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Maybe it’s cultural. Americans, particularly the children of the Self-Esteem Generation, are brought up to believe in themselves. Every red-blooded American child grows up believing that he (and she) can one day be President. Other cultures consider that attitude shamefully egotistical. Where’s the humility? Don’t you know your place? Who do you think you are?…

Congratulations to all of the teams who pitched at the AIS Startup Weekend in Bangkok! We heard fantastic pitches and saw awesome demos on Sunday night from 16 budding startups. The teams were: Traxi Hyperactive Games Tickob Carpool Chatterbox Got.It. The Cloud Postman Moodie Like.Me Parallel Street Production Flowz Shop Spot 54 hours Today SSS:…

What a crazy crowd @ #SWBKK! We had 96 pitches last night, which we believe to be a record for for Startup Weekends in Southeast Asia. This is out of 120 participants – an 80% pitch rate. Fantastic! Out of those 96 pitches, we chose the 17 teams with the most votes. As of Saturday…

One team asked, very sensibly: what happens if one of the co-founders leaves the startup somewhere along the way? Let’s pretend there are three co-founders in your startup. Plan A. The naïve equity structure looks like this: the company issues three shares of stock. Each founder gets one share. Two weeks after incorporation, one of…

They say nine out of ten new businesses fail after two years. This statistic agrees with the JFDI theory of new venture creation: we believe that every possible startup idea is being tried all the time, in every place. It’s a bit like quantum foam – virtual particles constantly appearing and disappearing. For your startup…

One of our mentors, Rowan Simpson, recently wrote a great essay on startup myths. I’d like to invite all our founders to give it their attention. http://rowansimpson.com/mythical-startup/

What a great night in Melbourne! We arrived just on time to Startup Weekend Melbourne for some pizza and Australian microbrews. About 160 people showed up tonight at the York Butter Factory. There were 44 pitches last night and 20 winning ideas plus a couple of teams who have decided to continue on their own….

Meng and Hugh are both mentors at the Founder Institue Singapore. Last night was a veritable Penn reunion: Adeo Ressi (Penn ’94 dropout), Scott Rafer (Penn ’90 and JFDI mentor), and Meng (Penn ’96 and JFDI Frog) spoke on the subject of Startup Research. Meng would like to offer the following highlights from his talk before…

“So what did you think of our project?” We get this question after every Startup Weekend, from almost every team. We believe in transparency and openness, so we’ll answer those questions out loud, in a series of blog posts, as well as in email to each team. Row 55, SQ919 from MNL to SIN. The…

Great energy here in Mint College in Taguig City, Manila where 250+ developers, designers, entrepreneurs and ideas gathered this weekend for Manila’s first ever Startup Weekend in the Philippines.   60 ideas were pitched Friday night. It was interesting to see some similar ideas to ones pitched at SWSG3 including a Startup Weekend online concept….