Both Sides of the Table
MAY 27, 2013
'Rob Bailey is the CEO of DataSift. He wrote a post this long weekend on how he manages the board of DataSift. You should read it. In his post he asserts, “You get the VCs you deserve” and the corollary “You get the performance out of your board that you deserve.” His argument is as follows. Spend time building investor relationship long before you raise money. .
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 4, 2013
'Did you ever wonder why some entrepreneurs always seem to have all the luck and success, while others never seem to catch a break? As an Angel investor, I quickly learned that luck has very little to do with it, and I now look for some personal characteristics and leadership styles that separate the potential winners from the losers. These differences are the reason that investors say that they invest in people, rather than ideas.
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Agile VC
MAY 13, 2013
'When we meet with entrepreneurs and ask about their competitive advantage or special sauce, one of the common responses is first mover advantage. ”We’re the first company to do X in an rapidly growing market” or similar. I’ve always felt being the first mover is a comparatively weak advantage and have been thinking about this more recently.
YoungUpstarts
MAY 13, 2013
'by Christine Comaford, author of “ SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together “ Most leaders know that command & control is dead and that fear doesn’t motivate employees. Quite the opposite, in fact. That’s why, for the most part, we refrain from doing scary things. (Only the worst “bully bosses” make it a practice to scream at an employee, or call him abusive names, or threaten to fire him the next time he makes the coffee too strong.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
The Equity Kicker
MAY 8, 2013
'There is a good post up today on Segment.io describing how they used Kickstarter as a lean startup tool to validate demand. First the background: Kickstarter is the perfect way to validate an idea. By definition, a successful Kickstarter campaign has a ton of people who’ve already put their money where their mouth is. It’s really similar to the popular suggestion of “throwing up a fake landing page” and letting people sign up, or to the strategy of running AdWords before you have a product.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 6, 2013
'TechStars Patriot Boot Camp is an intense three-day program that will educate and mentor Veterans and Service Members to innovate, build technology companies, and create jobs. TechStars hopes that participation in the Patriot Boot Camp will be the catalyst for Veterans and Service Members to kickstart their company, find co-founders and advance as entrepreneurs.
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Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 6, 2013
'In sports, mental toughness is defined as the ability to focus on and execute solutions, especially in the face of adversity. If anyone in business ever needed mental toughness, it’s an entrepreneur. Investors tell me that startup success is all about execution, all while facing determined competitors and overcoming customers’ resistance to change.
David Cohen
MAY 17, 2013
'Veterans give so much in their service to our country, it’s always an honor to be able to give something back no matter how small. That’s why at TechStars we’re very excited to be offering another TechStars Patriot Boot Camp from July 17-19 at George Washington University in Washington D.C. This will be the second year for the event, an intense three-day program designed to teach and mentor Veterans and Service Members about entrepreneurship and help them build and develop innovative technology
The Next Web
MAY 4, 2013
'Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. He is a part-time hacker, angel investor, and product advisor, and was selected from more than 300 people to “shadow” Dave McClure at 500 Startups. You can check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.
This is going to be BIG.
MAY 6, 2013
'Board meetings are a pain in the ass. Unless you''re a well funded, growth stage company that has lots of hands on deck--tons of instrumentation that easily dumps out pretty charts and metrics, or luxury emenities like, well, time, most entrepreneurs probably feel like they could be doing more productive things than telling their investors what they did last month.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 20, 2013
'Over the past few decades, the most compelling engineers and entrepreneurs I’ve met have tended to be working on problems that can be solved with software. Software has some great advantages but it comes with a few big drawbacks, namely it’s tied to a few standard types of input, although we are trying to impact that with some of our investments in our HCI theme.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 7, 2013
'Anyone who reads this blog frequently will know that I am a big believer in low-cost video content and specifically the power of YouTube as a content creation & distribution platform. Our industry just took one big step towards legitimacy with the hiring of renowned media exec Ynon Kreiz to run Maker Studios. The industry finally has one of their own at the helm of the largest YouTube network.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 27, 2013
'One of the most common failures I see in startups is lack of focus. Unfocused entrepreneurs boast that their new technology will generate multiple disruptive products for consumers as well as enterprises around the world. Investors hear this as trying to do too many things with limited resources, meaning the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition.
TechEmpower
MAY 2, 2013
'We’ve posted Round 4 of our ongoing project measuring the performance of many web application frameworks and platforms. As with previous rounds, the developer community has contributed several additional frameworks for Round 4, bringing the total to 57! This round adds Bottle (Python), Dancer (Perl), Kelp (Perl), MicroMVC (PHP), Mojolicious (Perl), Phalcon (PHP), RingoJS (JavaScript), Spark (Java), and Wai (Haskell).
deal architect
MAY 8, 2013
'N.R. Narayana Murthy is a revered figure in India. So, not surprising he is hearing murmurs to return, Steve Jobs style, to Infosys, the firm he co-founded. Reading this interview with him though it struck me how little of a.
Duct Tape Marketing
MAY 23, 2013
'Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Emeric Ernoult – Enjoy! Feeling a bit lost with your Facebook Page insights? Good. Facebook Insights terminology ( https://www.facebook.com/help/336143376466063/ ) was not built for humans, and now that we know you are not a killer robot from Mars, we’ll help you measure your Facebook Page’s performance without drowning in all that robotic Martian muck.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MAY 21, 2013
'This is a guest post by Nathan Barry, in response to two other posts that previously appeared on this blog. Nathan is the author of Designing Web Applications , The App Design Handbook , and Authority: A Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing. His most recent company, ConvertKit , makes email marketing suck less. How you price a product can have a radical impact on the revenue you make from it.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 19, 2013
'My internal compass has always steered me strongly toward the belief that founders who can scale with their startup companies are better to back that founders who eventually need to hire a CEO. I have talked about this publicly a great deal – how I prefer “missionaries” over “mercenaries.” But lately I’m more swayed by the wise words of Reid Hoffman.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 7, 2013
'Entrepreneurs inherently understand that they have to be the initial leader of their startup, but often they don’t have the experience or the training to know where their leadership competencies lie, or how to build a leadership team. For new entrepreneurs, leadership development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than business skills development.
TechEmpower
MAY 17, 2013
'We have posted Round 5 of our ongoing project measuring the performance of web application frameworks and platforms. In this round, we''re very happy to announce that a community member has contributed tests for ASP.NET running on native Windows. We''ve included Windows on EC2 results as a separate set of data within the results view but caution that the results should be considered preliminary.
Steve Blank
MAY 6, 2013
'The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here. Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Customer Development Manifesto , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching , Venture Capital.
Duct Tape Marketing
MAY 21, 2013
'People seem fascinated with routines – how other people get things done and the like. While you do need to develop your own way of getting it all done, it can be inspiring and reassuring to hear how others are doing it. (Yesterday I wrote – 7 Things I Did Not Know About Writing Before I Started ). How I decide what to write about. photo credit: Sven Van Echelpoel via photopin cc.
YoungUpstarts
MAY 17, 2013
'by Joyce D. Tucker. From medical records to I-9 forms, the human resources department of any business, large or small, is probably cluttered with paperwork. Even if you keep records digitally, you may wonder how much storage space you need to devote to records that are years old. On the off chance that your company may one day face litigation regarding an employee, it’s essential you know how long to keep these records.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 4, 2013
'When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. It was a fun period for me because everything was new and I was curious. What kind of deals should I be doing? What stage? What price? With which other investors? Should I focus on geographies or industries? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan?
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 13, 2013
'The universal challenge of every startup founder is to get everything done that needs to get done, and still have a life. Even outside of business, everyone wants to accomplish more, while working less. I’ve been a student of these techniques for some time, but some time ago I saw a great summary that seems to pull all the key principles together. Stever Robbins, known on the Internet as the Get-It-Done Guy, outlines his strategies in his book “ 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 17, 2013
'At this year’s NVCA meeting , my partner Jason Mendelson (who was the chair of the event) interviewed Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter. Dick is an awesome CEO, awesome human, and awesome interviewee. Among other things, he’s hilarious, and PandoDaily wrote a fun summary of the interview in their post What CEOs could learn from comedians.
Steve Blank
MAY 13, 2013
'The online world can be a dangerous place for the unprepared. And it’s just going to get worse. It’s time to teach Cyber Security as integral part of the high school and college curriculum and to all corporate employees. —-. I grew up in New York City and for a few years heaven on earth for me was going to Boy Scout camp in the summer near the Delaware River.
The Next Web
MAY 4, 2013
'At last week’s The Next Web Conference it was interesting to hear how entrepreneurs are changing their goals. At previous events we would often hear about monetization, scalability and the Long Tail. Starting at last year’s event, entrepreneurs seemed to give more attention to building 100 year companies, doing what’s best for the customer, and working ‘from the heart’ These aren’t ‘new age’ entrepreneurs who found Zen or don’t care about re
YoungUpstarts
MAY 10, 2013
'by Florence Black. Going to job interviews is stressful for everyone, and almost everyone has been or will be to at least one job interview. Returning military personnel may find their first batch of interviews when looking for a civilian posting especially harrowing. Changing careers and working cultures is not easy, but these six job interview tips should help you feel more relaxed and give you a better chance at landing your dream job: Prepare Talking Points.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 4, 2013
'When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. It was a fun period for me because everything was new and I was curious. What kind of deals should I be doing? What stage? What price? With which other investors? Should I focus on geographies or industries? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan?
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 17, 2013
'Being a risk taker in business is not the same as being reckless. Nevertheless, the word “risk” has a negative connotation to most of us, implying danger and possible loss. For true entrepreneurs, risk is viewed as a positive, with its implied challenge to overcome the unknown and hitting the big return. In fact, risk is an integral part of life, as well as every business, yet so few people learn to manage it properly, or even want to think about it.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 10, 2013
'It’s such an immense relief when the oppressive weight of depression begins to lift. While I’ve had a big struggle the past six months, the last few weeks have been better and recently I’ve felt a broad positive shift in how I’m feeling. My metaphor for my depressive episodes has always been that “dark clouds build on the horizon” as depression approaches.
VC Cafe
MAY 12, 2013
'Most startups will fail in their first two years of operation and only one percent of the startups that pitch to VCs will end up receiving funding. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].
Lightspeed Venture Partners
MAY 16, 2013
'Well it looks like the Department of Homeland Security is investigating Mt. Gox and the primary complaint is operating an unlicensed money transmittal business. Things do not look good for Mt. Gox. Its US accounts are being seized. This will likely lead to US customers of Gox (principally buyers of Bitcoin) gradually abandoning the platform, either buying Bitcoin and moving it away, or withdrawing their USD directly.
YoungUpstarts
MAY 6, 2013
'by Melissa Page. From writing cover letters, updating resumés, carefully reviewing long job listings, and preparing yourself for dreaded interviews, job hunting can be a daunting endeavor. However, with today’s fast paced world, online tools such as social media can give you the upper hand and help you expedite the job search process. While using LinkedIn for job search is a popular and helpful option, using other social media sites such as Twitter can also make for a speedy job hunt.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 25, 2013
'By now you will likely have read Andy Dunn’s scathing post about Venture Capitalists in which he decries the industry’s masses. I read Andy’s post with a knowing smile on my face. After all, I am no stranger to the publicly expressing the frustrations of dealing with the downside of this industry as I wrote about in 2006 when I was an entrepreneur.
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