Steve Blank
OCTOBER 30, 2012
Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched – Startup Weekend Next. A partnership of Startup Weekend , Startup America , TechStars and Udacity , Startup Weekend Next brings four weeks of amazing hands-on training learning to build your startup to cities around the world. Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 8, 2012
Did you ever wonder why some entrepreneurs always seem to have all the luck and success, while others never seem to catch a break? As an Angel investor, I quickly learned that luck has very little to do with it, and I now look for some personal characteristics and leadership styles that separate the potential winners from the losers. These differences are the reason that investors say that they invest in people, rather than ideas.
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YoungUpstarts
DECEMBER 5, 2012
by Vickie Milazzo, author of “ Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman “. The legend goes that prior to becoming the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina (now former CEO of HP) stuffed her pants with socks for a male-dominated meeting. Her message was clear: “I have everything it takes to compete.” Although Fiorina might be alone in literally stuffing her slacks, it’s a sure thing that plenty of other women have gone to great lengths—pulling longer-than-necessary hours, cutting maternity leaves sh
Mike Michalowicz
DECEMBER 18, 2012
Bad Business Habits. There was a time that you loved your work. Maybe you started the business yourself, or you joined a company that was going to take you places. But things have changed, and you hate your company. You dread coming to work. The cause of all this loathing may not be them, it may actually be you. After all we have the sole control over what we think of things.
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 Lessons Learned
MAY 9, 2012
TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today. It's been just about two years since Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits released their self-published book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development (you can see my original review here ).
Occam's Razor
SEPTEMBER 24, 2012
Facebook has an incredible audience, 950 million strong and counting. This audience is immensely attractive to Brands and Marketers around the world. We've seen explosive growth in brand pages, types of advertising and other fun ways to monetize this audience. Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Version One Ventures
OCTOBER 18, 2012
“Traction is the new IP ” sums up perfectly how the technology space has evolved over the past decade due to the nature of the web. Barriers to entry are no longer created by patents or by tech differentiation alone, but by superior traction in the marketplace. In today’s web landscape, word of mouth drives adoption and can lead to “winner takes all” (or almost all) in both B2C and B2B markets.
Gust
NOVEMBER 8, 2012
As I write this, days after the 2012 presidential election, I’m probably not alone in feeling relieved that the political jeering and soapboxing that reached a feverish pitch during the seemingly endless campaign season has finally subsided. Yet amidst all the partisan cheerleading and name-calling, there has been some discussion of substance.
ConversionXL
MAY 17, 2012
The design of your website is more important for conversions than you think. You can implement any conversion boosting tactic in the world, but if it looks like crap, it won’t do you much good. Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing. Design is your product and how it works. The more I’ve learned about design, the better results I’ve gotten.
VC Cafe
SEPTEMBER 5, 2012
Paul Graham’s Startup Curve – avoid the “through of sorrow”! Pintrest, Facebook, Zynga, Dropbox, AirBnb… What do they all have in common? They’ve all used growth hacking techniques to grow their user base from zero to millions (and sometimes hundreds of millions). Growth Hacking isn’t viral marketing (although viral marketing is part of it).
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 21, 2012
This is a guest post by my Startup Owner’s Manual co-author Bob Dorf. ——————-. While statistics are weak on startup success rates, the worst one I’ve seen suggests that 2 in 1000 venture backed startups will ever achieve $100-million or more in valuation. Another stat puts that number at 2% rather than 0.2%. Either way, the “hurdle” for successful, scalable startups is high, and it gets higher every day as customer acquisition challenges continue to increase.
David Teten
MARCH 12, 2012
Fitness/life guru Tim Ferriss just posted my guest article on ff Venture Capital ‘s approach to building a fitness office. (Thanks Tim!) I’ve attached below my original, much more detailed blog post about the details of how we’ve designed our office to help people stay healthy and be as productive as possible. (UPDATE: ff Venture Capital was recently profiled in The Roger, an online magazine that profiles creative workspaces.
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 2, 2012
by Jason Womack, author of “ Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More “ For many Americans, the 21st century has gone from being the age of information to feeling more like the age of information overload. Between the e-mails, memos, and other miscellaneous information you have to read at work, your friends’ Facebook updates, your Twitter community recommending articles for you to read, and that book that’s been sitting on your nightstand (unopened) for the pa
Mike Michalowicz
SEPTEMBER 6, 2012
Unlimited Real, Legit Amazon Reviews. Being that I am an, admittedly, relatively unknown author of business books, it was clear that I needed to show credibility immediately. A pretty book cover with a catchy title may get someone to look at your page on Amazon , but it is unlikely to get them to buy it. Ultimately, for a consumer to buy your book, product or service, they want to trust they are making a good decision.
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.
The Next Web
OCTOBER 17, 2012
Color Labs, the photo-and-video-sharing social network that received much criticism over its pre-launch $41 million funding round, is about to be acquired by Apple. We’ve heard through trusted sources that the startup was nabbed for a price that is in the ‘high double digits’, as in millions, and that the deal is ‘done’, though papers have yet to be signed.
betashop.com
OCTOBER 8, 2012
Home. Fab.com Fab Feed Bradfords Blog. Archive. RSS. 05. Oct. 90 Things I’ve Learned From Founding 4 Technology Companies. On October 27, 2010 I wrote a blog post about the “ 57 Things I Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies.”. It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages.
Version One Ventures
SEPTEMBER 19, 2012
With tens of thousands of new start-ups being created every year, the potential of a company to truly scale and become a large, stand-alone business is more crucial than ever before. A great product is always the foundation but a clear distribution strategy becomes essential to cut through the noise. So most early-stage VCs have started to evaluate investment opportunities with an imaginary benchmark in mind: can this company become a $100 million opportunity?
David Cohen
DECEMBER 10, 2012
Today, Nike announced their first Nike+ Accelerator program, powered by TechStars. Ten companies will participate in a three-month, mentorship-driven program. The technology focus will be about leveraging the success of the Nike+ FuelBand, Nike+ Running and NikeFuel to support digital innovation. Anyone that knows me will tell you I’m a quantified self geek and enjoy data.
ConversionXL
JUNE 14, 2012
What if there was a method – a process – that you could apply to (pretty much) any website to increase sales? Wouldn’t that be swell? Well, there is. This method works across all categories, it doesn’t really matter what business you’re in. I’ve turned it into a checklist. So the way to use it is you take your website, compare it to any item on the list, make improvements, and your online sales will increase.
Diego Basch
JANUARY 28, 2012
Some people believe that carrying out a large software project is like building a bridge. You look at your past projects and use the data to estimate the time and resources needed. This view has been debunked decades ago; this analogy was frequently seen as an aspiration for the future when I did my Master in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in the late nineties.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 23, 2012
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.
Duct Tape Marketing
SEPTEMBER 24, 2012
Talk about mobile and tablet usage dominates computer hardware conversations and the implications are one of the hottest topics in marketing right now as well. photo credit: waferbaby via photopin cc. Website visitors are now consuming content from our sites in a dizzying array of devices, formats and orientations. There was a time when browser compatibility was a designer’s primary concern.
Both Sides of the Table
NOVEMBER 18, 2012
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.
Seeing Both Sides
AUGUST 16, 2012
“TripAdvisor is to travel reviews what Kleenex is to tissues.”. . – Henry Harteveldt, Forrester. . TripAdvisor may be one of the most fascinating companies I know and so I was excited to dig into their business model as part of my series on scaling. This is a company that took $4 million of invested capital to build a company now worth over $4 billion.
Startup Lessons Learned
NOVEMBER 19, 2012
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.
Ben's Blog
MAY 18, 2012
First they hate you, then they love you, then they hate you again. What the f*ck do it take for a gangsta to win? —The Game, Don’t Need Your Love. Conventional wisdom among smart technology entrepreneurs says not to hire people with Masters in Business Administration (MBAs) into startups. Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint, expressed the sentiment well when he said: “ When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.
www.starling-software.com
OCTOBER 8, 2012
Programmer Competency Matrix. Note that the knowledge for each level is cumulative; being at level n implies that you also know everything from the levels lower than n. Computer Science. 2 n (Level 0) n 2 (Level 1) n (Level 2) log(n) (Level 3) Comments. data structures Doesnt know the difference between Array and LinkedList Able to explain and use Arrays, LinkedLists, Dictionaries etc in practical programming tasks Knows space and time tradeoffs of the basic data structures, Arrays vs LinkedList
YoungUpstarts
JULY 26, 2012
These days, the traditional path of getting a good education and going to work in the corporate world isn’t always the best way to find success. Although it’s still a great choice, many young people prefer instead to take a path of entrepreneurship, and there’s a lot that parents can do to help them follow that path. Lemonade stands, family learning adventures, and smart financial lessons are just a few of the ways that parents can instill an entrepreneurial attitude of success
The Startup Toolkit
MAY 8, 2012
(Note: In this post I’m talking specifically about tech startups, and especially non-sales-driven tech startups). Clever landing page tests and interviews can tell you whether an idea is bad , but not whether it will work. There’s still a big leap from “problem exists” to a product that delights while fitting into someones life and being able to attract new users.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 15, 2012
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.
Feld Thoughts
DECEMBER 4, 2012
This article ( Business Plans Are An Historical Artifact ) first appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal The Accelerators Column , which I’m contributing to on a regular basis. . In 1987 when I started my first company (Feld Technologies), I wrote a business plan for a course at MIT that I was in called 15.375: New Enterprises. The textbook for the course was Jeffry A.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 27, 2012
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.
Duct Tape Marketing
JANUARY 16, 2012
5 Ways to Get Your Customers to Create Content For You This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. You’ve heard enough about the need to produce content that I’m guessing you’re probably blogging away and curating, aggregating and filtering all manner of content. But there’s one type of content that you may not be focused on and I happen to think it’s some of the most potent to be had – and that’s customer generated content.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 28, 2012
When you work inside a startup with lots of clever and motivated staff you’re never short of good ideas that you can implement. It’s tempting to take on new projects, new features, new geographies, new speaking opportunities, whatever. Each one incrementally sounds like a good idea, yet collectively they end up punishing undisciplined teams.
Gust
NOVEMBER 11, 2012
Google's Larry Page image via Coolspotters.com. A while back, when a startup founder mentioned to me that he wasn’t sure he had the personality to be an entrepreneur, I realized how important that insight was. My first thought is that if you are more annoyed than energized by expert advice, team suggestions, and customer input, then you should probably avoid this line of work.
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