• Upstart, founded by a team of ex-Googlers, is an all-in-one loan agency, investment fund, mentoring network, and dream factory for up-and-comers in their early 20s. To find the most promising candidates, applicants are screened using sophisticated algorithms that can predict their likely future income based on GPA, educational background, past job offers, etc. Upstart helps them raise enough money to get their startups going, and in return, they pay their backers up to 7% of their future income each year for 10 years. [url]
• Check out these class notes from Peter Thiel's course on startups at Stanford, written in essay form. In 2010, venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel created the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $100,000 to 20 students under 20 years old, with the goal of encouraging them to create their own startups instead of going to college. [url]
• Read the Upstart blog for founder Dave Girouard's account of how he came up with the idea for Upstart. The blog also has other personal accounts, information about Upstart, and interesting articles and perspectives on entrepreneurship. [url]

"It's a way for you create demand and sell the product without giving up any equity. That is a compliment to what an investor might do. In terms of PE (price to equity), there are strategic investors and then there's just money. I'm not a big fan of money investors, which is what most angel investors turn out to be, because they just want their money back. I try to be very strategic, I try to add value, or I don't make the investment."

“We’re still doing investment,” Roberts explained to RPS, “but I’m going to be a bit more picky in choosing it, and I’m getting to dictate the terms better. I’m saying, ‘You guys have to realize about making the game as good as possible. No forcing us to go public or to sell out.’”

"It’s actually funny. Everyone I lined up is basically over the moon. Your big risk as an investor is, “I’m backing this thing. Does anyone really want it?” At this point there’s no question that people want it, and maybe a lot more than anyone was expecting."

• Resources: It's tough to do what you want to do if you don't have the resources to do it. This is kind of a universal one, and not at all surprising. Obviously, this applies to both artists and entrepreneurs, but in different ways and to different degrees. A lack of resources can be not just a challenge, but something immensely stressful as well.
• A missing roadmap: It was interesting just how often this one came up. One of the biggest challenges everyone admitted to facing was the fact that there is no roadmap for what you should do these days, and no single definition of success. The path (especially on the artist side, but also to a degree on the entrepreneur side) is a lot less clear than it may have been in the past -- and that uncertainty can make life difficult. It's one thing to follow steps A, B and C and face different challenges at each. But it's something else entirely if you have no idea where to go next. And part of the discussion was that the roadmap is very different for everyone. There are successful "working class" musicians who make a living day in, day out, and there are big "rock stars." They define success differently. Similarly, there are entrepreneurs who want to build a good, profitable business (sometimes called "a lifestyle business") and there are those who look to be the equivalent of rockstars: raising tons of money, becoming the next big IPO, etc. Plus there are all sorts of personalized dreams that will be a bit different for every person. How you get from here to there changes depending on how you define success, and that makes it all the harder for people to plot out their "roadmap" by finding good advice and sharing strategies with each other.
• Education: Perhaps connected to the roadmap issue, this one was about learning what's out there, and what the possibilities are. The challenge here was somewhat different for entrepreneurs and artists, it seemed. Entrepreneurs wanted to figure out how to better educate people about what they themselves were doing, while artists wanted to better educate themselves (and others) about career strategies and the entrepreneurial side of being and artist. For entrepreneurs, some looked upon education as going hand in hand with marketing (which could potentially turn off some artists). For artists, there was a clear desire to better connect with other artists, and some concern that artists don't talk enough about these things among themselves.
• Discovery: This is obviously a big challenge on both sides. For entrepreneurs it's about finding new customers and users and for artists it's about finding new fans. Everyone was interested in ways to do more of this, but admitted that it's a very big challenge in a wide open digital world. Too often people think that if you do something great, the people just show up. That happens, but it's rare. You can be a great musician, but people still have to find out about you. You can build a great tool or service, but if no one uses it, what good is it? Having people learn about you and like you is a challenge that many people seem to underestimate.
• Policy: There were some concerns about where government policy might get in the way of certain things -- whether it's preventing artists from doing what they want, or making life challenging for entrepreneurs. We had some discussions about areas where artists and entrepreneurs could agree on policy issues. Also, there were significant concerns about who has the most influence on policy, and whose interests they really represented.

• Continue this conversation: There seemed to be agreement across the board that (1) the all day discussion had tremendous value in a lot of ways, both in generating ideas and getting people to think through possibilities, but that (2) a one day event, no matter how focused on being practical and productive, wasn't really enough time to come to any grand conclusions. But everyone agreed that we, as a group (with some additional folks) should be continuing the conversation in some way, whether it's online or through more in-person brainstorming sessions. That task was put on me, and I'm working on it.
• There's an opportunity to create & curate useful info: There's a lot of info out there, with no shortage of advice being offered to artists and entrepreneurs, which is potentially overwhelming and can make it difficult to zero in on what's actually useful. They suggested that the education component could be helped by having better curation of such content. Others suggested that perhaps specific events could serve this purpose, with the example of "filmmaker labs" being tossed out. One concern raised: none of this content will get consumed if it's not presented in a fun and interesting way that attracts people. If it's just piling together a bunch of content into a haystack, that won't help people as much. Figuring out how this could be done and who should be involved is an ongoing discussion, with one concern being how to ensure that such a source doesn't become myopic and start pushing one set of ideas when the landscape is truly open and still evolving.
• Getting data: This came up both for the purpose of better education through aggregate data, and also to drive towards a possible rights database. There was a suggestion that, if Apple could be convinced to share its data, that could be a starting point -- though that would cover mostly music (but some TV and movie stuff as well). There were mixed opinions on whether or not Apple could ever be convinced to open up this data.
• Standardization: An interesting point that was raised was that part of the reason for a cloudy roadmap and an abundance of choice for artists (that makes things difficult) may be the near-complete lack of standardization. That is, there are a number of startups that often seem to be reinventing the wheel or working on similar types of tools, and that there might be much more value created (for everyone) if there was some standardization at the platform level. Say, for example, a common format for storing and communicating all of the info about an artist and their catalogue between various sites and services. Then different service providers could seek to build tools and services above that, and let the competition occur at that level. This would provide a somewhat more defined setup and less confusion over what services can help in what ways. It might also lead to better integration between different services, allowing artists to do a lot more. This was left as an issue for some of the entrepreneurs to continue discussions over, to see if there was a way to make it happen.
• Policy Issues: Going back to the copyright / metadata database discussion, there were some thoughts on whether or not there were ways to get the policy world to recognize how useful and valuable such a database would be for almost everyone. There was some concern about the few players it might disrupt (publishers, for one) who value keeping some of that data proprietary, but a general sense that the overall benefit of such a database for artists and entrepreneurs would be tremendous.

But in Europe, things still have a long way to go in terms of providing a digital perspective on legislation and treaties that can counterbalance the powerful lobbying machine of the old media industry there. That's what makes the following story about a revolt by French startups against a proposed tax rise, reported here by David Meyer on GigaOM, rather remarkable:

Arguing that there would be little point in being an entrepreneur in France anymore -- particularly with the UK offering a much better deal just across the Channel -- the startups organized themselves into a largely online movement called 'Les Pigeons', or 'the suckers'.

They were set for a street protest this weekend, but yesterday they met with finance minister Pierre Moscovici…and won.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Of course, with unemployment here above eight per cent, too little immigration may not seem like a bad thing: surely we need more jobs, not more workers? But this is a shortsighted view. Economies are not static, with a limited set of resources to go around. As the work of the economist Paul Romer has shown, economies grow faster when there is more innovation, and having more smart people in the workforce is a key driver of innovation. And the quickest, cheapest way to get more smart people is to make it easy for them to move here. What’s more, historically there has been a clear connection between immigration in the U.S. and entrepreneurship, with immigrants creating companies (and jobs) at a disproportionate rate. In one famous study, the social scientist AnnaLee Saxenian showed that Chinese and Indian immigrants alone founded a quarter of Silicon Valley start-ups between 1980 and 1998, while a 2007 study found that a quarter of all technology and engineering start-ups between 1995 and 2005 were founded by immigrants. On a larger scale, more than forty per cent of the companies in the 2010 Fortune 500 were started by immigrants or their children.

My site likes to find the best media-related content on the internet. We post photos, artwork and embed YouTube videos that involve things about our favorite movies, shows and games. I always give credit where it’s due, but on occasion, a photographer or artist cannot be located. Under SOPA, should they find their content on my site, they would legally have the right to petition my advertisers to stop paying me, or report me to the government. The same goes for YouTube videos I might feature. Though the content is not mine, as I haven’t uploaded it to the web myself, I am indeed linking to it, and with this new law, I would be subject to the same sort of harsh penalties should the content within be something copyrighted like footage from a game or movie. I am willingly linking to “infringing” content, and under SOPA, can be branded a “rogue site” because of that. Such a classification could cause me to lose everything.

I don’t understand the entertainment companies’ end game here. They’ve gone beyond obtuse to straight up maniacal. Do they think if they manage to shut down every bit of copyright infringement on the internet, that sales are going to suddenly skyrocket? Do they think people have some secret horde of cash that they’ve just been waiting to blow on DVDs and CDs, but haven’t because of The Pirate Bay’s existence? If my site can’t link to gameplay videos or movie clips, are my readers going to run out and buy them to see what they’re missing? If they land Unreality on a rogue evil pirate site list, who benefits? I’m suddenly homeless, without any cash to go the movies.

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

In the litigious precincts of intellectual property, the aggressor inevitably finds itself chasing its own tail—and EMI and its lawyers have actually tried to use the "generic" argument to their advantage. In 2008, Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four accounting firms, sued EMI in federal court in New York, alleging that the publisher violated its trademark for an Entrepreneur of the Year award. The dispute over the prize dates to 1994, when Ernst first sent EMI a cease-and-desist missive aimed at Entrepreneur's similarly named award. EMI fired back in a lawsuit in California that Ernst's award trademark cannot be infringed because "entrepreneur of the year" is a generic term. In the end, Ernst and EMI settled their differences confidentially and out of court. EMI changed its award name slightly (nominations for "Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneur of 2011" are now open), while Ernst is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its trademarked Entrepreneur of the Year program.

Almost every good idea has already been built. Sometimes new ideas are just ahead of their time. There were probably 50 companies that tried to do viral video sharing before YouTube. Before 2005, when YouTube was founded, relatively few users had broadband and video cameras. YouTube also took advantage of the latest version of Flash that could play videos seamlessly.

Other times existing companies simply didn't execute well. Google and Facebook launched long after their competitors, but executed incredibly well and focused on the right things. When Google launched, other search engines like Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos were focused on becoming multipurpose "portals" and had de-prioritized search (Yahoo even outsourced their search technology).

The fact that other entrepreneurs thought the idea was good enough to build can be a positive signal. They probably went through some kind of vetting process like talking to target users and doing some market research. By launching later, you can piggyback off the work they've already done.

Startups are primarly competing against indifference, lack of awareness, and lack of understanding -- not other startups. For web startups this means you should worry about users simply not coming to your site, or when they do come, hitting the BACK button.

Just as everything seemed to be going so well, I came up to Vancouver on September 24th to renew my H1b visa and it turns out the approval I got last year is not worth it's weight in paper. Upon appearing for my interview, my previous approval notice was held by the consulate till I furnished a ton of extra documentation from our tax filings last year, to a full report of all employees, all of my bank statements right down to the photographs of our work area (as alien founders we cannot have startups in garages and our apartments, it has to be in real offices).

I worked through the rest of Thursday and all through the night gathering all this evidence.... So after working through the night to get the evidence to the officers the very next day by 11:30 am, I was told that my application would take a week to be reviewed.

My biggest concern is that an LLC due to it's structure doesn't pay a salary to it's members but a guaranteed payment. My attorney has already warned me that this is a slippery slope to start explaining to consular officers when the time comes.

Now leaving aside the exorbitant costs of living in a city like Vancouver for a week, I don't have to talk about what an entire week means in startup terms. This particular week in question, since we're in fundraising mode, I have had to cancel a meeting with Comcast Capital and cannot present at the Plug and Play Expo on Thursday Oct 1st - they were nice enough and believed in our product to pretty much waive the $1500 participation fee, only to realize I can't make it.