Sat.May 16, 2015 - Fri.May 22, 2015

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Organizational Debt is like Technical debt – but worse

Steve Blank

Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. These shortcuts add up and become what is called technical debt. And the size of the problem increases with the success of the company.

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How To Find The Best City For Your Type Of Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Even in this age of globalization and virtualization, the geographic area where you choose to live and work can still make or break your startup business. I still have to tell some entrepreneurs that even with the best idea, they have to move to Silicon Valley to find the investors they need, or they need to move to the U.S. get the attention of the market they choose.

Las Vegas 223
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Practical Market Research Resources for Entrepreneurs

Up and Running

Most every organization will benefit from even the most elementary market research. If it does not provide new information, it will confirm what is known. Market research is the process of gaining information about your market. Preferably, this is specific information about your target market and the key factors that influence their buying decisions.

Marketing 119
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7 Risks You Should Be Aware Of When Using The Cloud

Mike Michalowicz

It’s not uncommon for business owners who aren’t particularly tech savvy to hear about running their business on the Cloud and go full-steam ahead heedless of the costs – both the financial costs and the risks involving security and company resources. The Cloud isn’t new; it’s just a new term that describes storage and application hosting that’s web-based, rather than based from your business’ computer systems.

Cloud 70
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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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Celebrating vendor AR

deal architect

Analyst relations at vendors is never an easy job. Sitting between big egos of analysts and just as big egos of their executives is always uncomfortable. They are supposed to be mind readers: “Why did he write this?” or even.

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SELLING YOUR COMPANY? 3 TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS

Scott Edward Walker

Last week, my client closed the sale of his company for approximately $65 million. Like most M&A transactions, it was a difficult and tricky ordeal. Indeed, we started the sales process nearly two years ago — so when the wire hit, he was a happy man. He even sent me a very gracious email: “There is no way this could have worked out so well without your hard work, experience, and persistent attention to detail.

More Trending

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What is The Best Way to Explain Your Startup?

Both Sides of the Table

Anybody who reads the blog regularly will know that I’m long video. I’ve made 5 investments in the sector and I hope to make 5 more. Between the US & Europe alone the video sector is worth around $500 billion. And TV / Film / Video Games / Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality and frankly the Internet will all merge. Western countries watch > 5 hours of TV per day.

Startup 276
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The Minimalist Guide To Managing Your Brand Reputation Online

Duct Tape Marketing

The Minimalist Guide To Managing Your Brand Reputation Online written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. A dissatisfied customer, on an average, tells 25 of his friends, while a happy one tells only 15. Seems like if good reviews spread like wildfire, bad reviews would be rushing with light speed. Reviews, and how the masses consume them, are human nature, but this human nature can be fatal for online businesses especially at a time when 8 out of 1

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The Real Deal: Jos Duarte on Digital Disruption in the Service Economy

deal architect

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well. This time it is José Duarte, CEO of Unit4. José developed most of his professional career at SAP where he held multiple leadership.

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How to Create an Expense Budget

Up and Running

An expense budget is part of the bread-and-butter basics of good management. Set your budget as a goal, then review and revise often to stay on track. Being right on budget is usually good, but good management takes the regular review to check on the timing, efficiency, and results of what your business spends. See Also The Key Elements of the Financial Plan.

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7 Founding Sins Seed-Stage Startups Should Avoid

View from Seed

Over the past few years, I have been involved with and close to a number of both successful and unsuccessful startups. To me, the most exciting (and most perilous) times in a company’s lifecycle are the early first stages when it is just getting off the ground. At the seed stage, the founder’s or co-founders’ role in the company is essential and therefore carries a great deal of risk for missteps.

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10 Steps For Entrepreneurs To Drive Real Innovation

Startup Professionals Musings

How is it that only a few business leaders and entrepreneurs seem to drive exceptional results and disruptive innovation in this rapidly changing market economy (marketquake)? These few seem more adept at executing market and technology turns, not just incremental evolution. They consistently take bold steps to stay ahead of the curve, often contrary to conventional wisdom.

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The Art Of Storytelling – Converting Fairytales To Brand Stories

Brandanew

When Brothers Grimm wrote up those wonderful stories stocked up in the forests coming up with one engaging fairytale over other, they perhaps did not realize the nostalgia, and childhood sense of fulfillment they would evoke in adults and children a century ahead. Fairytales with all their quirks and issues brought forward by modernists and Shreks, still remain stories that we remember.

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Set Tactics to Execute Strategy

Up and Running

Don’t leave the drawing board without some clear tactics. It happens all the time. You take your team away from the routine for a few hours, brainstorm, and develop a brilliant new strategy. And when you all get back into the routine, the routine wins and strategy loses. Nothing changes. The strategy was brilliant on the whiteboard, but never got to the real world.

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Singletasking: 7 Secrets To Success And Sanity At Work And In Life

YoungUpstarts

By Devora Zack, CEO of Only Connect Consulting, Inc. and author of “ Singletasking: Get More Done-One Thing at a Time “ In our culture of multitaskers, we attempt to accomplish more by doing several things at once. But here’s the rub: Multitasking fails us. Why? Because it doesn’t work. In reality, multitasking decreases our productivity.

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10 Ways Entrepreneurs Foster Team Accountability

Startup Professionals Musings

Getting things done effectively in a startup requires total individual and team accountability. You can’t afford excuses and multiple people doing the same job. In my view, “taking responsibility” is the core element behind accountability. Many people hear responsibility as an obligation, but I hear it as “the ability to respond.” Unfortunately many people don’t have the ability to respond, because they lack confidence in themselves, or simply don’t have the skills required.

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Cynic or Optimist?

Feld Thoughts

There will be a downturn. It might be in a day. It might be in a year. It might be in a decade. We have no idea when it will come, but it will come. I was talking to a VC yesterday who was an entrepreneur in the late 1990s, which we is now commonly referred to as the Internet bubble. He was very successful as an entrepreneur and has continued to be very successful as a VC.

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How to survive the entrepreneurial rollercoaster

The Next Web

It’s 10:36pm and you finally got a few minutes to spend with your significant other, after a 14-hour day of hustling up business for your startup. You’re going to relax and watch the next episode of House of Cards. Maybe some of Mr. Underwood’s negotiating skills and charisma will rub off on you. You sure could use it for the meeting you have the next afternoon with a couple of investors.

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Be A Great Customer This Summer

YoungUpstarts

by Laura MacLeod, LMSW, creator of From The Inside Out Project. Summer is almost here and beach weather, baseball and family outings await. After a long hard winter, we’re all looking forward to taking time off from work to dine out, sightsee, shop and celebrate holidays and special occasions. You will be a customer in restaurants, hotels, stores, baseball parks and tourist attractions.

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How To Stay Fully Charged As A New Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

New entrepreneurs routinely jump into a startup with a full charge of passion and energy, but often find themselves drained of both after a few months by the workload and challenges. As a result, burnout and loss of passion are consistently listed among the top causes of startup failure, according to many studies. The challenge is find ways to continually recharge along the way.

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Build Your Life Where You Want To Live

Feld Thoughts

Amy and I just got back from a great week off the grid in Paris. We were both exhausted and badly needed a break. When we want to get away from humans, we go to our place in Homer. When we want to lose ourselves in a big city, we go to Paris. We both are incredibly refreshed feeling and happy to be home with the rapidly growing puppy Super Cooper and his friend Brooks the Wonder Dog.

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How we built €20,000 in recurring revenue within 90 days of launch

The Next Web

When I build startups I like to share as much information as possible. I find that it helps others but more than anything it helps me understand the business myself. We launched Ruby & Duke on 15th February and in less than 90 days we have hit €20,000 in monthly recurring revenue so I thought it might be useful to explain how we’ve done that. We built the platform from scratch in just six weeks and although we currently fulfil all of the boxes ourselves we will be outsourcing that in month

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8 Pieces of Advice For CEOs That Need To Scale Their Startups

YoungUpstarts

by Philip Acuña. A startup’s ability to scale its services in response to increasing demand is one of the most important factors in determining its success. While certain processes and strategies may have worked for a business early on, a rapidly increasing customer base and the increased bandwidth needed in response will often bring those very same process to their natural breaking point.

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8 Ways To Maximize The Value Of Your Startup Stock

Startup Professionals Musings

When an entrepreneur first incorporates his or her business, he or she may find him or herself the proud owner of 10 million shares of common stock, commonly called founder’s shares. It’s disconcerting for most to realize that these shares are initially worth nothing, and the challenge is to get that value up as quickly as possible, without losing it just as quickly to investors, lazy partners and taxation.

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Market Your Business for Free: Find Your Brand Ambassadors

Up and Running

What’s the best way to market your business that costs nothing? Find your brand ambassadors. Brand ambassadors are the people who are so in love with your product or service, they’ll spread the word about your business for free. So how do you find these brand ambassadors? Below are tried and true tips to building a brand ambassador program that will keep your business growing and growing.

Marketing 117
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9 ways of gathering meaningful data about your customers

The Next Web

Understanding your customer better isn’t as complex as you might think, but it does require a thoughtful analysis of where and how you can collect meaningful data. By better defining which aspects of their behavior or profiles are most significant to your business, you can start to measure and analyze better ways to engage them and ultimately sell more.

Customer 113
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Why Your Computer Desk Is Breaking Your Back (And How To Fix It)

YoungUpstarts

By Shelley Little. Hello web surfer. I see you sitting there, hunched over your desk, squinting at your computer screen. Take a moment to take stock of your body and your posture. I bet you look something like this (above, source: Hello Doctor ). When in reality, you should look more like this (below, source: Greatist ): Let’s get real. Who can force themselves to sit rod-straight all day, with perfect posture and a 90-degree arm bend, as shown in the above image?

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Capitalism is being replaced by ‘talentism’

The Equity Kicker

This is a super interesting perspective. I’m not a big fan of inventing new words and I’m not proposing that we all start talking about ‘talentism’, but I do think we should all understand the key message here: As capital is increasingly commoditised the pace of change increases it is human talents that drive value creation. This move towards human capital is manifesting itself in the startup and venture community in two ways.

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Know Your Industry Before You Start Your Business

Up and Running

Take a second to get into context here. If your plan is a plan to be presented to outsiders, then you need to explain the type of business you’re in. You’ll be expected to explain the general state of your industry and the nature of the business, especially if your plan is going outside your company to banks or investors. And if your plan is for your own management purposes, you should still be very sure—whether you have to prove it to others or not—that you know your market.

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The Human Router

Feld Thoughts

Amy and I had a wonderful week off the grid in Paris. No phone, no email from Friday night 5/8 when I boarded the British Airlines flight in DIA until Friday morning 5/15 when we decided to turn stuff on and just lay around the hotel all day getting reading to go home. I’m always fascinated by the email patterns I have when I’m off the grid for a week.

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The Apparent Benefits Of Taking Your Business Online

YoungUpstarts

by Simon Horton, founder of ShopIntegrator.com. Either flow with the water or be ready to drown. And for businesses today the water-flow is towards the web. If you are asking me why, here comes my counter question – why not? Your customers are online and so are most of your competitors. There is no reason for you to lag behind unless you are thinking to retire.

eCommerce 168
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Fundraising is for CEOs

K9 Ventures

I’ve been on the receiving end of many many pitches by this point both via email and in person. One of the patterns that I have seen is that for pre-seed and seed stage companies (could be for later stages like Series A and B as well, but once a company is mature, some CFOs can handle the pitching as well if not better than the CEO) if the CEO is not the primary person pitching the company, then that’s a bad signal.

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Addressing the Dreaded Lifestyle Outcome

Gust

Three outcomes dominate exits of angel-funded companies: Dead bugs – Startups that go out of business, returning less-than-invested capital to angels (usually zero). Positive exits – Companies that liquidate with capital gains to investors, usually via a cash sale to a larger company. While IPOs are possible, they are very rare for angel-funded companies.

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Recalibrating For The Summer

Feld Thoughts

Even though I haven’t been in school for a long time, I still have some tenuous link to the idea of summer vacation. Well, not some much vacation, but a mode shift from going to class every day to doing other stuff, such as playing tennis at least eight hours a day (age 10 – 14) or writing software products (age 17 – 21). A few summers ago I did a hard shift to maker mode.

Slovenia 110
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Have Diploma, Will Work For Recognition

YoungUpstarts

By Hunter Hoffmann, Head of US Communications at Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Millennials graduating this month are entering a strong job market full of optimism with dreams of starting their new careers. The increasingly healthy economy provides more job opportunities for this year’s graduates than recent classes. But, not all of them are looking for a traditional entry-level, get your foot in the door job as their first step after college.

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The future of mobile ecommerce

The Equity Kicker

We’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about the future of ecommerce as the world goes mobile. As we all know people are increasingly accessing the internet and shopping from their smartphones (one of our more recent investments has 81% of it’s traffic from mobile), and within mobile people are spending a larger and larger share of their time in apps at the expense of browsers.

eCommerce 103