Josh Maher's Blog » Archive
SAC III Quarterfinals
Tweet The quarterfinals were fast and furious, three minute pitches with two minutes of questions afterwards. With 12-13 companies pitching per night, there was a lot of information to process. Each new presenting company was pitching almost immediately after the last one and for the un-prepared investor it was a Jim Cramer lightening round dizzying even the most savvy trader. With the quality and excitement of the companies, the dizziness quickly wore off and all the investors began diving in with questions that went to the heart of the businesses being presented. The room was filled with incredibly intelligent people who have backgrounds in technology, business, the medical field, etc. and the questions that filled the two minutes almost always provided enough insight for the investors to understand where the company stood relative to the … Read entire article »
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Investing, Technology
TechCafe Happy Hour @Appature
Tweet Here is an update from TechCafe… If you are counting, this is the first event of the year! We’ve been busy (as you may have noticed if you are a regular reader). We still love putting on tech events in Seattle though!! If you are itching for great events in between TechCafe events you should check out the events at Surf Incubator and Hub Seattle. We feel great that the community is growing here and are honored to be a part of it! At TechCafe we work with awesome startups and technology companies to offer brilliant technologists a few things for free. Sure you’ll be stuck in Appature‘s slick offices. Yes you will have to participate a little in the technical talk at the event or at least listen to the discussion that … Read entire article »
Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Lunch2.0, Lunch2.0, Lunch20-Seattle, NW events, Seattle, seattlelunch20, TechCafe
letters to my kids – risk
Tweet Second in the series letters to my kids… Hey guys, Here are some great thoughts about risk and how you should think about it. For some reason our society places risk in a negative category along with bad habits, failures, and mistakes. Once risk is placed in that negative category we all avoid it like the plague and think that managing risk means not taking any risks. It also means not failing, never admitting we have bad habits, and never owning up to our mistakes. For whatever reason these things have been hammered home in society through the media, books, and our education system. This makes it difficult to break out of the common mold in society and truly live up to our capabilities and pursue our dreams. That is what I like about … Read entire article »
Filed under: career
Seattle Angel Conference III
Tweet You may have noticed the slight increase in posts related to early stage investments and investing lessons from angels & VCs. This year, I am participating in the Seattle Angel Conference as an investor and have been learning a lot as I spend a few hours each week with 20+ other brilliant investors vetting companies. The experience is forcing me to put my thoughts about investment forward and explain to people how I view the world of investment opportunity vs. what others may see. It is highly stimulating and is most certainly making me a better investor of all types of assets. I have slowly been collecting my thoughts on the process itself and want to share those as well. The premise of the group is simple – a bunch of … Read entire article »
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Investing, Startups, Technology
Investing lessons from Dave McClure
Tweet I was pleasantly surprised to see Jonathan Sposato channeling my investing lesson series in his new member-only series Startup Jedi. Great to see that people like to convey information this way and especially exciting that topics such as what the hell are startup investors looking for is interesting to more people than just me! I haven’t profiled Dave McClure yet, I have profiled some other interesting investors such as Howard Lindzon, Chris Sacca, Fred Wilson, Chris Devore, Jeff Clavier, and others on the way. I had previously avoided McClure as he comes across as such a loose cannon. At least the things that he appears to be investing in and the reasons he appears to be investing appear much more on par with a day trader than they do an investor. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Investing, Startups, stocks, Technology
letters to my kids – learning by doing
Tweet I’ve been sending these letters to my kids for years and decided to start posting them here as well. I hope you enjoy the thoughts I’ve been sharing with my kids, you can follow them all in the series letters to my kids… Hey guys, Here is an interesting story of a guy from Germany who had the opportunity to learn computer programming in an apprenticeship program vs. at a university. The key thing in the article that you should pay attention to is that he was only successful because he was able and willing to get out of his comfort zone and apply the skills he was learning to those situations. The core of the lesson here is that it is important to be willing to get out of your comfort zone … Read entire article »
Filed under: career
Investing in lotteries
Tweet Investing is often difficult to discern from gambling, in fact many day trading strategies are based on the same principles of successful gambling. By successful gambling, I am referring to those gambling strategies that leverage the statistical odds built into the wager system to strategically pull out a profit and not the casual betting you and I may do at the school auction. I was recently at an angel investing conference here in Seattle. The conference was put on by the great TechStars Azure team and was focused on explaining the angel investing process. There were a variety of angel investors speaking from professionals like Geoff Entress, Chris Devore, and Andy Sack to angels who also have a day job like T.A. McCann and Christina Storm. During the talk, one comment struck me as … Read entire article »
Successful exits
Tweet Interesting thoughts from Ben Huh, Dan Shapiro, Andy Liu, T.A. McCann, and Oren Etzioni about the luck and serendipity required to run a successful company. Including successful exits and successful deals in general. If you read my last post on Monday about internet moats, you’ll quickly realize that the exits these guys are discussing are of businesses that were circling “All Markets” and waiting for an acquirer to scoop them up and take them on a competitive advantage ride. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Seattle, TechCafe, Technology
