Both Sides of the Table
MARCH 10, 2012
When I started my first tech company in 1999 I had pretty good tech chops and had led teams but had very little exposure to many other things that matter in a startup including sales, marketing & business development. Like most first-timers, I learned the hard way. Negotiating was a subset of every activity in a startup – it really was a way of life.
SoCal CTO
MARCH 12, 2012
I've recently received several emails from people looking for a technical cofounder for their startup. I promised I would write this post with some thoughts and ideas on the topic. Here's an example of that kind of email. "I'm looking for a partner / cofounder who can not only head the technical aspects and build a working model of the site, but someone with the connections to put a great development team together when we need it.
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Genuine VC
MARCH 14, 2012
We at NextView have been thinking about and looking for investments in seed-stage startups which leverage the megatrend of transitioning computing away from a standard fixed-web PC world. Of course that includes “mobile-first” applications and companies which ride the adoption of tablet devices (more on those in upcoming posts). But this exploration also includes alternative user-interfaces and inputs, like gesture controls.
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 13, 2012
Startup Weekend Singapore 2012 participants. After 54 hours of intense product development and business pitching at Startup Weekend Singapore over the weekend, Team Snapsell – which developed a mobile application which allows users to sell stuff on a mobile-first marketplace – beat over 40 other ideas to emerge victorious as grand winner of the event.
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
David Teten
MARCH 12, 2012
Fitness/life guru Tim Ferriss just posted my guest article on ff Venture Capital ‘s approach to building a fitness office. (Thanks Tim!) I’ve attached below my original, much more detailed blog post about the details of how we’ve designed our office to help people stay healthy and be as productive as possible. (UPDATE: ff Venture Capital was recently profiled in The Roger, an online magazine that profiles creative workspaces.
crowdSPRING Blog
MARCH 16, 2012
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 12, 2012
When you’ve made it to the management level, it’s tempting to think that you’re in a comfortable position where you don’t have much room for improvement. But while you may be a great manager now, there is always the possibility of becoming a better one, if only you just know how. These blogs offer a look into great ideas for growing and improving in your role as a manager, creating a better workplace and getting more results from the people you manage.
Genuine VC
MARCH 14, 2012
We at NextView have been thinking about and looking for investments in seed-stage startups which leverage the megatrend of transitioning computing away from a standard fixed-web PC world. Of course that includes “mobile-first” applications and companies which ride the adoption of tablet devices (more on those in upcoming posts). But this exploration also includes alternative user-interfaces and inputs, like gesture controls.
Agile VC
MARCH 13, 2012
How to Evaluate Firms for a Seed VC. How To Think About The Future. Home. About Me. AGILEVC My idle thoughts on tech startups. Yahoo! vs Facebook: Lame Lawsuit, Good Timing. March 13, 2012. Yesterday Yahoo! filed it’s much awaited lawsuit against Facebook for patent infringement. New Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson alluded to their plan a couple weeks ago but the IP lawsuit itself was only official late afternoon yesterday (and now public).
The Equity Kicker
MARCH 13, 2012
Please take a few minutes to read the passage below about the upcoming Capital On Stage conference in London. Arjen Strijker (the conference organiser) and I had a meeting of minds when we spoke last week about the importance of demystifying venture capital, it is one of the reasons I write this blog, it is why he started his conference and it is why I’m promoting it now.
Up and Running
MARCH 15, 2012
Last week’s post about the pros and cons of remote employees discussed how to tell if a remote worker situation would be a good fit for your company. Today, guest author Lior Levin provides tips to help you get up and running with remote employees or offices. Remote workers make up of roughly 10 percent of America’s workforce, according to MIT Sloan Management Review , and current cost-cutting trends suggest that this trade of cubicles for cafes and kitchen tables will continue.
Life Beyond Code
MARCH 12, 2012
My friends Chris Edmonds and Lisa Zigarmi have written a wonderful book called Positivity at Work Tweet. [Full Disclosure: Apart from Chris and Lisa being friends, the book is also published by our publishing company ThinkAha ]. First, quick bios of the authors: S. Chris Edmonds is a speaker, author, and senior consultant with the Ken Blanchard Companies.
Growthink Blog
MARCH 13, 2012
I've spent years starting and growing my own companies and helping thousands of entrepreneurs do the same. And one thing that's helped me and others succeed is keeping track of key numbers. We refer to these number as KPIs or key performance indicators. KPIs allow us to better manage our businesses. Since they allow us to clearly see what figures correlate with success, and allow us to focus on improving them month after month.
A Crowded Space
MARCH 13, 2012
Every marketplace deals with disintermediation: oDesk, eBay, Airbnb, CustomMade, and Etsy. No matter what, if you take a fee, some people will try to cut you out of the loop. This is known as disintermediation. . From Wikipedia: In economics, disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries in a supply chain: “cutting out the middleman”. . Disintermediation initiated by consumers is often the result of high market transparency, in that buyers are aware of supply prices direct from the manufa
deal architect
MARCH 16, 2012
Spring is in the enterprise software air. 3 signs this week were about transition and optimism. Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO of Workday presented to the same CIO audience I did at Stanford this week. He did it without slides in a.
Startup Professionals Musings
MARCH 12, 2012
One of the biggest red flags I see in many Internet-related business plans today is advertising as the initial revenue stream, or a key part of it. If challenged, the founder usually cites the Facebook business model (free service to users, revenue from ads), but forgets that Facebook has had several hundred million in funding, and has been profitable only in the last couple of years.
Steve Blank
MARCH 14, 2012
Today, the second half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the final four (the first five are here.). Team ParkPoint Capital. This team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that their market research proved that their business was providing credit to underbanked customers. 8 weeks later they ended up as a financial service provider for immigrants.
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 15, 2012
You’ll find e-commerce sites touting almost any kind of product on the Internet. Footsy ( www.footsy.in ) an e-commerce startup from India, is little different – it focuses on socks. And very colorful ones, at that. Founded by Seema Seth, 32, and Pooja Mehta, 27, Footsy was pretty much the culmination of the founders’ desire to having their own product-led business. “For me, Footsy is a promise of both business viability and dreams,” says Mehta, a graduate of Mudra
deal architect
MARCH 11, 2012
In a previous incarnation, a vendor in Long Island had accumulated or developed at least 4 different versions of General Ledgers. Of course, these days there are several vendors who can make similar claims. And with their multi-tenancy plans, Brangelina.
Startup Professionals Musings
MARCH 16, 2012
After the idea, it’s all about execution. In fact, it’s not clear that even the idea is all that important. Most investors tell me that an A entrepreneur with a B idea is much more fundable than a B entrepreneur with an A idea. It’s great to be a visionary, inventor, thinker, or a dreamer, but none of these matter in the business world if you are not also a do-er.
Rembrandt Communications
MARCH 14, 2012
As a small business owner, you may think it’s impossible to get a big, feature story about your company in one of your favorite publications, especially if you don’t have the money to hire a publicist. And while a publicist has the skills to build buzz and cultivate relationships with the media, it is possible [.].
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 13, 2012
The information you post online is not safe. That’s right – according to a study by Stanford University, even anonymous data posted online are collected via personal web browsers and then sold. Some shocking statistics: 8.1 million people in the United States fall victim to identity theft every year, and a further 1.6 million households have had their bank accounts compromised.
deal architect
MARCH 11, 2012
As I had lunch with my daughter a couple of days ago and she excitedly described various trips she has coming up, and as I get ready for my own travel this week, I thought about the subtle and not.
Startup Professionals Musings
MARCH 14, 2012
All the experts these days are talking about the increasing need for customer focus and maximizing sales. Typically entrepreneurs and even professional sales people think this means more emphasis on the customer selling process, when in fact it really means spending more time understanding the customer buying process (view from the customer). According to Kevin Davis, as outlined in a recent book “ Slow Down, Sell Faster!
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 13, 2012
By now the blogosphere, twitterverse, and even mainstream media is abuzz with the absurd decision that Yahoo has made to sue Facebook over ten software patents with the assertion that Facebook’s entire business is based on Yahoo’s patented inventions. My partner Jason Mendelson called this on 2/28 when he wrote his post Goodbye Yahoo! It was nice knowing you and Fred Wilson weighed in this morning with his post Yahoo!
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 13, 2012
Whether you work at home every day, need a place to finish up projects from the office, or have to work on homework from college classes , having a comfortable and organized home office can be essential to getting ahead and maximizing productivity while you’re working on just about anything. Luckily, there are many ways that you can create an amazing place to work in your home on a shoestring budget.
deal architect
MARCH 14, 2012
I was invited to present on themes from The New Technology Elite to an Innovative CIO executive session at Stanford. It attracted a wide set of CIOs and other IT leaders from various US, Brazilian, Dutch, Indian, Saudi Arabian and.
Startup Professionals Musings
MARCH 10, 2012
The most successful entrepreneurs and executives I have seen are savvy business people first, and experts in their field second. This may seem counter-intuitive to technologists, especially in an era when technology seems to be driving the world. Yet the sad truth is that a technology not focused on a real problem is not a business, and will probably fail in the marketplace.
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 14, 2012
It dawned on me last night that as of tomorrow TechStars will have three programs running at same time with about 40 companies actively engaged in programs in Boston, New York , and San Antonio. Last week David Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of TechStars announced that he had raised a new $28 million seed fund called Bullet Time Ventures II. The final companies are being selected for The Kinect Accelerator.
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 14, 2012
Business can be a dirty business. And the language of business can be hard to understand. For beginners in the field (or the more analog of the bunch), business acronyms old and new can confuse and ultimately disappoint if not correctly understood. The more market-savvy professionals already know some of these standard shortened phrases, and business glossaries abound.
deal architect
MARCH 14, 2012
on the innovation blog The Toto Washlet Impossible Chemistry The Old Farmer’s Almanac Google’s HUD Eyeglasses?
Occam's Razor
MARCH 12, 2012
Is there anything in the analytics space that is so full of promise and hype and sexiness and possible awesomeness than "big data?" I don't think so. So what is big data really? No one quite knows. As I interpret it, big data is the collection of massive databases of structured and unstructured data. The data sources include traditional (now considered puny) sources like corporate ERP / CRM systems and non-traditional (massive) sources like every technical ping from every human or
Feld Thoughts
MARCH 10, 2012
For all of you out there who are wondering, Amy is doing fine. We’re in Boulder, she’s happy, in some pain, but enjoying the delightful impact of Percocet, and making her way through MI-5 Season 8. Thanks for all of the support, emails, and kind words. I’m about to head out for a five hour run (broken into three separate segments) in preparation for the 50 miler I’m doing in April after I help her take a shower (which ordinarily I would be excited about), but first I thou
YoungUpstarts
MARCH 15, 2012
by Jason Womack, author of “ Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More “ The curse for many of us modern-day movers and shakers is that we never seem to have enough time to do everything that needs doing. There simply aren’t enough hours in the work day (or even the work week!) to accomplish everything on our to-do lists.
deal architect
MARCH 11, 2012
On the New Florence blog Nano Quadrotors Psychedelic Bean The Online Pinboard Long ride for some gum!
Up and Running
MARCH 13, 2012
This is a guest post from Amina AlTai , Marketing Director at Imagemme, a New York-based packaging design and branding agency. Building a memorable brand is more important than ever. In this climate of unlimited choices, your brand has to be cohesive, memorable and differentiated to captivate consumers and eventually capture mind share. Branding isn’t simply a visual identity, and a lot of start-ups go wrong by undervaluing the importance of branding initiatives.
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