Thu.Dec 18, 2014

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Does Your Culture Reward The Lazy Brain? Five Ways to Override This Natural Human Tendency.

YoungUpstarts

'by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization “. Humans are lazy thinkers. Although the brain comprises only about 2.5 percent of our body weight, it generally uses 20 percent of the body’s energy. That’s why the human learning machine prefers to operate in a low gear — on autopilot — as much as possible: It’s a conservation thing.

Employee 162
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Our 2014 in review

Version One Ventures

'Just like last year , 2014 has been busy and eventful here at Version One. We added 8 new companies to our portfolio: Clio , a cloud-based practice management platform for the legal industry; Dwellable , a mobile-first vacation rentals marketplace; HandUp , a donation platform that lets you give directly to a person in-need; Mattermark , an analytics platform for investing, partnering, selling and marketing; Shippo , an e-commerce shipping solution; and 3 startups that have yet to announce th

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Oracle: Time for some respect

deal architect

'Oracle is skirting with a market valuation of $ 2oo billion. Wall Street is gushing. Whatever. I am not writing this to join their praises – I have never judged companies purely on their financial performance. I am more impressed.

Valuation 376
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Share options are key to Valley culture; the UK is getting close, but not there yet

The Equity Kicker

'It sometimes seems that in the Valley that everyone is an angel investor and the streets are paved with gold. Building a startup there is, of course, still an enormously hard thing to do, but there are lots that have made it big enough to create scores of millionaires through their option schemes. Many of those newly minted millionaires go on to invest in startups themselves, which fuels the ecosystem and makes them role models for the next generation of startup employees that are hoping for a

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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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4 Reasons Why You Should Never Force Holiday Work For Employees

Mike Michalowicz

'My jaw dropped, and not because there was more turkey and pie. I was watching football with my family after enjoying a delicious turkey dinner, and the news came on with a horrible holiday story—that stores would start opening at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day to kick off the seasonal shopping madness. I couldn’t believe it. Not that people would go shopping (that’s their choice).

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If it can be counted, the CFO owns it.

Berkonomics

'There is a simple way to define the responsibilities of the chief financial officer. And it extends beyond the usual interpretation of the CFO position in many companies. If it can be counted, the CFO owns the responsibility for controlling it. The CFO should question and control the number of anything , including the number of chairs to be ordered.

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Startup Fundraising 101: Getting Ready To Raise A Round

Early Growth Financial Services

'EGFS COO Sirk Roh and Shayne Veramallay of DLA Piper covered fundraising basics from strategy to tactics to pitching, in our recent Inside Startup Fundraising 101: Are You Ready For An Investment Round? webinar. Be sure to check out the deck on SlideShare for more details. For now, here’s a quick rundown of the highlights: First things first. Why raise funds?

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"I would say I’m a boss who’s learning and I hope people have the patience for the fact that I’m."

Bryce Dot VC

'“I would say I’m a boss who’s learning and I hope people have the patience for the fact that I’m learning along the way because that’s a tough thing.

Startup 40
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Two years of remote working – hiring, scaling, culture, and the lifestyle trade-off

The Startup Toolkit

'This is just a story, not advice, but maybe there’s something relevant. At year’s end I’ll be trading away my location independence for something better. It’s been a fun stretch. Barcelona was my HQ but I figured there was no good reason I couldn’t travel and work from elsewhere as well. In doing so, I drank tea with prostitutes in Kiev, was stood up for dinner by the Slovenian president, wrote the first draft of my book from a hut in Bavaria, got to whack the gave

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13 Ways to Make Customers Desperately Want to Open Your Emails

Up and Running

'With so much inbox clutter these days and especially at this time of the year, how can you get more customers to open emails from you , especially emails containing important account information? We asked 13 entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share their tips. 1. Do a drip e mail campaign. Your email might not reach everyone on the first send: they’re busy, they accidentally deleted it or it got lost in the stream.

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How to Analyze Your A/B Test Results with Google Analytics

ConversionXL

'A/B testing tools like Optimizely or VWO make testing easy, and that’s about it. They’re tools to run tests, and not exactly designed for post-test analysis. Most testing tools have gotten better at it over the years, but still lack what you can do with Google Analytics – which is like everything. When you run a test until you’ve reached validity ( not the same as significance ), you have to do post-test analysis to decide on the way forward.

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Homebrew investment The Skimm raises $6m+ Series A

Hunter Walker

'Yesterday The Skimm (everyone’s favorite morning newsletter) announced their $6m+ Series A. Homebrew led their seed financing in 2013 and enthusiastically continued our participation in this latest round. As an investor I’m often asked about my “favorite” companies and have written before about how much I dislike the question.