Archive for the ‘startup’ Category

Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

What are the unique characteristics of entrepreneurs? It is a subject that I think about from time to time. Over the years, I identified a few patterns and I use such patterns in judging other people whether they are entrepreneurs or not. Here are the patterns that I identified and ...

Yottaa Looking for Rock Star UX Architect

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Yottaa is looking for a rock star UX architect who can help make deliver an amazing user experience for various web applications. Yottaa Inc (http://www.yottaa.com) is a Boston and Beijing based cloud computing company building a new generation of cloud services revolutionizing what we know about the Internet. With venture backing ...

Boston Area Startups to Watch

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Nine venture-backed startups IPO'd in 2009, but just one of them was based in Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale security firm Fortinet Inc. (Note that Fortinet is led by Tsinghua University alumni, also co-founder of NetScreen). Close-by, San Francisco's Open Table IPO'd in May. Otherwise, it was all Massachusetts, Chicago, Seattle, and Texas. ...

A Geek’s Guide to Startup Banking – What do you do after you close financing

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

This is my 2nd post in the “Geek’s Guide” series about all the things that entrepreneurs hate to do, are not good at doing them, but have to do them anyway. These things include office space (My first post is on this topic), legal, HR, administration, banking, accounting, insurance, payroll, ...

Is The Tide Turning?

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Though unemployment rate is hitting 10%+ in US, things are looking up from what I see: IPO market start to open up for venture backed startups: A123 System, LogMeIn, SolarWind, etc. Notable M&A exits: Cisco/Tanderberg ($3B), Cisco/Starent ($2.9B), Cisco/ScanSafe ($160M), Cisco/DVN($40M), Compuware/Gomez($296M),HP/3Com($6B), Google/Admob($750M), EA/Playfish($300M+)... Good activities from VCs: ...

A Geek’s Guide to Startup Office Space

Monday, November 9th, 2009

An interesting benefit for me in starting up Yottaa is to become a semi-expert in unexpected domains such as startup office space in Boston area, banking, HR and administration etc. I've learned some tips and thought they might be useful for my fellow entrepreneurs. This post focuses on office space. ...

Social Expeditions Looking for CTO

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

My friends at Social Expeditions are looking for a CTO. Below is what they are looking for: Social Expeditions is a company behind blockbusters on Facebook and MySpace. Millions use our products. We are profitable. This is no coincidence because we are obsessed with our customers. While many features ...

Yottaa Looking for Head of Engineering

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Based in Boston and Beijing, yottaa is a stealth mode startup in the area of cloud computing. We are not saying too much about what we do in public yet, but we can say that you will enjoy the deep computer science as well as the plenty “lost in translation” ...

SaaS Go-to-market Framework

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

OK, you are building a great SaaS company that will change the world. How do you actually get there? Ok, so we have to think really hard about how to go to market. What is the framework that one should follow? Here is a list of things that I have ...

Web Profiler Got Acquired

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Some of the folks may know that I wrote some code last year (when I was really bored). One of them is called "Web Profiler", a 3-D web profiling tool that produces deep information about web performance. Part of the inspiration of Web Profiler is due to my years of ...

Starting a company during a down economy

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Not sure whether this is lucky or unlucky, I am probably wedded to the pattern of "starting a company during a down economy". For comrades who are starting a company during the current couple of years, you are probably wedded to the same pattern too. To me, the root ...

Please, Economic Stimulus Plan - 10,000 Startups with $1B

Saturday, March 7th, 2009

This is a post echoing what a variety of people have been talking about for the last few weeks - I don't have a lot  to contribute, but am compelled and felt worthwhile to echo other people's voice here. On Februrary 21 2009, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote ...