SBIR Bill Favors Startups

May 04 2008

Posted by Jay Dia in Angel & VC View, Entrepreneur's View, The World of Startups |

This week, the SBIR reauthorization bill is expected to reach the Senate for a vote. The SBIR bill proposes to raise the amount of Phase I grants from $100K to $300K and Phase II grants from $750K to $2.2M. In addition, it would allow federal agencies to provide more funding. More importantly [...]

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Do You Know Your CEO?

Apr 28 2008

Posted by Jay Dia in Forming the Business, Growing the Team, Startup Guide, Tales from the Front |

In consulting with investors, I am often witness to the postmortem examinations of failed startups. Many times, the focus invariably turns to the CEO to see his or her role in the demise.
In one case, the CEO’s role was quite clear. The CEO lied to customers about product development times in an [...]

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Betting on Blogs

Apr 22 2008

Posted by Jay Dia in Angel & VC View, Entrepreneur's View, Tales from the Front |

In this week’s issue, Mass High Tech (MHT) reported that there were $196M in revenues from advertising in blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds in 2007, compared to $78M in 2006.
While this figure is modest compared to the overall ad spend, they signal a growing comfort level on the part of advertisers to put some money [...]