John Greathouse’s Bio

Gregory - you just made my day, thank you. Writing is a solitary undertaking and I often question if my advice is too rudimentary, obvious or even irrelevant. Feedback like yours is what keeps me focused on generated a steady output of entries.

Best of luck to you and please keep me posted of your progress.

John

Steven - that is high praise! Thank you for your kind words and for your service to our country. My father was a career military officer, so I have deep appreciation for your contributions.

I am curious, do you recall how you came across my humble blog? 

Cheers,

John

Thanks for the additional color. I haven’t done much to promote my blog, so I am always curious how folks discover my site. Google has been good to me, probably b/c I have been writing consistently since 2007.

All the best to you.

Troy,

Thank you, that is high praise. Ultimately that is my goal, to help others, in some small way, by sharing my experiences. I wish I would have had a business mentor in my youth, as I would have avoided numerous mistakes. 

All the best to you.

John

Jeff,

Sounds good. Send it to the info email address on Rincon Venture’s site and make it clear that it is to be forwarded to me. 

I am happy to give you some feedback.

Laura,

Docstoc (http://www.docstoc.com/) is a great source of agreements and documents, many of which are free. 

Also, get a great startup lawyer, as I discuss here: http://infochachkie.com/roping-in-the-legal-eagles/

You may also want to review this series on contracts, but I will warn you it is pretty detailed. You can read the first in the series here: http://infochachkie.com/contract-traps/

The issues shown in the Facebook movie could have been easily avoided with less passive aggressive behavior and a decent dose of maturity. If you are not already using Quora, start. I have seen some good answers regarding splitting up equity between Founders.

Glad to see you in the game. The world needs more entrepreneurs!

Good luck to you and your team.

John

John - Just discovered your blog via SoCalTech.  Now I have add another tab to my bookmark toolbar..you are in good company next to TechCrunch,  GeekWire and Feld Thoughts   Some really good insight.  It’s great to get another socal view on the tech landscape.

My co-founder and I have what we believe to be a very disruptive consumer ecomm concept that is seed stage.  We need about $30-50K to complete our pilot and POC in a multibillion dollar market.  We have a few angel investors we can go to, but I would really like to get your thoughts on strategic (active) seed capital vs. return-based (passive) seed investors. 

We are considering applying for the winter Launchpad LA class, but our model is not a pure software/programming solution.  It’s both software and hardware (infrastructure) investment as we grow.  I want to make sure that we have the right investor behind us that understands a longer-term build out, as well as long-term earnings. 

Question:  Do you think the accelerators like Launchpad, Muckerlab, etc. are really only geared for pure software/programming/social/gamification type concepts? OR do you have any recommendations that might consider an infrastructure build out along with an ecomm, emobile? (I believe you are involved in Launchpad?)

Any feedback at all would be appreciated.

Best of luck!

TJ

Hello. Thank you so much for speaking last Friday at the SB startup weekend.
I was really moved by what you said.
There were two things that I found especially important.
What you said about knowing yourself and your shortcomings was huge for me.
As was the part about taking responsibility for the situation rather than placing blame.
These were two vastly important things I had only just recently learned on my own.
And your talking about them gave me some much needed validation.
Thanks again.

Our presentation needed work so we weren’t well received. But we did get a lot of good market validation and investor interest. So we’re most likely going to move forward with the project.

Hi John!

I just wanted to reach out and say how much I love this site and the content it provides to startups. Do you accept contributed content?
My name is Brittany Dowell and I’m the Director of Publishing Relations over at Digital Talent Agents. What I do is get our clients’ articles publication-ready for your site to publish and use as contributed or guest content, whichever you’d prefer. These articles do not contain any promotional-type content, only industry relevant insights and advice from our clients that genuinely want to help others. Several of our clients are experts in startups and entrepreneurship. They have been published on such sites as WSJ, Entrepreneur, Inc., the list could go on and on! Many have chosen your site as a place of inspiration and they would love to contribute. Any thoughts?

Thanks, John!

-Brittany

John,

I also had the privilege to hear you speak at the Startup Weekend, Santa Barbara. I appreciate your candid insight and feedback on the human side of entrepreneurship. You gave us all an important reminder, the importance of knowing thyself… 

Easier said than done… Even Franklin said “There are three things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.”

However, you also shared a unique first step, use an intermediary to ask 20 people in our immediate network what they think we are good at/ not so good at. This allows us to seek the truth, and to find out who other people think we are. I am going to give this exercise a shot starting this weekend. I am looking forward to the results.

Do you have any additional references on this exercise that I could read up on, and share with my friends? Also, you mentioned something about people liking the negative photos of themselves. I did not catch this fully, can you please clarify. Thanks!!!

Cheers,
Brian

Hi John, I loved your comparison of the Lean Start-up to Louie Louie and it got me reading your blog, great, practical advice. I wanted to bring your attention to my book, Slicing Pie, that I think would be a good fit with your readers, it explains how to use a dynamic equity split to determine exactly how much equity each person in the start up deserves. It’s a new way of thinking about the problem that solves a lot of problems. If you want I will send you a copy.

Melanie - thanks for your kind words, but I have put guest entries on hold for now.

Lukas - thanks for asking. Unfortunately, other than what I have read on TechCrunch et. al., I don’t know much about this world. Sorry I can be helpful here.