October, 2011

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Lead, Follow or Get the Fuck Out of the Way

Both Sides of the Table

Today’s post courtesy of the Dave McClure school of vocabulary. About a month ago I was meeting with a seasoned entrepreneur. After 10 minutes I felt like we were old buddies because we had both been through the trenches of startup tech land and had had similar experiences. He was recounting one of his higher profile startups to me. He founded the company, raised a bunch of money, built the product and established a good reputation and market position.

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Nokia as “He Who Must Not Be Named” and the Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. (Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!) I presented to 1,000’s of entrepreneurs, talked to 17 startups, gave 12 lectures, had 9 interviews, chatted with 8 VC’s, sat on 4 panels, talked policy with 2 government ministers, 2 members of parliament, 1 head of a public pension fund and was in 1 TV-documentary.

Finland 324
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50 Great Ways To Use QR Codes In The College Classroom

YoungUpstarts

QR codes were first created by Toyota to track vehicles in manufacturing, offering a small barcode that can be quickly decoded. That was 1994, and now, almost 20 years later, QR code technology is experiencing a revival — but not in the automotive industry. The small, square codes are ubiquitous, showing up on everything from flyers to beer bottles, allowing anyone with a smart phone to quickly scan and find out more information with the code.

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Savvy Entrepreneurs Adopt More Good Habits

Startup Professionals Musings

Most of the entrepreneurs I know realize they have some bad habits, like maybe procrastination or not listening well, so they focus on dropping these. New studies indicate that a more productive approach would be adopting new good habits and behaviors that clearly move your business forward, like good time management and implementing customer recommendations.

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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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Valuation Methods 101

Gust

This is the first of a six part series on different methods used by angel investors to arrive at pre-money startup valuations. Below is a brief description of each of the most popular methods. Detailed descriptions will be published over the next few weeks: The Scorecard Method: This method compares the target company to typical angel-funded startup ventures and adjusts the average valuation of recently funded companies in the region to establish a pre-money valuation of the target.

Valuation 174
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The Helsinki Spring

ReadWriteStart

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship. I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. (Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!

Finland 158

More Trending

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The Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship. —— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University.

Finland 324
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Scavado – No More Stringing Recruitment Candidates Along

YoungUpstarts

Even though online professional networking sites and services like LinkedIn and BranchOut have changed the face of human resource recruitment, there’s still room for continued disruption. In fact, a new web-based talent sourcing solution aims to make Boolean search string training for recruiters – which they traditionally rely on – obsolete: Scavado , a simple, yet powerful, alternative to costly Boolean search training that quickly yields relevant prospects to recruit.

CTO Hire 173
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Twitter Link Roundup #105 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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!

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SayAhh’s Revenue Projections

Feld Thoughts

While Jane was building SayAhh’s revenue projections , Dick focused his attention on building the expense side of the projections. He procrastinated for a few weeks because he was deep in product development, but surfaced a few days ago when he realized they had an investor meeting coming up and really should have at least a basic financial model ready in case the investor asked about it.

Revenue 127
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Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Check Out Stanzr

ReadWriteStart

During today's roundtable, we had some excellent discussions of product marketing for a couple of different concepts. The 1M/1M Channel on Stanzr. The first of these discussions was about a new social media marketing platform called Stanzr, from San Francisco-based Voluble, that we are using at 1M/1M. Taariq Lewis, the founder of Voluble, is a 1M/1M premium entrepreneur.

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Netflix Redux: Is It Ever OK to Fire Your Customers?

Both Sides of the Table

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. A month ago I applauded Reed Hasting’s bold decision to split his business into two components. Today he’s announcing that they’re backing out of this decision. Netflix as a service has always prided itself on movie recommendations that are tailored specifically to you plus user ratings on the quality of films.

Customer 287
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People who don't run your company

This is going to be BIG.

I asked a company the other day whether or not they were going to take advantage of a great event here in NYC. Its an opportunity to pitch Sony on a biz dev deal --a no brainer for nearly any company given the scope of Sony's areas of interest. ( applications are due this Monday the 31st ) The company said no because their main angel investor didn't think it was a good idea to let an audience see their pitch.

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Management Quality Assurance

Ben's Blog

You’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself. —Ice Cube, Check Yo Self. Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization­—Human Resources—should look like. The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want.

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Twitter Link Roundup #108 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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!

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Congratulations IndexTank!

K9 Ventures

IndexTank (@ IndexTank ) has been acquired by LinkedIn ! Huge congratulations to the entire IndexTank Team and especially to IndexTank’s founder Diego Basch (@ dbasch ). Diego and I first met in 1997. I had recently finished the Master of Software Engineering ( MSE ) program at Carnegie Mellon and gone full time on my first startup. Diego had just started in the MSE program.

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How to get beta signups for your startup in 9 steps

thenextweb.com

login / register. The Next Web Blog. Conference. Got News? tips@thenextweb.com. -->. Social Media. Part of The Next Web family. Home. About Us. Team. Contact. Energy Goes Social On Facebook. Grammy CMO spells out social media savvy. Reprise for iOS makes iTunes look ugly. All Stories. Top Stories. Channels. Apple. Apps. Daily Dose. Design & Dev.

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When Bad News Is Actually Good News

Babbling VC

The European Investment Fund (EIF) put out a working paper recently that initially sounds like bad news. Fortunately, for those of us in the market long enough, it's actually good news. As a side note, I'm glad to see this paper come out from the EIF. For those of you not in the know, they are one of the largest limited partners ( LP's : investors in venture capital funds) in Europe and are basically in almost all the funds throughout the market.

LP 82
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Never Ask a Busy Person to Lunch. Here’s Why:

Both Sides of the Table

OK. I know with a title like that I’m going to subject myself to people thinking I’m just being a grumpy, exclusive VC. That’s not the point. It’s honest advice so please judge once you’re read the post. I’ll keep it short. Meals or coffee are a great way to build rapport with other people and since I’m an ENTP I love breaking bread as much as the next guy.

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The Synthetic Cloud

deal architect

SAP announced recently it was moving to smaller, more frequent modifications to its Business Suite every three months: “In the past, we have delivered innovation with enhancement packages or releases in a bundle, but our customers gave us clear feedback.

Cloud 297
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Small business tips: mobile technology, the iPad, and your business

crowdSPRING Blog

Last week I was struck by a news story that was unusual in several respects. I turned on the news to see video of a small group of rock climbers rappelling down the exterior of the Washington Monument. The sported the typical gear one would expect to see on such folks: harnesses, helmets, ropes, and what-not. They were also carrying small hammers and tapping away at the stone as they slowly made their way down the 555-foot tall obelisk.

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Congratulations IndexTank!

K9 Ventures

IndexTank (@ IndexTank ) has been acquired by LinkedIn ! Huge congratulations to the entire IndexTank Team and especially to IndexTank’s founder Diego Basch (@ dbasch ). Diego and I first met in 1997. I had recently finished the Master of Software Engineering ( MSE ) program at Carnegie Mellon and gone full time on my first startup. Diego had just started in the MSE program.

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How the iPhone Got Tail Fins – Part 2 of 2

Steve Blank

Read part 1 of this post for background. By the early 1920’s General Motors realized that Ford, which was now selling the Model T for $290, had an unbeatable monopoly on low-cost automobile manufacturing. Other manufacturers had experimented with selling cars based on an image and brand. (The most notable was an ad by the Jordan Car company.) But General Motors was about to take consumer marketing of cars to an entirely new level.

Jordan 300
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10 Quotes That Tag You as a High Risk Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur needs to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and realistic about their reasons for choosing the startup route. For any entrepreneur, even the best business opportunities, if entered for the wrong reasons, will likely fail. Some of these reasons seem obvious, so forgive me for restating, but I still hear them too often.

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The State of Venture Capital and the Internet

Both Sides of the Table

Early today I gave a keynote at the VCJ Venture Alpha conference here in San Francisco. I was asked to speak about the topic of “what is going on in the venture capital world and what is the next big thing after social networking?”. Future of VC Internet – Tough topic, but what the heck? Next week I promised to follow up on PE Hub , one of the main journals VCs read about our industry, with a detail description of some specifics that are happening.

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The full story of “the one important thing” for startups

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Get more involved in the Bay Area startup community: Join the WebWallflower mailing list to get a calendar of upcoming startup events and exclusive discounts sent right to you every two weeks. (Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. --> You might tacitly assume that I have no major blind spots when it comes building little tech startups. I pontificate on concepts that I learned through hard work, luck, observation, and failure, so surely I have all my bases covered.

Metrics 273
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Small business and startups: great reads from the business press

crowdSPRING Blog

I have been spending some time recently with the online business press. Lots of great articles and information out there, so I thought it was time for another edition of the Business Press roundup! It is an incredibly dynamic time in the world of startups and small business: the economy continues to freak, but at the same time we are seeing a record number of new businesses formed every month.

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Memo to Infosys

deal architect

You guys are killing me. I make a living blogging about innovation, writing books about it, presenting on it. Innovation should make people go “wow” – your presentation at OOW made the lady next to me go to sleep. Last.

Offshore 258
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20 Essential TED Talks For Entrepreneurial Students

YoungUpstarts

Although a strong education is by no means a requirement for business acumen or success, many still saunter off to college and further hone what they’ve already got. Those walking on or logging onto campus with visions of profits and genius dancing in their heads shouldn’t relegate their learning within those boundaries exclusively. They should drink up any potentially valuable insight they can, and the venerable TED offers up one such conduit.

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Ten Tips on How to Get the Entrepreneur X-Factor

Startup Professionals Musings

To be successful as an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be a fabulous person, but it helps. Some people, and some entrepreneurs, have that something extra, like Simon Cowell is searching for on the X-Factor , that you can’t quite put your finger on. But the entrepreneurs that have “it” seem to be able to effortlessly get team members, investors, and customers to follow them anywhere.

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Why You Should Ban Laptops & iPads at Board Meetings

Both Sides of the Table

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. I haven’t had too many board meetings lately so I want to get this timely post out now lest somebody think I’m talking about their company or board in particular. This is a post about ALL boards. Back when I ran board meetings as a CEO, the biggest annoyance was Blackberrys. You would always be able to tell what was going on by seeing the unhealthy infatuation board members had with staring at their crotches.

Agile 291
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Two Important Reports from the NVCA: VC Fundraising Declines 53% in Q3 2011 and U.S. Medical Innovation is in Crisis

Pascal's View

Kelly Slone, director of the Medical Industry Group of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA ) posted an important article on October 7 on the NVCAccess blog, clearly calling out that the unintended consequences of FDA regulations have precipitated a full-blown crisis in medical innovation in the U.S. This crisis has already damaged America’s global competitiveness and slowed medical innovation in the U.S.

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Episode 3: Smart Bear Live!

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s Episode 3 my little “ Loveline for startups. ” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast. It’s awesome having podcasting experts on board, Bob with pithy advice and Patrick producing and organizing the show which is a lot more work than you might imagin

Cofounder 208
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Small team? Fix your life with a non-virtual assistant

The Startup Toolkit

Like many others, I tried “outsourcing my life” using a digital assistant. A year and a thousand bucks later, I’ve received one department store recommendation and an admittedly adequate spreadsheet of competitive research. I have since cancelled. Why didn’t it work for me? I think I just didn’t trust it/them/him/her (that I even have this ambiguity is indicative of the issues).

Lean 46
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10 Famous People Who Flourished After Being Laid Off

YoungUpstarts

Being fired is by far one of the worst experiences a person can go through, but one thing’s for certain – you’re not alone. Some of the most talented people in Hollywood, politics and sports have been laid off at some point in their careers, but their resilience and strong work ethic helped them move past the loss and keep their eye on the prize. Here are 10 famous people who flourished after being laid off: 1.

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Smart Entrepreneurs Follow the Zig Zag Principle

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.