TechEmpower
NOVEMBER 16, 2016
Round 13 of the ongoing Web Framework Benchmarks project is here! The project now features 230 framework implementations (of our JSON serialization test) and includes new entrants on platforms as diverse as Kotlin and Qt. Yes, that Qt. We also congratulate the ASP.NET team for the most dramatic performance improvement we've ever seen, making ASP.NET Core a top performer.
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.
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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.
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 Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 7, 2016
Way back in the early eighties, I was privileged to be part of the original IBM PC development team, led by Don Estridge. He was a great leader, and one of very few who have even been able to dent the barriers to real change in a large corporation. We struggled with the differences between intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship, and I learned much about both.
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.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
OCTOBER 4, 2016
The single most important SaaS metric is retention , because cancellations indicate lack of product/market fit, no matter the cause (price, features, severity of need, duration of need). If it cannot be fixed, it means the business is a failure even if other metrics are stellar. Once you’re scaling (i.e. past product/market fit and into tens of millions in revenue), you realize that cancellation scales with total customers whereas growth scales with sales and marketing costs, which means cancell
Brandanew
OCTOBER 3, 2016
It’s good to start with good news. Fall has begun and we’re in a rush to get all the latest content on to our readers. And talking of readers, I’m very proud to announce that this blog (now only just 2 years old) has been ranked #20 on the list of the top branding blogs every marketer should read! Now that’s amazing. So, if you’re wondering how to achieve this feat for your brand, and basically how to scale content and social, tips here will help!
TechEmpower
FEBRUARY 10, 2016
“It was running fine.” In our performance consulting work, we often hear variations of the following: “Our web application was running fine with a few hundred users. Now when we run a promotion with our new partner and get a thousand users coming in at one time, it grinds to a halt.”. We’ve heard this from startup founders, product managers, development team leads, CTOs, and others who see their product gaining traction, but simultaneously see performance falling off a cliff.
Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 30, 2016
Amongst the most often asked questions I get from founders is, “How much money should I raise?” Reflexively founders want to raise as much money as they can because they figure it will give them more resources, better chances of competing and a longer runways before they have to do the often painful job of asking, yet again, for money. Every time you ask for money you’re faced with the possible of feeling literally and figuratively like a failure.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 26, 2016
There has been a lot of public debate over the past several weeks about whether it’s a good thing to be “gross margin positive” or not and commentary always reminds me that some people at startups don’t quite understand financial metrics or even how to think about which ones are healthy. When I publicly Tweeted that all companies should be gross margin positive many people pointed out that Amazon wasn’t profitable for many years.
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.
Both Sides of the Table
MARCH 25, 2016
Many startup businesses – tech or otherwise – fail. In our industry we applaud the efforts for entrepreneurs to have tried and we know that today’s failure can bring the experience for tomorrow’s success. We also know that even though many of us who are experienced in startup successes & failures look at businesses and say, “That will never work” (as many people said about Uber) or “You can’t make any money in that business” (as many said
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 21, 2016
We’ve just held our seventh and eighth weeks of Hacking for Diplomacy at Stanford, and the attention our course is getting from Washington – and around the world – has been interesting. Following Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with the students early in the quarter, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken paid a visit to the class in Week 7 and four foreign ministers in week 8.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 21, 2016
We’ve just held our seventh and eighth weeks of Hacking for Diplomacy at Stanford, and the attention our course is getting from Washington – and around the world – has been interesting. Following Secretary of State John Kerry’s meeting with the students early in the quarter, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken paid a visit to the class in Week 7 and four foreign ministers in week 8.
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.
Startup Professionals Musings
SEPTEMBER 14, 2016
Cash flow is a basic survival metric for every startup. Investors check your burn rate to assess your efficiency, and project your remaining runway before you run out of money and into a brick wall. Don’t wait until you are almost out of cash before managing every dollar spent, or looking for the next refueling from investors. Desperate entrepreneurs lose their leverage and die young.
Startup Professionals Musings
DECEMBER 11, 2016
Many aspiring entrepreneurs are looking to the Internet as an opportunity to get rich quick, instead of a place where you can start a business you love, for very little capital and minimal technical expertise. The reality is that if you build a business you love, you may in fact make big money, but if you start a business to get rich, you will probably fail.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 3, 2016
As a small business and startup advisor, I find that entrepreneurs often love to talk about their latest idea, but not their execution. Like most investors, I’m convinced that success in business is more about the plan and the person than the idea. It’s great to be a visionary and a thinker, but a business that generates real world change and wealth requires people who get things done.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 21, 2016
After listening to hundreds of startup pitches, and reading even more business plans, most new venture investors develop their own favorite list of “red flags” that signal the beginning of the end of their interest. Others, like Guy Kawasaki , have irreverently called some of these “entrepreneur lies,” but I prefer to think of them as innocent enhancements or omissions that can kill your deal.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 17, 2016
I was watching my favorite show on TV this morning – GPS (Global Public Square) with Fareed Zakaria. It is a hugely compelling show because Zakaria covers world issues that will affect all of us in ways that are accessible and with frameworks for processing disparate information. He brings knowledgable experts from varying points of view but never books anybody that engages in yelling matches.
Both Sides of the Table
JULY 6, 2016
I talk about failure a lot because I think it can be tremendously instructive and I think that success without failure often masks underlying lessons. I even prefer to fund entrepreneurs who have experience some level of set-backs in their careers or startups because I think it brings a humility to decision-making that I find healthy. I have experienced many first-time entrepreneurs with too much hubris if fund-raising came easily and press was fawning and employees joined in droves and customer
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 8, 2016
by Meghdad Abbaszadegan, adviser with Coplex. When I was 9 years old, I was super hyper and loved to hit things as hard as possible — in retrospect, I might have had some anger issues. Thankfully, my parents had the foresight to get me involved in tennis. I quickly fell in love with the sport. Tennis allowed me to let out some of my adolescent energy on the court while garnering praise for my efforts.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 11, 2016
I always told myself that I would stop pushing forward when there was an overwhelming force from the outside saying that this is not working. But even when I reached that point, I continued to try to brute force it into existence. I wound up losing a lot. We followed every test and experimental process from the get-go but we didn’t tell our investors we were doing that.
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.
View from Seed
MARCH 29, 2016
Ask a founder of a growing startup what they need most, and you’ll often get an answer along the lines of, “We need great people, and we need them fast.”. But even well-prepared startups that have laid out strategies for scaling can find themselves scrambling in the face of a fast-growing customer base. Founders need to make sure the quality of the startup’s offerings remains high and provide adequate sales and service support for prospective customers and new users.
View from Seed
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
As a second-year Harvard Business School student and NextView Ventures MBA Associate, constantly keeping up-to-date with the start-up world, I have heard some skepticism about the ability of MBAs to found top companies. Perhaps most famously, Guy Kawasaki quipped that the value of an MBA to an entrepreneur is “probably about a negative $250,000.”. There has been some fantastic recent work around debunking this common misconception, including Dimitri Dadiomov’s “Should We Take Harvard MBAs Seriou
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 1, 2016
Having time to think about “leadership” at most startups feels like a luxury. It feels like something you could turn your attention to once you have tens of millions of dollars and a large staff to run operations and you could step back from it all and think about how to lead. The reality of most startups is about survival. And because running a company requires money to fuel staff and offices and acquire customers and the like, much of the time spent in early days at a start feels l
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
FEBRUARY 8, 2016
Much has changed in the past four months of the technology startup world and how outsiders value the business. Of course it’s too early to predict whether this is a trend or an aberration but the smartest people I know in the industry are predicting the former. The startup industry may be “resetting,” which doesn’t mean a “crash” but rather just a resetting of valuations, timescales, winners/losers, capital sources and the relative emphasis of growth rates vs.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 9, 2016
There was so much great content at the Upfront Summit but I think one held a special place in minds of most people I talked to – our panel on diversity led by my partner Hamet Watt (<– what? you’re not following him?). The message of the panel was very clear – “We don’t need your help. We want to partner with you to make money.” And I’ll elaborate on this but I wanted to start first with an important quote from Magic, said with a very positive
Steve Blank
MAY 23, 2016
NYU Engineering Commencement Speech. Thank you for the opportunity to address you on your graduation from this esteemed engineering school. I’m honored to help you celebrate this important milestone. Your life is already full of milestones: Your first steps, your first kiss, passing a driving test, this graduation. And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker.
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 15, 2016
There is much talk these days that startup valuations have decreased and may continue to do so and that the amount of time it takes to fund raise may take longer. As I have pointed out in previous posts , 91% of VCs surveyed believe prices are declining (30% believe substantially) and 77% believe that funding will take longer than it has in the past.
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.
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 3, 2016
Looking for ways to improve your business often comes down to the technology and IT you utilize. It’s really important to make the most of the technology available to you and sustain it. IT in business helps to make everything much more efficient and effective. You can’t run a modern day to day business without using technology and IT. So, you have got to come up with ways of ensuring the systems within the company are looked after and running at the best possible level.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 9, 2016
If you aren’t willing to take some risk as an entrepreneur, then don’t expect any gain. Yet everyone has limits, and every investor implicitly has similar limits on what makes a startup investable, or one to avoid at all costs. If you need investors, it’s important that you understand their filters, and even if you are funding your own efforts, you need to recognize the red flags.
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