April, 2011

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Hiring a CTO for Your Startup

SoCal CTO

Several people have recently come to me to help them source and/or hire full-time CTOs for their startup having found me through my post that looks at: Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data. The first thing I do is suggest they explore if they really need to hire a full-time CTO for their startup and if so, what kind of CTO they need. There's a lot on my blog already around this topic.

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Brad Feld Drops Knowledge. Here’s What He Said …

Both Sides of the Table

Brad Feld is a fountain of knowledge & wisdom. I had the chance to sit down with him for an hour and ask him loads of questions that I thought you’d enjoy hearing. If you have time check out the video (or download on iTunes – Episode 27 - and listen at the gym or on your commute!). Or, as always, summary notes available below. Huge thank you to Steve De Long for the write up.

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Six Key Factors in the Right Outsourcing Decision

Startup Professionals Musings

Since my background includes software development, I often get the question about when to build a solution in-house, versus outsourcing it to a local company, near-shore service, or off-shore organization in China, India, or Eastern Europe. In the USA, “near-shore” is a euphemism for connected countries, like Mexico and Canada. There is no simple answer to that question for all cases, but there certainly are some key considerations which will help you select the optimal solution for your case.

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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 4: Customer Hypotheses

Steve Blank

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part four. Part one is here , two is here and three is here. Syllabus is here. Week 4 of the class. Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Value Proposition (their company’s product or service.) This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyer

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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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Beyond the garage

Startup Lessons Learned

It’s been just over a year since the inaugural Startup Lessons Learned conference , and it’s time to do it again. Steve Blank called last year’s conference “ Woodstock for entrepreneurs ” and my goal is do even better this year. (If you somehow missed SLLCONF 2010 , you can get caught up with a complete video recording here.) The Lean Startup movement has made tremendous progress in the past year.

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The investment that didn’t happen

K9 Ventures

Note: All information contained in this post is based on my best understanding and perception of what transpired. I have confirmed with the founders that none of the information contained herein is deemed confidential and is therefore fair game for me to share in this post. In April 2008, I was introduced to Ugmode, Inc. (thanks to my advisor Terry Winograd ).

More Trending

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How Startups Can Use Metrics to Drive Success

Both Sides of the Table

You Manage What you Measure. One of the things I discuss the most with the portfolio companies I’m involved with is that “you manage what you measure.”. It’s a very important concept for me because in a startup you are constantly under pressure and have way too many distractions. Having a set of metrics that you watch & that you feel are the key drivers of your success helps keep clarity.

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Technology Attacks the Venerable Business Card

Startup Professionals Musings

In a second, with Google, I can find a phone number that was assigned to you ten years ago, but it takes me an hour to find your phone number on that business card you gave me last week. That’s just wrong. We need instant access to the most important of all resources, current contact info. Too many of us have piles of business cards scattered around the office and home, as well as additional contacts on your cell phone, PDA, Outlook, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 6: Channel Hypotheses

Steve Blank

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment with a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. With two weeks and two more updates to go, this post is part six. Parts one through five are here , Syllabus is here. While we’ve been pushing hard on the teams, this week the teaching team was about to get its socks blown off. All the teams were showing us what agile looked like, but this week several would remind us what focused and relentless really meant.

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The real entrepreneurs of New York City

Startup Lessons Learned

The Lean Startup Machine looks a lot like reality television for startups. It's intense, the teams go head-to-head, the protagonists live and learn, and it's all very entertaining. But there is something serious at work, too. I have written previously about how powerful the these events are as a teaching tool for Lean Startup principles. While I was in New York, I had another opportunity to witness this firsthand, and I wanted to share the results with you.

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Twitter Link Roundup #81 – 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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5 Tools to Improve Your Idea Before You Write a Line of Code

ReadWriteStart

In my last post on ReadWriteStart, I talked about how, in many cases, it wasn't an advantage to build your start-up in stealth mode. As a continuation of that theme, I thought it would be interesting to explore five tools you can use to iterate and improve your startup idea before writing one line of code. There is nothing worse than building a tool no one is interested in, so I'd encourage you to consider these options before starting down the path of building your next startup.

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8 Startup Lessons You Could Learn from Gotham Gal

Both Sides of the Table

It’s easy to think that the wife of a well-known & successful VC ( Fred Wilson ) would have had an easy and storied life of wealth and privilege. I had previously had the opportunity to spend time with Joanne Wilson , Fred’s wife, and knew otherwise. That’s why I was so interested in having “ The Gotham Gal &# come on This Week in VC ( video link on YouTube , download iTunes, episode 15) ) and dispel those myths.

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Ten Ways to Optimize Your Investor Pitch Time

Startup Professionals Musings

The average length of a funding pitch to angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.

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How to get an exciting job at an awesome startup in less than a month

This is going to be BIG.

I take a ton of meetings with people asking me about opportunities in our portfolio. For a lot of people, I feel like I’m the one being asked to do the work of finding them something. For a select few people, they understand that startups need a lot of help, and fall in love with the people who are motivated and show that they can offer help right off the bat.

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Soundbites from the future

Start Up Blog

A few soundbites from the future: Leadership: It’s no longer about being king of the mountain, it’s about being center of the circle. Prof Joseph Nye author of Soft Power. Woman will lead the 21 st century, or at least a feminine social and business ethic. The 20 th century was very male centric. This has flipped with the rise of social facilitation.

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Twitter Link Roundup #82 – 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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FounderLY: An Open Platform for Sharing Startup Stories

ReadWriteStart

One of the best part of my jobs as a technology journalist is getting to hear founders' stories. I have some really great, memorable experiences of talking to entrepreneurs - not just about what they're building, but why. Sometimes these are stories that, in turn, end up in the articles I write. Sometimes they're not - off topic, off the record, and what have you.

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Master of Customer Acquisition, Matt Coffin, On Startups …

Both Sides of the Table

I recently sat down with Matt Coffin , the founder of LowerMyBills, which sold for $400 million but was very nearly a bankruptcy only a few years early, and talked “startups.&#. Matt is one of the most transparent, focused & honest startup guys you’ll meet. You can watch him on YouTube , download in iTunes (for gym or commute) 3/31/11 edition.

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Four Common Startup Issues Which Threaten Survival

Startup Professionals Musings

The best survival guides tell you how to be proactive and avoid the probabilities of ending up in a worst case scenario. Of course you need to learn how to recognize a bad situation before it bites you, and you need to know all the secret ways to wiggle your way out, before you succumb. The challenges stem from the simple fact that every entrepreneur is starting something new, where things are predictably unpredictable.

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How to approach and make an introduction to a VC

This is going to be BIG.

I had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur last week about how he decided which VCs he was going to pitch. Mostly, it was a function of who he could get introductions to. No matter how much I or any of the team here at First Round made themselves accessable through Office Hours, LinkedIn, Twitter, speaking, blogging, etc., he was always going to go where he already had the warm intro versus going in cold.

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The Entrepreneur’s Wish List from VCs [part 1]

VC Cafe

VC Cafe asked entrepreneurs to tell us what type of help or support they wish they could get from the venture capital investors. What started originally as how can VCs differentiate themselves to stand out, quickly became an Entrepreneur’s wish list from its VCs. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all the entrepreneurs that took time to add, modify and improve this initial list with thoughtful feedback.

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: SignNow.com

crowdSPRING Blog

I like doing anything and everything I can over the internet. Some might say this is because I am a college-aged millennial whose social skills have been stunted by technology, but I think it has more to do with the ease, convenience and immediacy the internet provides. Need pad thai at midnight? The internet will prevail. Need to order panda shaped salt and pepper shakers because you forgot to buy your room mate a birthday gift until two days beforehand?

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai

ReadWriteStart

On Saturday, April 9, 2011, I arrived in Chennai at 3 a.m. after a 24-hour journey from California. At 11 a.m., a group of entrepreneurs from TiE Chennai gathered at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) Research Park campus, and we spent the next four hours discussing strategy and tactics of early-stage entrepreneurship. TiE Chennai organized a Startup Super Day, during which I delivered the keynote address followed by a live strategy roundtable.

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Want to Know How First Round Capital was Started?

Both Sides of the Table

If you read this blog often you'll know that I'm a huge fan of First Round Capital. They have totally changed the way you run a VC firm, investing heavily in systems & events for their founders that are pushing the boundaries of the way our industry works. One example is that they introduced a program where their founders can pool together shares from their company and exchange them for a small portfolio of other First Round Capital companies.

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When to Pay a Premium for Your Company Domain Name

Startup Professionals Musings

I’m sure you have all been frustrated at least once at not being able to get the Internet domain name you want for your company. Who owns all of these names, and should you ever buy one for a premium? The simple answer is that if you want to be found and remembered on the Web, the perfect domain name can easily be worth several thousand dollars. Snagging an unclaimed great one is almost impossible these days because domain "squatters" gobbled up a lot of the catchy real estate several

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Guest Post: Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part Two)

OnlyOnce

As I mentioned in a previous post , I write a column for The Magill Report , the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. I share the column with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey and we cover how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur.

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The CEO’s CEO

Ben's Blog

This biography was unauthorized. —Nas, U.B.R. (Unauthorized Biography of Rakim). Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population.

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10 tips for entrepreneurs on working with a partner

crowdSPRING Blog

After almost five years of working closely with a partner in an internet venture, I have had a great deal of time to think about how to do it better. At times it has been as easy as could be – enjoying the work together, assisting one another seamlessly, being greater than the sum of our separate parts and more able than the sums of our separate skills.

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Crowdfunding Your Startup with MicroVentures

ReadWriteStart

Crowdfunding has become a popular way to fund a variety of projects, from small-scale endeavors to large-scale , literally earth-shaping efforts. It's still not the accepted or the obvious choice for funding your startup, however. But news that the Austin, Texas-based MicroVentures has successfully raised its first $150,000 for three startups via its crowdfunding platform suggests that these alternatives might be viable after all.

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Bechtolsheim, Cuban, Prokhorov, et al.

Growthink Blog

The founders of wildly successful companies - with their world-changing impacts and their awe-inspiring wealth creation - receive much well-earned praise and financial rewards for turning their great entrepreneurial visions into reality. But what about those with 1-2 degrees of separation who also benefit immensely? Angel investors like Andy Bechtolsheim - who put $100,000 into Google in September 1998, a position now worth more than $1.7 billion.

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How To Attract More Customer Referrals Through Strategic Relationships & Networking

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

It is one thing having an awesome product or service, but if nobody knows about it, how do you expect to sell it? This realization usually happens just before business owners start to consider self promotion and exposure opportunities. There are a number of ways to go about getting your name out there, and forming relationships and connections with other businesses is one very important way of going about it.

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Here are 10 Tips from BuzzFeed to Make Your Content Go Viral

Both Sides of the Table

I recently had the pleasure of spending an hour with Jon Steinberg, president of Buzzfeed , a company who focuses on helping media companies make their content go viral. His words, “we find things on Sunday morning that will be on the Today show on Tuesday morning.&# That’s why people turn up to Buzzfeed. We talked about a lot of great stuff in the video including how to do sales calls and a how a new “culture of writing&# is emerging as a critical skill set in business today.

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What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

Ben's Blog

It’s f@#ked up when your mind’s playin’ tricks on ya. —The Geto Boys, Mind Playing Tricks on Me. By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check.

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Google Summer of Code 2011

crowdSPRING Blog

Since 2005, Google has led a wonderful open source program called Summer of Code. The goal of that program is to promote open source software development. Google invites open source organizations to propose ideas that could benefit the world, and asks the organizations to mentor students to develop these ideas and released them as FOSS (free and open source software).

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Microsoft's $100K India Startup Challenge Grant

ReadWriteStart

At this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced our collaboration with Microsoft around a $100,000 grant that they are offering to four Indian entrepreneurs as follows: A $40,000 grant each to two entrepreneurs, one in Mobility and one in Cloud Computing; and a $10,000 grant to two entrepreneurs, also one in each of those two categories. 1M/1M will be working with Microsoft in helping entrepreneurs prepare for these grants.

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