Mon.Nov 07, 2011

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Another Day, Another Patent Troll

Feld Thoughts

These days I’m regularly exposed to patent trolls. Sometimes I read about them, sometimes friends email me about them, and sometimes companies I’m an investor in gets sued by them. Whenever I read the claims in the lawsuits, I often think that the claim in question is “obvious.” For those of you out there who know how patents are supposed to work, for something to be patentable it needs to be “non-obvious” as well as “unique.” While the specific cl

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Social Media is a Boon to Startups Who Do It Right

Gust

If your startup can’t be bothered with social media, or has no plan to take advantage of it, then you are definitely at risk these days. But simply jumping in is not enough. Before you start spending money and time being a user, you need to understand how it can help you and your business. Using it randomly or incorrectly is a waste of your precious time.

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3 Recommendations for Sales Compensation for SaaS

Guy Nirpaz

I am at the Cloud Channel Summit today. A topic that seems to be coming up over and over again today is the need to come up with innovative sales compensation (commission) models that align with the subscription business model of cloud. While this is mentioned as an issue, not too many solutions were discussed so far (we are only at lunch time) so I went hunting online for some good blog posts on the topic.

Sales 48
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Valuations 101: The Cayenne Calculator

Gust

We recently started a series of posts on establishing the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue startup companies for purposes of investment by seed and startup investors. The High Tech Startup Valuation Estimator is an online tool developed by Cayenne Consulting to assist entrepreneurs and investors in estimating the pre-money valuation of startup enterprises.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

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

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More New Florence

deal architect

on the innovation blog massive Asteroid 2005 YU55 passes us Tuesday Lowes commercial decomposes many of our everyday possessions 30 Technologies through the ages that changed everything

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Stop Looking For A Job, Start Looking For An Opportunity

YoungUpstarts

By Darren Hardy, author of “ The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success ” A lot of jobs that once were, aren’t coming back. Ever. To look for what isn’t there is a waste of time and an insult to your dignity. If you haven’t noticed, the world has changed – radically. The traditional yellow brick road to success and financial security has imploded.

More Trending

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[Event] Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011 To Hit Record 123 Countries

YoungUpstarts

The entrepreneurship movement around the world is growing from strength to strength, and much of that momentum can be attributed to the annual Global Entrepreneurship Week. Held every year, the Global Entrepreneurship Week sees many organizations in different countries around the world host and participate in various events that foster originality, imagination and ingenuity.

Global 167
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Using Veri to Understand Term Sheets

Feld Thoughts

For some time Jason and I have felt that VC’s have had an unfair advantage when it comes to understanding term sheets. So a few years back we wrote a whole series of blog posts (the Term Sheet series ) which became the basis for the book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Our goal with all of this was to help put entrepreneurs on a more even footing in negotiating a deal with a VC.

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The end or the beginning? Thoughts on the current startup environment

This is going to be BIG.

Just as an additional disclosure, these are my thoughts, not that of First Round Capital, my employer. The other day, Adeo Ressi wrote in TechCrunch about how we need more venture funds, because. "Every investor and entrepreneur knows there is something scary about the current startup economy. There is an enormous amount of angel capital available, while at the same time there is a small amount of Series A and a large and concentrated amount of late stage capital.

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Principles of effective blog design

ConversionXL

People judge books by the cover and other people by their looks. Take a look at these 2 men: Now answer these questions (you can’t choose “neither”): Which one would you rather ask investment advice from? Which one would you rather have babysit your children? Which one would you rather have cook your dinner? … and so on. You don’t know anything about these men.

Design 86
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Are you the master of your domain?

VC Adventure

The title of this post is meant to be taken literally, not metaphorically. Do you control your domain? Last Friday one of our portfolio companies briefly lost control of its domain. It wasn’t the fist time we’ve seen this happen and, as you can imagine, the result could have been disastrous (in this case we were able to lock down the domain before anything nefarious happened, but people don’t steal control of your domain for anything other than doing bad things, so it was lucky

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Mass Relevance Named First Re-Syndication Partner of Twitter

Austin Startup

Mass Relevance today announced that it has been selected by Twitter (blog post) as the first curation partner officially licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content. Content publishers can now work directly with Mass Relevance to publish and display syndicated Twitter content, as well as directly monetize the content through sponsorships or direct response.

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Bloggers will love themepivot.com

Start Up Blog

Local nice guy Ned had a very productive weekend. On Friday he pitched themepivot and the Melbourne Startup Weekend. On Sunday he had a very nice and workable site live and kicking. He also took first prize for his trouble. Put simply, themepivot is great way to redesign your blog and make it better, easier. I strongly recommend all you bloggers out that take a look.

Startup 79
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The Other Side of Dropping Out to Pursue Entrepreneurial Career

The Entrepreneurial Mind

In May of this year, Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, awarded 24 young, aspiring entrepreneurs $100,000 to "drop out of school and become world-changing visionaries." Now that the publicity has settled down, I thought it would be a good time to offer the perspective of three entrepreneurs who dropped out of Belmont's entrepreneurship program.

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Creative Countryside – Fitzgerald’s in Sawyer, MI

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

Innovation isn’t the exclusive domain of big companies and rocket scientists. People with passion can create good things anywhere. Even in the countryside, and in a tiny village like Sawyer, Michigan. Sawyer, Michigan is just big enough to contain my subject here — Fitzgerald’s Restaurant. Why is Fitzgerald’s Restaurant notable enough for a creativity and [.].

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A Pat on the Back

Growthink Blog

Whatever one's politics, those interested in seeing entrepreneurs prosper in America have to be heartened by the sea of change in “regulatory attitude” emanating from Washington. Across the ideological spectrum, I hear near universal agreement that “ cutting the red tape ” is the fastest way to re-ignite the nation’s economy and best position the country for 21st century global competitiveness.

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6 Tips for Cloud Sales using Channels

Guy Nirpaz

I attended Jeff Kaplan’s Cloud Channel Summit today. It was a very interesting conference. Clearly cloud channel sales is in its infancy, but there were some companies here with successful channel strategies including Salesforce.com (1400 partners and counting), Scribe and others. What follows are six tips that stuck with me: Lesson 1: Think how you will compensate cloud channels.

Channel 66
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Seriously, You Want to Launch Your Own Fund?

Babbling VC

A good friend wrote a mail this morning asking for a quick list of ideas regarding the launching of a first-time fund. Without really thinking it through extensively, below are 10 things I think are relevant if a team is about to go and raise their first fund. These are in no particular order and I'm sure I'm missing stuff but I thought I'd just share the list here too.

LP 66
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Sell Me Something Damn It

Duct Tape Marketing

Sell Me Something Damn It This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. Internet marketing types know that the only thing that matters is the sale – all that build up, spammy sounding long form sales copy, and gut wrenching emotional hot button pushing is about the sale and little else. I get that, you get that, but you’ve grown up online in the more genteel social media environment and you’ll go to your business grave before coming off salesy in that kind of way.

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Are you the master of your domain?

VC Adventure

The title of this post is meant to be taken literally, not metaphorically. Do you control your domain? Last Friday one of our portfolio companies briefly lost control of its domain. It wasn’t the fist time we’ve seen this happen and, as you can imagine, the result could have been disastrous (in this case we were able to lock down the domain before anything nefarious happened, but people don’t steal control of your domain for anything other than doing bad things, so it was lucky

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Walker Twitter Highlights: October 30st – November 6th

Scott Edward Walker

I’m using Twitter as a form of micro-blogging to share interesting blog posts, articles and podcasts relating to entrepreneurship and startups, M&A and legal issues. Below are my five most popular tweets (via bit.ly ) for the past week and a couple of blog-related tweets. If you’d like to see all of my tweets (or an RSS feed of them), you can do so here.

RSS 45
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Why public speaking should be at the top of your list for 2012

Jeff Hilimire

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”. ~ Jerry Seinfeld. Ah, Seinfeld. Come back already, will ya? I’ve always loved this line by Seinfeld.

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9 Student Start-up Ideas from Class

Campus Entrepreneurship

This semester my New Venture Creation course has 9 teams completing business plans. Here are the 9 new business ideas that these undergraduate management majors have settled on after a few pivots (more to come btw and these are in no particular order). Hotel vending machine that provides quality soaps, razors, headphones, batteries etc., lessening the need of hotel operator to offer those services and/or small shops and providing higher margin revenue opportunities. “After Hours Tour Oper

Revenue 37
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Scooters and Dishes

entrepreMusings

Woman in Beijing, China making dumplings for us in her house. There’s really no correlation between scooters and dishes. I got some scooters for my kids a couple of weeks ago and now they scoot around the house all the time. When they wake up, to the breakfast/dinner table, to the bathroom to brush their teeth, etc. I told them they could scoot around the house only if the scooter hasn’t been outside the house.

China 31
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How do I sell a general-purpose tool?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

(Powered by LaunchBit ). This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. Frustrated Builder writes: I have a general-purpose reporting tool that automatically creates reports from certain kinds of data sources.

Database 229
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What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits

The Startup Toolkit

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels. It has been fascinating. That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups. There’s going to be a common theme with these “discoveries.” They are all examples of me finally getting advice I’ve heard a million times before.

Viral 55
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Customer Centric Trumps Customer Service Every Time

Startup Professionals Musings

New product startups rightfully begin with a heads-down focus on creating the ultimate product – whether it’s a new technology, a new look and ease of use, or a new low-cost delivery approach. Most then add customer service at the rollout, but very few really understand what it means to be truly customer centric, and even fewer really achieve it. Customer centricity is far more than providing excellent customer service, although that’s a step in the right direction.

Customer 227
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What I learned from a month of blogging and 250k visits

The Startup Toolkit

Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. I put out an article most days and up to 3 per day when I was experimenting with new channels. It has been fascinating. That being said, this is not a post about blogging tactics. It’s about what the experience has taught me about startups. Find the customers first, then build for them.

Viral 44