Tue.Dec 18, 2012

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My next book beckons

deal architect

I average a book every 2 to 2.5 years and am due one in 2014. I don’t just pick on a buzzword like Gamification or Big Data and start writing. I don’t just listen to Valley VCs on what’s hot.

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Bad Business Habits That Make You Hate Your Company

Mike Michalowicz

Bad Business Habits. There was a time that you loved your work. Maybe you started the business yourself, or you joined a company that was going to take you places. But things have changed, and you hate your company. You dread coming to work. The cause of all this loathing may not be them, it may actually be you. After all we have the sole control over what we think of things.

LLC 150
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Building a Startup is Navigating an Obstacle Course

Startup Professionals Musings

It would be no fun if starting a business was simply plotting a straight line between your idea and success, with no challenges along the way. Zigging and zagging amongst the obstacles is the fun part of being an entrepreneur, and it’s what sets you apart from the average worker who knows exactly what he or she has to do every day to get paid. Relish it, or if it scares you, don’t try it.

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Entrepreneurial Re-entry — Businesses for Moms

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Recently Gotham Gal opened the question: What does workforce re-entry mean for the modern mom? She observes that a completely structured environment is unlikely to be fulfilling: I am not so sure that someone who had spent the last ten years at home raising a family has any interest in re-entering at the same speed, level or capacity. I believe most want to re-enter but not after having the flexibility and life that have had for the past ten years.

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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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Share Your Wifi Karma

YoungUpstarts

“Remember to set a password for your WiFi, otherwise you may compromise your online security and attract leeches.” “Bandwidth and mobile data is precious. There’s never enough of it.” “Sharing is for losers.” If these are the views you have towards using WiFi, you won’t quite get the concept of Karma. No, not this karma.

Bandwidth 162
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Startups Looking to Hire CU Students?

Feld Thoughts

In the Startup Communities , I talk extensively about leaders and feeders. I assert than anyone in the startup community should be able to start / create / do anything that is helpful to the startup community. They don’t have to ask permission – there is no VP Activities in a startup community. I also talk about how the students are the precious and most valuable resource of a university.

Hiring 152

More Trending

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On Why We’re Pivoting from Mobile-first to Web-first

Gust

Consider this (emphasis is mine): Ads are the Internet’s tax on users who want free apps and websites. Allmost all free apps and services have ads. Ad-supported companies are akin to the government in the sense that they are both really good at finding ways to charge you without it seemingly coming out of your pocket. Many people’s taxes are taken automatically out of their payroll, so they don’t think of that money as being theirs to begin with.

Mobile 144
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[Singapore] Golden Gate Ventures Invests In Three Local Startups

YoungUpstarts

Singapore-based early-stage technology seed fund Golden Gate Ventures has announced investments into cloud-based inventory and sales management SaaS solutions provider TradeGecko , online grocer RedMart and mobile payment provider Coda Payments. This marks Golden Gate Ventures first investments since its founding in February this year. Co-founders Vinnie Lauria, Paul Bragiel and Jeffrey Paine says that the venture fund’s investment decisions have been based on more than a year spent resear

Singapore 134
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11 Silent Enemies that Wreck Havoc in Life

Life Beyond Code

When you have enemies like these internally, you don’t need external enemies to wreck havoc. 1. Fear of Failure. Every one has fears of failure but your degree of fear of failure will determine your degree of inaction on things that matter. It is not that you won’t take action if you have fear of failure but it is that you will miss treading the edges to make radical progress. [ Please see: Pushed to an edge ]. 2.

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Nexus: Awesome Near Term Science Fiction

Feld Thoughts

Nope – I’m not talking about an Android phone. I’m talking about an amazing book titled Nexus by Ramez Naam. Ramez sent me a pre-release version last month. I read it over my holiday in Mexico while I was recovering from kidney stone surgery. I saved it for the end when I was reasonable rested and cogent – it was amazing. One of my favorite forms of science fiction is what I call “near term scifi.” It’s stuff written two to ten years in the future, usua

Mexico 138
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The Next Web introduces 12 local Startup Awards to celebrate entrepreneurship across Europe

The Next Web

Startup founders and investors across the world love The Next Web, and we love them right back. Today, we’re introducing a new initiative called Startup Awards , in an effort to celebrate entrepreneurship anywhere – though we’re starting in Europe. As you may have heard, we have also partnered with the European Commission to launch a prestigious event called Europioneers to identify and award Europe’s finest technology entrepreneurs.

Europe 126
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ff Venture Capital Holiday Video – 2012

David Teten

We would like to wish you Happy Holidays from ff Venture Capital! This video gives you a sense of our “ fitness office ” during the holidays. If you don’t get the joke, you might want to look at some related memes: planking , batmanning , and owling. There’s also a few shots of my in-office workout. Many thanks to David Lerner @ davidblerner of Venture Studio , and CityState.

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2012 has been ‘the year of mobile’ but the big mobile ad acquisitions were made three years ago

The Equity Kicker

VatorTV had an article this morning reporting on the growth in mobile advertising. They note from the eMarketer chart inset right that US mobile ad spend is up 180% this year to $4.1bn and say that “after years and years of every year being proclaimed as the ‘year of mobile’ it finally happened in 2012”. I wouldn’t argue with that, but the interesting thing is that the landmark mobile adtech acquisitions happened three years ago when Google acquired Admob for $750m in Nov 2009 and Apple followed

Mobile 100
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Learning From Lean

Mucker Lab

I love the lean startup ethos and methodology. It is by far the best thing that has happened to the startup community since the onset of the internet-fuel renaissance in entrepreneurship. These days at MuckerLab, we try to utter the basic concepts (mvp, iteration, hypothesis testing, customer development, etc) as much as possible to help [.

Lean 74
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What Job Are Your Customers Hiring Your Products To Perform?

crowdSPRING Blog

If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner developing a new product or service, how can you figure out what jobs people want done that they have difficulty doing? If you have an existing product or service, how can you improve that product or service to increase sales? Clay Christensen suggests an interesting approach: think about what “job” the customers are hiring your product to perform.

Hiring 77
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My Christmas Gift to You

ConversionXL

Another year coming to an end. Thank you for being a reader of ConversionXL. Here’s my Christmas gift to you. Like the last year, I’m going to do free conversion mini-reviews of my reader websites. I summed up my key learnings from last year’s reviews in this post. In this mini-review I will be pointing out the low hanging fruits – main things you should fix and that will make a difference in your conversions.

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Goals and cars

Start Up Blog

I’m a strong believer in the importance of setting written goals. However, it does seem as though for every person I meet that agrees with their ability to influence life outcomes, there are an equal number of people who dismiss the concept of goal setting as having an on achievement. So here is the simplest explanation I can provide for how goals work: Setting a written goal creates selective perception.

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Colbrook Kitchen

crowdSPRING Blog

It’s the most wonderful time of the year– when all of us are scrambling to finalize our gifts and holiday plans. There is nothing more daunting than finding last minute presents, especially if you happen to be struck with the writer’s block equivalent of gift giving. Let us help you jog your brain for some ideas, whether you’re looking to fill a box under the tree or for stocking stuffers.

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3 Potent Ways to Use Social Media in Sales

Duct Tape Marketing

Smart salespeople have learned to tap the power of social media, but sadly, many companies still see social media tools and networks as a pointless and even scary place for their sales teams to focus. photo credit: francistoms via photopin cc. It’s amazing to me that this mentality remains. I realize that there is potential for confusion if sales reps are left “out in the wild” to create their own messages and brand assets, but the downside of restraining this powerful approach is far greater.

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More Charts: Murders, GDP, Inequality

Diego Basch

I decided to plot country murder rates against gross domestic product per capita, and also against Gini coefficients. I scraped the data from these sources (.csv files at the end of the post if you’d like to use them). GDP per capita (Wikipedia). Intentional Homicide Rates (Wikipedia). Gini coefficients (World Bank). This is what Murders vs GDP per capita look like.

Chile 66
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Goals and cars

Start Up Blog

I’m a strong believer in the importance of setting written goals. However, it does seem as though for every person I meet that agrees with their ability to influence life outcomes, there are an equal number of people who dismiss the concept of goal setting as having an impact on achievement. So here is the simplest explanation I can provide for how goals work: Setting a written goal creates selective perception.

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Now I have two Engauge trophies. Gadgets and ping-pong. Sounds about right.

Jeff Hilimire

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The Power of Thinking Long-Term

crowdSPRING Blog

Amazon is an unusual company. It focuses on the long-term (typically 10 to 20 years) instead of short term (typically quarterly earnings). For example, in talking about the Kindle, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, offers the following insight: Go back in time when we started working on Kindle almost seven years ago. There you just have to place a bet.

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Hire For Cultural Fit Over Competence

Feld Thoughts

This first appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s Accelerator series last week under the title Cultural Fit Trumps Competence. Also, I’m going to be doing online office hours with the WSJ on Friday 12/21 at 3pm ET – join and ask questions! The first people you hire in your startup are critical to your company’s success. So it’s easy to say that you need to hire the “absolute best people you can find.

Hiring 173
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Programming Your Culture

Ben's Blog

'I do this for my culture To let them know what a n@#!a look like when a ni&%!a in a Roadster Show them how to move in a room full of vultures Industry is shady, it needs to be taken over Label owners hate me, I''m raising the status quo up I''m overcharging n$%^a for what they did to the Cold Crush —Jay-Z, Izzo (H.O.V.A.). Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers.

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Programming Your Culture

Ben's Blog

I do this for my culture. To let them know what a nigga look like when a nigga in a Roadster. Show them how to move in a room full of vultures. Industry is shady, it needs to be taken over. Label owners hate me, I’m raising the status quo up. I’m overcharging niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush. —Jay-Z, Izzo (H.O.V.A.). Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers.