Ron Gross' blog 2007-2015
Posts tagged ‘Startups’
I’m building a social network designed for Polyamory and non-monogamous relationships. Not going to elaborate a lot at this point, but: if you know a great UX/UI designer who is passionate about the subject and willing to work for percentages, let me know.
Details … when it’s ready 🙂
Hi all,
We are making a lot of progress in ReverseFunder, and are looking for a strong 3rd co-founder with background in bizdev/marketing.
Know anyone relevant? Please refer him/her to ron@reversefunder.com
Do you want a quick fix of startup juice? Want to read a bunch of books on entrepreneurship, but just don’t have the time?
Then this is for you:
Hi all,
As some of you know, I finished my role in the Mastercoin Foundation last August. Since then, I spent the last few months resting, catching up on my Starcraft, and just generally taking a long break from emails and unwinding. It’s been awesome!
Last week, I caught the bug again. I have officially started to bootstrap a new startup called ReverseFunder. There are more details here, and I recommend you follow our blog and social channels for updates. If you have any feedback or questions, you can reach me at ron@reversefunder.com.
Potential co-founders and contributors are welcome to drop me a line.
Someone asked me today
I’d like to ask how you educate about different things that are important in startups, for example how to develop your business, how to build a team etc. Do you have any good sources or something?
First of all, I’d like to state that I’m quite a newbie at this – Bitblu is my first startup, and I’m still learning the ropes.
Still, I believe even newbies can teach what they know, and I’m glad to do my bit. What follows is a bulleted list of resources that I gathered on this topic along the years:
Quora
Quora is the best site in the world after Google. Any question you have about anything – ask it on Quora, and you’ll find the answer sooner or later. Quora is swimming for experienced founders, many of them very eager to help and share their knowledge.
Your Friends
As you start getting into the startup business, you should build yourself a network of friends, more and less experienced than you are at the business of entrepreneurship. It can be hard to crack this if you don’t know any founders (a good tip is to go work at a small startup for a while, it’s a great school). Once you have a foot in the door, you’ll often find that it’s easier than you thought expanding this network and building honest relationships with people that have done this before, and are happy to share.
Just a word for the wise – don’t try to abuse these relationship, and make sure not to just look for people to learn from, but give back and teach and help others. This kind of honest, helpful communication helps the entire network and will expose you to the right kind of people.
You should use social networks, especially LinkedIn, as appropriate (FYI, Rapportive is a must-have extension for you) – just don’t be a jerk and respect other people’s time.
Meetups
Meetups are a terrific way for someone without a lot of founder friends to surround himself with like-minding individuals. They all may be of varying skill and experience levels, but their agendas are often similar, and the content that is presented in many of the meetups is extremely helpful.
Look for startups on Entrepreneurship and Startups in your vicinity. I’m lucky to live in Tel Aviv, one of the world’s best startup hubs, and have access to a lot of such meetups, most of them free of charge.
Blogs
Blog is a terrific resource for understanding what kinds of questions you should even ask yourself. I am following several such blogs myself, but there are a ton of them out there.
How to find and choose among them? Remember my first bullet – Quora?
I just searched for “startup blog” on Quora and found this terrific question, with many good answers.
Learn it on the go
The worst thing for your startup is to think that you can’t start it without knowing all the answers. The essence of startup, the essential product that you are producing, is not code … it is Learning. You learn your business problems, your customers, your technological hurdles. This learning is an ongoing, never-ending process – it’s not done before you get going, it is the work in itself.
You’re welcome to add any important resources that I missed in the comments below.
Good luck!
Yuval and myself, and a few others, have been working diligently over the past week, and we’re happy to present the new beta page for our startup – Bitblu.
The site is still not mobile-friendly, we will work out these kinks soon. If you have any sort of feedback, please do report it (you can even open bugs or send pull requests, the site is completely open source).
A software investment has recently come through BitAngels and raised $300,000. Now it needs a veteran entrepreneur to lead the effort.
Anyone interested in running one of the most disruptive technology efforts in the digital payments (Bitcoin) space let me know ASAP via PM.
(I can’t publicly divulge more)
As most of you know, I left Google a few months ago to join a hot new eCommerce startup (I can finally reveal it’s Commerce Sciences).
So far it’s been just Eyal, Aviv and myself working here at our Herzliya office.
Well …
We are pleased to announce that we secured an investment of more than 1.5 million dollars, and are now ready to spend that money on you!
That is … if you’re a really top notch developer looking for adventure, learning, teaching, cutting edge tools and challenges, a terrific product (still stealth mode, but we already have some clients) that will change the way we do eCommerce, together with a superior team.
You will be our second or third employee … plenty of room to grow, influence the team, the code/architecture and the product.
I was actually just planning to write a post about “why I love startups so much” when the news of the investment round was made public .. look forward to it.
I can’t elaborate publicly about the product, but technology wise I can say we’re working with Java 7 (thinking about Scala), Groovy, Play! Framework, Javascript/HTML/LessCss (will integrate Coffee Script first chance we get) Amazon EC2, git, and Trello.
