July, 2012

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Dual Founders Manage Technology Startups Better

Startup Professionals Musings

I often hear the qualms of business-smart but non-technical entrepreneurs, wondering if they really have a chance in this high-technology marketplace. I tell them that if their idea or solution is technology intensive, they clearly need technology strength on the team. Then the question becomes “How do I evaluate and attract the best technical talent?

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My Pal Dave: A Triumph of Substance Over Style

Both Sides of the Table

My pal Dave has blogger Tourette’s. He has it on stage, too, at conferences. He can’t help himself: He’s Dave. My pal Dave has problems. Not the ones you’d imagine. His biggest problems are with language, colors, fonts and spacing. Not much more. I think he could say “no” a bit more. I’ve told him that if a vet just clipped his wings a little bit I think it would be good for his health.

China 309
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Unrequited Love

Steve Blank

If there’s only one passionate party in a relationship it’s unrequited love. Here’s how I learned it the hard way. The Dartmouth Football Team. After Rocket Science I took some time off and consulted for the very VC’s who lost lots of money on the company. The VC’s suggested I should spend a day at Onyx Software, an early pioneer in Sales Automation in Seattle.

Seattle 259
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A Startup Advisory Board Dream Team is Priceless

Gust

Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. These should be carefully selected, with a proven track record, willing and available to help, and be completely trustworthy. Make sure they are willing to check their egos at the door. Let’s talk specifics.

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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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TechStars Patriot Boot Camp Is Happening This Week

Feld Thoughts

TechStars is running an event called the Patriot Boot Camp in Washington D.C. from July 18-20. About 75 veterans who are active or aspiring entrepreneurs have already been accepted and will be attending. During this three day event, they’ll get a mini TechStars-like experience. The number of people who have stepped up to offer to mentor these veteran-formed companies is just awesome.

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Sixteen Signs You May Be Practicing Cowardly Leadership

YoungUpstarts

by Mike Staver, author of “ Leadership Isn’t For Cowards: How to Drive Performance by Challenging People and Confronting Problems ” It’s a tricky time to be a leader. With the economy so unforgiving right now, making smart business decisions is critical. That’s true not just in terms of strategy (whether to change your product mix or move into a new marketplace) but also relationships (whether to fire the toxic high performer or address a conflict head-on).

More Trending

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Human Engineering and Emotional Intelligence for Startups

VC Cafe

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups. ( Wikipedia ). human engineering VC Cafe Photo credit: By imaginedhorizons (Flickr). On “ Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed “, a research by Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that “ 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “ human engineering ,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lea

Engineer 145
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Don’t hire people you know!

David Teten

Countless psychology studies have proven that we tend to like people who look and/or think like us. Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College and a Professor of Psychology, taught my “Introduction to Psychology” class in college. On the first day of class, he asked, “Do you want to know whom you are going to marry?” The 18-year-olds were excited to learn the answer.

Hiring 138
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No credit? Big problem. Here are 7 steps to build your startup’s business credit

The Next Web

In the startup world, venture capital is often viewed as the penultimate goal, yet for many startups bootstrapping is often the reality. And self-financing puts the emphasis on business credit. If you’re a small business owner, navigating the lending world today can feel like one big Catch-22 loop. Traditional lenders and commercial banks are typically reluctant to loosen their purse strings until you’ve proven yourself with a strong credit history.

CPA 126
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I want to mentor you in the Shopify Build-A-Business Contest 2012

Startup Lessons Learned

I recently teamed up with Tim Ferriss, Daymond John, and Tina Roth Eisenberg to help you launch a business from scratch. It's called the Shopify 2012 Build-A-Business Competition and it launches today. Now is the time to take that idea you've been mulling over and put it in motion. All you have to do is come up with a product to sell, open your online store on Shopify, pick one of the awesome mentors, then get to work.

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How to Get Bloggers to Write About Your Startup: Insider Advice

ReadWriteStart

It’s every startup’s dream - to get the attention of the people who matter. You might think that refers to customers or clients, or even venture capitalists or angel investors. Nope. We’re talking about bloggers. Sure, investors and customers are vital to the success of a startup business, but few things can turn your tech startup into the “it” company on everyone’s lips (and tweets) as quickly as getting mentioned by a prominent blog or blogger.

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A Startup Advisory Board Dream Team is Priceless

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup faces a myriad of challenges that are well beyond the scope of any founder, so you need a few guiding lights to illuminate the road ahead. These should be carefully selected, with a proven track record, willing and available to help, and be completely trustworthy. Make sure they are willing to check their egos at the door. Let’s talk specifics.

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Human Engineering and Emotional Intelligence for Startups

VC Cafe

On "Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed", a research by Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that "85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]].

Engineer 145
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Don’t hire people you know!

David Teten

Countless psychology studies have proven that we tend to like people who look and/or think like us. Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College and a Professor of Psychology, taught my “Introduction to Psychology” class in college. On the first day of class, he asked, “Do you want to know whom you are going to marry?” The 18-year-olds were excited to learn the answer.

Hiring 128
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How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

The Next Web

Editors Note: This is a guest post from Jeff Keacher , an engineer in Denver, Colorado. You can find him pretending to be an entrepreneur by fixing blurry photos or extolling the virtues of backup for photographers. Also, he loves playing hockey. You can follow him on Twitter @teuobk. . It’s never good to scare away your customers. It’s even worse if you don’t realize you’re doing it.

Internet 121
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Your brain peaked when you were twenty–what to do?

The Equity Kicker

This is one of my occasional health related posts. The next area of focus for me as I seek to slow the process of ageing is the brain. Physical fitness is a pre-condition for mental longevity, so I was right to start there, but the statistics (such as they are) on the physical decline of the brain after the age of twenty make for terrifying reading.

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From Inmates to Entrepreneurs: The San Quentin Startup Accelerator

ReadWriteStart

Prison inmates have all day, every day, to sit around and think. It could be the world’s largest pool of untapped brain time. Chris Redlitz decided to put it to productive use. He founded the Last Mile startup accelerator program at San Quentin State Prison in California. “I’ve driven by San Quentin every day for the last 14 years, but never bothered to understand the prison system,” says Redlitz, who lives in Marin County north of San Francisco (where the prison sits on San Francisco Bay) and r

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10 Keys to Making an Entrepreneur Website Credible

Startup Professionals Musings

Smart people only visit and buy from credible and memorable websites. In the past, if your startup had a website presence, the company was credible by definition. In today’s world, a website is necessary but not sufficient for credibility. Dreamers and gamblers have found out that if the website isn’t validated as credible, it’s probably a scam, and everyone loses.

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Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox, part 1

eranki.tumblr.com

Rajivs blog. RSS Archive. July 12, 2012. Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox, part 1. Rajiv Eranki. I was in charge of scaling Dropbox for a while, from roughly 4,000 to 40,000,000 users. For most of that time we had one to three people working on the backend. Here are some suggestions on scaling, particularly in a resource-constrained, fast-growing environment that can’t always afford to do things “the right way” (i.e., any real-world engineering project ;-).

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How to Create Free Buzz for Your Startup

David Teten

For startup companies trying to build buzz around their brand, but without the capital to launch a full-fledged PR campaign, there are a lot of ways to hack the PR game. Building on my earlier post about free publicity , I wanted to share some additional thoughts. To begin with, the best PR you can build is through satisfied customers with high Net Promoter scores.

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Quick Left: An unlikely CEO leads this app development house that’s “a bit like therapy”

The Next Web

Ingrid Alongi isn’t like most CEOs. While it’s typically understood that the CEO’s job is to be the salesperson and face of a brand, Alongi tends to spend more time focusing on the work conditions and employee happiness of her company, Quick Left. In fact, she’s so unlikely to talk about herself or her company that, while sitting with her for dinner during Big Omaha, the subject of Quick Left came up (not from her, mind you) and I said that I really needed to talk to some

Developer 114
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The IBM CEO Study: The Directors Cut

deal architect

Francis Ford Coppola edited plenty in the Director’s version of his classic The Godfather. The studio made him add almost 50 minutes back to the movie when it was released. I smiled when Jon Reed shared with me IBM’s CEO.

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7 Ways to Help Startup Workers Innovate

ReadWriteStart

Being innovative is part of the DNA of a tech startup - or at least it should be. But when your employees are working 18-hour days, unleashing their inner innovators can be a challenge. These 7 tips can help get the ball rolling: 1. Set an example. An innovative company needs to start with the founders and top execs. While even the most creative founders can’t drive innovation all by themselves, someone has to lead the way.

Startup 147
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How to Survive Four Common Worst Case Scenarios

Startup Professionals Musings

The best survival guides tell you how to be proactive and avoid the probabilities of ending up in a worse case scenario. Of course you need to learn how to recognize a bad situation before it bites you, and you need to know all the secret ways to wiggle your way out, before you succumb. The challenges stem from the simple fact that every entrepreneur is starting something new, where things are predictably unpredictable.

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From Airbnb to TaskRabbit to Zimride, sharing is becoming big business

www.usatoday.com

Skip to Main Content. USA TODAY. Tech. Subscribe. Mobile. Home. News. Travel. Money. Sports. Life. Your Life. Tech. Weather. Tech: Blogs. Technology Live. Game Hunters. Science Fair. |. Products. Products Home. Edward C. Baig. Talking Tech. Talking Your Tech. Kim Komando. Shop for Gadgets. |. Gaming. Gaming Home. Game Hunters. Jinny Gudmundsen. Marc Saltzman.

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Want to be happier, more positive and more successful? Understand and embrace the rules of the game.

Jeff Hilimire

One of the biggest inhibitors to happiness and success is people not understanding and embracing the rules of the game. Your reality is what it is. You can do things to change that, sure, but for the most part these things are, well, reality. People who constantly struggle to accept their own reality are always going to have a hard time succeeding.

Restful 71
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Lying on your resume

Steve Blank

It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup. Richard Nixon and Watergate. Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether to lie on my resume. I Badly Want the Job. When I got my first job in Silicon Valley it was through serendipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of my first employer.

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We dont actually do what we propose

deal architect

Remember the UPS ad below? I thought about the ad as I read this Fortune article about HP. Two visiting consultants are waiting for the elevator at a big company's headquarters. One is from HP, the other from IBM. The.

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Great Startups Need Founders' Heart, Mind and Soul

ReadWriteStart

Everyone’s heard startup advice about the importance of having a balanced management team. For instance, a tech whiz with no sales skills needs to have a strong salesperson on board to land investors. But a new book argues that startup management teams need a balance not only of job experience and skills, but also in their psychological makeup. Successful businesses often have one thing in common: The management team has carefully designated roles.

Founder 144
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Startup Viral Marketing Costs Real Money These Days

Startup Professionals Musings

Every time I challenge a business plan with little or no budget for marketing, I get the answer that they will be using “viral” marketing, which costs nothing. The founder explains that the product is so “buzz-worthy” that usage will spread rapidly through word-of-mouth only, meaning people loving it and recommending it to their friends. First of all, Seth Godin pointed out a few years ago that viral marketing does not equal word-of-mouth.

Viral 238
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Here are More Signs that LA Tech is Moving to the Next Level

Both Sides of the Table

I wrote a blog post on how to work with lawyers at a startup nearly two-and-a-half years ago. It was very widely read. If you don’t have much experience in working with law firms at a startup it’s a good primer. In that post I talked about how to select a law-firm for a startup. It should be: Local; Right-sized; and. Startup-focused. I specifically called out some of the best people I had personally worked with.

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A life-changing challenge: Guided by Pascal’s Wager

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

If the Gartner Group issued a Report on Recommended Behavior of Fortune 5000 Corporations with Respect to the Existence of a Power Beyond our Reckoning , surely they’d back up their ecclesiastical recommendation using a 2×2 diagram where the best place to be is up and to the right. Silly, and yet, that’s precisely what genius mathematician/physicist/inventor/everything-else Blaise Pascal did in his pithy argument for the existence of God: Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wa

Engineer 259
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Tenacious

Steve Blank

TE·NA·CIOUS /T??N?SH?S/. Adjective: Not readily letting go of, giving up, or separated from an object that one holds, a position, or a principle: “a tenacious grip” Not easily dispelled or discouraged; persisting in existence or in a course of action. When I was a entrepreneur I’d pursue a goal relentlessly. Everything in between me and my goal was simply an obstacle that needed to be removed.

Chicago 306
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Multi-Tenancy: Where are the outsourcers?

deal architect

I was reading Phil Wainewright’s nice note on multi-tenancy “The cloud operates within a service-oriented architecture, where providers achieve economies of scale by delivering their services in volume and operating them from pooled resources.” (italics mine) I drifted off wondering.

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Get Your Startup Into a Top Accelerator: 4 Insider Tips

ReadWriteStart

The top startup accelerators in the world - programs like TechStars and Y Combinator - receive a couple thousand applications for just a handful of spots each session. It’s harder to get into one than Harvard or Stanford. So how do you do it? You could Google “how to get into a top accelerator” and see what advice you find. Or, better, you could pick the brain of a recent graduate.

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Every Entrepreneur Dreams of an Overnight Success

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination. I was reading an article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”.