Tips Down

Several have reported that the New York Times, amongst others, ran a shortage of newspapers on November 5th after the successful election of Barack Obama.

My initial reaction: Newspapers? People still read those?

I’m going to make an effort to assemble some of the best videos on startups and entrepreneurship from around the internet here. This is the kind of stuff I love to watch and and sometimes it’s too dispersed to find the great ones.

VentureBeat’s Roundtable: The Venture Capitalists:


The Entrepreneurs:

An interesting method to rank colleges: The Global Language Monitor (www.LangaugeMonitor.com) ranked schools according to their mention in global media. The results:

Rank Top Universities
1 Harvard University
2 Columbia University
3 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
4 University of California, Berkeley
5 Stanford University
6 University of Chicago
7 University of Wisconsin, Madison
8 Yale University
9 Princeton University
10 Cornell University
11 University of Pennsylvania
12 Johns Hopkins University
13 Duke University
14 Boston College
15 New York University

Full Article is here.

Michigan beats Berkeley? Never

I met recently with a friend of mine who’s starting a online news site as a side project. I helped him a bit with go to market strategy and then asked if he had a plan to build community.

His answer: “Why do I need one?”

I thought about this because I always imagined the need was implicit. Here’s why you need a community.

Path of a customer:
1. Get the attention of Ideal Customer
1a. –engage–
2. Customer
3. Long time customer
4. Evangelist Customer

The growth towards evangelist customers is time consuming - but this group is extraordinarily valuable. These are the water-cooler conversationalists, the ones who invite their friends to a great new service: the leaders of your soon to be created community.
Most consumer orientated sites today have ‘users’ - you’re still making a sale to them whether you’re convincing them to buy something or take some action. In more general terms, customers could refer to users who make conversions.

For the past 9 months, Obama and his campaign has said that, shortly after graduating law school, Barack Obama gave up a high-paying job at a law firm to be a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. This was supposed to demonstrate his humility, his dedication to the community and the social good: he could have chosen the corporate track, but he choose to do good instead.

McCain’s VP nominee Sarah Palin expertly turned his strength into a weakness with one line: “I guess [being a Mayor is] like being a community organizer… except you have actual responsibilities. (paraphrased)”

Obama’s campaign is immediately put in a position to backpedal and defend a line they’ve used hundreds of times. Interesting: the most damaging attacks are often the most simple.

Hi. Thanks for coming to my blog. I’ll be writing here a bit about entrepreneurship, the internet, life as a young professional, and some other things that interest me.

You can always contact me by email here: nathanielrdean@gmail.com.

Thanks.