| How Not To Lose Your Investor During Your Pitch The product you've built, the team you've assembled, the customers you've won, the growth you're predicting - all crucial for winning investor support. And you can have all those pieces in place and still blow it during your pitch. This can happen because of your demeanor or something you say. "Startup killers" is how Cynthia Kocialski describes them. "When speaking to someone about the new... Continue Reading » Equity vs. Convertible Debt: VCs Debate Shifting Investment Trends In the latest example of VC chatter - wherein multiple venture capitalists simultaneously blog about a hot issue - the topic du jour is the debate between convertible debt and equity rounds. The spark came from a Friday night tweet by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (yes, he finally joined Twitter) that declared convertible notes victorious since each of this summer's YC class opted for them.... Continue Reading » Lessons Learned from a Failed Acquisition While a successful exit in the form of an acquisition may be the goal for many startups, the experiences of Backblaze, an online back-up and storage startup, demonstrate how time-consuming, challenging, and expensive the process can be, particularly when, as was the case with Backblaze, things fall apart. Backblaze was in the process of negotiating an acquisition with one of its partners and... Continue Reading » 5 Ways Tech Startups Can Disrupt the Education System "Revolutionary." "Disruptive." These terms are used with such frequency that they may have lost much of their meaning. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of products and services that are innovative, and plenty of systems, plenty of organizations that are ripe for disruption or "revolution." Take education, for example. Our modern education system is, after all, not so modern, with... Continue Reading » Developing Your Business By Marketing Your API Last week, Alex Williams posted a list in ReadWriteWeb's Cloud Computing channel of the "!0 Common Mistakes Made by API Providers." Alex's post points to some of the problems that occur in both the technical and the business realms of API development. In the case of the latter, he lists "Poor Community Management" and "Not Recognizing the API as a Core Line of Business" as common business-related... Continue Reading » Groupon Co-Founder to Headline Midwest's Largest Startup Conference The two largest startup ecosystems within the United States are arguably Silicon Valley and New York City, but there's a whole lot of land between the east and west coast. Smack dab in the middle of the country is Chicago, and not long ago we told you about a demo contest hosted by venture consulting firm midVentures that brought a bit of TechCrunch50 flair to the Windy City. This September, the... Continue Reading » | 
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