Assembling a WordPress Website My mother Carol Teten and I met Daniella Norwood, the owner of ella j designs, and her husband Brian Bigda at a Lean Startup Machine weekend at which I was a judge. She did a great job redesigning my mother’s site, DancetimePublications.com, so I hired her to do a redesign of Teten.com...
[Continue Reading]Exclusive: Announcing a Startup that Brings More Efficient Government to the US and Other Countries
I’m exceptionally excited to announce that I’m now Chairman and lead investor with some other angels in a new company, Spright Governance Inc. Spright is a spinoff of the Singaporean government, which will leverage their proven expertise and technology to run other cities, states, and nations globally. Due to the nature of our business, we...
[Continue Reading]Private Sector Bandaids, and Making the US Competitive Again
On Monday night I attended a Harvard Business School “Paths Forward” event tied to the March issue of Harvard Business Review, which consists of a wide range of research on How to Increase U.S. Competitiveness. I also contributed a blog post to the HBS Competitiveness website on some initiatives I’m working on personally with ff...
[Continue Reading]Visit to Case Foundation and Startup America
On February 16, I visited Washington, DC, where I attended an HBS Club of DC lunch on the Case Foundation and Startup America. Michael Smith, leader of the Social Innovation team at the Case Foundation, introduced the Foundation as a non-profit started in 1997 by Steve Case (AOL co-founder) and his wife, Jean Case. Its mission,...
[Continue Reading]Lessons from Facebook on Recruiting Elite Engineers
Following is a guest post from ff Venture Capital winter intern Max Segan, a Colgate senior majoring in computer science, who is starting at Facebook this summer as a software engineer. From our perspective, Facebook is both our friend (training hundreds of talented future entrepreneurs) and enemy (competing with our portfolio companies for top talent...
[Continue Reading]How Venture Capitalists and Government Can Promote Entrepreneurship
I’ve recently met with several universities, nonprofits, and government employees who’ve all asked the same question: how can we promote entrepreneurship? Just like me, they’re distressed about the poor economy and jobs situation. By contrast, as a venture capitalist, I can report that almost all of our portfolio companies are desperate to hire talent, and...
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