1. BOTH SIDES OF THE TABLE, @msuster: Investor, entrepreneur and blogger Mark Suster is a partner at GRP VC and recently created Launchpad LA – an incubator for Southern California-based companies. Suster has an 11 part series on what makes an entrepreneur successful and it’s a great primer for first time startup founders.
2. PAULGRAHAM.COM: Best known as the co-founder of YCombinator, Graham and his partners revolutionized the investment model. The entrepreneur popularized both the incubator-style program model and the term ramen profitable to describe lean startups. To look at what Graham is interested in, YCombinator publishes Requests for Startups on an ongoing basis.
3. A VC, @fredwilson: Perhaps one of the most well-known blogger/VCs, Fred Wilson is a principal with NYC-based Union Square Ventures. He has a 15-year track record and some of his investments include Twitter, Disqus and Etsy. Wilson is an avid blogger and offers insightful commentary on emerging tech trends as they happen.
4. VENTURE HACKS, @venturehacks: Run by startup advisors Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant, Venture Hacks offers great advice for early stage startups. The two have raised more than $100 million dollars for companies like test prep site Grockit and open source music company Songbird. With connections to major firms such as Sequoia, Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the duo’s blog also features guest posts from top-tier VCs.
5. VENTURE BLOG, @ventureblog: August Capital’s David Hornik is a former lawyer who has celebrated successful investments in Evite and PayCycle. During the winter of our financial apocalypse, Hornik was one of the first investors to offer a hopeful message to startups. Entitled Innovation Doesn’t Take a Vacation in an Economic Downturn, Hornik’s post inspired many to continue in their pursuit of great products.
Photo Credit: Flickr user Alistair and Andrew Magill
5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice – ReadWriteStart
First Pitch Practice – Pitch Masters HK
First Pitch Practice
Announcing the first ever pitch practice session for Pitch Masters Hong Kong.
The meeting will be on next Wednesday, the 13th of January, 8-9:30pm at the Lan Kwai Fong Beer Bar (formerly California).
The intent of this meetup is to try out the format of the practice sessions, which are intended to provide a friendly environment for rapid iterative practice of pitching to someone.
For those coming to this meeting, it doesn’t matter if you are an entrepreneur, investor, or just interested in trying this out, everyone must have a pitch presentation ready of some sort, no spectators.
I’ll put together some more posts that help to shape up what an elevator pitch and the short pitch could be. The topics are up to you, but typically should be related to selling someone (an investor, a client, etc.) on the concept of a business, product, or service.
We will be following this up with additional practice sessions and will be putting together a related meeting to bring in local investors for taking the skills learned in practice sessions into practical application.
See the post for more details about the format and comment there to RSVP. I’ll be posting up links and related info in that blog (more focused towards pitching and investing).
Michael Gerber of the E-Myth on How to Dream Big and Become a World Class Entrepreneur
How to work ON your biz and not work in it!
