August, 2016

article thumbnail

Back In The Filtering Game: Entrepreneur Drawn by The Siren Call Of The Startup

YoungUpstarts

by Shane Kenny, founder of Filtersnap. I love the fast-paced, see-my-work-have-a-big-impact nature of a new startup. I love it so much that, since middle school, I have been part of starting eight businesses. Admittedly, they have not all been successful. Some have been spectacular failures. Despite this, I have been drawn by the siren call of the startup once again.

article thumbnail

Are You Getting Your Fair Share Of Startup Equity?

Startup Professionals Musings

I always tell entrepreneurs that two heads are better than one, so the first task in many startups is finding a co-founder or two. You need to find the skills or experience you don’t have in business, technology, or money. So the first question I usually get is what percent of the company or equity is that person worth? Giving a co-founder a salary won’t get you the “fire in the belly” you want.

Equity 144
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 39: Jeremy Johnson and Michael Eidsaune

Steve Blank

The existence of a problem doesn’t mean there’s a solution to that problem. Wanting to create impact is great. But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. I don’t recommend anyone become an entrepreneur. It’s too hard. It’s too painful. Starting a business is too risky. There are better ways to make a living.

Cofounder 142
article thumbnail

Social Trends Podcast: A Vision For A Business Operating System

Brandanew

The Social Trends Show where we meet social experts, brand owners, bloggers and all sorts of creatives got a high degree of ultra cool recently. We spoke to a cartoonist and all round creative, Meera Sapra. Now Meera incidentally, also wears another hat of being the social media guru at Zoho. She recently shared Zoho’s vision for a business operating system, no less.

article thumbnail

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

article thumbnail

How to Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Up and Running

“Know Thyself”—an ancient Greek maxim inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. What are you good at? That’s a question we all want to know about ourselves, as well as the question that occasionally comes after it: What aren’t you good at? If you don’t know how to answer those questions about yourself, keep reading—I’ll help you come to a better knowledge of yourself.

Video 83
article thumbnail

How to Handle Mobile “Moneyball Syndrome” & Cross-Device Attribution

ConversionXL

It seems all technology is getting smaller and more efficient. It’s certainly true for computers, as smartphones are progressively overtaking their larger counterparts. According to Dazeinfo research , there were about 1.13 billion smartphone users in 2012. This number increased by 27.1% in 2013 to 1.43 billion, and by 2017, nearly half of global mobile users are likely to own a smartphone.

Mobile 54

More Trending

article thumbnail

How to build the right management team

Version One Ventures

There’s a lot of debate surrounding the right time to bring executive level hires into your start-up. But one thing is clear: how you build your team over the first few years can determine the trajectory of your company more than any other decision you make. There are no right answers here. Every start-up is unique so the same path won’t work for every company and management team.

article thumbnail

15 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Name

Hearpreneur

Share The idea of exactly what your business is going to be usually comes first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it.

Naming 48
article thumbnail

How to Effectively Use WordPress as Your CMS

Brandanew

In our last post , we talked about what tools and infrastructure you need to develop a remarkable blog. And as a follow-up in today’s post, we’ll be sharing how to effectively use WordPress as your CMS (Content management system). This post comes to us via guest blogger and tech-guru, Shahid Mansuri. Shahid has some really mean tips for taking your blogging game up several notches.

PHP 126
article thumbnail

Should you go after value-add investors for your seed round?

Hippoland

Portfolio founder: There’s an investor who wants to invest about $500k. me: Oh great! Who is he/she? Portfolio founder: That’s the problem. Person X isn’t well-known. I want “value-add” investors in my round. So, I’m thinking about declining the money. I have this conversation all the time with portfolio companies. This especially happens when founders start getting a lot of inbound requests from investors to meet, so they think that they have a lot of investor options.

article thumbnail

Why would a son want a different life from his father's?

deal architect

The question jumped out at me in this article about the wide open spaces in Mongolia. It’s a question a nomadic herder asks. It may seem quaint to us these days but it is something that was accepted for generations.

Mongolia 218
article thumbnail

How I Knew That I Could Bootstrap My Company

YoungUpstarts

by Aytekin Tank, founder & CEO of JotForm. In the realm of software and internet companies, 2006 was a whole different landscape, and it was the year that I founded JotForm. At the time, most users accessed the web through Internet Explorer. Facebook had just opened its doors to outside college campuses. Myspace was the largest social networking website in the world.

article thumbnail

The Pivot You Need to Read About

Both Sides of the Table

GOAT just announced it raised $5 million in venture capital led by our friends at Matrix Partners. On the surface that sounds unremarkable — fundings happen daily. But this isn’t just any funding. GOAT (“Greatest of All Time) is a sneakerhead marketplace that is en fuego, but we led the company’s last financing round in 2012 (yes, four years ago) when they were an application for letting people join group dinners.

article thumbnail

Three Reasons Google Analytics is Worthless for Small Business

Duct Tape Marketing

Three Reasons Google Analytics is Worthless for Small Business written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. photo credit Pexels. If you own a small business that has a website, you probably want to know how many people are visiting your site. In fact, you probably want to know a lot more than that. You want to know how they got to your site, how much time they spend on your site once they get there, how many pages they look at, and lots of other things.

article thumbnail

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Goes Lean

Steve Blank

We tend to associate the government with words like bureaucracy rather than lean innovation. But smart people within government agencies are working to change the culture and embrace new ways of doing things. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a great example. The NGA, an organization within the U.S. Department of Defense, delivers geospatial intelligence (satellite imagery video, and other sensor data) to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals and first responde

Lean 177
article thumbnail

10 Principles For Sustainable Innovation In Business

Startup Professionals Musings

As a startup investor in this age of the entrepreneur, I see many more startups, but innovation is still hard to find. The most common proposals I hear are for yet another social networking site ( over 200 active ), or another dating site (over 2500 in the US alone). Startups which display real innovation, such as alternative energy sources and new medical treatments, are still rare.

article thumbnail

Doctor, Heal Thyself

deal architect

An interesting set of observations from Silicon Collar While analysts are predicting doom and gloom from automation to other sectors, they themselves continue with a labor and paper intensive model based on dated, static tools like Magic Quadrants and Waves.

210
210
article thumbnail

Why The Food Service Business Might Be Just Perfect For You

YoungUpstarts

If you’re thumbing through a catalog of restaurant supplies with the idea of starting a food service business, you’re reviewing an idea that dates back through history. Busy Romans out on the town enjoyed the fare of street vendors. Meanwhile, public cooks gratified affluent Romans in their villas with delicious meals. Later, the catering business expanded into hostelries, monasteries, taverns, and inns for medieval travelers.

article thumbnail

Customer Differentiation in Competitive Markets – SxSW Interactive 2016

entrepreMusings

It’s been over 7 years since I submitted a panel idea to SxSW Interactive and now the time has come to do it again. You may wonder why or you may not care at all, but nonetheless I’m letting you know about it. Please vote, comment on, and share our panel idea: Customer Differentiation in Competitive Markets before September 2, 2016. We’d love to have the opportunity to share our collective wisdom on how to create, build, and maintain a highly successful customer focused org

article thumbnail

Most Startups Fail Due to Cofounder Conflict [NextView & Reboot Podcast Series Part 2]

View from Seed

On August 9, we released the first episode in a series together with Reboot , which helps educate and coach entrepreneurs on communication, leadership, and well-being. Today is Part 2, in which I play the role of skeptic and Reboot’s Chief Product Officer, Dan Putt, shares how to push through that mentality that “the soft stuff matters less.” After that, we address a couple more big challenges facing founders, all with one aim: debunk the myth that the “soft stuff”

Cofounder 131
article thumbnail

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Goes Lean

Steve Blank

We tend to associate the government with words like bureaucracy rather than lean innovation. But smart people within government agencies are working to change the culture and embrace new ways of doing things. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a great example. The NGA, an organization within the U.S. Department of Defense, delivers geospatial intelligence (satellite imagery video, and other sensor data) to policymakers, warfighters, intelligence professionals and first responde

Lean 177
article thumbnail

The Right Way To Get Funding From Family And Friends

Startup Professionals Musings

Most entrepreneurs I know are so passionate about their new idea that they are surprised when family and friends don’t line up to invest in their new venture. Yet they tend to ignore this problem, and move on quickly to professional investors. They don’t realize that most Angel investors and venture capitalists will also decline to be first, if you have no commitment from friends and family.

article thumbnail

Silicon Collar excerpt The Sum of All Fears

deal architect

My new book, Silicon Collar, which will be released in Kindle format on Friday, is on balance a positive book about the impact of automation on jobs, but as I write “While the practitioners I interviewed were positive about the.

163
163
article thumbnail

Small Business Security: 4 Ways To Prove Your Security-Smarts

YoungUpstarts

By Bindu Sundaresan, Strategic Security Solutions Lead at AT&T. Data security breaches suffered by big, high-profile companies earn the most attention, and rightfully so, but the reality is that even the smallest companies and vendors fall victim to cyber-attacks. Many hackers see smaller companies as weak links and the entry point to gain access to their larger clients, or an easy access point to get valuable credit card information, social security numbers, or other private information.

Security 109
article thumbnail

Questions to Ask When You Document Your Content Strategy

Brandanew

Research by Content Marketing Institute (and partners) shows that only 32% B2B businesses in 2016 had a documented content strategy. And at the same time, 48% businesses cited a documented content marketing strategy as the reason for their overall improvement in content effectiveness. The best way to predict the future is indeed to create it. If you’re at a point in your business where you’re doing things without a documented content strategy, you need to read this!

B2B 124
article thumbnail

A Startup Visa – The International Entrepreneurs Rule – Form I-941

Feld Thoughts

On Friday, the USCIS proposed The International Entrepreneurs Rule. While this is a proposal subject to a public comment period, I expect it will go into effect in about 45 days. We finally will have a startup visa! The best summary I’ve seen so far is from Tahmina Watson titled International Entrepreneurs Rule (Obama’s Startup Visa Alternative)- Detailed Summary by Tahmina.

article thumbnail

Hacking for Diplomacy – Solving Foreign Policy Challenges with the Lean LaunchPad

Steve Blank

Hacking for Diplomacy is a new course from the Management Science and Engineering department in Stanford’s Engineering school and Stanford’s International Policy Studies program that will be first offered in the Fall of 2016. Join a select cross-disciplinary class that takes real problems from the U.S. State Department and asks students to use Lean Methods to test their understanding of the problem and deliver rapid-fire innovative solutions to pressing diplomacy, development and foreig

Lean 160
article thumbnail

6 Value Priorities That Attract All Serious Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

Young entrepreneurs often are so excited by new technology or their latest invention that they forget to translate it into a value proposition that their customers or potential investors can understand and relate to. They become frustrated with investors, senior executives, and even customers who don’t seem to “get it,” with the result that everyone loses.

article thumbnail

The Fall enterprise event season

deal architect

September to November brings many enterprise events – Oracle OpenWorld, Workday Rising, Salesforce Dreamforce and others. I am looking forward, this year, to updates on core ERP, HCM and CRM functionality, but also hope to hear more around: a) Use.

163
163
article thumbnail

Digital Advertising Is Broken: Three Alternatives For Businesses Looking To Monetize Their Website

YoungUpstarts

by Max Emelianov, CEO of HostForWeb. I’m equal parts baffled and agitated when I see someone complaining about how adblock is killing the Internet. Websites, they claim, need advertising revenue to survive. Without clicks and impressions, they can’t pay the bills – and with that in mind, anyone who uses adblock is a dirty, no good thief. There are several things wrong with that perception.

article thumbnail

Social Trends Podcast: Building Quality Human Engagement For Your Brand

Brandanew

We’re already mid-way in season 1 of the Social Trends Show, and I am thrilled to share my inspirations with you. Today we bring you a social expert who will talk through what it takes to stand out as a digital brand. Reaching future customers and building engagement for your brand is nothing that we underestimate. What trends are experts seeing and what should you do to be seen as a human brand that connects?

article thumbnail

The Top 3 Things You Really Need to Know about Search Engine Optimization

Rembrandt Communications

Stick to the important stuff and get results! You hear all of the buzz about search engine optimization (SEO), and know you need to use it for your business. However, with all of the different SEO companies out there clamoring for your business, constant changes from Google and your daily work-responsibilities, the whole process can […]. The post The Top 3 Things You Really Need to Know about Search Engine Optimization appeared first on Boost sales fast with content marketing strategy, SEO

Engineer 116
article thumbnail

Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 38: Ryan Smith and Lane Merrifield

Steve Blank

If you don’t value your product neither will your customers. No one used it when we gave it away for free. Freemium was a going out of business strategy. When a reporter asked, “Your kids must think you’re the coolest dad in the world,” I couldn’t answer the question, because I realized that I hadn’t seen my kids in three weeks.

Cofounder 145
article thumbnail

6 Ways To Find A Fundable Startup Market Opportunity

Startup Professionals Musings

Many entrepreneurs are so enamored with their product vision that they believe their own hype, and are convinced that the market for their solution is so huge that no one will ask them for independent market research data. They don’t realize that business projections with no third-party validation have no credibility with investors, and smart potential investors will walk away.

Marketing 138
article thumbnail

The Golden Age of the Worker

deal architect

(Cross posted at Medium) I am releasing in time for Labor Day weekend, Silicon Collar — an optimistic perspective on humans, machines and jobs. I studied how automation — machine learning, robotics, unmanned autonomous vehicles, white collar bots, exoskeletons etc.

article thumbnail

Startup HR Advice: How To Retain Millennial Employees

YoungUpstarts

by Lewis Robinson. Managing millennials can often be seen as a challenge in helping them to stay fulfilled and keep them from becoming bored. According to a study commissioned by Elance-oDesk & Millennial Branding, millennials were the largest generation in the workforce in 2015 but employers were having a hard time hiring them and, once they were hired, it was also hard to retain them.

Employee 116