Sat.Jul 23, 2011 - Fri.Jul 29, 2011

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Announcing our summer intern class

David Teten

A bit belatedly (due to a backlog of blog postings), I wanted to announce ff Venture Capital ‘s summer intern class. We’re actively recruiting interns for the fall. You’ve already heard from some of them, and you’ll be hearing more over the course of the summer. Franklin Bi. Franklin Bi became passionate about venture capital and entrepreneurship after he spent a summer in Silicon Valley, working on an information services startup focused on innovation management.

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Twitter Link Roundup #96 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Beware of ASSHOLE VCs

VC Adventure

Before Foundry makes an investment we perform extensive due diligence. We meet with various company managers, talk to other people in industry to get their take, call current and prospective customers, exercise our own network of contacts to get background on the idea and team, perform reference checks on key management, etc. While this process varies, we’re always diligent before entering into what we view as a long term partnership with the company.

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Management by Chameleon

OnlyOnce

Management by Chameleon. When I first became a manager, back in the MovieFone days, I had the good fortune to have an extreme case of “first time manager&# – I went from managing nobody to managing 1 person to managing something like 20 people inside 6 months. As a result, I feel like I learned a couple lessons more quickly than I might otherwise have learned them.

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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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Inaugural Investor Day @ FinTech Innovation Lab

David Teten

This is a guest post from our intern Franklin Bi. On Friday morning, I witnessed another volley of shots being fired from New York City at Palo Alto during FinTech Innovation Lab ‘s Inaugural Investor Day. The Lab is a collaboration between the New York City Investment Fund and Accenture, with support from the New York banking community. The opportunity in NY is clearly heating up, both literally and figuratively, as investors turned out in 100+ degree weather to hear about emerging techno

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Project-based Funding

SVPG

If your company is one that still allocates product development funds based on approval of projects, then you still have the old “project-based funding model.” This is mostly a situation in either large companies, or those that have an IT-style legacy, but the mindset often exists even in small companies too. Unfortunately it’s a very bad model.

More Trending

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How Scientists and Engineers Got It Right, and VC’s Got It Wrong

Steve Blank

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. It might be its most important. ———-. ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley , was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. Since it was my first job, I just took for granted that scientists and engineers started and ran companies.

Engineer 305
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Beware of A **E VCs

VC Adventure

Before Foundry makes an investment we perform extensive due diligence. We meet with various company managers, talk to other people in industry to get their take, call current and prospective customers, exercise our own network of contacts to get background on the idea and team, perform reference checks on key management, etc. While this process varies, we’re always diligent before entering into what we view as a long term partnership with the company.

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Angel Investors Won’t Swoop Down on Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Fundraising is brutal. Actually, according to Paul Graham , “Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want.” More startups may fail for that reason, but a close second is the difficulty of raising money. A while back, I outlined “ Most Startups Get No Professional Investor Cash ” for startups, listing angel investors as alternative #6.

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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Think only the Swiss and Japanese can make precision watches? Don Tapscott on Business Model Innovation Grocery Shopping at your subway stop Name tags are so last decade.

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Eureka! A New Era for Scientists and Engineers

Steve Blank

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn’t pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money).

Engineer 278
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Belly Bandit – Selling Confidence To After-Birth Moms

YoungUpstarts

If necessity was the mother of invention, Lori Caden invented something – out of her own need – that most new mothers would thank her for. Lori Caden developed the Belly Bandit , a product that would help new mothers get their pre-baby bellies back quickly after birth. In 2005, Caden was buying cat food when the store employee offered to help carry her load – a nice gesture for a pregnant woman, except that Caden had already given birth the previous week.

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A Launch With Content Will Rocket Startup Growth

Startup Professionals Musings

Your marketing launch is the most important element of startup success these days, to get customer attention in this world of information overload. Yet it is the one element that too many entrepreneurs focus on only as an afterthought. Everyone assumes their product or service is so great that “word-of-mouth” will carry the day for them. Even great products need great marketing “content” to fuel the ascent of their online message.

Startup 235
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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Crowdsourcing Legal Advice Aquaculture 100 things your kid may never know about All the President's iPads.

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Venture Deals

Startup Lessons Learned

I was very pleased to receive an advance copy of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist the other day. After reading it, I've concluded that it's like having a super-mentor on your shelf. I have been extraordinarily fortunate throughout my career to have been blessed with amazing mentors. Men like Will Harvey and Steve Blank have been there to help me, encourage me, and push me to do better.

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Benjamin Wey’s 10 Tips For Entrepreneurs

YoungUpstarts

by Benjamin Wey, New York Global Group. When I came to the United States from China over 20 years ago, I was determined to live the American Dream. This drove me through the ups-and-downs that life as an entrepreneur brought me. While there is no guidebook to guarantee success as an entrepreneur, I hope these tips below can help you along the way: Focus on something you know about and is important to you.

New York 185
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Equity Compensation at a Startup is a Big Gamble

Startup Professionals Musings

Wouldn’t you like to be one of the lucky people who joined Google and Microsoft when these were startups, and now be a multi-millionaire? So people ask me “How many shares should I ask for when I join a startup today?” In reality, the number of shares doesn’t mean anything – it’s your percent of the total that you need to negotiate. For example, 200,000 shares may sound like a lot, but if the startup has issued 20 million (a common starting point), that’s just 1% of the company.

Equity 234
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More New Florence

deal architect

On the innovation blog ‘NASA should create a great vision’ Microsoft’s Imagine Cup Wave Powered Ships 3M’s “Periodic Table”.

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What Do You Want From Your SEO Press Release?

Rembrandt Communications

When you think of public relations for your business, the first thing that probably pops into your mind is to write and post a press release. Well, if you want to build attention online, a press release with search engine optimization (SEO) keywords is a great place to start. However, if you are a new, small [.].

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Salvo Global’s Six Lessons In Entrepreneurship

YoungUpstarts

Salvo Global is a Singapore startup in the business of providing business intelligence through well-researched masterclasses, conferences, and summits. Despite the intense competition, the company has established a strong position in the B2B events industry, with market presence in Asia Pacific (APAC), Africa, and the Middle East. In line with Salvo’s sixth birthday celebration in July this year, directors Gale Ong and Felicia Kaw share six lessons from Salvo’s journey with our readers and aspir

Africa 183
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Chronic Complainers Drain the Life From a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Throughout my career in small companies and large, I’ve always been appalled by the number of people who seem to complain all of the time. These people don’t seem to realize that they are hurting themselves, as well as other people’s productivity, and the company they are working for. I’ve always thought that I might be overly sensitive, but recently I saw an old survey done by badbossoloy.com , which claims that a majority of employees spend 10 hours or more a month complaining or listening to

Startup 233
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Finance Fridays: Getting Started – Allocating Equity and Founder’s Investment

Feld Thoughts

Finance Friday’s gets off the ground with today’s post by introducing you to an imaginary startup, the entrepreneurs that we’ll being following throughout the series, and their first challenges: splitting up the founders’ equity and addressing the case where one of the founders provides the initial seed capital for the business. We felt like we needed to put some groundwork in place using a case-study like approach, rather than just jumping into looking at balance sheets, income statements, and

Equity 137
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Ultimate Office for Fitness, Post #2—Photos and Coverage

David Teten

We’ve received a very positive response to our post about creating a fitness-friendly office. Daily Burn posted some photos, and we thought some additional ones would be interesting. Our intern Matt Fairbank took the photos below. When visitors enter the office, the first thing they see is our portfolio: Though most of the office is set up in an open layout, the four closed conference rooms are separated by glass, allowing them to feel much more open than most.

Portfolio 138
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[Review] The Start Your Own Business Bible

YoungUpstarts

Here at Young Upstarts we’re of course strong advocates of starting your own business. Often we receive emails asking for advice on how to start a business; and in many cases, we can’t help because we don’t have the necessary know-how in those industries. But with Richard Wallace’s “ The Start Your Own Business Bible: 501 New Ventures You Can Launch Today “, we’re in a better position to answer some of them now. “ The Start Your Own Business Bible

Cost 157
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Startup Founders Need a Timely Decision Process

Startup Professionals Musings

Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to dazzle investors today? The team is the same. The company's market is the same. The only difference might be the start of another recession like the last one, resulting in a lower valuation for Internet ventures, and that makes all the difference.

Founder 232
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Ask the VC Bonus Material

Feld Thoughts

When Jason and I set out to write Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist , we both agreed that we wanted to try to create as useful and durable a reference guide for entrepreneurs interested in raising a round of venture capital as we could. As a result, we created a Resources page on Ask the VC and decided to load it up with legal documents that are part of a venture capital financing.

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation

ReadWriteStart

This week, I've had several meetings with venture funds, incubators, corporate accelerators and other significant players in the startup eco-system. One theme seems to come up over and again, especially from geographies outside Silicon Valley: lack of a reliable pipeline of deals. On July 1, 2006, commenting on the Indian startup scenario, I had written a blog post called Too Much Money, Too Few Deals.

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Competing on Service: Eleven Ways to Beat the Competition by “Hugging” Your Customers

YoungUpstarts

by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Growing an Entrepreneurial Business “. The U.S. economy is still in a deep funk, and for many small business owners that means business isn’t exactly booming. Forced to do more with much less, the small businesses that have managed to survive and even thrive during these tough times have recognized one important factor: You can’t always compete on price, but you can compete on service.

Customer 113
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Google Executives are Exceptions Worth Emulating

Startup Professionals Musings

I tell entrepreneurs that Google was an “exception” to all the investment and startup rules, but I’ve always wondered what it takes to be an exception. Since every business is built by unique individuals, I’m totally convinced that exceptional people are the key to an exceptional company. To check out the Google founders, and because I still see so many business plans that are modeled after Google (more search engines, and more billion dollar growth models), I had to take a look at the definitiv

Founder 222
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Why I Won’t Game AngelList

Feld Thoughts

I think AngelList is awesome and I’m a huge fan of what they’ve done. Nivi wrote a great post celebrating their 1.5 year anniversary today: 1.5 Years Of AngelList: 8000 Intros, 400 Investments And That’s Just The Data We Can Tell You About. One of the powerful constructs of AngelList is social proof. It’s become an important part of the seed / early stage venture process as very early stage investors pile into companies that their friends, or people they respect, are investing

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When social media goes bad: a cautionary tale.

crowdSPRING Blog

One of the most enduringly popular ad campaigns in memory is from the California Milk Processor Board – “ Got Milk &# has become an iconic part of the cultural landscape and has been shared, copied, parodied, and imitated over and over again. Although that campaign pre-dated the rise of the social media, it is a great and early example of the viral effect that can sometimes occur with a fresh new campaign.

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Startup Q&A Site Sprouter to Shut Its Doors

ReadWriteStart

We've covered Sprouter several times here at ReadWriteStart , recommending the Toronto-based startup as a great resource for entrepreneurs - as both a professional social network and, more recently, as a Q&A site. So it's sad to hear the news today that Sprouter will be closing its doors. According to the Sprouter blog , the site will close on August 2 due to what founder Sarah Prevette describes as "capital constraints.

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Love and Startups: What I learned from my best friend's wedding

This is going to be BIG.

This past weekend, I attended the wedding of a guy I played t-ball with in the summer of 1985. That fall, we were seated across from each other in first grade. A year ago, I went with him to pick up the ring and two days ago, I was in his wedding party. Their relationship and the event made me think a lot about partnership and building something special--topics that are top of mind in my day to day job as a venture investor.

Startup 114
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Ask The VC A Question

Feld Thoughts

When Jason and I started AsktheVC , one of our goals was to have a place where entrepreneurs could ask us questions and get direct answers. We did this for a while, getting to most of the questions which has created a very nice corpus of answers to several hundred questions easily searchable by Lijit. For example: How Did We Get Our Idea For Our Startup?

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August 3 panel- How companies are leveraging real time data, content, and analytics

David Teten

I hope you can join me at PluggedIn Ventures ‘ August 3 roundtable, 8:30-10am, focused on "How companies are leveraging real time data, content, and analytics" “Social Technologies and mobile devices mean that words, images, and video now travel faster than the speed of sound, across the street and around the world. And everything from meaningless to the momentus can be captured and documented.

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Why Some People Succeed Against All Odds

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

“Every dream will be challenged!&# These powerful words from a mentor of mine have been burned in fire into my memory. Rarely, a dream or goal comes true easily and effortlessly, without delays, problems or hurdles. It is far more common, however, that you have to overcome many obstacles and suffer some pain before achieving any meaningful target.

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