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Superpowering the Silicon Prairie
(Guest post by Philip Rosedale.) I recently posted on the Coffee & Power blog about Silicon Valley’s amazing lead in startups, and our analysis of why it is both so strong and growing. The summary is that Silicon Valley has more tech people per capita (and per square mile) than anywhere else in the world,…
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Spend the next nine hours watching all of Big Omaha 2012 (Video)
With sweltering summer heat gripping the Midwest, the SPN meteorology team advises denizens of the Prairie to spend only sparing time outdoors. Instead, we recommend curling up in the cool of a climate-controlled environment in front of the web-enabled screen of your choice and enjoying our Big Omaha 2012 video playlist. Earlier this week, we…
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‘Humongous education problem’ fuels Skillshare founder (Video)
The entrepreneurial story Michael Karnjanaprakorn shared May 11 at Big Omaha 2012 was one that grew out of disenchantment with the status quo in education. Karnjanaprakorn’s frustration with education took root when he was in college and came to the conclusion that he’d been duped. College had always been portrayed to him as a place…
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On roller coaster journey, Rheingold learns to ‘ride it out’ (Video)
Ted Rheingold started Dogster in 2004 with the modest goal of making $500 per month from advertising to help cover rent for the office space he occupied. In his wildest dreams, he imagined the site might attract 10,000 users. Within a couple months, Dogster had put those dreams to shame. By March, the site was…
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Sarah Prevette tells a tale of bouncing back from failure (Video)
After a monthlong hiatus, the Big Omaha 2012 Video Series is back. Sarah Prevette of BetaKit kicks off the last batch of videos from our May conference with a talk about mistakes, missteps and bouncing back. Prevette is less than a year removed from selling her startup, Sprouter, a site that provides founders help with…
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Eddie Huang seeks a greater purpose in his pursuit of paper (Video)
The speaker who strolled on stage at Big Omaha 2012 to the cash-infused chorus of Kayne West song was, unsurprisingly, unapologetic about his own acquisition of liquid capital. “People are always like, ‘It’s not about money; it’s not about money,” Eddie Huang said during his May 11 talk at Big Omaha. “It is about money.…
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Four founders riff on fun, failure and asking the right questions (Video)
If you’ve been following our Big Omaha 2012 Video Series, you’ve seen the solo performances given by Yael Cohen of F Cancer, Ben Lerer of Thrillist, Jim McKelvey of Square and Philip Rosedale of Coffee & Power on May 10 at Big Omaha 2012. Now, we bring you an encore performance featuring that entire quartet.…
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Philip Rosedale foresees further shifts in the nature of work (Video)
An unmistakable thread woven through Philip Rosedale’s life and his talk on May 10 at Big Omaha 2012 is the tendency to challenge commonly held assumptions regarding people and the work they do. Take, for instance, Rosedale’s thoughts on the perception that Silicon Valley is full of nothing but the swashbuckling cavaliers of the business…
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Kevin Hale focuses on fostering relationships with users (Video)
Kevin Hale and his team at Wufoo, an online form builder, approach interactions with new users like dating, and interactions with existing users like a marriage. Wufoo’s software, Hale said at Big Omaha 2012, was constructed so that users can have a relationship with it. “When we knew that we were going to build software,”…
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Mena Trott finds lessons in all of life’s moments (Video)
Mena Trott has always been a goal-oriented individual. In college, she set her sights on getting straight ‘A’s at least one quarter. She did exactly that in her senior year, while juggling a course load of 25 credits, no less. Over the last decade, the founder of The Sew Weekly and co-founder of Six Apart…