ReadWriteStart

"We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it's illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense."

That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alum who are trying to garner support for the "Democratizing Access to Capital Act" (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund startups. Launched yesterday with the hopes of getting $100,000 from 100 pledges, the guys behind WeFunder have already seen near $3 million in promised funds from more than a 1000 supporters if the Senate passes the bill.

There comes a time in the life of any startup where the founders look at each other, let out a sigh of relief and say, "we're going to make it." Startup founders and their first employees work countless hours making sure the product is functioning, helping clients and customers and responding to mini-catastrophes that crop up all over the place like wild fires during the Santa Ana winds.

The founders of Boston-based startup Promoboxx must be breathing that sigh of relief. Promoboxx has landed a deal with Chevy to power its Super Bowl commercials from local dealers. Yes, that Super Bowl. The one where Madonna is playing the halftime show this year. How did a little startup out of TechStars Boston make it to the biggest stage in the world?

Yesterday, I wrote a short review of a new mobile app from Webscorer that has a curious lineage. The startup came to be from a group of several ex-Microsoft developers and is led by Vesa Suomalainen. I have known Vesa for many years, and first met him when he ran Microsoft's mainframe communications business with a product called Host Integration server. This was back in the 3270 terminal emulation days and was quite the advanced product for its time. Vesa shared with me some lessons that he has learned with several botched startups since then and what he is trying to do with his latest venture.

I've found myself thinking a lot about the research being conducted by the Startup Genome Project these days. The data is an absolute goldmine and provides quantitative benchmarks for issues I've thought about for years. One of the findings from their first report was:

"Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money."

This certainly maps to my experience as a founder and also working with other entrepreneurs. However, in most cases it's a little more complex than that, as I find a number of goals typically intertwine to get people to jump in and start a business.

While certainly not every business needs to raise venture financing, it is the path for many high-growth technology startups. Therefore, going down the fundraising path is something many technology entrepreneurs will need to do and is a critical step in the development of their business. This can be an intimidating experience so I've put together a list of five tips for raising a venture round. This is by no means an exhaustive list so I'd love to hear other suggestions from you in the comments of this post.

If you haven't read my colleague Scott Fulton's post on "The Steve Jobs Formula and Why It Works" go read it right now! It's a very insightful piece written by an expert who literally watched Apple grow up, and there are plenty of lessons for all entrepreneurs in the Steve Jobs formula he spells out. However, to be "fair and balanced" here at ReadWriteWeb I think it's also important to point out some things that as an entrepreneur you'd be well served to disregard. What follows are four factors of the Apple formula to ignore. I'd love to hear what you agree and disagree with in the comments below as well as other factors that should have been included.

I had lunch with one of my favorite Internet entrepreneurs today, Mark Sawyier, the CEO of Off Campus Media. The company provides college students with apartment listings near their schools, and what started out as an idea five years ago is now a multi-million dollar business. Sawyier came to this business without any formal training in computer science, business, management, or other technology training, yet he is a natural when it comes to running a modern-day Internet business. In the short time we spent today, he came up with a few bon mots and wise thoughts that I want to share with those of you that are thinking about starting your own businesses.

John Borthwick is doing a fireside chat with me next week at our 2WAY Summit. If you aren't familiar with John, he is the CEO of Betaworks, one of the most fascinating companies focused on building internet-focused startups today.

You may not be familiar with Betaworks but you certainly are familiar with some of their companies: Tweetdeck and Summize (both acquired by Twitter), as well as other startups still independent (at least for now) like Bitly, Social Flow, Chartbeat and news.me.

In my last post on ReadWriteStart, I talked about how, in many cases, it wasn't an advantage to build your start-up in stealth mode. As a continuation of that theme, I thought it would be interesting to explore five tools you can use to iterate and improve your startup idea before writing one line of code. There is nothing worse than building a tool no one is interested in, so I'd encourage you to consider these options before starting down the path of building your next startup.

Specifically, these five tools can help you do three critical activities before starting to write a line of code: create a wireframe, get feedback from the target market and test value proposition through multiple landing pages.

Personalized news recommendations on the go - that's the dream of many an online news nerd and the startups that would serve them. One strong entrant into this field is My6Sense, a well-designed, venture-backed, Israeli company that uses implicit behavioral data from users to recommend the most relevant content in your personal river of news.

It's a good service, and one you're likely to hear a lot more about soon. The company will announce this week that it has hired Louis Gray, a self-made Silicon Valley internet celebrity and startup consultant, as its VP of Marketing and first US employee.