By Sol Tzvi, CEO of Genieo As a young CEO and Co-founder of a startup company I often find myself thinking of the path I chose and the destination I lead myself to. Thinking of all those lonely times, when I’m traveling around the world in the middle of the night - sometimes even in the middle of nowhere really; crossing the world from one corner to another; scheduling meetings with different people from different cultures; speaking in a foreign language which forces me to concentrate not only on what I have to say but also on how to build a proper sentence, all in the cause of reaching out and touching these different cultures. This is my idea of living: exploring, learning, teaching others, sharing thoughts and ideas, braking

Here's one resource you are probably not using to its 100% capacity: your employees. And I don't mean it in the run-em-into-the-ground-work-around-the-clock kind of way. What I mean is that you are probably not leveraging their knowledge, their passion and enthusiasm or their social capital well enough. How do I know that? Because very few companies actually do this, and most of the rest do not really appreciate that their employees have a value above and beyond what they were hired to do. Think about it: with the advent of social media, your employees, as much as your customers, define your brand. If you even partially understand the impact that the social revolution has had on the way we do business and relate to each other as indivi

Atlantis Computing, Virtual Desktop storage provider, has announced the close of a $10 million Series C investment. The round was led by Partech International, El Dorado Ventures and Cisco Systems Inc. Atlantis will put the funds towards sales and marketing, particularly headed for international growth. “Desktop virtualization is one of the fastest growing technology sectors and has the potential to be even larger than server virtualization,” said Nicolas El Baze, General Partner, Partech International. “We think that Atlantis Computing is going to play a key role in the growth of this market and be an essential part of every VDI deployment.” The Atlantis ILIO VDI storage and performance solutions integrate with Citrix, VMwa

Federated Media has announced its acquisition of the core technology behind TextDigger, a search engine startup. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Launched as a project at a CNET incubator, TextDigger’s profiling technology platform is used to add semantics indexing on existing search engines. TextDigger later expanded and went on to raise over $5 million since first launching in 2005. It’s TextDigger’s semantic technology that Federated Media is interested in, and will be taking on some of its staffers as part of the acquisition, including CEO Tim Musgrove. The TextDigger company will remain a separate entity. For Federated Media, the acquisition of TextDigger is meant to expand its product offerings. As

Kara Swisher goes to Chegg headquarters to meet the Chegg team and interview Dan Rosensweig. As I reported first on Chegg plans to go public, Dan Rosensweig was hired to take Chegg to the next level including an IPO. Dan Rosensweig was hired to take Chegg public. Chegg is doing extremely well in the revenue department. The rational for Rosenweig is that Chegg will go public Chegg has hit a home run both in terms of business growth and in terms of revenue. Chegg is building a big durable business. The company has been on track to do more than $150 million in revenues in 2010. Chegg lets students rent as many textbooks as they like with just a few clicks. Books are delivered in less than a week. Renting textbooks through Chegg not

By Ben Horowitz Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008 during which it advised them to “Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.” (You can see the presentation here.) The presentation catalyzed a movement. Start-ups everywhere adopted a lean, low-burn, low-investment model. To this day, companies seeking funding at our venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, proudly proclaim in their pitch decks that they are raising tiny amounts of capital so they can run lean. On the one hand, it is a fact that capital invest

This summer while on vacation I had a chance to read the newest book by Andy Kessler called Grumby. It's a book about an entrepreneur who invents the next big thing then every imaginable success and failure happens. The book is available in hardcover or ebook on Amazon.  The hardcover is available in stores.  Go get it to read either hardcover or Kindle or Ipad.  I bought it on the Kindle app for the iPad.  You can get it now on your iPad or Kindle.  It's the price of a cold draft Sam Adams beer at the airport $7.99. It's worth the read and great for a flight from SF to Boston.  Or buy the hardcover version. Andy Kessler is amazing. He was an investor  in my last company PodTech when I was growing fast then it cratered big t

Almost everybody knows that Ron Conway has invested in a huge percentage of the top technology companies in the world, but entrepreneurs often ask me why Ron would be a good investor for them. When I talk to venture capitalists, they know that Ron is important, but they seldom know why. Gary Rivlin, despite writing an entire book on Ron, completely failed to understand what Ron does (which is why the book is so bad and not worth reading).  Speaking as an entrepreneur, if I were to start a firm today and could only have one investor, it would be Ron Conway. This post explains why. Before doing so, I need to make some important disclosures. Ron is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz. I am an investor in Ron’s new fund. Ron has made signi

Infochimps, the marketplace for using, buying and selling data, has released two new API calls and a series of updates. The new API’s offer deeper insight into various demographic groups and their social activity. MaxMind GeoLite is for the IP-Census and has 16 fields regarding a person’s neighborhood, looking across income, gender, age and housing information, to say the least. Strong Links, the second new API, looks at a Twitter user’s top corespondents. This will also help predict which users are best to recommend. Some use cases for MaxMind GeoLite: * Advertisers/marketers targeting specific Twitter users based on their demographic profiles; filtering by demographics for researchers also. * For political c

Robert Scoble just put out a thought-provoking video on his personal blog detailing the frightening bi-polar personality of US immigration policy. The three participants of note in the discussion Robert chronicles are Aye Moah, a brilliant Burmese UX designer who came to America based purely on her ability to do maths, Ronald Mannak, a European tech entrepreneur, and Chamillionaire, an American rapper-come-entrepreneur. [Aye] grew up in one of the poorest countries on earth. She shouldn’t have many opportunities. Yet here she was, talking with me at a Silicon Valley party after the Always On conference. The route she took? She went to MIT. How did she get in? Was one of the top-scoring students in Burma. One of the top 10, in fact.