March, 2014

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Understanding the Power of Your Human Networks

Both Sides of the Table

'We all intuitively know how important human connections are in business but for many people it’s like exercise or eating well – one of those things you keep meaning to get around to. It reminds me of a line my wife and I often jokingly say to each other after seeing the awesome film “ Notorious ” about the life of Biggie Smalls. “I know mothafuckas who know mothafuckas.” Please just take 8 seconds to listen to this clip on YouTube – it’s priceless

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Beyond the Lemonade Stand: How to Teach High School Students Lean Startups

Steve Blank

'While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation, the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle an experiential entrepreneurship class?” Hawken School has now given us an answer. Their seniors just completed the school’s first-ever 3-credit semester program in evidence-based entrepreneurship.

Lean 334
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Can Project Management Support High Growth Companies?

YoungUpstarts

'By Russell Harley, veteran project manager and Director at PMO. There is some thinking that equates project management with being a roadblock to speedy delivery of critical projects. This is reinforced by the number of processes and documentation that can be involved in a project. After all, when a company is trying to meet market needs or break into trends, the last thing it needs is a project manager/PMO saying, ‘We need to have all this documentation before we can start working on this

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Problem Solvers Rock In This New Entrepreneur Era

Startup Professionals Musings

'Perhaps sparked by the recent recession, I’m seeing a new era of the entrepreneur, with startups springing up all around. Based on my own mentoring and investing experience, the best entrepreneurs are pragmatic problem solvers. They have an uncanny ability to find elegant, easy, and fast solutions to pain points in the marketplace, as well as their own challenges.

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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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Why you should hustle every day (and how Jerry Seinfeld did it)

The Next Web

'Herbert Lui does marketing for clients such as Pivotal Labs, Busy Building Things, and Renegades. This post originally appeared on the Busy Building Things blog and was edited by Robleh Jama. What do software development hosting service GitHub, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and entrepreneur Karen Cheng have in common? They all practise every day.

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In WordPress Hosting Hell? Pantheon Now Supports WordPress

Feld Thoughts

'You may noticed from prior posts that we’ve had a difficult time at Foundry Group managing our growing portfolio of WordPress sites. We are not alone. You would think that by now, managing websites would be a solved problem, but that’s just not true. Talk with any professional marketer about their websites and two things will become clear: 1) websites are absolutely central to how digital marketing gets done and 2) websites are a giant pain in the ass.

Hosting 139

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ESADE Business School Commencement Speech

Steve Blank

'President Bieto, Dean Sauquet, members of the faculty, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen….Thank you for the kind introduction. I’m honored to be at a university noted for knowledge, and in a city with 2000 years of history – home of Gaudí one of the 20 th century’s greatest innovators. I’d like to start with a request. Everyone, hold your phone up in the air like this.

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Should You Build Out Features Or Create A New Product?

YoungUpstarts

'by Adam Root, founder and CTO of Hiplogiq. If you were looking for a lawyer to represent your company for a multimillion-dollar merger, what kind of lawyer would you want? A DUI lawyer? A jack-of-all-trades, I’ll-make-your-copies-too lawyer? Didn’t think so. Most of us would want to hire the most experienced, cutthroat lawyer specializing in multimillion-dollar mergers.

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10 Top Traits Of The Boss You Always Wanted

Startup Professionals Musings

'Everyone can recognize a great manager a mile away, so why is it so hard to find one? We all remember a few that are “legends in their own mind”, but that doesn’t do it. In fact, the clue here is that the view in your mind is the only one that matters, rather than the other way around. Almost every one of us in business can remember that one special manager in their career who exemplifies the norm, who commanded our respect, and treated us like a friend, even in the toughest of personal or busi

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12 ways to get your business development and tech teams on the same page

The Next Web

'Here’s a problem I bet every non-technical founder has experienced: the communication gap between what the biz dev team wants and what the tech team thinks they want, and vice versa. It’s disruptive, and for founders, very frustrating to watch. The thing is, everyone is actually working toward the same end goals – or at least they should be. So why is it so hard to get these departments on the same page, collaborating in peace?

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Set Your Online Reputation Before Someone Else Does

Gust

'Image via Flickr by krossbow. These days, your online Internet reputation is your reputation. Of course, having no reputation is usually better than a bad one, but don’t wait for someone else to establish a good one for you. It’s time for every business and business person to proactively create a positive presence, before someone else puts you in a defensive mode that is hard to win.

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How do I Really Feel About Anonymous Apps Like Secret?

Both Sides of the Table

'By now you likely know that Marc Andreessen weighed in on anonymous apps in a 12-part Twitter diatribe. Anonymity. As the old joke goes, “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” I have been weighing in slowly on the topic over the past few weeks on Twitter but have avoided writing a blog post about it until now. This was in part due to a tremendously busy 30-day period for me (in which my overall writing has been down) and in part the inevitability of knowing that weighing

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Everything You Need To Know About Creating Killer Explainer Videos

ConversionXL

'You’ve likely already heard that explainer videos can boost conversions anywhere between ten and ten bazillion percent. You’re probably even toying with the idea of doing one for your company. The question is… Can you make it any good? With over 100 years of movie & video history embedded in our collective subconscious, your customer’s expectations are really high.

Video 122
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5 Tips To Quickly Advance As A Professional

YoungUpstarts

'by Jeffrey Fermin, cofounder of Officevibe. Have you ever wondered what really makes an employee awesome in the eyes of the boss? There are always the obvious answers: they love friendly, motivated, enthusiastic workers that are passionate about their job. That’s great and all but how do we actually become this kind of worker and how do we use that to advance in the corporation?

Cofounder 226
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Set Your Online Reputation Before Someone Else Does

Startup Professionals Musings

'These days, your online Internet reputation is your reputation. Of course, having no reputation is usually better than a bad one, but don’t wait for someone else to establish a good one for you. It’s time for every business and business person to proactively create a positive presence, before someone else puts you in a defensive mode that is hard to win.

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Technical recruiting is broken: Here are 4 ways to hire better

The Next Web

'Vivek Ravisankar is the co-founder of Y Combinator alumnus, HackerRank , a platform for coding contests used by programmers to hone their skills and a tool for companies to streamline their own recruiting process. The hiring process for technical talent is broken. Across the board, the number one problem for any company is hiring programmers. Whether it’s a series A-funded startup or a large multinational corporation, hiring technical talent takes up a lot of time, energy, and money – and does

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Want to Work for a Startup? 10 Questions to Ask Your Interviewer

mashable.com

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A Tale of Two Fundraising Stories

This is going to be BIG.

'Here are two contrasting startup stories I''ve seen firsthand. With one company, a founder and his super inspirational, creative, and established buddy hatch a plan to build a very strong content brand that serves as a platform for a lot of diverse revenue streams--events, ecommerce, advertising. You could think of it as a spin on Thrillist. With the author staying close as an advisor, they build a real, cashflow positive business and start to think about where they could go with some outside c

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The Effects of Typography on User Experience & Conversions

ConversionXL

'“Typography is the detail and the presentation of a story. It represents the voice of an atmosphere, or historical setting of some kind. It can do a lot of things.” Cyrus Highsmith. We only have a handful of tools to communicating online, really. Words, images, colors & composition are the usual suspects – but they’re stealing most of the credit for what goes into making effective websites & landing pages.

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Debunking Five Job Hunting Myths

YoungUpstarts

'by Thomas Moran, CEO of Addison Group. It’s inevitable that new job hunters will run into a plethora of career advice, both wanted and unwanted. As the job market continues to be tough and technology is increasing competitiveness the dos and don’ts of job searching are changing. But while career advice is a useful tool in the job hunt, it can also be extremely outdated and counterproductive.

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Adopting Good Work Habits Beats Dropping Bad Ones

Startup Professionals Musings

'Most of the entrepreneurs I know realize they have some bad habits, like maybe procrastination or not listening well, so they focus on dropping these. New studies indicate that a more productive approach would be adopting new good habits and behaviors that clearly move your business forward, like good time management and implementing customer recommendations.

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‘I don’t know’: Why admitting you don’t have all the answers is perfectly okay

The Next Web

'Jason Freedman is the co-founder of 42Floors , making it easy for everyone to rent office space. He’s a two-time Y Combinator alum and blogs regularly on humbledMBA. This post was originally published on the 42floors blog. I want to share an interesting conversation I had with Kiran Divvela back when he was still interviewing for our company. Kiran runs all of our data supply chain activities.

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Andreessen Horowitz explain why now is a good time to be a tech investor

The Equity Kicker

'The guys at Andreessen Hororwitz are on a hell of a tear. The firm was founded in 2009 and they just announced the closing of their fourth fund at $1.5bn. On top of that they’ve invested in a large number of marquee companies that have had big exits, including this weeks hot story Occulus Rift, and Twitter and AirBnB. They are one of the firms that inspires us here at Forward Partners , particularly for their operational model which we have adapted and extended so it works for early stag

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Twitter Link Roundup #214 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, Marketing and More

crowdSPRING Blog

'Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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CS Degree Won’t Make You A Great Engineer, Your First Job Will

Hunter Walker

'Early Google engineer and now Twitter Ads engineering manager Jeremy Ginsberg follows up on my New Grad Career Advice with some of his own thoughts. tldr: CS Degree Won’t Make You A Great Engineer, Your First Job Will. A CS degree is generally the best foundation for a career in software (for PM’s and SWE’s alike, IMHO), but it won’t make you a great engineer: your first 2 years working in industry are when you really develop your skills and learn best practices.

Engineer 117
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One of My Most Frequent Pieces of Advice: Be Politely Persistent

Both Sides of the Table

'One of the hardest things for most entrepreneurs to know is how hard to push in situations where people tell you “no.” But then again most entrepreneurs fail. There is that rare breed that doesn’t accept “no” for an answer. It is impossible advice to give because there is such a fine line between being persistent and being annoying and it’s something you probably can’t teach.

Email 389
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How To Kick Your Business Legacy Up A Notch

Startup Professionals Musings

'Every entrepreneur and business leader waits too long before really working on the legacy that he wants to leave to society and his family. They realize too late that they don’t really want to be remembered for how many hours they spent on airplanes, how many emails they produced, or even how much money they made for the business. If you disappeared today, what would your legacy show?

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Want to work at a startup? Nail these 9 interview questions

The Next Web

'Ryan Matzner is the Director of Strategy at Fueled , the leading iPhone application developers and masters of mobile design , based in New York and London. This post was originally published on the Fueled blog. As Fueled has grown from its infancy to more than 100 employees, I regularly interview many smart candidates who could answer your standard interview questions in their sleep.

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Why Companies are Not Startups

Steve Blank

'In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are not larger versions of startups. There’s been lots written about how companies need to be more innovative, but very little on what stops them from doing so. Companies looking to be innovative face a conundrum: Every policy and procedure that makes a them efficient execution machines stifles innovation.

IRR 335
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Copywriting Tips and Tricks in a Digital World

Duct Tape Marketing

'Copywriting Tips and Tricks in a Digital World written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Christopher McMurphy – Enjoy! As a marketing tactic, copywriting has been around since the days when the Mad Men of advertising were knocking back highballs in the afternoon.

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Smartand Dumb Big Data

deal architect

'The Software AG theme at CeBIT was “smart big data” – using analytics and processes much more intelligently I have been thinking on the trip about two very smart set of services and two shockingly inefficient ones. 1a) I called.

Analytics 316
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Why You Shouldn’t Decide Anything Important at Your Board Meeting

Both Sides of the Table

'This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. There is an old saying in poker that if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is – it’s you. The same can be said of critical decisions in a board meeting or frankly any other meeting where major decisions are ratified. If you’re turning up to important meetings hoping to persuade the critical people who attend of a decision you’re trying to make and having already “counted your votes” you are sub-opt

Cofounder 325
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Hogging the Credit - Why Software Is Eating Banking

Seeing Both Sides

' . When this 10s decade is over, we will look back and be amazed that a mere ten years prior, a few, absolutely massive financial institutions controlled the global banking industry. Software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen famously observed, and an industry like financial services -- whose service offering is essentially all information-based -- is particularly susceptible to the disruptive force of technology.

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Forget what you know: There’s no right way to start up

The Next Web

'Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt and EIR at Tradecraft. Visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. Twitter is confusing. Early on, skeptics questioned, “What problem does it solve?” Even its founders couldn’t quite describe it, let alone foresee what it would become. It wasn’t clear what [Twitter] was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything.

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Get the Heck Out of the Building in Founder’s School: Part 2

Steve Blank

'With a ~$2 billion endowment the Kauffman Foundation is the largest non-profit focused on entrepreneurship in the world. Giving away $80 million to every year (~$25 million to entrepreneurial causes) makes Kauffman the dominant player in the entrepreneurship space. Kauffman launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies.

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Be A Business Leader As Well As A Thought Leader

Startup Professionals Musings

'By definition, most entrepreneurs are thought leaders. They have the ability to recognize a market need, the skills to design and implement a solution, and the drive to start a business from that solution. It all comes from within themselves. A business leader does the same thing and more through the people around them. Most entrepreneurs are not both.