Category Archives: Startups

New Market Disruptive Innovation for Web 2.0 1

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, [...]

Low-End Disruptive Innovation in Web 2.0 1

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 [...]

Top Six Core Competencies for any Internet Startup 0

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 [...]

Microsoft Yahoo Merger Good for Startups! 0

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 [...]

Strategy: Using Illegal to get to Legal? 0

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 [...]

Stanford Technology Ventures Podcasts 0

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 [...]

MBA Commercializing Technology? 0

After over a year at MIT Sloan, I’m starting to believe that the the prospect of a young MBA commercializing science out of an MIT lab is not realistic (read impossible). More broadly, the prospect of someone with 3-4 years management experience and an MBA becoming CEO of any venture backed physical science company [...]

Planning a Reunion Online – Reoonyun! 0

As the president of my high school class (graduated in 1998), I felt obliged to get involved with planning our 10-year high school reunion. I found myself really wishing for a service to help me do this online… I’m not sure how credible this is as a long term business, but there is definitely a [...]