Sat.Nov 10, 2012 - Fri.Nov 16, 2012

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CMO CTO COO Equity and Compensation

SoCal CTO

I was just asked about a particular startup situation (seed stage, CMO hire, non-founder) and particularly what compensation and equity is appropriate. I know a lot more about CTOs specifically CTO Salary and Equity Trends 2009-2011 , Visualization of Startup CTO Equity and Salary Data , Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data , but I've previously written about the issues with Equity for Early Employees in Early Stage Startups.

CTO Hire 329
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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. ————-.

Japan 292
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Crossing the Chasm is a Major Startup Challenge

Startup Professionals Musings

Everyone in the business world has heard of the old bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “ Crossing the Chasm ,” but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers. Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a startup.

Startup 254
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[Singapore] Location Based Marketing Association Launches Local Chapter

YoungUpstarts

The Ontario, Canada-based Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA) earlier this month launched LMBA Singapore, its new regional chapter focused on promoting and supporting Asian companies working on location-based services (LBS) market through collaboration, education and research. According to a statement from LBMA , Singapore was chosen as its new Asia hub due to the country’s high smartphone penetration and rich cross-section of LBS players from retailers, agencies, advertisers and media b

Singapore 165
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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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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
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All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces

abovethecrowd.com

Since Benchmark’s investment in Ebay 15 years ago, we have been fascinated by online marketplaces. Entrepreneurs accurately recognize that the connective tissue of the Internet provides an opportunity to link the players in a particular market, reducing friction in both the buying and selling experience. The arrival of the smartphone amplifies these opportunities, as the Internet’s connective tissue now extends deeper and deeper into an industry with the participants connected to the marketplace

More Trending

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[Infographic] 2012 Q3: Software Engineering Salaries in Silicon Valley

YoungUpstarts

Software engineers are extremely high in demand, and over the past few years the growth in their salaries has shown exactly how much in demand they are. California-based executive search and technical recruiting firm Riviera Partners recently crunched some numbers by aggregating salary figures from the highest paying tech companies and from a recent report covering the correlation of tech skills in demand and expected salary ranges.

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ITV results cast light on way forward for traditional TV companies

The Equity Kicker

UK broadcaster ITV announced their results yesterday and the differing fortunes of the two halves of their business show the way forward for traditional TV companies everywhere. The two parts of the ITV business are content production and content distribution. The production business is doing well with shows like Downton Abbey getting large audiences in the UK and selling well abroad, but revenues at the distribution business declined.

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How Do I Get In Touch With a VC?

Rob Go

I got this question on a panel last week, and coincidentally, I had a couple folks on Twitter tweet out the same question. Generically speaking, the question is “how do I get in touch with a potential investor about my company?” I don’t know for sure if this is true, but I have the impression that early stage VC’s as a whole have gotten more accessible than probably any time in the past.

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The end of vaporware

deal architect

It was a striking sight. It was end of day in last week’s Technology Summit after Workday had showed us countless demos of new functionality, when under non-disclosure they announced plans to develop a Recruiting module.

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10 Key Metrics To Take a Startup to the Next Level

Startup Professionals Musings

Entrepreneurs have no trouble focusing on how to build a product, and the good ones know how to find and nurture those first critical customers. Many, however, don’t know how to take their small business to the next level. What I’m talking about here is a level of discipline and skill necessary to collect and analyze the relevant business data, known as metrics.

Metrics 266
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Teeny bit of traction — what next?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. Burgeoning Startup Founder writes: After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit.

Affiliate 261
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Why tech founders can’t hire in early salespeople

The Startup Toolkit

Spoiler: You can’t hire out sales because in the early days it’s about learning, not selling, and hired guns can’t bring back bad news. At their peak, Groupon sales reps made 1250 calls per week to close 4 sales[1]. Once Groupon knew the math of that equation, they could throw money at the problem and scale a sales team. Until you have the roadmap nailed down, you can’t scale sales (it would be like throwing money at a big search campaign before you know your lifetime val

Hiring 51
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Weapons of mass creativity

deal architect

Dennis Howlett has a nice quote from Vishal Sikka of SAP in this blog post. During a recent conversation with Vishal Sikka, exec board member SAP on what might happen as a result of being able to cost effectively mashup.

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7 Keys to Positioning Your Competitors to Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur should spend plenty of time thinking about competitors, and how they relate to your business, but you need to be very careful what you say out loud about them to your team, your investors, and your customers. What you say speaks volumes about how you think about your startup, how smart you are, and your personal integrity. I’ve spent hours talking to startup founders, and heard a thousand startup pitches, and I always listen carefully to what is said (or not said) about compet

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[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.

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6 Clues That You May Be Cool as an Entrepreneur

Gust

Google's Larry Page image via Coolspotters.com. 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.

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The existential threat to on-premise models

deal architect

4 years ago when I interviewed Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho for The New Polymath, the prime driver in the marketplace for SaaS adoption was better economics compared to on-premise. But Sridhar also spoke about agility in SaaS delivery Feature.

Agile 246
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5 Entrepreneur Antidotes to Negativity in a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Throughout my career in small companies and large, I’ve always been appalled by the number of people who seem to complain all of the time. These people don’t seem to realize that they are hurting themselves, as well as other people’s productivity, and the company they are working for. I’ve always thought that I might be overly sensitive, until I saw an old survey done by badbossoloy.com , which claims that a majority of employees spend 10 hours or more a month complaining or listening to others

Startup 247
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Time for Thanks!

Rembrandt Communications

It’s almost Thanksgiving, and that means we are getting ready for the upcoming holidays. Things will get hectic with year-end deadlines, sales and meetings… not to mention all of the activities you have planned with family and friends. But while all of this is going on, don’t forget this little word that can mean a [.].

Sales 174
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[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 164
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The portfolio analysis of industry events

deal architect

I was taken aback by the modesty of Stan Swete’s question “Would you invest multiple days in a future Workday technology summit?” My answer was an easy yes. Workday, with a consistent track record of 3 releases a year and.

Portfolio 239
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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
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The 7 key components of a perfect elevator pitch

Up and Running

Whether you are trying to raise money for your business or just want to perfect your business strategy, a solid elevator pitch is an essential tool for achieving your goals. An elevator pitch can be delivered either verbally, ideally in 60 seconds or less, or as a one-page overview of your business. Think of the elevator pitch as an executive summary that provides a quick overview of your business and details why you are going to be successful.

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Knowing When It’s Time To Sell Your Startup

YoungUpstarts

by Christopher Wallace, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing. For years, the most desirable exit strategy for startup companies was to go public through an initial public offering. A volatile stock market and economic recession have since changed much of this thinking. Today, many startups are succumbing to the temptation to sell their companies early.

IPO 162
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More Innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog Do you see the irony in this? K-Pop The awesome slate at Cognizant Community The journey of an email message The Arctic gold, oil, tourist, shipping, fishing rush Aviation Jet Biofuel The glorious desert Thwarting.

Community 230
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Amazon Top 10 Business Books of 2012

Feld Thoughts

I just found out that Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City made the Amazon Top 10 Business Books of 2012. I’m not a huge “made that list person” but as a writer this is a very cool thing, especially when I look at the other books, and writers, on the list. I’m downloading all of the other books right now and taking them on my two week vacation which is coming up.

Community 148
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Are new entrepreneurial ideas keeping you from getting things done?

The Next Web

My mind is literally overrun with all kinds of ideas all the time. My to do list is filled mostly of personal projects. I’ve started countless spiral notebooks of business ideas and have filled them with research. I wake up in the middle of the night just to write down ideas. I can’t even enjoy watching business-based television shows that focus on improving a business (a la “ Restaurant Impossible ” and “ Undercover Boss “) anymore without getting up to get

Restful 151
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How To Be Successful By Turning Away Customers

YoungUpstarts

by Fred Perrotta , freelance marketer and co-founder of Tortuga Backpacks. Being just be another widget maker won’t get you anywhere. Most market segments can only support one, maybe two, companies. Just being a better version of a competitor isn’t enough. Not everyone will agree that you’re “better.” Others will dismiss you as a lesser or me-too version of the more popular product before learning what makes you different.

Customer 161
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My psychedelic 360 journey

deal architect

As an author, I love flowery, poetic language, so I admired how Jamie Anderson of SAP opens his column at Forbes celebrating The Doors I can hear Ray Manzerek’s analogue keys (pounding bass notes) reverberating through my subconscious as I.

Software 220
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Can enterprise SaaS products be viral?

Version One Ventures

Yammer sreenshot “Going viral” is often the holy grail for Internet startups, who hope to quickly scale to hundreds of thousands of users (then hundreds of millions) with relatively low user acquisition costs. However, in a recent blog post and presentation, Andrew Chen argues that SaaS products aren’t viral: “For consumer internet entrepreneurs that are working on big markets, getting to virality is hard enough.

Viral 149
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Early Seed Financing Terms Endure… Whether We Like It or Not

Genuine VC

Dharmesh Shah had a great post up last week about the lessons learned from raising a mezzanine round of financing. It’s really interesting, but perhaps only applicable to a more limited set of entrepreneurs. However, there was one gem of a small section in there with a more widely acceptable takeaway: “It turns out that the terms from your Series A are most often cut and pasted into your later round deals.

Finance 128
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Are You Building A Business That’s ‘80 Miles Wide and An Inch Deep’?

YoungUpstarts

by Lonnie Sciambi, author of “ Secrets to Entrepreneurial Success “ It never ceases to amaze me how many small business owners think that having multiple sources of revenue, often across multiple market types is a good business model. Or having products that seemingly have application across a series of vertical markets and attempting to penetrate all of them.

Vertical 160
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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.

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Resetting My Priorities

Feld Thoughts

If you’ve been following along at home, you know I’ve had a tough fall. It started with a bike crash in Slovenia, followed by a few weeks in New York where I physically felt awful. Fortunately I was with Amy for her birthday (we celebrate her birthday for most of September), but I underestimated how long it would take me to recover. I ended the three week trip in San Francisco for my mom ‘s 70th birthday, which was wonderful until I got a terrible stomach virus on Sunday mornin

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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