Startup Management
AVC regular William Mougayar is building an education oriented community for entrepreneurs called Startup Management. He soft launched it in the past week.
The idea, as I understand it, is to aggregate and tag blog posts about startup management from all around the web and curate them into a community site focused on educating entrepreneurs on how to be better leaders and managers of their companies. William will also create original content on the site. He describes it as a "Huffington Post" model.
There is certainly a need for this kind of thing. If you want to learn about term sheets, you can go to Brad Feld's blog and click on the "term sheet" category, but you would have had to know to go to Brad Feld's blog. If you want to read my stuff on employee equity, you would have to go to AVC, click on MBA Mondays, and then into the table of contents and scroll down to find it.
Obiously Google crawls all of this content and can find it for you if you poke around hard enough, but the idea of curating all the content that entrepreneurs, VCs, and others who work in the startup sector have written on the topic of startup management is a really good one.
I hope William succeeds with this effort and I am rooting for him.
Comments (Archived):
For all of Google’s success discovery remains the grand issue (setting privacy aside) on the interwebs. Good luck William.
Discovery and trust.(A major financial services company attempts to provide small business info. I found an article out there — after it was retweeted by a Columbia prof — that gave advice that would get a business owner into legal trouble. Ouch.)Bon voyage, William!
Thanks Anne. We’re in the wild now 🙂
Thanks JP.
Neat idea for content.
Thanks Vineeth. I saw your email and will respond.
Good luck @williammougayar I hope he succeeds too. Might become the “Hackman” of startup world!
Thanks Jeff. It has been a labor of love the past few weeks, and still trying to get to a base level before taking it further ahead.
Hi William,Love the idea and would be delighted to participate and help. Let me know how I can help.Regards,Bala
Thanks Bala. I like what you are doing in Iceland.If you see great articles, please Submit them with the Bookmarklet into that section http://startupmanagement.or… . It works the same as the HackerNews submission via a simple add.
Thank, will submit from the articles in http://blog.startupiceland.com
I’m not sure I have you email. Do you mind email me ? wmougayar at GMAIL thanks.
William is a Natural Born Curator.
It’s true. Some careers have themes, and “aggregator + curator” seems to be William’s. 🙂
Thanks Aaron! Agrocurator ? 🙂
🙂
Very cool.. I think the combination of aggregator + curation will continue across different verticals.I’ve been building something similar for life management (http://www.soulmix.com), except it takes the Pinterest curation model instead of the HuffPo model.Good luck on it!
Thanks Alex. I checked Soulmix and I like your format.
Haha. Thanks Arnold. As I say on the site, I will try to:Curate the Best, and Write the Rest.Then, maybe I will give you a Test.
Curate the best and write the rest.That’s a motto that will keep you busy forever.
So if I stop blogging about mobile popup stores ( http://awe.sm/r2nOP ) and street level mashups of data ( http://awe.sm/hGkBb ) I might see myself there sometime…
Am adding and tagging more selected posts gradually, yours & JLM included. You’ve got a quote or two in there. Look at the Quotes section 🙂
Cool….my new strategy though is to spend 1000x more time creating useful content then looking for what people are doing with mine.Works BTW. I just focus and what other’s find useful, find its way back to me. With some marketing tricks wired in of course!
Exactly. It will find its way back to you if it’s meant to.
Been thinking about this a bit. Leaders create, followers respond.It’s not black and white but it is that simple from a core focus and motivation perspective.
I wrote something to this effect in an email to him a few days ago (Master Curator) when he shared this with me and he was quick to point out that there is also original content. William’s blog has demonstrated his ability to create relevant (and meaningful) content as well as to recognize it. Not everyone can do this.
No question that William is a maven.
You are too, Arnold. But you know this.
I hope to live up to this expectation 🙂 Thanks Donna.
Spot on.
Thanks Mark 😉
Just watched Jack’s video on ceo editing/curation (on your shelby channel). Appreciated his perspective on critical job responsibilities.
Cool. The one from Ev about flat organizations is interesting too.
Yup!
Hi William, What’s your approach to the curation process?
For the curation, there is 2 tacts. For the Library, I select articles that have a long lasting Educational value, where the author is explaining a “How to” something. For the User Submitted ones, it’s the same goal, with a focus on the original thoughts ones.Note that the focus on the site is on Growth and Management, not on the startup phase, where I think there’s lots already.
Sounds good (startup bible of the future?). Steve Blank gives a helping hand: http://steveblank.com/tools…
Yes, Steve’s work will be widely represented. I like his tools page a lot.
thanks
Steve Blank is in the house !
Best of luck to @William Mougayar. SUM resources will definitely be useful for me and what I’m doing.I’ve been asked to create an incubator in Milan, Italy. We have 10,000 meters square of space (half the size of Trafalgar Sq) and will be providing educational programs to help startups too.This alongside running my own analytics startup: http://www.senseus.co
That’s great. It seems that Milan is ahead of Rome in terms of startup activity? Thanks.
Yes, mostly because Milan’s where the banks and local offices of foreign multinationals tend to be.Plus it’s home to Italy’s top business school, Bocconi, and design and technology institutes.Importantly, in Dec 2012, the Italian govt approved their Digital Agenda. In a way, Milan has the potential to become the Southern Europe startup hub in much the same way that London/Berlin are the dominant hubs for Northern Europe.I was going to head back to NYC or relocate to SV but now this Milan project is a great reason to stay in Europe.
Milan’s startup scene is definitely on a roll. You know the veespo team?
Thanks for the heads-up on Veespo, Arnold. No, I hadn’t heard of them.There are several opinion polling startups out there: Amen, HeyCrowd, Hinge etc.
Mazel Tov, you should talk to @David Semaria. shoot me an email (shana dot carp at gmail) and I’ll try to connect you
Thanks Shana. Will do.
Very cool! All the best with this!
Thanks, Donna. I’ve been reading AVC for three years and constantly awed and inspired by Fred’s and this community’s “Pay it forward, walk the talk, share knowhow” ethos.People talk about the “Paypal mafia”. Well, there’s a collective of “@fredwilson catalysts” out there who’ve read his posts and want to do what they can to help startups.William Mougayar being a great prime example.
Looking forward to seeing it. What’s the URL?
Linked to in the postBut its startupmanagement.org
Still on my first few sips of coffee (obviously).
Disqus is all over it :)I’m waiting for the migration to complete to bring a few other posts from my other blog.
Nice!Sorry, I was mostly off the grid this weekend.
Of course. Disqus is the best comment system around imo. I don’t even think that Livefyre holds a candle to it.
We know that…but not everybody does 🙂
Hi William,Good luck w/ this – I often feel – like I am not always tuned in or that I am missing something which I should be reading. I will be sure to check out Startup Mgt.org.Reminds me a little of Dharmesh Shah’s blog – OnStartupsGood Luck my friend!
Thanks. OnStartups is aggregated into the Top Blogs section. It’s a great must read.
Congrats on the launch, William! It looks great. When will you do a daily email? 🙂
Actually, I was testing it yesterday, and wasn’t sure whether to do it or not. It would be probably about 10-15 articles daily in a simple email.I might start it in a week, once I figure out added automation. In the meantime, do register with your email there so we can ping you. Thanks!
Second this. Will serve as further curation to allow us to get the most from the site within our already maxed out schedules and will remind us that there is more on the site if we want/need it.
was having dinner with my family some time after closing a round and my mom just looked at me and said “where’d you learn how to do all of this? i don’t remember you studying this in school…”learned it all online via Fred and Brad and Mark and Dixon and of course through search after search. awesome that future generations will have one place to gobest of luck @wmoug:disqus
btw @wmoug:disqus i maintain a spreadsheet i call the “Shelby Library” for anyone who joins the company.. filled with some favorite blog posts, pdfs etc that help define our approach to work, our culture, etc.. happy to share if you’d like
That’s a great idea for a whole product really — company curated/specific collections….
ah yeah… interesting. would show what certain co’s listen to/pay attention to and you can then make a call as to what worksmaybe an idea for a “featured startup” post @wmoug:disqus?
hmmm…. wonder if this would be something that would work on @MaxYoder:disqus’s lesson.ly platform? Great for on-boarding and enculturating team members.
yes, please …email me?
I love that story Reece. It feels good to hear it told
def a proud moment, though my mom then countered with something like… “then why’d you go to school? i told you you’d learn everything you need to know in the family restaurant…”let’s just say i’m glad i had both experiences
“you’d learn everything you need to know in the family restaurant…”Ah the missing part of the story. Big advantage being raised in not only a business family but a small business family where what you learned (as you have indicated) can be put into context.
yup
When I went to Wharton (a long time ago) the kids who came from business families were clearly distinct and had an advantage over the kids who didn’t. Concepts that others had to try and learn you were able to instantly put into context it all made sense because you had felt and experienced it in a different context [1]. The non-business kids didn’t have the seat of the pants feel. (It would be like me trying to duplicate your knowledge of sports by sitting in a classroom and seeing films and reading.)[1] I could give a 1000 examples but one that quickly comes to mind is my father not wanting to sell to Sears and the reason he gave when I was a kid.
well… what was it?
He sold to primarily gift shops, synagogues and smaller department stores (I remember Filenes, Gimbels etc.) He felt (iirc) that if he sold to Sears they would take all his output and he would loose the secure and stable base of the other accounts. It was an “all eggs in one basket” fear. And then Sears could just drop him and he’d have nothing.I also remember growing up the “rich guy in the neighborhood” (Mr. Cooper) who bought his 16 year old kid a Trans-Am [1] and had the nicest house and all the toys. He had a donut factory and made tons of money. Then he lost his contract with a big supermarket chain and filed for bankruptcy years later.[1] Totally the shit car back in the 70’s. And the kid was 16 parents may do stuff like that now but they didn’t back then.
Trans Am (in Chicago, pronounced Traaanz Aaammz) was the shit back in the day. Always wanted one with T tops.
Attached is a photo taken 4/1977 of a neighborhood friend (another guy) who was my age who was able to use his father’s trans-am (new – it was a ’77). With t-top etc. I did a photo shoot of it developed and dry mounted the photos.I haven’t spoken to him in 30 years but googled him last year and turned up that he had been indicted for a fraud. He’s one of the guys in the attached poster. I don’t know the current disposition but it more or less surprised me when I found this out. Since he seemed so normal and nice back then. People change of course (assuming he’s guilty which by reading about the case he seems to be) over time.
Ha! At my kids’ high school you can tell the students’ parking lot from the teachers’ because the students have nicer cars. My kids don’t fall into that category.
And Shelby.tv is part of the site, in the Videos section. Curated Videos!
woah! hadn’t seen it live yet! nice!
slowly, but surely adding them here:http://shelby.tv/startupman…
Awesome, William. Psyched you’re using Shelby for this!
i’ll second that reece. This is startup 3 for me but first time in the hot seat – so this learning experience so far has been way different and most of the advice has come from those you mention……
yup. can only learn it on the job
Yup, you learn on the job … and on blogs!
I agree. You can really learn a lot from reading AVC, as well as taking part in the comments section.
I love me some automated aggregation too, but nothing beats quality content curated by smart people. William is the right person to lead something like this.
Thanks Bill. I typically reject a lot more than I pick.
because you’re smart 🙂
Thanks for your support, Fred. It has been a labor of love in the past weeks, and I still have work to do to get it to a base level. But I’m looking forward to continue pushing ahead.btw- the Twitter account for Startup Management is @startupmanage https://twitter.com/startup…
I wish Twitter gave us the ability to log into multiple accounts, because logging out of one and into another just to post ONE tweet is really annoying and time consuming.
On mobile this is easy to do. Also on Tweetdeck.
What a life saver. Installed Tweetdeck on Ubuntu (through WINE). Thanks for the recommendation!
Regular reader/irregular commentor out of startup town, englandGood luck and godspeed WilliamMarkGB
Thanks Mark.Do spread the word in the UK!
@wmoug:disqus, you may want to look at http://www.clarity.fm as a potential partner. Your site and Clarity’s service seem perfect together. Best of luck on the new venture. The site looks great.
Beat of luck with this endeavor @wmoug:disqus.Start ups need all the smarts they can find!
Thanks Tom. I say Startups need to become Grownups now.
.Congratulations and well played.This will be a great success and you deserve it.JLM.
Thanks JLM.You were the first I shared this idea with a while back, and while I still have lots of work ahead, I thank you for your support.
Sounds awesome and I’m sure it will be great (looking forward to checking it out)…but of course, the option you didn’t mention is that you can also just go to gawk.it and do these type of searches (feldthoughts and avc are both in there, as are many other top notch ones) and get many awesome results (without having to do the extra work of tagging or figuring out the perfect tag to search what you are looking for).
Reminds me that I need to add Gawk.it to SUM as well for the blog search part.But I think my tact is different, especially around the aggregated/curated content, and the narrow focus on growth/scaling/managing. I am tagging these articles though, almost like a librarian.
Yes! Would love to power the search for it…and I agree, your approach is diff. (and I think powerful because it’s human intelligence driven curation — btw, that is a *big* part of what helped bring digg back from the dead)
Congrats William (more to come later).Looks like you are using a shared server (VPS) at mediatemple [1] by my quick check.Not going to cut it even right now the response time is dismal and there isn’t any traffic and usage.[1] nslookup startupmanagement.org -> 64.207.139.188 http://64.207.139.188 -> doesn’t yield the site but a “forbidden” page (and a few other things that I have hunched on). MT -> IP is their block, dns set to MT etc.
let’s talk via email. I did some performance testing using speed tools, and it was good, but I”m not happy either with the response in real.
Just got this:”Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 103809024 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19959 bytes) in /nfs/c10/h01/mnt/146287/domains/startupmanagement.org/html/… on line 251″For the benefit of others here I will say that if you are launching it pays to pay the extra money needed to insure that people have a good experience when visiting the site. In the case of any cloud provider what this means (short term) is increasing the plan or memory they are giving you. If you are using the $50/m MT plan you need perhaps at least the $100 or $150/m. At the very least until you get your footing. Not a long term solution either but better than what you’ve had.I’ve seen this happen often with others. I know someone who was on network TV and I warned them in advance to make sure their provider (volusion) knew they were going to be on TV so that they could insure that they had a good operating site. (In return for a testimonial about how “I was on network TV and my volusion site rocked”.) They didn’t feel comfortable doing that (I would have pulled that off in a second) and as a result their site was totally swamped and they lost plenty of business that night. All could be avoided. Business and $$ lost in that case. (Shark Tank).This is not the situation here of course (MT isn’t going to give you anything because you are mentioned on AVC) which means you have to suck it up and make sure you are covering this during the startup phase. That said WP is a hog and is most likely not the long term solution for what you are doing anyway.By the way any kind of shared server solution like this is totally YMMV. Depending on what others on the same server are doing and who else is on the same equipment you could have a good or bad situation long term or for a day. Meaning the fact that something is good or bad today doesn’t mean it won’t change.Bottom line: You get what you pay for and no free lunch.
I’ve just upped the service on MT to a dedicated Grid container. We were short on memory allocation, and I’ll go to another level if needed. But WordPress is capping at 40MB, despite changes in configuration. I need to speak to MT again. I need it to be 64 or 128MB but it’s not working. I’ll email you on the other thing. Thanks LE!
If this site really takes off maybe you could afford a dedicated server from a provider.
You familiar with the hosting services dedicated to wp hosting? Like WPEngine?
I could live on this site @wmoug:disqus. Except I’d feel too motivated to do something with all that knowledge/information.This is truly an amazing resource. Easily, a daily destination.
Thanks Donna. Lots there for sure but still, it’s Quality over quantity.
And that’s the genius. Combined with you being a trustworthy gatekeeper.
What also would be interesting would be if one put together a curriculum of this and sales.You put the curriculum and the articles and books out there for free. If you want to read it yourself great no cost.I have begged forever for Universities to teach this type of course but alas for some reason they think it is trade school stuff.Then if you wanted to make money you could have paid seminars where you actually talked about the stuff with people that have lived it.I put this out there because I am not the person to organize it, but I think I could speak on several of the subjects.Penn and Delaware think its a privilege to teach so they never pay guest lecturers. That’s fine because I totally want to give back to the kids. But whenever I speak it always turns to this “trade school” stuff. It fascinates people to hear what really happens.
Hi Philip. Thanks for these ideas. I have been thinking about some assessment service with a light weight accreditation, but I need to get more work done to make it happen if it’s a viable path. I’ll email you separately.
Adding my voice to the congratulations, William. Looking forward to watching this evolve.(I’m sending you an email regarding an issue on the site as a heads-up.)
Hey Dale, Thanks a lot for helping me figure out the memory issue. We fixed it, thanks to your guidance!!
My pleasure, of course, William. I expect you’ll need to make a few more tweaks, but you’re on your way. Do let me know if I can be of any further help. Best of luck!
This is great. William, I’d be happy to help in any way if I can be helpful.
I was going to email you 🙂 Thanks!
Great news, William! Congratulations. I care a lot about this issue so please say if I can help out.
Thanks a lot. I will ping you separately.
First Round is doing some interesting stuff with startup scaling and spreading internal knowledge. A Harvard Business Review for startups. William, if you haven’t seen it might be an interesting source. (If this was talked about here I apologize for repeating it. Been gone the past couple of weeks.)
This is a great find. I somehow missed this. Thanks, Elia.
You are very welcome, Donna. 🙂
Yes, they are doing a good job elevating that content. They started it last week, and we integrate their content throughout.We’ll always be the top aggregator dog and point to all the good stuff + a small dose of our own. Think HuffPos meets HackerNews with a dose of TechCrunchiness, focused on growth/scaling/management topics, not startup 101.
Love this direction. Go William!!
Thanks..now you know what I was up to 🙂
Very cool, William.I already found a couple of interesting reads on the site this AM that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.Nicely done.
Great. Hopefully you will something every day 🙂 Thanks for checking it out. IF you register or subscribe, we’ll add you to the mailing list.
Done — I’m on your list.
Congrats @wmoug:disqus !! I wish you had this live for my Columbia IE accelerator. I will connect you to them for the class of 2014! A great resource for startups!
Good to hear this can help others. That’s the goal:. saving time for entrepreneurs to help them find useful stuff without having to google infinium.
I was thinking, @wmoug:disqus, that maybe there should be a hashtag that we can use if we tweet a link and want to signal you that it might be good for SUM. Can that work in disqus — if SUM had its own disqus profile? BTW, didn’t notice that acronym until I began seeing it in tweets. Great for branding!
Good idea.
That’s a good idea. I quickly checked and “sum” people use #sum as an abbreviation for #summer, but I’m sure we can take them over!
I’m sure that @falicon:disqus would help you with gawk.it, as he indexes Disqus comments and could help you search for comments with that hash tag.I think gawk.it is one of the best uses of the Disqus API that I have seen so far.
Yes, I plan on using it.
As I get older, the more I need this – congrats William
Why?
@wmoug:disqus – I’d love to see this succeed! It’s something I worked on for a couple months in 2010, but ended taking a more than full-time job at a startup. If you ever want someone to bounce ideas off of that’s attempted to build something similar let me know. I’d also happily give you my domains if you want either or both:www.earlystagearchives.comwww.relentful.com – I wanted to call it “Relentless Resources” but it sounds like you have it covered already.
I’m trying to streamline all my processes so it can scale eventually. Thanks!
@wmoug:disqus, I am proud of you. Good luck!
Thanks Max. I’ll jump back into Lesson.ly soon. You’ve got a winner in the making there.
I appreciate that. With feedback like yours, we’ll get there.
I just took at look at the new Lesson.ly today — great concept. Can be a partner platform to a lot of other products. ;)cc: Max Yoder
Everybody at AVC. I really would like to thank you all for your tremendous support. I’ve received so many emails from people I know and don’t know. Everyone is so helpful and encouraging. That speaks volumes about the amazing people of this community.I’m very touched.
I know I’m late to the party, but congrats William! You really are a master curator–and great connector. There’s a real need for this, and I’m happy you’re building it. Cynthia
Thanks Cynthia!
@wmoug:disqus just wanted to let you know that on my first *but definitely not last* visit to the site, I clicked through to ‘8 Free eBooks’ and made a purchase (one of the ebooks isn’t actually free at the moment, but it’s four bucks so same thing). Are you considering affiliate as a potential small revenue stream?–Cynthia Schames
Actually, the Books section is an affiliate Amazon store set-up already http://startupmanagement.or…, but I didn’t think about linking that only book that wasn’t free. Weird, it was free when I got it. I think Kindle behaves differently depending on what country you’re accessing it from. Thanks.
Awesome @wmoug:disqus — let me know if startupnorth can help at all…-j
Thanks Jevon! I will ping you. Yes.
I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting William, but seldom does a week or so go by without him sending a useful heads up or a comment. In terms of co-ordinating an oracle (in the traditional sense : ) he also has all the background and knowledge so – great idea and hope it goes superbly, but then William can also execute so no doubts on that score!
Thanks James! We will meet one day…over a gourmet meal, preferably 🙂
born to do that
Hi great initiative, Startup Management. However, as an entrepreneur I have realised that it is more about Leadership than Management. So I wrote a book about leadership for startups, and if you’re interested I blog about it here: http://www.arnander.com