Go Team!

John Doerr is a VC with an apparently great track record, and does a Question and Answer session with Fast Company. He confirms the mental calculus that's been churning in the back of my mind recently: a great team is everything. Worth reading, if you're thinking about raising some hell with your own company some day. However, it's the kind of advice that you will have had to experience before you really get it. Via jd.

Beating the Syndicate

It's interesting to see how art and commerce collude to make money in an eyeball-driven media marketplace, and just how territorial people can be about protecting those structures. What people forget is how fragile even the mightiest of institutions can be, once people realize they have a better choice, and that choice is freely accessible. Buggywhip and barrel makers may welcome the syndicated cartoonist to their club of outmoded artisans, as entrepreneurial web cartoonists assault the newspaper cartoon page with new business models.

The idea is that popular web cartoonists offer their strips for free to traditional newspapers, in exchange for advertising or exposure. The syndicated cartoonists, described in this WebSnark editorial, are naturally upset. Scott Kurtz kicked the controversy off at SDCC 2004, for those who want to delve back a bit deeper.

Innovative Company Structures

Jeff over at Scintus forwarded me this FastCompany article about the most innovative company in America. Is it Apple, with their amazing string of products? Pixar? IBM? Nope! It's W.L. Gore & Associates, the company that makes GoreTex:

Gore is a strikingly contradictory company: a place where nerds can be mavericks; a place that's impatient with the standard way of working, but more than patient with nurturing ideas and giving them time to flourish; a place that's humble in its origins, yet ravenous for breakthrough ideas and, ultimately, growth.

It's an interesting article...thanks Jeff!

Dot-Com Business Plan Archive

The Economy seems to be picking up here in the greater Boston area. Just about everyone I know seems to have more work than they can handle, which is great if you're a freelancer. But beware the mistakes of the past that threaten to drag us down once again! Enter the Business Plan Archive:

The Internet boom and bust of 1996 to 2002 was the most important business phenomenon of the past several decades. In the wake of this historic period, we have an unprecedented opportunity to learn from our past mistakes and successes.

To help us learn from history, we are creating the Business Plan Archive (BPA) to collect business plans and related documents from the dot com era. These plans – the “blueprints” that lay out the assumptions and strategies of Internet entrepreneurs – will enable entrepreneurs and researchers to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research.

Sounds pretty cool! Registration required, though. Via slashdot.

Pure CSS Slideshow

Read on Joel on Software about this pure css slideshow called s5. It seems like it would be a good tool for one's client extranet, in sweet compliant CSS. Think of it as an engine for creating slide-style presentations on the web, just the kind of thing that might be nice for presenting a series of mockups or even online proposals. The default templates are not much to write home about, but you can of course customize them.