April, 2015

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Framework Benchmarks Round 10

TechEmpower

'Round 10 of the Framework Benchmarks project is now available! It has been a little less than a year since the previous round and in that time, approximately 133 contributors have made 2,835 git commits. These contributions have improved the project''s toolset and added many new framework test implementations. We retired our in-house i7-2600K hardware environment for Round 10, and we changed our Amazon EC2 environment to c3.large instances.

Framework 392
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4 Founders & Harvard MBAs on Finding Startup Traction & MBAs-as-Entrepreneurs

View from Seed

'On the heels of our research on HBS entrepreneurs , NextView’s Dimitri Dadiomov (HBS ’15) interviewed several top founders on the early stages of their companies. Below is a summary of some of their answers in which they discuss the genesis of each company, their views on when MBAs should start companies, and more. On Launching and Finding Early Traction.

Founder 255
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3 Elements To Ensuring PCI Compliance

YoungUpstarts

By Nikole Haiar, Director of Marketing at Hostway Services, Inc. Depending on what industry you’re in, your businesses may be under legal obligation to ensure its corporate information, as well as its customer data, remains secure. One such piece of legislation is the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, which outlines rules to help retailers protect credit and debit card details.

Cloud 142
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5 Ways To Improve Startup Founder Team Productivity

Startup Professionals Musings

If you are like most entrepreneurs I know, there just aren’t enough hours in a day to get all your own work done, as well as run the many one-hour meetings each team member seems to demand for decisions and mentoring. I have found it to be more productive and effective to lead with the model that no meetings will take an hour, and may be done in as little as five minutes.

Founder 205
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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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The Long Lost Myth of Capital Efficiency

Feld Thoughts

'I miss capital efficiency. It seems like you were our best friend just yesterday. Were you a myth? A lie? A justification by VCs to explain away their lack of capital to invest? A rationalization by entrepreneurs to explain away their inability to raise capital? Do you remember all the blog posts about how companies needed so much less money? All the articles about how capital efficient businesses were a result of AWS, better software development tools, easier starting points, better scaling te

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Top 9 Easy Career Hacks That Most People Don’t Do

David Teten

'I gave a presentation to Womensphere a few months ago on the most valuable lessons I learned early in my career. Back when I was an entry-level investment banking analyst at Bear Stearns (R.I.P.), our trainers gave us some basic advice on how to be a good financial analyst. At the time these sounded obvious, but now with hindsight I think that most of your success in your career is just executing on these basic points…whether you’re a CEO or aspire to be a CEO.

More Trending

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What Is Venture Debt and How Should Startups Use It?

View from Seed

There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt. What is it, and how should founders think about it? As a startup grows, venture debt becomes a viable option to continue that growth.

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Make ‘Em Say Wow: 11 Tips For Building A Strong Service Team

YoungUpstarts

'By Ron Kaufman, author of “ Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet ”. We love receiving great customer service. That’s no surprise. But did you know that great service can actually elicit a physical reaction? Well, it can! A recent American Express Service Study found that 63 percent of its 1,620 respondents said they felt an increased heart rate when they just thought about great service.

Maldives 178
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10 CEOs Who Made Huge Mistakes

Up and Running

Even Bill Gates, one of the most successful people in the world, isn’t immune to mistakes. It’s true that no one is perfect, and this shows itself in the business world as much as it does anywhere else. While entrepreneurs strive to do their best, mistakes are sometimes unavoidable. However, we small business owners can take some comfort in the fact that we’re not at the helm of a massive corporation where a mistake can cost millions.

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Small Business and Startups: Management for the Joy Of It

crowdSPRING Blog

'Business owners and managers tend to focus on business. This is right and this is good; it is our responsibility to our stakeholders to responsibly lead our companies towards success and to prioritize operations and profitability. We work hard every day to improve efficiency, acquire customers, increase margins, analyze results, craft strategy, execute tactics, and track growth.

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Recent Books: Paleo, Angel Investing, Mediation, and Career Acceleration

David Teten

I read a few books over the spring/summer that I thought were worth highlighting/recommending (belatedly): The book that has had the most practical impact on my life was The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health , by John Durant. This is a thoughtful analysis and explication of the “paleo” or “ancestral health” school of thought. The fundamental idea is that our bodies and minds were designed to function in a world very different than our modern desk-bound sphere, and that you’ll

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5 Relatively Simple Steps to Dominate Local Search

Duct Tape Marketing

5 Relatively Simple Steps to Dominate Local Search written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. If you do business mostly in your town, your marketing efforts must be hyper focused. You’re only targeting a very select group of people so, when those people go out there looking for a business in their community, you want to show up, right?

Search 60
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College Is (Almost) Obsolete

Diego Basch

A few days ago a neighbor in her eighties offered me a piece of advice regarding my six-month old son: “start a college fund.” For some reason it sounded to me as if she’d told me there’s a great future in plastics. I have no intention of starting a college fund for my son, and this post is an attempt to explain why. When I entered the workforce in the early nineties I had only one tool to increase my chances of getting the job I wanted: my resume.

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Six Ways Retailers Can Perform Spring Cleaning

YoungUpstarts

'By Nikole Haiar, Director of Marketing at Hostway Services, Inc. Although the holidays are over, retailers still have projects and initiatives going on. In fact, with spring just around the corner, many brands are building better e-commerce websites and revamping their in-store presences to reflect the warmer weather and changing customer needs. Some companies emphasize this time of year, utilizing it to adjust their offerings for the warmer months.

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How Small Businesses Can Effectively Use the Sharing Economy

Up and Running

Millennials are now filling up the job market and with them has come a different mindset—sharing, caring, and a low level of commitment is trending in Western cultures. While this seems troubling for larger corporations who are looking to keep their payroll stocked with dedicated, lifelong employees, there exists a benefit for smaller, low-staffed companies who are looking to save money wherever they can.

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The State of S4 HANA

deal architect

At SapphireNow next week, SAP is expected to provide much more detail around its next-gen, S4 product. It’s been a quarter century since the predecessor R/3 product was designed. So much has changed in the world since. The shop floor.

Design 220
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Why We Invested in @FerrisApp – A New Kind of Video Sharing App

Both Sides of the Table

We recently released the video sharing app Ferris and announced that Upfront Ventures led the funding in the company in our seed round of $2 million and I personally joined the board. We hit the top spot recommended on Apple’s iOS App Store on the day of the launch, which is a testament to the team and all of their hard work. I wanted to spend the rest of the blog post telling you why we decided to fund the company, how we settled on the final product design and our unique way of launching

Video 265
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6 Steps To Convert An Idea To A Sustainable Business

Startup Professionals Musings

It seems like everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and get rich these days. As a business mentor, I sometimes feel besieged by people begging for my view and support of their latest idea. In reality, I like most ideas, but I have to tell them that the real challenge is taking the inspiration from a dream to a business. All the evidence says that over 99% fail to make that leap.

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Flowchart: How a Seed VC Makes Investment Decisions

View from Seed

Ed. note: In 2013, Rob Go published a flowchart articulating his VC decision making process. Below, we’ve updated that graphic with new information in order to stay current and provide more context and transparency around each node. At NextView, we hold regular team offsites to step back and think about how we do everything from invest in seed-stage companies to create better platform initiatives in support of the Boston and New York startup ecosystems.

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The How, Why And When Of Website A/B Testing

YoungUpstarts

'By Alison Brehme, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Hostway Services, Inc. In today’s marketplace, companies cannot afford to overlook their online presence, including the brand’s website. Whenever new content is added or adjusted on this platform, it is critical to ensure that new features work appropriately and information is displayed as planned.

B2C 135
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Influence and Leadership: How Sales Can Make You a Better Leader

Up and Running

'Being an entrepreneur is a pursuit that can have tremendous rewards for those with the gumption to pursue it. Starting and growing your own enterprise requires patience, tenacity, and creativity. When you transition from working for others to building your own business, there are new challenges that you will face. One of these is learning how to be an effective leader.

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UX expectations grow

deal architect

Enterprise UX has taken giant strides in the last couple of years. On New Florence, I have profiled design innovation at Microsoft, Oracle, Infor and others. Yet, in many ways, future benchmarks may not come from each other but other.

Design 190
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Understanding Your True Character as an Entrepreneur

Both Sides of the Table

'Why do we do all that we do? Is it for the money? The recognition? Is work a part of life and life a part of work? Is it just the next rung in the ladder after we finish college and join the next grouping of people we’re tied to for a brief period in time? These aren’t generally the thoughts of 20-year-olds. That is the age where you do more than think. “Of course I work!

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6 Ways To Drive Success Through Customer Experience

Startup Professionals Musings

Not so long ago, every business assumed that the keys to success were the highest quality product, the best value for the buck, and the best customer service. Now all we hear about is providing the best “customer experience.” Exactly what is that customer experience that every modern marketer is talking about, and how do you measure it? A classic article in the Harvard Business Review “ The Truth About Customer Experience ” defines it as your customer’s end-to-end journey with you, not just the

Customer 208
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Value Inflection Points for Seed-Stage Startups

View from Seed

'When raising capital, it’s important to focus on raising enough money to get your company past big value inflection points. An easy way to think about it is that value over time doesn’t go up and to the right in a straight line like this: Instead, it’s more of a stair step like this: So, what are the value inflection points that create the stair steps, and how does one think about it at the earliest stages?

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[Infographic] The Workplace App Explosion

YoungUpstarts

The explosive growth of mobile apps is not only limited to the consumer space; the extensive adoption of smartphones similarly in business has led to a growing trend of the mobile workspace with Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) and Enterprise Apps. And that’s not surprising, considering these statistics – 41% of employees do not believe that the tools their company provides actually meets their needs which is why they choose to ‘go rogue’.

Mobile 151
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A Brief Guide to Choosing a Hosting Solution for Your Business Website

Up and Running

'Having a stable website has long become an imperative for almost any organization, company, or one-person business that aims to expand its online authority and reach connected consumers. As digital marketing strategies become commonplace in businesses of all sizes, the demand for reliable web hosting services increases and the choice of a web host becomes one of the critical decisions.

Hosting 103
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Why does every sector underestimate Amazon?

deal architect

Amazon finally broke out AWS revenues – it has an annual run rate of $ 5 billion with growth accelerating, and that is profitable. Lots of people are shocked Amazon has built a solid business in yet another sector –.

Revenue 271
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What Are Your Trying to Accomplish with your BtoB Content?

Rembrandt Communications

The days of wishing, hoping and haphazard results are over. What is really going on with your BtoB content strategy? Please answer these questions… Are you just posting on social-media when you remember, or just because you “think you are supposed to” because everyone else is? Do you have tons of “social” followers, but no […]. The post What Are Your Trying to Accomplish with your BtoB Content?

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8 Reasons To Initiate A Startup While Job Searching

Startup Professionals Musings

If you are one of the many professionals still trapped between jobs by circumstances outside your control, or are about to dump the loser job you have now, you should be actively defining and starting your own business, in parallel with looking for that ideal job. Let me explain why this is a win-win deal, no matter what the outcome. You have probably secretly always wanted to run your own show, but with an existing job, never took the time to consider a startup.

Search 209
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Harvard Is a Hotbed for Entrepreneurs (But Needs More Authenticity, Less Whiteboarding)

View from Seed

'Editor’s note: We recently published original research on the startup activity of Harvard Business School classes between 2008 and 2014. NextView’s David Beisel and Dimitri Dadiomov recently sat down with Michelle Tandler (HBS, Trinity Ventures) on her podcast to analyze this data further. This is a paraphrased summary of that interview. Why did you do this report?

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How To Use Your Small Business Marketing Budget To Deliver Big ROI

YoungUpstarts

by Azhar Katib, founder of WebSell Solutions Ptd Ltd. Leverage on the reach of internet to spread word around about your business. If you are a small business owner with limited budget then this should be your go to medium for marketing your product or service. While the numerous online marketing methods offer are wide spread of options today, simple Pay-Per-Click Ads on search engines can deliver the best bang for your buck.

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You Need a BoD Now

Scalable Startup

'How to design a board of directors. By Tom Nora. There was an article recently in VentureBeat about how much control the startup CEO founder has over his/her board of directors. Unfortunately, this actually isn’t true in most cases, especially for first time founders, for many reasons. Many factors come into play in early board formation including the founder’s goals, investors, cofounders, early appointees, family, friends.

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NetSuite deepens focus

deal architect

I do not often listen to quarterly earnings calls. I did to NetSuite’s 1Q call yesterday. It was a good primer to SuiteWorld coming up in a couple of weeks. Besides CEO Zach Nelson is always entertaining. Zach did not.

Cloud 207
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How Specific is your BtoB Content?

Rembrandt Communications

'Original Copy for your Target Market = Sales Are you writing original, BtoB content specific to your target market? With so much content on the Internet today, it’s easy to “copy and paste” information just to post something and check that off of your “to do” list. But don’t do it! Sure. It’s easy, but […]. The post How Specific is your BtoB Content?

PPC 122
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Why Investors Rank New Businesses By Leader Quality

Startup Professionals Musings

As an Angel investor in early-stage startups, I’ve long noticed my peers’ apparent bias toward the strength and character of the founding entrepreneurs, often overriding a strong solution to a painful problem with a big opportunity. In other words, the entrepreneur quality is more important than the idea -- in investor jargon, people invest in the jockey, and not the horse.