by Scott Austin, Lead Writer, Venture Capital Dispatch
Start-up CEOs often spend nearly all of their waking hours building their companies. Their investors, on the other hand, typically appear once a month for board meetings. So it’s not surprising that some entrepreneurs may feel a little resentful toward their venture backers.
That’s somewhat evident from the new survey, “A Seat at the Table,” which canvassed more than 500 VCs and CEOs at venture-backed companies and asked them several questions about their thoughts on boards.
For fast-growing technology start-ups, there are many approaches to employee hiring and retention.
Two of the more successful ones, Facebook and Zappos, have very different methods, each with different goals: Facebook wants to hire entrepreneurs even if that means they will eventually leave, while Zappos wants to hire the best people to fit its culture and figure out how to keep them.
by Sarah E. Needleman, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Sylvester Chisom began paying a consultant last summer to blog on Twitter, post status updates on Facebook and run marketing campaigns on both sites for his auto-detailing business.
He thinks the service, which costs $450 a month, is worth it. “It’s just better having somebody else dedicated to thinking of stuff to put up,” says Mr. Chisom, co-owner of Showroom Shine Express Detailing LLC in St. Louis.
by Scott Austin, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Here in New York, there’s no shortage of networking opportunities for entrepreneurs. The “city that never sleeps” is teeming with conferences, happy-hour meet-ups and business-plan competitions for start-ups.
The tech press is full of people who want to tell you how completely awesome life is going to be when everything moves to “the cloud”–that is, when all your important storage, processing and other needs are handled by vast, professionally managed data-centres.
As eBay Inc. looks to offload Skype, the executives who sold the Internet telecom firm to eBay have formed the hub of a European network of investors and executives that they hope will rival and even exceed the one in Silicon Valley.
by Russell Gold, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Every spring, fertilizer runoff from the U.S. Mississippi River floods into the Gulf of Mexico, causing a massive algae bloom that leads to a giant oxygen-deprived “dead zone” where fish can’t survive.
by Pui-Wing Tam, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Silicon Valley-ites have had a tougher time getting rich for much of this decade because their normal routes to huge fortunes–the sale or IPO of their startup tech companies–have been crimped by new regulations and poor market conditions, which have worsened in this recession.
It’s easy to write about what the government or other people should do with our/their money. It’s harder to come up with a course of action that I can undertake on my own that possibly, somehow could make a difference. My first inclination is always to try to look “for the next big thing.” But the next big thing is just that–next. It’s not now. Its Venture Capital. It’s not self-funding, renewal capital.
They kept their Twitter feeds quiet and their iPhone cameras dormant. Most of them didn’t want their names to be used. There was more than a little bit of paranoia in the air as the guests arrived at last weekend’s Summit Series event, formally the Young World Leaders Summit–not the most modest of names. It was a gathering of about five dozen under-35 entrepreneurs and executives at a beachfront luxury resort outside the glitzy vacation city of Cancun.
It would seem we’ve got all the makings of a tech shipwreck.
In the past few days, Xerox, Yahoo and eBay each announced plans to cut thousands of jobs. Esteemed Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital is warning entrepreneurs that it’s time to batten down the hatches because the good times are over.
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