Articles Comments

Josh Maher's Blog » Entries tagged with "Founders"

5 Investing Lessons From Howard Lindzon

Howard spews investing advice every Monday (usually), he talks about the individual companies he invests in all the time on StockTwits and isn’t shy to discuss his reasoning behind each of those picks. As you may have picked up on, the Investing Lessons series that has looked at Fred Wilson and Chris Sacca focuses on lessons that we can take back and incorporate into our own investment strategies. While it may be great to follow Howard into some of his picks (like Pabrai, I’m a fan of cloning great ideas), I think it is more valuable to learn from his examples and discussions about how he invests. Howard recently popped up in a foundville interview and provided some insights into himself and his thought process. Thinking through the lessons we can learn from … Read entire article »

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Investing, Profit, stocks

5 Investing Lessons From Fred Wilson

Following up from my last post in the series 5 Investing Lessons From Chris Sacca, I came across this article that Jeff Bussgang wrote on lessons for startup entrepreneurs. Reading the article, there were a few key points that Jeff points out as important for startup entrepreneurs. These are great for the MBAs Fred was speaking to and entrepreneurs, but it is interesting the insight that Fred is providing into his thoughts on investing and how relevant they are to investors in public companies. Let’s look at each of the key points and how they are relevant to retail investment decisions.   Lesson #1 – Embrace Failure Fred observed that failure is typically a valuable and powerful experience—forcing introspection, humility, and an extra drive to prove something to others. He observed that the entrepreneurs he … Read entire article »

Filed under: Entrepreneurship, ESPP, Investing, Startups, stocks

Is Entrepreneurship The New Degree?

I saw this clip of Alan Patricof and started wondering how the increase in entrepreneurship will influence the job market and hiring in the future. Historically… well a century ago… building a business was the norm for most people to earn a living. Granted the businesses were different, but earning a living was a family affair or that of a small group of people building a small company (a blacksmith for example). That isn’t to say that higher education didn’t exist, it just wasn’t the norm for most people. It wasn’t really required as anyone could build a great business and those that built great businesses were known as good people to work with. I wondered as Alan talked about all of the incubators and the startup fever that has taken … Read entire article »

Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Startups

TechCafe Happy Hour @BlueBoxGroup

I must say that I am pretty excited to go check out the event on Friday – nearly sold out (10 spots left)… We have been planning this one for some time and can’t wait to see all the great people in the Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond tech community come out for Happy Hour. Last year was an awesome year for TechCafe events – so awesome we took a few months off from getting geeky with the best startups and technologists in the area – rest assured though we are back and planning a few awesome events. If you are interested in sponsoring or hosting one – let us know! First up is one of our personal favorites. Blue Box Group! We have been watching this team grow for a while now and it has … Read entire article »

Filed under: NW events, Seattle, seattlelunch20, Startups, TechCafe

The Difficulty of Pursuing Your Ideas

I recently came across this story on TechCrunch about Fitbit’s new $12m business Fitness Tracker Fitbit Raises $12M To Market New Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Scale, Aria. Like all ideas, someone else thought of this one well before Fitbit thought it up. In fact when I thought it up eight years ago, I probably wasn’t the first to think it up either. But being a relatively good idea that I thought I had at the time, seeing this funding got me thinking. Why didn’t I pursue that idea further seven years ago? Whether you are an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or even a wantrapreneur. When you have ideas that you think are good, what holds you back from pursuing them? Is it fear, is it being lost at where to start, or is it … Read entire article »

Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Investing, Startups, Technology

What You Say Matters

Following up on my post about the modes of communication I found this video by Simon Sinek on leadership, inspiration, and doing something meaningful important – Sinek explains how these are all tied together and need to be used at the same time. I believe that the message you are providing matters just as much as the mode you are communicating that message in and Sinek provides some great insights into making that message more important. Definitely some good lessons here for people and companies to think through when they communicate with people. … Read entire article »

Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship

Does The Mode of Communication Matter?

Communication is at the heart of all things in life… finding the love of your life, raising a round of financing, getting a promotion, or enjoying life with friends and family. Some of those communications are obviously more critical than others and some are more time sensative than others as well. Living in a world where corporate training dollars fuels the research and instruction that permeates our training attention we are all well aware of the communication styles that research such as Myers-Briggs brings us. This is good and we all make efforts to adjust what we are saying depending on the type of person we are talking to (more data/less data, small talk/straight to the point, etc.). All of this focus on communication style seems to skip the relevance of … Read entire article »

Filed under: career, Entrepreneurship, Investing, RealEstate, Technology

Organization of Entrepreneurialism

There is an age old debate in the world of startups… go big or build a lifestyle business. There are a lot of arguments and debates about the benefits of both. From the concepts of building businesses that grow the economy on a small or large scale, to entrepreneurs using their talents to build big products vs. build what they want, etc, etc. Every time these debates crop up, everyone has an opinion on the validity of what type a startup is, whether or not particular examples of people building startups in one of the models can execute on that model, or why a particular startup as an example is different than all other startups at executing on their model. It doesn’t seem to matter if the people debating are … Read entire article »

Filed under: Seattle, Startups