Sat.Feb 21, 2015 - Fri.Feb 27, 2015

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Some Career Advice for Aspiring Tech CEOs

Both Sides of the Table

'A shortened, better edited and with nicer pictures version of this post first appeared on TechCrunch. But if you want it in it’s full V1 glory read on … You’ve never been a CEO but might like to be one some day. But how? Nobody sees you as a CEO since you’ve never been one? I wrote this conundrum and the need to take charge of how the market define your skills in my much-read blog post on “ personal branding.” If you don’t create the message about your

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Scaling by “delegation” isn’t good enough

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'Founding a company is a selfish act. It will consume every waking moment for the next 1-10 years. It’s an act of defiance and irreverence towards competitors and the status quo. That matches well with the life of a 20-something — fueled by the energy of youth, too young to be jaded, with no financial or social dependents. Not all selfish acts are bad ones!

Warrant 258
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4 Reasons Small Businesses Fail

YoungUpstarts

'By Brian Sutter, Director of Marketing, Wasp Barcode Technologies. Most entrepreneurs start a new business with dreams of success, but the unfortunate fact is that too many of them fail. The U.S. Census Bureau showed the reality in hard terms – 400,000 small businesses opened and 470,000 SMBs closed their doors just last year. What separates new businesses that flourish from those that close in disappointment?

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Will Crowdfunding Replace Angel And VC Investors?

Startup Professionals Musings

'Even if you ignore all the hype around crowdfunding, there can be no doubt that it is a real alternative for entrepreneurs to achieve visibility and funding today. According to articles on Entrepreneur last year, there are now almost 1,000 crowdfunding platforms in existence, currently estimated to add more than $65 billion and 270,000 jobs to the economy.

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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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Here Are the Details About Upfront Ventures’ Newest EIR – @Chamillionaire

Both Sides of the Table

'Five-and-a-half years ago I first met Chamillionaire at a tech conference in LA. I saw him on stage at the event talking about how he used social media to engage audiences. This was 2009 and his understanding of audience engagement was far beyond anything I was hearing from most people at that time. I reached out after the event to learn more. We started hanging out a bit and discussing technology and entrepreneurship.

Houston 330
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Enterprise Software Churn: UNIT4 in UK local government

deal architect

'The general presumption in the enterprise software marketplace is customers stay loyal for lifetimes – the more realistic thinking, of course, is they stay loyal for long periods, but not that long. When I was researching SAP Nation, I was.

Software 247

More Trending

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Market Type and Revenue. 2 Minutes to Find Out Why

Steve Blank

'Understanding “Market Type” can save you a ton of money and time. This 2-minute video explained “ why not all startups are the same ” and introduced the notion of “market type” and described the difference between new markets, existing markets and resegmented markets. The next video described what happens to startups who don’t understand they are in a new market.

Revenue 227
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10 Tips For Managing Entrepreneur Startup Overload

Startup Professionals Musings

'One of the most common complaints I hear from entrepreneurs is that they are overwhelmed by the workload and stress of starting their company. Then there are the additional challenges of balancing the demands of family and friends. Having too much on your plate can turn your dream into a nightmare. Some people will tell you to just get a bigger plate, meaning hire some help.

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Throwback S4HANA

deal architect

'When SAP launched S4HANA a few weeks ago, an executive emailed me to ask if it reminded me of 2006? 2006 as in the Oracle “Halfway to Fusion” announcement. Today Oracle alum and even some at the company chuckle about.

Software 233
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Will Your Startup Fail? Here’s How You Can Tell

YoungUpstarts

'There is an alarming number of statistics surrounding the failure of startups. The Wall Street Journal reports that as many as 3 out of 4 startups fail per year. These startups are actually backed by venture capitalists. Imagine the number of startups that fail without proper capital and funding. Why would a well-funded startup company fail? There are dozens of reasons.

Startup 175
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How I took a startup from 0 to 40M+ pageviews and got it acquired by Google

The Next Web

'Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of growth hacking consultancy Criminally Prolific. He also runs JustReachOut, a service that helps startups get featured by the press. So you finally put the finishing touches on your website and pushed it live. Damn, it looks so good! Your business is now ready to be shown to the world. Yet nobody is coming. Or, you push it live and get a few hundred signups in the first hour.

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10 Business Courses You May Have Missed In School

Startup Professionals Musings

'I’m sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses that we should have taken. What’s more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that aren’t usually even offered, resulting in more than a few students graduating ill-prepared for the real business world!

Dividend 213
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Big Data Misses: Auto Insurance

deal architect

'On New Florence, I have been cataloging impressive use of advanced analytics for a few years now. Nowadays, it is jarring when you see scenarios which do not leverage the deluge of data available at reasonable cost to most enterprises.

Analytics 195
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Hiring New Talent? Seven Ways To Spot Entrepreneurial DNA

YoungUpstarts

'by Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey, authors of “ The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways to Engage and Empower Your Peopl e“ and “ The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built a Bestseller “. As the market continues to improve, your organization might (finally!) be plugging some holes in the workforce and even creating new positions.

Hiring 158
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Hiring a data-driven modern marketing team

The Next Web

'Nick is the founder and CEO of Delmondo. He works with brands and startups improving their digital marketing and social media strategy, focusing on branded content. The recent proliferation in new channels (Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, digital TV, mobile messaging apps) ?and new technologies (marketing automation, retargeting, custom audiences) has made it more challenging than ever to deliver a consistent strategy and inspired customer experience.

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How Smart Entrepreneurs Make Innovation Look Easy

Startup Professionals Musings

'Why do a few entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, seem to come up with all the real innovations, while the majority of business leaders seem stuck in the rut of linear thinking? I have always wondered if innovation required some rare gene mutation, or whether I might be missing a simple formula for unlocking the ability in any intelligent business person to innovate.

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Enterprise Software Churn: Microsoft momentum

deal architect

'This continues a series about customer moves to reshape their enterprise software landscapes. When I was researching SAP Nation, I was impressed with how many customers are swapping out software, moving to third party maintenance, “ring fencing” the core solution.

Software 188
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Upgrading Your Laptop (For Cheap)

YoungUpstarts

'Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 has been receiving a tremendous amount of buzz lately. The tablet/laptop combination’s been hailed as a solution for the young professional who needs a highly portable device in order to be able to work in any situation but needs the storage capacity and hardware capabilities that a laptop offers. It’s just the latest in a string of exciting new tech releases, including Apple’s new watch, coming out this year and hitting stores.

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Startup Opportunities Book Tour, Presented by Intuit QuickBooks

Feld Thoughts

'Sean Wise, my co-author for my next book, Startup Opportunities , is a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. When we first started writing this book in late 2013, we knew that we were going to do both a United States tour and a Canadian book tour. We flipped a coin to see which one we’d do first and Canada won. The book is comes out in March ( pre-order right now to give me some love ) and we’re celebrating that with a Central and Eastern Canadian book tour.

Canada 125
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Top 15 Tips to Be a More Successful Young Leader

Up and Running

'Do you have what it takes to be a successful leader? The best way to become a more successful young leader is to disregard it as your goal and focus on your learning journey. That includes a combination of your everyday experience at work, with experiences of your own making. I started my career as an intern in Colgate-Palmolive and was eventually promoted to a position as an internet marketing specialist with a team that consisted of seven others.

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Introducing our latest investment: Perceptiv Labs – The future of smart drone technology

Version One Ventures

'In conjunction with their exciting public launch today, we’re happy to announce our newest investment in Perceptiv Labs , a startup that’s using computer vision to make drones more intelligent and fully autonomous. Imaging, delivery and manufacturing are increasingly becoming automated with the use of robots and drones. The current global non-military drone market is already at $2.5B, and is expected to hit $10B by 2024 (according to Forbes) with applications in agriculture, film production, p

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Don’t Let Your Alarm Clock Stifle Your Productivity

YoungUpstarts

'by Anthony Johnson, founder and CEO of American Injury Attorney Group. Nobody likes the sound of an abrupt morning alarm dragging you from a blissful slumber and shoving you unmercifully into a new day. This type of rude awakening virtually guarantees that any side of the bed you wake up on will be the wrong one. Even if you love what you do, the temptation to hit the snooze button can be difficult to resist, especially when you didn’t get a healthy amount of sleep.

Product 217
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The Magic of OtherInbox

Feld Thoughts

'I get 300+ non-spam emails a day. No matter how diligent I am at unsubscribing from stuff, I still get an endless stream of valid, opt-in email that I want to unsubscribe to. Google takes good care of my spam and they even jumped all over my complaints about their spam filtering , figured out the problem, and fixed it (thanks friends at Google). So, I’m not talking about spam, but all the rest of the stuff that I don’t need to see right away.

Email 114
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4 Secrets of Successful Business Owners

Up and Running

'Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group. Have you ever wondered how some entrepreneurs and business owners seem almost superhuman, that everything they touch and do practically turns to gold? Take Richard Branson for example. He started Virgin in 1970 and has built numerous businesses across multiple industries over the last 35 years. A company that stands for excitement, uniqueness, and more recently, making the world a better place through giving back.

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Digitisation shrinks markets by two thirds – music industry data

The Equity Kicker

'I pulled this chart from Business Insider. As you can see it shows that adjusted for inflation US music spend per capita has dropped 64% from $71 to $26 since the beginning of the century, a change largely driven by digitisation. It’s become a bit of a cliche that digitisation shrinks markets by two thirds, and it’s good to see the rule of thumb corroborated by hard data.

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6 Accounting Tips For Startups

YoungUpstarts

'From the moment you hang out a shingle or post a “Grand Opening” sign, your startup business requires a solid infrastructure. This requires a plan for marketing, advertising, merchandising, and — perhaps most importantly — accounting. If you aren’t a number-cruncher, this probably doesn’t excite you as much as the other components of the business, but it’s an essential puzzle piece in the landscape of your startup. 1.

Startup 213
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5 Ways to Find New Customers Fast… Without spending a fortune!

Rembrandt Communications

'Time to Boost Sales! As a small business owner, you are probably always thinking about your sales quotas and new customers. With all of your marketing, accounting, and other, responsibilities, the whole process can be overwhelming. But it’s time to step back and take a more simple approach. Here are… 5 Ways to Find (and […]. The post 5 Ways to Find New Customers Fast… Without spending a fortune!

PPC 109
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3 Strategies to Inspire Your Social Media Marketing

Up and Running

'Social media has become one of the most important outreach and marketing channels available to brands, which in turn means that it’s important to have a social media strategy as a core part of your overall marketing plan. Social media channels offer businesses a cost-effective way to promote their companies, to increase brand awareness, and to generate customer engagement.

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Selling benefits not features – explained

The Equity Kicker

'The graphic above is from an awesome post from Buffer titled People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves which sums up how businesses should sell. It’s a cliche, but customers don’t care about features, they care about what what products can do for them and/or why they matter. Marketing messages, therefore, should focus on benefits rather than features.

Partner 112
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The Women-Helping-Women Movement Is All About Connecting; Here Are 11 Ways To Do It Better.

YoungUpstarts

'by Nancy D. O’Reilly, PsyD, author of “ Leading Women: 20 Influential Women Share Their Secrets to Leadership, Business, and Life “ Competing with other women is out. Connecting with other women to share ideas, work together on projects, and offer support is in. The changes brought about by the global economy have made collaboration and innovation “must-have” skills, and the great news is that women tend to be naturals at them.

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Six Women Run Tech Startups to Watch in Austin

SiliconHills

'By LAURA LOREK Reporter with Silicon Hills News The stats don’t bode well for women-run tech startups nationwide. Less than 3 percent of venture-backed startups have a woman as a CEO. But things are changing. Groups like Women@Austin and Women in Technology are shining a spotlight on female tech entrepreneurs locally. And crowdfunding, bootstrapping, government […] The post Six Women Run Tech Startups to Watch in Austin appeared first on SiliconHills.

Austin 105
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Founders on a Mission

K9 Ventures

'I’ve often repeated that the definition of entrepreneurship is “ Insane perseverance in the face of complete resistance ” (something I learned from my professor and mentor the late Jack Thorne). Put differently, there are some founders for whom failure simply isn’t an option. They’re on a mission and they’re not going to let anything stand in their way.

Founder 104
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Everyone should be a writer

The Equity Kicker

'Blogging has been great for me over the last eight years. It’s helped build my profile, get to know many great people, stay in touch with many others, and maybe most importantly sharpen and deepen my thinking on numerous topics. These benefits are open to anyone who writes well. We love it when we see entrepreneurs who promote their companies through effective blogging and we encourage everyone at Forward Partners to get publishing.

Audience 107
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4 Reasons Why Starting Your Own Business May Be The Best Option For Foreign Students In The US

YoungUpstarts

'by Serhat Pala, President and founder of RhinoForce. The United States is the Land of Opportunity for many. This includes the almost 820,000 foreign students who were enrolled in US universities in 2013. They all came for their own reasons, but the one thing the vast majority of them have in common is they probably want to stay here past graduation and build their lives here.

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Why You Need to Stop Hating Self Promotion

This is going to be BIG.

'I counsel a lot of job seekers looking to get into the startup world. Very quickly, I lay out the fact that getting a job comes down to two very simple things: 1) Do you know what you do? 2) Does everyone else? That''s it. If people had a clear concept of what value you bring to the table and lots of people understood that value, all you''d have to do is tweet that you were a free agent and the opportunities would come to you.

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5 Ways to Find New Customers Fast… Without spending a fortune!

Rembrandt Communications

'Time to Boost Sales! As a small business owner, you are probably always thinking about your sales quotas and new customers. With all of your marketing, accounting, and other, responsibilities, the whole process can be overwhelming. But it’s time to step back and take a more simple approach. Here are… 5 Ways to Find (and […]. The post 5 Ways to Find New Customers Fast… Without spending a fortune!

PPC 100