Mon.Nov 19, 2012

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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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Lean Planning Drives Growth For Small Business

Up and Running

These days more than ever, as a business owner and entrepreneur, you need to innovate or die. This mantra is most true for any business in the technology sector. We constantly need to move forward, create new things, better and faster. The pressure that a small business owner has to leverage innovation into growth is only emphasized by the difficult economic climate.

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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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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.

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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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6 Clues That You May Be Cool as an Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

A while back, when a startup founder mentioned to me that he wasn’t sure he had the personality to be an entrepreneur, I realized how important that insight was. My first thought is that if you are more annoyed than energized by expert advice, team suggestions, and customer input, then you should probably avoid this line of work. Actually, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s a good start.

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Glyder – A Mobile App For Small Business Marketing

YoungUpstarts

Online marketing can be daunting for many small businesses, especially since many of them lack the right expertise and background in both marketing and technology. But a new mobile application may be what they’re looking for: Glyder , an iPhone application that lets small businesses create and share effective marketing messages for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, as well as email, text message, MailChimp and even Passbook.

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[Infographic] A Look At The Wealthiest People On The Planet

YoungUpstarts

Get ready to be jealous – green with envy, to be more precise. Did you know that the combined net worth of the 25 wealthiest Americans is more than US$500 billion? Or that 14 of the 25 most wealthy people in the world actually live in the United States? But Americans aren’t exactly the wealthiest people on the planet (although it does have over 400 billionaires, the highest number in the world).

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The Future of Brick and Mortar

This is going to be BIG.

As we prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I think a lot about the future of the physical retail landscape. As I walk around my neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I count every storefront whose products or services could be better delivered over the internet. The count is unfortunately high. Pretty much anywhere you buy items that aren't food, you could probably get them cheaper on the web, with a wider selection.

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[Infographic] How Apple Is Dominating The Classroom

YoungUpstarts

Technology is changing the face of education. The classroom that once consisted only of traditional teaching aids today is inundated with technology such as e-books and reading devices , and even employs cloud technology. Hell, you can even use QR codes for classroom purposes ! Here’s an interesting trend that’s also happening – tech giant Apple is dominating the tech war for today’s classrooms.

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What makes you happy?

Life Beyond Code

Think about this for a brief moment. What makes you happy? This seems like a million dollar question. Some of you may know the answer instantly and some of you may have to struggle with it for a while before you get a solid answer. I have asked this question to hundreds of people and the answers have varied from person to person. Two Influencing Factors.

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[Singapore] IT Infrastructure For Small Business: In Conversation With NetGear

YoungUpstarts

Setting up the right IT infrastructure for a small business can be a daunting task, especially for a new entrepreneur without any technical background. From acquiring the equipment most suitable to meet the needs of the business, to being prepared for future expansion plans, or even simply setting up a proper network for the team, can overwhelm many a new entrepreneur.

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Two New Startup Books You Need to Read

David Cohen

One thing that makes TechStars really work, and a reason people come from all over the country to participate, is that here in Boulder we’re part of a vibrant entrepreneurial community. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists know they can come here to seek out investment opportunities, business development partners, funding, mentorship and support. Brad Feld’s new book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City , which made the Amazon Top 10 Business Books of 2012 ,

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Conversocial’s company culture

The Equity Kicker

Josh March, CEO of our portfolio company Conversocial has been thinking hard about company culture for the last couple of months and today he put up a great post describing the journey he has been through, and published the Conversocial company culture presentation (embedded below). I think they had around 7 people when we invested and one of the attractive things about the company was how committed everyone was and how much they liked working together, and it’s been great to see those strengths

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Brian Sharples Wins National Entrepreneur of the Year

Austin Startup

Brian Sharples, Co-founder and CEO of HomeAway, has been named the Ernst & Young National Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2012 Services Award winner. The Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award is the country’s most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs. The award encourages entrepreneurial activity and recognizes leaders and visionaries who demonstrate innovation, financial [.].

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7 Ways to Increase Engagement on Your Website

Duct Tape Marketing

It can be a chore to drive traffic to your website. So, once you do gain a click through organic search, a referral or an ad, you need to you do what you can to keep them there long enough for them to dig in and see what you’ve got. photo credit: theunquietlibrary. Below are a handful of tactics that can help visitors find what they are looking for, consume more content and enjoy a more engaged experience overall. 1.

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Not Just About Us

OnlyOnce

Not Just About Us. When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements. One thing missing was our clients and users! So we added this value to our list: Not Just About Us: We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy.

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A Thanksgiving Post: Being Better

Rob Go

I’ve been in a funk the last 6 months or more. I’ve been cranky, cynical, and generally uninspired for a while. Part of it I think has been the passing of my Dad earlier this summer. That was definitely a contributor, but probably not all of it. Among lots of other things, the election also kind of dragged me down a bit. It was so negative regardless of what side you were rooting for.

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OATV Fund III

Bryce Dot VC

Last week we quietly closed our third OATV fund. We capped it $85M making it our largest to date. Generally we keep these closing quiet, but given the word has leaked I thought I’d take a moment to put down some thoughts on our development as a firm and some of the thinking that went into the new fund. Firstly, wow! With all of the turmoil in startupland and the world of venture fund raising we feel extremely fortunate to have been able to raise this new fund and to have done it in such a

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Repost – Being an Entrepreneur

ithacaVC

I have not had much time for new posts lately. I am not going to pull a “Brad Feld” (sorry Brad) and get all personal on you to explain why – don’t worry. The “what it is like being an entrepreneur” reality check is a topic that comes up a lot for me when talking with students (mostly undergrads and MBA students at Cornell – BTW, Johnson was just ranked #7!!).

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Android Fragmentation – Your Options

Jason Ball

If you’re developing for Android, this picture from Open Signal Maps (portfolio co) is only the start of your problems. Fragmentation permeates every level of Android devices: 400+ devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions, OS- various versions running (few of them up to date), Silicon – ARM 5, ARM 7, etc. Not so much fun… Why go through the pain?

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What Color is the Sky in Your Entrepreneurial World? Are You Dealing with Reality?

Small Business Force

"Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be, but the way they actually are." Robert J. Ringer, Entrepreneur, Motivational Writer/Speaker Early stage entrepreneurs often have so much passion and belief in their business concept that they become blind to the realities of the world around them. I've read a number of business plans that made me wonder what the color of the sky was in this entrepreneur's world.

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“It’s a Feature, Not a Company” – Build a Company

Scalable Startup

This is a line that was pretty common in Silicon Valley until recently. Steve Jobs even (ab)used that line on Dropbox when trying to buy them out of the market (They turned him down.). Now that’s all changed, for the moment. The threshold for “company” status is very low, including the following list of minimum pieces at their lowest cost. 1) a url – $10 2) incorporation – $200 3) Internet – free 4) build a website – free 5) developmen

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Are You A Good Fit For A Seasonal Pop Up Store?

Mike Michalowicz

I don’t know about you, but it’s not Halloween for me until the Halloween costume guys move into the empty retail space at the mall, hang a couple of spiders the size of Volkswagens off the building, and set up shop for a month. When they open their doors I know I’ve only got 30 shopping days until Halloween. We see it happen every Halloween and Christmas around here.

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