Ted Serbinski (Page 3)

4 Tips to Hire an Awesome Software Engineer

As a computer engineer and former CTO, startups often ask me “how can I hire an awesome developer?” and “how do I an interview a software engineer?” It can be tough, but it shouldn’t be much harder than hiring a non-technical person to

Detroit

Detroit's Startup Tech Resurgence: Be Part of the Inaugural Tech Week

Detroit’s inaugural Techweek celebration will take place May 19-25th in downtown Detroit. Sign up here and be part of the largest tech conference for entrepreneurs in Detroit. Full disclosure: I am the Chairman of Techweek’s Detroit Executive Advisory Board. I’ll also

Detroit

Detroit's Startup Ecosystem is Missing 3 Things

I’ve now been in Detroit for 882 days. Or roughly, 2 years, 5 months, and 1 day. As an ex-Silicon Valley guy who co-founded and sold a company, I have a good sense of what makes the valley tick—and how it turns

startup advice

The Achilles Heel of Every Great Idea

Ever since I started investing, both as an angel, and now as a venture capitalist at Detroit Venture Partners, there has been one recurring phrase that I hear nearly every day. It’s a phrase that once intrigued me by what was to be

startup advice

24 Business Insights I’ve Learned from Billionaire Dan Gilbert

I moved to Detroit a little more than 2 years ago, joining Detroit Venture Partners (DVP). While here, I’ve had the pleasure to work alongside billionaire Dan Gilbert, #118 on the Forbes 400, whose a General Partner in our fund. Unbeknownst to me

startup advice

The One Competitor Your Startup Forgot About

Startup Competition is GoodStartups are competitive by nature. They are out to solve a problem or change the world in an innovative way. As they take on funding, acquire paying customers, and generate revenue, others notice, and the competition heats up. This competition drives

startup advice

5 Secrets for Getting a VC to Respond to Your Email

I get a lot of email. I mean a lot. Close to 100,000 emails last year. And I try and read each and every email. But it’s nearly impossible. And responding to them all? Well, that is impossible. (side note: to learn

startup advice

The #1 Marketing Tip Your Startup Needs to Know

Updated to include the new Samsung Galaxy S4 ads and how they compare to Apple’s on August 12, 2013. So what’s the #1 marketing tip your startup needs to know? Well, it is a tip that focuses on how to sell your

insights

The Ultimate Failures that Killed My Last Startup

This is a story that has never been shared in its entirety. Despite a successful sale of our startup, ParentsClick, to Lifetime Television in 2008, eventually it became a massive failure that very few people know about. I was a co-founder and CTO of

Detroit

The Diamond in the Midwest

If you’ve been reading my previous posts, you’ll notice a common theme: why Detroit? I think I summed it well in my entrepreneurial gold rush post but I left out a key point: there’s a hidden diamond in the Midwest. Yes,

Detroit

Disrupting Venture Capital in the Midwest

In my last post, I wrote about the best startup advice I’ve ever gotten — think bigger. Truly the best advice I’ve ever gotten and I encourage you to read that post if you haven’t already. And in my first post, I

insights

The Best Startup Advice I've Ever Gotten

“Think bigger” George Zachary, General Partner, Charles River Ventures (early investor in Twitter & Yammer)I could leave it at that. It’s succinct. Concise. Even, world changing. But it doesn’t sound inspiring. That is, unless you understand the story behind this advice.

articles

The Entrepreneurial Gold Rush: Why I moved from San Francisco to Detroit

Updated to include Detroit filing for bankruptcy on Aug 12, 2013. “If Columbus had an advisory committee he would probably still be at the dock.”Arthur Goldberg, American statesman and juristEvery week, in a bewildered state, someone asks me “Hey Ted, why did you

code

How to Host Your Static Website on Amazon S3: Step-by-Step Guide

Login to your Amazon AWS accountCreate a new hosted zone for your domain using Route 53Copy the NS records for this zone to your domain provider (e.g., GoDaddy)Edit your domain on your domain registrar (e.g., GoDaddy) by clicking Set NameserversCreate a

code

Book Review: Drupal 7 Module Development

Well, it’s been a while my Drupal friends, almost 18 months… dusting off this old Drupal 6 blog and time to start posting again. And what better way to get started again than by talking about Drupal 7, by far the best release

code

Automatically Extracting Tags from Nodes

Automatically tagging content is becoming easier with services like OpenCalais and Yahoo Terms Extractor, offering their APIs for free semantic analysis of content. There’s even a great Drupal module, Auto Tagging (with a great writeup on usage) that ties these services together and

code

Website Crashes IE8 Browser with sysfader.exe Exception

So here’s what may be a crazy new IE8 CSS bug that can be triggered under the right circumstances. At MothersClick we started to get a few bug reports about “my browser crashing” when viewing the site. As hard as we could try,

code

RightScale & Drupal - How to Get Internal IP Address

I’m working on a new project that has a Drupal site running in the cloud–specifically Amazon AWS with RightScale sitting on top to manage our servers and automated scaling scripts. The advantage of RightScale is it allows us to manage our servers

code

How to Save and Archive Your Geocities Account (with jQuery + Firebug)

Back in the late 1990s, Geocities was all the rage and free 2MB of space for hosting your website rocked. It was in 1997 that I first put my own websites online and Geocities made it very easy to host. Fast-forward 12 years and

code

Drupal Behavior to Fix IE6 CSS Background Image Flickering

When the new myLifetime community launched we wanted to focus on performance, and one trick was to minimize HTTP requests by using the CSS sprites technique. For a great run down of this technique and examples of other major sites using this, check out

code

myLifetime Community Launches

Recently, the new myLifetime Community launched and it has been an overwhelming success. With members joining at such a fast rate, it’ll soon be surging past 100,000 registered members. This site is separate from the main myLifetime site (which also is Drupal)

code

Blog Redesign and Drupal "Spring Theme" Released

Almost exactly 1 year ago I redesigned this blog and today, I unveil yet another new design. This time, it’s running Drupal 6 and all that goodness. I’ve enhanced the contrast on the design quite a bit and really improved the readability

news

MothersClick Acquired by Lifetime Networks

MothersClick.com and the rest of the ParentsClick Networkhave been acquired by Lifetime Entertainment. I’ve been working on this site and with Dietrich (CEO & founder) for over 2 years now. Through the ups and the downs we stuck to it, determined to

code

Creating an Alpha Pager with Views 2 and Drupal 6

UPDATE: Earl comments below how this is already built in. Two different ways to achieve a similar result, each with their own pros/cons. Hats off to Earl Miles and the rest the views developers they have done a tremendous job with Views 2.

code

Getting Drupal to Play Nice with Your CDN

Note: A better version of this patch is going into Drupal 7. View the issue/patch here. Getting Drupal to play nice with your CDN can be a bit of a hassle. You have to make sure your assets (like JS, CSS, and image

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