Both Sides of the Table
MAY 23, 2012
This article originally ran on PEHub. If you prefer the super short version – I’ve summarized the post in the final section. Many observers of the venture capital industry have questioned whether its best days are behind it. They are frustrated by the past decade of subpar returns for the sector. The most recent report to weigh in on the troubles of the industry was produced by the esteemed Kauffman Foundation.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 12, 2012
The traditional mode of starting a company is to plan a serial process, where you complete only once all the steps, leading to the “big bang” launch of the company. I strongly recommend a dramatic departure from this model, called “planned iteration,” where you assume you won’t get it right the first time. This idea was well articulated by Paul Graham in an old essay, called “ Startups in 13 Sentences ” in which he talked about “making a few people really happy rather than making a lot of people
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YoungUpstarts
MAY 21, 2012
Everyone wants more money. But not everyone is willing to give up their down time to make it. If you’re one of the ambitious few that wants to diversify your income, there are lots of businesses you can start from the comfort of your home. And succeeding doesn’t have to be rocket science. If you’ve got a tiny bit of money saved (for a tax number and business insurance), and the business acumen to make the right choices and connections, consider starting one of these nine small business from your
Startup Lessons Learned
MAY 9, 2012
TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today. It's been just about two years since Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits released their self-published book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development (you can see my original review here ).
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
Feld Thoughts
MAY 3, 2012
Once again we are in a zone where hiring software developers is incredibly challenging. The market is fully employed and while there is some movement between companies, great developers tend to be decided to what they are doing for a while, especially in an entrepreneurial context. Last night I was at Angel Boot Camp in Boston. It was a dinner for about 50 angel investors – a mix of experienced ones and new ones – organized by Jon Pierce.
ReadWriteStart
MAY 10, 2012
Learning to code is becoming the key skill for anyone who wants to launch a tech startup, or even just get a job working at a hot tech company. That may seem intimidating, but programming is not some monumental skill that only specially gifted people can learn. Really, it it isn't all that different from learning to speak another language. If you can pick up the rudiments of Spanish or French in a couple of weeks, how hard could it be to get started with Ruby On Rails?
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 24, 2012
Starting a business is a lot like starting a marriage. At first, all parties are in dreamland, with a vision of changing the world, having lots of fun, and raking in the profits. But all too soon, reality sets in. Product development is stuck at that 90% mark, a key person leaves, and customers are talking but not buying. In his book Reality Check , Guy Kawasaki summarizes some of the key issues.
Gust
MAY 24, 2012
Dual-class voting structures are receiving a lot of attention these days along with intense publicity related to the Facebook IPO , following in the wake of other recent tech IPOs with a similar structure such as Zynga and LinkedIn. This is nothing new; long favored by family-controlled media empires such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation , among Internet firms alone, Google took a dual-class approach when going public in 2004.
This is going to be BIG.
MAY 17, 2012
How do you price a round? Its one of the most often asked questions and yet I've never seen a great answer given. It seems to me that the most important factor in pricing your round isn't your progress or your idea. It seems to come down to two things: 1) How much do you want to raise? 2) Supply and demand of capital willing to invest in your company.
David Teten
MAY 9, 2012
We are in the midst of two great disruptions to American business: the internet’s ongoing disruption of most traditional industries: finance, healthcare, retail, finance, fashion, etc. the shift of America to a majority minority country by 2050. Any company that aspires to maintain a leadership position needs to position itself to exploit these two macro trends.
ReadWriteStart
MAY 8, 2012
Have you thought about joining a startup, but have no idea what you could possibly offer? Perhaps you are looking forward to graduation and want to pick some skills that will help you work for a startup when you leave school. Maybe you want to change your career and get into the exciting world of tech startups, but do not know what it takes to succeed in that type of high-pressure environment.
Up and Running
MAY 10, 2012
It’s never easy to leave a stable job to launch a startup. But sometimes circumstances align and a budding entrepreneur just knows that the time is right to make the leap. Ben Lamson and Sulaiman Sanni, WeDidIt cofounders. Sulaiman Sanni and his partner Ben Lamson were both working for Meltwater Group, a large, well known Software as a Service company, Su as a social media consultant and Ben as a sales manager.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 2, 2012
If you are a young startup founder, how do you find that CEO or other executive for your “dream team” to close on funding and kick start your company? It makes logical sense to scour the job boards, engage an executive recruiter, or scan the networking sites like LinkedIn for a good array of candidates, and then interview the ones with the best resumes.
crowdSPRING Blog
MAY 3, 2012
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!
adam.heroku.com
MAY 18, 2012
a tornado of razorblades. by Adam Wiggins. How To Scale a Development Team. organizations. Thu Apr 28 09:56:38 -0700 2011. As hackers, we’re familiar with the need to scale web servers, databases, and other software systems. An equally important challenge in a growing business is scaling your development team. Most technology companies hit a wall with dev team scalability somewhere around ten developers.
This is going to be BIG.
MAY 14, 2012
I'll bet you don't know where the Center of NY's Tech Community and Center of Creativity is. Give up? It's in the Financial District--right at 55 Broad Street. It says so right on their website. In fact, it is "well-known internationally as the original home of New York's technology community.". I'll bet you didn't know that--mostly because it never was.
ReadWriteStart
MAY 29, 2012
With the recent passage of the JOBS Act, crowdfunding is about to get even hotter. Serial tech entrepreneur, speaker and consultant Scott Steinberg , author of The Crowdfunding Bible , explains how to make crowdfunding work for your startup. Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global , answered ReadWriteWeb’s most pressing questions with these 10 insights into successful crowdsourcing: ReadWriteWeb: Are particular types of tech startups better suited for crowdfunding than others, and why is that so?
Lightspeed Venture Partners
MAY 31, 2012
'The emergence of companies like Getaround, Airbnb and even Yelp are examples of ways that we as consumers are using technology to get more comfortable doing everything from sharing recommendations to letting someone rent our car for a few hours. While the technology is the enabler for these movements, social reputation plays a key role in their adoption.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 7, 2012
It’s a long way from an entrepreneur’s “idea” to a working product with a real market and paying customers. A necessary intermediate step for proof of concept, credibility with potential investors, and communication with your team, is a working prototype. Building a prototype should be an early and high priority task for every startup. A prototype doesn’t need to look great, or be built to scale, but it better accurately translate your vision into something real and tangible.
crowdSPRING Blog
MAY 25, 2012
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!
www.bothsidesofthetable.com
MAY 13, 2012
Home. About Me. Start-up Advice. Raising Venture Capital. Angel Topics. Entrepreneur DNA. Sales & Marketing. Negotiations. Both Sides of the Table. Entrepreneur turned VC. Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. A few people asked me to try and define the perfect startup organization chart.
Babbling VC
MAY 19, 2012
YOU are not Marc Zuckerberg. I, too, am not Mark Zuckerberg. Only he is celebrating becoming a millionaire (no, billionaire) overnight. Well, technically, he is just collecting his due after eight years of hard work. Whether he deserves it or not is a whole other story and not something I am getting at. What I am getting at is that he is a one in a million story.
ReadWriteStart
MAY 22, 2012
When it comes to financing a brand-new startup, most founders find themselves stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. While some lucky startups attract angel investors or have access to money from friends and family, the vast majority are on their own, at least at first. That’s why it’s so tempting to use credit cards to jumpstart your business.
thebarefootvc
MAY 8, 2012
Brad Feld wrote a fantastic post today entitled Too Many Seed Investment Choices. It’s a post that’s been circulating in my head as I’ve met with companies over the past 6 months. The best VCs are the ones that balance their optimism, vision and enthusiasm for startups with realism based on very real constraints (the primary one being his/her own time, but also includes market development and exit timing).
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 9, 2012
It’s Wednesday late afternoon. I’m aboard Delta flight 1833 from Cincinnati (actually, Northern Kentucky for what it’s worth) to Los Angeles. I had a very enjoyable day in Cincinnati meeting many local entrepreneurs, angels and accelerators. I was here to see one of our LPs (limited partners are the people who invest money in VC funds) called Fort Washington.
crowdSPRING Blog
MAY 11, 2012
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!
www.readwriteweb.com
MAY 10, 2012
ReadWriteHack. ReadWriteWeb. Channels. ReadWriteStart. ReadWriteBiz. ReadWriteEnterprise. ReadWriteCloud. ReadWriteHack. ReadWriteMobile. ReadWriteHack. Home. Archives. RSS. Twitter. Facebook. Bye, Bye Waterfall: 5 Steps to Implement Responsive Web Design. By Travis Sheppard / May 10, 2012 06:05 AM / View Comments. Tweet. Congratulations, you’ve finally convinced the powers that be that your next Web-design project needs to be responsive.
Ben's Blog
MAY 18, 2012
First they hate you, then they love you, then they hate you again. What the f*ck do it take for a gangsta to win? —The Game, Don’t Need Your Love. Conventional wisdom among smart technology entrepreneurs says not to hire people with Masters in Business Administration (MBAs) into startups. Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint, expressed the sentiment well when he said: “ When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.
ReadWriteStart
MAY 10, 2012
Not long ago, serial entrepreneur and founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council Scott Gerber offered his prescription to Fix Young America. In short, Gerber believes entrepreneurship can cure a lot of what’s wrong with the American economy. Yesterday on Salon.com, those ideas came under attack as an Occupy imposter - instead of representing American’s youth, the post contended, they’re shills for “the most noxious aspects of the bipartisan status quo.
Rob Go
MAY 14, 2012
I sent a tweet out last week that resulted in some healthy debate: “three years ago, I was telling everyone I met to start companies. These days, I’m telling everyone to think twice” Of course, it’s not fair to give general advice like that. But what I meant was, 3-5 years ago, when I met someone who was thinking about starting a company, my bias was one of action.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 17, 2012
I’m fond of saying that I look for entrepreneurs that have a chip on their shoulder. That they have something to prove. That they’re not afraid to stick their noses up to the establishment. I have always felt this way. It’s something I kind of seek out. I guess my thoughts are that if you’re part of the country club you have a vested interest in protecting the existing order and that disruption happens more from those that are on the outside wanting to change the rules.
Duct Tape Marketing
MAY 1, 2012
Over the course of the last few years I’ve been telling business owners about the need to create content – lots of it. But, I ‘ve also been talking about content as a strategy, as a tool to create trust and educate and as something you simply must make a priority. No matter how I position it, however, I always get the same question – How do I come up with enough ideas to write about?
Steve Blank
MAY 21, 2012
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win… John F.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MAY 1, 2012
The results of a serendipitous live experiment were recently published as guest posts on this blog. Sacha demonstrated the benefits of selling many copies of an eBook at a low price, while Jarrod pointed out the advantages of higher prices, bringing in more revenue with 1/6th the number of units sold. The ensuing discussion swirled around the merits of selling more units (i.e. maximizing reach) versus selling more expensive units (i.e. maximizing per-unit profitability).
ReadWriteStart
MAY 3, 2012
The conflicting (frequently unsolicited) advice startup entrepreneurs too often hear is enough to make you tune it all out. Either you’re told that you need to go big and grab all the angel or VC money you can get your hands on, or that you should start small, do it on your own, and retain control of your company. But bootstrapping a startup is not easy, requiring discipline and fortitude, as well as ingenuity.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 6, 2012
As we recover from some tough economic times, more and more people seem to be turning to entrepreneurship as an alternative to traditional employment. I applaud this trend, but caution all of you thinking this direction to approach entrepreneurship with your eyes wide open. It is not for everyone, as the entrepreneur’s path is fraught with challenges.
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