Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:00:00 PDT Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110128/13505112879/dailydirt-start-up-pitches-strikeouts.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110128/13505112879/dailydirt-start-up-pitches-strikeouts.shtml

Presenting a startup to investors seems to have a fairly well-set routine. It only takes about 6 slides. [url]

Marc Hedlund wrote up a nice autopsy on how Wesabe lost out to Mint.com. An interesting viewpoint on the head-to-head competition between two similar startups -- one that exited with an acquisition by Intuit, and one that ended by closing up shop. [url]

ChubbyBrain has gathered up a list of several other startup post-mortems. These are not sob stories; they're mostly lesson-learned conclusions from a variety of entrepreneurs. [url]

To discover more interesting business-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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]]> urls-you-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110128/13505112879 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:55:00 PST Timothy Lee http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080226/144955361.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080226/144955361.shtml interesting piece in Slate that nicely pulls together much of the discussion at Princeton's Computing in the Cloud workshop last month. He argues that web startups that have cultivated a squeaky-clean image start to have difficulties when they start trying to monetize all the traffic they've generated. The most obvious example is Facebook's Beacon fiasco. Reihan suggests that the "immaculate capitalism" of early-stage startups gives way to ordinary profit-seeking once companies face pressures to turn a profit. There's clearly something to this, but I think Reihan's time horizon might be a little bit too short. Keep in mind that even the mighty Google faced questions about its profitability as it stubbornly resisted the pay-for-placement schemes that many other search engines adopted. Google's refusal to compromise the quality of its search results for short-term profits helped it build market share, and it ultimately found non-disruptive ways to monetize all of those eyeballs. Facebook and Wesabe are much younger companies, and so it's not too surprising that they haven't found the right model for monetizing their users. Ultimately, their reputation with users is their most valuable asset, and so it's smart business to safeguard that reputation, even at the cost of foregoing some short-term business opportunities.

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