Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 11, 2016
Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca For the first 5 years or so after I became a VC I didn’t talk much about what I thought a VC should be excellent at since frankly I wasn’t sure. I was mostly doing my job and trying to figure out how to be better every day. After a decade on the job I’ve started to speak more openly when newer industry colleagues now ask me what I’ve learned.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 24, 2016
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.
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View from Seed
OCTOBER 5, 2016
Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help.
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 26, 2016
by Leigh Stringer, author of “ The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees – and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line “ Over the years, we have developed work styles that are not good for our physical, mental or emotional health. . It’s not that we’re bad people, or that we aren’t working hard. The problem is that what our minds and bodies need at a basic level is in conflict with our work style.
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
OCTOBER 7, 2016
Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. It’s been exciting to watch the Lean Startup movement grow from a practice utilized in the tech world to one implemented in a wide variety of sectors ranging from enterprise to education, religious organizations, nonprofits, and government groups. When we talk about government, we mean both the macro outfits whose work affects the entire country (perhaps you’ve heard of the IRS ) and regionally-focused groups alike.
Up and Running
DECEMBER 14, 2016
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Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
ConversionXL
OCTOBER 13, 2016
Ever scroll through a website and get irrationally angry? Maybe it was the slow loading time, the poor design, the frustrating lack of clarity – no matter the case, I’m sure you can relate. Though you might not like to hear it, a substantial amount of your customers are going through the same thing on your site right now. This is inevitable.
This is going to be BIG.
NOVEMBER 1, 2016
I can't think of a single time when a white man came to pitch me and I told him his fundraising plans weren't aggressive enough. Yet this is a message I'm giving to women and people of color all the time. It's not that this latter group isn't aggressive enough--after all, they're ditching everything else they could to to start companies. Something else is at play.
Hearpreneur
NOVEMBER 6, 2016
Share Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any job they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your job can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.
Version One Ventures
DECEMBER 14, 2016
This has been an important year for us as a firm, as well as the market in general. We couldn’t begin any recap of 2016 without focusing on the bubble we hear so much about. The industry entered the year bracing for an apocalypse. Every announcement – whether it was a funding round, exit or layoffs – was analyzed within the context that the tech bubble has definitely burst or that we’re still in the bubble.
David Cohen
NOVEMBER 20, 2016
I’ve had a couple of situations lately where a portfolio company founder or CEO went dark on me. They just stopped communicating. Sometimes takes me a while to notice it. When I do, I usually check in with the person and just ask something like “Hey – I haven’t heard from you in a while, how’s it going?” Sometimes the response is benign, and all is more or less ok with the company and people in question.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 24, 2016
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.
View from Seed
SEPTEMBER 28, 2016
New York City is a dream but can also be a navigational nightmare, equal parts crammed circus and rat race mixed at warp speed. This holds for the city’s tech sector. NYC Tech is bursting at the seams with nightly networking events at floors and floors of co-working spaces. We do not suffer a lack of tech activities. At the same time, the perception of our ecosystem as an insider’s game can often be self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating – creating a walled garden that can’t be breached.
YoungUpstarts
DECEMBER 14, 2016
You may have one or more ideas about how to make life easier or how to improve upon an already existing technology. Yet, you may have found that moving forward with that idea takes more than wishful thinking. Many entrepreneurs have used InventHelp to turn their imagined opportunities into real businesses. InventHelp allows you to discover and nurture the entrepreneur inside you.
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 11, 2016
Guest post by by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. The solution to long-term innovation in companies obviously isn’t having one person come up with all the bright ideas and then translating those ideas to teams that execute them. We’re looking at huge shifts in workplace structures that involve reimagining things like who holds the power to make decisions and how we judge performance, all the way down to how we run meetings to encourage constructive disagreement and a diver
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 1, 2016
As my series on using social media marketing platforms to market your small business comes to a close (check out past installments on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn ), we arrive at what is possibly the most niche platform in terms of content: YouTube. If you want to use YouTube to market your small business, you’ll be creating videos, plain and simple.
Occam's Razor
OCTOBER 24, 2016
Culture is a stronger determinant of success with data than anything else. Including data. [People + Process + Structure] > [Data + Technology]. It seems hard to believe. Yet, it is so fantastically true. At least for now. At least until AGI takes over. Why is this formula material? The first part of the equation, for better or for worse, improves in an evolutionary manner.
ConversionXL
OCTOBER 27, 2016
It will come as no surprise, but like most things in life, conversion optimization will benefit from a strong strategic approach. This generally includes aligning your goals and resources to build out a roadmap, or at least a framework/process, for your experiments. Much like in other disciplines, while experts agree that strategy is important, they can sometimes differ in their approach to such a strategy.
crowdSPRING Blog
OCTOBER 12, 2016
Image Source: opensource.com. If you’re not creating content, you don’t exist on the internet. Tweets, images, blog posts, comments, your Facebook posts – these are all content. Marketers know that when done correctly, content marketing can be a valuable marketing channel. As I wrote previously : “Content marketing” refers to creating information (content) that has value to others.
Hearpreneur
NOVEMBER 19, 2016
Share Entrepreneurship and mentorships are often seen as going hand-in-hand. Business mentors are as old as concept of entrepreneurs themselves. From Oprah and Maya Angelou to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, famous mentorships have a powerful impact on the lives of entrepreneurs. Having a strong figure in your life to help steady you through the currents of growing your business can be a lifesaver.
abovethecrowd.com
APRIL 20, 2016
Why the Unicorn Financing Market Just Became Dangerous…For All Involved. In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 “ The Age of the Unicorns ” noting — “Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists.” By January of 2016, that number had ballooned to 229.
Duct Tape Marketing
DECEMBER 2, 2016
Stop Hoping For Referrals – Build Your Referral Teams and Start Getting A Referral A Day written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Most people believe that getting referrals is something that just happens, that all you need to do is just turn up to networking events, do a good job with your clients or customers and be part of a referral group.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 31, 2016
The academic year is in full swing at Stanford and already we’re deep into our new Hacking for Diplomacy course. Building off last spring’s pioneering Hacking for Defense class, which sought to connect Silicon Valley’s innovation culture and mindset to the Pentagon and the intelligence community, we’ve now expanded our horizons to the Department of State.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 15, 2016
I know the title “I promise you one of the most meaningful days of your life” sounds grandiose but I mean it and I hope you’ll read through to the end and choose to take one small, totally free action, that will change your life and likely those of others. On September 10th of this year I spent an entire day in California State Prison with people who had committed felonies and worked with them on business plans to help them create legal enterprise upon their release as part of Defy Ventures 6-mo
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 16, 2016
Are you a small business looking to expand your social media presence? Well, these tips have been created to help you do so. They’re actionable, easy to implement and can result in notable social media gains with a little work. 1. Use Affordable And Useful Tools for all of the Heavy Lifting. These days social is huge. Facebook has an astonishing 1.65 billion active users per month.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 29, 2016
Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. The Lean Startup team has been hard at work finalizing the details of this year’s Lean Startup Week. Each year, we bring you new case studies from Silicon Valley startups (and beyond), government agencies, and global enterprise companies, along with expert advice from seasoned entrepreneurs and newcomers alike.
Street Smart Product Manager
DECEMBER 12, 2016
One of the biggest lies in product management is agile. That may sound like heresy, but hear me out… I actually love agile. It’s a great approach to reducing the risk of developing and shipping software. It’s a better software development methodology. But on its own it doesn’t solve the problem of providing a capital […]. The post As a product manager, you need to do just two things appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
DECEMBER 6, 2016
Worrying is a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Worry” causes the very thing you’re worried about, to actually happen. When you’re backstage getting more and more anxious that your performance won’t be good, you’re implanting thoughts of second-guessing and fear that will arise during the performance. Instead, you should realize you’ve already done all the practice required, and mistakes don’t actually matter anyway.
ConversionXL
SEPTEMBER 14, 2016
Everyone has heard a horror story about a website redesign. But there are still times when they are necessary or beneficial. Deciding when is the right time is one important aspect of doing a redesign well. The other aspect lies in the process itself. We can dramatically improve the performance of website redesign projects when we used a structured approach and we start testing all our assumptions.
View from Seed
SEPTEMBER 13, 2016
New tech ecosystems often benefit from entrepreneurs who will dive in blind and figure out their direction along the way. This profile of founder tends to be younger, obsessively driven, and inclined towards making big, bold, necessary mistakes early and often on the path towards product-market fit. In 2010, Eli Bronner and his Lua Technologies co-founders were this exact profile of entrepreneurs, and New York City was an exuberant tech ecosystem without much structure or identity.
Hearpreneur
OCTOBER 1, 2016
Share Each business has a story. No matter if the business is a Goliath like Wal-Mart, or a local business owned by a couple or family, the business has roots in an idea. For each business owner, the story of their journey can range from monetary needs or the passion for a unique project. Each story is different though the reasons may remain the same.
Brandanew
SEPTEMBER 26, 2016
Many small businesses and startups are out there to solve the content puzzle. How do they create a remarkable industry blog that positions them as thought leaders? It’s neither easy, nor coincidental how some blogs take off and carve in niche in their industry. If you’re wondering about this for your brand and business, this episode of the Social Trends Show is for you.
Duct Tape Marketing
OCTOBER 20, 2016
Live Video is King: How To Use It Without Going Broke written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. As you may have heard from industry events like NABShow and Social Media Marketing World , marketing dollars are switching from broadcast TV to live video streaming for more creative and targeted visual advertising. What makes a live video so effective and attractive to brands?
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 31, 2016
The academic year is in full swing at Stanford and already we’re deep into our new Hacking for Diplomacy course. Building off last spring’s pioneering Hacking for Defense class, which sought to connect Silicon Valley’s innovation culture and mindset to the Pentagon and the intelligence community, we’ve now expanded our horizons to the Department of State.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 28, 2016
The third edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is going to print and pre-orders are up on Amazon. For everyone who has purchased, read, or reviewed our previous editions, thank you! While it’s difficult to know exactly how many copies have been sold (the joy of publisher metrics), it’s around 100,000 to date, which blows our mind since we had no expectations around this when we wrote the book in 2011.
YoungUpstarts
SEPTEMBER 29, 2016
by Michael Manning , chief relationship officer at Rocksauce Studios. No matter your age, just about everybody loves the Beatles. But can your company learn from the Fab Four’s success? Of course, John, Paul, George, and Ringo had the swinging outfits and the screaming fans. But up until the very end, they also shared a key element that helped them stay together as a collective.
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