One year ago, we sold Spreets to Yahoo!7 before the business was 1 year old. It was one sign in many to media companies that the world had changed. The new world moves quickly. This was not a vanity investment from a media company trying to be cool, it was a real investment that materially [...]
When we started Pollenizer in 2008, we also started an Indian business to provide the software engineering services we needed to economically and rapidly launch our web businesses. Over the next three years we visited India every couple of months and grew a team around our our good friend Jagadeesh VM (“Jugs”) to 60 people. [...]
Are you watching China? There are some super interesting trends happening and we have become fascinated in its progress now we are spending time in the country. We’ll talk more about this in the coming year, but for now, we just want to get a couple of blogs added to your reading list. Techrice Technode [...]
I am taking part (judge and panelist) in the first ever DEMO Asia this February and there are no Australians on the agenda :( We have asked around our network and there are people travelling from far and wide to attend. It may be a great opportunity for you to get the DEMO experience (for [...]
I just spoke at Sydstart (#sydstart) and and we were giving away Matto Rochford’s terrific startup tees. Here are the designs. If you want an actual “Downunderpreneur” shirt and you are at #sydstart you need to you use Pygg to claim it. Go to Twitter and type “I want a shirt @pygg pay @pollenizer $1″ [...]
“I am from Friendorse. We help suburban communities find solutions to local problems and help suburban businesses find new customers. We are in week four of twelve and we have spent thirty six thousand dollars. This is what we have done this week…” We laugh because it sounds like alcoholics anonymous, but this is how [...]
Before I moved to Australia 20 years ago, I was seduced by Bruce Chatwin’s famous book, The Songlines. The same book also instigated my terrible addiction for Moleskin notebooks. There is a section that I always return to. ‘Sometimes’, said Arkady, ‘I’ll be driving my “old men” through the desert, and we’ll come to a [...]
Silicon Valley has shown us that startup communities thrive on being connected and collaborative. Our communities make our products and businesses better and more likely to grow in value or exit through ideas, resources and 1 + 1 = 3 joint ventures. When we started Pollenizer three and a half years ago, we decided to [...]
We have been working on a simple Ruby on Rails application to allow incoming founders to pitch to us and our friends at Innovation Bay. Its a bit of a side project for us but we have a working, simple version that we thought other incubators and investors might find quite useful. So here it is. [...]
Product design is the orchestration of utility, clarity and design. Does the user know what to do? What happens when they click that button? Is the result expected or confusing? Is it beautiful? Does the page load fast? There are more great products out there than there are great businesses because sometimes the product design [...]
