Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 21, 2014
'Startups are hard. You’ve heard that a million times. Those that we survive with become family. It’s something you can’t know unless you’ve ever been in the trenches. Working hard together at a big company just isn’t the same. The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad.
Steve Blank
JUNE 26, 2014
'We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum. We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. — Over the last three years the Lean LaunchPad class has started to replace the last century’s “how to write a business plan” classes as the foundation for entrepreneurial education.
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Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 18, 2014
'These days, it is almost impossible to find a small business where everything is done at the home location, by full-time employees. We are in the age of outsourcing, by any of many popular names, including subcontracting, freelancing, and virtual assistants. These approaches allow your startup to grow more rapidly, save costs, but costly mistakes can lead to business failure.
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 12, 2014
'by Tim Maliyil , CEO and Data Security Architect for AlertBoot. The decision to leave the security of a traditional job for the uncertain life of an entrepreneur is difficult. You’re giving up financial stability, committing a lot of time, and accepting the challenges of running your own business. Although you can never really know whether it’s the right decision beforehand, in many situations, the jump to entrepreneurship is worth the risk.
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
The Next Web
JUNE 1, 2014
'Chris Bolman is the Director of Growth at Percolate. This post originally appeared on the Percolate blog. Over the summer of 2013, David Byttow, a former Google software developer, started building a mobile app to solve a problem he had. Byttow noticed he and the engineers he worked with were bad at giving each other feedback, and he wanted a way they could comment honestly on each other’s work without professional or personal backlash for saying something negative.
This is going to be BIG.
JUNE 16, 2014
'How long does it take from first meeting a VC to getting cash in the bank? That''s an interesting question. Theoretically, someone could meet you, sign your document, and write you a check for deposit that day, but that''s not how it usually works. It''s also not the best way to create a helpful syndicate of investors that share the founder''s vision for the company.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Steve Blank
JUNE 19, 2014
'Today the National Institutes of Health announced they are offering my Lean LaunchPad class ( I-Corps @ NIH ) to commercialize Life Science. There may come a day that one of these teams makes a drug, diagnostic or medical device that saves your life. —-. Over the last two and a half years the National Science Foundation I-Corps has taught over 300 teams of scientists how to commercialize their technology and how to fail less, increasing their odds for commercial success.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 11, 2014
'In my years of advising startups and occasional investing, I’ve seen many great ideas start and fail, but the right team always seems to make good things happen, even without the ultimate idea. That’s why investors say they invest in people (bet on the jockey, not the horse), rather than the idea. Yet every entrepreneur I meet wants to talk about the idea, and rarely mentions the team.
Hunter Walker
JUNE 7, 2014
'Most of the startups we’ve backed at Homebrew don’t rush to announce their funding. Not because they’re all operating in stealth or pre-product – in fact some already are earning $1m+ in revenue per annum. They just don’t feel the need to draw attention to themselves or alert possible competitors. And my sense is the trend carries outside of our portfolio these days.
The Next Web
JUNE 11, 2014
'Mikita Mikado is a software engineer and entrepreneur from Belarus, now based in San Francisco. He is the co-founder and CEO of Quote Roller and PandaDoc. There is no other place like Silicon Valley, the tech Mecca of access to great talent, capital and countless prospective clients. For some founders, moving to the Valley is the only option to succeed.
The Equity Kicker
JUNE 20, 2014
'Yesterday Om Malik reminded us that predicting the future is hard. That’s true, but in the startup industry we have to do it every day. Both as investors and entrepreneurs. When companies attract high valuations their investors are predicting the future too – either that the business will trade in M&A at a ‘strategic multiple’ or that they will generate big cash flows.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 5, 2014
'John Oliver and his new show Last Week Tonight has become Sunday night entertainment in my house. He’s simultaneously brilliant and hilarious. Oliver took on Net Neutrality on Sunday. Due to my cable connection being down, I didn’t see it until Monday when I was able to watch it on my DVR. He started off by reminding us that American’s simply don’t respond to “boring” so he suggested we change the phrase “Net Neutrality” to “Cable Company Fu
ConversionXL
JUNE 12, 2014
'POP QUIZ! When you think about optimizing your website to increase conversions, what are some of the first things that come to mind? Like Ott had mentioned in the Mastering The Call To Action a study of Visual Website Optimizer’s customers shows most people are testing: CTA Buttons – 30%. Headlines – 20%. Layout – 10%. Copy – 8%.
Up and Running
JUNE 12, 2014
'For savvy startup marketing, look no further than Lori Cheek. In 2010 Lori launched Cheek’d.com , an online dating site that combines “old-school calling cards with the power of the internet.” The inspiration for the business came to her two years previously, when out to dinner with a colleague from the architectural company she worked for at the time.
crowdSPRING Blog
JUNE 13, 2014
'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
JUNE 7, 2014
'Mikita Mikado is a software engineer and entrepreneur from Belarus, now based in San Francisco. He is the co-founder and CEO of Quote Roller and PandaDoc. While Congress is trying to decide on immigration reform, I’ve been through the excruciating, year-and-a-half-long process of getting a long-term US visa. I wasn’t looking to work for an American company.
The Equity Kicker
JUNE 9, 2014
'Last week I wrote that a $1m revenue run rate and 20% month-on-month growth is a good benchmark to assess whether a transactional company is ready for a Series A, and then over the weekend I had a conversation on Twitter about whether investing in companies with a $1m revenue run rate was ‘venture’ capital or ‘growth’ capital.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 3, 2014
'This spring, Jason Mendelson and I taught a class called Venture Deals with the Kauffman Fellows Academy. It was a blast so we’ve decided to do it again. KFA uses NovoEd as their platform. Jason and I spent two days recording videos around our Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist explaining each section and going deeper with Q&A.
ConversionXL
JUNE 19, 2014
'There is one variable that data is not very good at deciphering – the human. It’s easy to forget when analyzing the data for conversion purposes is that the end user is a real human with feelings. Data tells us a lot of things, but it is really bad at anything that involves understanding the human condition. In an ideal world, designers and conversion optimizers can strike the perfect balance between the logical & emotional sides of the human brain & design experiences that “activ
Hunter Walker
JUNE 6, 2014
'Recently was interviewed on in a “three questions” format: You have had such a wide variety of experience—YouTube, Google, Second Life, and now a VC. What sort of changes have you seen in the computer industry in that time, and where do you see it going from here? I wasn’t trained as an engineer. My interest in tech is grounded first in creativity and community—desktop publishing for my high school newspaper, early Usenet discussion groups.
crowdSPRING Blog
JUNE 6, 2014
'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
JUNE 8, 2014
'Yoav Leitersdorf and Ofer Schreiber of are partners at YL Ventures. Developing an enterprise-grade SaaS product is not easy. The keys are maintaining capital efficiency, launching early versions to the SMB market and constantly applying customer development methods. B2B companies, often due to the higher barriers to develop a working product, have historically been less popular with early-stage investors – such barriers sometimes involve tough requirements for core IP and deep technology.
Up and Running
JUNE 4, 2014
'What do you do when a customer threatens to leave your product or service? Some companies don’t respond at all, while others reply with an exit survey. But for early-stage companies, trying to win them back — and learn from their feedback — is often a better strategy. To learn what works best, we asked 10 founders the following: What is one creative way that you can show value to (and possibly win back) customers who are threatening to leave your service or company for another?
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
JUNE 30, 2014
'This has to be one of the best “laptop lifestyle” case studies I have ever heard. Let me introduce you to Michelle Dale. She is the founder of Virtual Miss Friday , a virtual assistant service and training company. [ Download MP3 | Transcript | iTunes | Soundcloud | Raw RSS ]. Michelle has been traveling all around Europe … Read the rest of this entry » The post Michelle Dale: Mother Of Three Takes Her Kids Around Europe On A Ten Year “Laptop Lif
ConversionXL
JUNE 12, 2014
'POP QUIZ! When you think about optimizing your website to increase conversions, what are some of the first things that come to mind? Like Ott had mentioned in the Mastering The Call To Action a study of Visual Website Optimizer’s customers shows most people are testing: CTA Buttons – 30%. Headlines – 20%. Layout – 10%. Copy – 8%.
thebarefootvc
JUNE 15, 2014
'In 2011, I wrote about Jugaad, according to Wikipedia “a colloquial Hindi word that can mean an innovative fix or a simple work-around”. I noted in the blog post that Jugaad is “now an acceptable management technique…and also applies to any kind of creative and out of the box thinking which maximizes resources for a company and its stakeholders”. Resource scarcity leads to innovation — as those of us who have lived and worked in the developing world are acutely aware.
crowdSPRING Blog
JUNE 20, 2014
'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
JUNE 24, 2014
'Five years ago, when Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal were two music executives frustrated with the grandiosity of food criticism, they self-published a review of Manhattan’s Gemma. Their outlet was the Infatuation — a blog, traditional by then — but the tone was something new. Equal parts down-to-earth, lighthearted, and accessible, the Infatuation provided an unfortunately-rare type of dinin?
Hunter Walker
JUNE 23, 2014
'I don’t feel strongly enough yet to turn any of these thoughts into standalone blog posts so instead: Yo (single note notifications). Last week has been less like Yo and more like Whoa as lots of folks had pretty passionate debates about whether this was a new social platform or the dumbest investment ever. First, single purpose websites have been around for a long time but now we’re seeing single purpose apps.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
JUNE 16, 2014
'I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Natalie MacNeil , founder of She Takes On The World , a graduate of my Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind programs. She’s won an Emmy award, and today is in charge of a half a million dollar a year blogging business. You can listen to this interview right now to hear the … Read the rest of this entry » The post Natalie MacNeil: Emmy Award Winning Founder Of “She Takes On The World” Blogs Her Way To Half A Milli
ConversionXL
JUNE 12, 2014
'POP QUIZ! When you think about optimizing your website to increase conversions, what are some of the first things that come to mind? Like Ott had mentioned in the Mastering The Call To Action article, a study of Visual Website Optimizer’s customers shows most people are testing: CTA Buttons – 30%. Headlines – 20%. Layout – 10%. Copy – 8%.
Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 8, 2014
'I just returned from 3 days in Cincinnati including attending the annual meeting of one of Upfront’s LPs – Cintrifuse. I have never been more optimistic about the impact that the tech startup community is having on cities in America or about the role that cities outside of San Francisco / Silicon Valley can play in our future. Cincinnati, like many startup communities in the US over the past 5 years, has revitalized important regions in its urban core, created accelerators, built co
deal architect
JUNE 11, 2014
'“No stock footage here” Remarked Plex CEO Jason Blessing about the video about various shop floors at customer sites which kicked off his user conference, PowerPlex yesterday. Actually he need not have used any footage at all. He had 900.
Steve Blank
JUNE 10, 2014
'“Oh, what a tangled web we weave…when first we practice to deceive.”. Walter Scott, Marmion. Last week I got an email last week from a New York VC asking for advice about building a house in the California Coastal Zone. For six and a half years I served as a public official on the California Coastal Commission. The call reminded me that it’s been a year since I resigned, and it’s time to tell a few stories of what I learned as a Coastal Commissioner.
Rob Go
JUNE 16, 2014
'(Note: The majority of this post first ran on BetaBoston. This version goes a little deeper into some of my more nuanced thoughts). There has been a lot of discussion recently about the bar required to raise a series A. A few notable excerpts: Kyle Alspach’s commentary on seed and series A at BetaBoston; Brad Feld’s tweet a few weeks ago that “$100k MRR [monthly recurring revenue] used to be interesting.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 15, 2014
'Winning customers as an entrepreneur in a startup has many parallels to a young army trying to penetrate some formidable new and unfamiliar territory. You need a strategy as well as a goal, and you need to pick your battles well. Even in this age of purpose before profits, a business won’t survive by pretending there are no competitors out there to worry about.
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