Chris Maresca

Yet another cleaned up post from a startup thread on LinkedIn.  This one is about VC math and TAM’s. One thing that’s very much missing in most entrepreneur’s understanding of the fundraising process is the notion of total addressable market (TAM) and it’s relationship to fund size. Basically, it’s the understanding that fund size vs [...]

Last December, I was in an interesting meeting where the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) presented a bunch of interesting stats several days before they were due to be released. The most interesting statistic, however, was one that was generated specifically for this particular meeting and is not part of the regular dataset.  It was [...]

Over the years, I’ve gotten many requests from people wanting help raising funds.   Most of the time, I find that they have failed to do their homework and that even the most basic elements are missing from their pitch.   I recently posted in a forum describing what I would look for in a pitch, so [...]

Well, after 24 hours of trying out 01.com, I’m left frustrated by their jumble of different systems with no attempts to aggregate them into a single ‘portal’, particularly the diversity of different admin systems.   OTOH, the mail service is quite fast, although I have not tested inbound mail much.    They called me this morning to [...]

There have been quite a few memes in the past decade about the stupid things you do online living forever. Well, it’s not just the stupid things, you see. Just for kicks, I went back and looked at the website of the very first organization I built a complete, commercial web-presence for, back in 1995. [...]

Well, for the last month or so, I’ve been investigating several migrations to more managed hosted services so I don’t need to spend so much time doing admin.  Email is rather difficult as I host several power users who have pretty exacting requirements and I wanted to get more capabilities.   A lot of people suggested [...]

I’ve heard a lot about TED over the last 10 or so years.  It’s always an event I’ve wanted to attend but have never been able to justify the cost.  Lots of brilliant people I know rave about it, so I was happy to see the TEDx series of local events emerge.   I missed TEDxSF [...]

I’ve been a longtime Thunderbird user, and I thought I would upgrade to V3 today.  Bad idea.   Although the UI was slightly updated (notably through the use of tabs), everything else was either the same or broken.   The mail compose toolbar wound up overwriting the From field section (with From, Subject, etc all in lower [...]

I’ve always said that the security of biometrics is really problematic.  Once someone figures out how to hack a biometric device, it’s impossible for users to ‘change the password’.  Unlike most systems that provide authentication (e.g. passwords, SecurID tokens, drivers licenses, etc), you can’t just throw out the ‘token’ (e.g. your fingerprints or eyes) and [...]