Moving to Google Plus

Google Plus is a much better place for me to post items, so find me there from now on.

LinkedIn needs to learn to communicate better

So here I am, a happy user of LinkedIn sitting fat and happy.

And then they reached 100M users. And they are so happy that they send me a thank you letter, because I was one of the first 1M users, and early adopters are so important to the success of a company.

So now I am told that I brought them value through my early support and then what? nothing!
Maybe I am a bit too demanding, but if I indeed brought value to them, a thank you is nice, a piece of candy or something would have been even nicer. After all they are the one making the big bucks from all that value, and if they tell me I contributed to this succes, they should share something. It does not have to be anything expensive, maybe a golden frame around my online profile picture. But what does it mean to thank me and tell me I am so important, and then leave me hanging here nothing for it?
If they tell me that I brought value, either they mean it and do something about it, or they don't and they should not mention it.

Next time LinkedIn is proud of reaching a milestone, I hope that they will think twice about the kind of message they send us to brag about it...

from my friend Alana @rainforesteco: Race to the bottom

Here is an interesting piece of information that I just received from my friend Alana Lea at RainforestEco

You can also find more here:
http://www.climatesoscanada.org/blog/2011/02/17/2011-the-big-green-race-to-extinction/

>>
The Race to the Bottom : Green Corporates.

At the front line of the race to the bottom we must recognize The Nature Conservancy for accepting the challenge of “protecting nature” in an announced new partnership with Dow Chemical who have generously gifted Nature Conservancy with a cool $10 million. Unfortunately, this ‘bankrolled consent’ most likely means Dow will be too financially strapped to clean up Bhopal – whose citizens continue to suffer to this day. Never mind last week it was announced that Dow’s profit has tripled. The corporation reported a profit of $511 million for the quarter ending in December 2010. Nature Conservancy’s president and CEO is none other than former Goldman Sachs Group executive, Mark Tercek. Perhaps not coincidentally, former Nature Conservancy president Henry Paulson also made his rounds through the revolving doors of the Goldman Sachs Group. Yet another Nature Conservancy board member, Muneer Satter, also originated from Goldman Sachs. You may recall the name Goldman Sachs – most known for their role in the brilliantly executed 2008 financial crisis which threw millions into poverty as the rich became even richer. As well, Nature Conservancy just hired a new marketing director in 2010 — former executive vice president for marketing at World Wrestling Entertainment. Prior to that position, he served as senior vice president for marketing at Showtime Networks. Showtime indeed. Fiction? Satire? Unfortunately not. If such organizations were not so dangerous, one would have to laugh. However, considering we are on the brink of exterminating our own children, this is truly sickening and no laughing matter. (Fyi – The Nature Conservancy has more than $3.7 billion in assets, annual revenue of $860 million – remember that when they ask you for your last 20 bucks.)

The Trojan Horse - by Erik Adigard

From my friend Erik Adigard - The Trojan Horse.



We let Facebook Corporation enter our lives and capture the details of what we do, when, how and with whom. More than 500M of us feeding each others info and being asked to push the "like" button. Most of it "top of the head" voting rather than informed decisions. What's next?

Very interesting analysis of the "likes" on Facebook

The Like Log Study from Yury Lifshits on Vimeo.

Please contribute $25 to the Enterpreneur Commons Mutual Guarantee Fund on Indiegogo

Entrepreneur Commons just launched a campaign to raise $30k to establish a mutual guarantee fund. The money will be used as a guarantee for a loan to an entrepreneur selected by his/her peers from the Entrepreneur Commons network (free access, peer-support to entrepreneurs)

Please consider contribute, because this entrepreneur could be you: you today, or you tomorrow if you are just getting started, or maybe the you from a few years ago when you were looking for funding for your venture.
And if this entrepreneur is not you, you should contribute because entrepreneurs are the vital force of our economy, and we need to promote entrepreneurship to build a better future for every one of us.

If you have read this far, you have done half of the work, please consider giving $25 or more to this cause here: http://www.indiegogo.com/Guarantee-Fund-for-Entrepreneur-Commons-2

Please also help us spread the news. We are looking at participation from entrepreneurs, investors and economic development organizations that you may have in your network.
For entrepreneurs and economic development organizations, this is another way to help entrepreneurs.
For investors, this is a way to get involved with a group of entrepreneurs building a track record through the peer-support meetings, and into early stage funding through peer-selection.

VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators: What Are You Doing With Your Rejects?

From Sramana Mitra blog here: What are you doing with your rejects?

...we recently spoke with a VC in Boise, Idaho, who gets 500 deals a year. His firm invests in four. That means that less than 1% of the entrepreneurs who apply succeed in getting financed. If you look at the numbers of super angels in Silicon Valley, they are even more scary. Mike Maples told us that he gets 7,000 deals a year and invests in 12 to 15. That’s a 0.21% hit rate. The flip side: a 99.79% rejection rate.

Entrepreneur Commons is catering to the 99% who cannot get help from VCs or Angels, and what we offer is peer-support for entrepreneurs. It scales, and it brings a lot of value of entrepreneurs participating in the regular peer-support meetings. It would make sense for every VC, every Angel Group and every bank to host Entrepreneur Commons meetings so that if they cannot help with funding they can still keep the people within their ecosystem and allow them to grow to the best they can be. All it requires is a room and coffee once a month and it would allow them to switch from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking. We went in 2010 from 2 chapters to 19 chapters around the world, and there is no reason that we cannot grow to hundreds of chapters moving forward - www.entreco.org.

Young Entrepreneur Council study

Very interesting data on how young people (16-39) feel about entrepreneurship.

YEC/Buzz Marketing Group Youth Entrepreneurship Study

View more presentations from Buzz Marketing Group.

Startup America launched!

The White House is launching the Startup America initiative today - great news for entrepreneurs in the US, and for entrepreneurs around the world - http://www.startupamericapartnership.org/news

From the State of the Union speech:
Innovation, education, infrastructure.
We do big things!

And who are the people doing big things? Entrepreneurs!
So this year again is a year for entrepreneurs.
They deserve a better system for support and funding, let's give it to them in 2011.

Interview at Incubate 2.0

The video is now published:

Incubate 2.0 - Tim Delhaes interview - First Tuesday Americas

Incubate 2.0 - short presentation of the event and videos coming up

Incubate 2.0 is also available on the web (live streaming)

Event concluded

Get ready for Incubate 2.0

The Incubate 2.0 conference promises to be a really interesting event. We have gathered a great group of speakers, all involved with incubation and acceleration and working at the edge of this market, bringing innovation into the ecosystem.
The conference is going to give attendees an overview of what the state of the art is in this area, and I am even more excited about the 2nd day, which will be an un-conference to discuss on what is being done today and how we can do better to have massive and global on entrepreneurship.
If you have not seen it yet, take a look at what is coming up: http://www.incubate2.com

Microblogging should become a standard

The beauty with microblogging is that you are limited to a few lines. And really this is a standard that should apply to all written communication. If you need more than two or three lines to say something, really you should pick up the phone or meet with people. Who has time to page long emails? And are they really needed anyway?

feature or bug?

Facebook is giving me an opportunity to post via email, so they setup an email address that can be used to send something on my wall, except that the only people who have been using it so far are spammers who figure out somehow what the email address is and post updates in my name. Obviously the secret email is not so secret.
Now that's a great feature (not), and the best of all is that I cannot disable it. Really a bug in my system!
I know that Facebook wants us to share as much as possible, but I wish they would be less agressive about it...

Collaboration and funding

I am happy to report to this group that the concept that I was pushing to use collaboration to improve the world of seed funding is getting traction:
I presented the concept at Socap08, and I discussed the idea with Bob Patillo and the people at First Light in 2009, and they decided to implement.
They were so happy with the results that the are announcing now that more investments will be made. See this announcement http://goo.gl/fu6t

Please spread the word and if you have time to do hesitate to comment on the blog that this model for seed funding deserves to be expanded to more entrepreneurs and outside of just social entrepreneurs.
The Entrepreneur Commons blueprint rules - http://www.entreco.org

The new Inc 500 is out - VCs are not in

From this year Inc 500 top fastest growing companies data: where did entrepreneurs get the money to get started?
- 87% personal savings
- 26% friends and family
- 23% angel investors
- 22% credit cards
- 18% bank loans

VCs did not make the list. Their successes are well advertised, but they are not really where entrepreneurs get the help.
Something worth keeping in mind when you are considering starting your own venture!

Google: deconstructing itself

One more time I have to give Google credit for doing the right thing - clearly they keep working on "do no evil":
- After building Gmail, they introduced Google Apps, as a way for anyone to have their own Google Apps for their own domain name.
- Then they have opened Google Apps to others and provided a Google Marketplace where you can get all kinds of Google Apps plugins to enhance your own experience. And you have the choice of maintaining several Google accounts separately (per domain name).
This is a great example of building services to the point where they gain critical mass (Gmail), to then deconstruct these services into independent sets (Google Apps) so that you can give more control back to the user and allow the creation of a healthy ecosystem around the IP created (Google Marketplace). The next step for Google is to open the hosting itself to other service providers so that you can have "Google inside" in a completely independent system, creating an architecture with no single point of failure.
In the meantime Facebook, LinkedIn and other silos should learn from this approach and open up their services. A Facebook for my own domain? Google Buzz may get there earlier than the others. Google Wave is now a plugin for Google Apps, so it may not be that long before Google Buzz becomes one too, and if they do it will be interesting to see what happens.