People’s Software Company

So I was at BlogHer Boston on Saturday, and I ran into a gal at Spring Partners — they’re a software company with a novel web-bookmarking tool, and they were showing off their private beta. She’d been to the session at BlogHer San Francisco where my cofounder Susan Mernit and I — as well [...]

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Hop! (Cropped)

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams

When people ask me what TechStars was like, I’ve got a line — because I’ve always got one. I say, “It was like sticking my head in an active washing machine — again, and again, and again.”
So as long as the drive from Boulder to Boston was, I [...]

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It’s the day after TechStars and I’m in North Platte, Nebraska, with only 1,704 miles to go to my hometown of Watertown, MA. Over the summer I suspended H2otown, the community site I run for residents of the town, which was terrible for me and the people who missed it. In retrospect, I [...]

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Brad and Jason rules:

It is either going to be really hard or really easy. Focus on yourself, not how you compare to everybody else.
Having an easy time raising money doesn’t mean success.
Some of you will fail. At least one team in this room will not succeed in raising a round or will raise less and [...]

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So the whole team went to BlogHer in San Francisco.
In some ways it was a HUGE distraction, especially for three women who are trying to ship their beta. In other ways, it was a great testing ground, both personally and professionally–We got to connect with hundreds of other women, participate (and lead) a session on [...]

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modern Mum

Originally uploaded by Max Sullivan

Boulder is a great town for tech meetups. Pretty much every week you can go somewhere to see people demo alpha or unreleased software or web services.
It’s fun, but I gotta tell ya, these gatherings are tough on the mothers. There hasn’t been a single evening in which [...]

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axure widgets

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams

I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky’s Painless Functional Specifications. I think that if I can’t explain what every button, link, and tab actually does when you click it, I’m not paying the developer who’s implementing it enough respect. Mind reading is not part of their job description. [...]

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Rowan [L] and Joe [R]

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams

I returned to Boulder this week after a week in Boston, where I live with my husband Evan and our two kids. Boulder is wonderful, doing a startup is amazing — try it if you get the chance — and life would be completely and utterly perfect [...]

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This weekend was all about product ideas, user values, specs, user flow, logic and building prototypes. That means we were able to walk into the office on Monday morning and show folks what we’d done and get feedback. Wow, did that feel good.
We’ve got a ways to go, but I feel like we’re finally getting [...]

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I love this post from Ignighter, one of our fellow TechStars companies. All ten startups work together all day (okay, weekends, evenings, etc.), but even so it’s still worth reading their company blogs because they’re so fun and often, like this one, funny and well written:
Ignighter’s First Weekly Release | Ignighter - Blog:
On [...]

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