Both Sides of the Table
MAY 27, 2013
'Rob Bailey is the CEO of DataSift. He wrote a post this long weekend on how he manages the board of DataSift. You should read it. In his post he asserts, “You get the VCs you deserve” and the corollary “You get the performance out of your board that you deserve.” His argument is as follows. Spend time building investor relationship long before you raise money. .
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 4, 2013
'Did you ever wonder why some entrepreneurs always seem to have all the luck and success, while others never seem to catch a break? As an Angel investor, I quickly learned that luck has very little to do with it, and I now look for some personal characteristics and leadership styles that separate the potential winners from the losers. These differences are the reason that investors say that they invest in people, rather than ideas.
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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MAY 14, 2013
'Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Your bootstrapped startup is finally off the ground. You’re able to spend $6000/mo on AdWords to drive leads. Sure the conversion rates could be better, and sure it’s not the best ROI on Earth, but on the balance it’s making money. You don’t have a huge budget, but you can plough some of your winnings back into advertising.
Agile VC
MAY 13, 2013
'When we meet with entrepreneurs and ask about their competitive advantage or special sauce, one of the common responses is first mover advantage. ”We’re the first company to do X in an rapidly growing market” or similar. I’ve always felt being the first mover is a comparatively weak advantage and have been thinking about this more recently.
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
YoungUpstarts
MAY 13, 2013
'by Christine Comaford, author of “ SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together “ Most leaders know that command & control is dead and that fear doesn’t motivate employees. Quite the opposite, in fact. That’s why, for the most part, we refrain from doing scary things. (Only the worst “bully bosses” make it a practice to scream at an employee, or call him abusive names, or threaten to fire him the next time he makes the coffee too strong.
The Equity Kicker
MAY 8, 2013
'There is a good post up today on Segment.io describing how they used Kickstarter as a lean startup tool to validate demand. First the background: Kickstarter is the perfect way to validate an idea. By definition, a successful Kickstarter campaign has a ton of people who’ve already put their money where their mouth is. It’s really similar to the popular suggestion of “throwing up a fake landing page” and letting people sign up, or to the strategy of running AdWords before you have a product.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 19, 2013
'The emergence of social networking and the Internet has caused a new focus and value on “openness,” which leads to a new element of leadership, called “Open Leadership.” The mantra of open leadership is “Be Open, Be Transparent, and Be Authentic.” This is counter to the traditional business premise of “control,” so many companies are still pushing back.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 6, 2013
'TechStars Patriot Boot Camp is an intense three-day program that will educate and mentor Veterans and Service Members to innovate, build technology companies, and create jobs. TechStars hopes that participation in the Patriot Boot Camp will be the catalyst for Veterans and Service Members to kickstart their company, find co-founders and advance as entrepreneurs.
David Cohen
MAY 17, 2013
'Veterans give so much in their service to our country, it’s always an honor to be able to give something back no matter how small. That’s why at TechStars we’re very excited to be offering another TechStars Patriot Boot Camp from July 17-19 at George Washington University in Washington D.C. This will be the second year for the event, an intense three-day program designed to teach and mentor Veterans and Service Members about entrepreneurship and help them build and develop innovative technology
The Next Web
MAY 4, 2013
'Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. He is a part-time hacker, angel investor, and product advisor, and was selected from more than 300 people to “shadow” Dave McClure at 500 Startups. You can check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.
This is going to be BIG.
MAY 6, 2013
'Board meetings are a pain in the ass. Unless you''re a well funded, growth stage company that has lots of hands on deck--tons of instrumentation that easily dumps out pretty charts and metrics, or luxury emenities like, well, time, most entrepreneurs probably feel like they could be doing more productive things than telling their investors what they did last month.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 7, 2013
'Anyone who reads this blog frequently will know that I am a big believer in low-cost video content and specifically the power of YouTube as a content creation & distribution platform. Our industry just took one big step towards legitimacy with the hiring of renowned media exec Ynon Kreiz to run Maker Studios. The industry finally has one of their own at the helm of the largest YouTube network.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 6, 2013
'In sports, mental toughness is defined as the ability to focus on and execute solutions, especially in the face of adversity. If anyone in business ever needed mental toughness, it’s an entrepreneur. Investors tell me that startup success is all about execution, all while facing determined competitors and overcoming customers’ resistance to change.
Feld Thoughts
MAY 20, 2013
'Over the past few decades, the most compelling engineers and entrepreneurs I’ve met have tended to be working on problems that can be solved with software. Software has some great advantages but it comes with a few big drawbacks, namely it’s tied to a few standard types of input, although we are trying to impact that with some of our investments in our HCI theme.
crowdSPRING Blog
MAY 31, 2013
'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!
The Next Web
MAY 4, 2013
'Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Sangeet Paul Choudary who analyzes business models for Internet startups at his blog Platform Thinking. You can follow Sangeet on Twitter at @sanguit. Marketplaces are difficult businesses to run. Like all multi-sided platform businesses , they suffer from the classic chicken and egg problem : the technology has no value unless buyers and sellers are present and you can’t get the buyers on board unless you have sellers and you can’t bring in s
ConversionXL
MAY 29, 2013
'So you have a landing page – or maybe 87 of them. Too bad you’re screwing them up. Landing pages are easy – in theory. In the real world, landing pages are quite hard to get right. But now that it’s getting more and more difficult to make money via AdWords and other PPC channels, boosting conversion rates on your landing pages is more important than ever.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 19, 2013
'My internal compass has always steered me strongly toward the belief that founders who can scale with their startup companies are better to back that founders who eventually need to hire a CEO. I have talked about this publicly a great deal – how I prefer “missionaries” over “mercenaries.” But lately I’m more swayed by the wise words of Reid Hoffman.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 27, 2013
'One of the most common failures I see in startups is lack of focus. Unfocused entrepreneurs boast that their new technology will generate multiple disruptive products for consumers as well as enterprises around the world. Investors hear this as trying to do too many things with limited resources, meaning the startup will not shine at anything, and will not survive the competition.
TechEmpower
MAY 2, 2013
'We’ve posted Round 4 of our ongoing project measuring the performance of many web application frameworks and platforms. As with previous rounds, the developer community has contributed several additional frameworks for Round 4, bringing the total to 57! This round adds Bottle (Python), Dancer (Perl), Kelp (Perl), MicroMVC (PHP), Mojolicious (Perl), Phalcon (PHP), RingoJS (JavaScript), Spark (Java), and Wai (Haskell).
Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook
MAY 4, 2013
'A peek at the contents of an IdeaKeg Single. I’m off to the FEI show (Front End of Innovation) in Boston this week. In my view it’s the most serious innovation conference in the world, and the USA edition features speakers and participants from a who’s who of international organizations. I’m particularly interested in hearing Denise Morrison CEO of Campbell Soup about their use of culture in the innovation process, and also Nelson Farris of Nike about corporate storytel
The Next Web
MAY 26, 2013
'Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Sangeet Paul Choudary, who analyzes business models for internet startups at his blog Platformed.info. You can follow Sangeet on Twitter at @sanguit. Craigslist , that ugly set of electric-blue links that still stands around like an exhibit from the museum of early web design. Poor design and a general lack of features haven’t come in the way of the site’s popularity.
ConversionXL
MAY 24, 2013
'A strong A/B testing plan will allow you to increase your revenue. You will also learn valuable insights about your customers, because you will be “knowing” instead of “thinking about” their preferences. A/B testing produces concrete evidence of what actually works in your marketing. Continuously testing your hypotheses will not only yield good results for conversion rates, but will also give you a better understanding about your customers – Having a clear idea of what your customers actu
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 4, 2013
'When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. It was a fun period for me because everything was new and I was curious. What kind of deals should I be doing? What stage? What price? With which other investors? Should I focus on geographies or industries? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan?
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 7, 2013
'Entrepreneurs inherently understand that they have to be the initial leader of their startup, but often they don’t have the experience or the training to know where their leadership competencies lie, or how to build a leadership team. For new entrepreneurs, leadership development efforts may be more valuable for achieving startup success than business skills development.
TechEmpower
MAY 17, 2013
'We have posted Round 5 of our ongoing project measuring the performance of web application frameworks and platforms. In this round, we''re very happy to announce that a community member has contributed tests for ASP.NET running on native Windows. We''ve included Windows on EC2 results as a separate set of data within the results view but caution that the results should be considered preliminary.
deal architect
MAY 8, 2013
'N.R. Narayana Murthy is a revered figure in India. So, not surprising he is hearing murmurs to return, Steve Jobs style, to Infosys, the firm he co-founded. Reading this interview with him though it struck me how little of a.
Duct Tape Marketing
MAY 23, 2013
'Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Emeric Ernoult – Enjoy! Feeling a bit lost with your Facebook Page insights? Good. Facebook Insights terminology ( https://www.facebook.com/help/336143376466063/ ) was not built for humans, and now that we know you are not a killer robot from Mars, we’ll help you measure your Facebook Page’s performance without drowning in all that robotic Martian muck.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MAY 21, 2013
'This is a guest post by Nathan Barry, in response to two other posts that previously appeared on this blog. Nathan is the author of Designing Web Applications , The App Design Handbook , and Authority: A Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing. His most recent company, ConvertKit , makes email marketing suck less. How you price a product can have a radical impact on the revenue you make from it.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 4, 2013
'When I was new at Venture Capital I was trying to figure out the business. It was a fun period for me because everything was new and I was curious. What kind of deals should I be doing? What stage? What price? With which other investors? Should I focus on geographies or industries? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan?
Steve Blank
MAY 15, 2013
'I am honored to be with you as we gather to celebrate your graduation. This school has a distinguished roster of graduates… Earl Bakken, the founder of Medtronic , was an Electrical Engineering grad, and Bob Gore of Gortex , and your current president are both alums of your Chemical Engineering program. In fact, I feel very connected to another one your grads.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 13, 2013
'The universal challenge of every startup founder is to get everything done that needs to get done, and still have a life. Even outside of business, everyone wants to accomplish more, while working less. I’ve been a student of these techniques for some time, but some time ago I saw a great summary that seems to pull all the key principles together. Stever Robbins, known on the Internet as the Get-It-Done Guy, outlines his strategies in his book “ 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.
Jeff Hilimire
MAY 29, 2013
'I love this phone. I believe the Samsung Galaxy S4 (and possibly the HTC One, which I’ve only played with for a few minutes but seems very comparable to the S4) is the greatest phone built to date. And yes, its an Android. I switched to the Nexus 4 Android phone in early April, mainly because of the insistance of this guy. And I expect I’ll be an Android guy for the foreseeable future because the UI is on par with Apple now and almost every app I want, Android now has.
Duct Tape Marketing
MAY 21, 2013
'People seem fascinated with routines – how other people get things done and the like. While you do need to develop your own way of getting it all done, it can be inspiring and reassuring to hear how others are doing it. (Yesterday I wrote – 7 Things I Did Not Know About Writing Before I Started ). How I decide what to write about. photo credit: Sven Van Echelpoel via photopin cc.
YoungUpstarts
MAY 31, 2013
'By Ann Smarty, founder of MyBlogGuest.com. Anyone who runs their own business is putting a lot on their plate. Whether it is a single person start up or a company with other employees, there are endless tasks that need your attention. So many that the 24-hours that are in a day might just not seem to be enough to get it all done. No matter what you do, you are going to run yourself ragged.
Both Sides of the Table
MAY 25, 2013
'By now you will likely have read Andy Dunn’s scathing post about Venture Capitalists in which he decries the industry’s masses. I read Andy’s post with a knowing smile on my face. After all, I am no stranger to the publicly expressing the frustrations of dealing with the downside of this industry as I wrote about in 2006 when I was an entrepreneur.
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