November, 2011

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If You Don’t Have a Discrete Hypothesis You Are Incapable of Failing

Both Sides of the Table

There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. And there are very few people who so consistently exceed my expectations when I hear them speak. I find myself nodding – even when the topic is one I don’t expect to agree with such as “fail fast.” This week was no exception.

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Test Your Aptitude for Business Internet Jargon

Startup Professionals Musings

Many of the businesses and entrepreneurs I know still don’t realize that they need to use and understand the Internet, even if their interest is not e-commerce. Maybe you have also heard a lot of Internet terms, but are not sure you can explain how, when, and why they are relevant to your business success. Here is a quick test of your real Internet savvy.

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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

(Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. --> This is a guest post from Robert Graham — a solo bootstrapper who blogs about the experience. Robert has been working in software since 2005. He is a Ph.D. dropout who spent time working for Google. Someday he’d like to work for himself. When I started marketing my first webapp almost two years ago, I started the way I imagine most people do: online.

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Steel In Their Eyes – Why VC’s Should Be Startup CEO’s

Steve Blank

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. Mark Twain. Venture Capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year. Running a company is distinctly different from simply having operating experience – (working in bus dev, sales or marketing.

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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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[Review] Gamification By Design: Implementing Game Mechanics In Web And Mobile Apps

YoungUpstarts

The trouble with a book titled “ Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps ” is that most people will assume it’s meant for games – or at the very most, application – designers. But “ Gamification by Design ” by gamification expert and chair of the Gamification Summit Gabe Zimmerman, and entrepreneur and veteran technologist Christopher Cunningham, is a lot more than that.

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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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5 Easy Steps to Your Own E-Commerce Startup for $100

Startup Professionals Musings

If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.

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Valuations 101: The Venture Capital Method

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 Venture Capital Method (VC Method) was first described by Professor Bill Sahlman at Harvard Business School in 1987 in a case study and has been revised since. It is one of the useful methods for establishing the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue startup ventures.

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Twitter Link Roundup #109 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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What you have to know about conversion optimization

ConversionXL

This post will make you money. It will teach you about conversion optimization – how exactly to do it, based on all the best research and experiments. Why do conversion optimization? It is the cheapest, quickest way to increase sales online. Think about this: if you’re currently converting at 1% (1% of your visitors buy your stuff), but can increase that to a mere 2%, you’ve doubled your sales.

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Are You An Internet Entrepreneur In Colorado? Oppose PIPA!

Feld Thoughts

If you are a entrepreneur in Colorado who is working on something related to the Internet, please consider signing the following letter to Senator Udall and Senator Bennet opposing the Protect IP (PIPA) Act. I’ve written why I believe PIPA is effectively censorship and an incredibly dangerous and destructive bill to our economy, entrepreneurship, the Internet, and free speech.

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: VCs Are Not Always Right

ReadWriteStart

I know that many, many entrepreneurs are feeling dejected because of investor rejections. Today, I want to share with you a story of an amazing entrepreneurial team led by Alex Bouzari, CEO of Data Direct. In How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds , Alex and I explore the company's journey to $200 Million in revenue, while their VCs wrote them off.

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10 Clues That It’s Time to Start Your Own Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Many budding entrepreneurs struggle mightily with that first step – out of their comfort zone and into the unknown. They keep asking people like me whether the time is right, and the truth is that there’s never an ideal time to start your own business. It’s like starting a personal relationship, if you wait for exactly the right time, you’ll never do it.

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Startup Due Diligence Is Not a Mysterious Black Art

Gust

After you have successfully attracted angels or venture capital with your business case, your million dollar product idea, and you have a signed term sheet, there is still one more hurdle to overcome before investors write the check. This is the dreaded “due diligence” process. For no good reason, this process seems shrouded in mystery, when in fact it is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan.

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Twitter Link Roundup #112 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Tradeoffs in Innovative Careers

This is going to be BIG.

Tweet. This is the first of a series of posts this week on careers in innovation and startups--sort of a thought exercise for me on the topic for my talk at General Assembly at 8PM on 12/15. With any company I work with, I inevitably play the role or recruiter--mostly because I often play the role of career counselor to friends and other folks in the community.

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‘Capital Efficiency’ doesn’t exist

K9 Ventures

When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around often these days. It comes up most commonly in cases when investors talk about how “it’s gotten cheaper to start a company these days” (particularly in the Web space), and therefore these companies don’t require a lot of capital.

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5 Ways to Improve Local Search Results for Business

Duct Tape Marketing

5 Ways to Improve Local Search Results for Business This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. “This article originally appeared on the OPEN App Center. Visit www.theopenappcenter.com for more information and resources for streamlining and growing your business.” Increasingly, when folks turn to a search engine, they aren’t looking for something around the world, they’re looking for something around the block.

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How to Recognize a Great Boss, or Even Be One

Startup Professionals Musings

Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around. Almost every one of us in business can remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or busin

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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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Small business and startups: 5 great self-service HR resources

crowdSPRING Blog

The everyday grind of running a business can be tough. I am not talking about wooing potential partners at fancy lunches, or drinks with clients after work, or even the whiteboard sessions that can fill our days. I am talking about the nitty-gritty reality of operating a business, paying the bills, washing the dishes, and managing employees. Most small businesses and startups do not have a dedicated human resource professional to manage the endless details of benefit plans, recruiting, payroll,

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Foursquare: The Second Inning

This is going to be BIG.

Over two years ago, I suggested to Yelp that they should pay attention to Foursquare. While that post resulted in term sheets for Dennis and Naveen from VCs, the original intention was actually to get Yelp to invest in the company. The Foursquare founders had been to nearly every VC we could think of and no one, save for Bryce Roberts OATV who was willing to do half the deal if he could find an east coast partner, was willing to jump in.

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‘Capital Efficiency’ doesn’t exist

K9 Ventures

When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around often these days. It comes up most commonly in cases when investors talk about how “it’s gotten cheaper to start a company these days” (particularly in the Web space), and therefore these companies don’t require a lot of capital.

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MailerLite Review: A Simple Email Marketing Tool for Small Business

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

When it comes to building an online business (especially if you’re a blogger), one of the most valuable assets that you can have is a email list. I currently run two relatively active blogs, and my mailing lists play a HUGE role in helping to keep them going.

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10 Preparation Steps to Win an Angel Investment

Startup Professionals Musings

Every new startup I know dreams of being funded by an angel investor. Yet according to the latest data from Gust (formerly AngelSoft), only about 3 out of 100 companies who initiate the formal request process actually get funded. The Gust Deal Funnel from the last 12 months indicates is that 70% of the interested companies never make it past the initial screening process.

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You’ll Be Dead Soon – Carpe Diem

Steve Blank

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Steve Jobs.

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Ever Wonder What It’s Like Inside a VC Pitch Meeting? You Can Be a Fly on the Wall Here

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve often wanted to let people see what a VC pitch is like to help new entrepreneurs have a better sense of what it’s like to present. Obviously having a camera on will add a small bit of an artificial result because I don’t want to ask as much confidential information and with the camera on people are obviously a bit nicer. But this interview is fairly authentic.

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Episode 3b: Smart Bear Live!

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

(Powered by LaunchBit ). This is the conclusion of Episode 3 of Smart Bear Live; see the original post for details and the first half. You can listen by subscribing to my podcast on iTunes , or it’s enclosed in this blog’s RSS feed , or you can just download the mp3 of the first hour. Why listen? Especially if you don’t normally listen to podcasts?

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Opting For A More Traditional, Small Business

YoungUpstarts

We usually hear stories of young talent leaving corporate jobs to join technology startups, but here’s someone who left a fast-growing technology startup to found his own small business. 26-year old Adam Kaplan left his enterprise and large account sales role at Manhattan, New York-based online business listings site Yext and obtained a franchise so that he can “build something of his own” Kaplan is opening ShelfGenie – a franchise concept that designs, builds and install

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Top 5 Scaling Lessons From Superhero CEOs

Seeing Both Sides

Scott Kirsner of The Boston Globe called them the startup equivalent of the Justice League of America. Seven superhero CEOs gathered on Friday afternoon at the Mass TLC Unconference to discuss the challenges of scaling their young companies. The CEOs on the panel were (from left to right): Michael Simon, CEO/founder of LogMeIn (2009 IPO) . Scott Griffith, CEO ZipCar (2010 IPO).

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Can You Move From Thought Leader to Business Leader?

Startup Professionals Musings

By definition, most entrepreneurs are thought leaders. They have the ability to recognize a market need, the skills to design and implement a solution, and the drive to start a business from that solution. It all comes from within themselves. A business leader does the same thing and more through the people around them. Most entrepreneurs are not both.

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Scientists Unleashed

Steve Blank

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw. We’re in the middle of our National Science Foundation Innovation Corps class – taking the most promising research projects in American university laboratories and teaching these scientists the basics of entrepreneurship. Our goal is to accelerate the commercialization of their inventions.

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The Future of Television Presentation

Both Sides of the Table

I will be giving a speech today on The Future of Television at the PaidContent conference in LA. I will write way more details about this in the coming months but I thought I’d give you a sneak peak at my presentation for today. Future of TV. Feel free to leave comments and we can have a discussion about the topic in the Disqus comments section.

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Behind the scenes: Creating custom cartoons

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

(Powered by LaunchBit ). This is a guest post by Mark Anderson , owner of lifestyle business Andertoons which produces all the awesome cartoons I use on this blog. He created a custom cartoon for me, and I thought it would be interesting to get a behind-the-scenes peek at how cartoons are created. The custom cartoon began with Jason sending over an early draft for an upcoming presentation he thought might need some livening-up.

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[Infographic] Millenials: An Entrepreneurial Generation

YoungUpstarts

This just in: many young adults aged between 18 and 34 – better known as Gen Y or the Millenial Generation – are definitely aspiring entrepreneurs. The Young Invincibles , in conjunction with Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Research and funded by the Kauffman Foundation , released the results of a new poll that showed the Millennial Generation’s sentiments on the economy and entrepreneurship, and the signs are encouraging.

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15 Years Of Technology Progress

Feld Thoughts

Next week at Defrag I’ll be giving a talk titled “Resistance is Futile” I’ll be talking about my premise that the machines have already taken over. A few days ago a friend of mine emailed me a perfect image to summarize where we are today. Ponder and enjoy.