Healy Jones | 
11 26th, 2008| 
As I found out this morning, there are actually entrepreneurs who read this blog, so Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I’ll be off the grid until next week, so don’t let the markets fall further apart while I’m up in rural New Hampshire.
-Healy
Nov
26
Sep
24
On Monday I attended Amazon’s Web Services user group meeting in Boston. The event was attended by at least 50 startups (several of whom had pretty cool businesses), and a few venture capitalists as well. While I was a little disappointed by the lack of detail on the Amazon product road map that was presented, I did find the event useful. In particular, Amazon announced a new contest for startups using Amazon’s Web Services. The AWS Startup Challenge will award cash and web service credits to the winners. I’d encourage any startups using the Amazon platform to check out the rules and prizes.
These sorts of contests are good for startups for several reasons:
Aug
26
Today I had the pleasure of spending time with an entrepreneur planning a seed fund raise for his startup. While most of my fund’s investments are at the Series A stage, we do occasionally get involved with businesses raising a seed. We (several partners, the CEO and me) put together a pretty simple list of objectives that we hope the startup will accomplish with the seed financing. While this list is pretty simple, I thought I’d share it since it makes a lot of sense, if I do say so myself! (It is important to note that this list is for a web service company that already has a bit of traction; the list would be different for a startup in a different space or at an earlier stage.)
Milestones (for more of my opinion on why milestones are important see my post on setting them check out my previous posting) By the time that the company has run out of the seed financing the following should be accomplished:
- Team – Critical technical, business and customer support team members should be in place and fully functioning.
- Read the rest of this entry »
