Ed Belove, Software Pioneer, Startup Founder & Angel Investor "Harvard Goes Tech" Ep.8

As an undergrad at Harvard, Ed Belove hung out with people at the campus radio station that liked to play with computers. This eventually led to a brilliant career that included building software products with the visionary Mitch Kapor at Lotus Development.

Ed co-founded a company that greatly expanded the Apple II’s ability to communicate. The company would eventually pivot to supplying the hardware for early Internet services such as CompuServe and AOL.

This successful trajectory allowed Ed to dedicate his time to building early-stage companies and doing philanthropic work. As a much sought-after angel investor, Ed puts his capital and energy to work on behalf of promising startups. If you are building a software startup, you would be well served to listen to the thoughts Ed expresses in this podcast.

During our conversation Ed Belove made mention of a document written by Alex Schiff, co-founder of Fetchnotes, a company he and I were very interested in. The link to the document can be found here: Link to Lessons Learned from Doing Fetchnotes

Here are some of the topics covered in our conversation:

• Ed Belove Bio
• Data General in the Early 1970’s Was a Hotbed of Entrepreneurship – Many Startups Came Out of Data General
• Software As It Was Before It Ate the World
• Data General Gave Away Software to Sell Hardware
• Space War Video Game on PDP-10 Computers
• “Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder
• Now There Is a Huge Number of Software Building Blocks That Anybody Can Put Together – This Did Not Exist in the 1970s
• Telex and TWX Emulation for the Apple II – Got Around Apple II’s Inability to Multitask
• Ed Belove Went to Work Lotus Development – Mitch Kapor Was a Real Visionary
• Ed Belove Runs into People Who Are Still Using Lotus Agenda
• WorkFlowy!
• Ed Belove, Lessons from Fetchnotes – Alex Horak & Alex Schiff
• “Ease of use can't be overestimated”
• Interchange Online – Put the First Major Paper Online, The Washington Post – Ziff Davis
• AT&T Still Had a Monopoly Mindset despite Deregulation & Divestiture – No Hurry to Make Decisions in Fast-moving Market
• “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen
• “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson
• How Ed Belove Got into Angel Investing
• Do Help Get the Word out About Angel Invest Boston by Leaving a Review on iTunes
• What Ed Belove Looks for in a Startup
• Knowing What You Don’t Know
• CEOs Need to Have People to Talk to In & Out of the Startup – There Are Now Many More Resources than in the Past
• CEO, Don’t “Manage” Your Board, Work with Your Board
• CEO, Founder, Know Thyself
• Shares, Notes and SAFEs, Oh My!