Well like everyone else I’m watching the Facebook coverage today. There are some great resources for getting all the latest info. Techcrunch has some and CNN has a pretty cool style slideshow on who is richer as of this morning.

As I reflect on Facebook more than seven years after I first signed up, it’s amazing that they were able to hold out to reach this date. Mark and his team deserve the great financial reward coming their way. This company should have been a Viacom or Yahoo! property years ago but they stuck it out and here we are in 2012. So much for the Palo Alto housing bubble – looks like a new one just started.

With everything that’s happening online, you should be up to date on how to get your website ranked.  Every startup needs to find out more about the various techniques and methods that will help them promote their products and services on the internet more effectively. One particular common development that web marketers all over the world possess is by using blogs like a form of a search engine tool.

These days, having a blog on your website is no longer unheard of – one can now practically produce his or her own website in minutes and may readily compose anything and everything you think of and submit it online to the world to view. However employing a blog that factors in search engine optimization (SEO) is a completely different factor for your site.  Blogging to both inform people about your products and services and gain in the rankings is a great trick used by most of the most popular sites out there. Read more →

Jason and that Derek guy.

It’s nearing 7pm and we’re in Mountain View for Startup Grind live.  Tonight Derek will be talking to Jason Putorti, the Co-Founder of Votizen and early Mint.com Designer.  We’ll be liveblogging shortly, so get ready to start hitting refresh.

Aaaaaaand here we go…

It’s Derek’s third anniversary of leaving EA and doing the Grind.

Jason was one of the first 5 employees of Mint.  Now he’s a  Co-Founder of Votizen.

Jason: Grew up in upstate New York.  Went to school at Pitt.  BS in Computer Science and Math.  He took a design class and then ended up going to Parson’s for about 3 months.  His first gig was doing college books.  Moved into a tech meets design agency (mid-’00s).  Decided the services business didn’t scale well, so he came out to California.  Joined Mint. Read more →

***This post was written by Idan Benaim a founding member of oLyfe***  

During Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship week, entrepreneurs are offered a variety of classes, lectures, discussions and networking events, all in the name of the Entrepreneurial Spirit. “The Most Common Mistakes Startups Make From Legal Perspective” lecture was delivered by Attorney Timothy Harris, partner at Morrison Foerster.  Mr. Harris covered many topics entrepreneurs tend not to pay attention to, try not to pay attention to or “forget” to pay attention to. I mean, who needs the headache of incorporation, stock paperwork, and the blood sucking lawyers who come with it? Let’s file stock paperwork at $0.001 per share, a day before receiving a fat check at $1 a share! Now that’s growth! Yeah… No. Unless you want to find out you have new friends at the Internal Revenue Services of America. Read more →

Eric Ries is in Toronto today so we are trying to determine where the tires hit the road with lean startup methods between startups and investors.

I am a lean startup fanboy.  We use customer development methods for Cdling and I attended the most recent DemoDay for Ann Miura-Ko and Steve Blank’s engineering class at Stanford.

While still a class, teams were pitching real businesses, some had already received or were close to closing seed financing.

All of these “pitches” included business model canvas slides and they can get over 50,000 views on slideshare! Blank says that no business plan withstands contact with customers.

“We are not trying to be hip.” says Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech. “We are just trying to use the right tools.  For most startups we are not seeing business plans.  It’s not an appropriate tool.” Read more →

The Kauffman Foundation just released an indictment of the way big investors (like pension funds and foundations) place their money with venture capital firms.  In a report entitled, “We Have Met the Enemy … and he is us.” Kauffman calls into question some of the VC world’s most accepted ideas.

“To fix what’s broken in the LP investment model, institutional investors will need to become more selective and more disciplined investors in venture capital funds. The best investors will negotiate better alignment, transparency, governance, and terms that take into account the skewed distribution of VC fund returns.” says Kauffman in their report.

To that end, Kauffman says its new approach to venture capital investing will be:

• Invest in funds of less than $400-million (mc: like FloodGate, USV and 500Startups?).
• Develop a small portfolio of direct investments in startups.
• Directly co-invest in later round deals.
• Shrink the size of their allocation to venture capital. Read more →

Startup Grind San Diego is proud to announce its first event at the EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego on Wednesday, June 20^th. Entrepreneurs from all industries are invited to come and hear from Greg Horowitt, venture capitalist, serial entrepreneur, global innovation policy adviser and author of The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley. Make sure to join our SD community here and reserve your tickets for our inaugural event. 

San Diego has long been one of the action sports capitals of the world, a breeding ground for talented athletes like pro skateboarder Tony Hawk, who went from local hero to global icon, boasting 16 video games that carry his name and an estimated net worth of $120 million, among various other accomplishments. It is a city that operates on the ‘work hard, play hard’ philosophy – one where it is not uncommon to find surfboards lying around the office. Perhaps that has something to do with the reaction I got from my parents when I told them we were opening the San Diego chapter of Startup Grind they assumed it was a skate company. Read more →

I’m kind of insanely pumped to announce that Dave McClure is coming to the Startup Grind stage in Palo Alto on August 1. Reserve your ticket here. Dave needs no introduction but here goes. Dave McClure is a venture capitalist & founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA.

He has been an investor in over 250 companies including Mint.com, Twilio, Wildfire Interactive, SendGrid, TaskRabbit, SlideShare, Mashery, CreditKarma, KISSmetrics, and MakerBot, among others. We use many of these to power our own company.

Read more →

Pebble Founder, Eric Migicovsky will be the guest for Startup Grind Toronto’s first event to inspire startup enthusiasts on May 30th. Buy your tickets here. In the words of the immovable Tony Stark … “Let’s do a headcount shall we?”

• Persistence,
• low cost startups,
• the issues of identifying and supporting innovators,
• bridging local and global markets,
• crowd funding,
• a graduate of local incubation … but then what? Read more →

Exclusive: If you’re new to Startup Grind you’ll find that sometimes I write about really important and critical things to help you with your startup. Sometimes we’ll profile great startups, or write about breaking news. And sometimes we post stuff that is weird, cool, or funny. This post falls into the last category.

There is an extremely creative and talented Dutchman named Jo Luijten who is creating some of the coolest and most cleaver tech satire I have seen this year. He has amassed 3MM viral views in in the past few months and I’m excited to partner with him on his latest video project, If Pinterest had been invented in the ’90s. Check out the hilarious video below and please share it on Pinterest! We’re trying to help him get a partner account on YouTube. Message him on Twitter or in the comments if you have a connection on the inside that can help his new business.