Daily Reading from June 05, 2008

Links to what I’ve been reading recently.

• C and Morse Code
• Harvard Negotiation Project: 5 Lasting Rules For Negotiating Anything — "I recently had dinner with a friend of mine, a physician-turned-businessperson-turned-founder. We were discussing the virtues of transferable skills, and I asked him what management tools he brings to entrepreneurship from his earlier career in medicine. He pondered a bit ..."
• What Makes a Great Technical Manager — "Jurgen’s post, How to Select a Fine Technical Manager, along with the posts he responded to prompted this one. I’m not agreeing much with Jurgen today. I suspect it’s because we have very different experience. In my experience, only technical ..."
• Should your startup release financial data? — "Two different companies I profiled last night shared their revenue numbers with me in virtual interviews, but were both shocked that I printed the numbers in their profiles.  Each company asked that I remove the numbers and I complied with ..."
• Should startups pay to pitch for DallasBlue? — "The short answer: NEVER! Marc Freedman, who I don’t know personally, runs a group called DallasBlue.  Evidently he has been soliciting companies we have profiled asking them to pay him $400 to pitch to his group in an event titled ..."
• Seth's Blog: Email checklist — "4. Did every person on the list really and truly opt in? Not like sort of, but really ask for it? 5. So that means that if I didn’t send it to them, they’d complain about not getting it? 6. ..."
• Your reputation matters - how to handle reference calls — "The world that we live in trades on reputation.  What that means is that eventually whether you are raising capital or landing new customers, your references will matter.  If you are an entrepreneur, a VC will want to do some ..."
• Not an OS — Last Thursday I tweeted: “I strive to maintain an open mind when nontechnical people talk about the ‘Internet OS’ or ‘Web OS’. Sometimes it's tough.” I got some grumbles by email and I think the subject is worth more ...
• MC Hammer offers entrepreneurial advice to Intel Capital’s CEOs — "It was Hammer Time tonight at the Intel Capital dinner. With some 600 start-up chief executives in the audience, entertainer MC Hammer offered ministerial advice (embrace technology, don’t forget community) for tech entrepreneurs from a “content guy’s” perspective. With references ..."
• The Weird Economics of Information | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing — "All of this suggests that an entrepreneur should be open with everyone, and that they will get the most value out of being open with the people who are most knowledgeable about the particular problem they are trying to solve. ..."
• 7 Uncannily Obvious Lessons From A Product Launch
• Will your next meeting pass the "blizzard goggles" test?
• Anti-stealth for startups: Convinced yet? What if a VC told you it was a good idea? — "“I started thinking about this particular problem when I noticed that, at least anecdotally, there was a correlation between how open entrepreneurs were with us and their ultimate success. Simply put the entrepreneurs who are aggressively open in describing their ..."