Ashton Kutcher launched his new startup, Blah Girls, at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco this week. Ashton walked by the Microsoft lounge several times, in and out of interviews as you can imagine. From Ashton’s most recent blog post, I think he liked the Microsoft Surface we have on display here: “The coolest thing I've seen so far is Microsoft ...

I’m pretty damned stoked about TechCrunch50. I spent most of today setting up the Microsoft lounge area at the venue. The idea for the lounge started when I was sitting with the Qik team brainstorming ways in which we could partner to do some fun things at the event. In the midst of that, Michael Arrington calls and says, “get a Surface Table [for ...

10% of all non-spam emails that arrive in corporate inboxes are never read, according to informal polls of Microsoft Exchange administrators. Within Microsoft, that number rises to a whopping 33% – I guess I should count myself lucky that most of my colleagues actually respond to my emails. Lots of folks would interpret the non-reply to a ...

One of the key attributes that startups seek in an investor is relevant domain expertise. If you’re making quantum computers and you ask someone who made his fortune in digital media to join your board, that’s sort of like asking a NASCAR racer to be your co-pilot in a stealth bomber. At best, no harm will come of it, but chances are it could be ...

I stumbled upon this article that I thought developers running PHP based web sites may be interested in. The authors write: A significant percentage of web sites utilize PHP as a platform for dynamic content. During the development of Windows 2008, Microsoft included improvements that enable PHP to run more efficiently than previous Windows ...

I’ve worked with several funded and non-funded startups during my time here at Microsoft. Having seen what works and doesn’t, I thought I’d throw together a series of posts on how to startup a software company. First and foremost, you need to have an idea. Once you have an idea that you want to execute on, the flowchart for launching your company ...

Chinese mythology is replete with deities that ride clouds up into the heavens. Many startups similarly seeking nirvana on the back of cloud infrastructure have found their ascent rudely interrupted. It seems unlikely that any single cloud infrastructure provider can be entirely immune to outages. The massive scale of such operations is ...

Interesting rule of thumb based on military operational research performed by Frederick Lanchester during World War I: If you’re trying to enter an existing market where the dominant player has greater than 40% market share, you will need to spend at least 3x the sales/marketing budget of that leader to succeed in a head-on attack.However, if the ...

The news today was Marc Andreessen's joining the board of Facebook. From Netscape to Facebook, some interesting ironies along the way. Marc is also a founder of Ning, a social networking application. So why is this important to startups? It's because Marc will be a terrific mentor to Mark Zuckerberg. Having the right board members is so important ...

Along the road from starting a business to (perhaps) getting to the Next Big IPO, one of the more daunting assignments that an entrepreneur will likely face is the process of raising capital. The task can be decomposed into qualitative & quantitative elements. The former has many parallels with serious dating. Get a mutual acquaintance to ...