Startup Revolution

This is a great list and the piece starts with great quotes. I've started 4 companies. The biggest generated more than $16M in specialty gift sales and put products you may know into our popular lexicon (Magnetic Poetry Kit, Zen Board now Buddha Board). 

One idea I use to find the next thing to work on is creating a thought experiment. Thought experiments always start with a question. Last night I worked on an idea sparked by an interesting question from my tenure as an Ecommerce Director:

Q: 
Is there a way to TEST before spending money?

Quirky.com and Threadless harness the power of crowds to only product ideas with enough built in Day One support success is all but assured. 

My question was about how to create a process requiring little investment in time or capital that could help reduce the risk of any capial spent. 

I was able to answer that question in the affirmative and hope to share the idea soon (still in the could tell you but then would have to kill you stage :). 

 

Great advice here on how to "sell" the meeting. 

Cure Cancer Starter & Story of Cancer Foundation 
There comes a point in every startup where you have to "burn the boats". You have to push all the chips into the middle of the table, go all in. That point for me is NOW. 

I'm funding creation of CureCancerStarter.org (http://www.curecancerstarter.org ) with my Marketing Director Salary at Atlantic BT. Atlantic BT is helping by matching my investment. Cure Cancer Starter will be the first crowdfunding platform dedicated to cancer research, created by a cancer survivor (me) and working with great cancer research institutes (Duke, UNC, City of Hope, Roswell Park, University of Wisconsin Carbone & others soon). 

The platform is FREE for cancer centers to use as my way of saying THANK YOU for saving my life (more than once). Free for cancer patients their friends and family to use as my way of saying thanks for being there for me. 

As is always the case development costs are 2x what we thought so I need to raise some CASH. Tomorrow my SELL EVERYTHING sale starts. Will be selling my house and collections of books, records (the old fashioned kind), CDs, furniture, bicycles and anything and everything I own.

Time to go all in. You can help by letting your friends know about my SELLING EVERYTHING sale (live on Sunday June 2nd and house on market Monday June 3) and volunteering to help Cure Cancer Starter and the Tech Cures Cancer Movement (details tomorrow).