Let’s set the stage. On February 12, 2011, Hosni Mubarak resigned as President of Egypt. Just one month prior, on January 17th, a man lit himself on fire in front of Egypt’s parliament building in downtown Cairo – propelling the country’s people on a mission to overthrow Mubarak and his regime. Beginning on January 25th, the [...]
I never expected to find a mentor for my career when the cashier randomly included a magazine with my order of textbooks. It was September 2008, and I had just bought my textbooks for Clarkson University. It was in that very magazine that I first read about student entrepreneur Matt Ackerson. Digging around, I found him on Facebook and decided to [...]
Right now, a movement is taking place. A Party revolution. It all started with Gary Lachance throwing some pretty insane parties. Today, the parties have grown to tens of thousands of people. In a few weeks, they are bringing the ridiculous fun to the US for the ‘Strictly Business Tour‘. Along with his co-founder and fellow Canadian, Tom (pictured on the left), [...]
Welcome to The X Factor’s brand new illmatic redesign! Let’s just say….thanks a MILLION to Petovera Design. As an aspiring entrepreneur myself, I think one of the best ways to learn is to go directly to the source and study the stories of founders building startups. Wait ’til you read Natalie’s interview. Natalie Kaminski was [...]
Welcome back to the 4th (very noisy – sorry!) segment of my interview with the Founder and CEO of Socialwok, Ming Yong! Socialwok is a collaborative social feed built on Google apps. This is a story about what Socialwok learned from its private beta, and how it changed the way they thought about their initial [...]
Today is a monumental day for The X Factor – but I’ll get to that in a second. First, let’s turn the clock back a few weeks. In January, I wrote about a problem I saw with the difficulty of planning trips and the gap it represented in the travel startup space. My friend Chris [...]
THE BACKGROUND Around 2005, Sam Bensalem dropped out of college to pursue his dreams as an entrepreneur. After becoming frustrated looking for a developer, he took up the challenge of teaching himself how to code. Today, he is the Founder of VeVite – a startup that notifies its users when anyone that they are following [...]
Welcome back to the 3rd segment of my interview with Ming Yong, Founder and CEO of Socialwok; the collaborative social feed built on Google apps. Thousands of users. Praised by Robert Scoble. Winner of TechCrunch50′s Demopit Award. A growing track record of working with Google. A global presence achieved from being started in Singapore, having [...]
Branding advice from Ming Yong, CEO of Socialwok from John Exley on Vimeo. Welcome back to segment two of my interview with Ming Yong, Founder and CEO of Socialwok; the collaborative social feed built on Google apps. It was the summer of 2009. The Socialwok founders – based in Singapore – were planning to fly [...]
Interview with Ming Yong, CEO of Socialwok (Intro) from John Exley on Vimeo. Unforgettable. I still remember when I first discovered Socialwok. I was in Singapore’s Supperclub for the the iMATCH Launchpad event, standing behind a panel of investors that included former BitTorrent Founder and President (and current partner at early stage startup program i/o [...]