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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Today we’re presenting WhozAround? the application we built, at TechStars Investor Day.  WhozAround? works off your contact list, whether it’s your social network or an email list, finds out where people are, and lets you message them across a range of delivery channels, then takes the data for these personal events and puts it into [...]

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WhozAround is like Twitter for your calendar — it’s a fast, simple free way to make getting together easier. You don’t have to join YASNS (Yet Another Social Network Site) to get it, because it plugs into Facebook and Twitter to make what you’ve already got more fun and useful for you.
Eventually you’ll be [...]

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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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Next week, July 16th, is the 45th day mark at TechStars, Yesterday, we used a teleconference/Glance/Mac set up to demo our product fr Brad Feld, who was in Alaska. We ran through the problem we want to help people solve, the roadmap map, the screens and then the live code. And then we talked about [...]

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There’s a model of learning, which I first encountered years, when I spent time as a professional technical educator, which states that we pass through four stages of learning:

Unconscious Incompetence - we are such novices that we don’t yet know what we don’t know;
Conscious Incompetence - we know enough to recognise the limitations of our [...]

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So, further to my previous post, I’m delighted to confirm that Intense Debate (in the form of Michael Koenig) stepped up to the plate, and hit one out of the park. As you can see, here.
So I won’t be a sour-puss tonight - promise!
Thank you, Michael, for your prompt attention. *Now* I fell all warm [...]

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Tonight, at TechStars, we have a session on “lessons learned”, with some of the founders of the companies who were here in 2007. At that session, I’d like to walk up to the founders of one of those companies (assuming they’re attending tonight, of course) and say “hey, guys - great job on the customer [...]

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Performers Prepare for Neo-Kabuki Zombie Theater

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams

At TechStars we are encouraged to practice being uncomfortable. I tell you, it was pretty uncomfortable deciding to leave my family and come here, and it was pretty uncomfortable to be here without what we needed to succeed at first.
But the thing is [...]

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