Fri.Sep 09, 2011

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Logistics Required Before Approaching Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

Don’t charge the hill until you are “ready.” This probably seems obvious to military types, but I see entrepreneurs violating this rule all the time. They approach key potential investors way too early, trying to talk their way up the hill, with no supporting business plan, and before they have a support team around them. Needless to say, they usually get shot down, and get no second chance.

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It's Lonely at the Top? Guidance for the Early Stage CEO

Small Business Force

So you proved your concept. You have some actual customers, driving real revenue and maybe even have an employee or two. Have enough funding to last a little while, but some nagging doubts. You've never done this before. In fact, you've never really run a business. And now here you are, all alone, trying to figure out how to take that concept, those few customers, that couple of employees and create a sustaining, scalable business.

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More Innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog The logistics of moving the 9 ton Amenemhat II Energy Harvesting Displays Uncle Sam’s App Store Farmer’s Mobile Catastrophe Fleet.

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[Infographic][U.S.] Unemployment By The Numbers

YoungUpstarts

So we all know that the recent financial crisis has left a devastating wake on the American economy – and especially on unemployment – but how bad was it, really? Here’s an infographic that shows the sobering figures. Americans are suffering the highest figures of unemployment since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And if that’s not bad enough, the richest 1-percent of Americans take home almost 24-percent – that’s one-quarter – of the nation’s i

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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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It's Lonely at the Top. Guidance for the Early Stage CEO

Small Business Force

So you proved your concept. You have some actual customers, driving real revenue and maybe even have an employee or two. Have enough funding to last a little while, but some nagging doubts. You've never done this before. In fact, you've never really run a business. And now here you are, all alone, trying to figure out how to take that concept, those few customers, that couple of employees and create a sustaining, scalable business.

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[Survey] [U.S] Small Business Owners Poised For Growth in 2012; Concerns Remain About Economy

YoungUpstarts

Despite all the negativity we hear in the press about the sad state of the economy these days, the latest Citibank small business survey shows that the majority of small business owners believe they are poised to grow or are already in growth mode. According to the results, about 49-percent say they are “holding their own, but poised to grow when the climate is right” and 28-percent indicated they are already growing.

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Entrepreneurs Unplugged With Me – Part 2

Feld Thoughts

Last spring Brad Bernthal and Jill Van Matre turned the tables on me and interviewed me for CU’s Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. Normally I’m the interviewer (with one of Bernthal or Jill) – this time I was the interviewee. We went on for about 90 minutes at which point Bernthal asked me if I’d come back for a part 2 in the fall to cover a bunch of stuff he wanted to get to that we hadn’t yet talked about.

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The One Thing Every Venture Capitalist Wants

Growthink Blog

A venture capital firm is a financial institution that focuses on providing capital, in the form of equity, to companies who offer them the prospects of significant growth. The partners and associates at venture capital firms are known as venture capitalists. The term "VC" or "VCs" applies to both venture capital firms and venture capitalists. Unlike angel investors, who invest their own money, VCs are professional institutions that invest other people's money.

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Kayaks and Startups: Signalling direction on the open water by making a hard turn

This is going to be BIG.

Tweet. I kayak on the waters around Manhattan--which is a ton of fun but can also be a bit precarious when it comes to navigating ferry traffic. A few weeks ago, we were with a group of paddlers and came face to face with a ferry boat heading in our direction. We wound up between it and the pier that it wanted to turn into coming around a bend. The ferry boats in NYC are on pontoon-like structures, and so the worst thing you can ever see as a kayaker is straight through to the other side of the

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Women Business Owners – This Is Your Moment

Up and Running

Yesterday I was sent a link to a study on women owned businesses. While some of the data is a few years out of date, I was caught by this particular piece of information: In 2004, Women owned 10.6 million businesses in the United States. They employed 19.1 million workers–that’s one in every seven employees and their businesses accounted for $2.5 trillion in sales.

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Checking out this Mightybell app

Jeff Hilimire

I read this morning about a new service called Mightybell , which is Gina Bianchini’s new outfit. You might recognize her name as she was the former CEO of Ning. My 1st Mightybell experience. Mightybell, which you can try to sign up for here but they may be out of early invitations, is described by Bianchini as being “…based on a simple idea, which is that you are what you do…People of action think big but break anything down into a series of small steps and you make anyt

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Consumers Exert Ownership

Venture Chronicles

I have written on several occasions about how social network users and online community members have exerted their shared ownership of a service to affect changes in policy and feature. This comes about from the reality that a social network without members isn’t much of anything therefore the users in a network have a purposeful sense of shared ownership.

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Harvard Born Facebook Sees Revenue Soar

Campus Entrepreneurship

Harvard birthed Facebook seems to be performing pretty well. The Daily Brief over at Portfolio.com has short piece on the results of Mark Zuckerberg’s juggernaut. According to the Reuters source, the company hauled in $1.6 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, with about $500 million, or about 31 percent of that revenue, dropping to the bottom line.

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Know Your Battlefield, Pick Your Battles

Small Business Force

An army going into battle would never think to not understand what the topography of the battlefield was, including critical areas that needed to be captured to ultimately defeat the enemy. They would know where the enemy was entrenched and what resources in manpower and armaments they possessed. Additionally, they would know if they had allied forces in the area, what resources they possessed and how, where and when they might be deployed to help.

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9/11?s 10th

OnlyOnce

9/11′s 10th. I wasn’t yet writing this blog on 9/11 (no one was writing blogs yet), and if I had had one, I’m not sure what I would have written. The neighborhood immediately surrounding the World Trade Center had been my home for more than seven years before the twin towers fell, and it continued to be my home for more than seven years after they fell.

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Your Playing Small Doesn’t Serve Anyone

Duct Tape Marketing

Your Playing Small Doesn’t Serve Anyone This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. The single behavior that prevents business owners, or really anyone for that matter, from realizing the incredible potential that lies in their business is playing small. Small is easy, small doesn’t attract attention, small is comfortable, small doesn’t offend, small doesn’t raise eyebrows, small keeps that little voice in your head quiet, small doesn’t hurt as much when you fall – and small keeps you right where yo

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