I have written and spoken at length about the issues associated with equity crowd-funding of companies. And not long ago I wrote a piece entitled Customer Crowdfunding: Not So Fast, Entrepreneurs, which was about the pros/cons of customer crowdfunding at the product level (e.g. Kickstarter type fund-raising). In that piece, I made the point that, for [...]
Read more →[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community - see a list of links to the full series here.] This one is a bit off the usual beaten path. I was asked to give an interview about Launchpad and US angel investing in general for an entrepreneurial course being [...]
Read more →[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community - see a list of links to the full series here.] A CEO turned professional board member, volunteer, organizer, angel investor, and most importantly, advocate for entrepreneurs, Joe Caruso is a fixture on the early stage scene in Boston. Always [...]
Read more →Um, yes. Too much product detail. Empty calories. Get rid of them. Why? First of all, because you have to get through it in 15 minutes and there is no way. But more importantly because all that detail detracts from your message. Yes, you are justifiably proud of your incredibly sophisticated product and, yes, you [...]
Read more →Wil Schroter is the co-founder and CEO of Fundable.com which is a crowdfunding platform for startups, so it is not entirely surprising that he would pen a very pro-crowdfunding piece in GigaOM recently. In the piece, he righty calls out a few of the advantages: customer-sourced funding does allow you to test the market before you build, [...]
Read more →[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community - see a list of links to the full series here.] A chemist turned turned IT security and clean tech expert, Ralph Sheridan has been buying and investing in companies for over 30 years. For the last five or so, [...]
Read more →[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community - see a list of links to the full series here.] Jean Hammond is an institution in the Boston start-up community. She’s a Sloan MBA with a ton of entrepreneurial experience in the digital signal processing and networking space who [...]
Read more →New entrepreneurs show a lot of confusion on the subject of advisory boards and corporate boards of directors. It’s justified; there is some conceptual overlap. But they are very different animals. Think of it as a superset/subset relationship: a good board will provide some of the advice and guidance of an advisory board, but corporate [...]
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