Key role for #entrepreneurs in #Miami is helping mature city’s tech industry @CodeForMiami @ErnieAtLYD #SimeMIA2015

"People are doing lots of small things cobbling together a full living," said Lauren Venell, who teaches often sold-out DIY business classes at Workshop in San Francisco. Venell said her enrollees are mostly creative types — designers, crafters, and illustrators — who want to launch their own endeavors. Many hope to start curatorial businesses that recommend products or hand-pick items to sell. Most of them are in their twenties and thirties, or semi-retirees in their sixties, with few in between, Venell noted. And, for whatever reason, the majority are women.

Venell acknowledges the Bay Area's entrepreneurial pedigree, but says she's seen a new trend of people being drawn to start their own businesses out of economic necessity: getting laid off from their jobs or having their work hours reduced. "It didn't used to be that way," she said. "It was much more deliberate a few years ago. And now ... they're doing it with a little less preparation."

Most of the people I know in the news biz, and most of the students I teach, want to be reporters because they love to write, or get a charge out of chasing a big story, or are crusaders wanting to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and so on. Not many get into journalism to make a lot of money (if they did they'd be fools anyway.)

“The partnership, I think, has tended to push us in a little bit more traditional direction than we might have gone otherwise,” Weber told me. “There’s definitely an issue of orientation. If you’re thinking about something as a New York Times story, you think about it differently than if it’s just going to run on baycitizen.org. I think it’s made the coverage feel a little bit more traditional in its approach.” Were it not for the partnership, quite possibly, “we would be further along in developing the kind of voice and style of our own kind of journalism.”

"Young people intuitively understand that the old model is broken and they are in the forefront of inventing the new institutional model of the future," says Charles Heying, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at PSU. "But to make this omelet, many eggs are getting broken." [...]
To ask whether this collectivism yields independence, Heying suggests, is the wrong question. "Portland may be deficient in personal wealth, (but) we have an abundance of 'social wealth,'" he said. "The social wealth comes from the livability of the city, its low cost of housing relative to other West Coast cities, vibrant neighborhoods, abundant and inexpensive activities including access to good food and entertainment." 

“We only want to understand the logistics of the record business as long as it keeps us afloat creatively,” Kulash said. “Whenever I read music business magazines or blogs, I get nauseous. With the op-eds, we’re usually just chugging along as band, and when something gets in the way, I’ll say, ‘This counters common sense’ and write about it. But my great fear now is that if every musician is their own business, we’ll be self-selective towards very calculating musicians. I don’t think that being a clear thinker and being a great musician are mutually exclusive, but that’s not historically the trend."

There’s no upfront cost to local sites for a GrowthSpur partnership. Our revenue model is a service fee on the advertising revenue we help you with. In other words, we make money if you make money.

How much money? We believe, based on our research and experience, that a well-run, sophisticated local site can bring in more than $100,000 a year in revenue from advertising, e-commerce and other sources. GrowthSpur exists to help local entrepreneurs achieve that level of success—and more.

I left my job as a reporter/blogger/columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News in January 2009. Now I work for myself as a blogger at BargainBabe.com, which helps people save money on everyday expenses. In almost six months of working for myself I’ve learned a few things.

When you look under the hood of daily journalism, and the changes that have undermined newspapers’ classic print-advertising model, “I began to understand that we needed to put together a team to answer some basic questions,” including: “Is there a viable model anywhere in the world for us to emulate here in San Francisco?” “If there is not, how do we develop one?” “(H)ow would this model function in terms of news gathering and editorial content?”

I've found covering local news to be a lot more challenging than I expected, and in some respects a little more challenging than covering an issue beat.

For one, you have to be able to speak intelligently on everything from education policy to municipal finance to, in my case, environmental cleanup issues. And people are so invested in these local issues they aren't shy about letting you know when they think you've messed up -- in the most personal and derogatory terms possible, I might add.

That's another thing that I think was a shock for me in moving from print to online - the shift in what your readers want and expect from you in terms of their psychic needs (which shift from information to attention-getting, sometimes) and the kind of engagement they anticipate. I figure it'll take a lot of work for me to fine-tune that engagement level.

In his latest book, Tribes, Seth Godin, a leading American marketing blogger, confesses to obsessively checking his email at 4.00 am while on holiday in Jamaica. “It took me a long time to figure out why I was so happy to be checking my email in the middle of the night,” he writes. “It had to do with passion. Other than sleeping, there was nothing I’d rather have been doing in that moment.” In Silicon Valley then, work is passion; in Europe, I suspect, passion at 4.00 am is something entirely different.

There is a founder community just as there's a VC community. They all know one another, and techniques spread rapidly between them. If one tries a new programming language or a new hosting provider and gets good results, 6 months later half of them are using it. And the same is true for funding. The current generation of founders want to raise money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey took money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically. Imagine what it would do to the VC business if the next hot company didn't take VC at all.

VCs think they're playing a zero sum game. In fact, it's not even that. If you lose a deal to Benchmark, you lose that deal, but VC as an industry still wins. If you lose a deal to None, all VCs lose.

"I have this idea for a Silcon Valley startup. It's not really a startup. It's just some crazy guy with a laptop, a cellphone, a stack of blank business cards and some drawing pens."