Pin these to your board! via Fred Wilson

Mike Dempsey’s design business tips make great startup tips.

 

There has never been a better time to start something or a better time to get involved in a startup and work on something that will change the world. There also has never been a better time to try and shine a spotlight on our great technology and startup community. Everything is connected. Everybody is connected but it seems to me that sometimes we forget about our people: our local heroes, our local doers. I am amazingly surprised as to how many times I met an extraordinary startup in the valley only to find out they are homies! In the hopes of connecting everyone, shining a spotlight on developers, CEOs and founders, executive, hackers who make our tech community what it is, we decided to give you We Are TO Tech. Inspired by We Are NY Tech, we hope to showcase the best of our community!

We are hoping to launch in the coming months. In the meantime, we will be documenting our adventure launching We Are TO Tech on our tumblr blog.

We are 3 founders: April Dunford, Michele Perras and myself.

 

 

 

 

 

Michele Perras will be presenting our vision for We Are TO Tech at DemoCamp Toronto this evening. Join us to create an incredible voice for our community.

 

“we’re going in there and beat the shit out of each other and we’re going to make it real”

Well. That shouldn’t take long, should it? How “The Fighter” shot 35 days worth of fight scenes in only 3 days.

America’s most influential Founding Father kept a tough daily schedule. Startup material! A daily reminder for achieving greatness.

(via Nick Bilton)

 

Thanks to Werner Vogel tweet last night I got reminded of 37signals 2008 presentation and this gem:

“We completed years of research in the startup world and figured out the secret: charging for your product leads to profits.”

oh I am pretty sure that’s too simple and there’s got to be a “got you” there. I mean it can’t be that easy right?

 

[Photography by jaxxon]

Chuck Close:

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

Applies to startups too!

The three most important things to do with a sales lead [are] to qualify, qualify, qualify. Mark Suster

From Paul Graham: Want to Start a Startup March 2005.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.