Andy Sack advises against creating a Judy's Book. Would be curious to hear his thoughts on exactly why.

Quoted: But start-ups should view this market place with caution and trepidation. It's quick sand. It's a slog! There are easier ways to make money! If you contact me and ask advice about your local online start up, that's what I'll tell you.

Latest post to the blog.

Quoted: I recently attended a talk by Craig Sherman of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati about Corporate Structure and Common Problems. The event was organized by StartPad, an excellent Seattle-based entrepreneurial organization through which we rent our office space and hence get the opportunity to intermingle with and work alongside other startups.
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The talk was great! I won’t summarize the entire thing, since you can find the deck and video here. But, I did come away with two high-level points that are arguably applicable even beyond corporate structures:

Quoted: I recall there was a study done at MIT years ago that looked at the number of founders and success of startups as measured by revenue 1 and 2 years after founding. It turns out that the success of your start up is directly correlated to the number of founders up to 4 and then it starts to decrease.

Quoted: Silicon Valley's most venerable venture capital firm has raised $1.2 billion in two new funds. Kleiner Perkins announced the formation of its thirteenth ...

A nice list of the key points if you don't have the time to watch the videos.

Quoted: This is my attempt at a broad overview of the whole day; what I took away from each speaker. You'll notice that some of the takeaway's may contradict each other. Well, a few of the speakers seemed to contradict each other, which is a topic for another post. Here's a very broad summary of the day.

A hyperlinked list of Y Combinator-funded companies...

Quoted: The ones that are currently launched are: Reddit, Loopt, ClickFacts, TextPayMe, Snipshot, Inkling, Flagr, Wufoo, YouOS, LikeBetter, Thinkature, JamGlue, Shoutfit, Scribd, Weebly, Virtualmin, Buxfer, Octopart, Heysan, Justin.TV, I'm In Like With You, SocialMoth, Xobni, Versionate, Adpinion, Anywhere.FM, Fuzzwich, Bountii, Auctomatic, Disqus, Draftmix, Webmynd, RescueTime, Reble, Heroku, Tipjoy, AddHer, and 8AWeek.

I agree 100% that high quality engineering alone is generally not enough to make a great company. You need the right market opportunity, relationships, and distribution channels.

However, some folks take the extreme perspective -- describing programmers as commodities or resources. I'm happy that some prominent bloggers have challenged this perspective over the last few weeks:

Quoted: 3. Programmers have not been, and never will be, commodities. If you think this way, I'd quit now.
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2. Great software is produced by great people. Mediocre people don't ever accidentally produce great software that makes millions of dollars.

The other insights in this post are well, very insightful, too.

Quoted: Understanding what makes your product a "must have" painkiller versus a "nice to have" vitamin is the key to successful marketing. Identifying the key pain points and how your product solves them in a simple value proposition is job one. There are sometimes "trigger events" that cause these pain points. These "trigger events" cause your product to convert from a "vitamin" to a "painkiller" for customers. Qualifying your sales leads by trigger events and pain points will help focus your sales and marketing efforts and result in much higher win ratios.

Quoted: Here's the problem. The company/web service creation process needs some kind of end game. The entrepreneurs who spend years and risking a ton need a way to get paid for that effort. And those of us who finance their efforts need to get some return on our investment. We can argue about the magnitude of the return we need and a host of other things, but the fact remains that without a path to liquidity, all the innovation that is being created by the entrepreneur/VC equation will stop happening.
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It turns out that there is another private liquidity market under development called Opus-5.