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Having time to think about “leadership” at most startups feels like a luxury. It feels like something you could turn your attention to once you have tens of millions of dollars and a large staff to run operations and you could step back from it all and think about how to lead. The reality of most startups is about survival. And because running a company requires money to fuel staff and offices and acquire customers and the like, much of the time spent in early days at a start feels l
By Trevor Sumner, Chief Technology Officer of LocalVox. Because of the explosion of social media and mobile as the primary, go-to consumer device for local information, Google is increasingly losing search share to local directories, social media sites and maps apps. In the local space, about 50% 1 of searches are done on directories and map apps – further fragmenting an already dizzying number of ways customers find out and select small businesses.
We’re off to a fresh start here at the beginning of 2016. Looking back at 2015, the standout theme in the VC/startup ecosystem was unicorn hunting. We started the year enraptured by the “Age of Unicorns” with this cover of Fortune in January 2015 : Illustration: Jeremy Enecio. But by the time we ended 2015, the headlines like “ The Dangers Ahead if Tech Unicorns Get Gored (WSJ) ” and “ Regulators Look Into Mutual Funds Procedures for Valuing Startups (WSJ)
Let’s face reality -- no one can satisfy all the people all the time. In business, this means an entrepreneur who never says no to any customer is doomed to a hard life and some expensive mistakes. Many people will argue that total customer satisfaction is paramount, but I’m a pragmatist who believes that treating everyone the same really means treating all of them poorly.
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
Basketball or football? I realize sports analogies for startups can feel trite, but as you think about the different phases of team-building in a startup, this one is actually pretty spot on. Your recruiting strategy should be adapted to a few distinct phases just as the approaches to building different kinds of sports teams varies. Below, I take a look at each.
If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). And going for crowdfunding before you do customer discovery with customers can lock you into the wrong idea too early.
If you don’t have a dedicated website for your startup or small business, you’re in danger to fall further behind your competition. You might think that you’re building a fan base on Facebook ( if you’re buying fans on Facebook by advertising, you’re very likely wasting your money ), sharing small bits of content on Twitter and posting images to Pinterest.
If you don’t have a dedicated website for your startup or small business, you’re in danger to fall further behind your competition. You might think that you’re building a fan base on Facebook ( if you’re buying fans on Facebook by advertising, you’re very likely wasting your money ), sharing small bits of content on Twitter and posting images to Pinterest.
by Wes McDowell, The Deep End. If you’re a startup, you probably already know the importance of having a killer website. In addition to being your lifeline to the rest of the world, it can (and should) be a major tool to allow you to grow your prospects, and gain traction in the marketplace. The way I see it, your website should cover two major bases: It should be current.
Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any “job” they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your “job” can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.
If you have a software development background like mine, I’m sure you often get questions about when to outsource, versus building the solution in-house. The same applies to manufacturing and almost any process these days. Outsourcing is defined as contracting the work to another company, usually located in a developing country, like India, China, or Eastern Europe.
Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” But what if your measurement data is incorrect? What if you’re not measuring correctly or completely? What if there’s a whole pile of things you think you’re measuring when really… you’re not? The fact is that a lot of the people relying on Google Analytics are relying on bad data.
Photo Credit: Christopher Michel. Hunter Walk: I know you started Dogster, one of the seminal early online communities, but I don’t know Dogster’s founding story. How did the site come about? Ted Rheingold: In 2003 I owned and ran a web service business called OneMatchFire , and made a number of image sharing products for customers (or as side projects).
I once witnessed a first-time entrepreneur pitch his very early stage startup, vision, and product with so much passion, precision, and authority to a well-recognized Global consumer goods brand that the CIO agreed to a POC (proof of concept) even before the entrepreneur finished his 30-minute pitch! For a large multinational to take this leap of faith was no small feat – especially considering the relatively early stage of the startup.
By Omer Tadjer, CEO and co-founder of Comeet. Hiring mistakes and turnover can be costly for any organization; according to the Society for Human Resource Management , it can cost as much as half of an employee’s annual salary to replace them. Hiring the right employees in the first place can help prevent your losses by ensuring that the people you add to your team truly belong there and will stick around for the long term.
Systems administrators get all sorts of data from all sorts of places and don't have a holistic view as to what's happening. More parts throw off more data, which makes optimizing and troubleshooting that much harder over time. That was the Datadog pitch in late 2010, my first full year of leading deals, that I got from two software engineers. Makes sense, no?
For a software startup, a patent can be the intellectual property providing the key competitive advantage, or it can be an expensive non-defensible bureaucratic nightmare -- or both. I still generally advise software startups to file a patent as a barrier to entry from competitors and to increase their valuation by investors, but every entrepreneur needs to understand the tradeoffs.
Day in and day out, you’re surrounded by copy. You’re watching TV commercials, you’re seeing PPC ads in your search results, you’re visiting SaaS pricing pages, you’re shopping online for a new office printer… the list is endless. It’s easy to look around and think, “Yeah, I could have written that.” Whether you’re just getting started with copywriting or you’ve already written a few dozen landing pages, it’s important to kn
Over the past decade, startups and enterprises have devoted hefty resources to collecting and analyzing huge volumes of big data. For some, data is used to fine-tune a product; in other cases, data forms the foundation of the product itself. When it comes to building a startup around data, the more unique that data, the better. As I wrote last week in reference to machine learning startups , algorithms have mainly become a commodity these days.
The new year is already upon us. Can you believe it? Do you feel ready to put 2015 in the past, or are you looking back on a year well spent? Each year, we’re all familiar with the tradition of setting resolutions, things that we vow to achieve or become in the next year. Entrepreneurs, being goal setters by nature, often like to participate with resolutions related to their small business or startup.
by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization “. As a new year begins, most of us are focused on the resolutions we’ve chosen to pursue. While 2016 is still relatively fresh, you might want to consider adding one (probably unexpected) goal to perennial favorites like losing weight or getting your finances in order: becoming more humble.
The idea of exactly what your business is going to be usually comes first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it. Even still there are some people who study foreign words for the perfect meaning behind their chosen business.
Most entrepreneurs, and members of any small team, naively assume that the key to their success is hard work, dedication, and long hours in the business. In reality, their effectiveness is usually more related to how well they develop their work relationships with peers and business leaders. First they need to decipher correctly every relationship as a workship, friendship, or foe.
When you hear “data segmentation”, your instinct might be to bury your head in the sand or fall asleep. Why? Well, segmentation can seem daunting (or boring) to those unfamiliar with it. It’s an unfortunate truth because segmentation is perhaps one of the most effective tools at our disposal. The ability to slice and dice your Google Analytics data is the difference between mediocre, surface-level insights and meaningful, useful analysis.
I woke up this morning in Fort Worth, Texas. For the first minute I wasn’t really sure where was I but it eventually snapped into focus. This happens to me periodically when I travel. I’ve got a stretch where I’m on the road a lot. Fortunately, I’ve got amazing partners. I was reflecting on this over a cup of stale coffee this morning.
The idea for this post came this morning when I saw these two tweets from Benedict Evans. One shows the newspaper industry growing steadily for fifty years and then declining for ten and the other shows the Japanese fixed lens digital camera market growing from nothing to 120m unit sales in ten years and then dropping by 80% in the seven years after that.
Google is one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. Although Google has derived most of its success in the internet and software service sectors, its forays into hardware promise to boost its future revenue potential. Google already has 6 products that enjoy more than 1 billion worldwide users and this gives it a significant edge as they enter the hardware world.
Ideally, this is how things would go. If your employees are not “salespeople,” it can be a lot harder to track their work performance. To find out how others do it, we asked 10 entrepreneurs from the YEC to share what they feel are the most important points to consider when evaluating a team member. 1. Level of execution. “At the end of the day, nothing is more important than execution.” Click To Tweet.
Most entrepreneurs work long and hard to get a handshake agreement from an investor, and then tend to relax and wait for the check to clear. What they don’t realize is that about half the investment deals fail to close at this stage, including mergers and acquisitions , during the due-diligence process. The same is true of Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank investments you see on TV.
You already know retargeting works. But what if you’re doing it all wrong? What if grouping all audiences into the same retargeting campaign is actually doing more harm than good? The truth is that a lot of people never give the attention or resources that’s needed to improve their retargeting campaigns. It’s an afterthought. So today, we’re going to look at seven retargeting case studies that use some seriously creative tactics that I’ve never thought of… or even heard of.
For a decade now, my two blogs have been yin and yang. New Florence keeps me excited about new technologies, Deal Architect keeps me level headed about the economics of technology and the slow adoption rates in most enterprises. That.
This is the first of several blog posts discussing pre-seed rounds. To ensure you receive the rest, subscribe here. In this post, I want to answer the question, “What are pre-seed rounds?” I’ll also address why they’ve become fairly common. In the next post, I’ll talk about how we think about pre-seeds at NextView. It’s become increasingly common for startups to raise several seed rounds, and this has led to a bifurcation in the seed stage between what are kn
by Andrew Ostashen, co-founder of Vulsec. When an organization is within the startup phase, the first thing on their mind is “How do we get our product to market as fast as possible?” followed up by “How do we scale our product(s) the fastest and most efficient way possible?”. Typically, the idea of cyber security comes later down the road after a company compromise or when the organization is filing for compliance & regulations.
In the VC insider baseball world a discussion has gone on about “VC platforms” over the past 5 or so years. While firms define platforms differently, let’s just say they are the services that a VC offers outside of investment capital and partner time on boards or providing intros. Examples of VC platform services include: recruiting, marketing, design support, inside sales reps, consulting, accounting services and so forth.
If you can’t provide a memorable customer experience, your startup won’t survive very long these days. According to many observers , we can thank or blame technology for these higher expectations, providing information at the speed of light, leading everyone to expect more. You now need more than loyalty from your customers -- they need to be your best advocates.
What drives your decision-making? Trick question. Two drivers are behind the wheel: system one and system two. Which system is driving right now? Which system was driving when you bought that new house? How about when you solved difficult math problems in Grade 11? As it turns out, logic is literally a scarce resource. So, if you’re making a truly rational argument, you’ll want to ensure you’re optimizing for system two.
As part of its 2015 reporting, Rimini Street shared with me they now have as customers more than 125 Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 100 companies. That is pretty impressive reach when you also factor their smaller customers and many.
Editor’s note: Today, NextView is excited to release this ebook from partner David Beisel. Below, find an excerpt and free download of How to Find the Perfect Startup Job. Spend a few hours browsing content about startups, and one thing becomes painfully obvious: There’s a TON of it. And while plenty of it does a great job addressing the most common question I receive as a seed VC ( how to secure funding ), the second-most common question I get seems almost entirely missing from the
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