October, 2016

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How to Find and Close Angel Investors from a Standing Start

View from Seed

Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help.

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7 Key Entrepreneur Habits Highlight Execution Ability

Startup Professionals Musings

As a small business and startup advisor, I find that entrepreneurs often love to talk about their latest idea, but not their execution. Like most investors, I’m convinced that success in business is more about the plan and the person than the idea. It’s great to be a visionary and a thinker, but a business that generates real world change and wealth requires people who get things done.

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Autonomous Vehicles: Can You Get There From Here? (Part 2)

Agile VC

This is the 2nd post in a series about self-driving vehicles and it explores how autonomous cars could become a reality. Self-Driving Vehicles: The Future Always Takes Longer to Arrive is the 1st post and covers the state of the vehicle autonomy (circa mid 2016) and how we’ve gotten here. . =. So what are the different paths towards commercially available self-driving cars?

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The Future of Government: Hayward & the Lean Startup

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, contributing editor of Lean Startup Co. It’s been exciting to watch the Lean Startup movement grow from a practice utilized in the tech world to one implemented in a wide variety of sectors ranging from enterprise to education, religious organizations, nonprofits, and government groups. When we talk about government, we mean both the macro outfits whose work affects the entire country (perhaps you’ve heard of the IRS ) and regionally-focused groups alike.

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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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Support, Sustain, Protect – Making The Most Of Your Business IT

YoungUpstarts

Looking for ways to improve your business often comes down to the technology and IT you utilize. It’s really important to make the most of the technology available to you and sustain it. IT in business helps to make everything much more efficient and effective. You can’t run a modern day to day business without using technology and IT. So, you have got to come up with ways of ensuring the systems within the company are looked after and running at the best possible level.

Cloud 214
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Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

Steve Blank

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.

Azure 264

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6 Ways To Create Experiences That Customers Crave

Startup Professionals Musings

For decades, efforts to satisfy customers have been built around demographics – capitalizing on race, ethnicity, gender, income, and other attributes. Today, in this age of pervasive social media and two-way communication, the focus needs to get beyond demographics into personalities. Customer personalities define customer experience, and sets what they love, and what they hate.

Customer 203
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How Mindfulness Can Boost Your Creativity and Productivity

crowdSPRING Blog

Image Source: Evolation Yoga. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past two decades, you’ve probably at least had a passing encounter with the term “mindfulness,” whether it was seeing the term splashed on magazine covers, listening to self-help gurus extol its value on daytime talk shoes, or hearing your own therapist encourage its application in your day to day life.

Product 99
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Growth strategies for marketplaces: key takeaways from a fireside chat on growth

Version One Ventures

Last week I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Andrew Chen for a fireside chat on growth strategies as part of the Version One marketplace meetup. More than 75 marketplace founders and investors attended the event – coming from as far as South Africa and Nova Scotia. As an investor and former founder, I know that scalable growth (and the pretty hockey stick graph) is the holy grail for every startup.

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How Software Developers Can Be Set Up For Failure

YoungUpstarts

by Reed Gusmus, director of marketing at QASymphony. The outright and abject failure of a software development project is a surprisingly common occurrence, and the reasons for a specific project’s failure tend to revolve around three easily avoidable mistakes. Since failure ought to be viewed as an entirely unacceptable outcome, it is essential that software development professionals recognize the most common issues that ultimately lead to the complete demise of a project that once held a

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Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple

Steve Blank

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Microsoft entered the 21st century as the dominant software provider for anyone who interacted with a computing device. 16 years later it’s just another software company.

Azure 264
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How to Make More Money With Bayesian A/B Test Evaluation

ConversionXL

The traditional (and most used) approach to analyzing A/B tests is to use a so-called t-test , which is a method used in frequentist statistics. While this method is scientifically valid, it has a major drawback: if you only implement significant results, you will leave a lot of money on the table. In this blogpost, I will argue why a post-hoc Bayesian test evaluation is a better evaluation method than a frequentist one for growing your business.

Revenue 113
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Transformify Partners with Genashtim to Help Bridge the Skills Gap

Transformify

London, UK - 20th October 2016. Transformify, a global corporate social responsibility (CSR) platform, has entered into a partnership with Genashtim, a provider of online learning solutions, in an initiative to bridge the skills gap by providing e-learning opportunities. Skills and knowledge are essential for social development. The shortage of skilled workers across a number of industries is a complex and significant challenge faced by many businesses worldwide.

Partner 70
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Should Your Company Develop a Mobile App?

crowdSPRING Blog

Image Source: Pulatech.com. It’s no secret that mobile web use has skyrocketed over the past several years, with smartphone ownership in the U.S. nearly doubling between 2011 and 2015. And these smartphone users are all about the apps. The average smartphone user downloads 8.8 apps per month, spending 90% of their time on their phone in apps versus in mobile browsing windows.

Mobile 95
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This Article About Andy Dunn and Bonobos is the Blueprint for Founder Storytelling

This is going to be BIG.

I just read an article about Bonobos --or was it a press release. I'm not completely sure. If you've met Andy Dunn, you'll know why that's going to be a fine line for any reporter, because it's nearly impossible to have a conversation with him without getting wrapped up in a story optimized to share. And damn, does he have his story and the ability to perform inception with it down cold.

Founder 102
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10 Easy Ways To Create A Healthy Workplace

YoungUpstarts

by Leigh Stringer, author of “ The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees – and Boost Your Company’s Bottom Line “ Over the years, we have developed work styles that are not good for our physical, mental or emotional health. . It’s not that we’re bad people, or that we aren’t working hard. The problem is that what our minds and bodies need at a basic level is in conflict with our work style.

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There are 145 Entrepreneurship Courses at Stanford

Steve Blank

Stanford is an incubator with dorms. Download the full text file with links to the courses here. [link]. Filed under: Hacking For Defense , Hacking for Diplomacy , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Incubator 332
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How CRO Experts Build and Maintain Testing Roadmaps

ConversionXL

It will come as no surprise, but like most things in life, conversion optimization will benefit from a strong strategic approach. This generally includes aligning your goals and resources to build out a roadmap, or at least a framework/process, for your experiments. Much like in other disciplines, while experts agree that strategy is important, they can sometimes differ in their approach to such a strategy.

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An inflection point for HCM executives

deal architect

As I was writing Silicon Collar over the last year, I got to see the impact machines are having on jobs and workers in over 50 settings. I looked at work in accounting firms, in banks, on the battlefront, in.

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Escaping the Design Trap in Agile Marketing

crowdSPRING Blog

The biggest trend in marketing in 2016 has been the idea of “agile marketing.” Workfront, a project management solution provider, defines it as : A tactical marketing approach in which teams identify and focus their collective efforts on high value projects, complete those projects cooperatively, measure their impact and then continuously and incrementally improve the results over time.

Agile 48
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No wait, of course THAT is the single most important SaaS metric

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The single most important SaaS metric is retention , because cancellations indicate lack of product/market fit, no matter the cause (price, features, severity of need, duration of need). If it cannot be fixed, it means the business is a failure even if other metrics are stellar. Once you’re scaling (i.e. past product/market fit and into tens of millions in revenue), you realize that cancellation scales with total customers whereas growth scales with sales and marketing costs, which means cancell

Metrics 270
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Building A Website That Really Sells Your Business

YoungUpstarts

All modern businesses need to focus at least in part on the website they have. Your business’ website says a lot about it as a whole. What’s more, it will be the first port of call for many people who are interested in your company. It is clear, then, that building a website which reflects well on your business is going to be hugely important. No matter what it is that you trade in, you need to ensure your website accurately depicts it.

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There are 145 Entrepreneurship Courses at Stanford

Steve Blank

Stanford is an incubator with dorms. Download the full text file with links to the courses here. Filed under: Hacking For Defense , Hacking for Diplomacy , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Incubator 332
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How To Master Business Decisions And Problem Solving

Startup Professionals Musings

One of the most important skills for every entrepreneur is timely and effective decision making. In a startup, any decision is better than no decision. One of the primary roles of every founder is to solve problems, make a decision, and manage the decision to results. The best entrepreneurs relish this role, while others struggle mightily and ultimately lose their health and their company.

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NYC Tech Podcast: Shai Goldman of SVB on Local Growth & Who Makes His All-Startup Basketball Team

View from Seed

NextView’s NYC podcast rolls on. Today, I talk to Shai Goldman, one of the most active community builders in NYC Tech, on his background, the evolution of the local startup scene … and who he’d draft to an all-startup pickup basketball game. Follow me and Shai at twitter.com/tdevane and twitter.com/shaig. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts: The post NYC Tech Podcast: Shai Goldman of SVB on Local Growth & Who Makes His All-Startup Basketball Team appeared first

Startup 245
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How Mindfulness Can Boost Your Creativity and Productivity

crowdSPRING Blog

Image Source: Evolation Yoga. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past two decades, you’ve probably at least had a passing encounter with the term “mindfulness,” whether it was seeing the term splashed on magazine covers, listening to self-help gurus extol its value on daytime talk shoes, or hearing your own therapist encourage its application in your day to day life.

Product 56
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Monthly Roundup: How Do You Scale Content For Your Brand?

Brandanew

It’s good to start with good news. Fall has begun and we’re in a rush to get all the latest content on to our readers. And talking of readers, I’m very proud to announce that this blog (now only just 2 years old) has been ranked #20 on the list of the top branding blogs every marketer should read! Now that’s amazing. So, if you’re wondering how to achieve this feat for your brand, and basically how to scale content and social, tips here will help!

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5 Mistakes We Made While Growing A Startup In Southeast Asia

YoungUpstarts

In March 2016, Rosanne Hortensius left the Netherlands to launch online couponing platform Saleduck in Southeast Asia. As the company’s Commercial Manager, Hortensius was armed with the responsibility of setting up the office’s headquarters in Kuala Lumpur as well as growing the local team. Along with Ben Rogmans – Saleduck’s CTO and co-founder, the two have spearheaded the movement towards expanding Saleduck in five countries within Southeast Asia and are now looking towards furthering th

Asia 151
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The 11 Bad Habits Killing Innovation in Your Company

Steve Blank

Alexander Osterwalder invented the Business Model Canvas , co-founded strategyzer.com and was the lead author of Business Model Generation which sold a million copies in 30 languages. Alexander and I often collaborate on new ideas for corporate innovation. Here’s his guest post on what bad habits to avoid inside of a company. Big companies have great execution habits to manage and improve successful business models and value propositions.

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Entrepreneurs Need To Focus On The Right Skill Set

Startup Professionals Musings

In my experience in large businesses as well as years of advising startups, I see far too much focus on product skills, and too little on people and process skills. In my view, this focus on the wrong skill set is the primary reason why over half of new businesses fail in the first five years, and only one out of a hundred startups get their requested funding from professional investors.

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Dreamforce: way, way more than a user conference

deal architect

Five years ago, I called Dreamforce a “rainbow coalition” given the wide range of musicians, politicians, and guest executives you could see on the stage and often run into the luminaries on the floor. If that was diverse, you should.

Cloud 191
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Mental Fitness

Feld Thoughts

After a 30 day hard reset (also known as sabbatical ) I felt like this was an important re-entry topic as I fling myself back into the fray. Several years ago I got tired of the phrase “Work Life Balance” (and its various permutations – Work/Life Balance and Work-Life Balance.) When Amy and I wrote Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur we wrestled a lot with this notion, and the phrase.

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6 Brands That’ve Created Business Value Via Niche Social Communities

Brandanew

We’ve time and again shared the importance of niche social communities in today’s digital world. Niche social communities work when they’re connected, engaged and generate consumer value. It’s more desirable to be appreciated by a select set of followers in a specific area, rather than run around getting generic likes that amount to nothing.

Community 174
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Why Successful Startups Go To The UAE

YoungUpstarts

Running a startup is exhilarating. While there are a seemingly endless number of challenges to overcome. It is also your chance to change the world. For an increasing number of successful startups, they are foregoing London, New York, or Silicon Valley for the business-friendly UAE. In fact, some have dubbed it the Silicon Valley of the Middle East.

UAE 136
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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 43: Dakin Sloss and Ajeet Singh

Steve Blank

In large companies innovators have to work twice as hard – they spend time fighting the system. In a startup, your ideas turn into reality really, really fast. A startup founder needs to never lose sight of the vision, but be extremely adaptable to pretty much everything else. Lots of people have visions. Most are hallucinations. In a startup, you don’t fight the system; you are the system.

Cofounder 274
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A Paperboy Explains The Keys To Success In Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Creating a new business is not rocket science. Whether you are starting a paper route, or commercializing a complex technology, the same basic principles of success apply. I found this illustrated well in a new book I just finished, “ A Paperboy’s Fable ,” by a young entrepreneur and writer Deep Patel. It doesn’t take a superior intellect or big credentials to succeed in business.