MarkMaunder dot com

Monetization or Cannibalization – The State of Social Gaming Marketing

Mike Arrington is a genius. Main-stream journalists sit up, knees together, back straight and start taking notes because this is a master at work. His recent blog entry titled Scamville calls out the most focused on and buzz-worthy companies in the valley for making money from advertising scams and accuses Facebook of encouraging a vile […]

November 1, 2009 | Startups | No comments

The best lesson in entrepreneurship you'll get this year

This is a brilliant short talk by Tina Selig asking students “If you had $5 and 2 hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible?”. Her point that capital can simply be a distraction is a view I’ve held for a long time – especially in the context of cheap-to-start-and-run consumer […]

October 31, 2009 | Startups | No comments

The profitable business of taking money from startups

Under the guise of fostering innovation, guys like The Life Sciences and Healthcare Venture Summit, who spammed me today are happily taking money from entrepreneurs and offering a tax deductible day out of the office in return. Perhaps I’m inspired by Jason Calcanis’s recent jihad against investors that charge you to pitch, but these high […]

October 15, 2009 | Startups | No comments

Bleet: Big VC's aren't always the best choice

What’s a Bleet? A blog entry that really should be a tweet. Naval and Nivi (venturehacks) posted an interesting tweet today: Chris Dixon on the problem with taking seed money from big VCs: http://j.mp/2BHIPe. Some solutions: http://j.mp/4hFSsL I agree. I think there’s cachet value in having a large VC invest and based on Chris’s (IMO […]

October 14, 2009 | Startups | No comments

An immaginary conversation about immigration with Glenn Beck

Update: I wrote this blog entry and then predictably, I unposted it after my more diplomatic side took over. But it got out via my RSS feed anyway and a friend enjoyed it. So here it is in all it’s left wing liberal glory. I’m switching the published date to today. Enjoy. I’m an immigrant. […]

October 12, 2009 | Immigration, Innovation, Startups | No comments

ROTFLMFAO at 3am!

I’m sitting here laughing hysterically at 3am trying not to wake the whole house. Found this old fail surfing youtube:

October 11, 2009 | Startups | No comments

Will Twitter's lax data ownership policy result in jail time?

Update: My real-time traffic feed says it all. 🙂 Thanks for the mention and link-love M.G. and Techcrunch. Two people died and 19 passed out at an Arizona sweat lodge last night. The author who hosted the event is James Arthur Ray and is an avid Twitterer. He deleted his 10 most recent tweets after […]

October 9, 2009 | Startups | 1 comment

The real LCROSS mission

October 9, 2009 | Startups | No comments

Advice to a new Seattle entrepreneur

Google Groups archive of the STS mailing list isn’t working reliably, so I’m archiving a few emails I’ve sent to the STS list here. One day when I have too much time I’ll create a reliable threaded archive of the whole list. I sent this as a reply to a “getting started” advice request from […]

June 7, 2009 | Startups | 1 comment

The Two Universes

I posted this today to the Seattle tech startup mailing list. A few folks liked it, so I’m reposting it here. It’s in response to a NY Times article talking about VC’s not caring about a business plan. In my experience the most interesting things to a prospective valley based technology investor in descending order […]

May 15, 2009 | Startups | No comments

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.