I hear many executives and professionals in large corporations talking about their dream of jumping ship, and starting their own company. What they don’t realize is that the longer they wait, the more big-company habits they are acquiring, which will make their eventual decision harder and entrepreneurial efforts less and less likely to succeed.

Certainly, the longer they wait, the greater the variety of excuses they will find for why now is not the time. Common examples include; need to work on my resume, broaden my experience, enhance my skills, save my income, and maintain a stable family life until my children are gone. Most will then NEVER make the step, and remain unsatisfied through much of their career.

The reasons for waiting have merit, but they need to be balanced against the non-entrepreneurial habits that every professional picks up in a large corporation. These include:

• Managers delegate real work. Executives in an enterprise usually don’t write their own memos, contracts, and certainly don’t schedule their own meetings. It’s easy to grow accustomed to having your staff do the “real work” (my assistant will call your assistant to work out the details). In a startup, that luxury isn’t possible, so the work suffers.

• Executives have perks. By the time many big-company executives are ready to go out on their own as an entrepreneur, they have forgotten what it’s like to fly in coach class, buy their own health insurance, or having to deal with running out of money. The result is a startup with an exorbitant burn rate, and a very unhappy entrepreneur.

• Manage a team rather than work with a team. There is a difference. In a startup you have to be an integral contributor to your small team, taking your share of the workload, and leading by example. That’s a whole different mindset and skill set from your experience and training in an enterprise.

• Highly specialized focus. In a big company, you get used to having an IT team around configure your computer, a personnel specialist for hiring and firing, and a marketing team for strategy. You forget or even disdain any ability to be that jack-of-all-trades a new startup requires.

• Training courses are required. Before stepping into a new role, you count on the company providing you with in-house or contracted training courses for the basics, like project management or people management. In a startup, these don’t exist, and you have forgotten about how to self-learn, and there are no in-house experts to lean on.

• Count on getting paid for your efforts. Big-company professionals get in the habit of expecting near-term remuneration for today’s work. The average startup founder takes no salary for the first couple of years, with a high risk of never getting any return. After too many years, that’s an unfathomable step down for most people.

So when is the best time to make the leap from a big corporation to a startup? My scan of the literature and talking to investors would indicate a few years of experience in a large organization (zero to 5 years) is a good thing, while 20 or more years before founding your own venture will stack the cards against you.

Unless you are really young at heart, if you haven’t made the leap by the time you are in your early 40s, those habits you have picked up with your experience in a big company will be evident to your team and to investors. Not to mention the fact that if you are accustomed to a big-company culture and lifestyle, you will likely not be happy or satisfied with the startup lifestyle.

So if you really want to be an entrepreneur, there is no time like the present. Old habits die hard, so the longer you wait, the harder it will be to make the jump, and your odds of success go down. Going the other way is a lot easier.

Marty Zwilling

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Earlier today, we unveiled this year's Silicon Alley 100 -- a list ranking the coolest people in New York tech.

SAI editor Alyson Shontell and Business Insider deputy editor Nicholas Carlson talk about the making of the Silicon Alley 100, and they reveal who their favorite newcomers are in the video below:

Produced by Business Insider Video

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Yesterday in New York, the NBA board of governors approved the sale of the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team to a 34-year-old former Apple engineer.

Robert Pera, the CEO of Ubiquiti Networks, won't officially join that exclusive club of 30 team owners for a few more days.

He still has to finalize the transaction with Michael Heisley, the 75-year-old Chicago billionaire who currently owns the Grizzlies, although no hitches are expected.

NBA approval was regarded as the last major hurdle, and the league board of governors’ vote this morning was unanimous.

Associates of Pera, who will become the second owner in the Grizzlies franchise's history, say he's not talking publicly until he finishes things with Heisley.

But NBA Commissioner David Stern has already talked up Pera following yesterday’s vote.

“We are delighted that the NBA’s Board of Governors has approved Robert Pera’s purchase of the Grizzlies,” Stern said. “Robert will no doubt bring great energy and passion to the franchise. He has assembled an ownership group with very strong local ties, and we anticipate that their commitment to the Memphis area will greatly benefit both the team and the community."

Pera has assembled about a dozen co-partners who will own a slice of the Grizzlies with him. Pera will own less than 50 percent, but he’ll be the controlling owner of the Grizzlies ownership group, which will include Justin Timberlake, AutoZone founder Pitt Hyde, NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, and others including local Memphis businessmen.

Pera is not expected to be a Mark Cuban-type owner of the Grizzlies. So who is he? For starters, he founded a communications technology company, Ubiquiti Networks Inc., and took it public a few years ago.
He’s single, is said to live modestly despite being a multimillionaire and splits his time between Asia and Silicon Valley, where Ubiquiti is headquartered.

According to one analyst, he’s the kind of CEO who’s more into products and innovation than operations and finance.

He loves basketball. He plays pickup games regularly and is reportedly a walking encyclopedia of NBA stats.

Based on the terms he’s agreeing to for the Grizzlies, he’s not buying the team to make money. He’s agreed to keep the team in Memphis, where its home arena is FedExForum, for 15 more years or pay a huge fee if he moves it early. He’s also giving the local owner partners first right to buy the team if Pera wants to sell it – and for them to have the right to buy it at the price Pera paid.

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Albert, in response to your post “Thinking About Employment“, you’ve stumbled on a recurring theme in economics: if innovators are inventing new contraptions that can do the job of x people, won’t those x people become unemployed?

It’s an old theme, frequently arrived at, since the ‘rebirth of learning’ some six centuries ago.  As an example, the word ‘sabotage‘ likely comes “from the Netherlands in the 15th century when workers would throw their sabots (wooden shoes) into the wooden gears of the textile looms to break the cogs, fearing the automated machines would render the human workers obsolete.”

The short answer to the question is “no, productivity does not cause unemployment.”

The longer answer is that productivity or market changes can cause unemployment in isolated markets, but creates more jobs than it destroys overall. Human’s capacity for play, innovation, and creativity on one hand, and desire for status, novelty, and improvement on the other, create a cycle of increasing employment. To test the proposition, ask your CEOs if they ever run out of new product ideas for their developers to code, leading to idle capacity in the scrum. The answer is indicative of the broader human condition.

Let’s take farming as an example: in the past century, we’ve effectively conquered the problems of variety, freshness, distribution, yield, and price in the agricultural supply chain. One might fear that a permanently reduced demand (expressed in $, not lbs.) for agricultural products would be the result.

But time and again in human history, once the commodity needs are satisfied, the human desire for differentiation takes over. Thus, as the WSJ reports, and we are very familiar from our dining experiences here in New York City, trends, fashions, fads, and innovations occur, such as these chefs “going back to the farm“, or the replacement of generic chicken and pork with Niman Ranch chicken,  Berkshire pork, and, my favorite recent example from the Empire State and this morning’s breakfast, Chobani greek yogurt.  Brands, differentiation, and specialization create margin, which creates jobs.

To take an example at the other end of the cognitive spectrum: databases.  The rise of MySQL and USV’s own MongoDB most likely do lead to a reduction in demand for the skills of DBAs in the older database systems.  At this end of the cognitive spectrum, however, we rather expect that workers, as part of their profession, are consistently updating their skills and advancing their knowledge concurrently with present practice. I imagine the typical CTO would feel that a DBA unfamiliar with MySQL, and who had never heard of MongoDB, is in fact a bad DBA, rather than merely a differently-trained one.  Further, because of the inherently intellectual nature of the work, we rather expect that the professionals in the field will adapt to and adopt new intellectual constructs, abstractions, and systems.  We’ve never seen an organized labor action opposing the utilization of more productive, less labor intensive computer science, and I suspect we never will.

So then let’s move back to the middle: old media. The decline of newspapers and magazines impacts workers at both ends of the spectrum: journalists and pressmen.

New web-publishing technology has led to an increase in the number of voices available, but it can be fairly argued that it has perhaps led to a reduction in the number of paid positions, and it certainly has in old media.  The painful transition from dollars in print to pennies on the web (perhaps it’s dimes in digital, today?) has often meant reductions in pay for professionals making the switch.  We’re perhaps seeing the end of that with pay at Gawker, BusinessInsider and elsewhere being competitive with, or even superior to, comparable positions at old media companies, but in the broader media workforce, it likely remains the case that wages will be suppressed until the revenues per employee increase.

The ancillary jobs created in new media, however: SEO experts, content aggregators, social media analysts, etc., almost certainly have not become the new home for the ancillary employees of the old media : the operators of the presses that produce the physical printed product.  It is unlikely that those ‘pressmen’ skills have any comparable home ever again.  Pressmen, in the absence of retraining, have severely limited career prospects as their industry dies.

And, in fact, the pattern remains rather consistent: workers in physically productive professions have more limited prospects, fewer career choices, and longer re-training times, when their industries die.  Workers in cognitively productive professions more often have skill accretion and advancement “baked in” to the practice of their profession, and have better prospects and career choices, though similar psychological and emotional trauma, when their industries die.  (A counter-example for cognitive workers would be finance professionals engaged in derivatives, CDOs, CMOs, or the other financial engineering sectors prior to the Financial Crisis.  These workers, we’ve seen at TheLadders, had highly specialized training that has become effectively worthless, and is not readily transferable to any other type of cognitive work.)

So the rise of productivity, which leads to the decline in employment in the physically productive sectors of the economy, does not lead to overall reduction in employment, except locally, because of the nature, capacity and appetites of human beings.  Please do continue to support innovative new companies, Albert!

Well, what started as a comment has turned into a blog post in its own right.  So I’ll leave you with two reasonably accessible works that discuss this same theme at greater length…

Here’s a classic CATO piece on “Is Industrial Innovation Destroying Jobs?“:

Also superb is Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson“, which explains how the common sense understanding of many economic problems are in error, and, additionally, explains how those mechanisms actually work.

Hope that is helpful!

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Earlier this year, Paul Berry and other ex-Huffington Post executives created SoHo Tech Labs to launch and incubate startups.

One of the first startups they launched was CasaHop, which was positioned to threaten home rental company, Airbnb. It raised $1.2 million from investors such as First Round Capital and David Tisch, and it brought on Florent Peyre from Gilt Groupe to be its co-founder and president.

But six months later, Peyre has suddenly departed CasaHop. It's not clear where he's going next, or if his position will be filled at Berry's travel company.

A source tells us Peyre "wasn't working out" and he "wasn't a right fit." Despite its lack of Twitter activity (the last update was on October 5), the source believes CasaHop will continue to operate.

Meanwhile, Soho Tech Labs' other startup RebelMouse has picked up a new $2.5 million in financing, so Berry may shift his focus even more towards that.

We've reached out to Berry, Peyre and SoHo Tech Labs' Eric Hippeau for comment. We'll update if we learn more.

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One of the most important decisions a startup makes is how fast they want to launch, and how big they want to be at that time. Some choose to hire employees right away, while others decide on a pilot approach, testing the market on their own. 

A recent study from Andrew Burke of the Cranfield School of Management found that people that take a slower, pilot approach earn higher incomes and are significantly less likely to fail.

This table shows the rates of failure for people that start up and become employers from another or no job, versus those who take a pilot approach (a "Standard Individual"). Someone who starts hiring from a period of non-employment has a 146.7 percent greater chance of failure. 

See the full paper here

NOW READ: Here's Proof You Don't Need Tech Skills Or A College Degree To Launch A Software Company 

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $15.5 million round of venture funding for ItsOn Inc, a developer of software that supports more flexible mobile billing options like sponsored data services and split billing for work and personal use.

ItsOn, which has had funding from Verizon Communications, Vodafone Group Plc and Best Buy in the past, said its technology will power a new service for one of the top three U.S. mobile providers starting in early 2013.

Silver Lake AG and SV Angel are also providing funding for ItsOn in the current round but the majority is from Andreessen Horowitz, according to its founder Marc Andreessen. ItsOn was co-founded four years ago by former Cisco Systems Inc executive Charlie Giancarlo and Greg Raleigh, whose company Airgo Networks was bought by Qualcomm Inc in 2006.

ItsOn's offering includes software that is installed on both mobile devices such as smartphones and on remote servers connected to the wireless service provider's network.

The company's idea is that consumers would be able to use the smartphone software to easily make changes in their service plan without having to call customer services.

As consumers use more and more mobile data services on devices such as smartphones and tablet computers, they are increasingly wary of how much they use since U.S. operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc have moved from unlimited use plans and now charge based on how much data customers use.

The ItsOn software also allows the network operator to track data consumption on each device so it can suggest a different service option in cases where a user has a data plan that allows for well above or below the usage, the company said.

Mobile operators typically have a set number of price options they can offer customers as it takes time to introduce a new service plan.

But with the ItsOn system they can offer far more options and allow consumers to change them more easily, according to the company and its backers.

"This is a much more advanced way to do usage based pricing," said Marc Andreessen, noting that carriers now depend on "very crude pricing plans."

For example, ItsOn technology could allow temporary sponsorship of wireless data connections for specific sports events, online shopping or even services like personal email or social network access, its chief executive Greg Raleigh said.

Customers who use the same device for business and pleasure could also get separate bills by using the new software, Raleigh said. Both AT&T and Verizon Wireless have talked about the possibility of offering sponsored data connections but neither has said when such services would be available.

Raleigh declined to comment on which carriers and what types of services his software would support first.

(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Richard Chang)

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EMC has bought one of the Valley's hottest up-and-coming security startups, Silver Tail Systems, for an undisclosed sum.

The purchase is interesting for a bunch of reasons. Silver Tail was the brainchild of two former eBay execs: Laura Mather, a Ph.D. who's one of the world's experts on Internet fraud, and Mike Eynon, who led antifraud efforts at eBay and PayPal.

We recently named Mather to our list of the 25 Powerful Women Engineers In Tech.

Mather and Eynon took their antifraud know-how and built a product that let other websites protect themselves in similar ways.

Silver Tail quickly became the poster child for a new concept at the intersection of big data and security.  It detects Web fraud by watching clicks on websites and noticing weird behavior. It's been popular with banks and online retailers because it helps stop cybercrime iin real-time. It can monitor upwards of 330,000 clicks per second.

Silver Tail attracted $22 million in funding, including a $20 million round in June 2011, led by Andreessen Horowitz partner Scott Weiss. In just 18 months after delivering a working product, Silver Tail grew like a "tornado," Weiss said on a blog post about the acquisition. 

It nabbed nearly two-thirds of the top US banks as customers. It grabbed execs from the ranks of Cisco (Nick Edwards, a marketing exec); Juniper (engineer Paul Gacek); and Phoenix Technologies (Eric Newman, in charge of European expansion). Silver Tail was "cash-flow positive in the first half of [its] 2012 fiscal year, " Weiss said.

This purchase says a lot about EMC, too. EMC is known for its computer storage (and for good reason, it's one of the world's biggest vendors in that area). But since 2010, the company has acquired its way to become a security powerhouse, making such buys as RSA Security, Authentica and a bunch of other startups including, earlier this year, Silicium Security.

It's looking to use its $5.45 billion stash of cash buy more security startups, COO David Goulden told Dina Bass at Bloomberg in August.

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The startup space has become increasingly crowded with companies trying to help you find dates, find good deals or connect with new people online.

But what about the ones that have the potential to change your life?

From a tool that lets you remotely lock and unlock your door to a ride-sharing system that helps you get around easily, there are several startups that aim to make life better for people every day.

Some startup founders like Hugo Fiennes of Electric Imp, a home automation system, truly believe that their products can help make life easier for users.

"There's a Utopian vision where you come home and the lights are on and one button can turn everything off," Electric Imp co-founder Hugo Fiennes told Business Insider's Steve Kovach. "And I think a lot of people don't fancy that investment and go, 'I can turn the lights on and off myself.' But there's usually one thing that's important to them, which they'd like to have monitored or notified about."

Like Electric Imp, there are a slew of startups that are poised to change our lives for the better.

Lockitron

What it is: A keyless device and smartphone app that lets you lock and unlock your door from anywhere.

Why it's important: If you've ever left your house only to suddenly get the fear you left your door unlocked, Lockitron lets you check to see its status. And if you see that it is unlocked, all you have to do is tap the lock button on the app and you're all set.

Founders: Cameron Robertson and Paul Gerhardt

Lyft

What is: A cheap, on-demand ridesharing service. 

Why it's important: It offers a way for car owners to make extra cash during their free time and it's much cheaper for passengers than other solutions. It's a little less than a cab and about a third of the cost of Uber. 

Founder: John Zimmer

Electric Imp

What it is: A home automation system that lets you do things like tell your dishwasher to send you a tweet when it's finished. Each card, which comes with a built-in Wi-Fi antenna and processor, can be installed in essentially any device. Electric Imp is slated to debut in home devices later this year.

Why it's important: It's the first fully unified and easily accessible platform for home automation, and it only takes a matter of seconds to configure any device. It also has a wide variety of use cases and could be used for safety purposes, like getting a notification if you left your oven on and then having the option to turn it off.

Founders: Hugo Fiennes, Kevin Fox, and Peter Hartley

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Just a few months ago, Pano Logic, an enterprise tech startup seemed to be have a bright future replacing oldfashioned PCs with up-to-the-minute cloud technology.

Today, the company has shut down, its leaders have vanished, and its customers have been left hanging.

The company's PR team has confirmed to Business Insider that Pano is out of business. No more details.

Companies go out of business all the time. But what's particularly odd about Pano Logic is how it did so.

It was like sneaking out in the middle of the night, says Network World's Paul McNamara. Employees were told "out of the blue" that the company was shutting down, McNamara reports.

A search on LinkedIn shows that 70 members listed Pano as an employer.

Pano made so-called thin clients, which let enterprises deliver virtual desktops over the network, instead of installing software on a PC. The Redwood City, Calif., company was founded in 2006, and headed by former Wyse CEO John Kish. 

Earlier this year, Dell paid $600 million to buy Kish's former company, which also made thin clients.

Kish talked to Business Insider at that time, and said that business was booming. Microsoft's move to Windows 8 had made a lot of enterprise companies thinking about using virtual desktops. 

In fact, the company had—just a week ago—announced a big, two-year deal with Alabama’s largest credit union, Redstone, to replace over 700 PCs with Pano's thin clients.  Pano had other credit unions as customers, too.

Yesterday, Natasha Chilingerian at Credit Union Times discovered that the company was in bankruptcy and had "vanished." Customers had taken to leaving frantic messages on the company's Facebook page. 

The company's website is still up with one notable change: the page naming the company's managers is blank. Ditto for the page listing its investors.

Pano Logic had received $38 million in venture capital, including a $10 million round in 2010 led by Navin Chaddha of Mayfield Fund, with participation by Goldman Sachs and Foundation Capital.

According to McNamara, employees were told the reason for the shutdown was some kind of cease-and-desist order—which apparently the executives took to heart.

We've reached out to one of Pano's founders and other insiders and will update this story if we hear back.

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It’s now been three days since Hurricane Sandy has passed through New York, and many homes and offices are still without power.

But in spite of these circumstances, many of New York’s Silicon Alley tech companies are showing their resourceful sides by banding together and sharing power, internet... and breakfast.

It’s business as usual for e-commerce site Fab.com, minus the fact that Fab’s West Village headquarters are completely deserted. Fab’s team enabled more than 1,000 new products to go live on the site yesterday, and today they launched their holiday shop, exactly as planned.

Fab Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg sent a a company-wide email at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday titled “Team Together,” and within hours, more than 100 people responded. 

“We have Fab pods (apartments, Starbucks, etc.) where Fab employees are working from all over the city," Melissa Klein, the company's senior vice president of communications, said in an email. "It's been amazing to see the fab family band together. I’m hosting a fellow Fabber at my apt and there are a bunch of others doing the same.”

Even Goldberg is hosting some of his employees in his own apartment. 

“One third of our team does not have power and many of our team members are staying with each other and getting together to work on keeping Fab going,” Goldberg writes on his blog. “12 Fab team members huddled around my kitchen table today. It felt like the early days of the company—we started this company around my kitchen table.”

Another New York-based tech company, General Assembly had to adapt quickly when they shut down their offices during their storm.

The company, which is a network of campuses for technology, design, coding and programming classes, tweeted that they'd offer online classes for free in a Storm-a-thon theme.

General Assembly planned and launched the idea in less than 24 hours and had around 1,500 participants among the three online classes, said a representative from the company in an email.

"Thankfully, modern technology makes it easy to keep working even if we aren't in our offices," said General Assembly Co-founder Brad Hargreaves in an email. "Conference calls, emails, text messages, Google hangouts. All of these things have helped maintain morale and even helped to spark creative ideas."

The company, whose team members are also taking shelter in temporary offices, has been frequently tweeting and updating their Facebook status with class updates and information about how New Yorkers can get involved in volunteering in the post-storm clean up efforts.

Sandy has put thousands of New York City tech startups to the test. But so far, most have grown stronger, and taken advantage of the chance to prove how resilient they are. 

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CB Insights recently released it's first ever University Entrepreneurship Report, tracking the alumni entrepreneurship activity of six top universities (Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, NYU, U Penn, and MIT).

Stanford was dominant in both of the number of deals and amount of cash raised. This chart excludes Facebook, which adds an extra $2 billion to Harvard's numbers:

As for the number of deals, Harvard is catching up rapidly:

Also interesting, Stanford and Berkeley grads stay in California, and NYU grads in New York, but Harvard grads flock out of Massachusetts and Penn grads tend to leave Pennsylvania:

Find the full report here

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This past weekend my wife and I tried to get involved with relief efforts for Sandy. We used Twitter and Facebook and found organizations who needed help, and found lists of supplies that were needed as well.

We went from an Occupy Sandy center in Sunset Park to a drive by of the Gowanus Houses to stocking up at Target to delivering goods to the outer reaches of Far Rockaway. There were many who did much more and many who wanted to as well. The impact that the storm had on people's lives was terrible and heartbreaking. You don't need to see that close up to know it.

But without minimizing that, what struck me ultimately was how incredibly disorganized the civilian relief efforts were. In VC terms we would call this an inefficient market, or the failure of bringing together buyers and sellers. In this case, it was those who needed help and those who wanted to give it. There was an imbalance between the support of the NYC community and its impact on those who were suffering.

Twitter and Facebook were great, but the information was scattershot and not always reliable and coordinated. When we showed up at the Occupy Sandy church there were a vast excess of volunteers. When I asked one of the volunteers what we could do the young man in front of the church said: "We have too many clothes donations. We don't need them and they are taking up space. Can you bring them to goodwill?" So we did. We removed excess donations and brought them to the salvation army. That's what they needed but it felt like such a waste - to remove people's well intentioned donations. When we headed to the Rockaways, a friend posted on Facebook - "Good luck, yesterday they turned away our donations."

In Far Rockaway at the community center, lines were too long; they had people filling out blank pieces of paper with what they needed. In the Internet enabled, entrepreneurial software as a service world in which we live, I couldn't help think that what we needed was some sort of API for help, or an open source answer to disaster relief in local communities. Tweeting is great but before this happens again, I hope entrepreneurs much more talented than I can rise to this challenge.

What do we need? In my opinion, to start:

1. Real-time volunteer management solutions that can be updated by any device. Imagine a single site with every volunteer opportunity as well as if there is a current need or not. Imagine signing up online or with your phone to say, yes, I will show up from 4 - 6 and this is what I will do. This is organizing and mapping power that exists for other industries, even for signing up for courses or races, but it was sorely needed for coordinating the help people were willing to give. There was too much hearsay and not enough real information. That meant too many well-meaning folks found their relief efforts going to waste.
2. Real-time supply chain analysis. Everything I knew was from Twitter. Someone would say, "Over here they need Batteries." Six hours later they would have too many batteries. Why couldn't we, in real-time, have volunteers update from their phones what is needed, coordinate with drop off points and efficiently distribute critical goods. There was no balance of diapers, batteries and canned goods across all the sites that needed them.
3. Direct contribution and donations. Donors Choose, for example, allows teachers to request specific things for their classrooms from one universal platform. I would rather buy someone a generator or help someone find a new car more than I want to donate to a large national organization like the Red Cross. The Red Cross is great, but sometimes you want to make a very specific local impact and know where your money goes. Imagine a single place where all those who lost everything could ask for help, and where volunteers could verify and help them.

I am sure there are many other ways that our vast technical brainpower could create cloud based, open source solutions to helping people in our communities. It's part Facebook, part Twitter, part Foursquare and part Seamless Web, but for this need specifically. And it's across web and mobile.

When we spent a short amount of time at a local community center in Far Rockaway the lines were long and the donated goods inside, according to my wife who was in there, were vast but not organized. One of the volunteers suggested we go to the Far Rockaway public library a block away. Inside the Library was incredible.

The librarians (all of whom had volunteered above and beyond) had organized all the donations and spread them out on separate tables and had a smooth efficient line running. Our donations were sorted and subsumed within minutes. It was a revelation. In only the way  brilliant librarians could, they most likely served thousands of people quickly and efficiently while other locales were serving only hundreds with long lines. They did what they knew how to do and were trained to do - but with relief supplies instead of books.

Tech community, let's do the same and do what we know how to do with software solutions leveraging text, mobile and real time web so if this happens again, our community based responses can be efficient and tactical. It's products and make shift companies that go public, in the true sense of the word.

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As a general rule of thumb in life, knowing the right people socially never hurt anyone in achieving their dreams.

In the startup world it may be more fashionable to discuss this reality using the framework of "community" rather than the suit-and-tie tainted term of "networking." But whatever you call it, a big pool of supportive connections is usually thought to be a good thing.

But perhaps it shouldn't be, or at least not always, Chris Savage, co-founder of video hosting company Wistia, argued on his blog recently. Social support is great, of course—who would be against friendship—but Savage believes that there is such a thing as being over-networked and that an excess of connections can hurt your fledgling company in four ways:

Problem 1: Honest feedback is even more rare than usual.

As anyone who has ever been pitched an idea will tell you, when an idea is bad, it’s really, really tough to give honest feedback. The incentive to give honest feedback and risk upsetting an overly networked individual is just not there. It's so much easier "forget" to tell a networker your true feelings about their product so you can stay on their good side.

Problem 2: People will use your product for the wrong reasons.

 How many products have you tried because the person behind the product seems well connected? Have you ever tried a product that came out of Y Combinator even though you were actually pretty confused by the product's purpose?… I'm sure you can think of some startups run by networkers that never progressed because their fame brought them their users.

Problem 3: People will join your team because of your connections, not because of your ideas, execution, product, or traction.

 This problem is probably the one that can go either way for you. Build a truly amazing team with your overly-connected network and you may still have a shot of building a great company.But build a great team for the wrong reasons and you'll soon have a group of people who are dissatisfied and disheartened with the lack of vision and lack of real growth once your networker bump disappears.Being able to convince a real human, who doesn't know you solely as a networker, that they should quit what they are doing and join you is a great sign that you may actually be onto something. 

Problem 4: It can make it too easy to raise money.

 If it's hard to raise money, and you raise money, then you're probably onto something! Congrats, you've been able to convince others that you are in a big enough market, studying an interesting enough problem, with the potential to create a compelling solution.The problem, of course, is that if you've networked yourself too much then you are going to have a slew of people that will recommend you, just because they know you and think of you as a great person, but that doesn't mean that your idea is any good. I see people recommending great, well-networked people all the time who are working on terrible ideas.

Your first reaction to this list may be that you wish you had these sorts of problems. Too much A-grade tech talent beating down your door? Where do I sign up? But there might be a lesson here for mere mortals who don't spend a lot of time hand-wringing about how their copious connections in the venture capital world will make fund-raising just too darn easy.

If you're not in that class of networker maybe you stress that you should be. And then maybe you devote a lot of time to cultivating connections. Maybe that time could be put to better use in the early days on improving your business. Or, as Savage puts it, maybe you should largely skip networking for now and "hole up in your dungeon and spend your time building something that is f***ing great."

Here on Inc.com, has Jeff Haden has agreed with this sentiment without the NSFW language. "You don't have time to nurture dozens or hundreds of connections," he reminds early-stage founders in a post on why sometimes less really is more. 

Does your anxiety about networking ever distract you from the battle to build a great product?  

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On March 26, 2012, a new media startup called Upworthy launched.

Upworthy is a 14-person site that tries to make meaningful information and pictures go viral.

Today, it is the fastest growing media company in the world. Upworthy finished October with 8.7 million monthly uniques, up from 6 million the month prior. In August, it hit four million uniques, up from 2.5 million in July. Its fast growth was rewarded with $4 million from investors.

There are lots of media companies out there, but none have grown that quickly.

Are Upworthy's growth and business model sustainable? We're not sure, but either way the stats are impressive. We asked CEO and co-founder Eli Pariser what Upworthy has been doing to smash traffic records every month.

Here's what he had to say.

Don't write about politics.

Before he started Upworthy, Pariser worked for a digital, political publication, MoveOn. He and his co-founder, The Onion's former Managing Editor, Peter Koechley, thought the upcoming election would drive traffic to Upworthy.

But people weren't sharing much of Upworthy's political content, so the pair ditched that angle and broadened the site's coverage.

"We thought, 'Ok, it's an election year, people are going to be really interested in politics and the campaign, and we'll get a leg up that way,'" Pariser says. "The election was our whole argument for starting Upworthy this year. But it turned out to be a total non-driver of growth. Of all our top pieces, only a couple deal with politics or the election."

It can be tough for startups to let go of initial ideas and pivot to what's working. But as soon as Pariser let go of the politics angle, traffic soared.

Find story ideas on social media feeds, not other websites.

Upworthy's curators don't start their days surfing other websites for news. They surf social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook instead.

Sometimes it's easier to highlight a conversation than to start a new one.

"We have our team of curators spending all their time looking on the Internet for stuff," says Pariser. "We go for visible, sharable stories and really stay away from doing more typical, text-driven articles and blogging. We lean into images and videos."

Focus on Facebook, not Twitter

Upworthy has found that Twitter is small traffic potatoes compared to Facebook. At the end of the day, Facebook is where the most people spend the vast majority of their time online.

"Facebook is a huge piece of the puzzle for us," says Pariser. "Our Facebook community has grown from zero in March to over 600,000 likes."

Pariser says Upworthy hasn't done anything particularly brilliant to juice Facebook for traffic. It just spent a lot of time and energy cracking the social network.

"Honestly, I think part of [our success with it] is we take Facebook much more seriously than many of the other social networks," he says. "I love Twitter, and Twitter is a fun place to hang out with smart people, but it's a small fraction of our traffic compared to Facebook. The time and attention most sites spend on [perfecting] their homepages is probably what we spend on Facebook. If you look at our homepage, it's pretty mediocre."

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It turns out, some political campaigns are good for more than negative TV ads. Obama's last campaign gave rise to a hot startup, NationalField, with a little help from Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes.

Today, enterprises and politicos alike are using it.

NationalField is a tool for the social enterprise that has one up on Chatter, Yammer, and Jive, cofounder Edward Saatchi says. It doesn't just let people post stuff to a feed. It tracks their activities and uses social features to let them compete for glory, recognition, and bigger paychecks.

It all started in 2008, when Saatchi, an energetic young British citizen, moved to the United States to help Barack Obama become president. There he met up with two other campaign workers, Aharon Wasserman and Justin Lewis. The three of them were frustrated with the tools being used to manage the campaign.

"We were using Google Docs, an Access database," to keep track of phone calls, door-knocks, funds raised, and so on, Saatchi told Business Insider. The system was  "a nightmare" so they "decided to build something and modeled it on Facebook."

This being the Obama campaign, they tapped Hughes to help them. To this day Hughes is listed as an advisor to the company.

The tool lets everyone log their own day's work. The Facebook part lets people compete, showing off how much money they raised, or how many phone calls they made. Team leaders can easily see the day's work. NationalField's founders discovered that "when you marry a business intelligence tool with something social there's a weird alchemy that makes people competitive," Saatchi says. It's like turning work into a high-scores list on a video game.

The tool spread from one field office to the next. After the election, people told the three amigos to start a company because they wanted to keep using the thing. So they did, gaining customers immediately as friends got jobs at other nonprofits and companies. It turns out, the tool was good for sales teams trying to increase leads, and lots of other jobs.

Today, the company has an impressive list of customers including Kaiser Permanente and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, the fundraising arm of the House Democrats.

NationalField, based in D.C., employs 13 people. It has organically grown to over a quarter of million users, each customer paying $10 per user plus bonuses when employees hit high quotas. It just landed a new contract with the U.K.'s National Health Service, who signed a five-year, million-user deal.

Saatchi says the company regularly beats out Salesforce.com's Chatter and Microsoft's Yammer on enterprise deals, too.

"People are tired of the social enterprise," he say. "You can't just be Facebook."

Instead, companies want to be able to measure the productivity gains for using social tools instead of email.

Now the startup is ramping up to grow even faster. Last week, it took its first bite of investment money when it nabbed $1.5 million from angel investors including Excel creator Jabe Blumethal and DirecTV cofounder Jim Ramo.

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Imagine being on a first-name basis with the leader of your country.

That's a threshold Scott Farquhar crossed a few weeks ago and it felt surreal, he told Business Insider.

Farquhar is the 32-year-old cofounder of Atlassian, a software company based in Australia.

Last month, the country's prime minister, Julia Gillard, invited him to a forum on the digital economy. When he showed up, she clearly knew who he was.

"This is kind of weird," he recalled thinking. 

It reminded him of just how far he had come in the 10 years since he and his cofounder, Mike Cannon-Brookes, launched their company.

Today, Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes are the two wealthiest young Australians, according to BRW magazine, with an estimated net worth of $480 million.

Atlassian is a company that sells enterprise software for software developers. The flagship product is called Jira and it helps companies keep track of bugs in their software and other issues. Other tools help developers store code and collaborate.

In the early days, Atlassian was a tech-support company founded with the hope it would keep them in beer money.

"We basically didn't want to work for anyone else," Farquhar said. "The graduate salary at Pricewaterhouse was $47,500 so we said, if we could earn that kind of money, and we didn't have to put on a suit on, we'll enjoy it a whole lot more. That's the whole reason Atlassian got started."

But it wasn't fun, at first. Support turned out to be what Farquhar calls a "terrible business," with calls at 3 in the morning.  They paid themselves $300 a week.

Flash-forward to today. Atlassian did "$100 million in sales last calendar year, and is growing north of 30% per annum," Farquhar says. It has 22,000 customers, 300 employees in Sydney and 150 in San Francisco. Next step: an IPO, which is rumored to be coming up maybe next year.

It also has a freakishly similar history to its biggest competitor, GitHub.

Atlassian grew with no VC funds for eight years and then the founders took a $60 million investment from Accel Partners in 2010. It was Accel's single largest investment in a software company.

Earlier this year, GitHub nabbed a $100 million round from Andreessen Horowitz, also the largest single investment from that VC firm, also GitHub's first outside funding after years of self-funded growth.

Both companies have similarly wild, fun corporate cultures, too. While Atlassian is based in Sydney, Australia, it has a large office in a warehouse space in San Francisco, blocks away from GitHub's headquarters.

Farquhar says success hasn't changed him, much.  Besides knowing heads of state, the big difference is having less time.

"I've always prided myself on helping people and being available," Farquhar says. "I always believed that if you can can help someone get started in business or get over life crises then it's your your job to help them. But now I get five emails a day from people asking for advice or help ... and unfortunately I have to say no."

He worries about that.

"I can see how people might say, 'When Scott was younger he was nice and now that  he's a success he's a jerk,'" he laughs.

While Farquhar can't give as much personally, he makes sure the company makes up the difference. Atlassian donates one percent of its revenue, one percent of its employee, and one percent of its products to charity.

Oh, and he still doesn't wear a suit.

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Ron Conway has actively encouraged the San Francisco tech community to get involved with the government. Yesterday his hard work paid off.

The city of San Francisco voted in a new tax policy Conway supported, Proposition E. Proposition E won by a landslide with 70.6% of the votes, and it could save tech companies there millions of dollars.

Before Proposition E, companies were paying payroll taxes on every job they created, even if they weren't generating much revenue. Proposition E replaces payroll taxes with a gross receipts tax.

In other words, companies will now be taxed on total gross revenues instead of eating costs for every person they employ.

"Tax policy over the past decade has penalized job creation by taxing jobs instead of profit,"Conway explained on TechCrunch. "Proposition E incentivizes job growth, hiring, and economic investment which has a multiplier effect that generates millions of dollars in revenue for San Francisco."

Conway isn't stopping with Proposition E. He's adamant about getting the tech community more involved in public policy. Earlier this year he created sf.citi to get 350 tech companies more involved in San Francisco's civic action.

"Gone are the days when the tech community can innovate and run their businesses in spite of government," Conway says. "As we saw with the SOPA/PIPA debate, public policy has a direct and significant impact on startups and the investors who support them."

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Do you like Vincent van Gogh? That means you'll also probably like art by Henri Rousseau, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Utrillo and even contemporary artists like John Currin and Laurie Simmons—artists you may have never heard of.

So how can you discover these new artists? With Art.sy, a free website that lets users browse through thousands of artworks to find new art and artists.

Art.sy works with hundreds of galleries around the world to catalogue art and expose it to potential buyers. The company has been around for a few years—mostly researching and building its extensive database of art—but it launched publicly just last month.

The way it works is simple: browse through artworks and click on art that piques your interest. The site will provide information on the piece of art and the artist, and then suggest similar works by other artists that might appeal to you—much like Pandora works with music. You can save searches and follow specific artists. Some of the art is for sale, though not all of it.

The company uses what it calls the"Art Genome Project" to sort and classify works by time period, style, medium, artist, and region. This enables users to search for art by more than 800 "genes," as Art.sy staff calls them. It's also useful to people who are looking to collect works from a specific time period or genre.

Art.sy's goal is to "expose as many people as possible to art," according to its website. Art.sy COO Sebastian Cwilich knows that the company faces a formidable task.

"It's an ambitious enough vision that I expect it will take years to realize," Cwilich said. "Eventually this will be a resource that can benefit anyone who loves art, but this is especially valuable for people who are more removed from major art cities and don't have easy access to the galleries and museums we take for granted."

It's an ambitious goal, but bigshots in the tech and art worlds like Wendi Murdoch, Larry Gagosian, Eric Schmidt and Jack Dorsey—all of whom are partners, investors, or advisors in Art.sy—think the company can do it.

In short, whether you're buying or just browsing, Art.sy is making art accessible to everyone.

See also: Why Major Art Museums Are Going Gaga Over Islamic Art >

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In 2007, Google reached out to a startup it wanted to buy called Zlio.

Zlio was founded in 2006. It let anyone open an online store, even if they had nothing of their own to sell. Stores could be populated with products from Zlio's partners, such as Apple.

Google told Zlio it would work quickly to get the acquisition deal done. It emailed Zlio's founder, Jeremie Berrebi, and detailed everything he would need to send over to get the acquisition approved by Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt.

Instead of following up and signing Google's NDA, Zlio took an outside investment from Mangrove.

The decision not to join Google cost Zlio its life. Berrebi, now an active investor and co-founder of Kima Ventures, writes that Google blacklisted Zlio six months later. "It killed the company," Berrebi writes.

Still, Berrebi says he has no regrets.

So what does an acquisition email from Google look like, anyway?

Here's the email Zlio received, below:

(This email was originally posted on Berrebi's blog and has been reprinted below with permission):

Jeremie

Thanks for this.  I have had internal conversations now. We would like to move on this urgently as an acquisition. We realize you are late in your cycle and we are early in ours but frankly your idea and personal background is a good indication of strength in our mind and we have already got the internal senior nod to proceed. Add to this the fact that we share your vision and would want to execute on something similar anyway means we would like to move forward discussing with you. We believe the combination of your vision, leadership and first mover advantage with our ability to create Googlely products, our consumer and partner relationships and distribution, our checkout product and our scale infrastructure will lead to a great solution that enables you as an entrepreneur to reach your goals more efficiently. We have a pretty smooth acquisition process here at Google to make deals happen but here is how you can help us be quick:

1) sign the nda so we can start to exchange info – this is our standard nda. You should realize that we make absolutely sure that no engineers working on similar areas in Google are involved in the assessment of this deal at this stage so we can avoid tainting
2) send me captable (with names) and loan/liabilities info (Jerry tells me there are some complexities around ownership?), CVs of your team (we are especially keen on good engineering and prod people and in Israel we are already building out our team. You can delete the names on the top of the CVs if you want to protect anonymity)
3) consider location – Israel is great for your prd and eng people but relationship, partnership and business team may have to relocate to UK or US but we do have a Paris office that may be expanded – I just cant guarantee that right now.
4) consider valuation – if we are to act as quickly as you want we need strong guidance. You can give me a range and I will respond. You have indications of value from your VC termsheet and I can tell you that we will give strong monetary incentives to the people who join us in terms of bonuses etc on top of consideration for the equity of the company. Naturally, we believe we take away the risk of successful execution through an acquisition so value of the equity should reflect this.
5) send me financials
6) send me IPR/patent details
7) send me something that describes how difficult this is to do from an engineering challenge and arrange a conference call between your lead engineer and one of our deal team engineer members to have a discussion around this

I will take all this and the corporate presentation you have given me and create a presentation for internal use to our executive board (Larry, Sergey and Eric) for approval to negotiate then issue a termsheet to you

We will want to do some DD post then just like a VC, normally we front end some of this via a visit to meet you and the team but in the interests of time we can back end this but you need to be helpful with the 7 points above instead.

I hope this is exciting news for you as it is for us….

Let me know and also pls send me your mobile phone as it is not on your business card

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