Photo (@kamerakrazy) For over 10 years my focus, the one thing I strove to do well at was campus ministry. During my time at UC Berkeley my studies of physics and chemistry became secondary to my desire to help others explore the mysteries of the christian faith. After graduating I focused my career entirely on mentoring university students equipping them …
Tag Archives: product
Over the past couple weeks I have been introduced to a number people in finance interested in transitioning to technology startups. As I was about to copy and paste a paragraph into the second email I realized it is time for another blog post! My quick suggestions below: 1) Research on what exists or soon will exists Do you have …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …