View from Seed

JANUARY 5, 2016

Basketball or football? I realize sports analogies for startups can feel trite, but as you think about the different phases of team-building in a startup, this one is actually pretty spot on. Your recruiting strategy should be adapted to a few distinct phases just as the approaches to building different kinds of sports teams varies. Below, I take a look at each.

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YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 5, 2016

by Ann Noder, CEO of Pitch Public Relations. Big brands spend millions each year on managing their presence in the media through public relations. For small start ups, that expense is simply and sadly out of reach. But that doesn’t mean you can’t launch into the press spotlight. And you should! Like no other form of marketing, editorial media coverage gives companies an implied third party endorsement that can drive recognition and sales.

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Hippoland

JANUARY 5, 2016

When I was fundraising for my company LaunchBit, raising money frustrated me to no end. There were all the rejections. All the time spent in investor meetings. All the email follow ups that went nowhere. We ended up raising ~$1m, but it was brutal. On the flip side, I often enjoyed selling LaunchBit, as a product, to customers. Selling a product had many similarities to fundraising – again, constant rejection, lots of demo calls before getting to a “yes”, and follow up e

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YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 5, 2016

by Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, authors of “ The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People “ and “ The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built a Bestseller “. As the new year approaches, you’re probably looking forward to taking advantage of new opportunities that will help your business grow and blossom.

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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

Startup

Start Up Blog

JANUARY 5, 2016

I feel like marketing is more about design than it is about product. When I say this I’m really talking about the ability to make. In the TV Industrial era it used to be about the ability to make. But we all have the ability to make today. Now it’s about the ability to design thoughtfully what is made. We all have access to distribution, manufacturing, ecommerce and the formally restricted tools of business.

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The Equity Kicker

JANUARY 5, 2016

If you’re a tech optimist (like me) you will like this exciting list of sci-tech advances from last year. If you’re not a tech optimist then you should read it anyway to make sure you’re up to date on the counter-arguments to your position :-). My favourite is: (#9) Google’s Quantum Computer Is 100 Million Times Faster Than a Normal Computer.

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Bandwidth Social Media Cost Internet 65

crowdSPRING Blog

JANUARY 5, 2016

Some people wake up with the sunrise, while others are just then going to bed. Personally, I would much rather finish my day at 4 am than start it at that hour. I find that my creativity and productivity both peak while the rest of the world is asleep. There are few distractions, and I have extended time to finish my work. However, many people insist that getting an early start to their day is the key to success.

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YFS Magazine

JANUARY 5, 2016

Wasted effort. Do you ever feel like social media is just a complete time suck?

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Duct Tape Marketing

JANUARY 5, 2016

People Buy Stories Before They Buy Stuff written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. I’ve been writing about the use of story in marketing for years. I remember when I first started telling people over a decade ago to make their clients the hero of their stories and to use their personal stories as foundational marketing elements they were dubious at best.

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Framework Small Business Campaign Cost 46

ConversionXL

JANUARY 5, 2016

Conversion optimization isn’t necessarily something you can major in during college, so how can you tell who will be a world-class optimizer and who will just be.meh? While there are many universal traits that define a good hire – proactivity, strong work ethic, critical thinking, attention to detail, and so on – there are some specific and unique traits that help optimizers flourish.

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Early Growth Financial Services

JANUARY 5, 2016

Convertible debt is a staple in startup funding. But sometimes the complexity and costs outweigh the benefits. Enter the SAFE, or Simple Agreement for Future Equity. Designed for simplicity on the front-end, a SAFE allows a company to accept outside investment in exchange for stock issued at a later date. SAFEs usually appear around the seed stage of funding, as it gives founders the chance to raise funding without having to begin the process of setting a valuation or issuing convertible notes.

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2016

Spoiler alert: MCNs don’t exist. They are a figure of your imagination. 20 months ago we sold Maker Studios to Disney for $500 million in cash plus a large earn out. From the day after we sold the company until today I felt it was important that I not comment too much publicly about online video even though I continued to work actively in the sector and made five more investments.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 5, 2016

After two years of a dedicated experiment, we’ve decided to stop making new investments via our FG Angels Syndicate. We’ve learned a lot, achieved some of our goals, but ultimately have decided that the effort required to maintain our investment pace on AngelList is too great for us, at least for now. More on that in a bit, but let’s start with some history.

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ConversionXL

JANUARY 5, 2016

You know that persuasion is a powerful weapon. Perhaps you’ve even read our 18 Cognitive Biases You Can Use for Conversion Optimization and realized that you are definitely not dealing with rational visitors. However, there is so much more to persuasion than what can be boiled down to a handful of core principles. There are many other, lesser known persuasion techniques that you can use to increase your conversion rate.

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