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Ashton Kutcher launched his new startup, Blah Girls , at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco this week. Ashton walked by the Microsoft lounge several times, in and out of interviews as you can imagine. From Ashton’s most recent blog post , I think he liked...
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I’m pretty damned stoked about TechCrunch50 . I spent most of today setting up the Microsoft lounge area at the venue. The idea for the lounge started when I was sitting with the Qik team brainstorming ways in which we could partner to do some fun things...
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10% of all non-spam emails that arrive in corporate inboxes are never read , according to informal polls of Microsoft Exchange administrators. Within Microsoft, that number rises to a whopping 33% – I guess I should count myself lucky that most of my...
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One of the key attributes that startups seek in an investor is relevant domain expertise. If you’re making quantum computers and you ask someone who made his fortune in digital media to join your board, that’s sort of like asking a NASCAR racer to be...
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I stumbled upon this article that I thought developers running PHP based web sites may be interested in. The authors write: A significant percentage of web sites utilize PHP as a platform for dynamic content. During the development of Windows 2008, Microsoft...
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I’ve worked with several funded and non-funded startups during my time here at Microsoft. Having seen what works and doesn’t, I thought I’d throw together a series of posts on how to startup a software company. First and foremost, you need to have an...
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Chinese mythology is replete with deities that ride clouds up into the heavens. Many startups similarly seeking nirvana on the back of cloud infrastructure have found their ascent rudely interrupted . It seems unlikely that any single cloud infrastructure...
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Interesting rule of thumb based on military operational research performed by Frederick Lanchester during World War I: If you’re trying to enter an existing market where the dominant player has greater than 40% market share, you will need to spend at...
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The news today was Marc Andreessen's joining the board of Facebook. From Netscape to Facebook, some interesting ironies along the way. Marc is also a founder of Ning, a social networking application. So why is this important to startups? It's...
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Along the road from starting a business to (perhaps) getting to the Next Big IPO, one of the more daunting assignments that an entrepreneur will likely face is the process of raising capital. The task can be decomposed into qualitative & quantitative...
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Golf is an activity that requires a tremendous amount of overhead. Aside from actually learning how to swing, aspiring players also have to set aside continuous time blocks of 4 hours, gain membership at a suitable course, acquire an expensive bouquet...
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It can be a challenge today to find a large enterprise that’s not tinkering with desktop virtualization in some way, shape or form. Marketers have been capitalizing on the virtualization hype to repackage what’s essentially an old technology as the latest...
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One of the attributes that many investors look for in a startup (besides rockstar team, multi-billion dollar market opportunity etc.) is focus. This is understandable, as startups that try to do too many things at once or switch directions too often are...
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One of the attributes that many investors look for in a startup (besides rockstar team, multi-billion dollar market opportunity etc.) is focus. This is understandable, as startups that try to do too many things at once or switch directions too often are...
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About a month back, we took an equity investment in Oxigen Services (India) Pvt. Ltd. The announcement was an acknowledgment of the integral role of mobile telephony and mobile payments under our Unlimited Potential strategy. Some may...