The Social Analyst

When it comes to courting investors, especially venture capitalists, for your startup, the recipe is simple: stop worrying and start focusing.

Most investors have a singular goal -- to fund a startup that eventually becomes a large, independent, defensible company. Finding an Evernote, Airbnb, or Instagram provides the kind of return that makes or breaks a venture capital firm.

But how do VCs find a company that is going to become big? It's not an easy task, but there are a few clues investors look for in order to determine your chance at hitting the jackpot. Here are a … Read more

No decision is more important in a startup's life than the decision of who to start the company with. The right founding team can quickly find product-market fit, while an imbalanced team can find themselves working two years on a product nobody wants.

"What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them," Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said in 2005. "Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people."

I've seen hundreds of startups blow up because of teams that didn't know or respect each other. … Read more

It's been more than a week since Facebook's blockbuster acquisition of Instagram, and many people are still confused about the deal. It's understandable -- the $1 billion acquisition happened in the span of 48 hours between two CEOs rather than over the course of weeks between two armies of lawyers.

Facebook and Instagram consistently defy convention though, and that's one of many things you need to understand about both companies -- they are anomalies rather than the norm, even in the fast-paced world of tech startups.

I've seen countless reporters and bloggers question the valuation (… Read more

Sometime in the next 12 months, Google Chrome will become the world's most popular browser, knocking Microsoft's Internet Explorer off the mountain it has ruled for more than a decade.

This fact should scare the pants off of Facebook.

In July 2008, IE controlled 68.5 percent of the market, according to Statcounter, while Chrome wasn't even on the market. Now Microsoft's browser is down to 34.8 percent market share while Chrome controls 30.9 percent of total browser usage. Chrome has grown by a percentage point the last few months, while IE has dropped … Read more

Facebook and Groupon are two of the world's largest Internet companies, but their trajectories couldn't be any more different. One will become the largest Internet IPO in history, while the other can't find a way to stop its freefall.

I can't help but feel sorry for Groupon. In just the last two weeks, Groupon revised its fourth-quarter revenue downward due to higher merchant refunds, was hit with a shareholder lawsuit and took a beating from the press.

The result: Groupon's stock price has fallen off a cliff, and then some. Once worth $26.19 per … Read more

A week isn't complete in the tech industry without somebody suing somebody else over patents.

This time, Facebook is countersuing Yahoo, charging that Yahoo violated 10 of its patents. This move, of course, comes less than a month after Yahoo sued Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 of its patents.

Facebook's countersuit shouldn't surprise anybody; it was always going to fight fire with fire, especially since Yahoo started this unnecessary fight. It's the same reason Facebook purchased 750 patents from IBM last month -- it needed more ammunition in a patent arms race that is quickly … Read more

Y Combinator is one of the most influential organizations in Silicon Valley. But thanks to the incubator's most recent demo day, it has become a Disneyland for investors, where startups are the attractions that VCs and angels are willing to pay to ride.

On Wednesday, YC graduated 65 startups from its program, its largest class yet. The room was wowed by pitch after pitch from companies like Sonalight, 99dresses, Ark and Socialcam. There were plenty of graphs depicting skyrocketing user growth and revenue, and investors (as they typically do at YC demo day) ate it up.

This demo day … Read more

"Why aren't there more women in tech?"

It's a question I hear just about every week, especially when controversy erupts around the issue. However, it's not the question we should be asking if we really want to solve this systemic problem.

Several recent incidents has brought the lack of women in tech issue back into the spotlight:

A Boston-based hackathon, the Boston API Jam, offered women serving beer as one of its "perks". The ensuing controversy resulted in sponsors pulling out of the hackathon and an apology from its organizers.

A heated Twitter … Read more

I've seen thousands of startups fail, but they almost always fail for the same reasons. Most entrepreneurs fall into the same traps over and over again, despite how easy they are to avoid.

At the London Web Summit earlier this week, I told an audience of European entrepreneurs the seven mistakes I believe most often destroy promising startups.

These are my seven startup sins. Avoid these common mistakes at all costs:

1. Losing focus: If you're like the typical entrepreneur, you probably have hundreds of new ideas for your startup. But you must resist the urge to build … Read more