Business

Valuation Vs Terms #startupTips

Young entrepreneurs (at age or at heart – It doesn’t matter) are very sensitive about valuation or in their eyes: “how much I’m going to get diluted”. After doing several deals both as co-founder and as investor, it became clear to me that it’s the wrong thing to focus on. Moreover, in such an early stage of a startup, no one can do a valuation. It’s all guesses. So the numbers and the arguments over them are ridiculous. What I do find important, are the terms. The ‘little’ details in the term sheet that will drive the future outcomes.

Terms matter

You need to understand what is the meaning of each basic concept like: liquidation, participation, ratchets and preferred shares.
Let’s have a quick look. Continue reading →

Business, Chrome

Auto Complete Attribute Will Improve Your Profit (And Forms)

Autofill in Chrome

Chrome has a great new Autofill feature that as a developer you’ll want to add to your websites for Chrome to use. Other browsers are sure to follow too. The first time you fill out a form, Chrome automatically saves the contact information that you enter, like your name, address, phone number, or email address, as an Autofill entry. You can store multiple addresses as separate entries. Moreover, Chrome can save your credit card information, with your explicit permission. When you enter credit card information on a form, Google Chrome asks you at the top of the page whether you’d like to save the information. Click “Save info” if you’d like the credit card to be saved as an Autofill entry.

Later, when you start filling out a form, the Autofill entries that match what you’re typing will appear in a menu. Select an entry to automatically complete the form with information from the entry. Chrome also saves the text you’ve typed in specific form fields. The next time you fill out the same field, text that you’ve typed in the past appears in a menu. Just select the text you want to use from the menu to insert it directly into the field.

Improving your checkout flow

In Chrome, you get a full support for the autocomplete attributes . All we need to do is to make sure we are leveraging them. You will improve your checkout process and make your users 6.73 times happier. Since autocomplete is part of the standard (WHATWG HTML) you know that other browsers will support it as well.

The autocomplete attributes can be accompanied with a section name, such as:

shipping given-name
billing street-address

This is recommended because it will make your form easier to understand and fill. The browser will auto complete different sections separately, and not as a continuous form.
Continue reading →

Chrome, mobile

Google Now On Chromebook

“Google Now” got a powerful goal: The right information at the right time.
From knowing the weather before you go for a run, to planning the best route to avoid traffic, or even checking your favorite team’s score while they are playing, get the information you want, when you need it. You can look at it as a new phase in Search. You are getting the answers before you had the chance to ask the questions. If you use Android or iPhone – Good chances that you saw it in action. However, if you got a Chromebook, here is how you can manage it and sync between your phone and your laptop. Yesterday, Google has announced that they’re expanding Now with support for 70 new apps, including Spotify, Feedly, Runkeeper, OpenTable etc’.

How Google Now is working in Chrome? Continue reading →

Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, webdev

Chrome And The Web App Revolution

Quick update from the world of Chrome. The new version in stable (chrome://version = 42 just like the answer to the universe) brings some interesting and powerful features that give web developers more options to create amazing experiences.

Chrome 42 (stable)

We are getting to a world where web developer could create web apps that act just like ‘native apps’ without any bridges (e.g. Cordova). The main enablers APIs are already in this version. Check out what you can do today with Service Worker and the options it’s giving you to cache, work offline and push notifications in the background. Here is an example I wrote that uses service worker to cache & offline. I think we are going to see some very interesting implications. There are many options for the “physical mobile web” and these powerful APIs. Continue reading →

cloud

Google Cloud Platform Update

A talk I gave at Campus TLV back at 2014 (but got the video just recently). The lecture starts with Hebrew for the first minute, but the talk itself is in English. You can skip to 1:07 to start view the talk. There is a new Container Engine (alpha mode), powered by the open source technology Kubernetes. It enables you to run and manage Docker containers on Google Cloud Platform’s virtual machines. Try it out with this sign up for customer programs.

[youtube https://youtu.be/6RVSTZJNgXY?t=70] Continue reading →

Business, webdev

Pick the Right Tool #StartupTips

What is the best tool to do X?

Over the years, I’ve learn that if you are using the right tools and really master them – You become 10x better at what you do. This post is a short list of tools that entrepreneurs, developers, designers and ‘startups people’ might find useful. It base on my personal experience, so (of crouse) there are many other good options out there. The best advice is to try few tools and see what is working for you.

Cloud Platforms

It doesn’t matter if you are building for the web or for mobile platforms (Android, iOS). In the end of the day, you will need a ‘server side’ and hopefully it will be on an infrastructure you can trust for: performance, scale, redundancy, security, easy of usage etc’. I’ve used the first three cloud providers in the list. I really like the power of App Engine. Although, you will need to work in the ‘app engine way’ and not your own. If you need certain capabilities that app engine is not supporting, I suggest trying one of the IAAS options.

Google App Engine – I recommend this option because it gives you great ways to focus on your product and not administrative server tasks. Another good option is Google’s infrastructure as a service in the name of Compute Engine that will give you the freedom to have a clean server to work with.
Rackspace – Got nice sets of options for hosting and deployments. I’ve used them in my last startup (HighGearMedia) and they had a good value proposition.
Amazon Web Services – The current leader of cloud computing.
Microsoft Azure – If you like MS technology stack.
Pivotal – Cloud Foundry is the result of an industry efforts to build an open platform as a service.
Heroku – Supports Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java, and PHP so you can use the languages you know.

In the diagram below you can gain a good view of all the options on Google Cloud Platform. Continue reading →

Chrome, JavaScript, mobile, webdev

Physical Web On Mobile

Physical Web is the new approach to unleash the core superpower of the web: interaction on demand.
People should be able to walk up to any smart device, think on classic cases like: a vending machine, an art item, a poster, a toy, a bus stop, a rental car – and not have to download an app first. They should be able to just tap and interact with them.

The Physical Web is not shipping yet nor is it a Google product. This is an early-stage experimental project and we’re developing it out in the open as we do all things related to the web. This should only be of interest to developers looking to test out this feature and provide feedback. The Physical Web is an effort to extend the core superpower of the web – the URL – to everyday physical objects. The user experience of smart objects should be much like links in a web browser: i.e., just tap and use. At its base, the Physical Web is a discovery service: a smart object broadcasts relevant URLs that any nearby device can receive.
This simple capability can unlock exciting new ways to interact with the Web. Continue reading →

Business

Entrepreneurs And Investors – Funny And Sad #StartupTips

A list of the common sentences you will hear after a pitch. It meant to give you a heads up to detect the BS when it’s coming your way.

Common nonsense from Entrepreneurs Continue reading →

Business

How To Build An Amazing Product? #StartupTips

The path to success

Every startup should create the WOW effect for its new product. You wish to build, such an amazing product, that your users will want to use it every day more than once. After starting six startups and mentoring hundreds of entrepreneurs in the past 18 years. I got to sit down and think what are the common themes that I saw in great products. The list below is not ‘everything’ but rather the main pitfalls that (too) many developers are falling into. I hope it will help you build the next amazing product. Continue reading →

Business, Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

In-App Payments On The Web

There are many examples of applications that are free but let you add features with in-app payments. Think of a game that is free to play, but offers additional levels or virtual goods for a certain price (a low one in most cases). It’s very common to see applications that are free at the ‘trial period’ and later gives premium users the option to buy a specific level that match their needs. It’s a good practice to give users your product or service without any barriers (e.g credit card information). If they find it useful, they will pay for it with a smile.

Few examples

A designing web app that give the options to buy more projects (or more shapes, tools, features).
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application, that offer certain capabilities for a price.
The basic options to collect and manage your contacts will be free, but if you wish to send emails they will charge you.
A game that let you advances more quickly if you buy certain improvements. For example a ‘magic’ power that give you the ability to pass a difficult stage (e.g. the mighty eagle in Angry Birds).

Continue reading →

Ido Green

Thoughts To Remember

Valuation Vs Terms #startupTips