I tried to setup all my bills to pay off my credit card because I never open my mail, however I recently received an email notification from Qwest with the subject, ‘Unable to process Qwest Paperless Billing’ and the body:
The following error occurred while trying to display property:
An error occurred while trying to find node by path /Email/eBill/Confirmation/templates/failure/ece_paperless_fail.html.
Ah yes, I know exactly what to do now to fix that problem!
Rick Segal wants to give a musician $40. He tried talking to the RIAA, ASCAP, Amazon, his agent and his management company.
Sounds like he could have used Fairtunes (why did I let the domain name lapse??), a voluntary contribution system for music. You gave Fairtunes $5 or $40 and we’d track down the artist or their management company and cut them an old fashioned cheque and mail it to them. We ended up distributing tens of thousands of dollars but the site never really took off.
We flipped it to two crazy guys in a barn in upstate New York. We should have made off with hundreds of thousands but our lawyer made more on the deal than we did. I don’t know about John but I used my $3000 dividend cheque to buy my Neon. Sadly the boys in New York, while having co-founded About.com, ended up bankrupting themselves trying to make Fairtunes successful. Their first mistake was renaming the company to Musiclink, the second was re-writing the site and of course the third was screwing us.
Seven years later the idea is still a good one. My big regret was that instead of flipping it post-bubble we didn’t form a non-profit or non-for-profit to run the the site. I think the idea still has merit but there likely is not a good business case around it (we told investors that we were going to make interest off the float, how naive!)
From the ‘I’d be really impressed if you found this department’: I’m looking for a red Kopp glass lens. 8 3/8. Marbelite #77.
About once every two months I meet with a friend or friend of a friend working at one of the local big companies, Amazon, or Microsoft, because they’re interested in hearing more about the world of startups. At each of these discussions I rattle off a long list of must visit links and must attend events.
Local startup blogs
Everyone dialed into the Seattle startup scene reads John Cook’s Venture Blog who closely covers the Seattle startup scene. No other blog comes close. Though I do secretly yearn for a RainCityWag.
List of VC firms and startups
If you’re looking for startup jobs one of the best ways to find them is to visit the sites for the local VC firms and see who they have funded recently. The Seattle PI’s venture page is good for this.
Other startup blogs
A quick poll suggests most of us startup obsessed people read the following blogs:
TechCrunch
Guy Kawasaki
Paul Graham
Don Dodge
Organizations with events
This summer Jeff, Rob and I hit the startup event scene hard. Here’s my take on the events (in order of preference):
Seattle Tech Startups: These events attract a younger crowd than the other ones which is perhaps why I like them the most. The first bit is at the Seattle Public Library on Capitol Hill and the second bit is at the Stumbling Monk.
Ignite Seattle: Drink, mingle and listen to five minute presentations on random topics. Well attended by a hip crowd at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. Normally very hot and sweaty.
MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest. The have events with normally pretty decent guest speakers. The crowd is older and more dressed up. They also have breakfast sessions but damned if I’m going to wake up at 6:30am and drive to the east side.
Seattle Lunch 2.0: Have lunch at someone else’s offices and find out about something new.
nPost Seattle Networking events: We go to pub night and seem to fit in just fine.
North West Entrepreneur Network: Everything from tech startups to people hawking exercise machines that you might find on a late night infomercial. Pricey to join.
I haven’t attended these yet:
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