We’ve all seen or even put together a presentation that included some version of the following slide:   (FYI, I found these slides on slideshare, I’m not commenting at all on the quality of the overall pitch or the company itself . . .  I’m just using them as an example) Evidently, entrepreneurs love […]

Creating a liquid and vibrant marketplace is already hard enough; fine tuning a business model, and eventually getting paid for the value that has been created by the marketplace is just as complicated and perilous. There has been a lot of talk on the “take rate” a marketplace business can eventually sustain and justify. In

Erik happened to be on vaca so they ended up having to interview the looser canon on the team. I hope I didn’t say anything stupid 🙂 More on Inside MuckerLab on TechCrunch.

At some point in the life cycle of any successful company, it will have to abandon what made it successful in the first place. In the search for growth, the original customer, the initial wedge entry point, the early adopter will, by definition, will have to be left behind for the larger and more mainstream

1994 – “Consumers are fickle and unpredictable. Consumer products and services are hit driven, it’s really hard to build a scalable consumer company” (Internet) 1996 – “It’s impossible to get to build a billion dollar company selling widgets at $15 and taking $1 commission one at a time” (eBay) 1998 – “There is no room

A little more than one year ago, Marc Andreessen wrote a seminal piece which has defined venture investing and entrepreneurship since. The global trend for software powered innovations to permanently impacting every part of our lives and every part of our work is unstoppable and just at the beginning. Three generations into the birth of

This is a guest post from my partner, erik rannala thats originally published on Techcrunch. Much has been written about the Series A crunch that is facing entrepreneurs and their investors. Those who believe the crunch is upon us contend that a significant number of seed-funded startups will not be able to raise follow-on financing.

A better edited version was posted by Michael Carney (thanks Michael!) @ pando daily. Go read that one instead! ************ In the past 30 days I’ve had sad and unfortunate conversations with around 5 entrepreneurs about the reality that their venture funded companies are headed toward their eventual end . . .  some are indignant,

I love the lean startup ethos and methodology. It is by far the best thing that has happened to the startup community since the onset of the internet-fuel renaissance in entrepreneurship. These days at MuckerLab, we try to utter the basic concepts (mvp, iteration, hypothesis testing, customer development, etc) as much as possible to help

Sometimes, the quickest way to lose credibility is to tell people who are a lot smarter, accomplished and experienced than you are what they should be doing instead with their time. This is one of those times. But sometimes I just can’t help myself. Besides, I don’t have too much (credibility or fame or money)