Usually when a start-up goes under, the story of the successes and failures along the way dies with the company. By that point, the founders are exhausted by the experience, mentally and physically burned out. Too beat up to write about everything that went wrong.

But this time, we got lucky.

Roger Ehrenberg, co-founder of Monitor110, has written this excellent Post Mortem about everything that went wrong with the founding of the company. He boils it all down to “Seven deadly sins.” If you are an entrepreneur, read this article. It will help you avoid some mistakes that can be incredibly costly.

For me, I’m trying to take to heart point #5 - specifically, I need to launch my product as quickly as possible to get input and feedback from my potential customers. Otherwise, I’m developing in a vacuum.

I worked with two other companies in the past that used this post mortem approach regularly. At Let’s Go, where the staff turned over every year (only Harvard students are allowed to work at the company, and usually the managers are seniors), part of our salary was contingent on writing up a report at the end of the summer, after the books shipped to the printers, to tell the people who would have our jobs the following year what we did and why. These reports were my training manual for the job, and were incredibly valuable. At Network World, one editor would be responsible to review every issue of the magazine that came out - they would mark it up with comments and input, and would pass around the issue to every person on staff. Those reviews were always a bit painful (seeing the mistakes that we made - in print - wasn’t a whole lot of fun) but they made us better.

Good luck Roger! And thank you.

Photo by CristinaJucan

My friend Denise Dubie, who is a senior editor at Network World, has started doing high-tech movie reviews - and if you like going to the movies and are interested in technology, I highly recommend that you start listening.

Her co-host is Jason Meserve, and the tagline of the “Network Downtime” podcast is “Movies for techies, where we review movies that put technology in the spotlight, but sometimes get it wrong.”

If you’ve ever seen a movie and been turned off by the way that technology is depicted completely unrealistically, you’ll love this show. Denise and Jason are both skeptics, but fun and open-minded ones, and their take on this movie was totally entertaining and informative. My favorite part of the show is the chemistry that the two have.

Denise: Basically, I’m tired of seeing movies that misuse technology in their plots.

Jason: And I just want to go to the movies on Network World’s dime. 

Denise and Jason are both smart, interesting and funny - a good combination for a podcast. The first movie that they review is Untraceable, a new release starring Diane Lane, where she’s an FBI agent trying to track down a serial killer who is streaming live video of his victims. Check out their podcast. And let me know what you think.

When I started my career, the Internet didn’t yet dominate publishing to the extent that it does today. There was a lot more paper being pushed around, and my first two “real” jobs - at Let’s Go travel guides and Network World magazine - were both print-based.

The thing that I liked the best about both of these jobs was the feeling of accomplishment that I got when something was finished. At Network World, we put the magazine to bed every Friday afternoon, and were free for the weekend. Monday morning, the issue would appear in the office, all our hard work evident in the print publication. Let’s Go was much the same way, although on an extended scale. We would work through the spring semester and summer, and at the end of the year, the updated and improved travel guide book would be released. An entire book, with your name on it, to prove that you worked hard and produced something great. (I just checked and now that book is 10 years out of date and available to buy for $0.35!)

With my current work, I relate this publishing experience to launching a new Web site. Or a new feature on a Web site. Or a redesign. Or a blog post. There are so many more milestones with the Internet because things are fluid - if something isn’t working, it can be changed easily, so I am quicker to approve and launch something. But there is still a thrill that I get when I create something new and see it live.

Today I get to tell you about some new stuff - and I am excited. I hope that you check everything out and let me know what you think.

First, my blog has been redesigned. If you are reading this post on RSS reader, come to the site and check it out. The redesign was done by Allyson Nickowitz - she’s great and incredibly talented. Not to mention that she managed to get me to sit through a photo shoot!

The Web site for my new company is now live, as well. I hope that this helps explain a bit more about what I’m doing with my business for anyone who is curious.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in the Cara Austin music project from the beginning, and Cara’s first song is now available for free download at her Web site. The CD should come out sometime in December.

There are other projects that I have in process, but they are not yet ready for prime-time. More announcements on future launches will be coming soon.

I made it to the TechCrunch Meetup in Boston on Friday night, and it was a lot of fun. I appreciate the hospitality from the folks at TechCrunch (there was open bar for the duration of the event) as well as the sponsors. I managed to talk about half of the vendors who were there, as well as a lot of random folks who, like me, just wanted to network and see what was going on with start-ups in Boston. Personally, I got a lot more from the people who I talked to than from the exhibitors (and I think that they had better products and projects in the works). But here’s my take on the exhibitors that I chatted with:

Mzinga - B2B social networking, is how they explained it to me. What I don’t get about this service is that they launched at the event, but they already have 2.7 million registered users, according to TechCrunch. That’s a pretty solid user base for a newly launching product. Where did those users come from?

CoreBlox - The president & CEO did a very brief demo but had a hard time because his co-worker nearly spilled water on his laptop before someone else tripped on the wire and unplugged it, but my takeaway is that they are offering a free customer support tool that can be used by businesses. I didn’t get a good sense of the quality of the tool.

Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment - The people at this “booth” (I am not sure that it could be called a booth - cocktail table is more like it) were really knowledgeable and kind, especially since I don’t know much about online gaming, specifically MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role playing games). The thing that really shocked me, though, was that this company is two years, $40 million dollars in, and has 100 employees and a solid management team (from the looks of its Web site), but it doesn’t yet have a live game. My conversation with them went like this:

Me: What’s your biggest game?

Them: Stargate Worlds.

Me: How many people are playing it?

Them: Oh, it’s not live yet.

Wow. $40 million in, they must be sweating it a bit.

NowHound.com - Live Webcast search is all I got from the demo before Erick Schonfeld (from TechCrunch) came over and the folks there spun around in a neat little circle to talk to him.  

A personal note, my favorite part of the event was that I managed to drag along my good friend Denise Dubie. Denise and I worked together years back, but I haven’t attended a work event with her in years. It was so fun for me to see what a celebrity she has become in the IT world (she is a senior editor at Network World). For example, we walked by the Perkett PR booth and a couple of her story headlines were flashing on their screen, and at one point, I noticed some other people ducking and whispering about her before they came over to introduce themselves and shake her hand.

One of the guys in that group was Ross Levanto from Schwartz Communications, who was chatting with us for awhile. Our conversation was interrupted by some announcements by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Schonfeld. One of the things that they did during that set of announcements was draw a winner to play in an online game by Moola for a chance to win $5,000. Ross’ name was picked. He went, played and ended up winning the cash. He celebrates in the picture below (sorry for the bad photo, I was using my iPhone in a dark and crowded room):