Silicon Prairie News

Venture capitalist Fred Wilson took his weekly blog series "MBA Mondays" into the classroom this month to share the ins and outs of employee equity. Skillshare, a New York-based startup billed as a "marketplace of classes," facilitated Wilson's hour-long presentation. Wilson began his class by asserting his belief in the importance of awarding employee equity. He summed this up with a comment once left on his blog by Jeff Minsch: "If anyone … read more

"Every good pitch, whether it's an elevator pitch, a three-minute pitch at an angel forum or even a 20-minute pitch at an investor, starts with a strong opening sentence," Founder Institute's Adeo Ressi says. "And I can't stress to you how important getting this opening sentence right is." To help entrepreneurs, Rissi has developed a simple guide to pitching in the form of a mad lib: My company, (company name), is developing (a defined offering) to … read more

From your friends on Facebook to the hosts of The Today Show, it seems everyone – well, those who account for one of 4 million video views in six days – is talking about "Caine's Arcade," a short film documenting the imagination and entrepreneurial spirit of a nine-year-old boy in East Los Angeles. A Los Angeles Times' article captured the latter of those qualities of Caine Monroy, the film's … read more

By random polling of friends at South by Southwest Interactive, one of this year's best sessions was a Saturday afternoon talk delivered by Frank Abagnale, the former confidence trickster, check forger, impostor and escape artist who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can." Though his presentation isn't what you'd expect to find at an event celebrating the web, Abagnale's 30-minute re-telling … read more

As we're in the middle of March Madness, this week's Sunday Video features one of the greatest pre-game speeches of all-time, Bo Schembechler's "The Team." Though it was delivered in preparation for a football game and neither for basketball nor business, Schembechler's pep talk stresses the importance of a team better than any CEO or best-selling author could … read more

Today's Sunday video comes to us via Brad Feld on the Ask the VC blog. In it, Foundry Group partner Ryan McIntyre discusses the beginning and early days at Excite.com, one of the first internet search engines. These stories from the early days of the internet are really interesting to me, as it's amazing how far things have progressed in a very short … read more

Peter Kageyama, a community and economic development consultant and author of "For the Love of Cities," thinks that we need to find more lovers for our cities. "Ultimately, the element that makes for the most lovable cities are the people themselves who are in love with the city, the ones who are those living embodiments of a love note," Kageyama said in a presentation at TEDxIowaCity in November. A love note, as he defines it, is a … read more

At the Build conference in November, accomplished designer Wilson Miner, currently head of design for Rdio, opened his presentation by disclosing his sometimes shared cynicism of his career of designing for the web. "I have often said in moments of frustration, it's just a website," Miner says, "it's not going change the world, just get over it. But I do think … this is a uniquely exciting time … read more

Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur turned professor, offers a succinct and excellent answer to the commonly asked question, "What's a startup?" Presented as a part of Sprikle Labs's "Now I Know" series, Blank frames his answer around his parent's entrepreneurial story of opening a grocery story and how a small business differs from a startup, or what he specifically calls a "scalable startup." … read more