June 2012
44 posts
“Last year, Aziz Gilani, a director at Houston venture capital firm DFJ Mercury, ran a study of 29 North American accelerators for the Kauffman Fellows Program. He found that 45% of them produced not a single graduate who went on to raise venture funding.”
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Startup Accelerator Fail: Most Graduates Go Nowhere
Tech Stars a Y Combinator—exceptions!
“The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.”
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more….
“…after working night and day to make your vision reality, you wake up to find that things did not go as planned. Your company did not unfold like the Jack Dorsey keynote that you listened to when you started. Your product has issues that will be very hard to fix. The market isn’t quite where it was supposed to be. Your employees are losing confidence and some of them have quit. Some of the ones that quit were quite smart and have the remaining ones wondering if staying makes sense. You are running low on cash and your venture capitalist tells you that it will be difficult to raise money given the impending European catastrophe. You lose a competitive battle. You lose a loyal customer. You lose a great employee. The walls start closing in. Where did you go wrong? Why didn’t your company perform as envisioned? Are you good enough to do this? As your dreams turn into nightmares, you find yourself in The Struggle.”
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Love this….
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“Is it a local paper if you don’t have an editorial board to weigh in on matters of local importance, to call out the school board and complain about lousy streets? Is it a local paper if you rely on stringers to cover the big football games and miss the Cinderalla story that a beat reporter would’ve nailed?”
—What the future of news looks like in Alabama after Advance cuts staff
Read my thoughts with just one click
” —Advance cuts 400 staffers in Alabama: thoughts on the future of news—and the past - Susan Mernit’s Blog
“Is it a local paper if you don’t have an editorial board to weigh in on matters of local importance, to call out the school board and complain about lousy streets? Is it a local paper if you rely on stringers to cover the big football games and miss the Cinderalla story that a beat reporter would’ve nailed? Advance seems to think a local newspaper is three things: a small group of reporters, advertisers who need your paper whether it’s published three days or seven, and some readers. Fewer, every day”
—What the future of news looks like in Alabama after Advance cuts staff by 400 | Poynter.
“Soon after the release of Watch the Throne, and a few times since the “No Church in the Wild” video came out, I’ve wondered how Göran Olsson feels about Americans appointing Jay-Z and Kanye West to be our new black revolutionaries. Olsson is the Swedish filmmaker who, in September of last year—one month after Watch the Throne’s release—put out The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. The film, a documentary made up largely of archival interviews Olsson found in the basement at the Swedish National Broadcasting Company, depicts at the height of their fame ultra-renowned black leaders like Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and others. The activists were less skeptical of foreign journalists than American ones, and so Olsson’s film feels particularly intimate. In one interview, Carmichael queries his own mother about racism as she fidgets nervously on her couch. In another, Angela Davis ruminates on the racist violence of her childhood while sitting in the Marin County Jail on charges of murder and kidnapping.”
—What’s 50 Grand to a Revolutionary Like Me?: Watch the Throne and the New Black Power
“The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism committee that’s been interviewing dean candidates has recommended someone to university officials, according to the memo below. I’ve asked Carolyn Capps when we can expect an announcement”
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Berkeley panel recommends new j-school dean | JIMROMENESKO.COM
Can’t wait for this one! Hope it’s someone terrific. #schooluptheroad
“Fossil fuels are being burned at a rapidly increasing rate, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 35 percent since the industrial revolution began. At the same time, ocean acidity has risen by 5 percent in the past 20 years. — Ocean productivity is being diminished by vast “dead zones” where no fish swim, while 40 percent of Earth’s land mass that was once “biodiverse” now contains far fewer species of crop plants and domestic animals. — More animal species than ever are becoming extinct, and many plant and animal species are being forced by global warming to seek new ranges that could place them at risk of extinction, as well. — Within the next 60 years, the average global temperature “will be higher than it has been since the human species evolved.”
—Warming nears point of no return, scientists say
“The New York Times’ social media team is expanding, and ProPublica’s Daniel Victor is its newest hire. Victor, who is currently social media editor at ProPublica, announced yesterday that he’s joining the Times as a social media producer and will start at the end of June. “I’ll be doing a good bit of daily production, newsroom training, formulating best practices and experimenting with new tools and techniques,” Victor said via email. “I’ll be working directly with people who are as passionate about the potential of social media as I am, and an organization that understands how important it is. (Not that ProPublica wasn’t … it was very much both of those things, too.)”
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New York Times’ latest hire part of evolving social media team | Poynter.
Way to go!
