I met with two 20-something budding entrepreneurs this week, just by chance. I love working with and mentoring these young people. There is so much energy and hope to better themselves and make the world a better place too. And so much they need to learn. I thought I would encapsulate some of my advice that I gave them, and perhaps motivate you to reach out to someone you know who is looking to start their own business and send this post their way too.

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.

There's no better way to show off a new web application than by navigating through it with an expert hand, telling its story and recording a short demo video. Some startups pay a pro to make their videos but more people make their own. Sometimes they are terrible.

Attachments.me is a startup that makes it easy to sort through your email attachments and the company has a pretty good little demo video on its front page. Co-founder Benjamin Coe posted a video about videos yesterday and his method for making simple demo videos looks like something many people could benefit from watching. Different people have different methods for making videos but the big take-away I got from watching Coe's is that it's important to have a plan. I like his.

Auren Hoffman is the CEO of Rapleaf, a personal-data aggregator that has been the subject of a remarkable amount of controversy but is wildly useful as a data provider to must-see apps like Rapportive and Gist.

While Hoffman's company may know a lot about you as a web user and person, he knows a lot of people himself the old-fashioned way, in real life. Introduced before keynoting at Austin, Texas's Capital Factory Demo Day as "the most-connected person in Silicon Valley," Hoffman gave a really interesting talk about how he handles hiring at his company. I live blogged his talk on Google Plus and offer my notes below.

Ethernet inventor and generally accomplished tech super-guy Bob Metcalfe gave a great opening keynote talk at this morning's Capital Factory Demo Day in Austin, Texas. The event has been good so far and is live streaming online for free.

Metcalfe offered a wide ranging talk to open the day but included some tasty tidbits in the form of two lists: five personal skills that entrepreneurs need to develop in order to succeed in building tech companies that scale and six types of people a startup ecosystem needs to include in order to foster success.

Jeff Clavier was the first tech investor I ever met; he was introduced to me years ago by some hip engineers in a bar as "one of the few cool VCs." Years later Clavier's name now comes up all the time when one of his portfolio companies finds success; his exits include Mint, Tapulous, and UserPlane, other investments include Mashery (a ReadWriteWeb sponsor), Rapleaf, Fitbit, bitly, GroupOn, Twitter and many more.

Clavier spoke last week at the International Startup Festival in Montreal on the topic of raising money - with a special emphasis on the numbers that a startup should keep an eye on. My notes from his very informative presentation are below.

Paul Palmieri, Co-Founder and CEO of mobile advertising service Millennial Media just gave a really valuable talk at the International Startup Festival in Montreal titled "Investing in Your Influencers." Palmieri talked about how startups can get the most value out of their advisors and friends.

Prior to founding Millennial, Palmieri was a mobile advertising and data executive at Verizon and Advertising.com. My notes from this very interesting strategic talk follow below. I've posted them without comment as I think they speak for themselves, but would love to know what you think of this advice, readers. I'll tell you one thing: hearing these thoughts articulated so clearly makes me think that anyone thinking about joining a new company would benefit greatly from asking about that company's relationship with its advisors.

It's a familiar story: a startup launches their beta. The tech blogosphere writes up the news: "Sign up now!" Droves of people rush to do so (well, hopefully). There's a spike in traffic and solid number of names and email addresses of interested people. But then what?

Do you have the right people in your beta? Are you going to get the right feedback?

These sorts of questions are particularly important if your target users are from a specific group - a specific age, perhaps, or job-title. Such is the case with the new educational app ShowMe, which just posted on its blog detailing its strategies for running its beta.

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.

Steve Blank, author of Four Steps to Epiphany, has helped formulate the thinking behind the Lean Startup methodology, together with Eric Ries. I had an opportunity to meet him during a discussion around the Startup Genome project. He observed that most startups that succeed aren't lean: their goal is to have an exit rather than a scalable business. What would be the methodology for startups that simply want to flip?

Flip startups are agile startups that aim to exit quickly. Unlike Lean startups, their priority isn't to learn in order to create a scalable business model. Instead, their goal is to create a promising product. For example, it could be a successful single app or game. The idea is to build a hit that would make the founder(s) an appealing and quick talent acquisition (sometimes referred to as an acq-hire). This is lean development without any customer development. The focus is on building. Recent examples include Blindtype, Hipster or About.me. All three were bought before or right after launch.