Tue.Nov 13, 2012

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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. ————-.

Japan 292
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Don’t Look For Investors for All the Wrong Reasons

Startup Professionals Musings

There is so much written these days about how to attract investors that most entrepreneurs “assume” they need funding, and don’t even consider a plan for “bootstrapping,” or self-financing their startup. Yet, according to many sources , over 90 percent of all businesses are started and grown with no equity financing, and many others would have been better off without it.

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All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces

abovethecrowd.com

Since Benchmark’s investment in Ebay 15 years ago, we have been fascinated by online marketplaces. Entrepreneurs accurately recognize that the connective tissue of the Internet provides an opportunity to link the players in a particular market, reducing friction in both the buying and selling experience. The arrival of the smartphone amplifies these opportunities, as the Internet’s connective tissue now extends deeper and deeper into an industry with the participants connected to the marketplace

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The existential threat to on-premise models

deal architect

4 years ago when I interviewed Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho for The New Polymath, the prime driver in the marketplace for SaaS adoption was better economics compared to on-premise. But Sridhar also spoke about agility in SaaS delivery Feature.

Agile 246
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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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Teeny bit of traction — what next?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. Burgeoning Startup Founder writes: After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit.

Affiliate 261
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Knowing When It’s Time To Sell Your Startup

YoungUpstarts

by Christopher Wallace, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Amsterdam Printing. For years, the most desirable exit strategy for startup companies was to go public through an initial public offering. A volatile stock market and economic recession have since changed much of this thinking. Today, many startups are succumbing to the temptation to sell their companies early.

IPO 162

More Trending

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TradeHero – Making And Following Stock Market Champions

YoungUpstarts

Does stock trading scare the bejeezus out of you? Well, it should – you can literally bet the farm on stocks and lose it within minutes. But a new mobile stock trading app/game called TradeHero may just help give you enough confidence to wade into that very scary stock investment space. TradeHero , developed by Singapore-based tech startup MyManisku, is essentially a stock market simulation app for mobile devices that draws real-time data from 14 stock exchanges, 45,000 global securities a

Stock 157
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A Critical Vote on the Off Ramps In Boulder’s Energy Policy

Feld Thoughts

There is a critical vote in Boulder City Council on this Thursday, 11/15, about the “Off Ramps” in the exploration to explore the municipalization of Boulder’s power system. My understanding was that this was still in an exploration phase. Apparently, this particular vote is to effectively eliminate the “off ramps” that would potentially cause Boulder not to municipalize in case it wasn’t economically feasible.

Metrics 124
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Your Path To Greatness

YoungUpstarts

by Ben Newman, author of “ Own YOUR Success: The Power to Choose Greatness and Make Every Day Victorious “ Success is defined in different ways by different people, but more and more it has become synonymous with money and status. Real success, however, is less about results or a bottom line, and more about the process of achieving goals and dreams.

St. Louis 147
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Q3 M&A–volume flat, average value falling fast

The Equity Kicker

Ernst and Young’s latest quarterly Global Technology M&A Update found that the number of announced deals is pretty much flat year on year and compared with the last quarter, but the average value of those deals fell sharply to $185m. That’s 43% down on Q3 2011 and 12% down on Q2 2012. There were 752 deals announced in Q3, of which 153 disclosed the deal value.

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Want More Customers? Talk to Your Customers Like You Do Your Friends

Mike Michalowicz

Sometimes I think terms like, “night and day,” or “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” were coined to describe business people. So often what we see is not what we get or who we are. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt like I had to put on a more professional “business face,” to fit in and be accepted when I really wanted to kick back and swap jokes and laugh until coffee spewed out of my nose.

Customer 102
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Decisions and Outcomes

This is going to be BIG.

It is statistically possible for a manager to pinch hit for his best player in Game 7 of the World Series and have the scrub off the bench win the game with a hit. That doesn't mean it was a good move. Good outcome, bad decision. In the entrepreneurial world, there are lots of examples of great teams being funded for good ideas that still don't make it.

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Spend Your Time Wisely: Conferences & Marriages

Babbling VC

It is not money that you need to be most careful of when running a start-up. It's time! No matter how much money you are able to raise (or how's-this-for-novel, earn) time is always working against you. Unfortunately, I recently made the mistake of wasting my own time. Don't misunderstand the term "wasting time" as being completely derogatory. Let me explain!

Vertical 107
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SubtleData Brings Point-of-Sale (POS) Integration To The Cloud, Speeds App Development In The Hospitality Industry

Austin Startup

Most of the technology glitz in the restaurant and hospitality industry will likely end up as an app on your smartphone. You’ll be able to whip out your device and pay your bill, redeem a coupon, or even help your buddy leave a tip for that last round. But having all those capabilities takes some non-glitzy stuff. [.].

Cloud 82
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Free Webinars for Global Entrepreneurship Week

Up and Running

We celebrate entrepreneurship every day at Palo Alto Software but some weeks our enthusiasm is a little harder to contain. Following the president’s declaration of November as National Entrepreneurship Month last year , we knew that November would never be the same. And, once we found out that U2′s Bono was in on the action , we determined that dancing like rock stars in support of Global Entrepreneurship Week is the new order of business.

Global 74
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Innotech, AITP, SIM honor Innotech Executives

Austin Startup

The Austin chapter of the Association of the Information Technology Professionals and SIM Austin named one company and three local IT professionals as winners in their annual awards. AITP and SIM Austin used Austin Innotech, held Nov. 8, as the backdrop for the award program. Named as winners were: National Instruments: IT Solutions of the [.].

Austin 59
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5 Alternatives to PowerPoint Presentations

Duct Tape Marketing

Over the years I’ve given lots of presentations and attended lots of presentations. photo credit: Gue?rgui. I read about it, study it and do what I can to get better at the art. But here’s the deal, I’ll never be a super entertainer, but I care deeply about people getting practical information and that makes me useful – and useful is good. Of late I’ve become enamored with the idea of understanding how people learn or perhaps more interestingly, how they teach each other.

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Our Most Recent Marketplace Investment, DogVacay from Los Angeles

abovethecrowd.com

Earlier today, DogVacay, an exciting new startup in Los Angeles, announced that Benchmark Capital has led its most recent round of financing. DogVacay is an online marketplace that links dog owners with passionate dog care providers who open up there own home as an alternative to the traditional cage-oriented kennel. At first blush, a web site that allows owners to book a “Dog Vacation” for their esteemed pet may seem like an unusual choice for a venture investment.

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Social Enterprise Marketing Strategy

Business Plan Blog

'A social enterprise faces a challenge when it comes to marketing. As a social entrepreneur is seeking to meet a demand or need in the market that is currently unmet, the availability of data is scarce. Unlike a for profit organization, a social enterprise is often entering a hybrid market that is un-established and cannot be researched and quantified quite the way a traditional for profit market can.

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Walker Twitter Highlights: October 31st – November 11th

Scott Edward Walker

I’m using Twitter as a form of micro-blogging to share interesting blog posts, articles and podcasts relating to entrepreneurship and startups, M&A and legal issues. Below are my five most popular tweets (via bit.ly ) for the past two weeks and a couple of blog-related tweets. If you’d like to see all of my tweets (or an RSS feed of them), you can do so here.

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3 months of runway

The Startup Toolkit

You quit your job with 3 months runway to go full-time on your project. You launch in 3 months — hooray! But now you’re out of money and don’t have time to see if the business is going to work. Plus, it’s going to take you a month to find a job. You’re in a tight spot. You launch in 3 months, but after the second month, you start hedging your bets by looking for jobs.

Revenue 51
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Branson on entrepreneurship

Jeff Hilimire

This is a really nice set of videos from Richard Branson on entrepreneurship. “Dream big by setting yourself seemingly impossible challenges. You then have to catch up with them.” Yup.

Video 42
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Why You Should Care About a VC Term Sheet? (Video)

Early Growth Financial Services

What is a term sheet, and why should you care about it? Check out my quick overview. Questions about term sheets? Ask in comments below, or contact Early Growth Financial Services for help understanding your term sheet, and other financial support. Related Posts: Seven Things You Need to Understand—and Care About—In a Venture Capital Term Sheet 9 Ways to Negotiate Your Best VC Terms Calculating Your Equity Value.

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If it Didn’t Happen on Twitter it Didn’t Really Happen. Here’s Why

Both Sides of the Table

I wrote this post a long time ago. When I did it was a little too close to home for a company to have me publish it. Much time has passed. And I felt it was instructive still so I thought I would publish. I decided to water down some details to protect the innocent. But both stories are still accurate. I hope it still resonates. A while back I received a frantic phone call from the CEO of a company in which I invested.

PR 336
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The VC Shakeout: Are We There Yet?

Agile VC

[ This also appears as a guest post at PandoDaily ]. Over the weekend, I read Sarah Lacy’s PandoDaily article that the VC shakeout is taking too long. It’s rather thoughtful and definitely worth reading if you haven’t had a chance to yet. There are some obvious structural reasons why a shakeout in the venture capital industry takes a long time.

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Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Dalla Terra Winery

crowdSPRING Blog

Thanksgiving is just around the corner (next Thursday– it’s early this year). And right after you turn the Thanksgiving corner, you’re staring directly at a bunch of other major holidays. It’s just that time of the year. Besides turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and family there is one more key holiday component: wine! This week’s Small Business Spotlight is a Napa Valley winery called Dalla Terra.

Dallas 90