Sat.Oct 31, 2015 - Fri.Nov 06, 2015

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Founders from MIT With a Plan to Change How We Grow and Eat Food

Both Sides of the Table

In our industry we always talk about funding big ideas or funding things with more meaning. It’s something Yves Sisteron & I have been talking about for years at Upfront Ventures. Today we’re proud to talk more about Grove Labs – we really hope you’ll quickly check out this innovative product and we think many of you will be as impressed with Grove as we have been.

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10 Leadership Elements That Maximize Business Value

Startup Professionals Musings

Valuing a business based on assets and financial performance is a well-understood process, but every investor knows the real value goes well beyond these parameters, either higher or lower. The key elements of leadership in a company, both individual and organizational, are less tangible, but very critical in setting a market value for investment, acquisition, or going public.

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ATS Solutions For The Modern Human Resources Department

YoungUpstarts

Anyone involved in the modern workplace knows that Human Resources is changing. Technology has been pushing the vanguard of this very human industry, automating processes that have long required human attention, and changing perspectives that have been in place for several generations. These changes are most deeply felt in the hiring process. Modern Human Resources techniques allow managers to know a lot more about the people they consider hiring, and to find them more easily as well.

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Building A Software Business? 3 Things Software Entrepreneur’s Should Know

YFS Magazine

Following these fundamentals may not guarantee success, but they will lower your chance of failure by decreasing the room for error.

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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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14 List Building Hacks to Grow Your Email Database Fast

ConversionXL

Email marketing is one of the fastest ways to drive sales of any online channel. Think about it… What other channel can you launch something and drive sales immediately? But the biggest challenge most businesses face is they don’t have an email database (which I’ll interchangeably refer to as a ‘list’) big enough to see the benefits of email. Why the ‘traditional’ method of growing an email database doesn’t work.

Database 105
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6 Growth Barriers Most Startups Don’t See Coming

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur thinks he can relax a bit after his business model is proven, funding is in place, and revenues are scaling as projected up that hockey-stick curve. Unfortunately, the market is changing so fast these days that any upward climb can level off quickly, as the core business growth begins to stall. This S-Curve, with no correction, can quickly lead to disaster.

More Trending

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Top 10 Website Builder And Hosting Solutions?? For Entrepreneurs

YFS Magazine

Starting a website isn’t the massive headache it used to be. With a little bit of time, minimal tech knowledge, and little to zero cost, you can create a site that puts the early days of the Internet to shame.

Hosting 94
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How to Make Buying Easier on Your Site

ConversionXL

Understanding what consumers want, what consumers need and why is a crucial part of conversion rate optimization. Earlier this year, BrandShop released the results of the 2015 Digital Consumer Preferences Survey , which revealed in no uncertain terms that consumers want (and need) buying online directly from brands to be easier. Why do consumers, despite the rise of eCommerce, find buying online difficult?

eCommerce 105
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Oracle Cloud: If you build it, will they come?

deal architect

The Coliseum loomed large for me this week at Oracle OpenWorld. I flew into Oakland and took the new people-mover from the airport to the BART station at the venue which Oracle sponsors. So much more appealing and efficient than.

Oakland 224
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8 Reasons Young at Heart Entrepreneurs Lead the Way

Startup Professionals Musings

Surviving as an entrepreneur requires unbridled passion, enthusiasm and a certain naiveté in the face of many unknowns. Young people are more accustomed to facing a new world each day, so they don’t worry about it, and usually actually relish the new adventure. Once the rest of us reach a certain age, we know too many things that can go wrong, so we avoid the path entirely.

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3 BYOD Risks And Solutions For SMBs

YoungUpstarts

By Brian Sutter, Director of Marketing, Wasp Barcode Technologies. Today, many of us enjoy a seamless technology experience – moving from our smart homes, to our connected cars and into the workplace without missing a beat (or a swipe). These capabilities have created a new trend in business: BYOD, shorthand for “bring your own device”. Smartphones are the most common example of a personal device that might pull double duty as an in-office resource, but many employees also take their own tablets

Mobile 201
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Monthly Roundup October 2015: How To Do Content Marketing Right

Brandanew

It’s time for another monthly round up and I am excited to share thoughts that I’ve been discussing with global audiences. As you can see on my personal blog, 2015 has been a very heavy year of writing – which I truly feel grateful for and have enjoyed working on. This month I have some tips on how to do Content Marketing right. In addition you can join me for a free event on how to use digital marketing to sell your books , and also grab a free download of a content marketing

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Digital TransformationIndia Visa Process

deal architect

Last February, I described the nightmare applying for visas to India. In the end the trip got cancelled before my wife and I got the ten year visa on our passports. For these holidays we were looking at a family.

India 199
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8 Problem-Solving Practices Give Startups Success

Startup Professionals Musings

If you find problem-solving to be energizing, you could be the next great entrepreneur. On the other hand, if facing unforeseen problems annoys you and causes ongoing stress, don’t quit your day job. Creating an innovative new business is guaranteed to test your skills, patience and determination, and you need to derive satisfaction from the journey, as well as the destination.

Startup 208
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5 Ways Role Models Can Help Small Business Owners

YoungUpstarts

By Hunter Hoffmann, Head of US Communications at Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Entrepreneurs are some of the most courageous people out there since you need to be comfortable with a lot of risk to start a business from scratch. But, a lot of small business owners need some guidance to find their courage. That’s why most small business owners have someone in their life who served as a role model guiding them on their journey to start their own business.

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How To Grow Your Online Influence And Why You Are Failing

Brandanew

Influence is an interesting word. You never know who gets influenced by whom. Human psychology works in strange ways so you cannot exactly predict responses. But you can connect the dots and reverse engineer things. When it comes to building your online identity and influence, certain definitive steps must be followed. Following these basics should provide you a roadmap for sure progress.

Viral 138
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How Lean Startup Helped Serve Communities in Kenya

Startup Lessons Learned

Guest Post by Jennifer Maerz, Contributing Editor of Lean Startup Co., with Kirsten Cluthe as Contributor. Here’s the thing about The Lean Startup methodology. It isn’t just for use by one industry, or one staff size, or even in any one country. Our customer-first, rapid trials-rapid discovery ethos is adaptable to all varieties of mission driven, enterprise, and startup companies around the world.

Kenya 131
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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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The Apprentice UK: The BBC Show’s Greatest Success Stories

YoungUpstarts

Millions of people around the world have tuned into The Apprentice during its decade-long run. As we’ve watched from behind our television screens, we have been inspired, motivated, entertained, and driven to want more for ourselves. We have witnessed these born entrepreneurs apply their skills to a myriad of situations, and many of us have wondered whether we have the capability to do the same.

Matching 182
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5 Simple And Effective Tips On How You Can Improve Your Instagram Presence Today

Brandanew

Instagram with 75 million+ daily users is one of the fastest growing social networks. About 90% of the users are the highly engaged millennials under the age of 30. If we consider mobile only apps, there’s hardly any other social network that comes close. Some studies have shown that it also offers better engagement compared to other networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

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What are You Writing and Promoting?

Rembrandt Communications

Your content strategy and PR should provide results! Have you seen all of the stories about the death of traditional, public relations (PR) lately? The fact is that most people can get the news they need by simply going to their favorite, online news site, watching television or conducting an online search. Because of this, […]. The post What are You Writing and Promoting?

PR 130
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Startup ups and downs – Friday fun

The Equity Kicker

I’ve seen lots of diagrams over the years that depict the ups and downs of startup life, but this is the best. It’s from a post by Scott Belsky, and as he says the ups and downs are inevitable. The only thing to hope for is that the best fit line has a positive gradient. He also wrote: The science of business is the things that scale, the art of business is the things that don’t.

Startup 123
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Why You Should Run Your City Like A Startup

YoungUpstarts

By Scott Fadness, Mayor of Fishers, Indiana. 90 percent of startups fail. With such a high failure rate, why would I, the leader of a municipality thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, model my leadership style after that of an entrepreneur? As the mayor of an entrepreneurial city, I recognize the benefits that come from the startup approach to building a business.

Indiana 165
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5 Things Every Aspiring Writer Should Be Prepared For

Brandanew

So you love to write and aspire to make a career out of it? Well, that’s wonderful. If you do succeed, it can be a rewarding career. You will also get the satisfaction of turning your passion into your profession- something very few people tend to accomplish. However, for every celebrity writer there are hundreds of strugglers and the ones who have already given up.

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Accelerate Your Startup: Tuning the Engine

For Entrepreneurs

This article was originally published as part of a series of posts on GigaOm. As a VC and five-time entrepreneur, I frequently see two common mistakes being made by startups: Companies spend too much attempting to grow the business when it’s not ready for such growth; or Companies don’t spend enough money when the business.

Engineer 111
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How to recruit employees for your startup

The Next Web

As a startup, odds are you will not be able to afford a dedicated HR person or 30 percent headhunter fees, and will most likely need to be doing the recruitment yourself. Here are a few tips on how to find the right talent for your business, in a way that brings in the best candidates and reduces any distraction from your main business focus. Where to Recruit?

Employee 107
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Open Enrollment Advice: What To Think About When Selecting Health Insurance

YoungUpstarts

By Shaun Young, founder & CEO of Ardina. Open enrollment is now in full swing until the end of January – which is the time when insurance carriers are required to accept all applicants. As it is generally held once a year, it is critical that small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers and everyone in between, make the most of this process, and act swiftly to make the right decision.

Founder 154
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When basic questions aren’t answered it’s a massive red flag

The Equity Kicker

In a post Pondering Homejoy’s failure a former employee wrote (emphasis mine): At Homejoy a lot of us, myself included, got drunk under the majestic startupville spell. The hangover was rough. The swirling tales of companies that had found success circumventing basic business principals had taken root. We were all too often a pack of disillusioned startup junkies that swore that even basic math could be defied by growth and startup voodoo.

Retention 106
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How To Look Like A Professional Brand In 3 Simple Steps

YFS Magazine

Now that you have some new ideas on how to better brand yourself and create content for your audience, it's time to put these methods into action for your own business.

Audience 107
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The secret truth about what we wear to work

Start Up Blog

A friend of mine does keynote speaking. One of his topics is company culture and how it impacts an organisation’s ability to move quickly and adapt to disruptive forces. He recently did a gig which was one of many they planned with him around the country – a roadshow. After the first gig he was really pleased with how well it seemed to go.

Audience 100
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Why Workplace Well-Being Is Good For Business

YoungUpstarts

by Melanie Astbury, HR Manager at officekitten.co.uk. There are multiple reasons why looking after the health of your staff is a good thing. But crucially, aside from the moral and ethical implications, it impacts on your bottom line: 1. Why a healthy workforce = a healthy bottom line. In today’s working world more people are working longer hours to fulfil the workload previously shared between more employees.

Salary 152
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How and Why to Collect Customer Email Addresses

Up and Running

Are you collecting customer contact information? Being able to connect with your customers can be extremely beneficial to your new business, especially if you’re keeping a master email list. We asked Janine Popick, the CEO and founder of email service provider VerticalResponse, to explain the top reasons you should collect customer email addresses, and the best ways to get that information.

Email 99
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Important Lessons We Can Learn From Young Entrepreneurs?

YFS Magazine

Young entrepreneurs have undoubtedly been the driving force behind some of the biggest changes the modern world (and particularly the last 40 years or so) has seen.

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Accelerate Your Startup: It’s Time to Floor It

For Entrepreneurs

This article was originally published as part of a series of posts on GigaOm. In my two previous blog posts, I’ve discussed the first two of three key phases in a startup life cycle: finding a product/market fit, then determining a repeatable and scalable sales model. Once you’ve determined that the sales funnel process you’ve designed.

Startup 97
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The Importance Of Mentorship For Successful Business

YoungUpstarts

No matter which name you mention, a list of 21st century business successes always includes people who have been mentored by other industry figures. We often forget in the wake of successful people like Steve Jobs and Larry Page, that business acumen must be cultivated in order for it to grow into something that benefits the world. Mentorship has been a common thread for all significant business minds of the 20th and 21st centuries, and the same has likely been going on for centuries.

Internet 152
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Musing on inevitability, timing, and use cases

The Equity Kicker

I’m at the Web Summit in Dublin this week and attended two interesting talks today. One was an interview with Palmer Luckey , founder of Oculus VR and the other a panel with Rana el Kaliouby , founder of Affectiva and Ebbe Altberg , CEO of Linden Labs (creator of Second Life). All three of these people have an incredibly high level of conviction that the technologies they are working on will become become ubiquitous.