Competition & differentiation – Startup Briefs post #14
Few folks come to me having done extensive competitive analysis about their idea/product. What ensues goes something like this: “What do you know about the competition?” I ask. “Oh, what I do is different?” the young entrepreneur...
Value proposition, post #9 of “Startup Briefs”
As the school year gets underway, and I prep for practical, outside the classroom entrepreneurial education, I am reminded of the importance of value proposition. Sometimes that term gets bandied about as part of...
3×3: Experts on funding
Last week, the University of Pittsburgh’s student accelerator, Blast Furnace (run by my colleague Greg Coticchia) teams heard from three experts on funding early stage companies. The Blast Furnace is the University of...
The customer, post #3 of “Startup Briefs”
What is more important than your idea? More important than your startup? More important than you? You got it – your customer. Most first-time entrepreneurs don’t focus early enough on their customers: who they are, what their...
The idea, post #2 of “Startup Briefs”
How do you come up with the next big idea? How do you come up with an idea that is worth risking your time, expertise and talent? Your career? Where do ideas come from anyway? Let’s take a look at a few ways that I have seen...
Congrats to the Pittsburgh startup community. Oh, and stop congratulating yourself.
Pittsburgh is simply better than it ever was before. Period. This is a guest post by Greg Coticchia, of ENTRA and Entrepreneur in Residence at the Innovation Institute at Pitt. When I look around I see lots of exciting companies:...
Finding the entrepreneur
I make entrepreneurs honest. Yesterday I wished that, instead of offering slots in the Thrill Mill accelerator as a result of pitches by a team for a particular idea, we could just pick by interviewing the people to discover if...
CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA
Computer science professor, Manuel Blum, had been thinking about human computation and authentication schemes for quite some time. So in 2000 when Udi Manber, then chief scientist at Yahoo!, mentioned that bots were logging on as...
Importance of Entrepreneurship for African Americans
My mother sacrificed a lot, working two jobs early on in my life to make sure I could have more than she had as a child. She had me at the age of 21 and wasn’t able continue her college education, which made her a big proponent...
A glimpse of the future: Baxter the robot
Rodney Brooks, a thought leader in robotics and entrepreneurship, came to Pittsburgh the other day. Carnegie Mellon, courtesy of Matt Mason and the Robotics Institute, hosted Rod for the public unveiling of his new talk, “A new...