Wednesday, December 19, 2012

DC meetups for tech founders and entrepreneurs


Are you thinking about starting a tech company in the DC area? Do you want to meet with other entrepreneurs, see what they are doing and meet interesting people? You should because it is one of the fastest way to learn what you need to know in order to be successful as well as make useful connections that might be helpful later for your company.

There are a ton of different meetups and events available to you and there is no way I can list them all here. Instead I have made a very short list of the ones I fairly regularly attend, with a brief description of their focus.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Three spheres of engagement for early-stage founders

When you have just started your new company with your co-founders, many entrepreneurs are at "peak happiness". They have a great idea. They have just founded a company and nobody has yet to tell them that their idea/product is lacking or the team they have assembled may not be optimal to execute whatever grand vision they hope to bless the world with.

To stay at peak happiness (after all, it is a great place), some entrepreneurs make mistake #1. 

They decide that they can not tell anyone outside the bubble about what their plan is, and must instead focus on building this divine product and polishing it to perfection before it is ready to receive the standing ovation from an enchanted market of customers they have never met.

If they get that far, in 99.9999% of the cases, that is the end of peak happiness.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Can you see the next big thing already?

According to the gospel of innovation on the Internet, there was search before Google, social networking before Facebook and music playing devices before the iPod and yet these services and devices completely changed the way we think about the Internet and content.