10
2005
Lars Hinrichs is a great entrepreneur and my friend. He’s also the founder of OpenBC the preeminent social networking platform in Europe, and the best of breed in the world (more on that in another post).
OpenBC now has a blog OpenBlog and I was saddened to read of the passing of Lars’ grandfather. While I never met the man, Bill Liao’s tribute to a great man touched me as did the WH Auden poem.
Many of us celebrate success carved from adversity by the mythical lone wolf entrepreneur. But a greater legacy is to succeed and then mentor and guide another generation.
Heinz Richard Böse was by all accounts such a man.
Vale.
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10
2005
In light of the $20mm to $35mm sale (depending on who you’re reading) of Weblogs Inc to AOL many pithy words of wisdom are emerging about Jason Calacanis.
So why shouldn’t I add one.
In his what now? post, Jason tells the following Mark Cuban story:
Mark Cuban (who’s the best investor you could ever have BTW) always said “let’s not drown in opportunity†when he, my partner Brian and I would talk about the business. That’s why we didn’t launch an RSS reader or blog search engine, and that’s why we told everyone who wanted to do “business development†that there were only three ways to work with us: 1. read our blogs, 2. write our blogs, or 3. support our blogs with advertising.
[...]
I have to say my one piece of advice to startups is to focus on building your product and revenue and don’t waste time on partnerships. Maybe when you’re a huge company these things can work out, but the most important things in any startup are: 1. the product and 2. the bottom line.
So as I work on some IT consulting at the moment I feel the opportunities bobbing around. But if I pursued each one I’d be spread so thin I couldn’t execute well on any of them.
So I’m now working on two questions: what is my product? and how will it feed my bottom line?
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