Helping Startups Accelerate Funding
Tech entrepreneur, Clara Shih, was recently elected to the Starbucks Board of Directors to replace Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg–who will not be seeking re-election in 2012. Although she doesn’t want to opine on why Starbucks would want to hire her, I suppose this could answer the question: Starbucks considers her a pioneer within the technology industry. Pioneer indeed. Shih is one woman who created […]
OPINION: I’ve been running a digital marketing agency called ApeForest for a few years now and in late 2012, my co-founder and I were accepted for Startup Chile. The program gave us resources and focused our attention on building ContentForest – a ‘productised’ version of what we did for clients in our agency. We finished […]
How a government led incubator is attracting and building the next high tech community of start-ups in South America. Call it the Chilecon Valley or call it crazy. In 2010, the Chilean government launched Start-Up Chile’s revolutionary pilot program in the hopes of positioning Chile as the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of Latin America. To tackle […]
More and more, I have entrepreneurs coming to me before a major competition, pitch event, or conference saying, “We only have _____ (fill in the blank with any single-digit number) minutes to present. How do we get it all in?” I also coach hundreds of accelerator demo days, and with each event they seem to […]
The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That’s causing headaches for […]
For the 19th year in a row, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative American think tank, has ranked the city of Hong Kong the freest economy in the world. Singapore was a close second, however, followed by Australia and New Zealand. Switzerland was ranked fifth. The U.S., which has the world’s largest economy, was ranked 10th […]
In the war for talent, America can learn a lot from Chile THE world’s most valuable resource is talent. No country grows enough of it. Some, however, enjoy the colossal advantage of being able to import it. Rich, peaceful countries can attract clever immigrants. Unlike other useful imports, they cost the recipient country nothing. They […]
As America shuts out immigrant entrepreneurs, Chile welcomes them ONE by one they came to the stage and pitched their ideas to the crowd. There was the founder of Kwelia.com, which makes software that helps landlords mint more money from their properties. There was the co-founder of Chef Surfing, an online service for people looking […]
In the Sept. 29 issue of Orlando Business Journal, we had a story about the University of Central Florida’s incubator having formed an angel network with a dozen certified investors and $800 million in net worth. As part of that story, I spoke with Michael O’Donnell, an angel investor who’s heading the UCF Angel Network (he’s also a professor at […]
When Washington D.C. threatened to raise the price of an Uber cab by a few dollars, the online community staged a full-fledged panic attack. Yet it barely whispered a peep of discontent when Congress introduced a bill to alleviate the high-skilled immigrant crunch for tech companies. Yesterday’s defeat of the STEM Jobs Act, which would have added 55,000 […]
