Sat.Oct 08, 2011 - Fri.Oct 14, 2011

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Why You Should Embrace Opposing Views at Your Startup

Both Sides of the Table

What could you learn from looking at your competitors or other tech startups in a different way? Are you cynical about their chances in the market just because they seem to be hot in the press and that bugs you? Or you think their startup is a passing fad and yours is the real deal? I hear views like this all the time. Even if you’re right – there’s something you may be missing.

Startup 313
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Nokia as “He Who Must Not Be Named” and the Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. (Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!) I presented to 1,000’s of entrepreneurs, talked to 17 startups, gave 12 lectures, had 9 interviews, chatted with 8 VC’s, sat on 4 panels, talked policy with 2 government ministers, 2 members of parliament, 1 head of a public pension fund and was in 1 TV-documentary.

Finland 324
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[Event] [Singapore] Techventure 2011: A Sign of Increasing Asian Technology Innovation

YoungUpstarts

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few” – these famous words were uttered in a wartime speech by Sir Winston Churchill, referring to pilots of the Royal Air Force in defense of Britain during World War II. But those same words could easily be applied to the Singapore-based technology entrepreneurs present at Techventure 2011.

Singapore 168
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The Helsinki Spring

ReadWriteStart

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship. I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. (Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!

Finland 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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Netflix Redux: Is It Ever OK to Fire Your Customers?

Both Sides of the Table

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. A month ago I applauded Reed Hasting’s bold decision to split his business into two components. Today he’s announcing that they’re backing out of this decision. Netflix as a service has always prided itself on movie recommendations that are tailored specifically to you plus user ratings on the quality of films.

Customer 287
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Congratulations IndexTank!

K9 Ventures

IndexTank (@ IndexTank ) has been acquired by LinkedIn ! Huge congratulations to the entire IndexTank Team and especially to IndexTank’s founder Diego Basch (@ dbasch ). Diego and I first met in 1997. I had recently finished the Master of Software Engineering ( MSE ) program at Carnegie Mellon and gone full time on my first startup. Diego had just started in the MSE program.

More Trending

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Entrepreneurial Words of Wisdom From the Trenches

Startup Professionals Musings

When you have been on the startup firing line, you quickly learn that any insight from experts and entrepreneurs who have been there before you can make the difference between failure and success. Yet, many new entrepreneurs brazenly assume they are bulletproof, and march blindly into the fray. The result is that well over 50% of startups fail in the first two years.

Flash 245
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Never Ask a Busy Person to Lunch. Here’s Why:

Both Sides of the Table

OK. I know with a title like that I’m going to subject myself to people thinking I’m just being a grumpy, exclusive VC. That’s not the point. It’s honest advice so please judge once you’re read the post. I’ll keep it short. Meals or coffee are a great way to build rapport with other people and since I’m an ENTP I love breaking bread as much as the next guy.

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Congratulations IndexTank!

K9 Ventures

IndexTank (@ IndexTank ) has been acquired by LinkedIn ! Huge congratulations to the entire IndexTank Team and especially to IndexTank’s founder Diego Basch (@ dbasch ). Diego and I first met in 1997. I had recently finished the Master of Software Engineering ( MSE ) program at Carnegie Mellon and gone full time on my first startup. Diego had just started in the MSE program.

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20 Essential TED Talks For Entrepreneurial Students

YoungUpstarts

Although a strong education is by no means a requirement for business acumen or success, many still saunter off to college and further hone what they’ve already got. Those walking on or logging onto campus with visions of profits and genius dancing in their heads shouldn’t relegate their learning within those boundaries exclusively. They should drink up any potentially valuable insight they can, and the venerable TED offers up one such conduit.

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Two Important Reports from the NVCA: VC Fundraising Declines 53% in Q3 2011 and U.S. Medical Innovation is in Crisis

Pascal's View

Kelly Slone, director of the Medical Industry Group of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA ) posted an important article on October 7 on the NVCAccess blog, clearly calling out that the unintended consequences of FDA regulations have precipitated a full-blown crisis in medical innovation in the U.S. This crisis has already damaged America’s global competitiveness and slowed medical innovation in the U.S.

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Laurene Powell Jobs must be one heck of a lady

deal architect

I have admired the pillar of strength my wife Margaret has been through my last year of recovery. I had seen the ups and downs she went through as she lost to cancer the sister she was closest to. And.

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Celebrity Endorsements are Hot For Startups Today

Startup Professionals Musings

Most startups dream of attracting a celebrity endorsement, and assume that it will take their startup to the stars. There have been some “famous” recent successes in this regard, such as Charlie Sheen using Twitter to promote Internships.com , as well as some failures, including MyFavorites.com using celebrities to promote the books they are reading.

Startup 231
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[Singapore] Over 70% Of Singaporeans Want To Be Entrepreneurs: Intuit

YoungUpstarts

According to a recent survey conducted by financial management solutions provider Intuit , over 7o-percent of men and women in Singapore – most of whom in their 30s – have considered being entrepreneurs at some point in their lives. Which must, of course, come as a shock to their extremely conservative parents who expect their children to pursue more traditional, professional and safer career paths.

Singapore 162
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Great Startups Can Hook an Investor in 60 Seconds

Gust

An “ elevator pitch ” is a concise, well-practiced description of your startup and your plan, delivered with conviction and enthusiasm, that your mother should be able to understand in the time it would take to ride up an elevator. Everybody knows about these, but few people seem to deliver a good one. A good elevator pitch is not just for an elevator discussion.

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More innovation

deal architect

On the New Florence blog ANA’s charter 787 flights The Amazon Fire Kinect and 3D Tracking Scaling down Deere for rest of world.

Restful 186
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Put In the SEO and PR Work to See Results

Rembrandt Communications

Have you added search engine optimization (SEO) keywords to your site but aren’t seeing results? Did you send out a press release to hundreds of reporters without receive one phone call? Are you ready to “throw in the towel”? Don’t Stop Now! While you may think you have done what it takes to get noticed [.].

SEO 140
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[Interview] Found: A New Found Startup

YoungUpstarts

It’s been a rough time for the founders of Singapore-based, mobile location-based check-in service foound. After a spectacular launch at Echelon 2010 , the startup floundered and had to reinvent itself over the past year. Now rebranded as Found , the team is now looking at a new breath of life. So what went wrong? We asked Found ‘s founder Danny Tan what’s new with Found.

Singapore 164
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DNAnexus: Software Engineer - K9 Jobs - Posterous

K9 Ventures

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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Miami’s free outdoor gyms IBM’s Dr. Watson Autodesk’s Sketchbook Tidal Power.

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Revenue vs. Income

Feld Thoughts

Put this in the pet peeve rant category. I’m tired of “Revenue” being referred to as “Income.” Yes – I know Quickbooks defaults to “Income.” I know it’s technically correct when referring to “Income accounts” in a company’s “Chart of Accounts.” But it’s confusing, and it baffles me.

Revenue 144
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Negotiate Like You Mean It: Nine Tips To Help Women In Business Ask For The Money

YoungUpstarts

by Vickie Milazzo, author of “ Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman “. Let’s say you’re on the short list for a promotion with your company. A big promotion. If you get it you’ll take on far more responsibility and you definitely feel up to the challenge. But the salary attached to the job is a little well, lackluster — especially in light of your experience.

Salary 160
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Announcing ff Venture Capital fall interns

David Teten

We’re fortunate to have two rising star interns this fall, Wei Deng and Raffi Sapire, who have already made real contributions to ff Venture Capital. We welcome applications for spring/summer internships. Wei Deng. Wei Deng graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School. She practiced corporate law at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, and then switched to investment banking at Moelis & Company.

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2011 Valuation Survey of North American Angel Groups

Gust

During the summer of 2010, I developed a workshop, A New ACEF Valuation Workshop for Angels and Entrepreneurs. To provide some reference points, I surveyed thirteen angels groups in North American to determine their recent experience in negotiating the pre-money valuation of pre-revenue companies. See the 2010 data reported here: Current Pre-money Valuations of Pre-revenue Companies.

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Execution Is An Order Of Magnitude Easier Than Opportunity

Feld Thoughts

I heard a fascinating one-liner the other day that I had knee jerk negative reaction to but when I thought about it more thought was deeply insightful, especially in the context of big established companies vs. new entrepreneurial companies. A CEO of a very large, successful company said “execution is an order of magnitude easier than opportunity.” In the context of young startups, I often feel exactly the opposite.

Hiring 141
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[Infographic] Top Office Pet Peeves

YoungUpstarts

Do you want to know what really gets someone’s goat in the office? Professional social network LinkedIn recently released some data about the top office pet peeves that really annoy professionals. The country with the most pet peeves is India and the one with the fewest is Italy. Singapore came in a close second after India, at number two out of the 16 countries represented in the survey.

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Beer Kegs and the Future of Venture Capital: What It Means for Entrepreneurs

Genuine VC

Last September I wrote a post outlining my view of the venture capital industry: increasingly evolving like the beer industry as it continues to mature. Large VC firms resemble Budweiser-type macrobrews, competing based on scale and brand with a standardized product across multiple geographies, sectors, and stages. And much like the emergence of microbreweries specializing in [.].

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Free is Not a Business Model

ReadWriteStart

At today's roundtable, we had a chance to discuss a topic that continues to bother me endlessly - the Internet's obsession with FREE. MyStream. Richard Zelson, from New York, New York, discussed MyStream , a music streaming app that allows multiple people to listen to the playlist of one individual, serving, roughly speaking, the function of a headphone splitter.

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Can You Be A Deep Thinker While Being Insanely Busy?

Feld Thoughts

I am completely wiped out. It’s noon on Saturday in Colorado. I just had five days in a row of 18 hour days. I started the week in San Francisco and flew back home on Friday night from New York (with a red eye in between). It was awesome, but exhausting. In addition to all the work, there was plenty of ambient emotion last week including some around mortality (Steve Jobs died and a close friend’s father died).

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DropMySite.com Makes Backing Up Your Site A Breeze

YoungUpstarts

Terrified that your website will one day crash, making you lose all your data? Well, that’s the reason for using DropMySite.com , a free cloud-based storage service that you backup your website automatically easily. Founded in 2011 by Singapore-based Internet entrepreneur John Fearon – who also an online marketplace for buying and selling outdoor advertising called EatAds.com – when he was looking for a way to backup his websites that had user-generated content.

Singapore 156
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Five Things Small Businesses Should Know About Google+

crowdSPRING Blog

Google+ (also known as Google Plus) has generated lots of buzz, but most small businesses are still largely unfamiliar with Google+ and what it offers. In this post, we’ll explain what Google+ is, the key features every small business should understand, and how small businesses can use those features to increase sales. For those of you who prefer a video introduction, here’s a short video from Google with an overview of Google+. 1.

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Why Can't Filing a Patent Be As Easy As Buying a Book?

ReadWriteStart

I am not a lawyer, and I don't wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.

Web 121
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How Convertible Debt Works

Feld Thoughts

Last night I gave a talk hosted by SVB at their Palo Alto office. It was part of the “Never Ending All Old Is New Again Venture Deals Book Tour.” I had a ton of fun talking to and answering questions from about 75 entrepreneurs who – at the minimum – enjoyed eating the great food and wine that SVB provided on a luscious evening in Palo Alto.

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[Book Review] Building A Winning Business: 70 Takeaways

YoungUpstarts

Some business books wax so much lyrical that any nuggets of useful information or valuable learning points are hidden and buried. Not “ Building a Winning Business: 70 Takeaways for Creating a Strong Company during Good and Bad Economic Times “ Author Tom Salonek, a successful businessman and entrepreneur who grew his own IT consulting and training firm Intertech from US$2 million to US$10 million in annual revenue in the past ten years (and during the dotcom bubble burst, no less),

Hiring 154
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Knowledge Is Power: Convertible Note Financing Terms, Part III

Gust

Last week , we took the plunge and began dissecting an example term sheet for a convertible debt financing round piece by piece. I’ll continue with more specific terms and wrap up next week with some thoughts about recent changes and trends for the future. Readers may find it helpful to download the sample term sheet from my firm’s website and follow along with the commentary.

Finance 107
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Optimize for authentic relationships, not bluster

This is going to be BIG.

Tweet. I'm sorry that I missed yesterday's Glamour Magazine panel on women in tech --if nothing else because it featured two of my favorite women in technology, Hilary Mason and Kara Swisher. They're awesome and I'd show up to hear them speak anywhere. More importantly, I know them both for a while--Hilary since August of 2007 through twitter and, of course, getting to work with her at Path 101, and Kara since I used to e-mail her about her Boomtown columns in the WSJ over ten years ago.