astrid

Yahoo! acquires Astrid

Note: This post originally appeared on the Astrid Blog Friends of Astrid, We are thrilled to announce that we have been acquired by Yahoo!. When we set out to build Astrid, we sought to help as many people as possible become happier, healthier and more productive. We’re really excited to join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal …

How To Start Smart: The Five Things To Know When Approaching An Incubator

Note: This post originally appeared in TechCrunch Incubators are playing an increasingly vital role in acquiring meaningful investment for first-time entrepreneurs. TechCrunch reported that elite accelerators like Y Combinator receive on average one application every minute, and AngelPad reminds its participants that it is many times more selective than the Harvard Business School. Incubators ask for a 2 to 10 percent …

3 Suggestions to Prospective Astrid Employees

At Astrid, our vision is to help over 1 billion people become happier, healthier, and more productive. To that end, we need to not only be smart about how we build (engineering), but also what we build (design, product), and how to get the good news out to as many people as possible (marketing, PR, business development).  While I have …

Suggestions for Astrid Engineering Interns

Over the years I have heard many stories of interns writing code for companies for entire summers and at the end, the company erased it all.  In my opinion, this is a failure of management and mentoring. In contrast, the Astrid team has hosted 8 engineering interns in the past 12 months and all but one have written code that …

Building networks

I recently announced that my company Astrid raised seed funding from Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, and a number of individual angel investors.  I found the process had a lot in common with my previous fundraising and partnership development work in the non-profit world, where I asked hundreds of individuals and organizations to give significant amounts of time and money …

Why I left campus ministry to start a software company

During the summer of 2007, for the first time since I graduated from college I began to explore the possibility of leaving campus ministry.  I was leading a week-long seminar entitled Beyond Graduation for around 20 newly-minted Stanford alumni. That week, for the first time I started to sense it was time for me to leave the campus.  A week …