Start-Up: the book

What is the mentor role?

hlebret — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:47:04 +0000

I recently read Fred Wilson’s post on The CEO Mentor and Coach. As usual his post and the high number of comments are interesting. I would just like to add one of the best descriptions of a mentor I have read. It is what Robert Noyce represented for Steve Jobs. You can find the full [...]

Intuitive Surgical

hlebret — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:44:31 +0000

Here is a start-up that I heard about through various channels. As I am not an expert of medical technologies, it is not too surprising that this 15-year old, $10B company was unknown to me. You can learn more about Intuitive Surgical from their website or from answer.com. 15-year old? You may tell me it [...]

A start-up is a baby

hlebret — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:11:49 +0000

I’ve been using this analogy a lot in my talks or courses. Fred Wilson has been using it to in his latest post, The Expanding Birthrate Of Web Startups. In my talks, the slide is the following (you can check slide 61 in the pdf I posted in Start-Up, the book: a visual summary): In [...]

iPad vs. Kindle

hlebret — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:28:25 +0000

As I just mentioned in my previous post, I converted the English version of the book Start-Up to the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad/iPhone formats. I will describe here what I faced as challenges and output. The Amazon Kindle first. It was relatively easy to do the job. I just add to save my Word version [...]

Start-Up on iPad-iPhone and Kindle

hlebret — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:21:22 +0000

It’s done! I just made the book Start-Up available on both platforms, the Apple iBookstore for iPad and iPhone and the Amazon Kindle. I also checked bother versions so let me share with you a few things from the experience. The process with Apple was the most painful (more in my next post). Is it [...]

Super Angels

hlebret — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:46:43 +0000

I just come back from vacation and all of a sudden I discover that the world has changed! Before my break you had the business angels investing in the early rounds (up to $1M) and the VCs who would seldom invest in rounds smaller than $1-2M. Now the frontier is blurred: you have the seed [...]

Skype IPO filing

hlebret — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:19:19 +0000

What’s interesting about Skype new filing in addition to all the comments you may find is their current cap. table and investor structure. I hope we will know more about all this when the company files additional material. For the moment, here are the numbers I could built from their S-1 document dated August 9. [...]

During The Bubble, 77% Entrepreneurs Failed. Now, It’s Around 40%

hlebret — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 09:31:50 +0000

My colleague and entrepreneur David Portabella just mentioned to me Conway’s views on his investments. Conway is a famous business angel who invested in AskJeeves, Google and Paypal. In a nutshell: - In the 1997-2001 period, 77% of his investments failed. Since 2002, it’s down to 40%. - Entrepreneurs have a 66 percent chance of being successful [...]

Job creation: who’s right? Grove or Kauffman

hlebret — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:43:40 +0000

Two recent articles seem to draw different conclusions on the critical role of start-ups. The Kauffman foundation just published a report entitled The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, is someone who knows so much about Silicon Valley that his recent article How to Make an [...]

Give back to the community

hlebret — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:27:32 +0000

My sixth article in the newsletter Créateurs about high-tech success stories: Swissquote. I am leaving Silicon Valley after purely American stories with Adobe & Genentech, then followed by Europeans in SV (Synopsys, VMware) to talk about a pure Swiss success! Mark Bürki and Paulo Buzzi are the two founders of one of the nicest Swiss (not [...]