I recently invested in two companies whose founders either had little interest in school as students or who dropped out of grad school: MixRank and Influitive. Both management teams are driven, hard working and well prepared for the difficult road of creating a business from scratch.

Recently employers have begun asking job applicants for Facebook passwords under the assumption the social networking site will reveal the real story of who they are. We are not convinced.

Ben T. Smith IV, the co-founder and former CEO of MerchantCircle, is moving back into an operational role by taking the chief executive job’s at ShopCo. He will also keep his hand in investing as venture partner at the seed firm Accelerator Ventures.

TheComplete.me said it raised a $1.2 million seed round with funding from Intel Capital, PlentyOfFish, CrunchFund, and angel investors Russ Siegelman; Ben T. Smith IV; Social Starts, LLC; Spark Unlimited, Inc.;  Parker Coddington; Kevin Henrikson; Ali Jahangiri; William Lohse; and Konstantin Othmer. TheComplete.me runs a social dating network. PRESS RELEASE theComplete.me Social Dating Network Raises $1.2 [...]

Senior executive changes are happening with increasing frequency in today’s vibrant technology market. Seasoned managers move from one early-stage company to another, and from established companies and venture firms into the startup world. Some of the savviest new-gen Web companies recruit directly from brand name consumer and media outfits.

Communities can be among a company’s most potent marketing assets, yet among the most difficult to manage. People say they want one without knowing how to build it, exactly why it is valuable or the lengths they need to go to protect it.

The hardest thing for entrepreneurs to do is nothing. These Type A personalities have a deep need to act. But great things don’t come along all that often, and picking projects carefully may be the best advice in today’s excitable technology markets.

Mark Zuckerberg famously commented that a great engineer is worth a 100 average engineers (something every developer knows deep in her heart). He was talking about A-players, and in our opinion the worst thing any startup can do is accept less than the best and brightest.

The key to success in business is execution, whether you run a sprawling multinational or a 12-person startup. So measuring how your company stacks up against the best and brightest in your space is crucial. If you are a seed or early stage company executive, you know the following: Sooner is better than better. This [...]

Corporate venture capital comes and goes in waves. In good times, money flows easily into startups. When times turn bad, most corporate investors disappear, and the waves they create crash violently on the shore. It doesn’t have to be this way. Corporations have the resources and potential to make venture a long-term strategic asset. The [...]