Transparency in Startups

Today, I read a wonderful blog post by SEOMoz, a seattle based SEO company. Hands down - it's amazing how thorough it is! More importantly, it's humbling how openly they talk about their growth over the last 5 years and their lastest financing round. I think it is great value for aspiring entrepreneurs. It's another fine example of what kind of hurdles even a revenue generating startup needs to go through before raising a big round. They had trouble raising money in 2009 and 2011 before finally cracking it in 2012.

Read it for yourself and I'm sure you'll learn a hell lot of how a great pitch deck looks like!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozs-18-million-venture-financing-our-story-metrics-and-future

"Bad ideas"

I just read an article - why smart people have bad ideas by paul graham http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html. I can relate to so many mistakes that we made while we were working on couple fire. It's extremely fascinating and totally worth a read!

After reading this article, I'm going to read book by Dale Carnegie on "How to win friends and influence people.

Here are my favorite quotes from the essay:

• I don't think we should discard plunging. Plunging into an idea is a good thing. The solution is at the other end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make it good.
• if you're starting a company that will do something cool, the aim had better be to make money and maybe be cool, not to be cool and maybe make money. It's hard enough to make money that you can't do it by accident. Unless it's your first priority, it's unlikely to happen at all.
• A familiar problem issue: of all the things we could do, is this the one with the best chance of making money?