October, 2015

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The Legal Side of Entrepreneurship

YoungUpstarts

by John Vrionis, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Lightspeed is in the business of encouraging entrepreneurship. This past summer, the Lightspeed Summer Fellowships program invited selected guests to provide aspiring entrepreneurs a perspective into all aspects of starting a new company. The program provides entrepreneurs the resources and mentoring they need to build their companies and develop their skills.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 8: Phil Randazzo and Derek Andersen

Steve Blank

Successful entrepreneurs show up a lot and make their own luck. And they are resilient – they’re able to bounce back after failure. Both of these traits made all the difference for the two latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. Phil Randazzo. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were.

Las Vegas 208
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10 Ways An Entrepreneur Can Build A Winning Culture

Startup Professionals Musings

If an entrepreneur can’t build a culture of excitement and commitment at a startup, the chances of long-term success are negligible. It simply doesn’t matter how great your solution is. Every investor knows this. That’s why they insist on spending a day with your team as part of the due diligence process. A winning culture is easy to see, and a culture of fear and desperation is hard to hide.

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2 Challenges of Startup Customer Development & How to Get Great Feedback Instead

View from Seed

Step one in building a new company is the YC adage: “Build something people want.”. But how do you go about figuring out what people want? The obvious answer we all give (and receive) in the startup community is to talk to people. “Customer development” has become its own skill and body of knowledge, and there are some crucial nuances to understand up front before beginning your customer dev discussions.

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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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Boston’s WebInno Is Now BIG

Genuine VC

Back in June, the local Boston tech community together celebrated the ten year anniversary of the Web Innovators Group, affectionately known as “WebInno.” Now Boston’s largest regular tech conference, every few months it draws hundreds of attendees from the entrepreneurial ecosystem – including founders, software engineers, startup executives, and investors.

Boston 118
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Build Transformify - ?#?Creative? ?#?Web? ?#?Developer? TRJOB-8

Transformify

Transformify is growing and we look forward to welcoming new ?#‎members ?in our ?#‎virtual?team?: ?#‎Creative? ?#‎Web? ?#‎Developer? TRJOB-8. Want to work remotely and love our web site? Then why don't you help us to make it even better? You will work closely with our Digital Marketing Execs to deliver digital content on time.

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6 Simple Tricks to Avoid Late-Paying Customers

Up and Running

Eighty percent of small businesses are struggling with late payments. . When small businesses have delinquent accounts, it puts a major halt in their cash flow. If cash is king, what are these businesses supposed to do when they’ve lost control of the money that should be coming in? No business should be put in a position where they cannot effectively manage their cash flow.

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8 Myths Technologists Believe That Sink Businesses

Startup Professionals Musings

Most technologists have little interest in the mechanics of starting and building a business. That’s why I recommend that they find a co-founder who loves business challenges, including marketing and finance. I usually envision a 50-50 ownership split for their efforts, but every engineer believes the technology side deserves the majority share. In fact, an entrepreneur friend of mine, who made millions on her marketing expertise, asserted recently that most inventors fail in business because th

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28 Entrepreneurs Discuss Why they Started Their Businesses

Hearpreneur

Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any “job” they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your “job” can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.

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GTK’s and Pillsbury’s Internet of Things Executive Event - 2015 Edition

Growthink Blog

I had the good fortune to attend and participate in GTK Partners and Pillsbury's Internet of Things (IoT) Executive Event in Palo Alto last week. It was business star-studded affair - 150 Silicon Valley technology executives and investors gathered together to network and brainstorm on IoT - described by many as fundamental a technology shift as the emergence of the Internet itself was in the 1990's.

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The Advanced Guide to Qualitative Research

ConversionXL

You spend most days analyzing and interpreting numbers, right? You’re constantly sifting through Google Analytics dashboards, Formisimo reports, Mixpanel data – the list is endless. When you spend so much time focusing on the numbers, it’s easy to forget about the people generating those numbers. That’s where qualitative conversion research comes into play.

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The 2015 Lean Startup Conference is the Biggest Yet

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest post by Jennifer Maerz, Contributing Editor of Lean Startup Co. The Lean Startup Conference is a one-of-a-kind conference and community of 2,000 thought leaders who meet annually in San Francisco to discuss the ways everyone from big government agencies, multinational conglomerates, scrappy startups, religious organizations, and mission-driven initiatives puts continuous innovation into practice, empowering employees and fostering radical success along the way.

Lean 129
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Pros and Cons of Being Your Own Boss

Up and Running

One of the more common half truths of startups and entrepreneurship is the one about being your own boss. I’ve called it a myth before, but half truth is better because there are some real positives with being your own boss, but there are negatives too. I’ve spent a lot of years as theoretically being my own boss, including more than 10 years as sole proprietor business planning consultant, working on my own with clients; and more than 10 years building a company, as founder and owne

Cleveland 104
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5 Ways To Safely Sample The Entrepreneur Lifestyle

Startup Professionals Musings

If you think you are the perfect fit for the entrepreneur lifestyle, but you’re not yet sure if you’re ready to start your own, then I recommend that you take a job with an existing startup first to validate the culture realities against your dream. Without risking all your life savings, you may find that corporate desk you have as an alternative is a lot more satisfying.

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25 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Name

Hearpreneur

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. Even still there are some people who study foreign words for the perfect meaning behind their chosen business.

Naming 98
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Please, Mr. Ellison

deal architect

I know you were kidding last night about having only one slide but would love that minimalism in one of your keynotes. Our industry is overrun with slides. When I was at Gartner we unleashed 18 slides in every presentation.

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What To Do When Your Competitor Gets Funded?

Both Sides of the Table

This morning Clutter.io announced they raised $9 million from Sequoia , arguably the best venture capital firm that exists. Congratulations. Sincerely. Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t tell you this because I invested in their main competitor, MakeSpace. I know my MakeSpace friends will forgive me because I just don’t believe the conventional wisdom is right.

Cofounder 298
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Partnership for Freedom– Rethinking Supply Chains Challenge Grant Awarding $500,000 to Entrepreneurs

Pascal's View

I am excited to join in announcing the launch of Rethink Supply Chains: The Tech Challenge to Fight Labor Trafficking from the Partnership for Freedom, for which I will be serving as one of the judges. The Rethink Supply Chains Challenge is a call to action to a wide range of communities – developers, designers, social entrepreneurs, advocates, and innovators – to apply their talents to a critical cause: ending forced labor and modern slavery in the global supply chain.

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A Framework for Startup Traction & Pitfalls to Avoid [Traction #12: Gabriel Weinberg]

View from Seed

The NextView podcast Traction explores all the clever, creative, and atypical things entrepreneurs do to make initial progress against the odds. If startups should do things that “don’t scale,” then this podcast asks a simple question: What ARE those things? Past episodes include stories from founders of LinkedIn , DraftKings , General Assembly , Mattermark , InsightSquared , and more.

Framework 220
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Seven Easy-to-Pick-Up Skills All Great Leaders Have

Startup Professionals Musings

I have met several young people in business recently who believe that they are natural born entrepreneurs, and actually seem to feel that traditional training and experience may be a detriment to their success in this new world. I concede that some natural born disciplines do exist, but more often I tend to agree with Peter Drucker , who said “It’s not magic, it’s not mysterious, and it has nothing to do with genes.

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Pixar, Artists, Founders and Corporate Innovation

Steve Blank

I’m still surprised when I find unexpected connections with innovation in different industries. —– In a recent workshop with a large company focused on the Innovation@50x process, I mentioned that founders and intraprenuers operate more like artists than accountants – on day one they see something no one else does. One of the innovators in the room said, “It sounds like you’re describing exactly what Ed Catmull the CEO of Pixar wrote in Creativity, Inc.”.

Founder 243
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The Oracle enigma

deal architect

It has been quite a month for cloud computing. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson announced their “thirteenth consecutive quarter of more than 30 percent year-over-year revenue growth.” Amazon Web Services announced 78% revenue growth increase year over year. Microsoft reported 18.

Cloud 239
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Getting Your Business Ready For The Holiday Season

YoungUpstarts

The next few months are jam-packed with holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas tend to be the big marketing ones. Each holiday offers its own ways for you to promote your brand and improve office morale, so don’t delay and start planning your new strategies for the upcoming season. Spread Office Cheer. The holiday season offers plenty of inexpensive opportunities for you to boost company morale and promote camaraderie.

Turkey 145
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7 Types Of Photos Your Social Media Fans Will Engage With

Brandanew

Facebook’s organic reach has been a matter of concern for many marketers. Unless they really engage with your content, your content may not even reach the relevant newsfeed. You can have thousands of followers on your Facebook page but still have posts that no one really engages with. Having no engagement on posts is the social media equivalent of talking to yourself – it shouldn’t happen.

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Walking Before Knowing the Path

View from Seed

Often when thinking of what’s next, personally or at work, we tend to delay an actual step forward and instead labor over mapping the path we should take. A collection of well-worn avenues that others – bosses, parents, heroes – have taken before us forge this potential path, the details of which we agonize over. This is one part human nature and one part a damning effect of expecting results from a practiced action which secondary education engrains in us — we seek proven endeavors

Equity 196
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10 Questions to Assess Your Motivational Skills

Startup Professionals Musings

Motivated teams are the key to success at every startup, yet I still know entrepreneurs who gave an inspirational speech to kick off the quarter but haven’t been heard from since, or don’t realize that their actions are often more demotivating than inspirational. The result is a huge loss in productivity and morale and potentially the death of a promising startup.

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Do You Need a BtoB Content Strategist or a Copywriter?

Rembrandt Communications

There’s a big difference depending on your goals Potential, BtoB clients contact me on a regular basis looking for help. They have big sales-goals and know they need some copywriting done… but that’s about it. Well, if you are trying to boost sales, awareness, credibility, and more, it’s time to get specific. You may just […]. The post Do You Need a BtoB Content Strategist or a Copywriter?

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The HRO as CDO?

deal architect

Many HCM professionals are headed to HR Tech this week. I would urge them to also consider going to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics event even if they are not big sports fans. For a decade, that event has cataloged.

Analytics 188
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Can You Really Turn A Hobby Into A Business?

YoungUpstarts

By Nick Goode, Commercial Director at Sage One. The whole hobby-to-business proposition is a little misleading — primarily because we need to rethink the word “hobby.” When we hear it, we think of those fun, voluntary pastimes that bring us enjoyment and help us make the most of our free time: reading, collecting stamps, community theatre — they’re all things that we do because we enjoy doing them.

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5 SEO Techniques That You Need To Retire NOW

Brandanew

Marketers the world over collectively heave a big sigh every time Google makes a change on its search algorithms. It happened with the previous Panda and Penguin releases and as marketers we always need to be prepared for the new. The Internet has evolved and some SEO techniques have definitely become obsolete. As search engines and social media platforms constantly strive to improve their user experience, they do not care about the feelings of digital marketers who may have spent years “o

SEO 152
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How Much Seed Capital Should You Actually Raise?

View from Seed

In a world of pre-seeds , seeds, seed extensions, super-seeds , and more, figuring out the right amount to raise for a startup’s seed round can seem like a moving target. And if you do land on a “right” amount, is that the actual best number for the “ask” in a pitch deck ? Conventional VC wisdom says entrepreneurs should raise 18 months of runway. This rule of thumb is directionally correct.

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10 Age-Old Entrepreneur Rules Still Lead To Success

Startup Professionals Musings

In this world of constant change, new technologies, and a thousand cultures, it’s evident and somehow comforting to me that the basic rules for business prosperity really haven’t changed in the last hundred years. Business success is still more about the people than the technology or idea involved. As an angel investor and a mentor to entrepreneurs I still see this every day.

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The Market Diversifies: International Innovation Captures Larger Share Of Startup Funding Applications

Gust

In Q3 the global startup ecosystem continued to thrive, with 25% growth over the same quarter last year and up 18% from last quarter, as the innovation economy expands around the world. Quarterly data from Gust, the online platform for the global angel investment industry, reveals that while incumbent leaders show no sign of slowing down, new industries and areas Read more >.

Marketing 118
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More on S/4HANA at TechEd?

deal architect

Apple announced the iPhone 6s on September 9. It went on sale couple of weeks later and 3 days later it announced it had sold 13 million units – the strongest weekend sales of any product in Apple’s history. All.

Sales 177
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Taking Care Of Your Warehouse With These Ace Tips

YoungUpstarts

There you are, lounging in your ivory tower of an office complex, sun glinting through your 43 rd floor window. A newton’s cradle sways to and fro and you sit in your chair like a Bond villain. But something niggles at you from the back of your mind. You’re in the lap of luxury. But then you begin to remember disgruntled workers in your warehouse. Yes, that was it, some kind of picket line and a few burning tyres.

Security 147
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How To Make Audio Stories Using Podcasts To Tell Your Brand Story

Brandanew

My husband- an avid NPR listener switched over to podcasts last year. On his Twitter post that I read with great interest, he called one of them “pure podcast glory” He wanted to drive a little extra to hear Starlee Kine finish her mystery. With Serial, the Mystery Show, Startup, Limetown stories, I do think, it is the revival of the Podcasting industry.

Audio 162