2008

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim.

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Analytics Career Advice: Job Titles, Salaries, Technical & Business Roles

Occam's Razor

Michael, politely, says in an email: "I have done web analytics for five years, I have mastered Omniture, WebTrends and Google Analytics, I provide analysis and not just reporting. I feel like am an Analytics God. What would be your advice for me in terms of next steps for my career? My goal is to climb the ranks and increase my salary." Let me hasten to add two things.

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Cracking The Code: Getting through the downturn: a few thoughts.

Cracking the Code

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Thursday, November 13, 2008. Getting through the downturn: a few thoughts for SaaS companies planning their 2009 budget. A few days ago, Bessemer West Coast SaaS Practice - David Cowan , Byron Deeter and myself, hosted a CFO Dinner for our SaaS portfolio at John Bentleys in Redwood City.

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Thinking about web services

Eric Friedman

I have looked at a number of web services both from their inception and early alpha, to beta programs and later stage developed businesses. I have been doing this for years and it was definitely a highlight in thinking about my current role. Services have ranged from simple features that make an every day task easier, to a full blown subscription based service that operates independently of any other system.

Web 60
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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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Being The Best You Can Be - Startups and angels: Along the way to.

Tim Keane

'Startups and angels: Along the way to success. By Tim Keane, Angel Investor, Golden Angels Investors, LLC. Home. Archives. Profile. Subscribe. « The Whitehorse Daily Star - good advice for entrepreneurs | Main. | Forward to the past: The (re) rise of direct marketing » October 08, 2008. Being The Best You Can Be. Last week, our angel group reviewed a business with an online lie detector technology.  We've all seen The Sharper Image catalog voice stress analyzers and i supp

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8 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Programming Career

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Problems (For the Most Part) Resolved with WordPress and DreamHost MicroISVs, Software Products and Startups: Software by Rob’s Most Popular Posts of 2008 → 8 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Programming Career Becoming a Better Developer If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

More Trending

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Due Diligence Reveals All - To The VC

Seeing Both Sides

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog about how to prepare for the financing process , focusing in particular on follow-on financings. Some readers have pointed out to me that I left out a very key element of the due diligence process: what the process itself reveals about the nature of the entrepreneur to the VC. Many entrepreneurs I know underestimate the importance of their small and large actions during due diligence and the signals their behavior send to the VCs.

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Move to Boulder! | Seth Levine

VC Adventure

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ProfessorVC: Buyer's Remorse

Professor VC

ProfessorVC. The last blogger in Silicon Valley. Tuesday, February 12, 2008. Buyers Remorse. Wikipedia (where else would you look.) defines Buyers Remorse as "an emotional condition whereby a person feels remorse or regret after a purchase" and "a natural human reaction, rising out of a sense of caution". I certainly remember the feeling after buying my first house.

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New VC-InsideOut Podcast: Best Practices for Building High-Performance Boards During Challenging Times

Pascal's View

We have some engaging and topical new content on our VC-InsideOut podcast program– Episode 7 in our Governance Series, "Best Practices for the High-Performance Board"  This is a first for VC InsideOut as we recorded a live, 92 minute program at the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm this past Thursday morning. Allison Leopold Tilley, Danial Faizullabhoy, Chris Rust, Pascal Levensohn   The panel consisted of Chris Rust, General Partner of US Venture Partners , who sits on the b

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal.

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Excellent Analytics Tip #13: Measure Macro AND Micro Conversions.

Occam's Razor

We love our conversion rates. :) Really really. Part of me is glad because my book and the Trinity strategy and the Web Analytics 2.0 mindset all stress the importance of measuring Outcomes. No Outcomes = No Happiness. But I have come to realize that we are not being the best we can be by focusing on just the overall website conversion rate. We are leaving money on the table.

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Cracking The Code: Hard times.

Cracking the Code

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Monday, October 27, 2008. Hard times. Lehman Bank employees stage a protest by blockading the entrance to the Banks Headquarters. Posted by Philippe Botteri. at 9:32 AM. Labels: anecdotes. No comments: Post a Comment. Newer Post.

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Killer Apps

aweissman.com

skip to main | skip to sidebar. aweissman.com. Maximizing the serendipity around you. Apr 6, 2008. Killer Apps. My list of most important apps/products of the last 30 years: *Remote control *MTV circa 1980-84 *Curb-side check in *Caller ID *Email *Instant messaging *iPod 80 gig *EZPass *EpiPen *Metrocards on NYC subways *Suzuki method of teaching guitar *Senduit/Rapidshare/yousendit/megaupload etc etc.

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The Swinging Pendulum Between Distribution and Monetization

Genuine VC

After the crash at the end of the last decade, web startups clamped down to focus on their core value proposition and were forced out of necessity for survival to hone their revenue models. However, for the past couple years, the metrics of “success” with early-stage digital media startups (especially consumer-facing ones) have clearly focused on distribution, as opposed to monetization.

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Problems (For the Most Part) Resolved with wordpress and dreamhost

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← WordPress Headaches with Closing HTML Tag – Any Ideas? 8 Ways to Recession-Proof Your Programming Career → Problems (For the Most Part) Resolved with WordPress and DreamHost About this Blog If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

Caching 27
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Google Personalized Results

SoCal CTO

Google now shows me an option to push things in my search results to the top. It's an interesting choice. Doesn't it seem like it's inviting problems. Basically the only people who will spend time on this is people trying to improve their search rankings. The rest of us signal with lots of other things like links, bookmarking, etc. Not sure I buy this approach from Google.

Restful 150
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Microsoft VC Conference - Steve Ballmer's View On The World

Seeing Both Sides

Every year, Microsoft bigwigs trek down to Silicon Valley and brief the VC community on their view of the world and plans for the future. They are kind enough to invite East Coast VCs, not just locals, and so I flew out last week to partake in the annual event alongisde a few hundred of my VC brethren. Just as when I had attended the event in the past , the highlight was Steve Ballmer's address.

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The Venture Boutique

K9 Ventures

In my previous post , I claimed that “Venture Capital is a people business in every sense of the word. It is therefore a boutique industry and it cannot scale.” Let me expand on that thought a little more to qualify what I’m saying. Unlike investing in public markets, investing in early stage companies happens before those companies have a real business, when it is just a concept and a team, and sometimes not even a whole team.

IRR 99
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ProfessorVC: Why didn't I think of that??

Professor VC

ProfessorVC. The last blogger in Silicon Valley. Thursday, December 18, 2008. Why didnt I think of that?? Great ideas can come from many places. Some result from years of work and/or education while others are a result of trying to identify a unique solution to a consumer or business problem. Of course, there are those that are completely ridiculous ( think Pet Rock ).

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The SEC’s Colossal Failure of Oversight– Isn’t This a Violation of the Business Judgment Rule?

Pascal's View

The damning New York Times headline, “ SEC CONCEDES OVERSIGHT FLAWS FUELED COLLAPSE ,” from a September 26th article by Stephen Labaton, will hopefully end up as more than a footnote in the long list of misdeeds by the ’stewards’ of the American economy that have brought American capitalism to the precipice of systemic financial collapse.

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Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, November 7, 2008 Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online service, step-by-step If you want to build an online service, and you dont test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, youre crazy. Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers.

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10 Insights From 11 Months Of Working At Google

Occam's Razor

It will soon be a year of working at Google and milestones are always a good time for introspection. I have a lot on my mind but there was one thing in particular that I wanted to share with you all: What it is has been like working at Google. Interesting, fun, surprising, insightful, inspiring, impactful, and more such words. This post shares that experience.

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75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks

Hacking Startups

Facebook users fall into two categories: giggly and serious. Facebook user experience could be better if Facebook took this dichotomy into account. Ignoring the difference pushes apps to be giggly and serious users to be unhappy. Giggly 75% like pokes, quizzes, pic forwarding, fun games, selling friends, glitter on profiles. They express themselves through style and interact with friends using the mouse.

Viral 79
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Another way to connect

Eric Friedman

I recently added Facebook Connect functionality to the comments of this blog all powered by Disqus. This translates to allowing those people who have a Facebook account being able to easily comment on this blog. To see how to do this for your own site see the instructions straight from the source.

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Social networking and ads-who's paying attention?

BeyondVC

First of all, Google announced some amazing numbers growing its revenue over 50% and its earnings around 17%. That being said, investors in Google have high expectations and the stock fell in after hours trading. One note that many in the blogosphere seemed to pick up on is the higher cost of traffic acquisition from partners and the fact that social networking is not delivering results as expected( read Between the Lines for more).

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Landing Clients Nearly 100% of the Time, Car Insurance by the Mile.

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Startup Success Podcast, Open Source For-Profit Startups, One Laptop Per Child 2008, and $19 Usability Testing WordPress Headaches with Closing HTML Tag – Any Ideas? → Landing Clients Nearly 100% of the Time, Car Insurance by the Mile, and 91 Ways to Become a Better Developer Cool News, Links & Reviews If youre trying grow your startup you

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Value and Meetups - SEO / SEM

SoCal CTO

I went to a meetup yesterday that was on the topic of Internet Marketing / SEO / SEM. The meeting had a decent case study and some pretty good discussion around the room of different tools that you might consider using. Then the organizer went into a 20 minute sales pitch around his new training/coaching offering. It felt like a bad time share presentation.

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What Entrepreneurs and Angels Want To Know. - Startups and.

Tim Keane

'Startups and angels: Along the way to success. By Tim Keane, Angel Investor, Golden Angels Investors, LLC. Home. Archives. Profile. Subscribe. « Paying attention to the business model: Whos in charge here? | Main. | Two Rules: No Ask, No Get. and. If Not Now, When? » November 11, 2008. What Entrepreneurs and Angels Want To Know. Madison, WI -- Here' are two downloads to my presentation from last week's Early Stage Symposium, "What Entrepreneurs and Angels Want To Know A

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Holiday Greetings

K9 Ventures

Holiday Greetings to all from K9 Ventures! I decided to post the greeting to our blog and website rather than sending it out via email to avoid the email-overload of holiday greetings that occurs every year. This way only those of you who come visit the K9 Ventures site (either on your own, or by seeing a link on the RSS fee d , Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn , Plaxo etc.) will see our greeting and it won’t be force-fed through email!

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ProfessorVC: Man Camp

Professor VC

ProfessorVC. The last blogger in Silicon Valley. Thursday, November 13, 2008. Man Camp. Just returned from a golf trip to Bandon Dunes , Oregon. We played a Ryder Cup style tournament with 16 guys (the motley crew to your left) over 3 days and 72 holes, with a few drinks mixed in. Waking up Monday morning with a golf hangover, I remembered I hadnt had time to prepare for my class that afternoon.

Oregon 28
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@altgate » Blog Archive » Microsoft Buys 37signals For $300 Million

Altgate

@altgate Startups, Venture Capital & Everything In Between Skip to content Home Furqan Nazeeri (fn@altgate.com) ← How To Blog Like A Pro The World Without Altgate → Microsoft Buys 37signals For $300 Million Posted on December 31, 2008 by fnazeeri Not really. At least not yet. But that’s my prediction for 2009. Outrageous, huh? There are three elements of this prediction; let me address them in turn.

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Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. In this post I hope to talk about how to do it well, in terms appropriate for both audiences.

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The "Action Dashboard" (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards)

Occam's Razor

Know the difference between a Reporting Squirrel and a Analysis Ninja? One is in the business of providing data. One is in the business of providing, to use a old fashioned word, information. This one of the core reasons why most dashboards are "crappy", i.e. they are data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value.

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Would you work with micromanaging boss, no salary, and all your work thrown away?

Hacking Startups

If you think the coming nuclear winter will make job market tough for employees, you need to hear about the job offer my daughter got recently. The job has: $0 salary and no equity (you’re supposed to be compensated in experience). no benefits other than vacation and sick time: no insurance, for example. no possibility of promotion or raise, ever. no job description: just do what you’re told. micromanaging boss asks about project status every hour. strict hours, starting at 8:30AM sharp. if you’

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Zemanta for SEO

Eric Friedman

Image via CrunchBase. I have been using Zemanta for the past few months on this blog to help bring interesting posts to the end of my own creations, pictures to give context, and links within writing to provide explanations. The main point of Zemanta is to provide seamless connections to content that would be relevant to your article, pictures for relevance, tags for organizing, and great links.

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