Caines Arcade: Kid from East LA builds arcade out of cardboard. Flash Mob arrives. Joy ensues. 

Micah Baldwin told me about this a few days ago, but I forgot to watch it. Then tonight Crystal English tweeted about it. It’s wonderful. Watch it.

I recently connected with Tim Jahn of Entrepreneurs Unplugged (based in Chicago) to catch up. I’ve done a few interviews before with him, but it’d been about a year. Here’s the interview.

How Celebrating The Little Victories Led ArtistData to A Successful Exit

Last year I did a video interview for Beyond the Pedway in Chicago. After the ArtistData acquisition, they reached out to chat some more. Here’s 10 minutes from that interview about selling ArtistData, challenges of an entrepreneur, my new role, and celebrating the little victories.

Source: bmull.posterous.com

Lean Startup vs. Fat Startup Debate

Fred Wilson (of Union Square Ventures) and Ben Horowitz (ofAndreessen-Horowitz) debated the advantages and disadvantages of the amount of capital raised and spent by early stage companies yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt. I’ve embedded the video below. I think it’s well worth watching, as these guys are some of the smartest people around to discuss this stuff.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch gives the following summary:

Horowitz’s arguments centered on the idea that in some cases, a large amount of capital is necessary to really take advantage of an opportunity, or to take on well established competitors. As he put it, “if it’s better to be lean [in your case] that’s great, but if it’s better to take a lot of capital, by all means embrace your fatness”.

Horowitz used a few examples to defend his case. For example, when faced with increased competition, VMware used a large amount of capital to boost its headcount and fend off open-source options and Microsoft.

Wilson’s argument focused more on how to maximize the probability that entrepreneurs will get favorable exits. He boils down the formula to: (Founder’s Stake) x (Probability of an exit) x (Size of the exit). Wilson says to focus on the first two variables. Accepting more funding will dilute the founder’s stake, but it isn’t going to proportionally increase the probability of an exit (which is based on far more factors). In other words, it hurts the likelihood of a favorable outcome (at least from the entrepreneur’s perspective). Likewise, he says investors are looking to mitigate risk, which is why investing small amounts when a company is young is in their interest.

Fred Wilson posted on his blog this morning some of his thoughts on this debate.Read that here.

Source: bmull.posterous.com