Justin’s posterous

StartupVisa.com was created by Eric Ries, Dave McClure, and Shervin Pishevar to help raise awareness and change policy around the EB-5 visa, which enables investors from other countries to get a visa in exchange for starting a business in the US with $1M in investment capital and creating 10 US jobs (or $500K for economically targeted areas).

Maurer had started as a $3.10-an-hour seamstress at Appalachian Outfitters, a store in Oakton, and eventually bought the sewing end of the business for $14,000, borrowing $4,000 against her husband's life insurance. She saw a growing niche for backpacks, computer bags and duffel bags, and she eventually obtained patents for camouflaged military curtains and tents. After two decades of hard work, sometimes shlepping computer bags in the back of her Volkswagen Quantum station wagon, she sold the company. By then, Bea Maurer Inc. grossed more than $50 million a year and employed 120 people.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to watch video rather than (or in addition to) reading blog posts, here are some recent videos from TV appearances I’ve done on the topic of raising VC

1. Is VC Right for You?

Watch the latest business video at <a href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/” mce_href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/”>FOXBusiness.com</a>
The blog posts related to this video are Do you really even need VC? and How to approach a VC?

2. How to do a cocktail party pitch?

Watch the latest business video at <a href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/” mce_href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/”>FOXBusiness.com</a>

My blog post on the topic is How to do a cocktail party pitch?

3. Six tips for early-stage startups.

Watch the latest business video at <a href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/” mce_href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/”>FOXBusiness.com</a>
Blog post covering Most Common Start-up Mistakes

4. I met with a VC but haven’t heard back – what now?.

Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com

Blog post covering What to do after you’ve had a meeting with a VC

Share and Enjoy:

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Why I think that IDEA going open source is not a good sign

It looks like I shocked quite a few people with my recent prediction of doom for IDEA, so I thought I'd take some time to elaborate.

Here is what I said:

cbeust: JetBrains deserves the utmost respect for what they have created and pioneered, but IDEA going opensource means that it will now slowly die
cbeust: About IDEA: commercial software that goes open source never ends well, even for products that don't suck

First of all, I'd like to make it crystal clear that I have nothing but the utmost respect for the guys at JetBrains, who possess three very rare qualities:

• They are innovators. It's not exactly easy to come up with new ideas, whatever your field is, but these guys have come up with a lot of concepts that are now part of every developer's daily life.
• They know how to write a great application. Who would have imagined that it would be possible to create not only such a snappy Swing application but also one that just seems to read your thoughts?
• They managed to sell their product while competing against a free product that is of equally high quality (Eclipse) and funded by a very rich company (IBM).

About that last point: there is a saying that claims that if you are trying to sell software that competes against free products, you should change business. I don't buy that, and it's not just because I used to work for a company that was doing exactly that (BEA). A lot of companies are doing fine selling products that compete with free software, and they all have one thing in common: their product doesn't suck. JetBrains can certainly be counted as one of them.

Having said all this, I still see the move from commercial to open source as a sign that the business is struggling. A lot of companies have gone down that path in the past and all of them have tried to make it pass as a selfless action meant to help the community, but the truth is that they were just having a harder time selling their software, so making it open source is usually a last ditch effort to regain mindshare while trying to make money somewhere else.

I can't think of a single example where a struggling commercial software suddenly started regaining market share when they went open source. Can you?

I have no insight on how well JetBrains is doing, so it's quite possible that they are one of these rare exceptions. Maybe they were making tons of money with IDEA licenses and they really decided to suddenly give the product away out of kindness for the Java community. Even with these parameters, it still doesn't really sound like a good idea to me, but well.

Whatever side of the fence you stand on, one thing is clear about this move: it means less revenue for JetBrains for the foreseeable future. And what this means is that they will have less means to compete against Eclipse and less power to add features to either of the editions (the Community one or the Ultimate one).

And this is where a lot of companies make a fatal mistake: they think that making their software open source will automatically generate a ground swell of patches and additions from the community that will float them back to the top.

And in my experience, this never happens.

Oh patches will be sent and I'm sure a few isolated developers will come up with very cool additions to IDEA, but without a committee of JetBrains employees at the receiving end to sort through these patches and act as a strong steward ("reject this one", "accept this one as is", "accept this one but it needs more work", "accept this one but we need to integrate it with XXX", etc...), these patches will just start piling up and they won't be processed.

The challenge here is not just technical, it's about product management, and open source communities are just not good at that. Hackers scratch their itch and when they're done, they move on to the next itch with very little interest in how buggy their code is or how well it integrates with the rest of the platform. They leave that up to others.

So I'm pretty pessimistic about IDEA's future. I think the community edition will soon start stagnating and in one year, it will have made little progress. The Ultimate edition might fare well for a little while, as long as fans help support it by paying the $249, but I'm skeptical that this revenue will be enough to keep such an ambitious product alive.

And of course, Eclipse's apparently unstoppable momentum isn't helping. These guys just don't seem to rest and the amount of features and directions that they keep expanding on is just mindboggling.

I wish the best to IDEA. I really do. I think Eclipse wouldn't be nearly as good as it is right now if IDEA wasn't around and IDEA's disappearance from the landscape would mean that Eclipse risks stagnation as well. Competition is good for users. I really hope that I'm wrong with my predictions.

Let's meet again here in one year.

Posted by cedric at October 16, 2009 10:04 AM

I am writing to apologize.

As Chief Executive Officer of SIGG, a leading maker of reusable water bottles, I made a mistake when I decided not to announce that our old bottle liner contained trace amounts of bisphenol A. I learned about the liner's content in 2006, when there was debate in the scientific community about the effects of BPA. Scientists lined up on both sides of the issue: Some said BPA posed potential health risks, others said BPA was perfectly safe.

With the issue still very much undecided, SIGG decided to develop a BPA-free liner to eliminate consumer concern about our products. To be sure that BPA did not leach from our bottle liners, we commissioned independent scientific studies and asked the labs to rigorously test our bottles and bottles made by other companies. We urged them to put all bottles through tortuous conditions. Those tests reassured us because they showed SIGG liners leached no BPA. We posted those studies on our web site to provide consumers the information about product performance that seemed to me relevant at the time.

Today, the debate continues. Scientists are still split on the issue. But the consumer environment has changed. Because of the all the conflicting data, a growing number of people have decided to eliminate the concern from their lives by avoiding BPA. Given the situation, I recently decided that we had to tell everyone that bottles manufactured with our former liner (prior to August 2008) contained trace amounts of BPA.

We were right to make the announcement. But I was wrong to have waited this long. One of our primary goals at SIGG has been to help reduce unnecessary waste and to educate people on the environmental benefits of using a reusable bottle. With that objective in mind, SIGG has been labeled a "green" company.

Unfortunately, I am still learning to be a green CEO. When I took this position, I naively assumed that "green" meant being a steward of the environment. In 2007, SIGG became a member of 1% For The Planet and we have donated 1% of all of our sales to environmental organizations like The Sierra Club and Stop Global Warming. However, being a green company also means being held to the highest degree of corporate transparency.

Some executives learn this because they have grown up within the green movement. I have learned this by reading hundreds of emails from SIGG consumers. Some feel angry. Some feel betrayed. All feel disappointed because they were passionate advocates of our bottles.

People have written to explain why they are concerned about BPA. They have written about their personal stories, their intimate worries and their very honest anger. I have personally responded to hundreds of these notes, apologizing for my mistake, offering new bottles to make amends, realizing that my decision caused people real discomfort.

SIGG has been around for 100 years. Yet, we are still a small company with 127 employees worldwide -- about 90 of those working in our Frauenfeld Switzerland operation. SIGG is not a typical modern corporation and it doesn't have a typical relationship with its customers. People have trusted SIGG and my decision breached that trust. I wish I could turn back the clock and fully disclose the BPA content in our liners. What I can do is make sure that I personally never again compromise SIGG's good name and proud Swiss heritage.

In the next few days, we will announce the first steps in our path to full transparency. These will include some very specific things we will do to make sure we are the honest, green company that our customers expect us to be. We will:

• Post details about the contents of our bottles: the new liner, the cap, the bottle itself. And we will make the information as transparent and understandable as possible.
• Make it easy for consumers to exchange their old bottles for new, BPA-free SIGGs. You can still ship your old SIGGs to us via our voluntary exchange program. Or if you prefer to avoid shipping costs and lead time, you can make the exchange at your local SIGG retailer, most of whom are participating in the program. To make it easy, we will post on our website a list of these retailers.
• Unveil an independently managed grant program to help fund BPA and chemical research that will help eliminate confusion and concern about this issue. While we have moved away from BPA in SIGG products, it continues to be used in countless products that we all use each day. If it poses a real threat, we want to help curb its use.

When people buy "Swiss made" products, they are buying quality and peace of mind. I realize that my actions compromised SIGG's relationship with our loyal customers. I pledge to try to rebuild the hard-earned trust you have had in SIGG. I sincerely hope you will allow me to prove myself.

Disney Draws on Steve Jobs and Apple for Retail Store Makeover

Tuesday October 13, 2009 09:31 AM EST
Written by Eric Slivka

The New York Times reports that The Walt Disney Company is planning a ground-up revival of its retail stores using a high-tech "Imagination Park" concept and has turned to Steve Jobs and the retail store team at Apple for assistance with the project. Jobs became a member of Disney's Board of Directors and the largest individual Disney shareholder when the company acquired Pixar in early 2006.

The involvement of Mr. Jobs, the Apple chief executive who joined the Disney board with the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, is particularly notable. For the first time, Mr. Jobs's fingerprints can be seen on Disney strategy, in the same way that he influenced the look and feel of Apple's own immensely popular retail chain. While Mr. Jobs did not personally toil on the Imagination Park concept, he pushed Disney to move far past a refurbishment.

"Dream bigger -- that was Steve's message," said Andy Mooney, chairman of Disney Consumer Products.

Jobs reportedly provided Disney with inside information on Apple's retail store development and operations, as well as allowing Disney executive to visit the Apple campus and convincing the company to build a prototype retail store to aid in refining the customer experience.

Disney's "Imagination Park" concept apparently carries several other Apple-like aspects to it, from in-store theater areas to mobile checkout technology for sales associates. The concept has reportedly been approved by the Disney Board of Directors, and the company is currently negotiating with landlords to secure the high-profile locations necessary for the concept.

Rating (108 Positives; 28 Negatives)
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Thom Barthelmess, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association, says most librarians are waiting to see what happens. “We’re hoping for a happy resolution, so our collections aren’t decimated,” he says. If the CPSC’s ruling results in libraries needing to pull books from shelves, “there would be huge ramifications,” he continues. “If we lose a lot of titles printed before 1986, many of which are irreplaceable, it would have a huge impact on the nature of our collections.

To throw away books or not, that is still the question.... apparently a hard question to answer?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee countered that it was trying "to promote what he stands for and the positive processes that have started now." It lauded the change in global mood wrought by Obama's calls for peace and cooperation, and praised his pledges to reduce the world stock of nuclear arms, ease American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthen the U.S. role in combating climate change.

Apparently he got awarded for giving everyone hope...