Dale Fontenot

Saturday, January 1, 2011

How To Avoid Getting Fired From Your Own Company

If you start a company, it will probably happen to you someday. Maybe it will be your VC or a board member. Maybe it will be your co-founder. Sooner or later, they'll try to fire you. I'm an investor in or advisor to dozens of startups, and at least once a quarter, I get the call: "Chris, they're trying to fire me." (The other urgent call I get is when they're negotiating a financing round, merger, or sale. I much prefer those calls!) Most entrepreneurs are surprised the first time their investors or co-founders try to fire them. They can't imagine being banished from the company that they created. Maybe they were the only employee of the company for years. Maybe they recruited and courted the very person who comes to carry out the execution. The sad fact is, founder firings are the rule, not the exception.

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China Censors 60,000 Porn Sites, 5,000 Arrested

lothos writes with news that China has arrested thousands more people and shuttered 60,000 websites in an ongoing anti-pornography crackdown. "Wang Chen, director of the Information Office of the State Council, said at a news conference that some 350 million pieces of pornographic and indecent internet content were eliminated, according to the Xinhua report. The government launched a special campaign a year ago to rid the internet of pornographic and vulgar content, Xinhua reported. Overall, the campaign included 2,197 criminal cases involving 4,965 people who violated Chinese law by disseminating pornography via the internet or mobile phones, the news agency said. Of those, 58 people received prison sentences exceeding five years."

Facebook for iPhone Usage Statistics (Requires Flash Player)

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Fred Wilson and Fortune are right about Android vs iOS (and everyone else), but I hate it

Fred Wilson is recommending developers invest first in Android and Fortune has a similar article about why 2011 is going to be the year that Android explodes. Why? Market share. Android is about to really take off, his thesis goes. They are both right. But I hate it. First, let’s talk about why they are [...]

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New CMS Makes Creating and Managing Smaller Websites a Snap

This post is part of Mashable?s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please…

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Skype Looks to Accelerate Mobile Video Chat With iOS App

Skype makes it official; it's pushing ahead with a major mobile video chat effort starting with an update to its iOS client. Skype believes this will be a major step in further mainstreaming video chat in general and accelerating the adoption of mobile video conferencing.

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Skype Now Illegal in China: This Week in Online Tyranny

China outlaws Skype. VOIP phone and messaging systems have been outlawed in China with the exception of the state-owned China Unicom and China Telecom.

This is a pattern in China, where the two birds of repression and protectionism nest in the same bush. The combination of eliminating competition and controlling discourse made this act inevitable.

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South Korea to censor Twitter and Facebook. South Korea has reportedly issued a warning that South Koreans who post Facebook and Twitter messages and retweet messages that praise communist North Korea will face legal prosecution.

cuban flag.gif Leaked cables show deeper fear of bloggers than "activists" in Cuba. A number of U.S. diplomatic cables show how little the government of Cuba fear old-style dissidents and how concerned they are over bloggers, "a group that frustrates and scares the GOC like no other."