SoCal CTO
APRIL 27, 2011
Several people have recently come to me to help them source and/or hire full-time CTOs for their startup having found me through my post that looks at: Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data. The first thing I do is suggest they explore if they really need to hire a full-time CTO for their startup and if so, what kind of CTO they need. There's a lot on my blog already around this topic.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 29, 2011
The average length of a funding pitch to angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.
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Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 25, 2011
It’s been just over a year since the inaugural Startup Lessons Learned conference , and it’s time to do it again. Steve Blank called last year’s conference “ Woodstock for entrepreneurs ” and my goal is do even better this year. (If you somehow missed SLLCONF 2010 , you can get caught up with a complete video recording here.) The Lean Startup movement has made tremendous progress in the past year.
K9 Ventures
APRIL 27, 2011
Note: All information contained in this post is based on my best understanding and perception of what transpired. I have confirmed with the founders that none of the information contained herein is deemed confidential and is therefore fair game for me to share in this post. In April 2008, I was introduced to Ugmode, Inc. (thanks to my advisor Terry Winograd ).
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
SoCal CTO
APRIL 27, 2011
Several people have recently come to me to help them source and/or hire full-time CTOs for their startup having found me through my post that looks at: Startup CTO Salary and Equity Data. The first thing I do is suggest they explore if they really need to hire a full-time CTO for their startup and if so, what kind of CTO they need. There's a lot on my blog already around this topic.
ReadWriteStart
APRIL 26, 2011
Crowdfunding has become a popular way to fund a variety of projects, from small-scale endeavors to large-scale , literally earth-shaping efforts. It's still not the accepted or the obvious choice for funding your startup, however. But news that the Austin, Texas-based MicroVentures has successfully raised its first $150,000 for three startups via its crowdfunding platform suggests that these alternatives might be viable after all.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 29, 2011
I had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur last week about how he decided which VCs he was going to pitch. Mostly, it was a function of who he could get introductions to. No matter how much I or any of the team here at First Round made themselves accessable through Office Hours, LinkedIn, Twitter, speaking, blogging, etc., he was always going to go where he already had the warm intro versus going in cold.
OnlyOnce
APRIL 26, 2011
As I mentioned in a previous post , I write a column for The Magill Report , the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. I share the column with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey and we cover how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur.
Ben's Blog
APRIL 27, 2011
This biography was unauthorized. —Nas, U.B.R. (Unauthorized Biography of Rakim). Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
APRIL 25, 2011
It is one thing having an awesome product or service, but if nobody knows about it, how do you expect to sell it? This realization usually happens just before business owners start to consider self promotion and exposure opportunities. There are a number of ways to go about getting your name out there, and forming relationships and connections with other businesses is one very important way of going about it.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 25, 2011
This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. There’s a line of thinking in Silicon Valley that you should build product businesses rather than services businesses. This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry (and subsequently Wall Street) who are in search of high margin, highly scalable businesses. It’s nearly impossible to get a services company financed by VCs.
Sophia Perl of Wisdom
APRIL 28, 2011
As of late last week, I didn’t plan on doing anything this week. I saw a posting on the Women 2.0 website asking for women mobile developers to apply to win 1 of 5 free conference passes and a demo pedestal for APPNATION SF. I couldn’t resist, so I put my name in the hat. Viola! I had won. On top of that, because I was an APPNATION conference attendee, I got to enter my Eventabulous iPhone app into the AppCircus app pitch competition, a partnered event with APPNATION.
deal architect
APRIL 26, 2011
Notice how many enterprise tech execs smirk about consumer tech and call it “toys” ? Because enterprise tech costs $$$$$ while consumer tech costs $, enterprise tech must be that much more complex – right? Let’s see how "un-complex" consumer.
Seeing Both Sides
APRIL 28, 2011
The unemployment rate in America is hovering around 9%. But if you are a competent engineer, sales executive, online marketer or general manager in Silicon Valley, NYC, Boston or other start-up hotspots, the unemployment rate is 0%. The talent market has gotten as competitive and aggressive as I have ever seen in the last 20 years. CNN recently reported that 40% of the 130,000 job openings in Silicon Valley are for software engineers.
Both Sides of the Table
APRIL 23, 2011
I’ve just finished a week away from the office for Spring Break, which was much needed. I’m now back & ready for action. I took the opportunity this past week to publish summary notes of some of the VCs and entrepreneurs I had interviewed on This Week in VC. Back to regular writing this week so check back in. One of my goals in doing the show was not only to educate entrepreneurs but also to put a human face on many of the VCs in our industry as VCs can be hard to get to know.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 26, 2011
I don’t have an MBA. I used to fear that this would put me at a disadvantage in starting my own company, but now I’m convinced that it may be the other way around. In some recent surveys, as many as two-thirds of entrepreneurs felt that their entrepreneurial spirit was more ingrained than learned, so a specific education level is at least irrelevant.
deal architect
APRIL 24, 2011
Blogs and newspapers and Twitter are all a- flutter about amazon’s outage and even more the lack of supposed transparency and accountability. BP must be relieved we now have a new villain to beat up! In the cries for more.
Steve Blank
APRIL 26, 2011
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. Ernest Hemingway. Silicon Valley is built on simple myths – one of the most pervasive is that all winning startups are founded straight out of school by 20 year olds from Stanford or Harvard. The reality is these are the exceptions not the rule. Too Old at 30? I was having coffee with an ex-student at the ranch, watching our bobcat hunt in the front lawn.
Sophia Perl of Wisdom
APRIL 28, 2011
As of late last week, I didn’t plan on doing anything this week. I saw a posting on the Women 2.0 website asking for women mobile developers to apply to win 1 of 5 free conference passes and a demo pedestal for APPNATION SF. I couldn’t resist, so I put my name in the hat. Viola! I had won. On top of that, because I was an APPNATION conference attendee, I got to enter my Eventabulous iPhone app into the AppCircus app pitch competition, a partnered event with APPNATION.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 23, 2011
A term I’m hearing more and more these days is “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to create and manage a venture to make social change. On the surface, this sounds like entrepreneurs who want to build a non-profit organization.
deal architect
APRIL 25, 2011
I was talking to a CIO recently and he was marveling about what he called “infinite capacity” - at his scale he has access to cheap broadband, storage, event talent with the global reach of his company. It was his.
Steve Blank
APRIL 28, 2011
The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. With one week and one more updates to go, this post is part seven. Parts one through six are here , Syllabus is here. . With a week to go the teams are starting to look like opening night before the big play. Teams are iterating and pivoting right and left, one team threw their entire business model out the window and did a complete restart, and another team was having a meltdown over perso
Small Business Force
APRIL 28, 2011
The lack of capital hurts, virtually, every small business at one time or another. Some, though, use this lack of capital as justification for why their business is not doing as well as it should. These have, indeed, been trying economic times. Maybe the worst Yoda has seen since he has been in business, with no capital to be found from almost any source (regardless of how much your local banker protests that they're lending � a couple of credit line increases a year to their best business custo
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 24, 2011
I just read the Q1 2011 report from CB Insights , which shows venture capital is back. Overall, investors put $7.5 billion to work across 738 financing deals with U.S. startups. That represents a $1.5 billion jump in funding over the same quarter of 2010 with a similar number of deals, so it clearly shows a trend to larger deal sizes for fewer startups.
deal architect
APRIL 29, 2011
A Japanese executive once told me in their corporate culture, executives were shuffled around quietly and when the re-org announcement finally happened months or years later it was a non-event. That caused much less corporate chaos. Workday just announced Release.
For Entrepreneurs
APRIL 25, 2011
If you are a serial entrepreneur starting to look for an idea for your next startup, you are likely to want a way to stimulate your brain to come up with as many good ideas as possible. This blog post outlines a framework that is designed to fire up your best creative thinking modes, triggering [.].
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
APRIL 25, 2011
Everyone says small startups require focus. Say “no&# to anything that distracts from your goal, your vision, your strategy, tempting though it is to explore all opportunities, hoping each time that this is the one that will catapult you from Mixergy listener to Mixergy interviewee. Lack of focus results in half-assed initiatives, each interrupted by apparently greener pastures before you’ve invested the time and devotion it deserves.
Startup Professionals Musings
APRIL 25, 2011
Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, but there is no market for ideas. I’m often approached by people with a “million dollar idea,” but I haven’t seen anyone pay that for one yet. Equally often, I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven’t figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on eloquently for 20 pages about how great this product and
deal architect
APRIL 28, 2011
In the early 90s I did some work with a multi-national which had SAP at its home country, J.D. Edwards on AS/400 in major country subs, Platinum on LANs in smaller markets and spreadsheets in even smaller markets.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 28, 2011
If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that nothing is static. Periodically the meme surfaces that “the only place you can create a great software / Internet company is in the bay area.&# While I think the bay area is a special place, anyone that knows me knows that I strongly believe there are several great entrepreneurial communities throughout the US and the potential for many more.
Occam's Razor
APRIL 25, 2011
Every presentation I do is customized for the audience in the room. That means I get to spend loads and loads of time across many industry verticals, see many many campaigns, translate many many foreign websites (thanks Google Chrome for auto-translate!) and meet many many many executives and hear about their digital marketing strategies, challenges and outcomes.
ReadWriteStart
APRIL 28, 2011
Startup Weekend always sounds like mission impossible: you have 54 hours - from Friday night until Sunday night - to pitch, then build, then demo a product. But the intensity and creativity of the teams that come together for these events are impressive. Great ideas, great products, great teams, and yes despite the short duration, great startups are hatched there.
deal architect
APRIL 27, 2011
On the heels of my “The arrogance of enterprise tech”, I read a Fortune interview with Leo Apotheker of HP and a Forbes interview with Michael Dell. Both tout how they can use their agility in consumer markets to change.
Feld Thoughts
APRIL 25, 2011
As most nerds know, Skynet gained self-awareness last week and decided as its first act to mess with Amazon Web Services, creating havoc for anyone that wanted to check-in on the Internet to their current physical location. In hindsight Skynet eventually figured out this was a bad call on its part as it actually wants to know where every human is at any given time.
This is going to be BIG.
APRIL 23, 2011
In the startup world, getting the right kind of attention is critical to success. No matter how good your product is, you're always going to have to depend on someone else to tell your story--especially early on. That makes journalists a critical group to build a relationship with as an entrepreneur or even a VC.
ReadWriteStart
APRIL 24, 2011
The Founder Showcase is taking applications now for a chance to make your pitch onstage at its event, to be held June 15 in San Francisco. Any seed or early-stage company less than two years old and with less than $500,000 in funding is invited to apply. It's free to enter the competition, and members of TheFunded vote to determine who they want to see onstage.
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