Disqus - Latest Comments for elias

Re: USHealth Advisors Keep Calling? | TCPA Lawsuit | ClassAction.org

Elias Bizannes — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 12:24:31 -0000

Just got a call from them on 319 302 2452.

Re: AMA - Martin Hosking | Sunrise

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 18:44:52 -0000

If you had your time over again -- both in career and with Redbubble -- what would you have done differently to have become a better entrepreneur, executive and listed company sooner?

Re: AMA - Samantha Wong | Sunrise

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 18:19:30 -0000

What can us men do to better support women in the industry?

Re: AMA - Bardia Housman | Sunrise

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 18:12:27 -0000

World domination -- you're kind of good at that, selling two tech companies and now a real estate baron and now having the luxury to financially retire. What's your secret for success?

Re: CRITICAL UPDATE Re: DAO Vulnerability

Elias Bizannes — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 23:55:13 -0000

Vitalik, thank you. You're showing the leadership the community and now industry needs. Precedents like this will only make the future system more resilient and robust.

Re: AMA - Rick Baker | Blackbird Ventures

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 25 May 2016 23:28:14 -0000

It's Australia 2030. I'm sipping on my latte re-reading this post to see what one of Australia's leading investors thought the future would look like. So tell me sir, what does the future (current) look like?

Re: AMA - Chris Hexton | Blackbird Ventures

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 18:13:15 -0000

When coming up with the new product concept for Vero, how long did it take? What was the process to go from initial idea and brainstorming with your cofounders and team? What would you recommend looking back to have had you move in half the time for half the cost?

Re: AMA - Geoff McQueen | Blackbird Ventures

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 21:15:52 -0000

You often hear about entrepreneurship and stories of near death behind every major success story. You're turning into a success story yourself now, can you share any near death building-your-company experiences?

Re: AMA - Ash Fontana | Blackbird Ventures

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 20:28:45 -0000

I little birdy told me you turned down a job at a traditional Sand Hill VC to work at Angel List instead. Why? Any regrets?

Re: The Good Way to Say Good Bye

Elias Bizannes — Fri, 29 Jan 2016 12:55:53 -0000

I guess that's why I'm puzzled if it's about fairness. Disregarding the contributions of someone is the equivalent of unpaid wages being cleared off the books. Your philosophy is a great one and needs to be holistic, but this doesn't make sense and opens it up to unnecessary litigation.

That said, if you strictly define what "jerk" means -- like fraud, theft and working on a competing business -- then that would work. But allowing discretion of what constitutes a (un)fair termination is a weakness with this that if you don't define would have to get defined by the courts eventually.

Re: The Good Way to Say Good Bye

Elias Bizannes — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 22:39:04 -0000

Thanks for the clarification.

I'm influenced by California's at-will employments I guess where it doesn't actually matter. So my issue is having people earn equity and then clearing them is something that could be manipulated, much like how a CEO could fire someone before their one year cliff.

It should be you get paid out when you "gave" in fair market value or you can convert that to equity, but that's it. Whenever you allow discretion to (dis)allow someone to convert their contribution then that's a weakness in the model.

Re: The Good Way to Say Good Bye

Elias Bizannes — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 20:00:22 -0000

Mike, I love your concept and I admit I haven't read your book yet but I think this complicates your model. It's subjective (so who gets to decide which quadrant in the situation, a court?), and the whole point of what I'm reading is that you recognise equity based on performance. So to take it away from someone later, defeats the purpose of performance recognition.

It's like saying you pay someone a salary for a year and then you ask them to pay you back because the left on bad terms. But they can "keep" their salary, if they had a good reason. If this was a cash salary, this wouldn't be the case.

Re: AMA - Didier Elzinga | Blackbird Ventures

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 16:25:50 -0000

You suffered for three years bootstrapping and then got the traction you needed to start expanding. What would you have done differently in retrospect that could have shaved time from your execution?

Re: AMA - Andre Eikmeier | Blackbird Ventures

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 13 Jan 2016 18:16:31 -0000

You've said you changed your internal sales metrics from revenues to happiness and got the business to $50m in sales. Can you share a bit more on what those metrics were and what difference that made?

Re: How to Identify Talent

Elias Bizannes — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:49:03 -0000

Great post kyle -- I would tweak the formula though to incorporate 'capacity' as well.

You can be talented, you can have determination -- but you can also have so much on your plate where you don't have time and can't focus, that your effectiveness dwindles.

Re: How to become a “full time” foreign entrepreneur in the US

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:31:12 -0000

Yep, I don't see why not. Just because you own a business doesn't mean it invalidates your visa to work for a company which brought you to the US.

Re: Roboinvest, ‘Trading for the Rest of Us,’ Booms After Debut | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.

Elias Bizannes — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:18:54 -0000

Awesome progress Michael -- it's exciting to see you develop your vision.

Re: A Moment With My Sink

Elias Bizannes — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:30:12 -0000

Aha, sorry it's a phrase I use every day now due to the construction work at StartupHouse. It's lipstick on the pig that changes property, sorry poor way of linking it to the topic -- you probably haven't heard me say it :)

Re: A Moment With My Sink

Elias Bizannes — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 04:04:21 -0000

Sinks are the lipstick; I measure success more on what the lipstick is covering: the pig...and the amount of mud the pig got to roll around. :-)

Existence, Freedom, Impact -- and how much I'm optimising in those three dimensions http://eliasbizannes.com/bl...

Re: http://sinzone.me/post/8525724595

Elias Bizannes — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:00:56 -0000

Boom. It's on like donkey kong.

Re: Goooood Morning, Silicon Alley! Gary Sharma’s Picks for the Week of Nov. 7: Sponsor Gary’s Red Tie Edition

Elias Bizannes — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:29:29 -0000

The StartupBus Accelerate event link is wrong, it should be: http://startupbus.com/event...

Re: FullyFollow.Me: Follow, Friend & Connect with a Click

Elias Bizannes — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:24:38 -0000

Ha, I take it you haven't heard about another StartupBus product: http://profile.io/

Re: Why We Sold TechCrunch To AOL, And Where We Go From Here

Elias Bizannes — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 21:01:06 -0000

Mike,

Congrats. I'm going to need to update my biography on you (http://eliasbizannes.com/bl...

That said, two questions:
1) If Cubrilovic didn't do his disappearing act in December and did his job as CTO of TechCrunch, would things be different?

2) I see a ceiling in revenue potential for tech blogs due to limited inventory and hence capping the valuation potential. Conferences bring in money, but also have low margin -- growth is limited. Rafat I'm guessing sold at a similar amount as you exited because he would have seen a similar window and jumped. But let's assume you weren't tired; your tech problems didn't exit; and all you had to do was write and find new writers. To what extent can a 'news media empire' like the TechCrunch network scale to? What's preventing Mashable, GigaOm and RWW from becoming $100 million companies? Is subscription/analyst content the best way forward? I guess the point of my question is, as a new media pioneer -- what do you think is the future of the news media and its sustainability as a business model, in the wake of the changing economics of information. CPM is dying quietly and advertising dollars moving to a performance based model -- but long term, what will be driving the economics of the media? Is it conferences, lead gen, analyst reports, or maybe even the donation model?

Re: Journalism Student Won’t Leave Steve Jobs Alone

Elias Bizannes — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 20:08:10 -0000

Steve's in the wrong for responding (or his assistants who manage his email): there is no need for him to respond to unsolicited emails. He's a busy guy and like most busy people, if he doesn't respect his time no one will. The student has not right to demand a response and Apple's response is a favour and not an entitlement.

Re: Why every website should have a data portability policy

Elias Bizannes — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:52:43 -0000

So where's Backupify's Portability Policy? :)

You might also be interested in reading my economic theory about the value chain http://eliasbizannes.com/bl...