Startup Professionals Musings
AUGUST 9, 2020
I always tell entrepreneurs that two heads are better than one, so the first task in many startups is finding a co-founder or two. You need to find the skills or experience you don’t have in business, technology, or money. So the first question I usually get is what percent of the company or equity is that person worth? Giving a co-founder a salary won’t get you the “fire in the belly” you want.
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 18, 2020
Airbnb’s public S-1 dropped Monday afternoon. One of the most highly anticipated startup IPOs of recent years, we now get a peek inside Airbnb’s business. You can read various articles out there which will give you the cursory facts about Airbnb like their overall revenue or profitability or how their business has faired here in 2020 in the COVID environment.
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YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 10, 2020
by Zain Jaffer, serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of Zain Ventures. Running a small business can come with a slew of challenges. Among the list: the loss of a major client. In many cases, this scenario is inevitable and difficult to prevent. When it occurs, the consequences can be swift and devastating, wreaking potential havoc on a once steady stream of revenue.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 15, 2020
We just held our fifth session of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. Today’s topic was T he Challenges of Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare.
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
ReadWriteStart
DECEMBER 16, 2020
Based on our history, we can see that unprecedented events have the potential to cause permanent mass changes. Remember the 9/11 attack? That attack changed the face of airport security forever. Suddenly, new transit rules were enforced and sophisticated surveillance gear became commonplace. Here is how remote startups are changing the game for everyone.
VC Cafe
MARCH 18, 2020
It’s safe to say that we don’t yet know how long the Covid-19 situation will continue, but it has already had a major impact on public health and the economy. Tech can play a role in helping on various fronts: Startups and tech companies working directly on tackling Coronavirus – from prevention to testing and patient care. Startups and companies offering free or deeply discounted services to support impacted people – from educating kids in quarantine to helping teams wor
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Hearpreneur
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
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.
ConversionXL
DECEMBER 2, 2020
Get a chicken. Cook it until it’s perfectly done. Reduce the jus to a nice pan sauce. Then finish it with some butter until it has the right balance of flavors. Enjoy. This is a useless recipe, but it’s not wrong. It assumes, however, that accurate advice on what you should do is as valuable as advice on how to do it—the “Should-How Fallacy.” But being right doesn’t create value; empowering others to succeed does.
Duct Tape Marketing
DECEMBER 16, 2020
7 Small Business Trends that Arrived Just in Time for 2021 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. This blog post is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro. Every year for the last 20 or so, I’ve wrapped up the year with my predictions for trends in the coming year. I’m usually spot on too. But that’s really more of a testament to the fact that trends tend to creep up on us rather than overwhelm us.
Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 31, 2020
June 2019 (left) and November 2020 (right) I’ve been reluctant to write this blog post because historically I don’t like talking about weight. But I’ve been promising to publish how I lost 65 pounds in the past 18 months without any fad diets or gimmicks to try and be helpful to others. I have a plan, I know it works and for the friends and family who have followed what I’ve done they’ve equally lost a lot of weight.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 31, 2020
Sometimes I like to drop the comment socially that “I knew Bill Gates back when he was a regular guy.” I know that dates me a good bit, but it also shows that I have been hanging around startups for a long time. The honest truth is that I worked directly with him in the early days of Microsoft from my “safe” perch in big IBM, during the startup of the IBM PC.
View from Seed
NOVEMBER 18, 2020
One important tactical decision when fundraising is determining the size of “the ask”. Sizing the ask incorrectly is one of the things I see founders get wrong most often, and it ends up having a meaningful impact to the fundraising process overall. Telling an investor how much money you are looking to raise seems like a simple and benign question, but it’s actually pretty complicated.
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 22, 2020
The current business situation has brought new techniques for improving the global market – the fusing of AI with the call center directed to improve a business’s customer interactions. Today virtual call centers are the top users of AI technology from reliable poll ratings. Most businesses in the UK are adopting AI tech to increase the reliability of their call centers.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 24, 2020
We just had our first week of our new national security class Technology, Innovation and Modern War. Given the tech-centricity of Stanford and Silicon Valley, Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I thought it was natural to design a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 13, 2020
The following from C. S. Lewis. was on my fraternity email list this morning. It was written in 1948 after the dawn of the atomic age. In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are
VC Cafe
JULY 26, 2020
“After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. (Most of the funds that started in the late part of the boom would be underwater). Angel investment, which was small to start with, disappeared, and most corporate VCs shut down. VC’s were no longer insisting that startups spend faster, and “swing for the fences”. In fact, they were screaming at them to dramatically reduce their burn rates.
Version One Ventures
OCTOBER 6, 2020
We’re thrilled to announce the third edition of “A Guide to Marketplaces.” We published our first edition five years ago and the second nearly three years ago. So much has changed since then – from the rise of B2B marketplaces to new crypto-native platforms. . Even as we explore emerging sectors like climate and crypto, we continue to be excited about marketplaces.
ReadWriteStart
JUNE 25, 2020
Podcasts are one of my favorite content mediums, and I know I’m not alone. Podcasts are inexpensive, typically free, they’re incredibly diverse, they’re usually updated on a daily or weekly basis, and you can listen to them while doing other things—like driving, doing chores, or exercising. Here are ten entrepreneur podcasts every founder should listen to.
This is going to be BIG.
NOVEMBER 27, 2020
Not everyone’s career moves up and to the right from beginning to end. In fact, I don’t think that actually happens to anyone—but some people are just better at hiding the wrong turns, u-turns, and downturns than others. The key isn’t skipping over them—because a recruiter or potential employer can sniff out a story that doesn’t make sense from a mile away.
Duct Tape Marketing
DECEMBER 17, 2020
2021 Trends for Small Business written by Jenna Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch . In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast , I do my annual wrap up of 2020 in a way that predicts what is coming next year! I’ve been doing this post for the last 20 years and I’m usually spot on. That’s not a nod to my prediction ability but more to the fact that trends usually creep up on us and grow.
The Next Web
JULY 9, 2020
Germany has been a startup ecosystem on the rise for quite some time now. It’s produced a number of global success stories including SoundCloud, Zalando, Flixbus, and HelloFresh. In 2019, the country was ranked number one in Europe for startups by NimbleFins. EY reported that Germany’s top 100 startups received a total of $11.1 billion in funding in 2019, a significant increase from the $6.3 billion reached in 2018.
Startup Professionals Musings
MAY 24, 2020
The era of stable lifetime jobs for business professionals within a single company are gone. Companies are rightsized quickly now as markets change rapidly, and business professionals are quick to jump to new opportunities for growth and survival, with no ties to special benefits or pension plans. Thus smart business professionals are rapidly becoming the new entrepreneurs.
View from Seed
JUNE 23, 2020
“Be formless, shapeless, like water.” – Bruce Lee. I was on a pitch video call the other day when the founder asked me what the guiding principle for product was at Blue Apron when I was leading the team there, and my response was that consumer product experience should be like water. At a first glance, that could sound pretty counterintuitive – isn’t the point of a product team to purposefully design and build?
ConversionXL
DECEMBER 16, 2020
“Why don’t we rank first for [keyword]”? Every SEO analyst gets this question. And every business investing in SEO uses keyword rankings to judge performance. Despite the flood of “organic rankings are dead” articles in recent years, I have yet to see a single business or agency that has given up on tracking keywords. So are all those articles wrong?
Steve Blank
JUNE 23, 2020
The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Accounts receivables are stretching way out. Revenue models and forecasts are no longer valid.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 10, 2020
Most people don’t understand exponential growth. It can be counterintuitive and is easily misinterpreted. Understanding it is particularly important right now around Covid-19. The following eight-minute video is extremely well done and uses the historical Covid-19 data to help understand exponential growth. There’s a magic number in this that we should be focusing on, but gets lost in the fog of hysteria.
VC Cafe
SEPTEMBER 9, 2020
“A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living” Kevin Kelly, 1,000 True Fans. At the heart of the creator economy (also dubbed the “Passion Economy” or “Hustle Economy”) is the ability of a creator to monetise attention and fandom.
Version One Ventures
AUGUST 13, 2020
It’s been exciting to see so much renewed investor interest in climate tech and clean energy startups. As Peter Thiel documented in detail, the last wave of late 2000s cleantech VC excitement ended in a trough of despair as many of the more well-funded companies went bust (with the notable exception of a few big winners like Tesla, SunRun, and Opower).
ReadWriteStart
APRIL 27, 2020
Starting a tech company is exciting, but there are dozens of factors you’ll need to consider if you want your startup to succeed. Much of your time brainstorming will be spent considering things like how to reduce costs, how to expand efficiently, and how to build the right team—but you’ll also need to consider the nature of your brand, including your business’s name.
VC Adventure
OCTOBER 5, 2020
Some of the most popular posts I’ve written over the past couple of years were the two that focused on just how rare outsized returns for an individual deal are in venture capital. You can see the original posts here and here. In those posts I was analyzing data from Correlation Ventures that showed just how skewed venture returns are, specifically that 65% of investment rounds fail to return 1x capital and only 4% return greater than 10x capital.
Duct Tape Marketing
DECEMBER 22, 2020
5 Trends That Impact Consultants and Coaches in 2021 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. In addition to working with thousands of small business owners each year, I also work very closely with coaches, consultants, and small marketing agency owners. These folks are, of course, small business owners in their own right. Still, this work gives me particular insight into the challenges, workings, and characteristics of this specific niche of business owners.
Hunter Walker
MAY 25, 2020
As an early stage investor I look at A LOT of pitch decks. In the seven years since we started Homebrew there has been some evolution in this area – Docsend, videos, the occasional memo – but the lingua franca among founders and investors is still largely 10-25 slides with several expected sections. And while some of us have very strong personal reactions to certain portions ( seed decks should never include an exit slide ), we’re generally aware these are lowest common denomin
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 24, 2020
As a frequent advisor to new entrepreneurs and startups, I often hear your frustration with being treated differently from other startups by investors, on expectations for valuation , traction, and market size. Of course, it could be your level of experience, or the quality of your team, but the difference is often more related to the lifecycle stage of the market you are trying to enter.
YFS Magazine
OCTOBER 31, 2020
If you're ready to cruise past startup burnout, checkout these five tips to increase the productivity of your startup.
ConversionXL
OCTOBER 27, 2020
On October 15, Google announced that it will integrate more artificial intelligence into its search algorithm, improve visual search, and work on 3D search functionality. When it comes to organic results, the biggest news is Google’s new focus on “passages”: By better understanding the relevancy of specific passages, not just the overall page, we can find that needle-in-a-haystack information you’re looking for.
Steve Blank
MAY 21, 2020
The Covid-19 virus is not politically correct. It discriminates against the old and the unhealthy. The biggest risk factor in dying from the virus is age. If you’re 60 to 70 years old, you’re 30 times more likely to die from Covid-19 than if you’re under 40. And if you’re over 80, you’re 180 times more likely. It’s not that the young don’t get sick or die, but the odds are dramatically different.
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