Tue.Jan 22, 2013

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Amazon: The Phantom Menace

deal architect

The MIT Technology Review suggests Amazon is jumping into the advertising game to compete against Google and Facebook. Certainly plausible – advertisers would love to get access to consumer data which drives its recommendation engine. What’s interesting is how many.

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A Post Startup Execs Should Forward to Your Spouse or Partner. 12 Tips for Making it Work

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote a post about how to manage relationships when you’re at a startup or are busy executive. It was based on an excellent book I had just read by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor (his wife). I had images in my brain of all of the stresses I had placed on my wife in the heyday of my startups. We once took a “vacation” in Spain with Tania’s parents but we were in the midst of an M&A transaction so this photo is how my wife & her family remember me on that

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Back to Colombia: Vive La Revolución Emprendedora!

Steve Blank

My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. He’s back to Bogota, Colombia this week for round two. —– Back to Colombia: Vive La Revolución Emprendedora! Lean LaunchPad Colombia starts again today in Bogota with 25 more teams of tech entrepreneurs and at 25 mentors from the country’s universities, incubators, and chambers of commerce.

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The Most Reliable of Innovation Sources: The Calendar

deal architect

Last year I cataloged my major sources of innovation stories. We all have our favorites. Valley watchers focus on local startups. Apple and SAP fanboys hype up every burp in each of their cafeterias. Others like to scan academic papers.

Startup 270
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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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Back to Colombia: Vive La Revolución Emprendedora!

Steve Blank

My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. He’s back to Bogota, Colombia this week for round two. —– Back to Colombia: Vive La Revolución Emprendedora! Lean LaunchPad Colombia starts again today in Bogota with 25 more teams of tech entrepreneurs and at 25 mentors from the country’s universities, incubators, and chambers of commerce.

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How to Protect Your Startup Founder’s Shares

Startup Professionals Musings

In reality, so-called “founder’s” shares are simply common stock, issued at the time of startup incorporation, for a very low price, and normally allocated to the multiple initial players commensurate with their investment or role. But that’s only the beginning of the story. These shares are allocated and committed, but not really issued and owned (vested) until later.

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More Trending

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Urban Airship Meeting Rules

Feld Thoughts

I love Scott Kveton , the CEO of Urban Airship. He and his team are building an amazing company in Portland. If you do anything mobile-related and use push notifications of any sort , or real-time location targeting , you need to be talking to them. But even more impressive is how Scott leads his company. The other day, I got an email from my partner Jason with a photo of the Urban Airship Meeting Rules posted on the wall.

Portland 190
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Do Startup Location Matters Even Matter?

Genuine VC

About a year ago, I wrote a post about how office space is the face of a startup – it communicates both an outward message and provides insight into what’s going on underneath, as the physical environment in which startup employees work inevitably match the company’s story and culture. Recently I’ve been thinking that it’s not just the space of a startup itself which matters, but that perhaps also the location of that office which matters as well.

Boston 169
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[Singapore][Competition] Applications For 14th Start-Up@Singapore Now Open

YoungUpstarts

One of Singapore’s oldest startup competitions – Start-Up@Singapore – is back, this time for its 14th edition. Organized by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Entrepreneurship Society and aimed at encouraging youth entrepreneurship, Start-Up@Singapore started in 1999 as a business plan but has now grown to be much bigger. Its recent edition attracted more than 3,000 teams and 9,000 participants, both locally as well as from countries such as Australia, Canada, Norway, I

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Scenes from Legitimate Front’s Album Release Concert

Feld Thoughts

I’m crazy proud of my partners Jason Mendelson and Ryan McIntyre for their band Legitimate Front. In addition to being VCs, we each have a creative outlet that is super important to us. Mine is writing books ; their’s is creating awesome music. In August, their released the first album from their new band Legitimate Front. The idea of staying up until midnight on a Saturday night at The Fox Theater in Boulder is an odd thing for me, but I showed up and rocked out with them.

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Founders – Don’t Forget To Manage Your Own Personal Finances

YoungUpstarts

We’ve heard it all before – startup founders who try and make every dollar stretch while trying to build “The Next Big Thing” To save money, they do things that run the gamut from eating ramen noodles every night to sleeping over on friends’ couches (until they get thrown out, that is), all the time waiting to hit pay dirt.

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Range, convenience and price – the three axes of retail competition

The Equity Kicker

The big news in the UK business sector this week is that the high street music, voodoo and game retailer HMV has gone into receivership. This won’t be a surprise to many people. Back in 2007 I noted that HMV was the most shorted stock on the London stock exchange and many similar businesses have also gone bust in recent years (Game in the US and Zavvi in the UK spring to mind).

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Documents.Me – Your Important Business Documents On Your Mobile Device

YoungUpstarts

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got various important business documents scattered in different locations. I use DropBox, Google Drive and iCloud, and I have many critical documents scattered in those cloud services that are so buried within I lose track of them. But here’s a service that may help: Documents.Me ( www.documents.me ) is a mobile app that aggregates all those important business documents from private, public and email clouds.

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How To Avoid Disaster In Your Small Business Digital Marketing Efforts

crowdSPRING Blog

Small businesses are changing how they spend their money on digital marketing. These changes are driven, in part, by the growth of social networks and media platforms. For example, in a recent report from BIA/Kelsey , 63% of SMBs said they use social media as a marketing tool for their business. In the last five years, the average number of media used by SMBs for promotion has nearly doubled (see chart below), putting increasing pressure on marketing teams and budgets.

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How To Build Trust With Prospects

Mike Michalowicz

People prefer to do business with other people (or things) who they know, like and trust. It makes sense. But how do you ever compete with established, big companies like Amazon that pretty much everyone knows, likes (well maybe not likes) and trusts. Surprisingly, it’s easy. You do it by achieving greater frequency. Frequency is simply the number of times your prospect sees you or your brand during a specific period of time.

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This Week in Startups

David Cohen

Today I’m in LA visting LaunchPad LA and I had a fun appearance on “ This Week in Startups ” with the always entertaining Jason Calacanis. The video is below. Thanks @Jason for the show, and for all you do for the startup community. If you’re not going to the LAUNCH Festival in March in SF, you’re missing out. Contact me and I’ll see if I can get you a free ticket to attend.

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We Are Austin Tech: Larry Warnock

Austin Startup

This week on We Are Austin Tech: Larry Warnock is the President and CEO of Gazzang, responsible for the company’s leadership, operations, and strategic direction. He brings more than 27 years of operational expertise working with both startups and established technology companies, particularly in the enterprise software and data center tools markets, to his role at Gazzang. [.].

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: TripBucket

crowdSPRING Blog

Did you know that January is the considered by pseudoscience to be the most depressing month ? The holidays are over, the days are still short and, if you live in the Midwest, it means day-dreaming on how you’re going to get out of this icy, cold, snow-filled landscape. Might we suggest this week’s Small Business Spotlight, TripBucket, for your trip- planning daydreams?

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Price Cap Liquidation Preference Windfall Regulators

The Startup Lawyer

Most convertible notes have a price cap as a feature term. Depending on the delta between the price cap and the pre-money valuation of the qualified equity financing, the convertible note investors could receive a windfall in terms of liquidation preference. The Potential Problem Let’s say Series A investors invest at a pre-money valuation that [.].

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12 Tips to Craft More Effective Copy for Your Startup

Early Growth Financial Services

Originally published in Business 2 Community Content marketing is the marketing strategy du jour, but it’s hard to tell your business’ story honestly from the inside. What’s your most effective advice for entrepreneurs who want to write customer-facing copy that WORKS? The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs.

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Inspirational Words for Entrepreneurs That Should be Read Every Day!

Small Business Force

Most entrepreneurs have favorite phrases, sayings or words from which they take their inspiration.What words have inspired you? Today, Master Yoda, brings in wisdom from an outside source � Teddy Roosevelt, famed Rough Rider, 26 th President of the United States and a man whose words have inspired countless people from all walks of life. For Yoda, as an entrepreneur, these words were my guide, my inspiration and still occupy a valuable place on the wall above my desk, so I can see them and be in

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Top-Down Dates

SVPG

In my last article, I discussed how we manage public commitments in an Agile, Dual-Track environment. In that article I talked about those public commitments that are needed to run a business, such as when a customer can count on getting some capability, or when a development partner can plan on testing, or determine what will be available for the upcoming holiday season.

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