Josh Maher's Blog » Technology
Investing Lessons from the World Financial Symposium
Tweet If you haven’t been following the series on investing lessons from venture capitalists, now is a good time to start. The latest in the series comes from some great insight that was provided at the World Financial Symposium here in Seattle. The question of course that everyone has next is what the hell is the world financial symposium and why is it in Seattle? Amazingly of course the angel investors on hand at the symposium generally had the same thought in response to the always outstanding question of why isn’t Seattle a bigger startup community? Regardless of the amount of angel and venture capitalist investment that happens in the region, there is an amazing amount of talent on the entrepreneur and investor sides of the table. Some of the lessons from … Read entire article »
Filed under: Economics, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Investing, Seattle, Startups, stocks, Technology
measured and actionable life
Tweet Measured life is worthless if it is not actionable when you need it to be… Yet most of the measurement tools that have been built have been built only around measuring. This is great and leaves the measurer the opportunity to analyze the data, combine it with other data, and gain a deeper understanding or a different perspective. What if we did the analysis though and helped the person measuring themselves without their input? A text at lunch with a restaurant suggestion If you have been tracking your food, your workouts, your sleep etc. Wouldn’t it be nice as your usual lunch time was approaching if your weight management system sent you a friendly text with a link to a dish at a healthy restaurant that has an ingredient/calorie profile that fits your weekly limits? A … Read entire article »
Filed under: Innovation, Technology
Renting, Buying, or something like it
Tweet Renting and buying have been the only real options for getting a place to live in the US. With the 2008 housing bubble these limited options scared about everyone, but didn’t shake many people to think that the problem needed some imagination. I came across thinktrio which does just that – thinks about living in homes from a new perspective and allows you to buy into ownership of a home while still allowing you to move to another city (into a ThinkTrio property). They don’t exactly describe it this way, but it looks a lot like a time share for permanent residences. You own the right to live there; however, you aren’t stuck in a single location, don’t own the underlying real property, and pay a price in between renting and … Read entire article »
Filed under: RealEstate, Technology
Take This Travel And
Tweet I am sick of traveling! There I said it, at least two weeks a month I am on the road with customers staying in some hotel room in some city other than my own. I honestly wouldn’t mind a few days here and there a month. Even one day a week wouldn’t really be all that bad, but when you are planning to be gone for more than half of your family’s life because of your work – I think there is definitely an issue. After all if you are not planning to be with your spouse and kids, what was the reason that you brought them into your life? Even with all that hatred for travel, I get wrapped up in. I enjoy going out to eat at new places, … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Innovation, Technology
TechCafe: Free Lunches and Startup Launches
Tweet The growing Seattle technology community is an amazing place. There are giants like Amazon and Microsoft, there are incubators like Techstars, Eastside Incubator, and Founders Institute, there a number of Angels, a number of Venture Capitalists, a wealth of students from some great institutions, and of course no shortage of startups with raw willpower to succeed. The glue holding all of these together are the events where connections of all shapes and sizes happen. From the occasional networking meetup at a bar with no agenda, to Poker 2.0, to the more formal events put on by WTIA, NWEN, or MIT Forum. Without a healthy dose of events for developers to meet business counterparts, founders to find a designer looking for work, or a room full of people to launch or … Read entire article »
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, NW events, Seattle, seattlelunch20, Startups, TechCafe, Technology
Mentoring and Experimenting
Tweet This is on the heels of an analysis over at RWW on the success and failure of technology startup accelerators and the subsequent post on Forbes about job creation being the success story in startups even if we can’t easily quantify their success. The key takeaway for accelerators is that they are becoming the university system for tech entrepreneurs. There are a few tiers of accelerators, the top ones have better odds at setting the participants up for immediate success with more exits and successful startups being built from these top tier startups. There are a larger majority of lower tier accelerators that don’t show this same immediate success for the participants. I would bet that just like community college, the participants learn what they need to be successful they just … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Investing, Startups, Technology
Services and Locations
Tweet I came across this story from a couple days ago about Dropbox extending its service to a physical location – the Fedex office store. In reality it is the other way around as there are other services being extended to the Fedex Office store. It got me thinking though about this trend of services and locations merging. In fact Fedex was an early adopter of this trend when they purchased Kinkos for $2.4b back in 2003. Although a good move, it was a bit of a response to UPS purchasing Mailboxes, etc. back in 2001 for $191m. Suddenly, these shipping services had physical storefronts to present their brand to people. People know the shipping company, they know the stores, and there is an ease of use factor in being able to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Economics, Innovation, Technology
