Kickstarter

So here goes! I'm kicking off my Kickstarter project today, with a little help from my friends. It's called Founders Less Than Three and you can support it right here!

It's a novel all about entrepreneurs -- five CEO guys and five CEO girls and their teams are building new companies from scratch and racing to get funding.  Boston is the best place in the world to found a start-up and my enterprenerds come from all over the world.

It's early here in Boston and I am thinking about my characters getting up, washing their faces, getting ready for the day. It's 5:30am, so a bunch of them have been working all night at their offices at Kendall Square. It's just one of those things, you figure you'll grab the T in time to get home late and then you just keep working through the night instead.

If you haven't tried Kickstarter, this is a great time to join. You can support my project for as little as a $1.00 and there's no complicated sign-up process and all that. Have you ever bought anything from Amazon? If so, then that's all you do with Kickstarter -- it all runs through Amazon and you don't even pay for a month (and only if my project gets fully funded.) So try it out and be sure to peruse the other amazing creative projects over at Kickstarter as well.

Guy Kawasaki's Cool New Stuff

Guy Kawasaki's set up a mailing list if you want cool stuff about his upcoming books and other projects he's been working on.  Just go to this link.

From TechStars in Kendall Square to the Middle of Mitte

A week before Demo Day here at TechStars Boston in Kendall Square and I'm solidly in love with our gang of 12 start-ups, including my e-publishing start-up, Libboo, but also infatuated with what's going on in Berlin and can't wait to be there for the NextBerlin conference.  Yes, I can finally say it, NextBerlin is NEXT WEEK!   And I can't wait to get there and test out SoundCloud co-founder, Alex Ljung's theory, "We don't really live in a country.  We live on the Internet.  The idea of countries is secondary."

But maybe cities are not secondary.  And as for innovations in printing and books, I start my trip by flying to Frankfurt (not far from Mainz where Gutenberg printed his bible and invented moveable type) then visit friends in Alsfeld on the fairy-tale route where you can see a statue of the famous Grimm Brothers' Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) -- and those guys were the original storytelling innovators.  From here we take the train to Berlin where Techcrunch says this week, "There is a chapter in the history of technology startups, or perhaps more a book, that will be dedicated to Berlin," then reports on The Factory, a new building dedicated to start-ups.  (Also check out Henrik Berggren's quick demo of ReadMill on Techcrunch here.)

So I hope to finish up my visit to Berlin with a lot of stories about innovators and why that city is a great place to build companies.  Feel free to leave some comments about any start-ups you think I shouldn't miss.