November, 2012

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CMO CTO COO Equity and Compensation

SoCal CTO

I was just asked about a particular startup situation (seed stage, CMO hire, non-founder) and particularly what compensation and equity is appropriate. I know a lot more about CTOs specifically CTO Salary and Equity Trends 2009-2011 , Visualization of Startup CTO Equity and Salary Data , Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data , but I've previously written about the issues with Equity for Early Employees in Early Stage Startups.

CTO Hire 329
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Careers Start by Peeling Potatoes

Steve Blank

Listening to my the family talk about dividing up the cooking chores for this Thanksgiving dinner, including who would peel the potatoes, reminded me that most careers start by peeling potatoes. KP – Kitchen Patrol. One of the iconic punishments in basic training in the military was being threatened by our drill instructors of being assigned to KP – Kitchen Patrol – as a penalty for breaking some rule.

Thailand 331
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6 Right Times to Be a Ready-Fire-Aim Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

I know entrepreneurs who have suffered from the dreaded premature execution syndrome often associated with the ready-fire-aim approach. Yet I believe that many more have benefited from this approach, especially in early startup stages. If your product is highly innovative, and speed to market is critical, you won’t get it right the first time anyway, no matter how cautiously you plan.

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Don’t Pass this up: Getting your business on Apple’s Passbook, DIY style

The Next Web

The long-term overall impact of Apple’s Passbook has been a hot topic over the last two months since it was launched with iOS 6 on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But one thing is for sure: if you’ve got a business — small, medium or large — where getting people in the door is important, and are looking to follow in the footsteps of the likes of McDonalds , United Airlines , Eventbrite , MLB , Starbucks , American Express and others, you should at least be looking into

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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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Forget Presidential Politics: Here’s How We Create Jobs — And How You Can Help

Gust

As I write this, days after the 2012 presidential election, I’m probably not alone in feeling relieved that the political jeering and soapboxing that reached a feverish pitch during the seemingly endless campaign season has finally subsided. Yet amidst all the partisan cheerleading and name-calling, there has been some discussion of substance.

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Bringing Lean Startup to Life at GE

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference. At a party in NYC recently, I was challenged by a VC to name the biggest company currently using Lean Startup practices. I think he expected me to describe a medium-sized startup or maybe some small, old-school media organization. So his eyebrows jumped when I said that GE is the largest company we know of.

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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. ————-.

Japan 292
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Crossing the Chasm is a Major Startup Challenge

Startup Professionals Musings

Everyone in the business world has heard of the old bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “ Crossing the Chasm ,” but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers. Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a startup.

Startup 254
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When is it time to stop calling yourself a freelancer and become an entrepreneur?

The Next Web

Self-employed. Freelancer. Entrepreneur. Business owner. However you label it, these people are making an independent living by themselves and their businesses they have built. These “labels” often blend into one another: those who are self-employed consider themselves business owners, business owners consider themselves entrepreneurs, freelancers consider themselves self-employed.

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Twitter Link Roundup #155 – 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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First Impressions Matter: The Importance of Great Visual Design

ConversionXL

People make snap judgements. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. This number comes from specific studies.

Design 134
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All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces

abovethecrowd.com

Since Benchmark’s investment in Ebay 15 years ago, we have been fascinated by online marketplaces. Entrepreneurs accurately recognize that the connective tissue of the Internet provides an opportunity to link the players in a particular market, reducing friction in both the buying and selling experience. The arrival of the smartphone amplifies these opportunities, as the Internet’s connective tissue now extends deeper and deeper into an industry with the participants connected to the marketplace

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The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt

OnlyOnce

The Value of Paying Down Technical Debt. Our Engineering team has a great term called Technical Debt, which is the accumulation of coding shortcuts and operational inefficiencies over the years in the name of getting product out the door faster that weighs on the company’s code base like debt weighs on a balance sheet. Like debt, it’s there, you can live with it, but it is a drag on the health of the technology organization and has hard servicing costs.

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Don’t Look For Investors for All the Wrong Reasons

Startup Professionals Musings

There is so much written these days about how to attract investors that most entrepreneurs “assume” they need funding, and don’t even consider a plan for “bootstrapping,” or self-financing their startup. Yet, according to many sources , over 90 percent of all businesses are started and grown with no equity financing, and many others would have been better off without it.

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Don’t Pass this up: Getting your business on Apple’s Passbook, DIY style

The Next Web

The long-term overall impact of Apple’s Passbook has been a hot topic over the last two months since it was launched with iOS 6 on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But one thing is for sure: if you’ve got a business — small, medium or large — where getting people in the door is important, and are looking to follow in the footsteps of the likes of McDonalds , United Airlines , Eventbrite , MLB , Starbucks , American Express and others, you should at least be looking into

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Twitter Link Roundup #156 – 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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People Comparison Shop, Stupid

ConversionXL

If you think people might buy your products or services without checking out the competition first, think again. Research says that on average consumers visit three websites before making a purchase. Another insight by the same study was that the more sites a consumer visits, the more money they are likely to spend. In other words, the more expensive the product, the more time people take to comparison shop.

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Tim Ferriss Talks About His Latest Book “The 4-Hour Chef”, How To Learn Anything In Half The Time And Why He Went To Sniper School

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Download the Text Transcript in PDF. Subscribe to this Podcast in iTunes. This is a good interview. Trust me. You’re not going to want to miss this. Just hit play now. Then grab a copy of Tim’s latest book – The 4-Hour Chef. Timothy Ferriss needs no introduction. I interviewed him previously about his 4-Hour Workweek book, a runaway … Read the rest of this entry » Download the Text Transcript in PDF Subscribe to this Podcast in iTunes.

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Entrepreneurshit. The Blog Post on What It’s Really Like.

Both Sides of the Table

It’s 4.50am. Sunday morning. And I couldn’t sleep. I have much on my mind since I just returned from a week on the road. 5 days. 3 cities. Late night Mexican food. Beers. Airports. Delays. I left on a Sunday. I had to miss a full day with my family, camping in the mountains. I returned home Friday night at 10pm – too late to see my kids.

Monaco 420
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5 Tips to Alignment With New Consumer Buying Habits

Startup Professionals Musings

Entrepreneurs always work hard to create an innovative product or service, but often count on standard seller marketing for sales. But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Reports suggest that 90% of today’s shoppers skip marketing pitches, to research online before they buy, and over 50% check user reviews before making a decision.

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Time to sell your site? Here’s how to get started.

The Next Web

You’ve put years of work into your website or blog, but now you’ve decided that it’s time to sell. Maybe you’re not getting the satisfaction you used to from the pursuit. Maybe it’s not making as much money as you had hoped and you want to get something out of all that effort. Maybe you just want to see the site do well under the management of a more experienced, better-funded enterprise.

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How To Choose A Market For Your Startup Or Small Business

crowdSPRING Blog

I’m rarely surprised when a young entrepreneur or small business owner hasn’t fully identified how their new business will make money. But I’m always surprised when that entrepreneur or small business owner has a tough time describing the potential customers for their new business’s products and services. After all, without customers, there is no revenue.

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Open Source Entrepreneurship

Steve Blank

One of the great things about being a retired entrepreneur is that I get to give back to the community that helped me. I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. Free: Startup Tools. If you’re building a startup, the Startup Tools tab on the top of this page has curated links to hundreds of startup resources.

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The worlds largest outsourcer you never heard of

deal architect

Quick, name the outsourcer which comes to market with A $ 140 billion services backlog. A relentless focus on guaranteed performance and improved outcomes for customers, not just standard SLAs or fixed price contracts Deep vertical knowledge in oil and.

Vertical 308
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Entrepreneur’s Don’t Think Enough. Here’s What You Can Do About It …

Both Sides of the Table

Every so often I find myself caught up in a really hectic 3-4 week schedule where it seems like I float endlessly betweens meetings. Pitches. Intros. Board Meetings. Conferences. And I get flooded with legal docs, end-of-quarter financial administration, recruiting, whatever. I get sucked up in “Do” mode. Startups Are for Doers. Now, I’m pretty on the record that being an entrepreneur is about being great at The Do.

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How Do I Get In Touch With a VC?

Rob Go

I got this question on a panel last week, and coincidentally, I had a couple folks on Twitter tweet out the same question. Generically speaking, the question is “how do I get in touch with a potential investor about my company?” I don’t know for sure if this is true, but I have the impression that early stage VC’s as a whole have gotten more accessible than probably any time in the past.

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Find and Talk to other Startup Founders of Similar Startups

SoCal CTO

One of the recommendations I make all the time to startup founders, is to find other founders who have tackled similar problems as yours and talk to them about how they solved these problems. As an example, I'm working with two sets of founders who are both going to be dealing with Getting Started with a Two-Sided Market Business - they are variants of two sided markets, but have similar characteristics.

Founder 301
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Every Entrepreneur Needs to Master Public Speaking

Startup Professionals Musings

As a mentor for aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs, I talk to a fair number who may have a great vision and a strong engineering background, but have a negative interest in the role of public speaking in business. In fact, they often claim to be part of the survey group that fears public speaking more than death, but I’m not sure how anyone could validate that survey.

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Entrepreneurs as Dissidents

Steve Blank

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.

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The art of storytelling

deal architect

Abe Lincoln inspires a whole range of emotions in people. One aspect of his life I was not very familiar with till I saw the Spielberg movie was his endless stream of stories and his wicked sense of humor even.

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Why Silicon Valley and Hollywood Don’t Get Each Other and Who Will Win the Future

Both Sides of the Table

For the past three years I have been pounding the table as loud as I can about the future opportunities in digital video. The concise guide is here. My narrative has stayed pretty simple: People in the US watch 5.3 hours of TV per day. People read for less than 30 minutes. You will not fundamentally change consumers media consumption habits. So you tell me what the future of the Internet will be?

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Teeny bit of traction — what next?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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. Burgeoning Startup Founder writes: After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit.

Affiliate 261
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Why tech founders can’t hire in early salespeople

The Startup Toolkit

Spoiler: You can’t hire out sales because in the early days it’s about learning, not selling, and hired guns can’t bring back bad news. At their peak, Groupon sales reps made 1250 calls per week to close 4 sales[1]. Once Groupon knew the math of that equation, they could throw money at the problem and scale a sales team. Until you have the roadmap nailed down, you can’t scale sales (it would be like throwing money at a big search campaign before you know your lifetime val

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10 Avoidable Mistakes Cause Entrepreneurs Much Pain

Startup Professionals Musings

I’ve been advising and mentoring startups and growth companies for years, and find myself always pushing them to try something new, for the sake of growth and survival. When you try new things, you make mistakes, and I’ve seen many. Smart companies learn from their own mistakes, but some don’t pay enough attention to other people’s mistakes. In the spirit of saving you a few lifetimes of pain, here are some common mistakes that seem to happen routinely: Wait until your company is up and growing

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Cubes Are For Squares: The Startup/Corporate Matrix – Where Do You Fit?

YoungUpstarts

By Melissa Thompson , CEO of Talk Session. Everyone wants his or her dream job, but few have the courage to take big risks. Two years ago I attended my Business School reunion and it was clear that I was part of the 1% who effusively loved her job. I was also in the 1% of alumni who had a salary of zero dollars per year. Now, eighteen months after graduation, my classmates are leaving their jobs in droves to similar roles that with a slight change in name, title and uptick in optimism.

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East Coast Offense

deal architect

In Walter Isaacson?s biography of Steve Jobs, Isaacson describes the time that Jobs cold called Wendell Weeks, the CEO of Corning, Inc., to learn about Gorilla Glass (which is now used in more than 500 devices). Weeks? assistant refused to.

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