View from Seed

OCTOBER 5, 2016

Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help.

Angel Investor 332

Angel Investor Boston Seed Stage Syndication 332

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca For the first 5 years or so after I became a VC I didn’t talk much about what I thought a VC should be excellent at since frankly I wasn’t sure. I was mostly doing my job and trying to figure out how to be better every day. After a decade on the job I’ve started to speak more openly when newer industry colleagues now ask me what I’ve learned.

Venture Capital 292

Venture Capital Fractional CTO Cofounder Early Stage 292

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.

Azure 264

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 264

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 26, 2016

by Leigh Stringer, author of “ The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees – and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line “ Over the years, we have developed work styles that are not good for our physical, mental or emotional health. . It’s not that we’re bad people, or that we aren’t working hard. The problem is that what our minds and bodies need at a basic level is in conflict with our work style.

Architecture 213

Architecture Tucson Arizona Design 213

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

OCTOBER 3, 2016

As a small business and startup advisor, I find that entrepreneurs often love to talk about their latest idea, but not their execution. Like most investors, I’m convinced that success in business is more about the plan and the person than the idea. It’s great to be a visionary and a thinker, but a business that generates real world change and wealth requires people who get things done.

Entrepreneur 266

Entrepreneur Technical Review Metrics Restful 266

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2016

Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. It’s been exciting to watch the Lean Startup movement grow from a practice utilized in the tech world to one implemented in a wide variety of sectors ranging from enterprise to education, religious organizations, nonprofits, and government groups. When we talk about government, we mean both the macro outfits whose work affects the entire country (perhaps you’ve heard of the IRS ) and regionally-focused groups alike.

Government 165

Government Lean Startup San Francisco 165

Brandanew

OCTOBER 14, 2016

When utilized in the most proper manner, a large community on Instagram for your brand can be a highly-effective visual advertising channel. Recent studies showcase that this platform can provide 25% more engagement with consumers when compared to other social media channels. This means that Instagram could be a prime channel for building your brand or e-commerce business.

Community 160

Community Social Media Nashville Philippines 160

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.

Azure 264

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 264

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 3, 2016

Looking for ways to improve your business often comes down to the technology and IT you utilize. It’s really important to make the most of the technology available to you and sustain it. IT in business helps to make everything much more efficient and effective. You can’t run a modern day to day business without using technology and IT. So, you have got to come up with ways of ensuring the systems within the company are looked after and running at the best possible level.

Cloud 214

Cloud Technical Review Security Networking 214

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 9, 2016

If you aren’t willing to take some risk as an entrepreneur, then don’t expect any gain. Yet everyone has limits, and every investor implicitly has similar limits on what makes a startup investable, or one to avoid at all costs. If you need investors, it’s important that you understand their filters, and even if you are funding your own efforts, you need to recognize the red flags.

New York City 213

New York City Silicon Valley Startup Bootstrapping 213

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2016

Guest post by by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. The solution to long-term innovation in companies obviously isn’t having one person come up with all the bright ideas and then translating those ideas to teams that execute them. We’re looking at huge shifts in workplace structures that involve reimagining things like who holds the power to make decisions and how we judge performance, all the way down to how we run meetings to encourage constructive disagreement and a diver

Agile 131

Agile Lean San Francisco Technical Review 131

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 5, 2016

Sites that don’t work don’t convert. That’s why optimizers conduct quality assurance on sites, landing pages, test treatments, email campaigns, you name it… to make sure they work the way they’re supposed to. While it’s common knowledge that quality assurance is something you should do, not enough optimizers complete it properly.

Technical Review 104

Technical Review Software Review Mobile Analytics 104

Version One Ventures

OCTOBER 31, 2016

Last week I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Andrew Chen for a fireside chat on growth strategies as part of the Version One marketplace meetup. More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended the event – coming from as far as South Africa and Nova Scotia. As an investor and former founder, I know that scalable growth (and the pretty hockey stick graph) is the holy grail for every startup.

Software Review 111

Software Review South Africa Hockey Stick Viral 111

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

I always told myself that I would stop pushing forward when there was an overwhelming force from the outside saying that this is not working. But even when I reached that point, I continued to try to brute force it into existence. I wound up losing a lot. We followed every test and experimental process from the get-go but we didn’t tell our investors we were doing that.

Columbus 249

Columbus Entrepreneur Cofounder Ohio 249

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 16, 2016

Are you a small business looking to expand your social media presence? Well, these tips have been created to help you do so. They’re actionable, easy to implement and can result in notable social media gains with a little work. 1. Use Affordable And Useful Tools for all of the Heavy Lifting. These days social is huge. Facebook has an astonishing 1.65 billion active users per month.

Social Media 211

Social Media Small Business Media Curation 211

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 30, 2016

Traditional marketing says you have to “push” your message out to customers, over and over again, to get you remembered. A more effective approach in today’s Internet and interactive culture is to use “pull” technology to bring customers and clients to your story. You pull people in by providing new content with real value on your website at least every few days.

Flash 210

Flash Technical Review Customer RSS 210

Occam's Razor

OCTOBER 24, 2016

Culture is a stronger determinant of success with data than anything else. Including data. [People + Process + Structure] > [Data + Technology]. It seems hard to believe. Yet, it is so fantastically true. At least for now. At least until AGI takes over. Why is this formula material? The first part of the equation, for better or for worse, improves in an evolutionary manner.

Analytics 118

Analytics Metrics Technical Review Channel 118

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 28, 2016

I just read an article about Bonobos --or was it a press release. I'm not completely sure. If you've met Andy Dunn, you'll know why that's going to be a fine line for any reporter, because it's nearly impossible to have a conversation with him without getting wrapped up in a story optimized to share. And damn, does he have his story and the ability to perform inception with it down cold.

Founder 117

Founder Technical Review Naming Customer 117

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 4, 2016

The traditional (and most used) approach to analyzing A/B tests is to use a so-called t-test , which is a method used in frequentist statistics. While this method is scientifically valid, it has a major drawback: if you only implement significant results, you will leave a lot of money on the table. In this blogpost, I will argue why a post-hoc Bayesian test evaluation is a better evaluation method than a frequentist one for growing your business.

Revenue 113

Revenue Conversion Programming Green 113

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 11, 2016

I always told myself that I would stop pushing forward when there was an overwhelming force from the outside saying that this is not working. But even when I reached that point, I continued to try to brute force it into existence. I wound up losing a lot. We followed every test and experimental process from the get-go but we didn’t tell our investors we were doing that.

Columbus 206

Columbus Entrepreneur Cofounder Ohio 206

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 23, 2016

By Raj Subramaniam, Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Communications, FedEx Services. Consumer behavior and the way people shop are changing. Over the last several years, e- commerce has risen and there’s no longer a clear-cut distinction between bricks (store) and clicks (online shopping). It’s all just shopping. There’s increasingly an omni-channel approach to purchasing.

Small Business 158

Small Business Asia Channel Technical Review 158

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 21, 2016

Every technical entrepreneur is an early adopter of technology, so naturally they build things with people like themselves in mind. Unfortunately, for most solution markets, early adopters represent only 10 to 15 percent of the total opportunity, so it’s easy to get mislead on the real requirements of mainstream customers. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Customer Restful Technology 207

crowdSPRING Blog

OCTOBER 4, 2016

Image Source: Evolation Yoga. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past two decades, you’ve probably at least had a passing encounter with the term “mindfulness,” whether it was seeing the term splashed on magazine covers, listening to self-help gurus extol its value on daytime talk shoes, or hearing your own therapist encourage its application in your day to day life.

Product 99

Product Technical Review Restful Demand 99

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2016

I know the title “I promise you one of the most meaningful days of your life” sounds grandiose but I mean it and I hope you’ll read through to the end and choose to take one small, totally free action, that will change your life and likely those of others. On September 10th of this year I spent an entire day in California State Prison with people who had committed felonies and worked with them on business plans to help them create legal enterprise upon their release as part of Defy Ventures 6-mo

California 311

California Programming Private Equity Equity 311

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 6, 2016

Just when you start to think that A/B testing is fairly straightforward, you run into a new strategic controversy. This one is polarizing: how many variations should you test against the control? There are many different opinions on this one, some completely opposite. Some of it comes down to strategy, some of it to mathematics. Some of it may depend on the stage of business you are the sophistication of your program.

Bandwidth 111

Bandwidth Conversion Nebraska Kentucky 111

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 6, 2016

Stanford is an incubator with dorms. Download the full text file with links to the courses here. [link]. Filed under: Hacking For Defense , Hacking for Diplomacy , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Incubator 334

Incubator Lean 334

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 28, 2016

by Reed Gusmus, director of marketing at QASymphony. The outright and abject failure of a software development project is a surprisingly common occurrence, and the reasons for a specific project’s failure tend to revolve around three easily avoidable mistakes. Since failure ought to be viewed as an entirely unacceptable outcome, it is essential that software development professionals recognize the most common issues that ultimately lead to the complete demise of a project that once held a

Software Developers 135

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Software 135

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 14, 2016

I’m sure all of you know one or more of the 200 or more young companies that are currently valued at one billion or more by investors and stockholders. These are popularly called “unicorns.” Some of the most well-known include Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Xiaomi, and Pinterest. What every entrepreneur is asking me these days, is “How do I get to be a unicorn?

Intellectual Property 207

Intellectual Property Valuation Merger Exit Strategy 207

TechEmpower

OCTOBER 19, 2016

I want to combine the elements of multiple Stream instances into a single Stream. What's the best way to do this? This article compares a few different solutions. Stream.concat(a, b). The JDK provides Stream.concat(a, b) for concatenating two streams. void exampleConcatTwo () {. Stream a = Stream. of ( "one" , "two" ); Stream b = Stream. of ( "three" , "four" ); Stream out = Stream. concat ( a , b ); out. forEach ( System. out :: println ); // Output: // one. // two. // three. // four. }.

Java 276

Java Algorithm Programming Operations 276

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2016

The single most important SaaS metric is retention , because cancellations indicate lack of product/market fit, no matter the cause (price, features, severity of need, duration of need). If it cannot be fixed, it means the business is a failure even if other metrics are stellar. Once you’re scaling (i.e. past product/market fit and into tens of millions in revenue), you realize that cancellation scales with total customers whereas growth scales with sales and marketing costs, which means cancell

Metrics 270

Metrics Retention Revenue Equity 270

deal architect

OCTOBER 3, 2016

As I was writing Silicon Collar over the last year, I got to see the impact machines are having on jobs and workers in over 50 settings. I looked at work in accounting firms, in banks, on the battlefront, in.

257

257

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 6, 2016

Stanford is an incubator with dorms. Download the full text file with links to the courses here. Filed under: Hacking For Defense , Hacking for Diplomacy , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Incubator 334

Incubator Lean 334

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 23, 2016

In March 2016, Rosanne Hortensius left the Netherlands to launch online couponing platform Saleduck in Southeast Asia. As the company’s Commercial Manager, Hortensius was armed with the responsibility of setting up the office’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur as well as growing the local team. Along with Ben Rogmans – Saleduck’s CTO and co-founder, the two have spearheaded the movement towards expanding Saleduck in five countries within Southeast Asia and are now looking towards furthering th

Asia 151

Asia Thailand Malaysia CTO Hire 151

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 22, 2016

For decades, efforts to satisfy customers have been built around demographics – capitalizing on race, ethnicity, gender, income, and other attributes. Today, in this age of pervasive social media and two-way communication, the focus needs to get beyond demographics into personalities. Customer personalities define customer experience, and sets what they love, and what they hate.

Customer 203

Customer Social Media Media Employee 203

View from Seed

OCTOBER 19, 2016

NextView’s NYC podcast rolls on. Today, I talk to Shai Goldman, one of the most active community builders in NYC Tech, on his background, the evolution of the local startup scene … and who he’d draft to an all-startup pickup basketball game. Follow me and Shai at twitter.com/tdevane and twitter.com/shaig. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts: The post NYC Tech Podcast: Shai Goldman of SVB on Local Growth & Who Makes His All-Startup Basketball Team appeared first

Startup 245

Startup Community 245

Brandanew

OCTOBER 3, 2016

It’s good to start with good news. Fall has begun and we’re in a rush to get all the latest content on to our readers. And talking of readers, I’m very proud to announce that this blog (now only just 2 years old) has been ranked #20 on the list of the top branding blogs every marketer should read! Now that’s amazing. So, if you’re wondering how to achieve this feat for your brand, and basically how to scale content and social, tips here will help!

Social Media 220

Social Media Analytics Media Community 220