Mark Henricks interviews John Osher who discusses the 17 most common mistakes startups make, along with 5 must dos to win:

Mistake 1: Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it’s viable. “This is really the most important mistake of all. They say 9 [out] of 10 entrepreneurs fail because they’re undercapitalized or have the wrong people. I say 9 [out] of 10 people fail because their original concept is not viable. They want to be in business so much that they often don’t do the work they need to do ahead of time, so everything they do is doomed. They can be very talented, do everything else right, and fail because they have ideas that are flawed.”

Interesting look at Wal-Mart from www.alwayslowprices.net. Glenn Reynolds notes that he’s never really liked shopping there. I have to agree. they do have great prices on some products, but you must be willing to put up with shopping their way (crowds and little in the way of aesthetics (which target has taken advantage of).

Alorie Gilbert interviews “legendary” venture capitalist Don Valentine (Founder of Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital):

I really think it’s sort of embarrassing for South Korea to have an intrinsically greater disposition in broadband than California……..
I got to Silicon Valley in 1959. Nothing is revolutionary; it’s evolutionary. Look the sequence of Intel microprocessors. It’s all predictable. The nature of silicon and software and storage go hand in hand. In the case of software, you just have to be more clever about the nature of the application. So all these things kind of tick along, feeding off each other