Tony Wright dot com

On Friday I spoke at a “Business Bootcamp” in Corvallis, Oregon. The event was fabulous (big thanks to John Sechrest) and I was pretty impressed to see that kind of passion for startups in Corvallis.
I wanted to follow up with that community with a few thoughts (that might be interesting to a broader audience, [...]

This will be a small post, but I stumbled onto some interesting data that I thought I’d share. As a background, we’re currently searching for a great C++ dev to work at our startup here in Seattle. I decided to do a bit of research to see other job postings, compensation packages, etc.
I [...]

My first experience with stock options was at the ripe age of 34 years old, when I was selling Jobby (retired) to Jobster (Gah, make the Web 2.0 names STOP!). Before that, I’d been running my own business for close to a decade– with good success, but there really wasn’t any sense in setting [...]

Last night I spoke at Seattle Tech Startups. Given that lots of people who go to these meetings tend to be wantrepreneurs (aspiring startup folks), I focused on early decisions that need to be be made. Do you shoot for a great lifestyle business or do you aim for a grandslam? Services [...]

Christian Anderson (a former colleague at Jobster) had an interesting (and well-researched) post on his blog called “How to Pitch Robert Scoble — HINT: No Direct Tweets“… , which led to a discussion on FriendFeed (with Robert himself weighing in) that was pretty interesting.
I had a contribution bouncing around in my head but held off [...]

A lot of people are damn religious about bootrapping businesses. Especially nowadays when it’s so easy to start a software business– you just need a few hackers, Ruby on Rails, a cheap virtual server and you’re ready to roll, right?
Sure.
But just because it’s cheaper to start a software company, doesn’t mean that it’s that [...]

I can’t help but think that the startup world is a bit drunk on the concept of viral distribution. Distribution is a huge problem for startups, so I suppose that I can’t blame them.
First of all, I want to point out that I think viral distribution freakin’ rocks. It’s amazing. It’s awe-inspiring. [...]

One of the frustrating things about iterative software development is that you never get to do a heroic launch (a la Steve Jobs). Your software starts off to be barely good enough for someone to endure. The next week it’s better. Rinse, repeat. If you’re good, someday you wake up and [...]

I wrote a little guest post over at FoundRead (part of the GigaOm network). Give it a read!
http://gigaom.com/2008/04/02/ycombinator/

This Wednesday, I’ll be participating in a really interesting panel discussion entitled “Silicon Valley Fights Back Against the (Information) Monster it Created”. The panel is moderated by Matt Richtel (New York Times Correspondent). Here’s the description:
Intel launched no email Fridays. So did US Cellular. Some managers at Genentech urge employees to check email [...]