Chris Dixon is currently the CEO & Co-founder of Hunch. Chris’ blog is written from the perspective of the entrepreneur
# Hunch personalizes the internet by helping you share and discover great recommendations about all sorts of topics.
# Chris Dixon graduated with Bachelor of Arts and MA from Columbia University, majoring in Philosophy.
# He has an MBA ,Business Administration from Harvard Business School
# Chris designed and programmed multimedia web applications, including the original version of Oddcast’s talking avatar software, and the karaoke software that became kSolo, later acquired by MySpace/Fox
# He is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Stack Overflow, TrialPay, DocVerse (acq by GOOG), Invite Media (acq by GOOG), Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.
Chris Dixon’s thoughts and insights on starting up and entrepreneurship
- I got involved in investing mostly to get into the flow of what was happening on the Internet, It was the exact opposite of the reason as to why others may invest.
- There are two kinds of investors: Ron Conways who try to create value by finding good people and helping them create something great, and others, who want a piece of someone else’s things. The builders and the extractors. Avoid the extractors.
- When founding a tech startup, there are certain areas where you should spend time trying to be creative/innovative. Generally these should be: product, recruiting, marketing
- Make something weighty – try to build an empire – and you’ll be far less vulnerable to the ups and downs of the market.
- When you take any money at all from a big VC in a seed round, you are effectively giving them an option on the next round, even though that option isn’t contractual
- A startup is a long trip — what you should care about is whether, through the ups and downs and after the buzz dies down, the investors will actually roll up their sleeves and help you.
- Good startups build an initial user base with simple features and then quickly iterate to create products that are enduringly useful.
- You can’t outsource the understanding of key financing and other legal documents to lawyers
- For early-stage companies, you should never rely on quantitative analysis to estimate market size. Venture-style startups are bets on broad, secular trends.
Check out his blog content, its a startup resource guide.