July 2008 Archives

DFJ Frontier, an early stage venture capitalist affiliated with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, operates out of Santa Barbara and Sacramento.  They have a very useful "Team Building Tactics" PDF, with great info on hiring new employees, interview tactics, what to look out for and more.

Darius Monsef of COLOURlovers puts together a great set of lessons on the trials and tribulations of building an online community (with some offline lessons as well).  His article is posted on the whimsically named siliconflorist.com.  I learned a lot of this by trial and error.   Good readin'.

Lesson: You must grow within your community, especially in the early days. Later, leaders will arise who can handle some of the day-to-day things and welcome new members. But in those first few days, weeks and months… you are the welcoming committee, janitor, house mom, judge, jury and banninator.