Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 20, 2010
I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. A few people have asked me to try and define the perfect startup organization chart. I don’t believe that one exists. Every team configuration is different. But I do have more insight into understanding your startup team. This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent.
SoCal CTO
APRIL 23, 2010
I’ve come to realize that I have lots of posts around startup software development scattered around in different posts. Thought it would be good to capture them in one spot and also include links to related posts from other sources. Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything Startup Software Developers Symptoms of a Weak Development Team Technology Roles in Startups Startup CTO or Developer Part-Time CTO Technology Advisor CTO Founder Acting CTO Software Developm
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Steve Blank
APRIL 12, 2010
Startups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank. At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think I know how to fix it.” He took a deep breath, looked around the boardroom table and then proceeded to outline a radical reconfiguration of the product line (repackaging the products rather than reengin
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
APRIL 12, 2010
I remember "disruptive" when it was called "paradigm shift." That phrase died during the tech-bubble along with "portal" and "think outside the box," yet the concept has returned. Don't follow along. When I get pitched — usually by someone raising money — that they "have something disruptive," a little part of me dies. You should be worrying about making something useful, not how disruptive you can be.
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
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 8, 2010
Sometimes I like to drop the comment socially that “I knew Bill Gates back when he was a regular guy.” I know that dates me a bit, but it also shows that I have been hanging around startups for a long time. The honest truth is that I worked with Microsoft then from my “safe” perch in big IBM, during the early days of the IBM PC. At that time I couldn’t imagine a startup succeeding that was first called Traf-O-Data to process raw traffic data into reports, later changed to Microsoft to sell Basic
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 27, 2010
Business plan competitions are the air guitar championships of the startup world. This is the case when the requirements of these events don’t actually include building a real business or product. I mean, you don’t have to build an actual business—you can just mimic the movements and demonstrate something that looks like a startup on paper, without any of the necessary risk taking, lessons learned or even a fraction of the effort—all the stuff that investors like to see.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 14, 2010
How could you not fall in love with a company named AgileZen ? Today, Rally Software – a company I’ve been an investor in since 2003 – announced that they have acquired AgileZen. If you are an Agile software development shop, or follow ALM, Rally just added Kanban to the mix. This is the second acquisition Rally has made – the other was 6th Sense Analytics which they acquired at the beginning of 2009.
Steve Blank
APRIL 19, 2010
One of the best ways to get a debate going into the entrepreneurial world is to throw the “Nature versus Nurture” hand-grenade into a conversation. The question is whether you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or whether you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur. Taking Sides. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Jason Calacanis , founder of Mahlo.com, and Mark Suster of GRP Partners, have all weighed in on the nature side – you’re born being an entrepreneur or your not.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
APRIL 5, 2010
In the quest for optimization, A/B tests, metrics, and funnels, we're in danger of losing the fun and value of creative work. When we demand overwhelming customer outcry before committing to the slightest product change, we're in danger of losing the value of creating a cool feature that takes too much effort but people just love. When we do the minimum necessary to get the job done, we're efficient but not thrilling.
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 4, 2010
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 4, 2010 Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Kent Beck will give the opening keynote at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. Our mystery keynote is now revealed and I couldnt be more excited. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on.
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 21, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week! How To Create Outstanding Modern Infographics – [link].
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 27, 2010
Oh, boy. Here we go again. Another post on job hopping. This will be my final word on the topic. I promise. My goal here is to move the debate forward, add my POV but not inflame things any further. Inflaming was never my goal. Let’s see if I can achieve that. My WORD of the day is “loyalty.&# It’s one of the angles that people who were angered by my original post the most found so offensive.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 28, 2010
As Fred Wilson likes to say, often the best content for blogs is in the comments. In this case, it was in an email I got from Boaz Fletcher in response to my post Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers. Boaz made a very interesting observation: “As for learning how to code, I think good storytellers make the best programmers. I used to freak prospective employees out by having them write a story for me instead of the “what’s wrong with this code?
www.paulgraham.com
APRIL 28, 2010
Want to start a startup? Apply for funding by March 3. November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes throughseveral rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take justenough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the nextgear. Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few areoverfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
APRIL 12, 2010
One of the most common questions I’m asked during interviews is what major mistakes I made on the path to the success I enjoy online today, which if I had a chance, I would do over differently. Usually the first or second response I offer to this question is that I would outsource much earlier than I did. Although you can call me one of the “oldies&# when it comes to making a living online, since I’ve been doing it for over ten years, the first five years were very, very slow.
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 7, 2010
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, April 7, 2010 Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem) Lean startups don’t optimize. At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers.
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 6, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week! 2000+ Illustrator Symbols for Illustrators and Animators – [link].
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 2, 2010
This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital. I’m writing this series because if you better understand how VC firms work you can better target which firms make sense for you to speak with. It in not uncommon to see a VC talk about “total assets under management&# as in “We have $1.5 billion under management.&# I don’t really understand why VCs do this since it’s mostly a meaningless number.
Ben's Blog
APRIL 28, 2010
“You’re just a rent-a-rapper, your rhymes are minute-maid. I’ll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade”. —Rakim, Follow the Leader. When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm , the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit.
www.paulgraham.com
APRIL 28, 2010
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasnt sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decidedto ask the founders of the startups wed funded. What hadnt Iwritten about yet? Im in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I writeabout startups.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 22, 2010
Boy did I have an epiphany last night. Every time I talk to a mobile developer, they complain about what a pain in the ass it is to develop for Blackberry—given that so many of the device/carrier combinations require customizations. On top of that, numbers for app downloads on Blackberry trail other platforms. Yesterday, I figured out why. A friend of mine asked me how she could get Twitter on her Blackberry.
Austin Startup
APRIL 27, 2010
Austin-based startup Plerts recently released a service application that leverages check-in technology to enhance one’s safety and security. Users are enabled to select people from their social graph to become part of one’s safety alerting system. If you are in danger or miss a check in people in your safety alerting system are notified via text and email.
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 6, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week! 2000+ Illustrator Symbols for Illustrators and Animators – [link].
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 10, 2010
So Twitter is buying and building Twitter clients. I don’t find this surprising at all. In fact, I said as much in September 09 at a Twitter conference in LA on a panel that Guy Kawasaki was moderating. I said in the following video that I thought Twitter would by Seesmic , the company that makes one of the most popular Twitter clients. (If you’re interested you can watch my comments by fast forwarding to minute 31.25 and listening for about 90 seconds.
Berkonomics
APRIL 21, 2010
Time bankruptcy results from the deliberate over-commitment of core resources. . I created the term “time bankruptcy” almost thirty years ago when the computer software business was young, and I was a software developer building a young company based upon quality first. Asked to speak at a number of software industry events, I found my voice and immediate audience understanding as I described variants of the following problem to my audience.
Software By Rob
APRIL 21, 2010
Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Podcast Ranked #13 in iTunes: Management and Marketing Join My Online Split Testing Class on May 11th → It’s Easy to Criticize from the Stands Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 14, 2010
I have to admit, when I first saw Unvarnished , the anonymous people review site, I was very concerned. It didn’t really solve a problem I had. In fact, it seemed to create one. I saw it as a problem I now needed to deal with. As soon as I got my invite, I started requesting reviews from people I knew would give me a good recommendation—just so I could pad my score to protect against the inevitable driveby.
Growthink Blog
APRIL 19, 2010
A couple of days ago, I was unloading the dishwasher. I'm about half way through and came to a dish that just wasn't very clean. Then another one. And so on. Not good. Since then, my wife and I have taken a bunch of steps to fix the problem (I'll tell you about those in a moment). Then, this morning, I started thinking about all these steps, and noticed some interesting marketing lessons.
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 28, 2010
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week! Understanding and the Meaning of Color Within Design – [link].
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 15, 2010
I was on This Week in Venture Capital (TWiVC) again this week with Jason Calacanis. He’s considering making me the permanent co-host so if you enjoy any of this episode or want to see me on the show on a more regular basis please Tweet @jason and let him know (he asked for direct feedback). I’m loving doing the show and I think that Jason and I have pretty good banter and rapport.
Austin Startup
APRIL 8, 2010
Entrepreneurs in the central Texas region have good reason to be excited this week. Not only has Austin been recognized repeatedly for the relative strength of its local economy in recent weeks , but on Monday, Austin-based Microventures launched its new site for peer-to-peer venture funding. The site takes the form of a marketplace where startups can submit their companies for funding, and investors can choose to invest anywhere between $250 and $5,000.
Startup Company Lawyer
APRIL 15, 2010
(The following is from a WSGR client alert.). On April 7, 2010, the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) issued an opinion letter addressing the requirements employers must meet in order to have unpaid interns in compliance with California law. Although widely published news reports, including a recent New York Times article analyzing the DLSE’s April 7th opinion letter, have raised hopes that California is relaxing its position with respect to the permissibility of un
Berkonomics
APRIL 28, 2010
Second to visionary leadership, this is your most important job. . Many of us go through the motions of hiring to fill a position, trying to use our intuition and skills to find the best candidate for the job. Sometimes we use consultants or recruiters; many times we use internal talent to fill most positions. . And over the years, we students of business success have learned that there is a science to the hiring process that continues through the life of an emplo
Software By Rob
APRIL 14, 2010
Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← My Podcast Launches Today: “Startups for the Rest of Us&# I Need Your Help! Which Book Would You Be Most Likely to Buy? → The Terror of Firsts Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.
crowdSPRING Blog
APRIL 19, 2010
The Nevica P roject was launched in 2008 by Jayson Lawfer originally as a way to work on his own time while traveling to and from Italy. Since then, it has become an extremely successful business concept for the art world in this trying economy. The Nevica Project is an online gallery and art consulting business featuring well known as well as emerging artists.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 28, 2010
Today we had another episode of TWiVC – you can watch the episode here. This was the first episode where Jason wasn’t on the show, which gave me the chance to have another VC on the show to discuss deals. This week’s guest was David Travers from Rustic Canyon Partners. Rustic Canyon is an LA-based, but geography-agnostic VC that is currently investing from a $200 million fund.
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