Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 27, 2012

By now you probably know that David Sacks , co-founder of PayPal and founder of both Geni & Yammer made some observations on Facebook that Silicon Valley “as we know it” was coming to an end. He says. “In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that. (1) has escaped the attention of the major Internet companies, which are better run than ever before; (2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5M, the typical seed plus series A investmen

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Silicon Valley Technical Review Early Stage Cofounder 299

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant. They’ve done it for more than 400 companies ranging in size from 200 hundred starts-ups, one of whom was Citrus Systems that became Citrix, to IBM.

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San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 261

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 5, 2012

Coworking spaces are a really cool option for a lot of workers that, for whatever reason, don’t really fit in to a traditional office space like startups, telecommuters, small businesses, and especially creatives in search of collaboration. With free coffee and Internet, workspaces, and built-in community, coworking spaces provide a great place to get things done without feeling the isolation of working at home, or trying to overcome the frenetic nature of working in a coffee shop.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 3, 2012

Contrary to what most of you might guess, the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity over the last few years is not Gen-Y young upstarts, but Baby Boomers in the 55-64 year age group. In fact, according to a study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, these Boomers are actually driving a new entrepreneurship boom. Some people are calling entrepreneurship the ‘new mid-life crisis’ for the 76 million-strong demographic once thought to be over the hill.

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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

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 28, 2012

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. Regretful Pricer asks: Can you recommend any good price negotiation approaches with the existing customers? My service has greatly improved as times goes, but the rate is still ~30-50% lower than other companies are charging for the same thing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2012

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein , co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference this fall. Last week , we announced the date and venue for The Lean Startup Conference: Dec 3 - 4, 2012 at the InterContintenal in SF. Now we’re starting to reach out to speakers. We’re aiming for a mix of people: those well known for their work on lean startups and those who aren’t yet prominent but are applying Lean Startup techniques and have valuable lessons to share.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2012

At times not losing is as important as winning. Customer Validation. E.piphany was an 11-month-old startup with 31 people and on fire. We had closed four $100,000 deals for our customer relationship management software. Joe Dinucci, our VP of Sales, was hot on the trail of our next big order. He had just demo’d our product to his friend, the CFO of Autodesk.

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YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 13, 2012

If you’re curious about learning a programming language then you’re in luck: there’s no shortage of resources for learning how to code online. University-level courses, tutorials, cheat sheets, and coding communities all offer excellent ways to pick up a new language, and maybe even a new job, too. Read on, and you’ll discover 50 great places to learn how to code, for free, online.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 31, 2012

Every investor expects to see some business traction, both before and after a funding event. If you have been working 20 hours a day, and spent your last dollar, but have no results to show, investors will be sympathetic, but will probably tell you that your dream doesn’t have wheels. Traction means forward progress. I hear a lot of entrepreneurs contemplating their great “idea” for several years with little discernable progress, and looking for money to start.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live, the call-in show with Jason Cohen, sponsored by Software Promotions. In this episode, Jason speaks with Jared from Padseeker.com. Pin It Listen to this episode if you want to hear a really tough conversation about refining a cool idea into a profit-making business. This is a long episode (1:20), but it’s a conversation that will resonate with a lot of early-stage startup founders.

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This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 22, 2012

You have a million things to get done at your startup, yet you only have a handful of people to do them. How are you ever going to get it done? Who should you hire? What should be the makeup of a founding team? What is the Minimum Viable Team, if you will, for a startup? To make life simpler, I'll take a page from George Carlin, who masterfully widdled down the Ten Commandments down to two simple rules.

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 15, 2012

I recently read Brad Feld’s thought provoking piece encouraging founders to sit on the board of another startup company. I found it thought provoking because I’ve always believed startup founders need extreme focus on only their company to succeed. We live in an era where the press espouses the entrepreneurs who have five startups. I’m not one who has subscribed to the “superman founder” narrative.

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 28, 2012

In today’s startup landscape, practically everything can be outsourced. But when it comes to core technical skills, more and more entrepreneurs are opting to partner with technical co-founders rather than hiring someone for an in-house position. So how do you decide what’s right for your new company? To find the best way to integrate core technical skills into a start up, we asked eight successful young entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) whether startups need tech-oriented f

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Technical Review Cofounder Founder Software Review 131

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 6, 2012

College campuses are ripe with innovation, as students grow through education and experimentation in school. To help foster this innovation, many colleges and universities have opened business incubators, helping students and others in their community to help make their innovative dreams a reality. Whether they’re offering tricked-out labs or incredible funding opportunities, these incubators offer a great opportunity for students who are smart (and lucky!

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 25, 2012

The new hot topic for entrepreneurs these days is crowd funding, which is anticipated to at least supplement, if not replace, the slow and mysterious process of current Angel and venture capital investors. The problem is that crowd funding means something different to everyone, and even I have been confused by the different ways the term gets used. So I have set out here to outline and offer some practical advice on the many different models currently used with the term “crowd funding” and “crow

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Gust

AUGUST 22, 2012

At the threshold of one of the most recognizable landmarks in human history — the sole survivor among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World , dating back nearly five thousand years — my host was engaged in heated debate with a rotating phalanx of functionaries. As our group sweltered in the July heat on the outskirts of Cairo , each of these purported minions of the state — none of whom wore a uniform or badge — in turn blocked our entry, determined to exercise the modest amount of authority b

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Technical Review Egypt Morocco Russia 172

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 13, 2012

If anything has held true about the progress of technology over the last 150 years, it is that one generation's bread and butter tasks become automated and the skill level requirement for participating successfully in the workforce is forced up. We've seen disruption by machines among all sorts of human labor, particularly in the area of "making stuff".

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Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 29, 2012

Nate Redmond is the managing partner of Rustic Canyon Partners – he’s probably one of the youngest managing partners of a major fund you’ll meet. And no wonder, lately he and his partners are on a tear, investing out of their $200+ million VC fund. They recently exited their investment in Gaikai for $380 million while their rival OnLive (who had raised > $200 million) just went through bankruptcy.

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David Teten

AUGUST 29, 2012

I’ll be a judge for IGNITE!, a pitch event featuring ten early stage tech startups, Tuesday night , September 4 at Microsoft’s midtown office at 1290 Avenue of the Americas. RSVP. Presenting Companies. geekli.st. A place for geeks to share what they’ve done, who they did it with and connect with great companies and communities. Geeklist is a vibrant platform for geeks to discover, connect and share the great work they have done.

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YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 7, 2012

When you think of customer service, websites rarely come to mind. Instead you probably envision smiling faces and helpful staff guiding customers through the buying experience or handling a question or concern for an existing customer. However, the world is changing, and many consumers want a new kind of customer service; they want one that is accessible to them night and day, without having to talk to or interact with anyone in person.

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 16, 2012

The ends justify the means, according to Machiavelli in The Prince back in the early 16th Century. The concept is hardly to news to countless startup founders who find themselves facing intense pressuresto survive and grow their companies in extraordinarily challenging conditions. Hopefully, the struggles and compromises are worth it in the end. We asked a panel of eight successful young entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to reveal the hardest, most wrenching thing they’ve h

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Founder Bootstrapping Startup Early Stage 152

David Cohen

AUGUST 22, 2012

I was recently interviewed for a WSJ article that was exploring the trends associated with the popularity (or lack thereof) of the freemium model called “ When Freemium Fails.” In researching my answers for the WSJ reporter, I dug up some data on TechStars companies over the last several years that use the freemium model. Here’s the data: 2007: 10%. 2008: 30%. 2009: 42%. 2010: 20%. 2011: 12%. 2012: 21%.

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Vertical Search Business Model Software Development 110

The Next Web

AUGUST 4, 2012

If you’ve read any of my previous marketing focused articles, you might notice a common, underlying theme : If you’re not measuring, you’re not marketing. In my professional life, this is a credo I live by. Companies live and die by how agile they are and how they’re meeting the demands of their customers. But the age old question is: “How do I know what customers want?

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Occam's Razor

AUGUST 13, 2012

A couple weeks back I'd requested the nice folks following me on Google+ and Facebook to submit their most important digital marketing and analytics questions. The questions reveal a bunch of things we used to worry about, and continue to, like data quality and creating data driven cultures. They also reveal things that starting to become scary (Privacy!

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crowdSPRING Blog

AUGUST 15, 2012

We’re fortunate to have built a great team at crowdSPRING. What makes one employee highly effective and another average? For some of our job postings, crowdSPRING receives hundreds of resumes. How do we find the the most effective people to join our team? Contrary to the way most companies hire – we never hire the best candidate from a pool of candidates.

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YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 9, 2012

by Mike Staver, author of “ Leadership Isn’t For Cowards: How to Drive Performance by Challenging People and Confronting Problems ”. When you arrive at the office each morning, you find yourself in a blame-free zone. Your team attacks projects proactively and with confidence. When a problem arises, everyone involved “owns it” and takes corrective action.

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Gust

AUGUST 23, 2012

Startups usually begin with one or two founders who play many roles. The lead founder is likely to wear the hats of Founder, Chairman, CEO, President, CFO, CRO and CMO, while a co-founder may well be CTO, Chief Product Officer, and Programming Team Lead. As the company grows and brings on more people, even in cases where everyone wants to keep the organization ‘flat’, it simply becomes too unwieldy for the CEO to have more than six or so direct reports, or for the CTO to both code ev

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CTO Hire Cofounder Startup Founder 118

Growthink Blog

AUGUST 14, 2012

Crowdfunding, or raising money from the Internet "crowd" has really taken off. Just a couple years ago there were only hundreds of companies who had raised Crowdfunding. Today we are in the tens of thousands. Below is a brief overview of the many Crowdfunding platforms to consider. The Largest Crowdfunding Sites: Kickstarter.com is the largest site for funding projects, mostly creative projects.

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SEC Equity Technical Review Mobile 113

The Next Web

AUGUST 26, 2012

In November 2010 we launched Whatser : an application that made it easy to get personal suggestions on where to go such as bars, restaurants, galleries, shops and other spots based on your location, interest and social graph. Although we got some early traction, we were unable to prevent a bankruptcy from happening in October 2011. We are currently in the middle of a restart and would like to share our seven lessons learned in the hopes that other entrepreneurs can benefit from our experiences a

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Bankruptcy Technical Review Intellectual Property Due Diligence 121

VC Cafe

AUGUST 9, 2012

Photo credit: Images_of_Money, Flickr. Guest post by Nitzan Yudan*. Building a good reputation is one of the most fundamental components to a successful start-up and is particularly invaluable in the early stages. Without positive feedback and growing popularity, the critical first few sales become even harder as well as funding being tough to secure.

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Elevator Pitch Startup Europe Reputation 109

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

A founder’s skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination. Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. ——— Yuri, one of my ex students started a big-data analytics company last year. He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 323

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 9, 2012

by Chip Averwater, author of “ Retail Truths ”. There’s no denying how much the Internet has empowered today’s consumers. They can find what they want for the price they want without ever leaving their couches. And today, many of them are entering brick-and-mortar stores wielding another powerful weapon — their smartphones. Now consumers can compare a product’s price while they’re in a store to what it’s going for at other brick-and-mortar and online stores before they even step out of the aisle

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Sales .Net Cost Advertising 190

deal architect

AUGUST 30, 2012

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well. This time it is Charles Phillips, the CEO of Infor. I have had the honor of knowing Charles for 2 decades in his.

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Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 1, 2012

Every startup founder feels the pressure of the thousands of things that need to get done, all seemingly at the same time. There is just not enough time! The real solution is better productivity and less procrastination, to put you back in control of your business. You need to spend time on important things, as well as the urgent. Many entrepreneurs waste too much time on low-priority administrative tasks, procrastinating on higher priority but tougher tasks, resulting in last minute crises, and

Product 294

Product Entrepreneur Database Restful 294

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 16, 2012

It has always surprised me that founders were so quick to fight over how many board members there were and so quick to agree to have as many board observers as people wanted. I have always been vehemently against board observers and wrote some of the reasons in this previous post. But over the past couple of years I’ve slightly modified my views, which I’d like to explain: The Case Against Board Observers.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 21, 2012

Pin It If you run your own software company, or you want to, going to Business of Software is possibly the most useful thing you can do this year. It’s certainly more useful than spending that time reading static blog posts or business books. Of course it costs $3000 more than reading blog posts (including airfare and hotel), which sounds steep.

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Software Video Metrics Web 225