startups

Startup Secret 46: Beginner's mind at Personal Capital

"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

Startup Secret 45: Might as well go big

"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

How to create a business in 48 hours

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

The battle for SXSW is Highlight's to lose

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

Startup Secret 44: A rose by any other name

"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

Startup Secret 43: It's not you, it's me

"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

Foursquare's latest move: A partnership with Time

Time and Foursquare today announced an arrangement making them exclusive partners for the 2012 Democratic and Republican political conventions.

Individuals checking in or around either of the conventions will be able to unlock unique badges from Time and Foursquare. For those of you who aren't badge collectors, Time will use Foursquare to aggregate and visualize updates, "from reporters, newsmakers, and VIPs as they check in."

In addition to this partnership, Foursquare has made a number of other announcements in recent days. Earlier this week, it dispatched with Google Maps in favor of the OpenStreetMap movement.

It's … Read more

Startup Secret 42: No time like the present. I mean, future. No, past.

"We were too early."

-- numerous founders

It's a common self-criticism of the founders of flopped startups that they launched a product into a market that wasn't ready for their brilliance. Few regret it, though.

As Ole Lutjens of MX (Reporters' Roundtable: The Second Screen) says of his previous and mostly fizzled venture, Beta Lounge, "Maybe I should have waited. But the upside was experience, and defending the idea, and making connections to people who otherwise wouldn't be interested in talking." He says that people remember enthusiasm and conviction, which, if you've … Read more

AOL says bye-bye to Brizzly

Thing Labs is killing its social media client Brizzly.

When Brizzly launched in 2009, the Web-based client used Google Translate to offer inline translations of tweets. It also distinguished itself by providing definitions for topics trending on Twitter.

Trends would be its defining feature. Brizzly went so far as to launch the "Let's Be Trends" API, giving applications access to its trend information.

In 2010 AOL, acquired Thing Labs. Co-founder Grant Shellen said then on the startup's blog:

First things first: Brizzly is sticking around. Of course anything can happen in the future, but nowhere on … Read more