DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans

The Kauffman Foundation just announced that they are providing 15 scholarships to Defrag. If you are an entrepreneur running a startup that is pre-Series A funding, you are eligible for a scholarship. Kauffman will cover the full cost of the conference pass - all you have to do is get to the conference and find [...]

I've written in the past about my obsession with measuring things. While my manual measurements via Daytum include miles run, books read, flights taken, and cities slept in, I've become much more focused in the past year on what I've been calling "human instrumentation." This resulted recently in Foundry Group leading a $9 million financing [...]

About a month ago I wrote a post titled Trying Gmail For A Week. I haven't thought about Outlook, Entourage, or Mac Mail for a month and I don't think I'm ever going back. It took about a week to rewire my brain for how conversations worked and what the keyboard shortcuts were, but not [...]

I had my first pain free run in five months. And I'm very happy right now. In March, I hurt my back. This was my first real running injury since I started running marathons in 2003. I've had some ankle twists and some knee bruises from all the trail running I do, but nothing that [...]

Earlier this week I did a one hour interview on "Meet the Angels" sponsored by Tech Coast Angels (one of the LA Angel groups.) It was supposed to live but for some reason there were some problems getting into the webcast. It's now up on the web - if you were trying to watch it [...]

I think I'll avoid all the "are super angels colluding", "no they aren't", "go fuck yourself and stop talking horseshit", and "guys, quit being narcissistic and do something productive" blog chatter today and focus on something that came up yesterday. I was on a call when someone asked a straightforward question that had a binary [...]

About a year ago David Cohen and I were having a beer together talking about ways to capture all the different things we'd learned about early stage entrepreneurship from running the TechStars program. In a moment of insanity, we decided to write a book. The result is Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your [...]

Once again I'm moderating the Entrepreneurs Unplugged series hosted by Silicon Flatirons. Our first interviewee - this coming Monday night - is Andre Durand, the founder and CEO of Ping Identity. Andre Durand brings 18 years of software industry executive leadership experience to his role as founder and CEO at Ping Identity. Durand co-founded Digital [...]

One of my favorite conferences, Defrag, is really heating up. As always, Eric Norlin is doing a magnificent job of curating the agenda and already has some great headliners such as Esther Dyson, Paul Kedrosky, Vinnie Mirchandani, David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd, and Vivek Wadhwa. Today, Jeff Ma agreed to keynote Defrag. From Eric's blog post: [...]

Today our portfolio company BigDoor launched the first ever gamification plugin for WordPress. The plugin will allow a WordPress site owner to add leader-boards to their site as well as reward users with badges and points when they leave comments and check-in. It is a great way to incentivize repeat visits and help build a [...]

I was thinking more about my post from yesterday titled Addressing The VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem. There were a bunch of good comments that caused me to realize that I wrote the post from the perspective of a VC, not an entrepreneur. As I mulled the comments over, I realized something very specific. If [...]

One of the most common criticisms of VC investors making seed investments is something that has become known as "the signaling problem." The explanation of this problem is that VCs create a "negative perception" about a company if they make a seed investment but then don't follow through and make a next round investment. Another [...]

Now that my Apple and Google experiments have been huge successes, I thought I'd try an Android phone one more time. I like my iPhone 4, but it's pretty weak with all the Google apps. Specifically, I badly want better contact integration, clean email sync, and Google voice. Plus, AT&T still blows in Boulder. Any [...]

TechStars is coming to New York City. The first program runs from 1/10/11 to 4/8/11. Applications are open now. The NY mentor list is stunning and includes the following: Phin Barnes (First Round Capital), Alex Blum (KickApps), Matt Blumberg (Return Path), Brad Burnham (USV), Jeff Clavier, Dennis Crowley (FourSquare), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Roger Ehrenberg, [...]

Amy and I created a tradition about a decade ago we call "four minutes in the morning." We try to - fully clothed - spend four minutes together every morning 100% focused on each other. I'm an early bird - usually getting up around 5am regardless of the time zone I'm in (except on the [...]

Following is a post on super angels I wrote yesterday for PEHub. In the beginning, there were angel investors. And it was good. As individual angel investors made more and more investments, they became super angels. One day a super angel woke up and thought to himself, "Gosh, I could do a lot more investments [...]