Sat.Mar 31, 2012 - Fri.Apr 06, 2012

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Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit?

SoCal CTO

Using my StartupRoar as a radar, I came across a great post by Gabriel Weinberg Do you really need a full-time hire for that? Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. The problem is you don't yet have product/market fit, and until you do, you don't really know what to build.

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10 Sure Ways to Get Your Plan Trashed by Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

After struggling to create your business plan for months, every entrepreneur likes to think that their document is inspirational and will reach someone who is smart enough to see the brilliance of the idea, intuitive enough to recognize their business acumen, and enthusiastic enough to offer the money required to make it happen. Every serious investor, on the other hand, has a stack of these in their in-basket (email or real plastic) awaiting review, and is looking for the flaw or less-capable e

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Four Ways To Create A Positive Team Culture

YoungUpstarts

by J. Clint Anderson Ph.D., founder and president of J. Clint Anderson Company. Between increased diversity, growing workload, geographic dispersion, and organizational changes, who has time to worry about a corporate culture? Research shows that when people connect well, organizations succeed. So, the real question is: Can you afford not to invest in your team culture?

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St. Louis Startups Strut Their Stuff

ReadWriteStart

Two events this week in St. Louis show how vibrant the startup ecosystem has become there. On Wednesday, a group of 13 companies presented to 50 investors, looking to raise an aggregate of $16 million in capital. The companies were all part of Capital Innovators, an accelerator venture fund that has been operating since last fall. Capital Innovators put on the event, called Demo Day, at the cherished Pageant Theater, which normally is a concert venue.

St. Louis 127
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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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Exclusive: Announcing a Startup that Brings More Efficient Government to the US and Other Countries

David Teten

(An aerial view of Parliament House in Singapore. Photo credit: Wikipedia). I’m exceptionally excited to announce that I’m now Chairman and lead investor with some other angels in a new company, Spright Governance Inc. Spright is a spinoff of the Singaporean government, which will leverage their proven expertise and technology to run other cities, states, and nations globally.

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Twitter Link Roundup #126 – 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!

More Trending

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A Field Guide on How to Create an Innovator

ReadWriteStart

Are people born innovators, or can they learn to become that way? An interesting new book, "Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World," by Tony Wagner, a member of Harvard's Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, explores this question in detail. It is a must-read for anyone who is thinking of taking the lonely road toward starting one's own venture.

Engineer 156
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Reading what was written and the VC age question

This is going to be BIG.

For a solid six or seven minutes, I was pretty pissed at Fred Wilson for his last post on the age of venture capitalists. I even started writing a post defending the new crop of younger investors and why they can be value-add to investors. I was writing against his argument that it's better to take money from an investor over 40. Only. that's not what he wrote at all.

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Live-Data Prototypes vs. Production

SVPG

I have written earlier about the differences between user prototypes (simulations intended to test the user experience), and live-data prototypes (actual code intended to send live traffic to in order to test real behavior). See [link]. We use a live-data prototype (usually in the context of an A/B test) to prove something works, and we perform user testing to understand why it doesn't work, and what we can do to correct.

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I’m in Unicode Love: The Curator’s Code

crowdSPRING Blog

Attribution on the web is a controversial topic; ideas, stories, videos, graphics are copied and pasted over and over again, propagating their way across the virtual universe. As an entrepreneur and blogger, I am always pleased when I see my articles shared on other sites, or linked to in the social media. While I would prefer for all of those readers to come over to our blog to read the piece, I certainly understand the value of additional reach that can be gained when my posts are re-published

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How We Fooled Ourselves into Delaying Our Startup’s Launch

viniciusvacanti.com

I remember reading the first few pages of Steve Blank’s book, Four Steps to Epiphany , and thinking two things: This is not exactly a page-turner. This is a really smart way of thinking about startups. Soon after, I started attending the Lean Startup meetup in New York and reading Eric Reis’s writings. I was believer. One of the main principles is to release an early prototype of your idea to potential users to get their feedback.

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Some Thoughts about Selling at Startups

Both Sides of the Table

Many MBA programs still cater too much to the needs of large, corporate management jobs or prepare students to enter big consulting companies or investments banks. If you haven’t read Adam Lashinsky’s awesome new book about Apple , you should. It takes on many of the lessons MBA programs and Corporate America have been teaching about business for the past 50+ years and questions whether lessons from Apple might be more applicable in thinking about the future.

Startup 319
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Blinded by the Light – The Epiphany

Steve Blank

Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun ?/i?pif?n?/. A moment of sudden revelation or insight. We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. ————-.

Flash 313
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5 Ways to See If Your Business Integrity is Showing

Startup Professionals Musings

As an entrepreneur, your personal integrity is critical for getting and keeping the support of investors and team members, and your company’s integrity is critical for getting and keeping customers and vendors. But in a practical sense, what does that really mean? Most definitions of integrity include something like “the quality of being honest and morally upright.

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Burning Question: What should Ginni Rometty do?

deal architect

As she enters her second quarter as IBM’s CEO, Ginni faces a tricky scenario which frankly could qualify her for Veep consideration this summer. What to do about Augusta? Readers?

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WordPress Page Caching Faster than Light — @WPEngine releases TachyCache

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Dateline April 1, 2012. Austin TX. Today WP Engine proudly announces a new WordPress page-caching technology which actually delivers pages before the user clicks the link! In a joint venture with CERN, WP Engine has developed a TCP/IP layer on top of a faster-than-light neutrino beam, delivering page content in negative time. Page state and web analytics is preserved forward in time using quantum-entangled cookies.

Caching 219
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Random Thoughts And Printers

entrepreMusings

For some reason today was a weird day. It started out with me dragging myself onto the treadmill at 6:00 a.m. Then I sorted through a bunch of email and set up some meetings. I had a good meeting with one of my clients. I even had a good lunch with a potential client. Then it got mixed up in a few ways that illustrate the complexity of us humans and machines as follows: I called my insurance agent to discuss car and homeowners premiums.

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7 Key Drivers to the Best Investor For Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

If your startup desperately needs an investor, you may not care if the investor is a so-called “angel” investor, or a venture capitalist (VC). The money is the same color in either case. But I have found that making the right choice at the right time can have a major impact on your long-term valuation, and the decision process is complex. The basics are simple.

IRR 248
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Outsourcing and the Circle of Trust

deal architect

A colleague told me about an outsourcing firm which refuses to adopt SaaS for internal operations because they do not external eyes having access to their data. The irony is seemingly lost on them that their own staff can eye.

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22 Big Reasons To Start A Small Business While Still In School

YoungUpstarts

You’re young, strapped for cash, and totally busy with school. It sounds like a terrible time to start a business, but really, things couldn’t be more perfect. We’re seeing a boom in businesses started in tiny dorm rooms, and there’s a really good reason why: college is an ideal time to get your venture off the ground. With incredible support and resources, a low cost of living, and your life spread out before you, right now is when you should be making the leap.

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8 Reasons Why Cloud Computing is Even Better for Small Businesses

ReadWriteStart

Sure, cloud computing offers benefits to companies of all sizes. But the clouds' advantages apply even more dramatically the smaller and newer your company. At the same time, the standard objections to cloud computing matter less to small companies than to large ones. On the plus side, the cloud's economies of scale naturally make a bigger difference when your company is too small to generate similar savings and capabilities on its own.

Cloud 165
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Many Entrepreneurs Never Leave Their Comfort Zone

Startup Professionals Musings

One of the biggest impediments to starting a new venture is the “terror barrier,” as popularized by Bob Proctor , a 75-year-old millionaire and world renowned entrepreneur. This is the imaginary barrier that always seems to appear at the critical point where we would step out ahead of peers or competitors, but fear causes us to stop short. Everyone has a comfort zone, or level of risk, where they feel in control.

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CIO Do over wishlist

deal architect

Chris Murphy at InformationWeek is one of my favorite technology editors ( He also kindly wrote a blurb for the back cover of my new book.) He has a nice gallery of CIOs each expressing something in their career they.

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How Small Businesses Can Pack More Punch

YoungUpstarts

Small businesses need to learn to be like David when fighting against Goliath ( source of image ) What can Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and independent freelancers do to build their reputations, enhance their businesses, and strengthen their reach? With limited resources and finances, how can these entities carve a space for themselves in an increasingly crowded market with competitors possessing deeper pockets, greater resources and fuller teams?

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1000 Genomes Project and AWS: A Startup Opportunity?

ReadWriteStart

Last week, Amazon welcomed the 1000 Genomes Project data to Amazon S3 as part of the Obama administration's big data initiative (PDF). The initiative is far-reaching and likely to have an impact on a number of businesses. Focusing just on the 1000 Genomes Project, though, I wonder if this might be an opportunity for startups to provide tools or services around the data.

Startup 151
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5 Lessons From the Recession for Young Entrepreneurs

Startup Professionals Musings

Every dark cloud has a silver lining. Driven by the recent recession, smart entrepreneurs of all ages are jumping into the fray with new ideas, new recovery strategies, and discarding outmoded business models. I see it most in the newest generation of entrepreneurs (Gen-Y), who were shocked out of entitlement into action by the recession. Donna Fenn, in her book from a while back, “ Upstarts!

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More trailer-tow marketing

deal architect

My wife asks me “Is Cisco an innovative company?” And I respond “Yes”. “Wow, they make great robots and cars and music.” And I go, “not the Cisco I know” So, she shows me the commercial below. Hey, if AT&T.

Marketing 210
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11 Compelling TED Talks On Money

YoungUpstarts

Money talks, but what it has to say happens to be grimmer than, “Timmy is trapped in a well.” Sadly, people tend to turn clogged ears toward its intricacies, and as a result wind up compromising their homes, businesses , and even surrounding neighborhoods. Proper financial education, on a macro and a micro level, helps translate some of what dollars and cents can really do, and their potential to make life as amazing as it does hellish.

Ethiopia 175
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BigDoor Cracks The Code On Web Site Engagement

Feld Thoughts

One of the most enduring challenges any Internet marketer faces is getting users to come back regularly and engage on their website. In other words; loyalty. Social gaming companies and a few very popular consumer web services have gotten extremely good at creating loyalty, where loyalty rate is defined as Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU).

Web 134
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What Startups Need to Know About Marketing

ReadWriteStart

One of the hardest things that a startup can do is get its marketing act together. Part of the problem is that entrepreneurs are passionate about creating their business, but not necessarily savvy about setting the right tone for the pitch. Another part is what Marcia Kadanoff, the CEO of OpenMarketing.com says where "many smaller companies can't always find the right mix of marketing skills or people.

Marketing 138
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The Internet Hour

deal architect

The stats in the Infograhic from Intel below are striking, but it’s easy to dismiss what companies as a whole are doing. Nothing smacks you more than the intensity of individual executives. In my book, Tony Prophet who heads operations.

Internet 210
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8 Bad Habits That Are Driving Your Coworkers Crazy

YoungUpstarts

Everyone has bad habits that have a way of showing their face while you’re at work. You may not be the loud talker or the office flirt, but maybe you have a bad habit about coming to work late or spending too much time on Facebook. These habits may not seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but one thing’s for sure – they drive your co-workers crazy.

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If Steve Jobs Worked For You, You’d Probably Fire Him

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

There is a great deal being said and written about the late, great, Steve Jobs. He was a complex personality — and a remarkable leader. Folks often overlook the personality piece and focus on the leadership. After reading another article about his leadership style, it got me thinking, What if Steve Jobs Worked for you? Imagine if you will a young Steve Jobs, fresh out of not graduating from college, twenty something, energetic, but not expert.

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Gini Dietrich's 6 Biggest Startup PR Mistakes

ReadWriteStart

Did you hear about the "green" startup that touted how environmentally conscious it was by sending reporters five identical copies of its press kit, each one filled with nonrecyclable package "popcorn" and a small forest's worth of paper? Needless to say, the startup didn't get any press coverage. In the era of social media, you may think public relations doesn't play a role in your marketing plans.

PR 133
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The Not-so-flat earth

deal architect

This weekend between Ray Wang’s problems with United Airlines and Dennis Howlett’s irritations with British Airways on his way back from Australia, a set of Twitter and other conversations ensued which drew comparisons to Singapore Air, Emirates Air and other.

Singapore 210
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[Primer] Tips On Using Facebook Pages For Small Business

YoungUpstarts

Over the weekend, brands and businesses on Facebook transited over to the new Facebook Timeline. If you’re a small business owner and have a Facebook Page for it and haven’t noticed – shame on you. You’d have noticed that the layout of your Page has changed significantly. The question for small business owners is – how do we leverage the new Timeline and maximize the use of the new features such as Cover Photo and Pinned Posts?