Both Sides of the Table
NOVEMBER 27, 2011
There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. And there are very few people who so consistently exceed my expectations when I hear them speak. I find myself nodding – even when the topic is one I don’t expect to agree with such as “fail fast.” This week was no exception.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 27, 2011
Many of the businesses and entrepreneurs I know still don’t realize that they need to use and understand the Internet, even if their interest is not e-commerce. Maybe you have also heard a lot of Internet terms, but are not sure you can explain how, when, and why they are relevant to your business success. Here is a quick test of your real Internet savvy.
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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
NOVEMBER 14, 2011
(Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. --> This is a guest post from Robert Graham — a solo bootstrapper who blogs about the experience. Robert has been working in software since 2005. He is a Ph.D. dropout who spent time working for Google. Someday he’d like to work for himself. When I started marketing my first webapp almost two years ago, I started the way I imagine most people do: online.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 1, 2011
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. Mark Twain. Venture Capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year. Running a company is distinctly different from simply having operating experience – (working in bus dev, sales or marketing.
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
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 25, 2011
The trouble with a book titled “ Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps ” is that most people will assume it’s meant for games – or at the very most, application – designers. But “ Gamification by Design ” by gamification expert and chair of the Gamification Summit Gabe Zimmerman, and entrepreneur and veteran technologist Christopher Cunningham, is a lot more than that.
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 7, 2011
These days I’m regularly exposed to patent trolls. Sometimes I read about them, sometimes friends email me about them, and sometimes companies I’m an investor in gets sued by them. Whenever I read the claims in the lawsuits, I often think that the claim in question is “obvious.” For those of you out there who know how patents are supposed to work, for something to be patentable it needs to be “non-obvious” as well as “unique.” While the specific cl
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Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 18, 2011
If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels. In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
NOVEMBER 21, 2011
(Powered by LaunchBit ). This is the conclusion of Episode 3 of Smart Bear Live; see the original post for details and the first half. You can listen by subscribing to my podcast on iTunes , or it’s enclosed in this blog’s RSS feed , or you can just download the mp3 of the first hour. Why listen? Especially if you don’t normally listen to podcasts?
Gust
NOVEMBER 1, 2011
We recently started a series of posts on establishing the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue startup companies for purposes of investment by seed and startup investors. The Venture Capital Method (VC Method) was first described by Professor Bill Sahlman at Harvard Business School in 1987 in a case study and has been revised since. It is one of the useful methods for establishing the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue startup ventures.
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 29, 2011
Entrepreneur Finder ( www.EntrepreneurFinder.com ) is a free interactive resource for entrepreneurs, skilled professionals, students and investors to find each other and designed to help startup companies grow. A startup looking for investment, mentorship, or specific talent to help grow your company? Check. A student looking for internship opportunities in a startup?
Feld Thoughts
NOVEMBER 28, 2011
If you are a entrepreneur in Colorado who is working on something related to the Internet, please consider signing the following letter to Senator Udall and Senator Bennet opposing the Protect IP (PIPA) Act. I’ve written why I believe PIPA is effectively censorship and an incredibly dangerous and destructive bill to our economy, entrepreneurship, the Internet, and free speech.
uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com
NOVEMBER 17, 2011
Magazine. Network. Shop. Job Board. Smashing Directory. Coding. UXDesign. Wordpress. Designinformer. RSS. Facebook. Twitter. Newsletter. All categories. Coding. Design. Graphics. Inspiration. CSS. Freebies. HTML5. JavaScript. Photoshop. Typography. Usability. Wallpapers. WordPress. Smashing Magazine. An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability. By Justin Mifsud.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 14, 2011
Many budding entrepreneurs struggle mightily with that first step – out of their comfort zone and into the unknown. They keep asking people like me whether the time is right, and the truth is that there’s never an ideal time to start your own business. It’s like starting a personal relationship, if you wait for exactly the right time, you’ll never do it.
crowdSPRING Blog
NOVEMBER 4, 2011
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!
Gust
NOVEMBER 14, 2011
After you have successfully attracted angels or venture capital with your business case, your million dollar product idea, and you have a signed term sheet, there is still one more hurdle to overcome before investors write the check. This is the dreaded “due diligence” process. For no good reason, this process seems shrouded in mystery, when in fact it is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan.
David Teten
NOVEMBER 8, 2011
(This is the first of three blog posts on financial modeling for startups.). While some entrepreneurs may think that financial models are just a formality that needs completing in order to placate straight-laced venture capital types, the reality is that models can be essential tools for creating and analyzing the roadmap an entrepreneurial venture should follow.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 4, 2011
This post will make you money. It will teach you about conversion optimization – how exactly to do it, based on all the best research and experiments. Why do conversion optimization? It is the cheapest, quickest way to increase sales online. Think about this: if you’re currently converting at 1% (1% of your visitors buy your stuff), but can increase that to a mere 2%, you’ve doubled your sales.
ReadWriteStart
NOVEMBER 14, 2011
We had written code for 8 months in our home town of Missoula, Montana before it occurred to us we might need to raise money to launch our startup. There were a number of reasons for this: 1) We had no idea what we'd do with the money. 2) We assumed our apps' success would be huge and immediate. Obviously, this was naive.This naivete was complicated by the fact of our geographical remoteness from the centers of funding.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 24, 2011
Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around. Almost every one of us in business can remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or busin
crowdSPRING Blog
NOVEMBER 18, 2011
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!
Gust
NOVEMBER 7, 2011
If your startup can’t be bothered with social media, or has no plan to take advantage of it, then you are definitely at risk these days. But simply jumping in is not enough. Before you start spending money and time being a user, you need to understand how it can help you and your business. Using it randomly or incorrectly is a waste of your precious time.
This is going to be BIG.
NOVEMBER 28, 2011
Tweet. This is the first of a series of posts this week on careers in innovation and startups--sort of a thought exercise for me on the topic for my talk at General Assembly at 8PM on 12/15. With any company I work with, I inevitably play the role or recruiter--mostly because I often play the role of career counselor to friends and other folks in the community.
mashable.com
NOVEMBER 2, 2011
Top Stories Photo & Video Galleries Top Lists Trending Topics Twitter YouTube Facebook iPhone Google Video More Topics. People Recommended Mashable Staff More people. Jobs Awards Welcome to Mashable! Sign in with Facebook or Facebook Mashable Social Media All Social Media How-To Facebook Twitter YouTube Google Plus Featured in Social Media Tech All Tech Apps & Software Dev & Design Gadgets Mobile Featured in Tech Business All Business Advertising Marketing Media Small Business Startups Featured
ReadWriteStart
NOVEMBER 3, 2011
I know that many, many entrepreneurs are feeling dejected because of investor rejections. Today, I want to share with you a story of an amazing entrepreneurial team led by Alex Bouzari, CEO of Data Direct. In How To Defend Your Dream Against All Odds , Alex and I explore the company's journey to $200 Million in revenue, while their VCs wrote them off.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 4, 2011
Every new startup I know dreams of being funded by an angel investor. Yet according to the latest data from Gust (formerly AngelSoft), only about 3 out of 100 companies who initiate the formal request process actually get funded. The Gust Deal Funnel from the last 12 months indicates is that 70% of the interested companies never make it past the initial screening process.
crowdSPRING Blog
NOVEMBER 11, 2011
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!
VC Cafe
NOVEMBER 19, 2011
There’s been a lot of talk recently about small startups being over funded. Sean Parker, founder of Napster, President of Facebook and Founders Fund investor, said: “The market is ridiculously overcrowded with early-stage investors. A lot of these early-stage investors will fund literally anything… [it's] the assembly line approach to investing.” What’s the problem with that?
This is going to be BIG.
NOVEMBER 16, 2011
Over two years ago, I suggested to Yelp that they should pay attention to Foursquare. While that post resulted in term sheets for Dennis and Naveen from VCs, the original intention was actually to get Yelp to invest in the company. The Foursquare founders had been to nearly every VC we could think of and no one, save for Bryce Roberts OATV who was willing to do half the deal if he could find an east coast partner, was willing to jump in.
K9 Ventures
NOVEMBER 16, 2011
When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around often these days. It comes up most commonly in cases when investors talk about how “it’s gotten cheaper to start a company these days” (particularly in the Web space), and therefore these companies don’t require a lot of capital.
techblog.netflix.com
NOVEMBER 26, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011. Benchmarking Cassandra Scalability on AWS - Over a million writes per second. by Adrian Cockcroft and Denis Sheahan Netflix has been rolling out the Apache Cassandra NoSQL data store for production use over the last six months. As part of our benchmarking we recently decided to run a test designed to validate our tooling and automation scalability as well as the performance characteristics of Cassandra.
Duct Tape Marketing
NOVEMBER 17, 2011
5 Ways to Improve Local Search Results for Business This content from: Duct Tape Marketing. “This article originally appeared on the OPEN App Center. Visit www.theopenappcenter.com for more information and resources for streamlining and growing your business.” Increasingly, when folks turn to a search engine, they aren’t looking for something around the world, they’re looking for something around the block.
crowdSPRING Blog
NOVEMBER 30, 2011
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!
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
NOVEMBER 23, 2011
When it comes to building an online business (especially if you’re a blogger), one of the most valuable assets that you can have is a email list. I currently run two relatively active blogs, and my mailing lists play a HUGE role in helping to keep them going.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 30, 2011
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Steve Jobs.
K9 Ventures
NOVEMBER 16, 2011
When I started K9 Ventures, I did so based on a specific investment thesis which had a clear set of investment criteria. One of those criteria was ‘Capital Efficiency.’ We hear that term lobbied around often these days. It comes up most commonly in cases when investors talk about how “it’s gotten cheaper to start a company these days” (particularly in the Web space), and therefore these companies don’t require a lot of capital.
Both Sides of the Table
NOVEMBER 9, 2011
I’ve often wanted to let people see what a VC pitch is like to help new entrepreneurs have a better sense of what it’s like to present. Obviously having a camera on will add a small bit of an artificial result because I don’t want to ask as much confidential information and with the camera on people are obviously a bit nicer. But this interview is fairly authentic.
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