Mon.Apr 02, 2012

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Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit?

SoCal CTO

Using my StartupRoar as a radar, I came across a great post by Gabriel Weinberg Do you really need a full-time hire for that? Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. The problem is you don't yet have product/market fit, and until you do, you don't really know what to build.

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10 Sure Ways to Get Your Plan Trashed by Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

After struggling to create your business plan for months, every entrepreneur likes to think that their document is inspirational and will reach someone who is smart enough to see the brilliance of the idea, intuitive enough to recognize their business acumen, and enthusiastic enough to offer the money required to make it happen. Every serious investor, on the other hand, has a stack of these in their in-basket (email or real plastic) awaiting review, and is looking for the flaw or less-capable e

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Why I’m Joining The Application Developers Alliance Board of Directors

Feld Thoughts

I spend all of my working time in the domain of software, Internet, and entrepreneurship. Over the past few years I’ve gotten increasingly involved in a handful of political situations – local, state, and national – that directly impact companies either in the ecosystem I’m part of or that I’ve invested in. Many of these political situations stifle entrepreneurship, innovation, or opportunities for these companies.

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How We Fooled Ourselves into Delaying Our Startup’s Launch

viniciusvacanti.com

I remember reading the first few pages of Steve Blank’s book, Four Steps to Epiphany , and thinking two things: This is not exactly a page-turner. This is a really smart way of thinking about startups. Soon after, I started attending the Lean Startup meetup in New York and reading Eric Reis’s writings. I was believer. One of the main principles is to release an early prototype of your idea to potential users to get their feedback.

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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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The Internet Hour

deal architect

The stats in the Infograhic from Intel below are striking, but it’s easy to dismiss what companies as a whole are doing. Nothing smacks you more than the intensity of individual executives. In my book, Tony Prophet who heads operations.

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8 Bad Habits That Are Driving Your Coworkers Crazy

YoungUpstarts

Everyone has bad habits that have a way of showing their face while you’re at work. You may not be the loud talker or the office flirt, but maybe you have a bad habit about coming to work late or spending too much time on Facebook. These habits may not seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but one thing’s for sure – they drive your co-workers crazy.

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Of Ideas And Pitching: Four Thoughts For Founders Facing A Judging Panel

YoungUpstarts

Last week I was invited by the organizers of the ideas.inc Business Challenge to sit as one of the judges on the panel for its semi-final round. It was an incredible – if extremely tiring – experience, but we managed to see through over a dozen pitches in a day. What interesting about that experience was not seeing how startup founders reacted when under pressure.

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What Startups Need to Know About Marketing

ReadWriteStart

One of the hardest things that a startup can do is get its marketing act together. Part of the problem is that entrepreneurs are passionate about creating their business, but not necessarily savvy about setting the right tone for the pitch. Another part is what Marcia Kadanoff, the CEO of OpenMarketing.com says where "many smaller companies can't always find the right mix of marketing skills or people.

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7 Messages You Carry With You ALL the Time

Life Beyond Code

Whether you are doing something or nothing, you are always carrying a few messages with you. These messages include but not limited to: 1. A Promise: You always make a promise to the world. The latest buzzword for that promise is that you always have a personal brand – whether you want it or not. 2. A Story: I have a story. You have a story. You tell this story by who you are because your collective story so far has what made you who you are. 3.

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JOBS Act to Change Startup Funding Landscape

ReadWriteStart

Number of U.S. IPOs by year, 1980-2011, with pre-IPO last 12-month sales less than (small firms) or greater than (large firms) $50 million (2009 purchasing power). [Credit: Prof. Jay Ritter, for testimony before the Senate Banking Committee]. The fact that a great deal of the content produced by tech news sites concerns startup companies might make an observer from another planet think America is a veritable nursery for brilliant business ideas.

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Tattoos and YCombinator Demo Day

This is going to be BIG.

It was June of 2003. I sat in a little ink shop on Rivington Street called Porcupine Tattoo. Emma was tracing the design I had given her--some wrap around barbed wire--onto my arm with a pen. She had flower sleeves of spectacular color. Seven Nation Army was playing. I never really thought much of tattoos. My dad has two on his arms and, after 50 plus years, they've faded quite a bit, blurring at the edges.

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Clarity Is Key When Negotiating with Investors

ReadWriteStart

For any entrepreneur, finding the perfect investor is like a match made in Heaven. But as in any marriage, things don't always go smoothly. And if things get ugly, you can end up in court instead of living happily ever after. To make sure that doesn't happen - and help startups avoid costly lawsuits (another instance where the only people who get rich are the lawyers) I asked Anton Rosandic , a California-based attorney and an entrepreneur himself, for some free advice.

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How can Twitter chat help your business?

Up and Running

One of the best ways for small businesses to build their networks and increase their influence is by participating in Twitter Chats. Twitter chats are Twitter-based conversations that anyone can participate in and are kept on track through the use of a #hashtag , or topic with a hash symbol (“#”) at the start to identify it. There are currently more than 600 ongoing Twitter Chats, ranging from weekly to monthly discussions on a wide variety of topics.

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Relax, and Go Home

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

I had the pleasure last week of hearing the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. For those of you whose “woo” detection meter has just started clicking, well, hang in there, I think you’ll see the business relevance in a moment. The experience of meditating with 3000 people at Royal Festival Hall was refreshing and energizing.

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The Stress and the Straddle

Life Beyond Code

In your heart, you want to stand out from the crowd. There comes the stress right there. The Stress. During the process of you transforming yourself to “stand out,” you are still part of the crowd. When you are there and becoming someone that is not one of them, there is a lot of resistance from all quarters. Think about it – you are working yourself to glory from within a tribe to get yourself stand out of that tribe.

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How Anshul Dayal Leveraged Ebay And Small AdSense Sites To Quit His Day Job

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Hello again dear reader, today we’re hearing from a friend of mine, Anshul Dayal. Anshul is an ex-architect turned animator who worked on the Oscar winning film , “ Happy Feet.” Like almost everyone reading this blog, Anshul was bitten by the online entrepreneur bug and after that there was no turning back.

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Dachis Group Launches Advocate Insight

Austin Startup

Dachis Group launched the second of it's paid SaaS applications today, named Advocate Insight. It's built upon the same big data platform that drives the Social Business Index, Social Portfolio Insights, and the Social Performance Monitor. The product helps to solve the problem of advocate identification for large brands with thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of advocates.

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2 boys & their dad

Start Up Blog

Two young boys had the unfortunate up bringing by a father who was a thief a scoundrel and a drunk. He gave them little support and set the worst possible example for how to lead life as an adult. One of the boys grew up to be just like his father. A thief and scoundrel and a drunk. One of the boys grew up to be a successful businessman and a stand up member of his community.

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Shapiro to keynote Thursday at San Antonio InnoTech

Austin Startup

This is the first of two interviews with Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronic Show. Shapiro is also the author of the best selling "The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream." Matt Scherer, our San Antonio correspondent, has been in touch with Gary, who is delivering the conference keynote Thursday at InnoTech new's locale, the Henry B.

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2 boys & their dad

Start Up Blog

Two young boys had the unfortunate up bringing by a father who was a thief a scoundrel and a drunk. He gave them little support and set the worst possible example for how to lead life as an adult. One of the boys grew up to be just like his father. A thief and scoundrel and a drunk. One of the boys grew up to be a successful businessman and a stand up member of his community.

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The Apps Revolution Manifesto

Venture Chronicles

I’ve been reading a research paper put out by Credit Suisse called The Apps Revolution Manifesto – Volume 1: The Technologies. It’s a fascinating read, if you can get a copy I would encourage you to get a copy (I don’t believe I have distribution rights otherwise I would like a download copy myself). As I read it I am struck by 3 thoughts: 1) Credit Suisse’s thesis is, to paraphrase, that predictions of big on-premise app vendors deaths are premature.

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Walker Twitter Highlights: March 26th – April 1st

Scott Edward Walker

I’m using Twitter as a form of micro-blogging to share interesting blog posts, articles and podcasts relating to entrepreneurship and startups, M&A and legal issues. Below are my five most popular tweets (via bit.ly ) for the past week and a couple of blog-related tweets. If you’d like to see all of my tweets (or an RSS feed of them), you can do so here.

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Fake Grilled Cheese #aprilfools

Jeff Hilimire

Yesterday was April Fools’ Day and my sister passed me a link to Fake Grilled Cheese. I think she found it on Pinterest, you know, the place everyone finds everything (like my Pinterest page where you can find super important things like Fletch disguises and Spider-man memes ). What you see below is the concoction I made with the help of @ryanptuttle.

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Student Startup Offers Quora Like Platform for Profs and Students | The Chronicle of Higher Education

Campus Entrepreneurship

Last week the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about the boom in higher education startups. Today it profiled a few of them, including one created by Stanford MBA student Pooja Sankar. From Jeffrey R. Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Ms. Sankar, who is 31, was inspired to create the service based on her own experience as an undergraduate in India, where she studied at the highly selective Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.

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Multi-Channel Attribution: Definitions, Models and a Reality Check

Occam's Razor

A wise person said: "To guarantee success, spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% of the time solving it." I believe deeply in that quote. In my life I spend an extraordinary amount of time understanding the problem and attempting to define it clearly. As if by magic, I find that it is then much easier to find the optimal solution (or realize none exists!).

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Financial Tips For The Young Worker

YoungUpstarts

by Tara Brookes. From budgeting and saving, to investing and spending, financial decisions are about weighing your choices and making informed decisions. Budgeting. This is a word that most of us women hate to hear and think about (let alone doing it!). After all, who wants to live life with financial limitations? As unattractive as it might seem, though, it will serve you well to buy only what you can afford, not over-spend or go into debt.

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Winners and Losers in the Coming Crowdfunding World

Growthink Blog

This week, the President is expected to pass H.R. 3606 - the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) bill, which includes provisions that for the first time legalize investment-based crowdfunding. While the crowdfunding portion of the bill still needs to go through SEC rule-making, the die is clearly cast that a whole new social networking – based world of start-up and small business investing and financing is coming fast upon us.

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The Single Most Important Way to Get More Out of the New Facebook

Duct Tape Marketing

The Single Most Important Way to Get More Out of the New Facebook This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. You’ve probably read your share of tutorials talking about the new Facebook Timeline changes and how to get the most from them. I’ve even added my own thoughts on the subject, but here’s the deal, not much has really changed. Yes there are what amounts to cosmetic changes to your page that make sense and yes there are lots of people that still want to sell you products and

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