Capitalism 2.0

Presenting Your Pitch

You've developed your idea into a working prototype.  Your co-founders and you are experienced and confident.  Your angel investor has helped to open some doors giving you a couple of impressive early customer partners.  You can't help but thinking ahead to actually starting to earn a salary and hire employees.

Now you've secured audience to present to a venture capital fund.  All your dreams are now riding on you and your team's ability to get funding.  You know that venture capital funding is preferable to the alternatives.  In fact, you believe that funding from the right venture capitalist greatly enhances your prospects of success.

So you go open your pitch presentation in PowerPoint.

 

Linden Lab Fact Sheet

A number of emails have inquired about the specifics of Linden Research ("Linden Lab", "LL").  I've compiled this fact sheet, for those interested.  This information is reasonably accurate, but some of it is a tad bit dated.  I'm not sure how much more I'll write on the subject, given that it seems the honeymoon is quickly drawing to a close on Second Life.

Entrepreneurial Finance - Signaling and Commitment

Who is an Entrepreneur?  Primary objectives, and the importance of signaling.

Introduction

The word Entrepreneur is of French origin, literally translated as "undertaker".  Drucker describes an entrepreneur as one who creates something new, something different, by changing or transmuting values.

More thoroughly, Smith & Smith define that an entrepreneur:

1. Must recognize an opportunity to create value by re-deploying resources.
2. Must create a strategy for gaining control over those resources.
3. Must create a plan to execute change.
4. Must harvest the rewards resulting from succeeding in the above.

Entrepreneurial Finance - Intro

Entrepreneurial Finance:  This article will be the first in a series I am running on the subject of entrepreneurial finance.  Entrepreneurial Finance is the process of making financial decisions for new ventures.  New ventures are inherently different from established ventures, as are entrepreneurs inherently different from conventional business managers.  The financial decisions faced by each are starkly different as well.

Persistent Blogs for MLS Properties?

An idea I was baking a few months ago was to aggregate publicly available MLS data, starting with a tight regional focus, being careful not to violate copyrights (but admittedly pushing the limit).  The thing that would be different would be to create a UUID for each property, and cross-reference additional data.  I suspended my designs for a while for conflict of interest reasons, and also because Zillow.com and others have come on-line recently.

But something is still missing, in my opinion.  Persistent "blogs", or more specifically a way for the community of buyers to aggregate their direct knowledge about properties.  Kind of a buyers' exchange, but tied directly into a portal that would be driven by properties actually on the market (thus, the MLS tie in).  As the prospect of an Open MLS has increased, I think this idea may still have some merit.

Is Silicon Valley Doomed?

There is no shortage of pundits proclaiming the death of Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco Bay Area (BA).  Certainly, this metropolitan region has enjoyed tremendous economic growth over the past 2-3 decades.  But, given today's anemic job growth, ever consolidating software companies and inevitable loss of jobs, global info-worker wage competition, and of course those ever annoying BA real-estate prices, is there any hope of a real recovery this time?