Welcome to the professional site for Marc Colando, serial entrepreneur in Seattle, WA
Google’s brain teaser interview questions have gotten lots of press in the blogosphere lately. But mid- to high-level hires are almost certainly better off building a network to hiring advocates within Google to land a job with the search giant. Inspirational reading for the brainy geeks who still love the Google challenges is Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas C. Schelling.
Friday the 13th is as good an occasion as any to talk about servers, storage and backup. I’ve been running a solution that’s worked fantastically in the home office for more than a year and (fingers crossed!) should survive any bad luck today with flying colors.
Big exit events can be a great reality-check for entrepreneurs. I personally have paid a price for believing unrealistic rumors about how well an entrepreneur should do when they exit. This post offers a semi-educated guess about who makes what in the Google-AdMob acquisition, with exit percentages that can be adjusted or scaled to fit any company as it raises valuation and investment rounds.
AdMob deserves all the kudos they’re getting for their acquisition by Google. They beat significant odds — a great idea or product isn’t enough — to get funded in the first place back in late-2006. This post looks at the Series A funding odds a startup typically faces. Next week, I’ll try to guess how the big Google paycheck works out for the startup AdMob team.
International and other special characters can be a real hassle in Rails and MySQL because of different methods for encoding/decoding UTF-8. Two lines of code in your Rails database.yml file will get Rails and MySQL on the same page for easier development.
Socialnomics by long-time friend and client Erik Qualman is a great overview of where social media is headed. Erik packs the book with loads of data and relevant case studies that can help social media entrepreneurs make the pitch that social networks aren’t just a fad.
I like to think every entrepreneur has a bit of attention deficit disorder. I certainly do. It’s what keep me excited about new innovations and trying to change the world. But harnessing this energy is key to converting potential to actual. Three particularly good blog posts are pinned to my wall as a reminder of how to focus.
I’m re-launching twicefunded.com as a single source for my online contact info, and as an aggregator for my own, and other, startup activity. The first official post is coming November 2, 2009.
A former freelance designer to my first startuphad the seeds of an idea. What if a bit torrent TV download/streaming site got mashed-up with social networking? Find shows you like, share them with friends and discover new stuff from people like you.
Good idea. You can see the intro video on YouTube.
I took the idea through to reality with legal and content partners and the core technical team. The site launched to rave reviews and attracted more than one million unique users in the first 30-days after launch. TIOTI was acquired in late-2008.
I’ve always been a huge music fan. I mean, it has to count for something that my library has LCD Soundsystem, Too $hort, Arvo Part and Katy Perry (among others.) Reverb® is a framework that attempts to keep downloadable content free to users, profitable for content owners and powerful for brands. The Reverb architecture inject real-time suppressible advertising into content streams to enable what we called a “freemium” business model back in 2001/2.