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Several years ago, I wrote a post titled Why VCs Should Recycle Their Management Fees. From the start of Foundry Group in 2007, we have felt strongly about this. We feel that if an LP gives us a $1 to invest, we should invest at least that $1, not $0.85 (the average fee load over a decade for a typical VC fund is 15%.) Our goal for each fund is actually to invest closer to 110%, which means if an LP gives us a $1 to invest, we are actually investing $1.10.
The startup stage of a business is grueling. Chances are, you are overworked, understaffed, and functioning on a shoestring budget. Taking into account the statistic that only half of businesses survive the first five years, even the downtime can get stressful. Achieving rapid growth after a few tough years in the startup stage can be one of the most exciting (and relieving) times in the life of an entrepreneur.
No matter the aim of your small business, a crucial component to attracting your ideal customer is to help them find your brand via your company website.
Medtech startups are big money in today’s marketplace, producing high-value solutions for healthcare, ranging from health records software to genetic testing and diabetes management devices. But medtech isn’t all money and innovation – it’s also an industry that’s responsible for people’s lives, and when things go wrong, startups can be liable, with serious legal and financial consequences.
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
“…it looks cold in there…” A prospective customer looks to your business to provide something they need or want. This is the beginning of a very important story for your business. And, starting with your very first interaction, this story can develop in one of three ways: You fail to meet their expectations. You meet their expectations.
5 Steps to Small Business Search Engine Optimization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. The video above is a replay of a recent live webinar I conducted. Combined with the text below you should have a pretty good feel for the steps necessary for small business SEO. If you’re looking for a highly technical post on search engine optimization (SEO), this is not the content for you, and honestly, that’s because I don’t believe SEO is that technical (unless yo
By: Tom Hadfiled, CEO @ M.io SXSW 2019 may still be many months away, but the time to vote for panels is now! Support the ATX Startup Community by voting for this selection of panels featuring Austinites. If you’re unfamiliar with PanelPicker?—?it is a time for brands, influencers and professionals to submit their ideas for presentations and discussions to be held on one of the many stages at next year’s SXSW.
By: Tom Hadfiled, CEO @ M.io SXSW 2019 may still be many months away, but the time to vote for panels is now! Support the ATX Startup Community by voting for this selection of panels featuring Austinites. If you’re unfamiliar with PanelPicker?—?it is a time for brands, influencers and professionals to submit their ideas for presentations and discussions to be held on one of the many stages at next year’s SXSW.
by Jaren Nichols, Chief Operating Officer at ZipBooks. Email marketing is a great way to connect with your customers, increase your online presence and drive traffic to your website. However, email marketing is no walk in the park and often business owners feel forced to settle with a good open rate, but a distinct lack of click-throughs. Email click-through rate is one of the best ways to measure consumer engagement with your brand, but they are also renowned for being one of the biggest challe
Turning up a new social media profile or directory listing takes all of 30 minutes. Alright, maybe an hour, if you want to do things right. You’ll need to make ongoing investments of time and resources (human, for sure, and perhaps financial) to expand and maintain these properties. But the listing process itself is a relative snap. Source: Pixabay.
Using Convenience to Disrupt the Competition written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Shep Hyken. Podcast Transcript. This week on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I chat with Shep Hyken. He is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations and the author of the upcoming book The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience That Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty.
You can’t survive as an entrepreneur without resilience, because you are going to fail at least once, maybe multiple times. That’s the nature of trying something that’s never been done before. Resilience means not giving up, and being energized by what you have learned. As Thomas Edison said, "I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won't work.
by Lewis Robinson. Startups are known for their ingenuity, creativity, and innovation. They have to be, honestly, if they want to survive in a world that is dominated by colossal behemoths that have exponentially more people and resources at their disposal. However, just because you have an established business that’s been around for a few generations doesn’t mean you can’t give it a startup mentality – one that embraces change and fosters creativity.
Quick note: I’m not your lawyer. I’m not giving legal advice in this post. Back in the olden days of venture capital, company boards had wide discretion in pricing company options. As is true today, there was a requirement that options be priced at or above the “fair market value” of the underlying stock (otherwise there would be tax consequences to the optionee and sometimes to the company as well).
They say Millennials are the food truck generation , where 47 percent of them have eaten from a food truck in the U.S. As the world consumes this ongoing gourmet trend, you shall be seeing more trucks lining up outside our office or your school. On the flip side, food truck entrepreneurs are trying to make a living serving specialty foods on wheels and competition can get pretty tough these days.
I cannot believe I am writing about another legal matter this week. I wrote earlier this week about litigation cases involving Oracle, SAP and Workday. Judge Larry Hicks of the US District Court in the District of Nevada has had.
As your startup grows, you’ll inevitably reach a point when you can no longer do everything on your own – it’s time to expand. That means you’ll need to write out a job description. Don’t default to the traditional language of job listings, though. Hiring is changing, and if you want to identify the best candidates, you need to adopt a competency framework.
When I heard a friend and business mentor say, “Your startup won’t fail if you don’t quit,” I realized that every entrepreneur should adopt “never give up” as their mantra. Rather than quitting, there are always alternatives, like pivoting the business model or merging with new partners for support. Either could improve the statistic that half of startups fail within the first five years.
Yup. I’m done with Facebook. However, it’s tough to delete your account. Read the message above. I exited out of this screen, suspended my account instead, but then went back 15 minutes later and actually deleted it. Well – I started the deletion process. I don’t know what day I’m on, but I think I’m close to 14 days.
Oracle, SAP and Workday have all been hit with lawsuits in the last few weeks for very different reasons as I describe below. But first a preface – lawsuits draw a lot of attention but it’s usually wrong to extrapolate.
As a young entrepreneur, thinking about investment and planning your future is something that will become increasingly important as your business grows. As you expand and develop your business, it’s worth looking at ways you can invest your increasing capital. By investing the money you make now, you can start protecting your future and property is a great asset to have.
According to the entrepreneurs I advise, the biggest challenge they typically face in starting a new business is funding. It consistently takes a huge amount of time and effort to find an investor you can trust, and that constrains your efforts in developing the solution you envision. People always expect that it should be easy to find investors, given their passion and excitement for the solution.
The idea of exactly what your business is going to usually come 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.
With more than 12 million ecommerce businesses on the web, it is a bit daunting for new ones to make a mark quickly, especially when businesses as big as Amazon and Spotify are at the top. However, this does not mean that you have no chance to succeed. If you work hard, you can leave a mark as well. Amazon itself was a small company when it started and today it is a giant because of creativity and hard work of its team.
Contrary to popular opinion, viral marketing has not eliminated the need for old-fashioned lead generation to bring customers to a startup. Indeed, while the rules and technologies for lead generation have changed, Forrester and other experts still see it as the most effective way for businesses with limited budgets to maximize their return on marketing investment (ROMI).
Sales acceleration expert Jeb Blount identifies the four types of objections you'll encounter and offers some powerful techniques for turning them around.
I’ve always thought that the concept of a decentralized prediction market like Augur or Gnosis is one of the most interesting and crypto-native ideas. Just imagine creating millions of small markets around any potential outcome in the world…from sports to elections, weather and stock prices. So it was great to see Augur go live a few weeks ago ( [link] ) and I took the opportunity to play around with the product.
Depending on the type of business you’re starting, you might require a company car. It would be necessary for making house calls, delivering product, driving between service points, and performing other long-distance business needs. Vehicles are not difficult to fund, whether you use a business loan or a car loan. Even if you have poor credit, there are options for getting a car loan, so it can be a tempting move for a new business owner.
The reigning theory in business has long been that “alpha” leaders make the best entrepreneurs. These are aggressive, results-driven achievers who assert control, and insist on a hierarchical organizational model. Yet I am seeing more and more success from “beta” startup cultures, like Zappos and Amazon, where the emphasis is on collaboration, curation, and communication.
This motivational video is to help CEOs, entrepreneurs and business owners start the week off on the right foot. Have a plan for the next day as you go to sleep. Work the plan and it doesn’t work, change it. The shortcut is a lie and the hack doesn’t get you there. Discipline defeats excuses. Live in beast mode, don’t stop until you get it.
According to Podcast Insights , there are over a half-a-million active podcast options available, providing approximately 18.5 million episodes of listening in more than 100 different languages. So, think of all of the consumers your business could potentially reach, solely by taking the time to share more about your company, its products and services, and other relevant information via a dedicated podcast.
According to a recent study, nearly 70 percent of business owners incubated the idea for their venture while working for someone else. Before making the leap into owning a business of your own, you have to make sure your idea is feasible and has the ability to make money. Most entrepreneurs turn a side business into their main business only after it is has proven itself to be lucrative.
This week Australian pay Tv operator Foxtel announced the launch of its IQ4 box. The key selling feature is that it enables 4K resolution of content like sports, documentaries and concerts. An interesting move considering all those around them are growing not based on ‘resolution’, but different business models. The numbers for subscription TV services are already telling this tale with Netflix already well ahead and growing, while Foxtel declines.
While it’s easy to tell people things, it’s much more powerful to learn things. And, as I get older, I see the same lessons being learned by subsequent generations. While this isn’t a post that says “everything is the same as it was before”, there are foundational lessons in life that play out over and over again. I spent the weekend with a friend from the last 1990s who was the lead banker on the Interliant IPO (I was a co-founder and co-chairman.
By Laura Lorek Publisher of Silicon Hills News The MassChallenge Texas accelerator transformed re:3d’s business. “We’ve grown by more than 30 percent since we’ve been in the program,” said Samantha Snabes, the startup’s co-founder. re:3d took home the $10,000 USAA Ventrepreneur Award in the MassChallenge finalist awards ceremony held Wednesday evening at the Hyatt Regency […].
by Leo Bottary, author of “ What Anyone Can Do: How Surrounding Yourself with the Right People Will Drive Change, Opportunity, and Personal Growth “ . A person’s success typically isn’t the result of superhuman feats. It’s the outcome of doing the things anyone can do – though most of us just don’t. As a point in fact, 92 percent of people who set New Year’s goals don’t achieve them.
You love to drive and you don’t want to work for anyone any more. The next logical step would be to start a business that allows you to drive and brings you the control you want. Small businesses make up 99.7% of all businesses in the US and 60% of all new jobs created come from them. With over 56.8 million employees working within the small business sector it might seem that starting your own business is the recipe for success but this is only true if you are careful.
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