Danny Boice is the CTO of Speek - a 500 Startups-funded startup that lets users do conference calls with a simple link (speek.com/YourName) rather than using phone numbers and PINs. A serial startup/technology entrepreneur and executive, Danny started his career as a software engineer working for startups like Network Solutions and MusicMaker.com in the 90′s. You can find Danny on Twitter @DannyBoice.
In my last post I waxed poetic about the many lessons I learned from watching House of Cards on Netflix. The post was so well received that I decided to do a part 2 and consider my poignant insights / potty humor for the…
Building a company from a startup into a business is crazy hard work. I founded my startup Speek two years ago. We now have around $3 million in venture funding, 19 employees, and are post-revenue. One thing I’ve learned in Speek’s quest to fix…
If you are a startup founder, product manager, user experience designer or otherwise playing any role that may influence a product in any way, shape, or form, you need to get familiar with BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model. I have made it my mission at…
I’m not sure if it’s the holiday season, missing CES this year, or the fact that my startup Speek just released our SaaS business offering this week, but something’s made me sentimental and introspective as of late. I’ve found myself thinking back through my…
In my capacity as co-founder and CTO of Speek, where we are busy making free conference calls fast and easy, I do a significant amount of guest writing for major publications. I write this weekly column for Tech Cocktail (you can sign up to write…
My name is Danny Boice and I am a college drop out. There, I said it. I briefly went to college, realized I was spending a bunch of money I didn’t have while not learning anything that was going to actually help me do…
I may or may not be a good reference point as to the inklings of the average man-about-town. However, if there can be said to be an average geek-chic-startup-founder-man-about-town, I feel like you could do a lot worse than me in trying to assess…
My startup Speek is making free conference calls fast and easy. Speek has raised nearly $3 million in seed funding from a blend of angel investors and VC’s. We are currently going through the process of closing our Series A round. I’d like to…
As 2013 nears its end, I find myself reflecting upon the good, the bad, and the ugly of the past year. 2013 saw many notable IPOs, crowdfunding for startups appears to finally have become a reality, and my startup Speek is still here(!) fixing…
My friend Michael Chasen wrote an interesting post the other day laying out the pros and cons of celebrity endorsements for startups. His post was great and his advice was dead-on. This article came on the heels of announcements that Justin Bieber is leading…
If you have a PR firm on retainer as a seed stage startup (even, in most cases, if you are Series A funded), you’re doing it wrong. At Speek, where we’re making the conference call fast and easy, we see press placements as part…
The ways startups fund themselves are rapidly changing. In the late 90s you could get started with a little friends-and-family money and then go straight to a Series A round good for a few million bucks—pre-product, pre-revenue, and pre-traction. Then the bubble burst. In…
When you found a startup, the odds are stacked against you from the beginning. The world can seem like it’s divided into two kinds of people: those who aren’t quite sure what it is that you do (most family members, pretty much anybody who…
In startups, sometimes you’re the horse and sometimes you’re the damn whip. “Ups and downs” is putting it mildly. I’m not sure if I was bipolar before I founded my startup, Speek—my wife Joanne is sure that I was, but I’ll let her save…
“I know how it feels to wake up f****d up Pockets broke as hell, another rock to sell People look at you like you’re the user Selling drugs to all the losers mad Buddha abuser But they don’t know about the stress-filled day Baby…
True story: I once took a wrong turn at the Las Vegas Convention Center and ended up smack dab in the middle of a South Indian bazaar which featured such prized items as secondhand quilts/iPad covers with pictures of your kids screen-printed on them…
My startup Speek just raised a large seed round – over $1.2 million large. 500 Startups came in first and really kicked things off for us. After a few more months of work, we got some really great angels and VCs in on our…
