Author Archives: Simeon Simeonov

About Simeon Simeonov

Entrepreneur. Investor. Trusted advisor.

The rising power of the Google platform

If anyone ever doubted that Google is a platform company, check out the “Google SDK.” I’m putting this in quotes because what you find there is really an aggregation of a bunch of separate projects than a well-thought-out integrated SDK–that … Continue reading

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Eric Ries interview about lean startups

Lean startup meme inventor Eric Ries is in town. He will be at the Lean Startup Circle event on Thursday night. If you are lucky-enough to have gotten a ticket for this, either hold it tight or sell it on … Continue reading

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Twilio forwarding and CallerID hack

I like Twilio. They’ve made programming voice fun, something it certainly wasn’t when Dialogic boards were the platform of choice. I’m using Twilio for a new service I’m working on. More on this in another post. When you start playing … Continue reading

Posted in Web 2.0 | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments

Finally

After more than four years, I finally updated the theme of this blog and added better linking to FastIgnite and FastStartup. The new theme is Twenty Ten, which sets me up for planned obsolescence in less than three months. Know any … Continue reading

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The Zen of fundraising

When investing in companies through FastIgnite, I usually sell my super-secret value-add as opposed to just cash. See, cash is not that hard to get if you know how to ask for it and there aren’t any obvious reasons for … Continue reading

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FastStartup

Through FastIgnite I work closely with entrepreneurs as a co-founder, investor and mentor. Today, FastIgnite gets a partner – FastStartup. While FastIgnite is primarily about my work, FastStartup will be more community-oriented. FastStartup will do some events, like the sold out Customer … Continue reading

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The Startup Holy Trinity

My last post was about agile ideologies, the practice of suspending disbelief and trying something without too much thinking or tweaking for long-enough to collect quality data but not long-enough to go native and lose perspective. A great starting point … Continue reading

Posted in cloud computing, startups | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Agile ideology in startups

I am not a fan of ideologies. Inflexibility of thinking or the ability to take reality into account rarely leads to great outcomes. Just look at history. Methodologies, on the other hand, I like. The difference between the two is in … Continue reading

Posted in Life, startups | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

The master moves to the cloud

Fact: data is moving en masse from PCs and enterprise networks to SaaS applications in the cloud. This trend will reshape the computing industry and change the very core of how we think about data and applications. For example, we … Continue reading

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Finding the best startup customers

Phil Libin (@plibin, CEO of Evernote), Alexei Erchak (CEO of Luminous Devices) and I did a session with the Boston chapter of the Founder Institute last night. Towards the end of the program we listened to several startup pitches. Every … Continue reading

Posted in FastIgnite, startups | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments