December, 2010

article thumbnail

Social Networking (the Shorter Version) Past, Present, Future

Both Sides of the Table

This blog post originally appeared in serialized form here on TechCrunch. This version is the shorter, ADHD version. If you came here via a direct link you might want to check out the more detailed full version on my blog, which is here. Social Networks: Past, Present & Future. I recently spoke at Caltech at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking,&# the 30-minute video is here and the PowerPoint presentation is here on DocStoc ).

article thumbnail

For Entrepreneurs, Success is Ideas With Follow-up

Startup Professionals Musings

When someone introduces me to an “idea person,” I automatically jump to the down-side conclusion that this person doesn’t do follow-up. Of course there are people who are great at getting things done, but haven’t had an original idea in their life. Great entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates, are great at both. I was with IBM in the early PC days when Bill worked with us to provide PC DOS and other software.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Teaching Entrepreneurship in “Chilecon Valley”

Steve Blank

Teaching in Chile. I’ve spent the last week in Santiago, a guest of Professor Cristóbal García at the Catholic University of Chile as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program. Valaparaiso houses. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what I call “Chilecon Valley” is being talked about continually here. In my next post I’ll share a longer description of my impressions.

Chile 235
article thumbnail

Holiday Reading: 5 of This Year's Best Books for Startups

ReadWriteStart

Ideally, you'll find some time over the next few weeks to curl up with a good story. Or hey, at least that's what I look forward to on vacation. If you are looking for some books on entrepreneurship to read, or even to gift, here are some recommended books from 2010. There were a number of great business books published this year, many of which we reviewed here as part of ReadWriteWeb's " Weekend Reading " series.

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

Building a company that people want to work for

This is going to be BIG.

I just had the pleasure of sitting in on a SinglePlatform team development session—where everyone in the company (they have about a dozen people at the moment) sat down to work through personal styles of work and communication. They sat around a table talking personality types, how they prefer to interact with others, etc. Everyone was having fun because it was clear that they were all working towards making a better and more successful working environment.

article thumbnail

Lean Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses and Startups

crowdSPRING Blog

Small businesses and startups face many challenges when marketing their products and services. Small businesses and startups have minimal brand recognition, are often located in geographic or demographic areas that limit their marketing options, and most have small (or non-existent) marketing budgets. Some marketers advise small businesses and startups to research and create strategic marketing plans.

Lean 129

More Trending

article thumbnail

Ten Executive Titles You Don’t Want in a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. VCs and angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. More executives, or other more creative titles are seen as a big red flag.

CTO Hire 227
article thumbnail

2011

Startup Lessons Learned

Thank you, 2010. I'm excited for 2011, and I want to share some of my plans for the coming year. But before I do, I also feel obligated to take a look back on my plans for last year. I can't believe a whole year has passed since I wrote a blog post called " Towards a new entrepreneurship " laying out my priorities for 2010. Back then, I wrote: "[Here is] an idea that I don't think is too widespread yet: that entrepreneurship is an industry.

Lean 153
article thumbnail

Startup Strategy Roundtable: Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting

ReadWriteStart

During this week's roundtable, one of the questions that I answered was about the One Million by One Million program's plans around supporting social enterprises. Well, 1M/1M is focused on helping businesses generate $1M in annual revenue, whatever be the nature of the business. We see a lot of businesses that can be characterized as social enterprises, ranging from education to rural development businesses.

India 116
article thumbnail

Delicious Closing Leaves a Bad Taste in My Mouth

This is going to be BIG.

This was the first time I had ever heard about del.icio.us (I still like to use the old naming convention)… note the date. This was about three months before Union Square Ventures closed an investment in the company—and a month before I actually joined them fulltime. As I look at my e-mail archive, I had already started to do some project work before my start date, looking into companies, doing some competitive analysis.

Guinea 121
article thumbnail

Twitter Link Roundup #64 – 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!

article thumbnail

3 Advanced Web Analytics Visitor Segments: Non-Flirts, Social, Long Tail

Occam's Razor

The last blog post shared custom analytics reports that you can use to find amazing insights faster, enabling you to create a focused, truly data driven organization. In this blog post I want to continue the let's help make your day-to-day life better path. I'll share three advanced segments that I personally find to be of value in the process of moving from data to actionable insights.

Analytics 118
article thumbnail

Every Entrepreneur Needs to Start With a Prototype

Startup Professionals Musings

It’s a long way from an entrepreneur’s “idea” to a working product with a real market and paying customers. A necessary intermediate step for proof of concept, credibility with potential investors, and communication with your team, is a working prototype. Building a prototype should be an early and high priority task for every startup. A prototype doesn’t need to look great, or be built to scale, but it better accurately translate your vision into something real and tangible.

article thumbnail

Internet/Media: 5 things that will define 2011

Lightspeed Venture Partners

'Some observations from Bipul Sinha about the internet and media industry in 2011. 1. Year of Social Utilities. With over half a billion users and open graph integration, Facebook is the Internet with social graph at its core. This is as much of a game-changer (due to a new distribution model based on the social graph) as going from offline to the Internet was in the 90s.

Internet 114
article thumbnail

Snowflakes in the Valley: What Happens When 40 Nordic Entrepreneurs Visit Silicon Valley

ReadWriteStart

During the holidays, the Web becomes an even more significant part of our lives, connecting us to our relatives and friends around the world. The Internet might be truly global then, but the world of startups still revolves much around Silicon Valley. Together with 40 Nordic entrepreneurs , we decided to take a trip to the startup mecca, looking for opportunities and lessons to learn.

article thumbnail

A Heart Surgeon and an Internet Marketer: Interview with Dr. Mani

Life Beyond Code

I am very inspired by the work of my friend Dr. Mani Sivasubramaniam. Dr. Mani is a heart surgeon. Dr. Mani is also an Internet Marketer. While I have not seen any other heart surgeon who is an Internet Marketer, Dr. Mani is more special than that. He sets aside part of the profits from his Internet Marketing initiatives to help young children with congenital heart diseases.

Internet 106
article thumbnail

Twitter Link Roundup #66 – 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!

article thumbnail

Jason Fried is on Cloud Nine

Growthink Blog

If you aren't familiar with who Jason Fried is, you should be. Jason is the Founder of 37 Signals, makers of Basecamp, with over 3 million users and 2.8 million live projects, arguably the world's most popular project management software. Jason is also the author of Rework, a New York Times bestseller on entrepreneurship, technology, and design. Basecamp is the project management and collaboration tool of choice for the serious entrepreneur.

Cloud 72
article thumbnail

Taking Other People’s Money Changes Your Life

Startup Professionals Musings

By Francine Hardaway, Ph.D. Taking other people’s money to fund your startup changes your life in ways you cannot predict. And many of those ways are negative. I meet with dozens of entrepreneurs a week. No matter how they couch it, they are asking for money. They come to me wanting to know first, will I invest myself? Doubtful, unless I already know them really well, know the company really well, and have some spare cash.

article thumbnail

Gaurav Dhillon 2.0 and His All New Integration Company

Ben's Blog

Snap yo fingers, do yo step. You can do it all by yo self. —Lil Jon, Snap Yo Fingers. Gaurav Dhillon was one of the great enterprise entrepreneurs of the ‘90s and early 2000s. He founded and ran the premier integration company of the era, Informatica, took it public and built it into the number one company in the market. Informatica is currently worth over $4B.

article thumbnail

LivingSocial Co-Founder Explains the Importance of the Pivot

ReadWriteStart

As one of the leaders in the group-buying space, LivingSocial has had a great year, ending the year with $175 million in investment from Amazon earlier this month. But like many success stories, LivingSocial didn't suddenly spring up wholly formed. Indeed, the company has had to pivot several times before landing on their current form - and success.

Cofounder 128
article thumbnail

How To Become Unemployable

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

I am unemployable. I always have been. I always will be. Up until last year employment gave me a morbid fear deep in the pit of my stomach. Even with a successful personal business, living in a house that is paid for, and a dedicated support team in the wings – I still was freaking out about the fact that I don’t think I could hold a job anywhere for anyone.

article thumbnail

Twitter Link Roundup #67 – 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!

article thumbnail

Year in review – Google Style

Start Up Blog

It’s interesting how technology changes the way we interact. In fact, the way we do a year in review is also changing as Google show here with their Zeitgeist 2010 video. I’m sure there is something in this for everyone, not just retrospectively, but the type of stuff that matter in our business prospectively.

article thumbnail

Ten Tips to Make Your Startup Website Memorable

Startup Professionals Musings

Smart people only visit and buy from credible and memorable websites. In the past, if your startup had a website presence, the company was credible by definition. In today’s world, a website is necessary but not sufficient for credibility. Dreamers and gamblers have found out that if the website isn’t validated as credible, it’s probably a scam, and everyone loses.

Startup 230
article thumbnail

SpeedMenu Open to New Customer Base

Austin Startup

SpeedMenu announced today that their mobile menuing, ordering and payment software has entered the beta testing stage with Micros Systems Point of Sale (POS) software. SpeedMenu enables patrons at participating establishments to connect to their tab, order items and pay for their tab – all from their cell phone. Dan Janjigian, CEO of SpeedMenu said “Due to the size of the Micros installed client base, SpeedMenu will begin offering service in every city around the country.

Utah 74
article thumbnail

Startup Strategy Roundtable: Where Should You Raise Money?

ReadWriteStart

During this week's roundtable we had a group of entrepreneurs from the Pune Open Coffee Club gather at the offices of Persistent Systems to participate in the roundtable together. It is a very good format for entrepreneur groups around the world to get together and network around the roundtable programming which happens every week, religiously. First up today was Jacqueline Floro-Pierre with ShopTranslated from China.

article thumbnail

OptimizePress Review – The Easy Way To Make Squeeze Pages, Sales Pages & Membership Sites

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Two months ago, I decided to launch a training program called the 7 Day Bootcamp. In that program, I teach people how to start an internet business in 7 days. I spent a ton of time putting together the videos, resources, task sheets and I really focused on the quality of the content. Then I launched the site. Initially, I just wanted to get it out there, and I didn’t care too much about how it looked.

article thumbnail

Twitter Link Roundup #63 – 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!

article thumbnail

You Think You Screwed Up? Have I Got a Story for You!

Babbling VC

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." Niels Bohr (1885-1962). According to the above quote from Nils Bohr, it's taken me at least ten years to exhaust many of the opportunities for making mistakes. This doesn't mean I won't make any more mistakes nor does it infer that I am now going to rock as a VC.

article thumbnail

How to Survive the Dreaded Due Diligence Process

Startup Professionals Musings

If your startup is great enough to get a term sheet from angel investors or a venture capitalist, the next step for the investor is to complete the dreaded due diligence process. This is the last step of the process, where surprises in the evaluation of the management team, documentation, and personnel problems can derail the investment. Some startups do nothing to prepare for the due diligence process, assuming the people and business plan documents will speak for themselves.

article thumbnail

How to Run Better Presentations & Improve Results

Both Sides of the Table

I sit through a lot of presentations. It’s usually people wanting to raise money and/or persuade me of something. Many of these are not as effective as they could be. 1. Understand Personality Types – One of the benefits of working for a big company (Accenture) was that we had lots of speakers come in and train us in topics like leadership, creativity, presentations, strategy, etc.

Analytics 358
article thumbnail

How to Detect a Toxic Customer

Software By Rob

A month ago I received a sales inquiry via email for my invoicing software package. The prospect asked if we could complete the questions he had attached in a spreadsheet: I will need the attached questions answered in order to proceed as I can’t get them all answered off your website. There were nearly 80 questions, at least half of which could be answered from our website.

article thumbnail

My steady progress

deal architect

I went to my neurologist this week and he compared his notes from my first visit in October to updated tests he performed and his eyes gleamed over and over. Good progress. Come back and see me end of January.

338
338
article thumbnail

10 random online resources for Entrepreneurs (2010 version)

crowdSPRING Blog

Seeing as how it’s the end of another year, I thought I would take a shot at a 10 best list of my very own. But instead of focusing on just one category of thing, I am going to mix it up and make it about various resources any entrepreneur might benefit from. Tools, blogs, Twitter personalities, magazines and newspapers, conferences – any should be fair game for this particular list.

article thumbnail

The Lean LaunchPad – Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Management Science

Steve Blank

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. They are going to get out of the building, build a company and get orders in ten weeks. Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate are co-teaching the class with me (and Alexander Osterwalder is a guest lecturer.

Wiki 311