Startups

The energy is palpable. 100+ sleep-deprived participants, with overworked laptops, have seriously raised the temperature in the new Fishburners events space. Extra fans were acquired. Lunch has been served, and pitching practice has begun. Sydney Startup Weekend kicked off last night, and we’re right in the thick of it. A dozen ideas are being fleshed out, validated and developed. The goal for Sunday night is a compelling pitch, ideally with a working prototype. Bonus points for paying customers. ...

Week 2 of Blackbox Connect. Off to a blazing start today with Dan Martell, on Social Marketing for Startups. Dan was founder of Flowtown, acquired last year by Demandforce. He’s currently working on another startup, while advising and investing in others. He calls himself a growth hacker. I like that title. It explains what pretty much every startup with lean marketing budget is trying to do. His weapon of choice? Social media. Results kinda speak for themselves: ~22K Twitter followers; 17K Facebook fans; 15K email subscribers in the very early days. ...

Everything you do is wrong. You just don’t know it yet. It’s Day2 of Blackbox Connect. 12 startups from 10 countries, and an amazing lineup of speakers and sessions over 2 weeks. The team is live blogging here (w/ photos). Today saw the first of 3 sessions with Janice Fraser. She’s cofounder of LUXr (The Lean UX Company), after selling a previous company (Adaptive Path) to Google. Oh, and she coined the term Ajax. ...

I’ve just landed in San Francisco, after a long flight ex-Sydney. I’ll be in the Bay Area for a bit over 3 weeks, splitting time between StartupHouse and the ’Blackbox Mansion’ (more on both of those soon). It’s primarily a trip for learning and connecting. Learning about the environment for startups, launching, recruitment technology, and fundraising. Connecting with people across all those spaces. I’m now a fresh sponge. All going to plan, I’ll write here more often, to free up some space for more absorption. ...

2011 was an up and down year, with 2-speed economies across the globe. In Australia, most of the talk has been of a ‘resource’ bubble (with sprinkles of ‘housing’). Elsewhere, froth was brewing from the ‘tech bubble 2.0’. The US (or specifically, Silicon Valley) was the source of most concern. Valuations for early stage companies were ‘crazy’, ‘out of control’ and ‘way too frothy’. It was a topic for much navel gazing and debate. The tech blogs loved it: Was it 1999 all over again? Was it even a bubble? And if so, did it really matter, given all the ‘crazy’ valuations were for private companies? The only investors who’d be affected if/when it burst would be already-rich white guys on the west coast (vs mom and pop shareholders in tech bubble 1.0). ...