Not many entrepreneurs have a motor like Kevin Ryan’s. Kevin is best known for his work as CEO at the on-line advertising firm DoubleClick, which he grew from a 20 person start-up to the largest Internet company in New York at the height of the dot-com boom.
As I mentioned in my last post, we do our best to cover how business gets done on both coasts, and everywhere else. I'm headed out to San Francisco for the first time in a few months for the Web 2.0 Expo. If you're out there too or you know of anyone we should be talking to, drop us a line.
I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of excellent entrepreneurs for MBAs at NYU's Stern School of Business. The panel included Thrillist co-founder Adam Rich, Daily Candy's Eve Epstein, Sean Pfitzenmaier of stealth startup Social Sauce, Music Nation founder Daniel Klaus and Jonah Beretti who's a founder of The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed.
Marketing a startup is tricky business. Every entrepreneur faces the dilemma between allocating time to improving the product and marketing the product. If the two can be mixed just right, then perhaps sterile marketing can go viral. We tackle that issue in part 2 of 3 of our very own Venture Voice Startup Workshop coverage in New York City.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then we must have been dead on in our list of the Top Five Venture Capital Firm Web Pages. In a very bizarre case documented by Dan Primack of peHUB, Sequoia Capital is suing ComVentures for copyright infringement of its website:
Before the rise of the Internet, cable TV was the new form of distribution remaking the entertainment business. Life-long entrepreneur and former jazz producer Fred Seibert pioneered that field, and is known in the industry for branding MTV (remember their ever-changing animated logo) and Nickelodeon (remember Nick-at-Nite).
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The battery is an afterthought for most inventors. All the fun seems to be in developing a device, not in powering it. But when was the last time you cursed your phone, camera or podcast player because it ran out of batteries?
Jazz has undergone the ultimate irony. Born in New Orleans, Jazz was once deplored by the music establishment and academia as modern day rap is now considered offensive by ears accustomed to Beethoven. It was the devil's music. Now it's hard to find an article about it in anything other than media outlets aimed at upscale audiences. The New York Times just printed an article titled Jazz Is Alive and Well. In the Classroom, Anyway.
We've covered the ongoing debate over "teaching" entrepreneurship. Now we have a report from the front lines.
Ravi Mishra, a University of Pennsylvania junior double majoring in engineering and business who still describes his location as "Silicon Valley, California", writes a blog post titled Where Entrepreneurship Comes to Die.
He tears apart his fellow b-schoolers' business ideas with an entertaining vengeance usually only seen in a venture capitalist (I wonder what he scored on the VCAT), which includes building the craigslist for college students (as if craigslist isn't the craigslist for college students) and a plan to bring the campus meal plan off campus.
Yet Ravi doesn't lay all the blame on his Ivy compatriots. He says of the class: