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As an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, Jeff Bussgang sits in a unique position that allows him to provide advice that is both relevant and helpful to young companies. Such was the case this morning on his aptly named "Seeing Both Sides" blog where Bussgang discussed what he and investors like him look for in startup teams. As we've mentioned before, a VC invests just as much (if not more) in the entrepreneurs themselves as they do in the idea being pitched - and Bussgang has an interesting perspective on why this may be true.

As an avid podcast subscriber I have dozens of audio and video programs feeding into iTunes daily, but one recent submission from the TED Talks video podcast caught my eye because of its parallels to lean startups. Tom Wujec, author and fellow at Autodesk, presented at TED 2010 back in February, and his talk, "Build a tower, build a team," is now available online. Wujec conducted a team building experiment with all types of people, from business execs to kindergartners, and the results he presented were surprising, to say the least.

In our recent discussions of branding for startups and entrepreneurs, we've mentioned that marketing and branding is always harder to do when what you're trying to sell isn't a quality product. Successful startup products tend to fit into an equation involving the ideas and the people who are executing those ideas. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Hunch and previously Flickr, says that it wasn't just the idea that attracted her to Hunch; the people behind it were just as important.

From CircleUp, a group messaging service for membership websites, comes a new service called SmartPay which lets small groups and teams collect money via email. This can easily replace the old method of payment collection used by most groups today: passing around an envelope and stuffing it full of cash and checks. The new SmartPay service uses Amazon Payments on the backend, providing members with a familiar experience that will hopefully ease their security concerns about paying online.

Today at DEMO09, a company called cc:Betty launched their new smart email service which creates "mailspaces" for your email conversations. These online sites serve as a home for your email discussions, functioning somewhat like a SharePoint site or a Google Group, but far more robust and much easier to create. The collaborative workspaces are populated with the email conversations themselves as well as images, videos, audio files, and more all retrieved from within the email thread. Most importantly, they can be created on-the-fly. All you need to do is "cc: Betty."