Tue.Apr 12, 2016

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Lightspeed is growing our Consumer Investing team

Lightspeed Venture Partners

I joined Lightspeed ten years ago. It’s been an amazing ride. We announced $1.2bn of committed capital in our latest fund family last month and four of us have been listed on the CB Insights/NY Times list of top 100 Venture Capitalists. The partners here had made many great investments in consumer companies before then — companies that resulted in successful IPOs like BlueNile and eHealth in the late 90s.

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Invention is Drudgery

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Edison spent 18 months on the drudgery of trial and error to produce the first workable light, which lasted only 13 hours before the carbon fiber filament would burn out. He then spent another 18 months on the drudgery of trial and error before discovering that a carbonized bamboo filament would last 100x longer, and finally a modern-like light-bulb was born.

Audience 164
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Connecting With Customers

YoungUpstarts

By Steven D. Goldstein, author of “ Why Are There Snowblowers in Miami? “ The idea that a business needs to treat its customers well and understand their tastes and habits is so obvious it seems hardly worth stating. But oddly enough, many big companies fail in this area. Fundamentally, you’re in business to utilize the assets you have to generate a positive return on the investment made by your shareholders.

Customer 100
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How To Beat Michael Jordan At Sports

Feld Thoughts

I had a great interaction with a friend several months ago. The question he asked was: “How do you beat Michael Jordan at sports?” I thought about it for a second. I knew Michael Jordan was a good golfer and I don’t play golf. I figured he was in better shape than me and could beat me on a track. There is no way I could ever beat him at basketball.

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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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5 Top Tips To Get Your Start-Up Off The Ground

YoungUpstarts

To succeed in today’s competitive and cutthroat business world, you will need to have a great deal of drive, enthusiasm, passion, and determination. This is especially true if you are starting from scratch, as estimates suggest that between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of new businesses fail before they even get going. But, on the assumption that you possess all of aforementioned character traits, what else is required to get a start-up off the ground?

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3 missteps to avoid at all costs when building a minimum viable product

The Next Web

So… your brilliant idea for a web or mobile application is going to completely change the way consumers or businesses [fill in the blank]. Great! But the days of investors cutting checks for ideas with zero validation are a fading memory. Today, investors more often commit money to scale companies than for initial market and customer testing. Therefore, the best first step for many startups with an idea for a B2C or B2B software application is to build a Minimum Viable Product.

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More Trending

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4 Ways Shy People Can Succeed At Networking Events

YFS Magazine

Networking events are the perfect place to meet people to help you grow your business. However, if you are a shy person by nature, they can be your worst fear.

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Making The Most Of Business Loan Web Pages

YoungUpstarts

One of the most effective ways of getting ahead in your business is looking for different ways of expanding it. In such cases, the most frequent source of money is a bank business loan. Because terms and rates are not fixed and tend to change continuously, calculating just how much money you can borrow and above all, how much money you are expected to pay back may be confusing; unless of course, you make use of one of the many available resources featured in any of the most prestigious business

Web 100
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Find Underused Keywords, and Searchers Will Find Your Brand

Up and Running

Every day there are literally billions of searches, and millions of those searches have never been performed before. This means you have a chance to stand out in your particular niche. You just need to remind Google (and the world) that you’re an expert. To do this, you will need to produce compelling content focused on the topics or “keywords” that you know about.

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Tips For Keeping Your PC Safe From Viruses

YoungUpstarts

Viruses, spyware or malware can really damage your computer system, regardless whether you are a casual home user or a computer administrator in a company. You have to take proper care and take some measures for precaution if you want your systems to be safe at all times. Computers can be damaged in many different ways. Damages can be small and easily removed, but there are some severe damages that can affect the overall performance of your system and can even destroy your PC.

Security 100
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Remember how totally dominant Microsoft was?

The Equity Kicker

Personal Computing Platform Shares. A 35-year Retrospective by @asymco #dataviz pic.twitter.com/EYExwJODIT. — Perspective (@pixxa) April 11, 2016. This graph charts history beautifully and is a great reminder of just how dominant Windows was in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s also a reminder that Apple’s position isn’t as strong as it sometimes appears.

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Are You Waiting For Capital To Launch Your Startup?

YoungUpstarts

by Anand Srinivasan, founder of LeadJoint.com. Almost each one of us reading this blog has a business idea that we are convinced can be the next big thing. The hustlers among us have also validated their idea through prototypes and pop-surveys. What stops a majority from moving ahead to the execution stage is funding. Most businesses – online or offline, need seed capital to get established and without access to these funds, launching a business can seem like an improbable dream.

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What Former NFL QB Peyton Manning Can Teach Us About Life And Business

YFS Magazine

Peyton Manning announced retirement, after 18 seasons, on March 7, 2016. Manning’s final words of his retirement speech were, “I’ve fought a good fight. I’ve finished my football race and after 18 years, it’s time. God bless all of you and God bless football.”.

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Building a Winning Team through the Draft and Free Agency

Lightspeed Venture Partners

March and April are the most exciting months of the NFL offseason. Free agency begins in March and the NFL draft takes place in April. As a fan, you get to watch your favorite team add new players as they take aim at the coveted Lombardi Trophy. This time of the year also reminds us that the perennial playoff teams – the Patriots, Steelers, and Packers – were all crafted using the same formula: build a strong core team through the draft and complement them with up and coming playe

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3 Sure-Fire Ways To Create Irresistible Content

YFS Magazine

Each day content is produced and distributed across the Internet by the millions. Brands hoping to have their content read and shared flock to the Internet in droves to gain awareness, traction and growth through content marketing.

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Cory Huff: Shakespearian Actor Starts A Blog To Teach Creative People How To Sell Their Art Online And Today Makes $180,000+ A Year Online

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

[ Download MP3 | Transcript | iTunes | Soundcloud | Raw RSS ] Cory Huff is certainly a creative person. He’s an interesting mix of actor and internet marketer, who today runs a business focused on teaching other creative people how to sell their art online. Cory runs a blog, The post Cory Huff: Shakespearian Actor Starts A Blog To Teach Creative People How To Sell Their Art Online And Today Makes $180,000+ A Year Online appeared first on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. [ Download

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Hiring Employees? First, Create A Recruitment Plan

YFS Magazine

Planning ahead will increase the quality of your recruitment process, minimizing costly hiring mistakes and ensuring your business is well-equipped for future growth.

Hiring 63
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A cold call is an unplanned warm call

Start Up Blog

Cold calls are something we’ve all done. It’s hard, uncomfortable and sometimes it even works. They must work or they wouldn’t happen. But here’s the thing, a cold call is really an unplanned warm call. So, how do you warm up a call that would normally be cold? It’s pretty easy – invest a bit of time in the person you intend to call.

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Fresh from the SPRING: arsOrum

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 arsOrum. Check out more great work on arsOrum’s profile page. Nicely done, arsOrum, nicely done! Related posts: Fresh from the SPRING: ReesQ. Fresh from the SPRING: Dragas.

Design 48
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The Community Foundation, EFCO and Pledge 1%

VC Adventure

Cross posting this article I wrote for The Community Foundation of Colorado. As many of my readers know, I’ve been passionate about the intersection of startups and community for years. And specifically developing a worldwide movement of startups giving back to their local communities from their very founding. I blog a lot about community: entrepreneurial, local, national, international, social, etc.

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Women in Product

SVPG

Note 1: I’m focusing in this article on women, however, my points here are intended to apply to all under-represented groups. Note 2: I am highlighting here the product role, which is a subset of the “women in tech” topic. I would also love to see more women in engineering and design roles, but I am especially focused on the product role because it’s such a strong path to CEO and GM roles.

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What does “great” look like?

Version One Ventures

One of the biggest challenges for first-time founders with little work experience is that they don’t always know what “great” looks like in every area required to build and run a successful business. Understanding “great” is one of the single most important levers to push your team to greatness, hire the best people possible for a specific job, and build a world-class organization.