Sat.Jan 22, 2011 - Fri.Jan 28, 2011

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High Burn Rates Result in Short Startup Runways

Startup Professionals Musings

Cash is the fuel of every startup. Your burn rate is the rate at which that money is being spent, and allows an estimate of how long you can go before refueling (runway). That refueling is when you will need more investment, or when you will break even and begin that steep profitable growth curve. Investors look at your burn rate to see how efficient and effective you are at running the business.

Burn Rate 231
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Startup Suicide – Rewriting the Code

Steve Blank

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially with the success of the company.

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“Fantastic” beats “efficient”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

What if you decided to provide something tremendously fantastic for your customers, even though it meant great expense and hardship? This one thing would be incontrovertible — you’d refuse to compromise on that one thing, even if it seems impossible to work out how to do it profitably. It’s easy to identify companies who became wildly successful with this technique.

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5 Lessons From the Garage48 Helsinki Hackathon

ReadWriteStart

Garage48 Helsinki , the largest hackathon in the Nordics, took place last week. It gathered 120 hackers from Finland, Estonia and Latvia under the same roof and challenged them to go from zero to demo in 48 hours. Sixteen startups were created during the weekend. Together with Osma Ahvelampi (CTO, Sulake ) and Teemu Kurppa (co-founder, Jaiku ), I was a mentor to those teams.

Latvia 158
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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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Best Practices and Tips for Restaurant Web Design

crowdSPRING Blog

Whether you’re an entrepreneur opening your first restaurant or a seasoned business owner with many years of experience in the restaurant industry, you face many challenges. Among the most important of these challenges is your restaurant’s website. A strong web design can help a restaurant to more effectively market itself, can help convert visitors who find the restaurant by searching, for example, on Yelp, shopping for a deal through Groupon, or searching on Google or Bing.

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The 47th (-46) International Business Model Competition

Steve Blank

Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship? I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr , (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship.

More Trending

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The Last SMS

This is going to be BIG.

Texting has become an integral part of mobile communications for most people--so much so that it has replaced a lot of voice calls. Why call when you can just send a quick text? Yet there are signs that texting's days are numbered. To be clear, the desire to send and receive short messages isn't going away--but the need to send them via the SMS protocol may become extinct.

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Webinar: Is FusionHQ The Internet Marketing Tool For You?

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

A couple of months ago Gideon Shalwick hosted a webinar with Leon Jay , the founder of FusionHQ. I promised a recording of the webinar and I finally have it for you. Here is the page were you can watch the full webinar replay – FushionHQ is an internet marketing tool that makes it a whole lot easier to do the following things - Create pages like landing/squeeze pages, video landing pages, opt-in forms and sales pages with text and/or video using a simple WYSIWYG editor.

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Identity and Reputation Online: Embrace It or Fall Behind

Babbling VC

My number one development to watch online is the growth of the reputation graph. If you want some background on this, read these blog posts from Jon Bischke here and here. My take on this is that it's a mix of reputation management as well as online identity management. . We all know that our "presence" online continues to grow and at the same time, your reputation online is becoming ever more important.

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The past, present and future of Work

deal architect

Prof. Tom Malone of MIT wrote the seminal book The Future of Work in 2004. When I interviewed him for my book about ways work has changed in the years since, he honed in on the phenomenon of communities and.

Community 362
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How to use PR Firms at Startups

Both Sides of the Table

One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask about when they raise a little bit of money or are getting close to launching their first product is whether they should hire a PR firm. There is obviously no black-or-white answer, but I’ve tried everything from working a large international agency, to hiring in-house people to doing it myself.

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Bootstrapping Your Start-Up Business with Little or No Money

entrepreMusings

The following is a guest post by Bill Hazelton , Managing Director of Credit Card Assist , a leading credit card resource site for consumers and small business owners and Sell It! On The Web , an e-commerce and online marketing blog. For other local bootstrapping resources here in Austin, check out the Bootstrap Austin site. In periods of high unemployment, many of those having a hard time finding a job consider starting their own business as an alternative.

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Entrepreneurs and Inventors Need Each Other

Startup Professionals Musings

In my experience, inventors aren’t interested or aren’t very good at building a business, and entrepreneurs aren’t usually good scientists. These people need to find each other, and can jointly make a great team for a new startup. Historically, it’s also not often that a good inventor was also a good entrepreneur. Some now argue that even our entrepreneur heroes, like Thomas Edison, really cheated on the invention side.

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Verizon-Terremark

deal architect

So, on the $ 1.4 billion planned deal, the WSJ comments “The acquisition could help the company secure more deals for such services—collectively known as "cloud computing"—and compete with companies like Amazon.com…” VentureBeat on the other hand says “The deal.

Cloud 210
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ProfessorVC: How Much Diligence is Due.

Professor VC

ProfessorVC. The last blogger in Silicon Valley. Thursday, January 27, 2011. How Much Diligence is Due.Or are investors better just rolling the dice. Ive addressed the due diligence question in previous posts, but this came up again in a debate we were having at a recent meeting of the Sand Hill Angels. A blanket statement was made by one of our members that there was a direct correlation between the amount of diligence done and returns on angel investments.

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Should You Really be a Startup Entrepreneur?

Both Sides of the Table

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”. The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).

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Startups are Media Companies Building a New Brand

Startup Professionals Musings

The days are gone when a techie or a genius could build things in his garage and customers would find and buy the product, based purely on the “wow factor” of the technology. New technologies are everywhere today. People have seen so much that they aren’t impressed anymore, and fully expect the impossible to appear tomorrow. They are overloaded by the media with amazing advertising messages, and people now realize that you can’t believe anything you see in pictures, and even videos can be edited

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More New Florence

deal architect

On the innovation blog Game On! Davos and WEF Technology Pioneers Medical Rehab 2.0 The “Dream Chaser” Cloud in a Box.

Cloud 210
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Never Mind the Valley: Here's Vancouver

ReadWriteStart

When you talk about vibrant West Coast startup scenes, obviously Silicon Valley dominates the conversation. Then there's Seattle, of course. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Portland too. But just north of the border, the entrepreneurs in Vancouver, British Columbia insist that their city should be viewed alongside these other prominent West Coast hot-spots.

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On Leadership, Teams, Success & Happiness

Both Sides of the Table

Lately the topic of leadership & teams has been coming up a lot in my daily life. Some investors are team focused, others market focused, others seems to look for product / market fit. I’m in the team centric sphere so every investment decision I make first & foremost centers on this plane. Only then can I even care about product, market or their nebulous “fit.&#.

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Startups Get No Help From an Investment Bank

Startup Professionals Musings

The name “investment bank” somehow always sounded like a place where I could somehow deposit my investments, and maybe even earn a little interest. Then I learned that these banks really negotiate investments and collect fees on the transactions, sort of like commercial banks do with loans to businesses. None normally work for or provide funds for early-stage startups.

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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Advanced Visualization Lab The Volvo “Road Train” Rethinking the MBA The On-Off Wall Paint.

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Start Every Board Meeting With A Demo

Feld Thoughts

I find three hour “reporting board meetings&# where everyone sits around and goes through a 50 page PowerPoint deck to be tedious. When I first started investing in 1994, this was the norm. I put up with it even though it wasn’t my style because (a) I didn’t know better and (b) I didn’t have any better ideas. ?27,351 board meetings later, I know there is a better way.

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Grow or Die – - Revenue growth must be the core strategy and drive all other strategies.

Scalable Startup

An ominous title for a blog post, but “Grow or Die” has been one of the most basic rules in the high-growth startup world for decades. And by growth I mean revenue growth. The first trick is to offer something that the world will need more and more over the next few years (growing market), without that it doesn’t matter much anyway; your product/service/thing must “catch on”.

Revenue 22
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Do You Pass this Web Checklist?

Rembrandt Communications

You have your new Website up and running, and are ready to start bringing in sales. Perhaps, you spent hours writing the copy yourself? Or maybe you hired a big, Web company to design a site with all the bells and whistles? Either way, you are not finished…. unless, you did this one, key step… [.].

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Sequoia Capital Raises $1.3 Billion for New Startup Investment Fund

ReadWriteStart

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing released yesterday, the investment firm Sequoia Capital has raised at least $1.3 billion for a new fund. The filing was uncovered in a story by Fortune , which points to a memo from the University of Michigan Regents, a longtime investor with Sequoia, to describe the strategy of the new fund. According to that document, the fund will continue the firm's focus on investment in early and growth stage technology companies in the U.S. and expa

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The Wave of iPad Purchasing Has Just Begun

Feld Thoughts

It’s fascinating to me when a new product aggressively shifts from early adopters to the mainstream. It should be no surprise that the day the iPad came out a bunch of them appeared at the Foundry Group offices. At the next board meeting I was at, I think every VC had one and was using it in the meeting presumably to view their board package (although I caught at least one checking his email throughout the meeting.

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Are Facebook and Groupon Bubbles Waiting To Burst?

Growthink Blog

Goldman Sachs recently sold shares in Facebook at a value of $50 billion , a price greater than that of Nike, Target, eBay, and General Motors, to name just a few. Yet the blogosphere is abuzz with how Facebook usage rates and advertising effectiveness are already starting to plateau. Groupon, the darling 2-year old “daily deal” company, recently turned down a $6 billion purchase offer from Google.

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Black Eyed Creativity — will.i.am and Intel Join Creative Forces

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

I read with some interest, and, frankly, surprise that Intel and will.i.am are joining forces. They’ve named the rapper “Director of Creative Innovation.&# Read the PR Blurb in Daily Finance for the spin on the story. This is really interesting. Some quick thoughts: 1. will.i.am is undoubtedly a creative force as an artist. The Black [.].

PR 101
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Non-dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing

ReadWriteStart

During this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we started with a discussion of our hot-off-the-press news: 1M/1M Announces Partnership With Persistent Systems; CrowdEngineering First Beneficiary. This partnership speaks to a core philosophy of the program where we encourage entrepreneurs to get as much customer validation as possible before raising too much money, use other people's channels if you can get to them, don't burn too much cash, and all that good fiscal conservative stuff.

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Running and Dumping

Feld Thoughts

If you are a fan of Californication , you’ll recognize my homage to Hank Moody. As a marathon runner, I regularly encounter one of the mildly unpleasant aspects of long distance running. When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. And it’s not always straightforward. This morning I had a great 80 minute run in Boulder starting on the Boulder Creek Path downtown.

Cloud 130
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I’m in Logo Love: the new Comedy Central logo

crowdSPRING Blog

“I’m In Logo Love” is an ongoing series on the crowdSPRING blog. Periodically, we’ll pick a logo we’d like to take home from a bar and tell you why. And if you think it’s a bit strange to have a crush on a cleverly designed logo, get in line – my mom has already lectured me on this topic. Today, we’ll look at the logo for the cable channel, Comedy Central.

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Common Stock vs. Preferred Stock in Venture Funding Transactions

Growthink Blog

I get the same question a lot from entrepreneurs raising equity capital (venture capital or angel funding). The question is whether they need to issue common or preferred stock. The answer depends on how and what rights are defined in the preferred stock. One very popular "preferred right" or "preference" that adds very significant value to outside investors and is common in venture capital investments is a liquidation preference.

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White Tigers in the Chains of Fear

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

I just finished reading a wonderful novel, The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. It’s a brisk story told in first person by a young Indian entrepreneur. I won’t say much more about the story, but it’s a good one, and deserving of the accolades and prizes its received. Perfect airplane reading, and, it has me [.].

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Upstate New York Do More Faster Book Tour

Feld Thoughts

Last summer, my long time friend Martin Babinec and his colleague Nasir Ali asked me if I’d come spend a few days in Upstate New York talking about TechStars and entrepreneurial communities. I first met Martin around 1990 at one of the very first Birthing of Giants events and we were both early YEO members together. At the time, Martin had recently started a company called Trinet which today is a large and successful PEO.

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3 Winning Startups And Keys to Success

Up and Running

What do award-winning entrepreneurs have in common? The three here won Entrepreneur.com Entrepreneur of the Year awards for 2010. They accepted the awards last Thursday at the Entrepreneur.com Third Annual Growth Conference, held this year in Atlanta. For each of them there was a short videoand a short talk. I was in the audience, and I was impressed.