MarkMaunder dot com

What it's like to be an entrepreneur

Dave Lu, CEO of FanPop.com was part of a panel at the Churchill club recently – a previous entry has the video. I loved an analogy he made: That the leap of faith you take as an entrepreneur is a lot like a scene from Indiana Jones. Here’s the scene: I love what he does […]

July 18, 2007 | Startups | No comments

Markus Frind James Hong video panel/interview

I found this awesome vid on Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It’s a panel session with Markus Frind, Founder, PlentyofFish.com and James Hong, Co-Founder, HotorNot.com and a few others. Markus Frind is my personal hero and much of the reason I have an aversion to VC money. This is more than an hour long, so when you’re […]

July 18, 2007 | Startups | No comments

Open Coffee at Louisa's

I’m at open coffee this morning at Lousa’s Coffee shop in Seattle – here early to get some reading in. Come down if you’re free this morning. There’s going to be an awesome group of entrepreneurs and innovators here from 8:30 until everyone leaves (usually after 10:30).

July 17, 2007 | Innovation, Startups | No comments

Programming language choices for entrepreneurs

I’ll often find myself chatting about choice of technology with fellow entrepreneurs and invariably it’s assumed the new web app is going to be developed in Rails. I don’t know enough about Rails to judge it’s worth. I do know that you can develop applications in Rails very quickly and that it scales complexity better […]

July 17, 2007 | Code, Startups, Technology | No comments

Saving server costs with Javascript using distributed processing

I run two consumer web businesses. LineBuzz.com and Geojoey.com. Both have more than 50% of the app impelemented in Javascript and execute in the browser environment. Something that occurred to me a while ago is that, because most of the execution happens inside the browser and uses our visitors CPU and memory, I don’t have […]

July 16, 2007 | Code, Innovation, Startups, Technology | No comments

Competitive intelligence tools

In an earlier post I suggested that too much competitive analysis too early might be a bad idea. But it got me thinking about the tools that are available for gathering competitive intelligence about a business and what someone else might be using to gather data about my business. Archive.org One of my favorites! Use […]

July 16, 2007 | SEO, Startups, Technology | No comments

Negotiating your aquisition

Just a tiny bit of wisdom I picked up along the way. As always, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you’re selling your business, you’re going to be handed an M&A agreement. That agreement is probably going to have something like 15 pages of representations and warranties – things […]

July 15, 2007 | Startups | No comments

How to start a startup – for developers

Creating your own startup is easy. You don’t need an MBA. You don’t need an expensive law firm. You don’t need an ‘older more mature CEO’ to hold your hand. And if you can afford 6 months without an income and $5k to get started, you might not even need a VC or Angel investor. […]

July 14, 2007 | Startups | 1 comment

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.