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.
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...
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 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...
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...
“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...
This is the second part in a two-part series on hiring. Read the first part here: “Hiring is a Dog from Hell.” Having a huge pipeline of candidates can almost be as bad as having little to no pipeline. Interviews can be a massive...
We got Speek off the ground using a hive of moonlighters, freelancers, contractors, interns, sweat-equity employees, and founders. It was a bear, but it was what we had to do. Once we’d raised a little cash, it became time to establish a full-time team...