Even though a lot of people in the startup world can get by without exchanging tangible calling cards—using Bump to exchange contact information, for example—handing over an actual card can leave a longer lasting impression. I wrote about what to include on a business card in my other blog, focused on photography, and the business of photography, so I’ll simply reference it from here.
I worked with and advised a lot of small and startup companies over the past couple of years. When meeting a new founder, I ask what they do. Often times they ramble on for a while and I have to discern what it is that they do. So, I try to head off the rambling and ask them to tell me their “elevator pitch.” If they’ve been in the startup-community for more that a few months, then they should know what that means—often they don’t.
What is an elevator pitch? It is the statement that you could make to a chance encounter in an elevator—the person who might be your first investor—and finish before they get off the elevator. Everyone should have an elevator pitch that they can recite without hesitation. The goal is for that person to invite you for a longer conversation; not to tell them everything about your venture.
Since you never know how long the elevator ride will be, you want to make sure to cover the most essential elements of the pitch, first. Start with a 30-second pitch (perhaps even less!) and make sure you cover these points:
If you are in the elevator with someone with the means to finance you, then your ride will be longer. Extend your statement to include more detail:
With more time, you can cover:
You should have practiced different length versions of your pitch: 15-seconds, 30-seconds, 1 minute, 3 minute. Any longer than that probably involves an invitation rather than an elevator ride—in which case, you should follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule from his blog, book, The Art of the Start
Another good summary on the broader topic of presentation preparation:Â How to Present and Pitch.
When a browser (or any web client) requests content from a web server, it can tell the server what types of content type it can interpret (HTML, text, audio, etc.). The underlying HTTP protocol allows these to be specified via “header” settings—metadata that is sent before any actual content, describing characteristics about the content. The browser can send an “Accept” header—to describe what it accepts—and the server responds with a “Content-type” header. The Accept header can be quite elaborate, but what happens when what happens when these conflict? Read the rest of this entry »
I have a whole series of posts, waiting in draft, describing my evolving PHP framework, I call ccPhp. If you have nothing better to do than play with someone else’s dalliances, then here is a quick installation guide. A little backwards, because I’ve yet to publish reasons why you’d want to. But, if, after my eventual publications describe this framework, you decide to install it, this is the quickest place to see how to do that.
The following describes only one way to arrange the setup. I have designed the framework with few cross-dependencies. After my “standard” setup description, I will describe the few file dependencies so that you easily define your own file organization. (If you are on Windows, you can extrapolate the appropriate things to do there). Read the rest of this entry »
Darn if the ISP serving up our PHP and WordPress content wasn’t attacked with an exploit. So I did a lot of learning as I cleaned up my web server, this past weekend. The goal of this exploit was to infect visitors of the web site with viruses by coercing visitors’ browsers to download malware from predefined third-party sites, seeded with the malware. That means modifying web site code to send visitors to those malicious sites.
After noticing some strange behavior that tripped my anti-virus software on my Windows machine, Read the rest of this entry »
Objective-C is the programming language of choice for iOS an Mac OSX programming, so becoming proficient in native programming for those platforms is essential to building great applications. Apple emphasizes that programmers must understand the “retain-release” model of how to manage objects. True, but this is not enough. Unfortunately, Objective-C makes it exceedingly easy to inadvertently write code that breaks the retain-release model, leading bugs that cause programs to crash. You can adopt some practices to avoid such problems. Read the rest of this entry »
With thanks to “moomin lens†via Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/jumpn_around/185876077/
There are 100s of PHP frameworks out there, but I have been so frustrated with so many of them; they are either too complex, not well designed, not well documented, buggy, or all of the above. Also, there is a lot of great technology for PHP that are notfull frameworks. It’d be nice to have a framework that does not try to do everything but, instead, allow easy integration of “best of breed” technologies. And a much more subjectively, only a subset of frameworks out there (though growing) embrace object design as typical of traditional, non-web programming using C++, Java, C#, etc. PHP 5 allows that kind of programming, but not all framework developers have embraced that approached it yet. I’ve spend a non-trivial amount of time with the following (well, I haven’t spend enough time with Kohana, yet): Read the rest of this entry »
We are excited to watch the Facebook developers conference live stream. Last night we started experiencing programmers pain since they’ve rolled out some changes prior to updating the documentation. The Hand Things Down app which is launching this weekend has broken so we are anxiously awaiting updates to the documentation. We are hoping to stay on our release schedule and will likely have to work night and day to hit our deadlines. Hurry up Zuck!
I recorded this video after coming home from Extreme Pitch. I wanted to give advice on what to do to calm yourself before a pitch. I think I managed to say don’t drink too much coffee and go to yoga, that advice probably won’t work for most people. Sorry guys! Read the rest of this entry »
Crushed Under the Tower of Software-Babble
I think my brain cells are shrinking—it is unbelievable how quickly I forget. Such is the life of a software developer, these days.It is amazing how quickly I can forget the details of one programming language detail over another after just a few weeks away—when I see my old code, I amaze myself at how good a programmer I was… last month! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Commentary, Startup