startups

"We are fixing the wrong things."

--Ryan Howard, CEO, Practice Fusion

Entrepreneurship is really commitment. Passion. The putting aside of short-term comforts, or even needs, so the Idea can live.

Is there such a thing as too much commitment? The story of Ryan Howard might illustrate just that. I thought so, at first. But by the time I was finished talking to him about his company, Practice Fusion, I was glad he did the dumb things he did to keep his company alive in the dark days of its founding.

Practice Fusion is an electronic medical records service … Read more

Mark Jacob's MJ Registry Watcher is a very simple yet effective tool for automatically monitoring your Windows Registry for changes (especially unauthorized changes) and alerting you to the change, and even preventing it from happening. It polls your registry and files every few seconds, looking for changes to your startup files, registry keys and values, and other places that Trojans and rootkits target. RegWatcher also hooks the registry, which means it intercepts commands and blocks those that pose a threat, simultaneously issuing an audible alert.

RegWatcher is portable freeware that needs no installation. The download includes a lot of … Read more

Microsoft is playing nice with startups in its new Windows Azure Accelerator.

The company announced recently that the accelerator, which will rely heavily upon Microsoft's Azure cloud service, will be a four-month program designed for early stage startups "doing big things in cloud, Web, and mobile." Microsoft says that it'll provide the companies with mentors, development tools, and other key elements to help attendees grow their businesses. The accelerator will be held at Microsoft's Israel Research and Development Center.

"Microsoft will provide the participating companies with support at unprecedented scope and quality," Nir … Read more

"Don't let your experience be your enemy."

--Bill Harris, founder, Personal Capital

Bill Harris is the CEO of Personal Capital, an online money management service. Anyone can get his company's tracking and stats on existing financial accounts for free. But to step up to the company's full financial management services, there's a $100,000 buy-in.

Personal Capital is a freemium play with cajones.

(My original review, if you're interested: Mint for rich people. The new iPad app is coming out today. I tried it. It's very good.)

Bill has been CEO of … Read more

"It takes the same amount of time to run a small company as a big one."

--Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures

This was just a little tip that Shervin let slip during a judging panel he was on at the Launch conference (stories). Later, Sky Dayton echoed the sentiment, talking about one of his early ventures running coffee shops in Santa Monica.

Sky watched Starbucks take off while he was running mom-and-pop cafes. He recognized that Starbucks chief Howard Schultz was probably not working much harder than he was, yet Starbucks was opening stores every day. … Read more

Businesses are hard to build and even harder to grow (just ask any successful entrepreneur), but they're easier to create than you might think. This is especially true if you have technical chops, access to a room full of investors, and a lot of caffeine.

I recently had the opportunity to be part of two hackathons--I was a judge for the Mobile App Olympics, a global mobile app competition, and the host of AngelHack, a bicoastal hackathon competition. Teams had one weekend to create a viable product that they had to present in front of a panel of investors, … Read more

Highlight, a passive location-sharing app, is poised to emerge as the big winner of South by Southwest, thanks to a wave of positive media attention. But will it be able to live up to expectations?

The SXSW music, film, and interactive-media festival is one of the most important and prominent launching pads for tech startups. The confab hosts one of the largest concentrations of techies and early adopters in the world (more than 20,000 will attend this year's festival), making it fertile ground for an app to quickly gain traction and go viral.

Don't underestimate the "… Read more

"You make it mean something."

--Don Dodge, Developer advocate, Google

Don and I were at the Launch startup conference talking about goofy company names. It turns out he's sort of in favor of them. New companies spend way too much on securing what they think are important, common-word short URLs. And then they try to back into the justification. Color, for example. Or Path. I can tell a company has paid too much for a domain name when I ask the CEO what it cost, and they turn red and quietly answer, "We'd prefer … Read more

"Fire your worst customers."

-- Name withheld

A PR friend of mine (the flack-writer relationship isn't always adversarial) who also started her own agency and thus has startup chops, told me how liberating it was to "resign" clients and partners with whom neither she, nor anyone else in her company, enjoyed working.

"It's not beneficial to either party, if you can't work together harmoniously," she said.

A bad working relationship doesn't build value for either side. It doesn't lead to reference relationships you can use in the future. It … Read more