Steve Blank
JANUARY 21, 2015
'Just before the holidays I had coffee with Anne, an ex MBA student running a fairly large product group at a search engine company, now out trying to raise money for her own startup. She had an interesting insight: existing content/media companies were having the same problem as hardware companies that rarely made the leap to new platforms. And she had a model for a new media company for mobile and wearables.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 25, 2015
'Startups in a world of massive markets can be confusing. The law of large numbers, platforms that can make your company blow up unexpectedly and the trendy nature of tech markets can be deceiving. Success for many is ephemeral. I have written about the deceiving nature of early successes before – in particular in the SaaS or B2B world leading to a phenomenon called “shelfware.” If you didn’t read it I recommend it.
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Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 17, 2015
'For the elite startups and entrepreneurs who manage to attract the investor they dream of, and survive the term sheet negotiation, there is still one more hurdle before the money is in the bank. This is the mysterious and dreaded due diligence process, which can kill the whole deal. In reality, it is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of the business and the team.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 18, 2015
'by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization “. Go to school, study, get good grades. Traditionally, this strategy has prepared children to become successful adults. But thanks to rapidly advancing technology, an increasingly connected world, and the evolving global marketplace, students will need to develop a lot more than “just” book smarts to compete for tomorrow’s jobs.
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
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 7, 2015
'I just saw my first proposal for a Coding School Rollup. As you are probably aware, 2014 saw the explosion of coding schools all over the US. These are typically four to 12 week programs. Some are full-time, others are part-time. Many are immersive and include internships. A few are longer than 12 weeks. I know several people who have gone through the with great success and gone on to have excellent software development jobs.
Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of entrepreneurs experiencing pushback to the concept of minimum viable product. Their teams may disagree about what a product should look like, who the customer is, and which distributors to work with, but one thing they can all agree upon is: “We build high-quality products in this company. We wouldn’t even know how to go about building something ‘minimally viable.
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Occam's Razor
JANUARY 12, 2015
'The world of digital analytics seems to be insanely complicated. And, yes, some of it is. Third-party or first-party cookies anyone? And, are we tracking people, devices, web browsers or whoknowswhat? But it is a lot less complicated than you might believe. No. Really. A lot less complicated. I led a discussion the other day with a collection of people who were brand new to the space and some who were jaded long-term residents of Camp Web Analytics.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 28, 2015
'New entrepreneurs tend to focus only on getting the product right, and assume that the right culture and ethics will come later simply by hiring good people. In fact, they need an early focus on developing their moral compass, as well as setting the right ethical tone. Building an ethical business is more than just compliance and meeting legal requirements, and it has big paybacks.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 8, 2015
'How do we build strong brands in the digital age? Should brand marketers “bow to algorithmic salvation”, allowing data and process to ride roughshod over inspiration and creativity? Chairman of JWT Asia Pacific Tom Doctoroff provides compelling answers to these burning questions in his latest book “ Twitter is Not a Strategy: Rediscovering the Art of Brand Marketing “ Author of the book “ What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism, and China’s Modern Consumer ” (read o
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 22, 2015
'There has been a lot of recent noise in Boulder about growth, challenges, and the impact of the tech community on the city. I stirred the pot a little more with my post The Endless Struggle That Boulder Has With Itself. It generated some private emails, including non-constructive troll-like ones such as “Get the f**k out of town, you and people like you are ruining everything” at one end of the extreme to “It’s so frustrating that the all growth is bad crowd is framing
Version One Ventures
JANUARY 21, 2015
'One of the best parts about having a strong portfolio filled with smart people is the wise advice that founders share with each other. In this case, one of V1’s portfolio companies has been looking to hire a VP of Sales and I asked Jon Zimmerman ( @jpzimmerman ), CEO of Front Desk , to share his experiences and insight on the matter. The resulting dialogue proved so thoughtful and valuable that I wanted to share parts of it with others who might be wondering if it’s time to hire a VP of Sales.
Up and Running
JANUARY 26, 2015
'Welcome to Day 1 of our 5 Day SWOT Analysis Challenge! Sign up for our daily updates during the challenge and complete your own SWOT Analysis. Click here to join the challenge for FREE. Invite others to take the challenge! Share this article on Facebook or Twitter and use the #SWOT hashtag. As an entrepreneur, you want to know your business inside and out so you can make informed, money-making decisions.
Mike Michalowicz
JANUARY 26, 2015
'Show Summary . Business owner Mel West joins Episode 12 of the Profit First Podcast. Mel breaks down common problems in the work place and explains the importance of communicating with your employees. Our Guest. Mel West is President of Prosperity Logic; a performance-consulting firm that specializes in assisting clients increase profits and achieve wealth using its Prosperity Business Model.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 24, 2015
'Most entrepreneurs I meet are reluctant to disclose anything about their idea to investors before getting a signed confidential disclosure agreement (CDA). Professional investors and advisors, on the other hand, usually refuse to sign these agreements today due to the risk of litigation and administrative workload, and will walk away. How can you make this a win-win opportunity?
OnlyOnce
JANUARY 20, 2015
'ReturnShip Program. Today is a very exciting day for Return Path as we launch a new program we have been cooking for more than a year called the ReturnShip program. (Sometimes the name of our company comes in handy.). Return Path has always had a significant commitment to building a strong and diverse organization as well as supporting and encouraging women to pursue careers in technical environments.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 29, 2015
'tl;dr: As a small company, focus on two things with big companies: “1. What can we, the small company do, to make the big company successful? 2. What can I do, as a leader of a small company, do to help the people I’m working with at the big company be successful within the big company?” I was on the phone yesterday with the head of corp dev for a very large tech company.
ConversionXL
JANUARY 4, 2015
'There are many, many, many lists of conversion optimization best practices. Some are sacrosanct: Sliders distract – you should get rid of them. Everything needs to be shorter – cut stuff out. Just make the button bigger ! These practices often come from broad trends observed over many experiments and they highlight what usually and typically works.
Up and Running
JANUARY 21, 2015
'Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, image via winbeta.org. Every year, a few businesses make bad decisions or mistakes publicly. Sometimes they recover quickly and no one notices. Other times, the blunders are nothing short of newsworthy. We’ve gathered up some of the worst fails of 2014 and included some helpful tips on how to avoid them yourself. Walmart asks its employees to purchase their own uniforms.
The Equity Kicker
JANUARY 27, 2015
'Steve Denning, one of the leading business thinkers pushing the business world to abandon the outdated idea of maximising shareholder value has published an interesting article on Forbes titled Why do managers hate agile? That immediately made me think of my first experiences with agile as a board member of software and web startups shifting away from waterfall development to agile to improve productivity.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 19, 2015
'The average length of a funding pitch to Angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.
David Teten
JANUARY 7, 2015
'Ray Dalio, Founder of Bridgewater Associates , the world’s largest hedge fund, is a man after my own heart. A few years ago he publicly set down his core Principles for living, managing, and investing. Bridgewater uses these codified rules for recruiting, training, and most important, managing the firm’s culture. It’s well worth your time to read them, or at least a summary from a Bridgewater alum.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 21, 2015
'Raj Bhargava (CEO of JumpCloud ) and I got into a discussion at dinner the other night about the major security hacks this past year including Sony, eBay, Target, and The Home Depot. Raj spend over a decade in the security software business and it was fascinating to realize that a common thread on virtually all of these major compromises was hacked credentials.
ConversionXL
JANUARY 13, 2015
'One of the great truths that people ignore when it comes to optimization is that you can fail with any tool. It’s only when you are trying to succeed that differences in tools really matter. Once you’ve established the right mindset for a successful program you are still going to need a number of tools to enable you to test and to get value from your actions.
abovethecrowd.com
JANUARY 30, 2015
'“Can you take me Higher? To a place where blind men see . Can you take me Higher? . To a place with golden streets”. — Creed, Higher. In their seminal 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies , Jim Collins and Jerry Poras coined the term BHAG (pronounced BEE-hag) — an acronym that stands for “ B ig H airy A udacious G oal.
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 19, 2015
'From Day One we viewed crowdSPRING as the ultimate light-touch, self-serve, highly scalable internet business. We determined that we would build the product and out website such that even the least sophisticated visitor could learn for themselves how the system worked and could then take self-led actions to source the creative services they came looking for.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Successful startups seem to follow similar paths to greatness, and unfortunately all too often that path leads them back down the hill much faster than they went up. Big company powerhouses, like IBM and Xerox, took fifty years to make the cycle, but new companies today, in the age of the Internet, often make the cycle in five to ten years, or even less.
Duct Tape Marketing
JANUARY 23, 2015
'6 Key Tactics Agencies Use to Help Local Businesses Rank Higher in Google written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing, and today’s guest post is from Dan Olson – Enjoy! photos credit: Business strategy with seo concept © Ximagination | Dreamstime.com. Small businesses today, more than ever, rely on agencies to help with organic search and local results to drive business in their local markets.
deal architect
JANUARY 30, 2015
'In the last couple of weeks, in very different settings I have seen the future of ERP. Invited to be part of UNIT4/FinancialForce’s sales kickoff in Madrid, Spain and that of Plex Systems in Troy, MI, I saw wildly enthusiastic.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 19, 2015
'Any reader of this blog for a period of time will know that I’ve been long YouTube for years. Along with Greycroft, I was the first institutional investor in Maker Studios (sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion) and am still the largest investor in Mitu Network , the largest online video producer of Latino content. We have made 5 online video investments in total – some we will talk about later this year.
Rob Go
JANUARY 12, 2015
'As an early stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction? I posed this question on Twitter in Dec and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high. And as a firm, we generally believe that there isn’t a “sub-prime” market for VC.
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 5, 2015
'Alright then. Hangover from New Years eve is gone these past few days. The last long weekend of the holidays is done. And now, once again, we turn our gaze lovingly back to our business, our customers, and our team. As managers, we are so focused on the moment at hand, the task that needs accomplishing, the strategy that needs executing, the data that needs analyzing, that we often neglect to take time to simply reflect.
View from Seed
JANUARY 8, 2015
'Visit a startup’s website, and you’ll eventually drift towards a few standard links, from About to Team to Contact. But among those options, appearing on almost every site, is one link that simply doesn’t belong with the rest: “Blog.” Don’t misunderstand, it’s not the fact that a startup’s blog exists that’s so troubling.
Duct Tape Marketing
JANUARY 9, 2015
'Using Large Business Tactics on a Small Business Budget written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing, and today’s guest post is from Jesse Aaron – Enjoy! You won’t find your local pizza shop in the Super Bowl advertising line-up, but you will find Papa John’s there.
deal architect
JANUARY 26, 2015
'This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well. This time it is Bruce Richardson who joined Salesforce in 2011 as the Chief Enterprise Strategist. He may be best known for his.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 24, 2015
'I was waiting for my son’s basketball game to start this morning and with the morning’s emails all drained I turned to Twitter and saw this Tweet from Marshall Kirkpatick. Test: open your twitter stream, look at the 1st item in it, think of something to say in response, say it. Theory: it’s really that simple. — Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 24, 2015.
Steve Blank
JANUARY 6, 2015
'There are 4 types of startups. Which one are you? If you can’t see the video click here. Filed under: 2 Minute Lessons , Market Types.
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