Posts in the "Business News" Category

• Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners

  Business News
  

  At today’s roundtable, we announced 1M/1M Premium company Freshdesk’s $1M funding from Accel Partners. Freshdesk is a social customer support startup offering a SaaS solution to small businesses. The team is led by Girish Mathrubootham and Shanmugam Krishnasamy, who have their roots in Zoho, a SaaS company that has revolutionized the category by drastically undercutting the CRM price-point by leveraging India to build a $100M+ 100% bootstrapped business. Freshdesk aims to do the same in Social CRM and already has ..read more Read More...

• How to be the Anti-Microsoft

  Business News
  

  Yesterday, I wrote a short review of a new mobile app from Webscorer that has a curious lineage. The startup came to be from a group of several ex-Microsoft developers and is led by Vesa Suomalainen. I have known Vesa for many years, and first met him when he ran Microsoft’s mainframe communications business with a product called Host Integration server. This was back in the 3270 terminal emulation days and was quite the advanced product for its time. Vesa ..read more Read More...

• Entrepreneurship Sucks

  Business News
  

  The sad state of affairs is that working for yourself is really just a worse version of working for somebody else We really, deeply, unabashedly, lust after entrepreneurship. It’s the dream job. Do whatever you want! No rules! Your own office, your own schedule, everything exactly the way you like it. At Harvard’s Biz school where I am a student, they have a required course in entrepreneurship in the spring semester. But I’m going to take the contrarian position ..read more Read More...

• Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship

  Business News
  

  I have written about this before on my Forbes column, but want to raise the question again: Are Business Schools Setting Up Entrepreneurs To Fail? The question has, over time, resulted in huge discussions, some defensive, some self-aware and some even solution oriented.

  Nonetheless, in the last couple of years, the flow of first-time entrepreneurs who come out with the misconception that Entrepreneurship = Financing has not abated.

  Sponsor

  Folks, please understand a simple point: Business schools, when they teach you entrepreneurship, ..read more Read More...

• Starting (Up) in the Big Sky: Fund Raising Outside Silicon Valley

  Business News
  

  We had written code for 8 months in our home town of Missoula, Montana before it occurred to us we might need to raise money to launch our startup. There were a number of reasons for this: 1) We had no idea what we’d do with the money. 2) We assumed our apps’ success would be huge and immediate.

  Obviously, this was naive.This naivete was complicated by the fact of our geographical remoteness from the centers of funding.

  Sponsor

  Michael ..read more Read More...