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

There is a certain well respected venture capital firm (VC) that has a program for fledgling entrepreneurs. The teams that are selected get a desk, a small stipend, and advice for a few months from experienced VCs. I could imagine back when I was starting my first company thinking this was a great opportunity - [...]

An obvious but surprisingly under-practiced design principle is to "embrace the medium." Applied to software, this means building applications that take advantage of the strengths of the platform instead of trying to mimic the strengths of another platform. iPhone and Wii games provide many stark abuses of this principle. Call of Duty is perhaps the single [...]

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to relating to other people in the business world. The first approach is transactional and legalistic: work is primarily an exchange of labor for money, and agreements are made via contracts. Enforcement is provided by organizations, especially the legal system. The second approach relies on trust, verbal agreements, reputation [...]

For most people I know who join or start companies, the primary goal is not to get rich - it is to work on something they love, with people they respect, and to not be beholden to the vagaries of the market- in other words, to be independent. The reality is being independent often means [...]

One of the hardest things to do as a startup is to create a new category. Bloggers and press have a natural tendency to "pigeonhole" - to group startups into cleanly delineated categories, and then do side-by-side comparisons, comment on the "horserace" between them, and so forth. At my last startup, SiteAdvisor, we were at first consistently pigeonholed [...]

Some startups become huge sensations without requiring any active marketing - YouTube, Skype, and Twitter come to mind. However, the vast majority of successful startups gained adoption through marketing: PR, SEO, partnerships, paid marketing, and so on. My strong suggestion would be to hope for the former but plan for the latter. Marketing is a huge [...]

There are two broad philosophical approaches to explaining the forces that drive world events. The first one is sometimes called the Great man theory, neatly summarized by the quote "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." This view was famously espoused by the philosopher Hegel and later Nietzche, who called such [...]