Thu.Nov 15, 2012

article thumbnail

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
article thumbnail

More New Florence

deal architect

on the innovation blog Airbus vision of safer skies How do you know when a politician is lying? Maasvlakte2 – transforming Port of Rotterdam The Best Hospitals in the US The man who flew half a Space Shuttle mission The.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

10 Tips to Help a Business Leader Quit While on Top

Startup Professionals Musings

For most business leaders, their current role is not where they intend to stay until they die. At the right time, they all intend to make a graceful exit, and leave while still perceived to be on top of their game. The challenge is how to know and exit gracefully when the right time has come, without trauma to either the company or themselves. I haven’t seen much insight on this subject, so I was intrigued by a new book “ Leaving on Top: Graceful Exits for Leaders ,” by David Heenan, a business

.Net 209
article thumbnail

[Infographic] How Small Businesses Get Funding

YoungUpstarts

One of the greatest challenges faced by entrepreneurs is raising sufficient funds to start, continue or even expand the business. Whether it’s finding the cash through your own pocketbook, obtaining a loan from a bank, or approaching investors, without money it’s near impossible to get on the road to success. If this is a challenge you face, you may want to know around 31-percent of small business owners actually borrow money from friends and family.

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

What are the regulatory barriers preventing the emergence of a liquid market for equity in seed stage startups?

Gust

Parts of the answer are that (a) there are enormous regulatory requirements relating to secondary markets, and (b) there are no analysts tracking private company stocks. But by far the biggest issue is that the very essence of public markets (and what makes them “public”) is that the SEC mandates an enormous amount of transparency, including complete quarterly financial statements, complete publication of the company’s cap table including all significant shareholders, and so fo

article thumbnail

[Singapore] [Infographic] Top Childhood Dream Jobs: LinkedIn

YoungUpstarts

When I was growing up, my childhood dream was to be a general. Yes, in the military, commanding soldiers in the fight against the enemy. My childhood hero was General George S. Patton, who once famously said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Little did I know that would involve plenty of marching and crawling in the mud, and a health problem put paid to that dream.

Singapore 163

More Trending

article thumbnail

Vinod Khosla on VC board directors and founders as CEOs

The Equity Kicker

Vinod Khosla has been round the block more times than most anyone in the venture capital industry, first at Kleiner Perkins and more recently at his own firm Khosla Ventures and on Saturday he drew on that experience to pen a very thoughtful post: If, when, and how to avoid hiring a CEO. This is a very emotive subject and much of the debate is characterised by chest beating and/or positioning but Khosla gets to the heart of the matter with a set of reasoned and reasonable assessments: The best c

Founder 108
article thumbnail

Video and Yahoo

Mucker Lab

Sometimes, the quickest way to lose credibility is to tell people who are a lot smarter, accomplished and experienced than you are what they should be doing instead with their time. This is one of those times. But sometimes I just can’t help myself. Besides, I don’t have too much (credibility or fame or money) [.

Video 106
article thumbnail

Successful Business Ideas: The Strong Sprout Method

Mike Michalowicz

Mike Michalowicz, Author of The Pumpkin Plan , shares the method of identifying and cloning your best clients. Imagine have 10, 50 or 100 copies of your best client – the result is always colossal growth and colossal profit. The method, used by colossal pumpkin farmers, is called “strong sprout selection” and is the exact method successful entrepreneurs follow to grow a colossal business.

article thumbnail

New Boulder Startup Genome Map

David Cohen

Be part of an awesome opportunity to help connect entrepreneurs, investors and resources in Boulder’s startup community. Startup Colorado , the Silicon Flatirons Center , Startup Genome , and Foundry Group have collaborated to develop the Startup Genome map , a curated social startup map for Colorado. The map is up and running, but it’s far from complete.

article thumbnail

The Starting Point to ALL Success

Growthink Blog

The REAL Reason Businesses Fail to Achieve Success Soon after entrepreneurs and business owners start businesses, they tend to become trapped in the day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month struggles. At some point, virtually all of us become 100% focused on the short-term and lose sight of our long-term visions. As a result, we begin to wander, and never achieve the initial vision we had when we first started or bought our companies.

article thumbnail

OutboundEngine Launches with $1.6M Series A

Austin Startup

OutboundEngine, the platform enabling independent professionals to nurture their customer relationships through automated, customized email and social media services, emerged from stealth mode today and announced it had closed a $1.6 million Series A investment round from top tier investors. One of the most sought-after investors in the valley right now is Mike Maples, Jr. [.].

Stealth 75
article thumbnail

Turn “process” into “game.”

Berkonomics

Most of us are driven by the competitive spirit, the desire or need to win. It reinforces self-worth, provides closure at the end of a good effort, and energizes us during the effort to achieve. Many of us as managers – and our employees as workers – are driven by process, actions required to achieve a result. And many of these actions are repetitive to a fault, contributing to boredom and ultimately to restlessness and desire for something new, in or out of the company.

Metrics 70
article thumbnail

Words of Wisdom from Jessica Livingston

Scott Edward Walker

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “ Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.” Each week, we post a favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics. This week, we present Jessica Livingston , the Co-founder of Y Combinator , the author of the book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days and indeed an extraordinary individual.

article thumbnail

Why I'm Not Buying Apple's iPad Mini

Babbling VC

Being the Apple fanboy that I am, I find it hard to type that title. It's true though that I will be passing on the iPad Mini. I had actually decided this even before I had a chance to play with the device. After having the opportunity to fondle it, my mind hasn't changed. Don't get me wrong.it's a great device. There is a scenario in which I would even consider buying it but right now, it's a pass. .

Email 66
article thumbnail

7 Social Collaboration and Accountability Tools

Duct Tape Marketing

This post is one in a series of tips for making your small business run better and is sponsored by UPS. UPS is all about logistics — the logistics that makes your business run better and faster. One thing is for certain – it’s become much easier to work virtually these days. New online apps and tools are being created every day to make it easier to connect, collaborate, contribute and manage staff flung far and wide of the traditional cube or physical office setting. photo credit: eldeeem

article thumbnail

A new model for understanding the stages of a startup

The Startup Toolkit

The language we use for startup stages (discovery, validation, customer creation, company building) is abstract. The lines are blurry. And if jumping ahead of yourself is the #1 cause of startup death[1], that’s a problem. So here’s another way of thinking about the stages of a startup in visual terms using the business model canvas[2]. It’s based around three questions.

Startup 55
article thumbnail

5 “Don’ts” for Raising Startup Funds

Early Growth Financial Services

Of course there are a lot of things you need to do when you’re trying to raise money for your startup. But there are also a lot of things you want to avoid. If you’ve landed a meeting with a potential investor, you don’t want to blow it! Avoid the following 5 “don’ts” and you’ll be on the right path to making a favorable impression: 1. Don’t raise more money than you will need.

Startup 31
article thumbnail

via mostmotivational

Bryce Dot VC

via mostmotivational

49
article thumbnail

Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Highlights by Stanford University | Stanford / Entrepreneurship

Scalable Startup

Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Highlights by Stanford University | Stanford / Entrepreneurship. via Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Highlights by Stanford University | Stanford / Entrepreneurship.

article thumbnail

TechStars FounderCon 2012

David Cohen

Here I am interviewing Fake Grimlock. I'm the human on the right. I just got back to Boulder from an amazing week in Boston and I wanted to reflect on it while it is fresh in my mind. Of all of the things I’ve helped build in my career as an entrepreneur and investor, I think the thing I’m most proud of is the network of amazing entrepreneurs, investors, and mentors around TechStars.

Boston 82
article thumbnail

The New Marketing Machine

Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Aaron Dun – Enjoy! “Don’t Wake Up With Your Website in a Ditch” Expand Your Content & Your Contributors to Keep Your Content Marketing Strategy Humming. As content explodes around you, if you are the only person contributing to your content marketing strategy, I hate to break it to you, but you’re going to be in trouble–just like the characters in recent television ads from DirectTV.

article thumbnail

Twitter Link Roundup #154 – 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!