While I was living in Silicon Valley for a couple of months earlier this year, I had the opportunity to see how a number of the startup accelerators over there function, and also to speak to a number of tech entrepreneurs that passed through their programmes.

The formal definition of an accelerator is a “programme designed to assist startup businesses with financial and/or operational resources that will increase their chance of growth and success”.

After seeing them for myself, my definition is slightly different. I would suggest that: “Accelerators are schools for entrepreneurs, primarily tech entrepreneurs, where you can do your real life learning in a fraction of the time that it would take you to do it on your own.”

Y Combinator is probably…

[Read more →]

It’s been a crazy few months living in San Francisco & Silicon Valley (a blog post on life in the valley is way overdue), and I checked my comments for the first time in ages.

There were HUNDREDS of comments which at first glance looked genuine, but because I saw them in one go, I straight away realised each one was actually very clever blog spam.

The commenter uses an email address which looks real, and a name that sounds convincing, so if you only received a single one of these, you would consider actually approving them.

Here are 4 examples so you can start to notice the trend:

1. This is my second visit to this blog. I am thinking about starting a brand new blog in the same category. This blog gave me some information to work with. (Don’t worry, I won’t be copying you :)) You have done a nice job.

2. Great blog, it’s keeping me from getting anything done. I’ll be keeping an eye out for updates.

3. I don’t usually add my comments, but I will in this case. Nice work. I look forward to reading more.

4. It is in point of fact a great and useful piece of info. I’m glad that you just shared this helpful information with us. Please stay us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.

Have you been seeing similar comments on your blogs lately?

So you want to raise funding? Either an angel round or a Series A round, from the HOT investors. An angel or VC fund in either New York, Boston or Silicon Valley? Yes, there have been cases where entrepreneurs have gone to the “Send me your pitch” page, and emerge with bucket-loads of cash ready to build a global business. But I believe these are few and far between!

When we were building Clicks2Customers, Vin, Llew, and myself use to travel to the States often! We attended Affiliate Summit, PubCon, AdTech, Search Engine Strategies and plenty of other conferences. We became friends with people. And when we weren’t travelling, we were interacting - commenting on people’s blog posts. (and if Twitter had been around in those days, we’d have been using that as well)

By now you should have figured out, that when I say “only friends of Dave McClure raise funding”, I’m obviously not referring to… [Read more →]

Mark Zuckerberg is a Billionaire. Not bad for someone just 25 years old (he was born on  May 14, 1984)! Nearly everyone in the world has heard of his company, which was launched only a few years ago - it’s called Facebook, and it’s the biggest Social Network currently in the world - with over 500 Million people joining it (that’s right - HALF A BILLION PEOPLE)

To put that in perspective, only China & India have more people than that, and America has just over HALF of that amount! (check out Wikipedia for the full list of populations). So if Facebook was a country, they’d have the 3rd largest population in the world!

“The Social Network” is the name of the independent movie that just got released, giving a viewpoint of the history of Facebook.

So what did I think? [Read more →]