November, 2012

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CMO CTO COO Equity and Compensation

SoCal CTO

I was just asked about a particular startup situation (seed stage, CMO hire, non-founder) and particularly what compensation and equity is appropriate. I know a lot more about CTOs specifically CTO Salary and Equity Trends 2009-2011 , Visualization of Startup CTO Equity and Salary Data , Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data , but I've previously written about the issues with Equity for Early Employees in Early Stage Startups.

CTO Hire 329
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Careers Start by Peeling Potatoes

Steve Blank

Listening to my the family talk about dividing up the cooking chores for this Thanksgiving dinner, including who would peel the potatoes, reminded me that most careers start by peeling potatoes. KP – Kitchen Patrol. One of the iconic punishments in basic training in the military was being threatened by our drill instructors of being assigned to KP – Kitchen Patrol – as a penalty for breaking some rule.

Thailand 334
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6 Right Times to Be a Ready-Fire-Aim Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

I know entrepreneurs who have suffered from the dreaded premature execution syndrome often associated with the ready-fire-aim approach. Yet I believe that many more have benefited from this approach, especially in early startup stages. If your product is highly innovative, and speed to market is critical, you won’t get it right the first time anyway, no matter how cautiously you plan.

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Choosing The Right Cloud-Based Accounting Software For Your Business

YoungUpstarts

by Monica Shepherd, TradeGecko. It’s a no-brainer that keeping track of your incoming and outgoing finances is a critical part of not only keeping your business running, but also of ensuring your business grows and prospers. Therefore you need accounting software that reflects an effective and efficient business – meaning, you’re going to have to upgrade from that spreadsheet.

Cloud 197
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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

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

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The non-developer’s guide to hiring software developers

The Next Web

If Marc Andreesen is right (and I happen to believe he is) then talented software developers will soon be the most sought after type of employee for just about any company, whether that company’s main business is building software or not. Attracting and hiring great software developers for your company is difficult, but it’s not impossible. Here are some tips to get you started: 1.

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The Collaborative Web: Github is the New Flickr

This is going to be BIG.

I can't take credit for this meme, even though I've already invested in it.twice. (Once with Docracy, once with a super cool company launching in the first quarter of 2013.). I was chatting with Thor Muller a couple of weeks ago about web trends--and he made a very insightful point as I talked about how I see more and more models around getting people to work together in different ways.

Web 149

More Trending

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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. ————-.

Japan 305
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Crossing the Chasm is a Major Startup Challenge

Startup Professionals Musings

Everyone in the business world has heard of the old bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “ Crossing the Chasm ,” but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers. Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a startup.

Startup 254
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Are You In Control Of Your Business?

YoungUpstarts

by Monica Shepherd, TradeGecko. Are you in control of your business? I don’t mean are you the person calling the shots. I mean as in, if you had to make some critical snap decisions, do you know your business well enough that you could you make them with total confidence? In order to be able to make these sound, informed business decisions you need an accurate and efficient operating system.

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Don’t Pass this up: Getting your business on Apple’s Passbook, DIY style

The Next Web

The long-term overall impact of Apple’s Passbook has been a hot topic over the last two months since it was launched with iOS 6 on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But one thing is for sure: if you’ve got a business — small, medium or large — where getting people in the door is important, and are looking to follow in the footsteps of the likes of McDonalds , United Airlines , Eventbrite , MLB , Starbucks , American Express and others, you should at least be looking into

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Bringing Lean Startup to Life at GE

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference. At a party in NYC recently, I was challenged by a VC to name the biggest company currently using Lean Startup practices. I think he expected me to describe a medium-sized startup or maybe some small, old-school media organization. So his eyebrows jumped when I said that GE is the largest company we know of.

Lean 167
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Twitter Link Roundup #155 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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!

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Moneyball Design: Why the Research and Data Analysis is Critical to Getting Your Prospects to Convert

ConversionXL

136 CMOs were recently asked “What do you see as your biggest opportunity for revenue generation in early 2013?” 46% of them said “improving conversions” Excellent. Now that we know where the opportunity lies, how do we go about doing it? We had two prospective clients this past week where their overall site design was good enough that they didn’t need a full redesign.

Design 100
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Don’t Look For Investors for All the Wrong Reasons

Startup Professionals Musings

There is so much written these days about how to attract investors that most entrepreneurs “assume” they need funding, and don’t even consider a plan for “bootstrapping,” or self-financing their startup. Yet, according to many sources , over 90 percent of all businesses are started and grown with no equity financing, and many others would have been better off without it.

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[Infographic] 2012 Q3: Software Engineering Salaries in Silicon Valley

YoungUpstarts

Software engineers are extremely high in demand, and over the past few years the growth in their salaries has shown exactly how much in demand they are. California-based executive search and technical recruiting firm Riviera Partners recently crunched some numbers by aggregating salary figures from the highest paying tech companies and from a recent report covering the correlation of tech skills in demand and expected salary ranges.

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When is it time to stop calling yourself a freelancer and become an entrepreneur?

The Next Web

Self-employed. Freelancer. Entrepreneur. Business owner. However you label it, these people are making an independent living by themselves and their businesses they have built. These “labels” often blend into one another: those who are self-employed consider themselves business owners, business owners consider themselves entrepreneurs, freelancers consider themselves self-employed.

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All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces

abovethecrowd.com

Since Benchmark’s investment in Ebay 15 years ago, we have been fascinated by online marketplaces. Entrepreneurs accurately recognize that the connective tissue of the Internet provides an opportunity to link the players in a particular market, reducing friction in both the buying and selling experience. The arrival of the smartphone amplifies these opportunities, as the Internet’s connective tissue now extends deeper and deeper into an industry with the participants connected to the marketplace

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Twitter Link Roundup #156 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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!

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First Impressions Matter: The Importance of Great Visual Design

ConversionXL

People make snap judgements. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. This number comes from specific studies.

Design 134
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5 Tips to Alignment With New Consumer Buying Habits

Startup Professionals Musings

Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Reports suggest that 90% of today’s shoppers skip marketing pitches, to research online before they buy, and over 50% check user reviews before making a decision.

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[Infographic] More Singaporeans Shopping Online To Save Time: PayPal

YoungUpstarts

In Singapore, online and mobile shopping is set to enter a new phase. According to a new PayPal survey conducted by market research agency GfK to measure the changing ways that consumers shop and pay, Singaporeans are planning to do at least half of their holiday shopping electronically this year. Singaporeans are expecting to shop online 15 times each this coming festive season – assuming each trip takes around three hours (what with braving the horrendous traffic, crowds and queues), thi

Singapore 182
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Don’t Pass this up: Getting your business on Apple’s Passbook, DIY style

The Next Web

The long-term overall impact of Apple’s Passbook has been a hot topic over the last two months since it was launched with iOS 6 on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But one thing is for sure: if you’ve got a business — small, medium or large — where getting people in the door is important, and are looking to follow in the footsteps of the likes of McDonalds , United Airlines , Eventbrite , MLB , Starbucks , American Express and others, you should at least be looking into

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The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt

OnlyOnce

The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt. Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet. Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs.

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Twitter Link Roundup #153 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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!

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People Comparison Shop, Stupid

ConversionXL

If you think people might buy your products or services without checking out the competition first, think again. Research says that on average consumers visit three websites before making a purchase. Another insight by the same study was that the more sites a consumer visits, the more money they are likely to spend. In other words, the more expensive the product, the more time people take to comparison shop.

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Tim Ferriss Talks About His Latest Book “The 4-Hour Chef”, How To Learn Anything In Half The Time And Why He Went To Sniper School

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Download the Text Transcript in PDF. Subscribe to this Podcast in iTunes. This is a good interview. Trust me. You’re not going to want to miss this. Just hit play now. Then grab a copy of Tim’s latest book – The 4-Hour Chef. Timothy Ferriss needs no introduction. I interviewed him previously about his 4-Hour Workweek book, a runaway … Read the rest of this entry » Download the Text Transcript in PDF Subscribe to this Podcast in iTunes.

Restful 92
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Entrepreneurshit. The Blog Post on What It’s Really Like.

Both Sides of the Table

It’s 4.50am. Sunday morning. And I couldn’t sleep. I have much on my mind since I just returned from a week on the road. 5 days. 3 cities. Late night Mexican food. Beers. Airports. Delays. I left on a Sunday. I had to miss a full day with my family, camping in the mountains. I returned home Friday night at 10pm – too late to see my kids.

Monaco 420
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Time to sell your site? Here’s how to get started.

The Next Web

You’ve put years of work into your website or blog, but now you’ve decided that it’s time to sell. Maybe you’re not getting the satisfaction you used to from the pursuit. Maybe it’s not making as much money as you had hoped and you want to get something out of all that effort. Maybe you just want to see the site do well under the management of a more experienced, better-funded enterprise.

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Open Source Entrepreneurship

Steve Blank

One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. Free: Startup Tools. If you’re building a startup, the Startup Tools tab on the top of this page has curated links to hundreds of startup resources.

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Twitter Link Roundup #152 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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!

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The worlds largest outsourcer you never heard of

deal architect

Quick, name the outsourcer which comes to market with A $ 140 billion services backlog. A relentless focus on guaranteed performance and improved outcomes for customers, not just standard SLAs or fixed price contracts Deep vertical knowledge in oil and.

Vertical 308
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How Do I Get In Touch With a VC?

Rob Go

I got this question on a panel last week, and coincidentally, I had a couple folks on Twitter tweet out the same question. Generically speaking, the question is “how do I get in touch with a potential investor about my company?” I don’t know for sure if this is true, but I have the impression that early stage VC’s as a whole have gotten more accessible than probably any time in the past.

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Entrepreneur’s Don’t Think Enough. Here’s What You Can Do About It …

Both Sides of the Table

Every so often I find myself caught up in a really hectic 3-4 week schedule where it seems like I float endlessly betweens meetings. Pitches. Intros. Board Meetings. Conferences. And I get flooded with legal docs, end-of-quarter financial administration, recruiting, whatever. I get sucked up in “Do” mode. Startups Are for Doers. Now, I’m pretty on the record that being an entrepreneur is about being great at The Do.

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Find and Talk to other Startup Founders of Similar Startups

SoCal CTO

One of the recommendations I make all the time to startup founders, is to find other founders who have tackled similar problems as yours and talk to them about how they solved these problems. As an example, I'm working with two sets of founders who are both going to be dealing with Getting Started with a Two-Sided Market Business - they are variants of two sided markets, but have similar characteristics.

Founder 301
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Entrepreneurs as Dissidents

Steve Blank

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.

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How To Choose A Market For Your Startup Or Small Business

crowdSPRING Blog

I’m rarely surprised when a young entrepreneur or small business owner hasn’t fully identified how their new business will make money. But I’m always surprised when that entrepreneur or small business owner has a tough time describing the potential customers for their new business’s products and services. After all, without customers, there is no revenue.