Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 26, 2013

'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.

Technical Review 242

Technical Review Due Diligence Startup Term Sheet 242

YoungUpstarts

JULY 26, 2013

'by Libby Gill, veteran management consultant and author of “ Capture the Mindshare and the Market Share Will Follow: The Art and Science of Building Brands “ To create a compelling brand, you have to capture more than just the market share, you capture the total mindshare – that is, minds, hearts, soul and the hence the unimpeachable trust of your customers.

Technical Review 177

Technical Review Public Relations Community Customer 177

Mike Michalowicz

JULY 26, 2013

'Sleepy’s tagline is “For the rest of your life.” FedEx’s is “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” Ivory Soap’s is “99.44% pure.” A great tagline communicates confidence to customers. It sets expectation. It is a concise way of saying what your customer will experience. Here are the steps to take to create a great tagline: 1.

Restful 165

Restful Employee Customer Management 165

Feld Thoughts

JULY 26, 2013

'I’ve been fighting with creating charts and data visualizations – well – forever. Anyone remember VisiPlot and VisiTrend? Harvard Graphics? Eventually Excel dominated for a while, but it was always sheer misery for me. Eventually I figured out how to make rows and columns of data look like a chart in my mind, and I just stopped making charts for myself.

Founder 138

Founder Product 138

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

The Equity Kicker

JULY 26, 2013

'Benhmark Partner Bill Gurley, for my money one of the smartest VCs around, and and author of the amazing Above The Crowd blog did an interview with Sarah Lacy last night which is partially written up here. Amongst other things he was talking about why Benchmark hasn’t copied many other VCs and started making seed investments. As the cost of starting a business falls and falls the pressure on VCs to identify wining companies earlier in their life is getting stronger and the fear of missing

Seed Stage 99

Seed Stage Due Diligence Venture Capital Reputation 99

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2013

'The best thing you can do to nail an investor pitch is to learn how the process works and be prepared. It’s sort of a Catch-22, because you don’t know what to expect until you’ve tried it a few times, but you can minimize missteps by learning from the advice (and mistakes) of others. In a recent webinar, serial entrepreneur Caroline Cummings answered some commonly-asked questions on how to pitch and get funding.

Elevator Pitch 79

Elevator Pitch Angel Investor Term Sheet Business Model 79

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2013

'One of the best ways I know to get something done that really matters in your business is to give it the prioritization it deserves. But in order to do that effectively, you need to understand the role that “something” plays in your business and/or life. You may have come across this grid before, but it’s always a good wake-up call: Organizing what you do every day into these four categories takes less than 30 minutes to do, but it will completely change the way you prioritize your

Social Media 70

Social Media Email Hiring Channel 70

Mucker Lab

JULY 26, 2013

'Creating a liquid and vibrant marketplace is already hard enough ; fine tuning a business model , and eventually getting paid for the value that has been created by the marketplace is just as complicated and perilous. There has been a lot of talk on the “take rate” a marketplace business can eventually sustain and justify. In general, there is a direct and positive correlation between the strength of network effects achieved and the take rate that can be sustained, as well as a negative causati

Business Model 60

Business Model Networking Revenue 60

Spencer Fry

JULY 26, 2013

'Iterative (or incremental) development is what''s meant by doing only a little bit of product development at a time so that you can learn from the work you''ve done. The idea is, the more quickly you can get your work into the hands of users, the quicker you can learn what works and what doesn''t work. Then you can take what you''ve learned and apply it to the next iterative cycle you do.

Developer 73

Developer Product Development Web Customer Development 73

Campus Entrepreneurship

JULY 26, 2013

'Just received the latest University Ventures letter with a piece, “You Won”, by Daniel Pianko. He explains that his tenured professor brother has acknowledged the future is online and that #highered is going to get whipped by educational equivalents of Amazon and Uber: As colleges and universities face off against new technology, how does this game compare with the one retailers and taxi drivers have been playing?

Phoenix 37

Phoenix California Global Cloud 37

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2013

'Are you looking to promote your business to a local audience? Local marketing practices change constantly, and one way to keep up with the times is to find leading experts and follow their blogs. Just a few minutes a day browsing through your blog reader will help you see other entrepreneurs in action, generate new ideas, and ultimately increase profits.

Social Media 82

Social Media Marketing SEO PPC 82

Jeff Hilimire

JULY 26, 2013

'I had a great time yesterday being interviewed by Sam Williams in a fireside chat at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. Fun format and a lot of great questions from the audience. A lot of the conversation focused on how to get your business to grow as a new entrepreneur. Growth, particularly early growth, is the hardest thing for a new company to achieve in my opinion.

Atlanta 64

Atlanta Reputation Sales Audience 64

Small Business Force

JULY 26, 2013

I just read an article about an entrepreneur I knew, who just sold her company after about 10 years. She made a bunch of money and thanked the friends and family investors who helped originally stake her and who also got a nice return. Then she addressed her employees and thanked them (none were shareholders) and said, essentially, "now on to a new adventure.

Employee 37

Employee Stock Options Vesting Stock 37