October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 48. Avoid Distractions
Andy Sack
Andy is the managing director of TechStars in Seattle, the co-founder of Founders Co-op, and the co-founder of Revenue Loan.
I became the lead investor in Tom Staple's company, Cooler Planet, in July 2007. The company was originally conceived to do lead generation in the energy efficiency market. Neither Tom, Chris DeVore (my partner at Founders Co-Op), nor I had experience in anything remotely related to the energy efficiency market. We didn't let that ignorance stop us; we were knowledgeable about online marketing and we thought the trend toward green energy was going to grow a bunch over the next five years.
Tom decided to focus on and win the solar market first. His theory was that energy efficiency was too broad a market to cover; solar was narrower and it'd be easier for us to matter to both consumers and merchants if we narrowed our focus. At first, Tom thought that winning the solar market would take about six months. We were right about narrowing our focus but totally underestimated the time that it would take to win the solar market.
Tom spent the first two years building a series of web sites that provided the backbone of becoming the Number One consumer resource for solar information online. The business model is simple: The company attracts user traffic interested in solar (both paid and organic) and then monetizes the traffic by selling ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.