Archive for the ‘Venture Capital’ Category

Robots At Our Doorstep

There’s a really, really interesting blog post that talks about robots a little bit. It’s by Paul Miller on IEEE Spectrum and draws a parallel between how the personal computing industry got started and the state of robot development today. Specifically, it talks about hardware hackers. If you want to dig even deeper, there’s another [...]

Artful Pitching

My partner, Graham, is a bit of a wonder. He’s been in “the biz” of telepresence for some time, starting as an inventor / artist and really being part of the core of how to connect remotely to someone else since the 80s. With my company, AquaCinema, too, he’s worked with some key-players in VR [...]

Thoughts on Intellectual Property and dealing with *everything else that is out there*

We’ve talked to a number of investor these last months and I can classify their questions into three categories: Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) Revenues and Operations Revenues is a straightforward concept and reflects market potential, market share, and business-model. Operations can also mean business-model as that clearly affects your operations, it also concerns the team, [...]

The role of Sunk Costs in Strategic Decision Making—a European’s perspective

In his MBA-series (that I don’t read enough, but I may not be the target audience), Fred Wilson writes about the role of sunk costs in making future decisions. As an entrepreneur, I am constantly concerned with the cost of decisions, so I was kind of happy to find out (though I do vaguely remember [...]

E’ship diary part 7: Gut Instinct vs. Calculation, or On Managing Uncertainty

Let me start by saying that it’s hard to write about what we’re doing, particularly from a non-marketing angle. Tech IT Easy is a .Org and it doesn’t feel right to use it as a commercial medium (apart from the sponsorship banner, which I value very much and which will at some point host my [...]

E’ship diary part 5: project management and vision development in the face of ambiguity, technology and market risks

Having reached a personal milestone, part 5 of my entrepreneurship diaries, I should mention that it’s very pleasurable and useful for me to write on these topics, and I hope it’s the same for you. In this post, I want to briefly address the issue of uncertainty in early stage technology companies and how that [...]

E’ship diary part 3: Why I don’t like the term ‘entrepreneurship’

Both ‘startup’ and ‘entrepreneur’ are terms that immediately evoke an often false reaction from an audience and I would personally prefer not to describe my work using those words. In the following post, I write about three associations in regards to entrepreneurship, one positive, one negative, both somewhat false, and one what I see entrepreneurship [...]

An e’diary part 2: what are the responsibilities of an entrepreneur

This post is part of a series, a diary of starting a business if you will. It follows part 1, the decision of becoming an entrepreneur. One thing I found out is that it’s hard to put your responsibilities down on paper… there are so many!!! There is of course a basic job-description, which more [...]

The Poor Man’s Business Model—How Out-of-the-Box thinking can generate tremendous value for customers

I’m always fascinated by business models, i.e. at how entrepreneurs and companies put together services in order to make money from them. I’d call it the source code of business if I hadn’t seen the other source code in Luxembourg —legal and accounting—but arguably that’s more like binary code, i.e. 99% unintelligible. Sarah Lacy writes [...]

Summary of visit to Silicon Valley

Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there. UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies. Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the [...]

Some questions to finance geeks out there – on learning about investing

Hey guys, I wanted to pose this question on Twitter, but couldn’t describe it in 140 characters. Basically, if I want to learn about investing, what would be the best way to go about it? I noticed, reading Business Accounting for Dummies, that accounting is a topic that is very nationally driven. Sure, there are [...]

My theory of the firm

Inspired by the Grasshopper podcast on Venture Voice. Har har, Vincent Like Unlike

What I dislike about business plans [addendum]

First, what I love about business plans. I contains four elements very close to my heart: Writing, talking to people, innovation, and entrepreneurship. That is not to say that writing business plans is a fun activity that should be taken lightly. The crux of writing a business plan is that it needs to be executed [...]

Why you should invest your time & money into space technolology

Depending on where you stand, this is going to a long boring blog post or an interesting one. While I didn’t write much about it, my last consulting project as a freelancer was to help get a startup into the European Space Agency Incubator (ESI)… successfully, I’m happy to say. I wanted to write a [...]

Why I firmly believe in boundaries

I’m sitting here writing this on my new Intel Macbook, 4GB of RAM and 256MB of video-memory, coming from a 4-year old PPC iBook with 1GB of RAM and 32MB of video-memory. The latter is the very definition of the principle I’m talking about. From the beginning, I’ve had to find creative solutions to doing [...]