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11 Jul 09

An Interview with Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines and ONEList — TechDrawl

  • The most interesting part of the interview was when Mark described how his first startup took off very quickly, once he arrived at a solid concept.  Mark created ONEList and it took off overnight because it solved a fundamental pain many people were experiencing.  Making mailing lists at the time was a painful process, and ONEList made it easy.  Bloglines was another good idea because it solved a problem Mark personally was experiencing, how to keep up with the many blogs he read.  Furthermore, Mark leveraged the marketing and PR relationships he had built at ONEList to get press for Bloglines which spurred their growth.

Lessons Learned: 10 years of entrepreneurship

  • One thing really stands out to me today. I wasted a lot of energy, time, and passion on trend-spotting and trying to compare my success with others. Is it really worthwhile spending time and money trying to impress each other with our supposed successes, especially in a business where real feedback can take five or ten years? We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. I think it's wasteful. Instead, let's focus on building companies that matter, on creating real value for customers, and learning. In time, success will come. And if it doesn't, at least you'll have spent your time doing something intrinsically worthwhile.
    • Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them. http://sivers.org/zipit - on 2009-07-10
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  • In the meantime, don't worry if you can't spot the trends. Neither can the rest of us (well, except for Matt Cohler).
03 May 09

What You'll Wish You'd Known

  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd
    say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You
    don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you
    need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff
    you like if you want to be good at what you do.

    It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you
    like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get
    an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way
    it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors,
    by volunteering in hospitals. [1]

    But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is
    doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years
    didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast,
    and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a
    world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.

  • What they really mean is, don't get demoralized.
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22 Feb 08

The Future of Web Startups

  • It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially
    there's some device that's very expensive and made
    in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply;
    many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.
  • This pattern is very old. Most of the turning
    points in economic history are instances of it. It happened to
    steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s.
    It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating
    the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. Agriculture
    itself was an instance of this pattern.
18 Oct 07

An Introductory Guide to Startup Funding : Instigator Blog

  • You might also think that everyone knows everything about startup funding, but that’s not the case. Recently someone sent in a question asking about the differences between angel and venture financing. With that in mind, I’ve put together a brief, introductory guide to startup funding.
02 Mar 06

BusinessPundit: Why I Quit Entrepreneurship and Got a Real Job

  • Several people encouraged me to write, to expand this blog and do some other things but after much thought I realized that I''m not ready for that. I love writing about business, but at the same time I don''t just want to write about business, I want to do it. Why? To learn. I''m 29, and even though I don''t equate age with knowledge or skill, I know I''m not ready for what I want my future to be. Learning is so much more intense when it has tangible consequences. I can write about what companies should do, and I can be wrong (as I often am) but I don''t learn from that the way I learn when I make a mistake such as losing a sale, losing a key employee, botching a presentation, miscalculating a strategic move, etc.

OPEN Adventures in Entrepreneurship

  • Three of the Web’s most widely read business bloggers explore answers to the timely and critical questions facing entrepreneurs today
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