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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
Agile VC
OCTOBER 3, 2016
This is the 2nd post in a series about self-driving vehicles and it explores how autonomous cars could become a reality. Self-Driving Vehicles: The Future Always Takes Longer to Arrive is the 1st post and covers the state of the vehicle autonomy (circa mid 2016) and how we’ve gotten here. . =. So what are the different paths towards commercially available self-driving cars?
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 31, 2016
The academic year is in full swing at Stanford and already we’re deep into our new Hacking for Diplomacy course. Building off last spring’s pioneering Hacking for Defense class, which sought to connect Silicon Valley’s innovation culture and mindset to the Pentagon and the intelligence community, we’ve now expanded our horizons to the Department of State.
ConversionXL
OCTOBER 13, 2016
Ever scroll through a website and get irrationally angry? Maybe it was the slow loading time, the poor design, the frustrating lack of clarity – no matter the case, I’m sure you can relate. Though you might not like to hear it, a substantial amount of your customers are going through the same thing on your site right now. This is inevitable.
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.
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.
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.
Hippoland
OCTOBER 9, 2016
I just passed my 2 year mark at 500 Startups. The other day, my colleague asked me how many company pitches I’ve personally seen. When we were calculating it out, it came out to about 20k! To be fair, this number includes pitch emails like this (incl a response from my former colleague Sean Percival). (In fact, the vast majority of pitches I’ve seen probably fall under this category and these only take a few seconds to read and archive, so this is how you get to see 20k pitches!
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 31, 2016
The academic year is in full swing at Stanford and already we’re deep into our new Hacking for Diplomacy course. Building off last spring’s pioneering Hacking for Defense class, which sought to connect Silicon Valley’s innovation culture and mindset to the Pentagon and the intelligence community, we’ve now expanded our horizons to the Department of State.
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.
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 25, 2016
Starting your very own e-commerce company can be an exciting proposition. In many ways, getting an e-commerce company off of the ground is easier than a standard business; depending on your business model, you may not have to keep as much physical inventory, hire as many workers or deal with as many tax considerations. However, there are numerous concerns that are identical to brick and mortar businesses.
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.
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.
SiliconHills
OCTOBER 20, 2016
When a drone can deliver a burrito to a hungry college student, it’s no longer just a novel technology but a major innovation for businesses. Still, the commercial drone business in the United States is in its infancy with rules and regulations just being worked out. This summer, the Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration […] The post Hangar Technology Lands $6.5 Million for Drone Software Development appeared first on SiliconHills.
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.
ConversionXL
OCTOBER 27, 2016
It will come as no surprise, but like most things in life, conversion optimization will benefit from a strong strategic approach. This generally includes aligning your goals and resources to build out a roadmap, or at least a framework/process, for your experiments. Much like in other disciplines, while experts agree that strategy is important, they can sometimes differ in their approach to such a strategy.
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 19, 2016
by Tom Hughes, Vice President – Small Business Product Management, AT&T. Four years ago, a storm developed in the Caribbean. What started as a tropical depression quickly turned in to a super storm. Two days later, Hurricane Sandy smashed into the Caribbean and then the East Coast of the United States. Devastating events happen every day — hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires and otherwise.
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?
Hearpreneur
OCTOBER 1, 2016
Share Each business has a story. No matter if the business is a Goliath like Wal-Mart, or a local business owned by a couple or family, the business has roots in an idea. For each business owner, the story of their journey can range from monetary needs or the passion for a unique project. Each story is different though the reasons may remain the same.
crowdSPRING Blog
OCTOBER 12, 2016
Image Source: opensource.com. If you’re not creating content, you don’t exist on the internet. Tweets, images, blog posts, comments, your Facebook posts – these are all content. Marketers know that when done correctly, content marketing can be a valuable marketing channel. As I wrote previously : “Content marketing” refers to creating information (content) that has value to others.
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.
ConversionXL
OCTOBER 28, 2016
Every company wants their visitors (i.e. potential customers) and customers to leave their site with a lasting positive memory. Of course, that’s much easier said than done when you consider technical issues, copy confusion, price barriers and the like. If you want to bring a smile to people’s faces when they hear your company name, you’ll need to understand how memory works and how you can design for it.
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.
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.
Duct Tape Marketing
OCTOBER 20, 2016
Live Video is King: How To Use It Without Going Broke written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. As you may have heard from industry events like NABShow and Social Media Marketing World , marketing dollars are switching from broadcast TV to live video streaming for more creative and targeted visual advertising. What makes a live video so effective and attractive to brands?
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.
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