expensive conference (or enroll in an MBA program) and Stanford lets you download [...]
Categories: Startups