SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Some really great stuff in 2010 that aims to help startups around product, technology, business models, etc. You can find some of the monthly ones in the following: Top 57 Online Startups Meets Technology Meets Product Posts for November 2010 Top 30 Startup Technology and Product Posts for September 2010 Top 40 Startup Posts for August 2010 Top 30 Startup Posts for July 2010 Top 30 Startup Posts in June 2010 Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 17, 2011

Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity. (A slightly shorter version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch ). As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativit

Technical Review 356

Technical Review Framework Audience Media 356

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2011

I spent two weeks of December in Chile as a guest of Professor Cristóbal García, Director of EmprendeUC at the Catholic University of Chile , which just signed up a 3-year collaboration partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program , spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile Development, and at a Conference in Patagonia supported by the Ministry of Economy’s Innovation Divisi

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley Chile South America Venture Capital 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 10, 2011

Here’s a simple question, often asked when designing software but more useful when you’re designing your marketing and sales pitch: How are people doing this today without you? Sounds obvious; I want to take it a step further, like this: Ignoring most of your potential market , how are expert, power-users doing this today, without your software?

Software Review 232

Software Review Technical Review .Net Design 232

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

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 28, 2011

Cash is the fuel of every startup. Your burn rate is the rate at which that money is being spent, and allows an estimate of how long you can go before refueling (runway). That refueling is when you will need more investment, or when you will break even and begin that steep profitable growth curve. Investors look at your burn rate to see how efficient and effective you are at running the business.

Burn Rate 231

Burn Rate Startup Salary Equity 231

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 28, 2011

Garage48 Helsinki , the largest hackathon in the Nordics, took place last week. It gathered 120 hackers from Finland, Estonia and Latvia under the same roof and challenged them to go from zero to demo in 48 hours. Sixteen startups were created during the weekend. Together with Osma Ahvelampi (CTO, Sulake ) and Teemu Kurppa (co-founder, Jaiku ), I was a mentor to those teams.

Latvia 158

Latvia Estonia Coder Finland 158

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 2, 2011

Back in the 60’s, JFK make a bold proclimation that we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The details of exactly how this was going to happen were a bit sketchy, but having a big hairy audacious goal galvanized the innovation community into achieving something spectacular. In today’s world, one of the bottlenecks we have to innovation is the lack of software development talent.

Developer 135

Developer New York City Java Ruby 135

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially with the success of the company.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 325

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 24, 2011

What if you decided to provide something tremendously fantastic for your customers, even though it meant great expense and hardship? This one thing would be incontrovertible — you’d refuse to compromise on that one thing, even if it seems impossible to work out how to do it profitably. It’s easy to identify companies who became wildly successful with this technique.

Intellectual Property 242

Intellectual Property Open Source Bandwidth IP 242

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 26, 2011

Whether you’re an entrepreneur opening your first restaurant or a seasoned business owner with many years of experience in the restaurant industry, you face many challenges. Among the most important of these challenges is your restaurant’s website. A strong web design can help a restaurant to more effectively market itself, can help convert visitors who find the restaurant by searching, for example, on Yelp, shopping for a deal through Groupon, or searching on Google or Bing.

Web 127

Web Design Flash SEM 127

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 18, 2011

Right now there are a lot of reports about large companies in the Valley not being able to find the talent they need. There are also a lot of reports about companies bending over backwards financially to retain the people they have. But what I found working for a large Valley corporate in the last few years is that it is not hard to find talent. The real problem is that companies are not ready for new talent.

Europe 139

Europe India Hiring Engineer 139

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 18, 2011

I received an inquiry from a reader of my blog and thought I would provide some thoughts, but would definitely welcome input: I am an unpaid CTO of a small startup. I have been working full time with two founders for about 10 months on full time basis. I have been through many months with them but because of lack of funds, I spent lot of time doing non-technical work for first 4-5 months, spending time with them on putting pitches for investors, cash flows, budgets, writing business plans, produ

CTO 150

CTO CTO Hire Equity Vesting 150

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

This week, the startup tribe from Harvard Business School is making their annual trek to Silicon Valley. They’ll hear from a variety of experts and get to see many startups firsthand. While they’re here, I’m sure they’ll be received warmly. But I don’t think they’d be too happy to hear what gets said about them when they leave the room. It’s a common refrain around Silicon Valley to disparage the role of MBA’s in entrepreneurship.

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 19, 2011

Over the last 40 years the U.S. has evolved an entrepreneurial ecosystem with two of the most unlikely partners – venture capital investors and technology entrepreneurs. This alliance has led to an explosion of technology innovation, scalable startups and job creation. Tied at the hip, VC’s and entrepreneurs take large risks together. VC’s invest in startups with minimal tangible assets and no certainty about the product’s viability, market size or customer adoption.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Software Review Technical Review 237

Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 10, 2011

Congrats to my friends at Avalon Ventures on raising their new $200 million fund. I’ve been friends with and co-invested with Rich Levandov , one of Avalon’s partners, since the mid-1990′s, most recently in Standing Cloud , Zynga , and NewsGator. I’ve gotten to know several of Rich’s partners over the past few years and recently had a wonderful Do More Faster book tour dinner hosted at Avalon’s San Diego office by Kevin Kinsella (a fellow MIT-grad turned VC.

San Diego 127

San Diego Cloud Hosting Finance 127

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 19, 2011

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 logo design , web 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!

Social Media 97

Social Media Small Business Design Media 97

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

JANUARY 10, 2011

Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link. Download the MP3 [ 59 Minutes - 28 MB ] Many a time I’ve received a question from a person who has English as a second language, regarding their options for writing a blog and whether they should focus on English since most success stories seem to be from English websites.

Software Review 107

Software Review Technical Review Affiliate Audio 107

Occam's Razor

JANUARY 24, 2011

Regular readers of this blog will recognize that I suffer from OOD. Outcomes Obsession Disorder. I am seeing a therapist for it. The way OOD manifests itself is that in every website and web business I work with I am obnoxiously persistent in helping identify the desired outcomes of the site / business before I ever log into their web analytics data.

Analytics 123

Analytics Conversion Affiliate Web 123

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2011

(One of the common questions I hear is how to reconcile design and user experience (UX) methods with the Lean Startup. To answer, I asked one of my favorite designers to write a case study illustrating the way they work, taking us step-by-step through a real life redesign. This is something of an IMVU reunion. The attendees at sllconf 2010 were wowed by Food on the Table's presentation.

Design 167

Design Lean Metrics Silicon Valley 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship? I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr , (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship.

Business Model 285

Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 285

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 28, 2011

Texting has become an integral part of mobile communications for most people--so much so that it has replaced a lot of voice calls. Why call when you can just send a quick text? Yet there are signs that texting's days are numbered. To be clear, the desire to send and receive short messages isn't going away--but the need to send them via the SMS protocol may become extinct.

SMS 121

SMS API Technical Review Mobile 121

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 12, 2011

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 logo design , web 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!

Social Media 95

Social Media Small Business Design Media 95

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 13, 2011

We started this week's One Million by One Million roundtable with a discussion of online advertising trends, looking at them from the perspective of cost-effective customer acquisition and brand building, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities. You can find more on the topic on my blog at Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade. While on this topic, I want to particularly emphasize the social media advertising trend, and my observation that the infrastructure to measure, analyze, optim

Advertising 116

Advertising SMS Entrepreneur Silicon Valley 116

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 14, 2011

'There is a great thread over on Quora answering “ what are the most common mistakes first time entrepreneurs make ?” The current top rated answer is from Siqi Chen , one of the co-founders of Serious Business. We funded Siqi and Alex Le at Serious Business. I’ve reproduced Siqi’s answer below but it is worthwhile to follow the link to Quora to read other answers, and the comment thread on Siqi’s answer.

Technical Cofounder 114

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley 114

VC Cafe

JANUARY 6, 2011

E ze pinged me few weeks back saying he’s going to visit India. I wished him good luck knowing he’s going to have a great time there. India is a great place to visit and also a great place (although highly challenging) for doing business. The key, though, is to know how. Few facts: it is believed that the Indian art of trading goes all the way back to 2800 BC.

India 87

India Asia Software Review Technical Review 87

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

JANUARY 20, 2011

Living in Brisbane last week was a little bit different. I’m not entirely sure what the news coverage was like overseas, however I do know many of my readers aware that we have had a little flooding problem in my city, the third largest in Australia. Needless to say it was, and still is huge news, and it caused major disruption to the lives of people in my home town.

Flash 108

Flash Technical Review Australia Programming 108

Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 4, 2011

After a two-fer of deeply annoying arrogance demonstrated by two different VCs on the first business day of 2011 that I’m still pondering (a mix of conflict avoidance behavior and passive aggressive behavior) I’m really looking forward to CES. Several years ago, my partners and I started going to CES together. Jason and Ryan had being going for a while.

Las Vegas 106

Las Vegas Technical Review Cloud Engineer 106

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 26, 2011

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 logo design , web 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!

Social Media 95

Social Media Small Business Design Media 95

Up and Running

JANUARY 4, 2011

I just read Neil Patel’s Business isn’t fun! on his QuickSprout blog. It’s a great case of being very right but explaining very wrong. Try this on: I hate to break it to you, but business isn’t fun. People start and join businesses to make money. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the New York Stock Exchange; companies are purely based on their financial performance.

Stock 80

Stock New York Software Development Software Developers 80

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 9, 2011

Five years ago, I started nextNY with the idea that it would be participant driven--that the community would take an active role in managing itself. I think that we've done a decent job with that, and we have a number of examples of individuals who have used it as a leadership platform, but it isn't as much of a leader factory as I had hoped. With that in mind, I tried to come up with a structure and set of incentives to make it easier for new up and coming faces in the crowd to step up and make

Community 102

Community Leadership Venture Capital PR 102

Growthink Blog

JANUARY 3, 2011

When seeking breakout companies to back, here are four mega-trends for 2011: 1. Look for Companies That Harness the Power and Avoid the Danger of “Corporations of One.” Never before in human history has the world afforded more opportunities for talented individuals to work for themselves, by themselves. Tools of virtual collaboration – email chief among them but also Skype, Google Apps, and inexpensive “cloud” project management software like Basecamp - have eliminated most of the collaboration

SMS 69

SMS Software Review Social Network Equity 69

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

JANUARY 14, 2011

This is Yaro here, briefly intruding on Leigh’s column. I just wanted to clarify that Leigh wrote this article to highlight many of the best and most important articles hidden away in the archives of this blog. Since Leigh is a long time reader of Entrepreneurs-Journey.com (and now columnist) she’s been around long enough to see this content come and go on the front page and be in a position to talk about what she thinks is worth reviewing, especially if you are new to this blog.

Entrepreneur 104

Entrepreneur Affiliate Technical Review Internet 104

The Startup Lawyer

JANUARY 10, 2011

Dallas-based Tech Wildcatters is set to launch their 2nd class and will stop accepting applications January 16th. Their inaugural class of 5 companies raised over $4,000,000 in funding through two venture and two angel rounds. Tech Wildcatters is a startup accelerator that offers up to $25,000 and 12 weeks of hands on mentorship. Here’s what they look for in a startup: -2 or more founders (there’s way too much work for just one person).

Technical Review 69

Technical Review Software Review Dallas B2B 69

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 5, 2011

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 logo design , web 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!

Social Media 93

Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 31, 2011

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”. The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).

Entrepreneur 384

Entrepreneur Startup Salary Egypt 384

Ben's Blog

JANUARY 4, 2011

And I always find, yeah, I always find somethin’ wrong. You been puttin’ up with my sh#t just way too long. I’m so gifted at findin’ what I don’t like the most. So I think it’s time for us to have a toast. Let’s have a toast for the douchebags, Let’s have a toast for the a@%holes, Let’s have a toast for the scumbags, Every one of them that I know.

Employee 78

Employee Jordan Hiring Engineer 78