Tue.Feb 09, 2016

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The One Video Every Silicon Valley Investor Should Watch

Both Sides of the Table

There was so much great content at the Upfront Summit but I think one held a special place in minds of most people I talked to – our panel on diversity led by my partner Hamet Watt (<– what? you’re not following him?). The message of the panel was very clear – “We don’t need your help. We want to partner with you to make money.” And I’ll elaborate on this but I wanted to start first with an important quote from Magic, said with a very positive

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The never-ending technology hype cycle

deal architect

Quicken Loans says it has 30 years of lending experience and closed more than $140 billion in mortgage loans in 2013-2014. They say they have streamlined the mortgage loan process and it is “engineered to amaze”.

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3 Of The Best: Business Insights From Leading UK Entrepreneurs

YoungUpstarts

Branson, Sugar, and Singh. These names thrown together sound like the title of a high-end law firm, but of course they are the names of the three most well-known modern entrepreneurs in the UK. What we’ll try to discover in this article is what makes these men special. More importantly, many people are entrepreneurial, so what has allowed these three to rise so far above the average entrepreneur and amass such incredible fortunes?

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The Complete Guide to Starting an Online Boutique

Up and Running

Searching for the perfect products, finding a color scheme that speaks to you, building a brand that embodies the style and look you love—if starting an online boutique sounds like heaven to you, I’m not surprised. But, before you jump headfirst into hand-picking items and deciding on website fonts, let’s start at the beginning. Here is my guide to starting your own online boutique; we’ll cover everything from business plan resources to using brand ambassadors to help you build a social me

Curation 102
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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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Bootstrap Mentality: Key Ingredient For Startup Success

YoungUpstarts

by Amit Damani , cofounder of Vista Rooms. Bootstrap was term coined from the computer lingo ‘booting’ which means starting a computer or starting a chain of processes which eventually starts up the operating system. In the startup world, bootstrapping essentially means funding your own venture and not being too dependent on external sources. Let’s face it, to have a bootstrapped startup you need grit and total faith and conviction in your product, something a lot of new startup’s find it diff

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Founders – Use Your Down Round To Clean Up Your Cap Table

Feld Thoughts

Mark Suster wrote a great post yesterday titled The Resetting of the Startup Industry. Go read it now – I’ll wait. Once again, as we find ourselves in the middle of a significant public market correction, especially around technology stocks, there’s an enormous amount of noise in the system, as there always is. Much of it is very short term focused and, like a giant tractor beam, draws the conversation into a very short time horizon (as in days or weeks).

More Trending

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New money into venture explains ups and downs in the market

The Equity Kicker

There’s been a lot of talk recently about what will happen to startup financing in 2016, including here on this blog. The consensus is definitely negative, but one thing that has buoyed my optimism about the prospects for our portfolio is the number of new funds raised in London recently. A lot of them are focused on Series A investing and favour the ecommerce and marketplace sectors that Forward Partners focuses on.

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Using Color Psychology To Design An Effective Business Logo

YoungUpstarts

Image credit: Color wheel from Shutterstock. When it comes to designing your business logo, it’s important to be conscientious about what colors you choose to go with. Certain colors can increase your sales, whereas some can have a negative impact on your business. Color greatly affects human emotion and – as a result – human behavior. Understanding the basics of color psychology, especially how color affects the minds of consumers, will help you design a logo that will maximize your business’

Design 100
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Marketing To Millennial Women?? 5 Brand Strategies That Actually Work

YFS Magazine

Notice the countless female entrepreneurs, fashion bloggers, business leaders, and glossy websites geared towards women in the high-stakes startup space?

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The Surprising Ways a Distributed Team Can Help Your Company Succeed

crowdSPRING Blog

I love working with people from around the world and truly believe that distributed teams provide huge benefits for small businesses and startups. I’m not alone to think so – according to a study updated in September 2015, the number of people working remotely risen 103% in the past year. Still, even as the number of remote workers has increased, some companies continue to resist allowing for more flexible work environments.

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10 Useful Tips For Doing Business In Mexico

YFS Magazine

There are many challenges when doing business abroad. It is important to understand the business culture of a country you plan to business in, and the country's etiquette.

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You should read this if you don’t understand Snapchat

Start Up Blog

My post the other day on Snapchat had a lot of my friends saying they don’t get Snapchat, the UX is terrible on Snapchat, they don’t know how to use Snapchat as well as a whole lot of other reasons not to use Snapchat. So here’s a couple of thoughts we need to remember: Blogging was weird when it first arrived. Twitter was strange to understand.

Mobile 58
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Top 5 Ways Social Media Can Help Your Small Business

YFS Magazine

Social media is essentially a great way to grow your business. Business
 relationships can be enhanced and nurtured.

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Innovating too early is the same as being wrong

Start Up Blog

I’ve had a few startups where I was a bit early. I’d put my former startup rentoid in this category – not to mention the amazing potential pivots I missed. When someone is early to an emerging market we often say these simple words. “He had the right idea, he was just a bit early.” Here’s the truth. Early is the same as wrong.

Cost 55
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Startup Founders’ Favorite Interview Questions to Judge Early Team Fit

View from Seed

At seed-stage startups, especially companies with well-networked founders and investors, finding applicants who can do a job on paper is not overly difficult. The true challenge is to find candidates who will mesh into a small, budding team and culture. As a result, the interview process during the seed stage can feel a bit more meandering to the hiring manager — who is most likely the founder(s) given the size and stage of the company.

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Fresh from the SPRING: DBanks

crowdSPRING Blog

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we noticed this gem submitted in this logo project. Let us start the slow clap for DBanks. Check out more great work on DBanks ’s profile page. Nicely done, DBanks, nicely done! Related posts: Fresh from the SPRING: 5IVE_STAR_CREATIVE. Fresh from the SPRING: Janisa.

Design 49
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CTO for a Startup? Please Read.

Austin Startup

For eight years I was BP3’s CTO, before becoming CEO in January, succeeding my co-founder and partner in BP3, Lance Gibbs. This feels like… Continue reading on Austin Startups ».

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Indie.vc Q3 Update

Bryce Dot VC

We just wrapped up our 3rd Indie.vc quartlerly retreat in Los Angeles last week so I’m thinking now is as good a time as any for a quick update. Of the 8 participating companies all of them are still alive. 4 of them have double their revenue or, in a few cases, significantly more than doubled revenue, since we kicked off the program 9 months ago. A few of them are solidly in the black.

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Common Growth Hacking Myths (and How Growth Actually Works)

ConversionXL

You’re familiar with the term “growth hacking”, right? You’ve likely read about how Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Hotmail, Dropbox, etc. growth hacked their way to mega success. Those case studies resulted in a widespread shift in thinking. Many marketers became more concerned with 10x growth hacks they read about online than strategy and growth process.

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The most successful startups think extremely big and extremely small

Jeff Hilimire

I’m just about done with the biography on Elon Musk, called, Elon Musk: Telsa, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Musk is perhaps the biggest dreamer of any of the entrepreneurs I’ve read about. Instead of, say, wanting to build the world’s largest e-commerce site, Musk wants to do things like colonize Mars. For instance, check out this video where he describes Tesla’s Powerwall, which at some point he’d essentially like to have powering the entire Earth,

Startup 38
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How to Force Yourself to Ship (Even Though It’s Hard)

Software By Rob

It’s been a week and a half since we launched Drip’s biggest feature in 18 months, called Workflows. Had we not committed to a deadline, in public, 2-weeks prior to the ship date (when we published this post and emailed a bazillion people), I believe we’d still be adding finishing touches. It’s scary to ship. And it’s in our nature to want everything to be perfect before doing so.

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How to Force Yourself to Ship (Even Though It’s Hard)

Software By Rob

It’s been a week and a half since we launched Drip’s biggest feature in 18 months, called Workflows. Had we not committed to a deadline, in public, 2-weeks prior to the ship date (when we published this post and emailed a bazillion people), I believe we’d still be adding finishing touches. It’s scary to ship. And it’s in our nature to want everything to be perfect before doing so.