The quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human socialneeds and figure out how to mediate them on-line. (Look at the first wave of the web/mobile/cloud startups that have done just that:  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Match.com, Pandora, Zynga, WordPress, LinkedIn.) It’s your turn. Hard-wired This week I’m in New York teaching a 5-day version of my Lean LaunchPad class at Columbia University.  While the class teaches a process to search and validate a business model, it does not offer any hints on how to create a killer startup idea.  So after teaching several...

Bootcamp participant Ming Morford responds to a question from Keith Bowers, director of the Small Business Development Center, during her presentation about Little Ginkgo Fabrics. / Dave Hodges / Business Matters Dave Hodges Dorian Van Horn has great business goals, driven by considerable experience in her field and determination you can’t help but notice. She stood before a panel of reviewers this week to make a closing pitch on her plans for her company, Veritas Threat Management, and convince them she was ready. “I teach this for a living, but selling it is completely...

Jeremy Fisher and Keenan Cummings’ stealth startup Wander is the first TechStars New York 2012 startup to announce a big funding round. Wander was in our list of 25 New York City Startups To Watch. The team of five has raised $1.2 million led by NextView Ventures’ Rob Go and Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC. SV Angel, Google Ventures, Red Swan, Collaborative Fund, some angels and TechStars also contributed to the financing. Wander isn’t Fisher’s first startup. He founded a startup that’s flying on auto pilot called Dinevore. Dinevore is a platform for sharing...

Earlier this week, we made a post describing the3 Lessons for any startup from the Instagram acquisition.   As I mentioned we discussed this in our NUvention Web class at Northwestern University yesterday.   I wanted to also describe the myths and non-lessons from the acquisition: It was the magic of an inspired initial idea by a 2 kids with a compiler. Their was certainly inspiration on the part of the team; and it’s clear these were particularly talented founders from a raw intellect perspective, but a good startup is rarely about the initial idea; and this is certainly true of the Instagram...

NY Tech Day 2012 New York City held its first NY TechDay, featuring 160 startups and over 3500 attendees. Investors, aspiring entrepreneurs, press, and curious bystanders crowded together at theLexington armory to celebrate the emerging tech scene here inManhattan. NYC has long viewed itself as being the best city in the world on many fronts- culture, advertising, finance, food, fashion. So it has not been without some envy that the city has looked west across our American continent and watched the major global impact that Silicon Valley has had in its nearly 50 year run as the undisputed global...

Just four weeks into its public beta, which we covered previously, social activity discovery marketplace Lifecrowd announced a $5 million Series A financing today. The round was led by Lightbank and also included Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures, and Prism VentureWorks. It’s a vote of confidence in Lifecrowd’s ability to connect online users with one another around fun activities in the offline world. Lifecrowd enables its users to browse activities ranging from rock climbing to wine tasting and then invite friends to join the outings, which are led by other members of the community. The service...