Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

We just posted an interview I did with Jason Nazar, CEO of Docstoc. If you are interested in taking a look, he also passed on some private invites for socalTECH readers to get into their service (which is still in closed beta).

Go to: http://www.docstoc.com/user/register.aspx and use the invitation ID socaltech

We’re full swing into conference season, and I just wanted to mention a few upcoming ones in the area: The Technology Council has VentureNet (we’re a sponsor) coming up Friday, this one is a great opportunity to watch some companies pitch and rub elbows with VCs; we’re giving away some tickets tomorrow. Also, Forbes MEET is coming up towards the end of the month in Beverly Hills on October 24th–this has a great mix of movers and shakers who attend–last year, I was sitting next to Chad Hurley a few days after Google acquired YouTube, and mixed with Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, among a bunch of other notables. We’ve got a discounted rate for our premium subscribers, if you’re interested (more than worth a year’s subscription to socalTECH, btw…)

One of the questions I often hear listening in on pitches to angels and VCs are some of the questions about assumptions behind their financial model. In particular, there’s often a question of how an entrepreneur determined the cost of employees–which are usually the biggest expense for a startup.

Guy Kawasaki has just posted some numbers from Glenn Kelman, CEO of Seattle real estate startup Redfin, on real estate costs, recruiting costs, and other expenses at the firm, which might be useful for startups building their financial plan.

We’ve just posted a new contributed article on trademarks, in our Startup section. This one is “Basic information About Trademarks” from Steven C. Sereboff, Mark A. Goldstein, and Michael D. Harris.