Category: Tech news

Microsoft just announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview, the company’s final pre-release version of Windows 8, is now available for download. With this release, Microsoft is also making new versions of its Windows 8 apps for Hotmail, SkyDrive an Messenger available, as well as hundreds of new and updated apps from third-party developers in the Windows Store.

Other new apps in this release include a Bing Travel app, as well as Gaming and Music Xbox apps that integrate with Microsoft’s Zune music service.

Microsoft says that it will focus its resources before launching the final version of Windows 8 on improving the installation process, security and privacy, as well as device and software compatibility. As Microsoft’s president of its Windows Division Steven Sinofsky noted, his team “will still be changing Windows 8, as we have done in past releases of Windows.”

We will be giving the Release Preview a good spin soon, but we already know that Microsoft has significantly improved multi-monitor support in Windows 8, for example. While this new version still features the Windows 8 Aero theme, we also know that this will be gone in the final release.

Microsoft also says that it has increased personalization options for the Start screen and refined the way “the way people find and download apps through the Windows Store.” The touch-friendly Metro version of Internet Explorer now also supports Adobe’s Flash player and features a Do Not Track feature that is turned on by default.

You can download the Release Preview installer here. If you prefer to get the Preview Release as an ISO, you can find there here.

Businesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That’s why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization. PostRocket analyzes your Facebook Page, and provides recommendations for when and what to post.

The 500 Startups Fall 2011/Winter 2012 company pulled in the syndicate seed round from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, and several angels. PostRocket’s CEO Tim Chae is actually the youngest founder ever funded by Dave McClure’s accelerator.

The money will build out the team, content recommendation tech, and marketing, and hopefully get it out of private beta. The investment seems like a smart little bet considering the bloated acquisition prices Facebook marketing companies have been commanding lately.

PostRocket’s team was originally managing the Facebook presence for multi-platinum selling musician Pitbull. They helped him go from reaching 650,000 fans a week with his news feed posts to 1.3 million in just three weeks. The team began building tools to more efficiently pull publishing insights and tactics from Facebook Page data.

Eventually the Boston-based co-founders dropped out of Babson College, drove across the country in 42 hours, and joined 500 Startups. Then three weeks before Demo Day this Winter they pivoted from another idea into selling access to their tools and service as a subscription.

The five-person team’s average age is 21 years and 3 months, with the youngest member just 18. With their $610K seed in hand from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, Maneesh Arora (founder of MightyText, ex-Google PM), Amar Chokhawala (Google engineering manager), Mehdi Maghsoodnia (CEO of Rafter, ex-CafePress VP), Roham Gharegozlou (Rising Tide partner), and some more angels, the spunky youngsters are eady to hustle

PostRocket fancies itself masters of EdgeRank, the secret formula Facebook uses to determine what appears in the news feed. It’s why the average Page post only reaches 16% of a Page’s fans. SEO is still important, business are getting an increasing share of the their traffic from Facebook, and need to be focusing on their Facebook EdgeRank as well as their Google PageRank.

While there are plenty of general best practices guides floating around the Internet, Chae tells me those don’t work because a brand’s Facebook strategy “all has to do with their demographic. The problem with NFO is that it requires marketers to spend a lot of time analyzing Insights data, and to have great knowledge and expertise in understanding EdgeRank.”

So PostRocket uses the Facebook Insights API to suck in data about a client’s Page performance. It analyzes what types of posts (photos, status updates, links, videos) work best, how frequently they should be published, and when they should be pushed out. These aren’t vague suggestions — they’re formatted as “Today’s Recommendations”, a checklist of exactly what to do to improve your Page’s reach, click-through rate, and virality. PostRocket says its tech is proven to double the fans a Page reaches.

Now the company is cranking on its content recommendations, which lets admins tag their posts with topics, sentiments, and other characteristics, and see which kinds of content are performing best. Along with paying for marketing and hiring a chief data scientist, its seed round will fund development of its recommendation engine so it can point admins towards relevant articles to publish or current events to mention. Since most Pages are best off posting multiple times a day, admins can quickly run out of things to say, but PostRocket’s data makes sure brands aren’t desperately fumbling for what to post.

PostRocket is definitely a software company, not an agency. The whole process is completely automated so it’s very scalable. It’ll be competing with PageLever and EdgeRank Checker, two experienced news feed optimization companies.

These types of analytics startups could have long legs, as while Facebook continues to stream roll Facebook Page management solutions by adding features like scheduled posts and admin permissions, it’s yet to offer real recommendations instead of pure performance data. Then again, you never know what the Facebook juggernaut will do next.

If brands are going to shift their spend from TV and other mediums to social, they want to get the best bang for their buck. PostRocket can help those brands blow up on Facebook. Boom.

PostRocket is still in private beta, but you can get an instant analysis of how well your Page is doing and request an invite here.

OnSwipe’s been around for a little over a year, and since raised a total of $6 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form content on their even-smaller iPhone.

That said, publishers who don’t want to build out an app will now have a new tool to display iPhone-optimized content to folks on-the-go.

OnSwipe for iPhone essentially lets publishers, both big-name sites like TechCrunch (for example) or a smaller Tumblr-er, beautify their site by pairing high-res imagery and touch interactions (just like their tablet-centric publishing platform) to create a smoother web experience for readers. In fact, all of the features of OnSwipe’s tablet publishing [WHO USES ONSWIPE?] tool have migrated to the iPhone version, including favorites, recommendations, and content categories. Publishers can also brand their OnSwipe iPhone web app by adding accent color and logo.

But the iPhone publisher isn’t the only feature the company is launching today.

OnSwipe Draft is a web-based layout editor and IDE for devs and publishers to personalize their own layouts. And you may have noticed me drop in the word “Favorites” up there, which, if you’re familiar with OnSwipe, should sound new.

The feature will allow readers to favorite content across all of OnSwipe’s publishing partners, complete with social integration. The feature uses Facebook connect, so any favorited content will be available to your friend network and vice versa. This means users will have a trove of their favorite content, regardless of publisher, and be able to see friends’ favorited content, as well.

Check out OnSwipe’s Draft tool in action below:

Click to view slideshow.

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next big idea.

Courtney Powell is the CEO and co-founder of PublikDemand, a social crowd-based platform where individuals can initiate and/or join campaigns (or “demands”) against Fortune 1000 companies. (Currently, they support demands against nine larger companies and plan to expand as demands increase.) Their platform is different from other “social good” or corporate social responsibility programs — on PublikDemand, customers of companies can use the power of the crowd to lodge complaints against those large entities and pressure them into changing policy. Within the last six months, PublikDemand has served as the catalyst for a California man who became so fed up with his service from AT&T that he initiated his campaign against the company on the site itself, has created targeted leads for AT&T competitors, and has even caught the eye of Netflix’s Reed Hastings in his fight to preserve Net Neutrality.

On the surface, PublikDemand is tapping into some large, global trends — the explosive growth of crowd-sourcing (embodied by Kickstarter), the ability of social networks to capture, aggregate, and channel negative consumer sentiment, and the next generation’s reluctance to accept the norms of larger, established institutions. With PublikDemand, Powell and her team have created a social media-based “pressure valve” that enables everyday people to collectively pool their complaints to create a bigger swarm that larger companies will have little choice but to deal with. In this brief discussion, Powell explains how people can use PublikDemand today, how they will add new companies over time, and how the company’s platform can amplify customer complaints to bring about real, tangible change.

Note: This discussion was originally recorded on April 23, 2012 in San Francisco.

Privacy guidelines such as the “Do Not Track” option proposed by the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily mean the end of the kind of targeted online ads that have brought such riches to web companies over the past decade. In fact, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says, more privacy on the Internet could actually bring the industry much more money that it attracts now.

When it comes to advertising paying the way for the bulk of the Internet’s content and innovation, Leibowitz said in an on-stage conversation this morning at the D10 Conference in Southern California that “no one wants to undermine that, and I don’t think the FTC’s policy prescriptions would.” The proposed changes would simply make companies come up with a less invasive way to target advertisements, he said: “A ‘Do Not Track’ alternative for third party cookies is a pretty modest proposal for protecting consumer privacy.”

It’s not just regulatory agencies who are welcoming of some increased privacy policies on the web, Leibowitz added. Even profit-minded executives have expressed support for “Do Not Track,” according to him. “I’ve heard from chief captains of the tech industry and CEOs that this is a good thing for this industry, because there is a virtuous cycle here,” he said. “The more control consumers have over the internet, the more they trust it and the more commerce they do…. this is good for business.”

If the proposed policies are implemented, Leibowitz said, “We will have a vibrant internet ecosystem and we will also have privacy protected ina meaningful way.”

“Do Not Track” as a concept has received general support from major internet portals and browser providers such as our own parent firm AOL, Yahoo, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft — although some of these firms have differing opinions on how new policies should be implemented and what exactly they should entail. Social networking sites such as Twitter have also stated support for “Do Not Track” initiatives.

Quite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple’s Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not.

John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week’s TC/Gadgets webcast.

As far as WWDC expectations go, the debate currently centers around docks and displays. Matt seems to think that a 4-inch display on a Droid X-sized iPhone is in the works, while I’m hoping against hope that a larger display can fit onto the same size iPhone. John, as usual, doesn’t really care. He’s more interested in the docks — rumors are circulating that suggest a microUSB port on the new iPhone rather than Apple’s standard 30-pin connector.

This would, of course, leave hundreds of speaker and charging docks out in the cold, with the exception that Apple releases John’s suggested $39.99 iDong.

We also discussed what we expect out of E3, which amounts to little more than nothing. No new Xbox, no new PlayStation. Basically, we’re getting our hands on the Wii U, which is exciting, but there’s only so much that can be upgraded in current hardware.

Which leads right into our next point: how important are specs?

Matt wrote a post recently harshing on the Nexus tablet for a lack of wireless connectivity, but more importantly, detailing the insignificance of performance testing and specs. To his first point, John and I both own WiFi-only iPads and are perfectly content, whereas Matt needs data to survive.

As far as specs are concerned, we seem to agree on the idea that specs are important in a few select areas, like camera and display. But without a solid understanding of what they mean, and how they can be unrepresentative, they’re just as worthless as a processor clock speed. For example, Nokia’s 808 Pureview 41-megapixel camera doesn’t take 41-megapixel pictures. It rather captures around 40 megapixels of raw data which is then compressed into an incredibly sharp 8-meagpixel image.

In the same vein, display resolution is only a worth looking at alongside display size. The idea is to have a high resolution on a smaller screen. The bigger the display, the less pixel dense the resolution is.

We spent a good deal of this webcast arguing, so feel free to join the fight in the comments.

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google’s chief Internet evangelist and “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, however, the company also applied for domains it thinks ” have interesting and creative potential,” including .lol.

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like these will soon become a reality on the Internet and will work side-by-side with today’s 28 TLDs like .com, .org, .net and more obscure ones like .jobs and .aero. This new program will likely create somewhere between 300 and 1,000 new gTLDs per year. Applicants have to pay a $185,000 evaluation fee, as well as additional fees once their applications have been accepted.

It’s worth noting that there had been quite a lot of opposition against these new domains. A number of stakeholders, including large corporations and non-profit organizations, have argued that this process would force them to spend more money than necessary on securing their trademarks, for example.

Here are some of the domains Google applied for (and the company’s reasoning behind applying for them):

• Our trademarks, like .google
• Domains related to our core business, like .docs
• Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified
• Domains we think have interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

Chances are, this is just a small glimpse into all of the gTLDs Google applied for. As Cerf notes, Google is “just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment. By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverse—and perhaps shorter—signposts in cyberspace.”

We asked Google for a full list of all the gTLDs the company applied for and will update this post with this information once/if we get it.

Besides Google, a number of other companies today announced the gTLDs they applies for as well. Web.com, for example, said that it applied for .web. CloudNames applied for .cloud and .global and Radix applied for 31 gTLDs, including .law, .music, .movie, .baby and .app. Just like Web.com, Radix also applied for .web, by the way. So far, we haven’t heard from Facebook, Microsoft and other major Internet companies about the gTLDs they applied for and we may just have to wait until June 13 before we find out.

Until now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS, however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services.

The Flikdate team gave me a demo of the service earlier this week and it turns out the app is about as easy to use as it gets. You simply sign up with your Facebook login (no worries, the app doesn’t post to your wall or access any of your data), tell the service if you want to chat with men or women, and after that, it just takes one click to get started. The service works over 3G and WiFi (though the video quality tends to be more consistent over WiFi).

The team built a monetization scheme right into the app. By default, every conversation is limited to 90 seconds and costs you one flik. If, however, you decide that you want to talk for longer, you can go on a virtual “date” without time limits. That’ll cost you 5 fliks, but if your partner accepts your proposal, he or she will now appear in your datebook and you can go on another “date” or communicate by text chat anytime.

Once you run out of fliks, you can either wait a day for the service to automatically top off your account or buy 25 additional fliks for $0.99.

Avoiding The Chatroulette Penis Problem

Chances are, the memory of Chatroulette and its constant parade of exhibitionists is still burned into your unconscious, but Flikdate hopes to avoid this problem by allowing you to ban users who decide to expose a bit too much of themselves. As Flikdate uses Facebook as an identity mechanism, which allows it to easily ban users who misbehave. On the service itself, of course, you are completely anonymous – but if you decide to take those pants off, Flikdate knows who you are.

Flikdate was founded by the all-girls team Dominika Wolski, Crystal Johnson, Lauren Lin and Kimberly Hunt. The company’s advisor’s include Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, Lemon.com‘s Isabel Pesce Mattos and echoecho‘s Nick Bicanic.

The Flikdate team has submitted its app to Apple and expects it to be live within about a week. At first, the service will be iPhone-only, but an Android app, as well as geofenced sessions (so you could limit dates to a specific college campus, for example), are coming soon.

Banjo, the slightly creepy social discovery app that shows you who’s doing what nearby, has been updated today with a handful of new tweaks for its iOS version. Sorry Android folks — you’ll have to sit this one out for the time being.

Here’s a quick recap if you’ve never messed with Banjo before. Banjo pulls in geo-tagged pictures and updates from all of the major social platforms (think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and the like), and splays them all onto a map (or into a list) so users can see what’s going on around them.

Since it culls this social information from so many sources, it’s become quite the way for users to pore through and share their friends’ photos from one place. To help make that experience a bit better, the team has redone the Community and Friend feeds to place a greater emphasis on those shared images — no longer are they trimmed and squeezed to fit into a small amount of space.

Instead, they’re given plenty of room to breathe within the feeds and they’ve also reconfigured the navigation bar that runs along the bottom to disappear as users scroll down their lists of aggregated posts.

In an attempt to make the processing of sharing those photos more streamlined, the sharing panel has been reworked as well. While before the usual list of sharing options would slide up from the bottom of the screen and obscure the image, users can now tap an icon directly below the photo to bring up a funky new sharing panel that lets users disseminate photos without being pulled out of their groove.

This new update isn’t all about photos though — users have been given the ability to like and comment on Facebook posts from directly within the app. Perhaps most thoughtfully though, Banjo now displays a small distance indicator as you scroll through your feeds, providing people with instant context about how far away their friends are and where these events are happening.

The team has been pretty darned busy these past few months — they launched a web version of their app back in December so people stuck at their desks can join the fun, and they made a bit of a splash (albeit a very controlled one) at this year’s SXSW. With any luck, these updates will help them stay ahead of the pack — AppData has the service sitting at around 500,000 monthly active users, well ahead of Highlight and many of the other location apps fighting for recognition in that space.

Those who don’t live or haven’t recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be “inconsistent and unreliable” in mainland China — to use Google’s words. Error messages like “This webpage is not available” or “The connection was reset” are common and those errant queries then prevent users from searching again for a period of time. In a blog post today, Google’s search team said that, after “taking a hard look” at its own systems, the problem isn’t emanating from Google’s end, and is instead “closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries.” As a result, Google search will now be notifying Chinese users when their search terms are likely to cause these interruptions.

Google’s language seems to make it clear that these breaks are outside of their control, of course, it’s less clear why they’re taking place. It seems as if Google is going out of its way not to point the finger at the “Great Firewall,” but the reasons could certainly be political.

We reached out to Google to see if they could or would say more, to which they responded:

We’re not able to do an in-depth examination of technology beyond our own systems. We looked at our own systems and found no technical problems. Our hope is simply to improve the search experience for people in mainland China.

In any case, in prompting users to revise their queries, Google is obviously taking what steps it can to reduce disruptions experienced by users of its Chinese search engines. So, a team of search engineers has been reviewing the most popular Chinese search queries to identify specific terms that are causing problems.

Now when users type in a term, the search engine will highlight the problematic term and a dropdown menu appears below the search box at which point they can continue their search anyway, choose to edit the search, or redirect to this help center article.

Here’s Google’s explanation of the type of terms that are at the root of the problem:

We’ve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts. For example a search for the single character [?] (Ji?ng, a common surname that also means “river”) causes a problem on its own, but ? is also part of other common searches like [??] (Lijiang, the name of a city in Yunnan Province), [????] (the Jinjiang Star hotel chain), and [????] (Jiangsu Mobile, a mobile phone service). Likewise, searching for [?] (Zh?u, another common surname that also means “week”) triggers an error message, so including this character in other searches—like [???] (Jay Chou, the Taiwanese pop star), [???] (Stephen Chow, a popular comedian from Hong Kong), or any publication that includes the word “week”—would also be problematic.

Google is obviously being diplomatic in its description of the issue, but it’s important to frame this in the context of the company’s somewhat embattled history with China. Two years ago, Google moved its servers off the mainland of China to Hong Kong, meaning that users would still be able to use Google search from the mainland, but all queries would pass through the Great Firewall on the way to its Hong Kong servers.

For a long time, China has struggled with its approach to how it will embrace the Web, which has in turn come with a lot of government intervention and censoring, often to the chagrin of its citizens and to those abroad. But what’s interesting, whether Google would say it or not, is that its new search notification has the potential to act as an ever-present reminder that the Chinese government is censoring search results. And, in intervening by way of its firewall, happens to be screening words that are as inoffensive and everyday as “river” — as seen in Google’s description above.

It should be fascinating to see if this new system proves helpful for Chinese searchers. For more, check out the video below, in which Google offers a fascinating firsthand look at what it’s like to use Google in China — behind The Great Firewall.

What once you had to use or pay for outside software to do, Facebook now offers for free. Facebook today rolled out Page administrator permissions and post scheduling. The two critical marketing features were previously only available in third-party Page management products like Buddy Media and Vitrue, which are fetching big acquisition prices in part because of these kinds of options.

Roles let a Page owner assign publishing, advertising, or analytics privileges to team members and service providers without giving them total control. Scheduled posts lets marketers push out a steady stream of messages to the news feed, day and night.

Now that these software features are native to Facebook, the pressure will increase for marketing service providers to deliver value through insightful execution of social media strategy, app creation, ad buying, and offsite services. Otherwise they’ll be commodified out of existence.

Facebook also just opened a new revenue stream by rolling out Promoted Posts, where Pages can pay to have their posts appear to a higher percentage of their fans. This “marketing steroids” feature is different than Twitter’s Promoted Tweets because Promoted Posts is publicly available as self-serve, and only lets marketers reach more of their existing fans rather than new people. That’s led to some criticism that Facebook is “selling fans back to Pages” that already “own” them, along with initial limited tests seeing lackluster performance. But back to Facebook steamrolling third-party Page management software…

Page admins can now assign roles of Manager, Content Creator, Moderator, Advertiser, Insights Analyst, each with progressively fewer privileges as shown on the chart below. That means you could give an intern the ability to delete spam comments without letting them post to all your fans, or let a marketing manager buy ads for you without being able remove other admins or delete your Page. The cascading privileges aren’t quite as granular as some business might want though, as you can’t just give someone the ability to moderate but not advertise.

When admins with publishing privileges go to post, they can click a clock icon in the bottom left of the publisher to set a future date for the post to be pushed out. Scheduled posts then appear in the Manage->Use Activity Log section until they go live. However, you can’t edit scheduled posts beyond changing their publishing date, there’s no tagging to assist with analytics.

These basic native versions of core third-party features will be most dangerous to smaller, cheaper marketing platformsthat don’t offer a robust set of other tools or services and are aimed at local businesses and fledgling brands. Bigger Page management solutions like Buddy Media, Virtrue (recently acquired by Oracle), Wildifre, Involver, and ThisMoment have less to worry about, as they’re designed for huge brands who need premium service, include sophisticated scheduling and permissions options, and handle marketing beyond Facebook on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and other sites.

Still, it’s becoming easier and easier for a savvy mid-sized brand’s marketing department to run their Facebook presence without third-party help. I’ve been watching this commodification of Facebook Page management for over a year now. With time, I see the value proposition of Page management companies shrinking as social media expertise proliferates and Facebook’s native tools get stronger. While their businesses are healthy for now, and they come with strong software and big client lists, the $300 million Oracle paid for Vitrue and the near $1 billion, or 10x revenue, we’re hearing Salesforce might buy Buddy Media seem a little bubbly.

Samsung’s new Series 5 Chromebook has a better trackpad, a faster processor and a much-improved user experience. Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

When the first Chromebooks showed up, they felt more like reference designs than fully baked notebooks.

Google’s initial attempt at a machine powered entirely by a web browser, the black CR-48, was a developer-only laptop with a slow processor and an unusable trackpad. Last year brought two consumer-ready Chromebooks, Samsung’s Series 5 and Acer’s AC700, both of which were capable, but felt saddled by merely passable keyboards, dim screens, and clunky trackpads.

With Samsung’s newly redesigned Series 5, however, it feels like the Chromebook has finally arrived. The laptop has gotten a big performance boost, its trackpad has been much improved, and the design is sleeker and more elegant. These hardware enhancements are paired with updates to the operating system — Google’s unique, entirely web-based Chrome OS — and together, the machine offers a much more refined and complete computing experience.

The Chromebook Series 5 550 notebooks go on sale Tuesday, at $450 for the Wi-fi-only version and $550 for the same laptop with 100MB per month of free 3G broadband from Verizon as part of the price (There’s also the Chromebox, a miniature desktop PC, which we’re reviewing separately).

I spent the better part of a week with the a new Samsung Chromebook Series 5 550, and I’ve been using the previous version regularly since its release last year. Outwardly, there doesn’t appear to be much new here. The new Chromebook has a 12.1-inch screen, dual USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader and an HD camera. On-board storage is limited to 16GB, the idea being that the SD and USB slots can pick up the slack where cloud storage isn’t practical. The keyboard appears to be unchanged, and the weight is the same at 3.3 pounds.

Under the hood, the improvements are significant — you get a new dual-core Intel processor, up from an Atom N570, and the RAM has doubled from 2GB to 4GB — and some finer exterior details are evident. The screen’s hinge is improved and feels sturdier, and the palm rests below the keyboard are now brushed metal and more comfortable. Front and center is the new multitouch trackpad (finished off with a slim ring of shiny chrome, naturally) for which Google says it has completely re-written the software stack.

The result of the hardware and software enhancements is a night-and-day improvement in performance. Browsing — what the machine was built to do — is screaming fast. I watched hours of 1080p videos on YouTube, Vimeo and Netflix without a single hiccup. Script-heavy sites like Rdio and Facebook simply fly. I typed a few documents, including the majority of this review, into Google Docs with zero latency. Scrolling and multi-touch gestures are smooth, and the responsiveness of the UI is exactly as crisp as I’d demand from a premium laptop. The battery gave me six hours of general web use, and a second charge lasted through just over four hours of streaming video. It boots up in five seconds and awakes from sleep in less than two.

The new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook in ‘Titan Silver.’ Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

Of course, the big difference between the Chromebook and every other mobile computing device is that absolutely everything happens in the browser. It’s all you see, and all you get. Chrome OS has been updated recently to include an app launcher, a file manager, and something that resembles a traditional desktop. But otherwise, everything happens within the confines of Google’s Chrome browser. So the Chromebook really only makes sense for people whose lives have already been fully and completely webified. If you’re a Google user — Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Drive, right on down the line — then a Chromebook isn’t going to be a big leap for you. But if you’re used to the comforts of Outlook, Photoshop, iTunes or editing documents offline, this obviously isn’t your game.

About that last point: The ability to use Google’s productivity apps while disconnected from the internet is a biggie, and it’s one Chrome OS currently lacks. You can cache docs to view them offline (a recent addition to Chrome OS) but you can’t make changes. However, the company does have plans to debut offline editing in Google Docs in the very near future. Google says the feature should arrive in time for its IO conference at the end of June, and I was invited to test a beta build of the feature, so I can confirm it works.

This will make a huge difference in how these devices are perceived, as they will become eminently more usable. And the feature will just show up — Chrome OS updates are delivered over the air, so all you have to do is open the lid and log in.

The hardware isn’t perfect. The screen could be sharper and brighter — I found myself consistently boosting the font size a notch or two, and using the laptop in bright light isn’t as pleasant, even with the screen’s matte finish — and the speakers, oddly located under the keyboard and facing down, are laughable.

Then there’s the price. Starting at $450, it’s probably too steep. Yes, the hardware is nice, and the improvements over last year’s model (which debuted at $450 and now sell for $350) are obvious. But the Chromebook, with its limited functionality and paltry storage, is closer to a $500 tablet with a keyboard than a $500 Windows laptop. Most tablets can’t exactly match the Series 5′s performance, but they are more versatile since they can run apps. Tablets are far more portable, too, and can make use of Bluetooth keyboards when needed.

Right now, the nicest Chromebook and the nicest tablet cost about the same. Google says Intel is bullish on the Chromebook platform, and that the companies expect more devices (at lower price points) to roll out in the coming months. So this isn’t the last we’ll hear or see of the Chromebook, but it is likely the platform’s flagship for 2012, a premiere device at a premium price.

Given the quality of Samsung’s hardware, I can still recommend it, even at around $500. But beware — it’s only a smart buy for people who want the comfort and performance of a nice laptop and won’t be inconvenienced by an entirely cloud-based environment, or feel limited by the total lack of the legacy PC stuff. If you’re already a web-head, this is a very nice surfboard.

WIRED Updated design with a complete (and much needed) redo on the trackpad. Excellent video performance, smooth scrolling and snappy input. Six hours of battery. Login screen great for multi-user environments, and all your bookmarks and history can be synced. Over-the-air updates mean new capabilities just show up.

TIRED No big disks, no keyboard backlight, no DVD drive, no Bluetooth, no other traditional laptoppy stuff. Speakers stink. Screen is dim and lacks sharpness. Could be lighter. The whole “Just the web?” thing doesn’t fly for everyone.

Faster than you can say “Can I borrow your copy of ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People,’” it’s tech conference season again. There hasn’t been a week during the month of May where I haven’t attended a tech conference or traveled to something tech conference-related. And judging by Techmeme’s events calendar the state of affairs only gets worse as we get deeper into summer.

Between Disrupt NYC last week, D10 tomorrow, NY Founders and Le Web London in June, Allen & Co, Sun Valley in July, the CrunchUp in August and TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September, the tech community is pretty much spending the next couple of months checking in and out of airports on Foursquare, Path, Instagram or whatever their social/mobile/local drug of choice currently is.

In between this barrage of formal tech conferences, I briefly popped into F50 earlier this month … Founders Fund’s first attempt at a tech conference, F50 is the ultimate “un-conference,” where fifty of the technology industry’s “most promising” engineers and entrepreneurs were brought together on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Founders Fund partner Bruce Gibney called it “intellectual exchange without the structural nightmare that’s gone up around it” and INC magazine dubbed it, “The Most Exclusive Tech Conference Ever?”

The elite group of fifty technologists were hand-selected by the Founders Fund partners and sent invites to save the dates between Friday May 11th and Sunday the 13th. Those from out of town were flown out to SF and put up for Thursday night at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, and both the East Coasters and the West Coasters were picked up by black car or bus and taken to Oakland’s Private Airport on Friday.

There they met the other F50ers for the first time, in addition to about a dozen Founders Fund friends and mentors, and all traded in their fancy steel invites for a spot on one of two planes. None of the attendees knew exactly who else was on the trip or who they were flying with prior to their arrival and the group didn’t even know their destination as they boarded the jets.

The seating on the private flight was arranged, and upon each seat was a personalized engraved iPad, complete with a .pdf deck of photos and bios of the rest of the attendees. While Founders Fund won’t let me publish the full list, it was very thorough and ran the gamut of world-changing innovators — from a guy with a serious plan to cure Cancer to a rocket engineer to a 3-D printer with a gaggle of rockstar computer scientist thrown in for good measure.

Also worth noting: Founders Fund footed the bill for the entire fifty, turning the traditional model of “conference as a business” onto its axis (Note: As the only press invited I flew in coach and Aol paid most of my way). “Invest early and often” at its most extreme.

Aboard the incoming flight, the menu was geek-themed, and guests could choose from the paleo friendly “Contemporary Nerd” (Filet Mignon and Tomato Basil salad), “Classic Nerd” (Pizza Pockets, Chicken Nuggets, Pringles and Red Bull) and “Vegan” (Pasta with Grilled Vegetables in an herbed Olive oil) meals. I guess whoever set up the menu thought vegan was nerdy enough to stand on its own.

In order to encourage interaction between the attendees, Founders Fund made everyone switch seats halfway through the flight. In addition, Founders Fund partner Auren Hoffman, who has an obsession with questions apparently, had written out an ice-breaker question tailored to each attendee’s interest next to the iPads, like “What could be invented if energy were freely available everywhere?,” How will the human body change over the next thirty years, and how should we change it?” and “What turns human passion into money?”

(Mine, which Hoffman handed to me the next night, was appropriately enough, “What makes you weird?”).

After the very informal in-flight networking, the plane landed on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, and, finally finding out their destination, the fifty were driven to the Four Seasons, where they disembarked and picked up a simple swag bag filled with orange flip-flops and F50 t-shirts. They then were herded to a dinner where the conversations between these brilliant young minds were spearheaded by either a Founders Fund member or mentor at each table.

“I had more great conversations per hour than I’d had in years,” Hoffman later told me.

The mentors, who flew in on a different plane along with Founders Fund partners Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Bruce Gibney and Sean Parker included Yelp’s Russell Simmons, Palantir’s Stephen Cohen, World Economic Forum CTO Brian Behlendorf, and Airtime co-founder Joey Liaw. From what I heard the mentors really didn’t feel like there was that much difference between them and the attendees — as in, both groups were just as in awe of each other and eager to partake in dialogue.

In lieu of the artifice of talks or anything even remotely structured the next morning, the attendees were given the option of going snorkeling or off-roading in Jeeps, and those that chose snorkeling got to explore the ocean floor with industry visionaries like Parker and Thiel. Because this was Hawaii, some of the group even informally went golfing, on a whim.

To give you a sense of how casual everything was, when I arrived in Lanai, Island Air informed me that it had lost my baggage and I was stuck wearing my default airplane outfit to the conference: a Coachella hoodie, a pair of cut-off shorts, ballet slippers and a tank top. When I asked the hotel guest reception whether or not my attire was appropriate for dinner, they responded, “Yeah, everyone else is also dressed like you.” I ended up buying a Hawaiian themed dress from the gift shop anyways.

I arrived at the dinner 15 minutes late, and immediately one of the F50 kindly helped me get situated. My table was a cornucopia of super-impressive people, to my right Eben Bayer, a entrepreneur who is trying to make mushrooms “the new plastic” with his company Ecovative Design, to my left Founders Fund partner Gibney, and across from me was child prodigy Taylor Wilson — a kid who created nuclear fusion in his garage at 14 and currently owns one of the largest private collections of radioactive materials in the US.

At 18, Taylor wasn’t yet old enough to drink the wine and margaritas being offered to the table. He really wasn’t missing out on much, we insisted.

Sometimes I like to think of the technology industry as what high school would have been like if the nerds were actually cool, and this exactly was the vibe at F50. The next morning when I donned my swag shirt to breakfast (I still didn’t have normal clothes) I came across a girl who was also wandering aimlessly about the Four Seasons, also looking for the F50 breakfast, I assumed.

Ariel Garten was slight and about as un-intimidating as possible until she opened her mouth to respond to my cliche, “And what do you do?”question. “Thought-controlled computing,” was her answer and it made me do a double take. As CEO of InteraXon industries, Garten is making hardware products that can be controlled by the human mind (Seriously). She is also part owner of a Fashion Boutique in her native Canada.

“I can pick any one person here and they’ll be amazing,” she quipped as we headed to breakfast.

“Neither haphazard tossings of business cards nor random people’s elevator pitches blessed the event, where, profoundly brilliant people exchanged world-changing ideas,” explained attendee Meredith Perry (who, as the founder of Ubeam, is working on a ground-breaking wireless phone charger), who I got to know over a breakfast buffet replete with scrambled eggs, bacon and mangoes and more.

Perry set F50 in a league apart from other tech conferences, “[It] was small enough so that people felt intimate and uninhibited, and unstructured enough so that violent ideation could unfold … The relationships formed between the eager minds in attendance will lead to future-changing partnerships.”

And indeed I already know of one (off-the-record, for the moment) partnership to stem from the event — just weeks or so after. “The real ‘results’ of the F50 weekend won’t materialize for several years,” Perry said.

So who exactly were the chosen fifty?

“We asked our friends to identify the smartest, most entrepreneurial people they knew who were not already directly known to Founders Fund,” Gibney told me, “And then we made sure that these were people who wanted to go out and change the world – people who hadn’t succumbed to irony, boredom or cynicism, but had a real plan for how to make things better through technology .. The result … really was one of the half dozen most fun and interesting things I’ve participated in (and this in a week that includes the FB IPO and a Falcon 9 launch).”

Whether or not any of the F50 will actually end up changing the world remains to be seen, but the conference has already proven to be the gift that keeps on giving for many (and I have a slew of new, smart friends in my inbox). The bonds forged between attendees through a mere couple of days were strong enough that when the plane that was supposed to take us back to the mainland broke down, one attendee remarked, “Well if you’re going to be stuck on a deserted island, it might as well be with these people.”

Another said goodbye to a new friend thusly, “Good luck with saving the world and curing Cancer and everything.”

Indeed.

Images via: Jason Purtorti and Michael Solana

Earlier this month, Y Combinator held its Work At A Startup Event, where many of its alumni took the stage — not to pitch investors (as is the case at the incubator’s enormous demo day), but instead engineers who might be lured to work at the startups in question. After the presentations, I grabbed some one-on-one time with a few of the presenters (Weebly‘s David Rusenko, Codecademy‘s Zach Sims, and Stripe‘s John Collison) to answer some basic questions: Why should someone work for your startup? And what’s it like to recruit right now?

The fact that Rusenko, Sims, and Collison were at the event is itself a sign of the recruiting challenge that startups are facing. As Collison put it, “Right now is a really good time to be a software developer.” He painted it as a simple issue of supply and demand, with the demand for “a huge amount of software to be written” outpacing the supply of developers. However, he noted that thanks in part to startups like Codecademy and Udemy, getting a degree in computer science isn’t the only path to becoming a developer — Collison himself studied physics at Harvard.

Speaking of Codecademy, this was shortly after Jeff Atwood published his blog post “Please Don’t Learn To Code“, which offered a skeptical view on the idea that everyone should learn programming. Since Codecademy was one of the main targets, I asked Sims respond. He argued that what Codecademy provides is not just to “learn to code per se” but also “a better way to understand the world.”

Editor’s note: This post is written by guest author Darius “Bubs” Monsef, who is founder & CEO of the new design marketplace CreativeMarket. He is also the founder of the popular creative community COLOURlovers and is a mentor with 500Startups & PIEPDX. Bubs blogs at HelloBubs.

I’d started raising 3 rounds. One fell apart and the others raised $1M & $1.3M in a few weeks each. The startup game is a marathon and while I’m not yet qualified to give advice about crossing the finish line, I feel like I know a lot about the first 5 miles… It’s from that perspective I give the following advice to fellow founders who are looking to raise their seed rounds.

I learned a ton when the first round fell apart. We didn’t need it, which is why it fell apart… but the interactions & lessons learned were invaluable in us later successfully raising two rounds. When we set out to do our first, we had just completed YC and were bootstrap profitable. We had some ideas of where to take the business, but they were largely influenced by what we thought investors would want to hear. That didn’t sit well with us and made my pitch less impassioned. And we weren’t sure we wanted to raise… So I took meetings and got some interest from investors, but those meetings were scattered over the course of a few weeks. (We were dealing with an acquisition offer at the same time, so my full energy wasn’t in raising.)

As weeks went on, investors that were interested and had given us verbal commitments started taking longer to respond to emails and some were never heard from again. You could feel things going cold. After we closed that big partnership deal, I proactively shut down the round. I reached back out to investors to tell them we had some capital to take us further down the road and that we would circle back later on. I wanted to shut it down from a position of strength instead of letting it fizzle out.

There’s a lot more to say, though.

Below are the lessons I’ve learned. I hope they help you raise your rounds.

Manufacturing Heat

Let me first be very clear: This isn’t about lying or being dishonest. It’s about preparing yourself and your strategy for a key time in your startup’s life. The same way you should optimize a landing page for conversions, you should optimize your pitching for conversions.

It’s a lot like dating. Attraction matters. And you can’t just Photoshop your Match.com photo for your seed round. You’re going to have to meet people in person, so make sure the person you present in your deck is the person you are… the best version of who you are.

I heard advice once from a fellow founder that agreed that manufacturing heat is important, but he took it further and said something to the effect of… “Take meetings just to cancel them.” That kind of move can work for some people, but that’s not how I roll and in my opinion you don’t want to start any kind of relationship by being dishonest. If you can’t raise your round without lying & trickery, then maybe you should reevaluate what you’re trying to do.

Some founders are lucky to bathe in the light of hype. They raise big rounds fast. The rest of us, however, have to really work at it.

When my company is in fundraising mode I’m dedicated to that 100% of the time. My team knows I’m not on product or other biz dev tasks. For a solo-founder company or one where the person pitching investors is also the sole developer, this can be a big drag. But you can’t half-ass making heat and without the heat you probably won’t raise your round.

One Does Not Simply Walk Into Fundraising

The moment you tell anybody you’re raising a round, the clock starts ticking.

The longer it takes you to close your round, the less likely it will actually happen. If you’re hot you should be able to get interest and close a round pretty quickly. If you’re still dragging ass two months in, things can get cold and often freeze up.

An honestly packed schedule forces you to be busy and appears less desperate. “I can talk to you anytime this week” sounds like nobody else is interested. “I can talk to you at 1pm on Wed or 3pm on Thurs” sounds like your schedule is full (and it really should be). “My schedule is pretty full, but I really want to connect and will move things around” is your first line if the meeting is really important.

So, don’t say you’re raising until you’re really ready. Here’s how you’ll know:

– You have an early commitment.

– You have your list of 30-50 investors in a spreadsheet ready to work.

– You have intro requests queued up from 3-5 people for each investor you don’t know.

– You have your calendar cleared for the next 4 weeks of intensive fundraising.

Now go.

How to Raise Before You Raise

It might not make sense to have an early commitment before you start raising, but it’s hugely helpful. Flex your networks and figure out what investors you have the best relationships with. If you don’t, then start working on it now. And don’t stop.

Months before we started raising our first successful round I thought a lot about who we could get in early and how we’d round it out. I’d met Dave McClure a few times and thought he and his newly created 500Startups would be a good fit. So I reached out to offer my help as a mentor in design & community for 500Startups. And for a couple months I added value and got to know him. I also knew Alexis Ohanian and had talked to him a few times about our personal alignment around our philanthropic work.

Then when I knew we were getting ready to raise, I approached Dave and Alexis about being in our round. Remember to get verbal commitments for the round before you start.

Let’s be clear, not everyone may be able to get a verbal commit before they actually start publicly raising and in that scenario, what you should do is front-load your calendar with the meetings that will most likely convert. Start with the investors who most understand your product and market fit. Or the investors that are capable of making split decisions (i.e., Angels, not VCs.) and those you have the strongest ties to.

If you’re lucky enough to have family or friends or anyone willing to invest early on, it’s super helpful in being able to approach early investors and tell them “we just started taking meetings about our round and already have $50-100k committed.”

Matching the Right Patterns

Investors, especially the great ones have what’s called ‘deal flow’. They’ve see a ton of deals. In order to be able to get through checking out every opportunity, they look for patterns. They look for things they’ve seen in other successful companies… Harvard, MIT, Stanford educations… Google, Apple, Facebook former employee… up and to the right graphs…

Every abnormality from these patterns, though, is a negative mark for you.

But, this doesn’t mean your deal is dead, it just means you need to position yourself where your strengths are. If you have the pedigree, put it out front; if you don’t but have traction, put that out front.

I went out to raise a seed round for a color website… at a time when game mechanics & social analytics were all the rage. There is now a design renaissance that makes us more appealing as a pattern match because of the success of both Pinterest and Fab.

I didn’t graduate from a great school with a CS degree… I didn’t graduate at all. None of our founders have a CS degree. (We’re all self-taught.) In fact, I was recruited by Microsoft and went through YC, so that’s what helps qualify us to investors. But what we have to show for our team is a track record of building great product and growing passionate communities. So… My team bio slide is not first in our deck.

This is:

How Much to Raise

I’ve talked to lots of entrepreneurs that think they want to raise $200k or $300k. But these are abnormal amounts for legit seed rounds. Again, when hot startups are all raising seed rounds of $750k-$1.5M and you say you’re raising $200k, it’s not a good look. Investors don’t hear “we’re smart & capital efficient” they hear “this is a small idea and we don’t need much money because their isn’t a big opportunity to go after.”

So, set a realistic target round size and then try and get oversubscribed. You’d rather be in a position where you have more interest in your round than room to fit investors in. This gives you the option of raising more, or being selective about what investors you really think are the best fit for you. For our seed round we set out with a target of $750k and ended up raising a million. We had some great investors that we wanted to fit in, and the difference between raising the extra $250k was only a couple points of equity.

Again, this isn’t about being tricky and or dishonest. I know a lot of investors that are pretty annoyed at how much founders are pushing the whole oversubscribed thing. For any investor who takes the time to get interested in you and evaluate your deal… to get pushed out because you were just talking to them to inflate interest is a pretty shitty move.

Shoot for a reasonable target, and if you’re not able to get enough interest to close the higher amount, at least you’ve set an amount you know you can close. If you went out to close a $1M round and got stalled out around $800k, it can be a painful road to get that last $200k. At that point you’re not hot. You’re desperate to close and that sends all the wrong signals.

Also, make sure you really are raising enough. Push for explosive growth, but assume a slow rise. “Seeing seed funded startups that raise less than $750K have a very high rate of mortality. Not sure if its correlated or causative.” @georgezachary

Advisors & Investors

Be careful about your advisors. People often like to have big amazing advisory boards… but if any of your advisors are also investors (who aren’t investing in you) it sends up a big red flag. Paul Graham once told me that an advisor is an investor that doesn’t believe in you enough to put cash in. To be fair this isn’t true of all advisors. I advise a couple startups about early stage design & community building stuff… but I’m not investing right now, so there is no conflict. When you have a known investor as an advisor but who doesn’t have some skin in it, other investors are going to take that as a bad sign.

So either get your advisors to invest some cash or don’t count them as an advisor.

When You’re Raising… Rainbows & Cupcakes.

One thing that bothers me about Silicon Valley is how people talk about how they’re doing. Even in friendly conversations rarely do people say anything negative… even when things are on flames and 10 feet from crashing into the ground. This is because the startup world is small. Way smaller than you think. I try to be a pretty direct and honest person, when things are bumpy I’ll tell you about it. I’m confident about what we’re doing and humble enough to ask for help when I think people are smarter than me. But this has come back to bite me in the ass more than once.

When we were first out of YC talking to investors, a prominent investor who was friendly with us suggested we talk to one of his buddies who also ran a thriving community site. So we met this other founder for beers and what I thought was just hanging out. We talked about our startups, ideas, random thoughts about opportunities, etc. It was just a few founders out for drinks and shooting the shit. But it really wasn’t. What was communicated back to that investor was that we didn’t know what we were doing. That we had a scattering of ideas and weren’t confident. And that investor, although he had verbally committed to be in our round backed out. Causing the round to fall apart.

In a world where everybody says things like “awesome, dude. growth is amazing and the team is killer.” It’s not a good look when you say something less confident and that apparent lack of confidence is often the only thing that is heard.

So when you’re raising, and sometimes you’re always raising. Be careful about what you say and to who. This world is small and everybody knows everybody else. Just assume whatever you say is going to get to the ear of an investor.

Not sure I need to point this out again, but this isn’t about lying. Just find a way to see and talk about what’s in your glass… even if it isn’t half full and closer to only a drop left in it.

Convertible Note Or Series Seed

I don’t have a strong opinion on this. Both rounds I’ve raised were done as notes, but I would have been fine doing series seed docs. As a founder with hundreds of things on my brain, the conversion details of the note are just one more thing to have knocking around versus the clear cap table of a series seed round. I think you can also have series seed docs that are just as friendly to founders as notes but notes can be cheaper and quicker to get done.

The Pitch Deck Is The New Business Plan

Pitch decks are almost required for raising a round, but they don’t have to be a required part of your pitch. I’m good in conversation and presenting to small groups, so I’d prefer to have a conversation as opposed to doing the pitch dance. The risk in presenting your deck is that your pitch has to be perfect for any investor. You can say one word about your market that can derail the whole rest of your conversation and it’s hard to course correct when it’s written right there in your slide. During my first round I started getting my laptop set-up to pitch an investor but by the end, my laptop stayed in my bag until I needed to demo something. My pitch deck was really only sent out as a reference tool for partners.

There is also caution in letting your deck speak for you. Even if you’re the best slide crafter in the universe, it’s hard to get 10 slides to be more passionate, inspiring and intelligent than you are. So don’t send your deck out with your cold emails. I only send it out after I’ve spoken to somebody, or if a lead is already really hot and just needs some reference points. My decks are also purposefully not great without me there to weave the story. They’re just a few words on a slide, or a graph, or a picture. I don’t want my deck to tell my story. I want to tell it in my voice.

But if you’re a bit shy or don’t freestyle conversation that well, using a deck to help you tell your story is fine. Like with all founder advice use what works well for you, and don’t worry about the rest.

Exactly How I Made Our Seed Hot

We got early verbal commits from well known and respected investors BEFORE we started raising. (Don’t tell Dave McClure I said he was respectable. That would ruin his image.) We agreed to terms with Dave and then went out to raise.

(Note about terms. The valuations that companies are raising right now are pretty crazy. If you’re lucky to be a YC company your valuation can be close to $10M. For a brand new idea this seems a bit nuts to me… but hey, if you can get it, good for you. We had an established site, millions of users and we raised our first round at a $5M cap. Although we could have raised at a higher valuation, we prioritized investors over a higher cap. The dilution wasn’t substantially different but we ended up with the investors we wanted to and not just the ones who would accept different terms. Do your own math and figure out what’s right for you.)

With our terms set, we put our profile up on Angel.co and they blasted us out to a thousand investors. Because of our advisors & early commitments, we got 25 inbound requested intros and that interest created heat. Enough heat to push our inbound intros to about 65 in the first week or so. (An Angel.co record at the time.) Then I packed 60 meetings into the next couple weeks. Often with 8+ a day. I’m not a bullshitter and I hate sales-y jargon and when a potential investor was giving me grief or not understanding the opportunity, I simply said,  “No worries, I appreciate your time” and quickly removed them from my target list. When you have 50 other meetings to take, you can rebound immediately from a crap meeting. When you only have 3 scheduled and take a downer… it’s hard to get back up.

From those 65+ intros we ended up closing a round with about 10 investors. Some large VCs, some growing syndicates and some small angel founders that I respect a lot.

Leverage the Tools You Have

I’ve technically tried to raise four rounds but I really can’t count the first. It was 5 years ago before I knew anything about startups. I lobbed a couple cold emails into top tier VCs and hoped to talked to them. They didn’t get back to me.

Nowadays there are amazing resources like Angel.co (who I credit with largely helping us raise our first round) and CrunchBase (where I go to see who’s invested in who when compiling my target lists).

I’m just one of hundreds of founders who’ve raised a round but feel free to ask for help. Need help putting your deck together? Want an intro to an investor? Want advice about terms / round size? Ask us. We’re busy, but I think most of us are willing to carve out a bit of time to help a fellow founder getting started.

All the best. Build great companies and change the world. Let me know if I can help you.