About Me

The 5 skills article is right on the money, even more so if you've taken the path to customers and revenue to build a solid foundation to accept investment. My company is in the advertising space where tumultuous times are afoot, tremendous opportunity are available and none are for the faint of heart. Thanks for an inspiring article, it's one to re-read when times get tough.

Mark,

Thanks for taking the time to come out to USC last week. Your perspective and advice was relevant and on point. Looking forward to digging further into your blog.

dammit, Mark, why you postin' so much? i'm 2 weeks behind on TC and after reading your latest barrages now I have to add another must-read to my regular list . . . you as much as anyone know how time stressed your target audience is :)

-Clark Benson

LOL. Your ears must have been ringing - I was just talking about you twice this week! Hope all is well.

Hi ..thank you for your insight..It is a fact that there must be thousands of great ideas missed by investment houses.. ( on the law of probability there must be a few geniuses in the 3 billion poor..!! )

My quest is to find a way for you chaps to more easily discover these hidden ideas .( even in the ones you have rejected...testrat.com is one idea and this led to beta testing ... and the alpha site ..... nearly finished

www.tmi2.testmyidea.com on the fly test ?

There must be a better way than the current waste of time ? ..ian

Mark - Have greatly enjoyed this blog since discovering about a month ago.

Have been in the startup game for 16 years in the Virginia market, now have the chance to run my own after learning the game by helping build a few other startups- Digex, Cybertrust, etc - where we exited well for our investors. Your posts ring true to my own experiences, and appreciate your advice as we are now at $5MM in revs after our May '09 launch and looking at a possible venture round.

Thanks a heap.

Andy Hunn
COO
Resonate Networks

Awesome background and revenue ramp. Judging from your website you shouldn't have a hard time raising vc ;-) Good luck.

Your website looks very interesting. I will for sure come back. Bookmarked it. Thanks for the interesting reads until now.

I've enjoyed reading over your thoughts and was wondering if you'd be interested in taking a look at, and giving me comments about, a book I recently completed called "Elevator Pitch Essentials." I think it's good, but I'm always looking for ideas about how it could be improved.

I could try but ... man oh man ... I'm already behind on a million other things. If you send it and I find it engaging I'll read and comment.

E-mail me your snail mail address (thepainguy@gmail.com) and I'll drop a copy in the mail, in case you get time. It's only 100 pages.

Mark,
Great blog! I am actually starting my own web business coming from a Bain backed startup (I also started and ran a small services firm after b-school, but was not my idea). Your advice is really helpful and based on accurate facts - at least compared to what I have experienced. Once I get further along in my alpha site, can I share it with you for feedback?

Sure, I'd be happy to check it out. Send me a Twitter message @msuster

Saw your comment on Twitter while launching at TC50. Thanks for the comparison with S*****. Hope that you realize that our model is very different :-) I follow you on twitter. Will enjoy a DM with feedback or an email. marc at rackup.

I'm guessing you guys are the ones who looked to me like Swoopo? It's so hard in a short demo to really be able to tell the difference. Sorry if it was off base.

Your Deer Hunter piece is right on the money...

Mark,

I just wanted to stop in and say thanks for putting this out there.

Seeing things from your point of view has provided some great insight. I've found the site informative and helpful and hope that you keep this going.

Best,

Don

Thanks for the feedback, Don.

It looks like you have updated to new blog, since I have visited last time (normally I read via RSS). I was looking for some of the older comments to older posts. Are those all gone?

I'm trying to figure that out right now. I asked a friend to help me import them all - he thought he had gotten them. Have you spotted some that are missing? Any pointers would help. I'm trying to track this down.

I was looking for that particular comment dialog that we had about type of startups, that finally made me start the startupcommons.org initiative. I would like to check the dialog again and also the correct date, so I could have mentioned when I will blog about the steps that lead to startup commons.

I think it was on the post "Do You Really Even Need VC?". It was sometime early summer, maybe june.

It seems to me that since you have this new blog all of those (had to be hundreds) of comments were left behind. Do you still have that old blog live somewhere?

Please let me know, if you find/restore those comments.

Other than missing comments, I really like your new blog with disqus etc.

As a VC, I think you are doing a really great job sharing your wisdom, with thoughtful posts - really covering both sides :)

Mark,

I've found your blog extremely helpful and full of great advice. I'm a new entrepreneur looking to learn more about how to "price" my company, how splits work, how much equity a VC is looking for, what happens to the equity that angels own and so forth. Is there a good blog you can suggest to read to learn all this? I'm hoping to raise VC for my company in the next month and am definitely hoping to understand all this

Thanks
Mark

Mark, thanks for the feedback. Some sites you might check out are venturehacks.com, avc.com, askthevc.com, feld.com and hopefully many issues covered on my site. If not, feel free to post questions under the blog heading "Pitching a VC" and I'll try to answer them.

Congrats on your new venture, Mark. Looks interesting.

Take care.

-Doug Lytle

Mark,

I'm following your Twitter feeds with interest... be nice to chat; already speaking to Kent Goldman at FirstRound... but lunch at Zuni's would be fun.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=302

All the best,

Rick (Waghorn)