Greg Gottesman's Blog

Calling All Engineers: Why So Serious?

“Why so serious?” –The Joker in Batman Returns

If you are fortunate enough to be building software for a living, do us this small favor: Put a little more personality into your products.

The best products pay deference to their creators. They’re functional, but they also can be fun at times, whimsical, punchy, interesting, sexy and surprising. Done well, they mimic the best parts of the personality of the teams that created them.

The classic example of adding personality to a product is Google’s homepage. Is there a more

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Posted on January 25, 2013 by greggottesman · 2 Comments

Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?

I spent this morning at the Career Day of my youngest kids’ elementary school (West Mercer) with about 30 third, fourth, and fifth graders. My session was entitled “Your $100,000,000 Idea.” My goal was to explain what a venture capitalist does, lay out the criteria we use to make investments (team, product, market, business model and timing), and give each student the opportunity to pitch a new business concept. I told the students that each group would pick a winning idea, and I would publish the winners here.

To my surprise, the ideas the students came up with were incredibly

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Posted on January 17, 2013 by greggottesman · 1 Comment

Interview with the Great Wizard of Moz, Rand Fishkin

No one has been more supportive of StarkRavingVC.com than Rand Fishkin, the SEOmoz CEO who has more Twitter followers than the populations of the capital cities of Alaska, Maryland and Vermont (combined). When I started blogging, Rand Fishkin wrote a post about the 14 ideas he wanted me to write about in my blog. We decided it might be fun to hit them all in a video interview format. It’s no Skyfall, but I think Rand does an excellent job of posing the questions that entrepreneurs really want to ask VCs. Let me know what you think.

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Posted on January 4, 2013 by GG · 15 Comments