Sat.May 21, 2016 - Fri.May 27, 2016

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NYU Commencement Speech 2016

Steve Blank

NYU Engineering Commencement Speech. Thank you for the opportunity to address you on your graduation from this esteemed engineering school. I’m honored to help you celebrate this important milestone. Your life is already full of milestones: Your first steps, your first kiss, passing a driving test, this graduation. And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker.

Lean 221
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7 Team Attributes That Can Make Any Idea Come Alive

Startup Professionals Musings

There is an old saying in the startup investor community, “Smart investors invest in the team, not the idea.” As an angel investor, I’ve learned to believe in this approach, since I have seen great ideas go astray, due to poor execution and I have seen apparently marginal ideas make millions, managed by a savvy entrepreneur. Giving the wrong people money doesn’t help at the idea level.

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5 Monumental Legal Mistakes Made By Startups

YoungUpstarts

by Laura Costello. It is important for all startups to ensure that they fulfill all necessary legal requirements before beginning operations. Fulfilling these requirements early, ensures that your startup will not be subject to serious and business ending legal ramifications later. Consultation with legal experts in the field, such as experienced business lawyers in Melbourne , can ensure that you avoid these 5 monumental and costly legal mistakes commonly made by startups: 1.

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Book: Neon Fever Rising

Feld Thoughts

Neon Fever Rising by Eliot Peper was outstanding. But you can’t read it yet as it’s still in draft form. Eliot’s last book Cumulus was published a few weeks ago and has gotten awesome reviews. He’s turned into a writing machine and already had a draft of Neon Fever Rising ready to go when Cumulus was finalized. I first met Eliot several years ago when he emailed me a few chapters of the first book he was working on about a fictional tech startup in Boulder.

Oakland 74
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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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How User Generated Reviews Affect Conversion Rates

ConversionXL

Almost all business owners hate Yelp, but they understand its power. User generated reviews in general are tremendously influential in persuading people to buy. One study found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 72% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust businesses more. Millennials, in particular, trust user-generated content 50% more than other media.

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15 Entrepreneurs Share What Makes Their Business Unique

Hearpreneur

Share In the current generation of business being unique is a top priority to getting noticed. Each day some new story comes out about some creative marketing plan that takes the cake and drives huge traffic to a business. The Taco Liberty Bell April Fool’s joke or Verizon’s real life ‘Can You Hear Me Now?’ promo can only be described as unique. If a business is to survive and thrive making an effort to be unique is a must.

More Trending

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Top 5 Business Benefits Of SaaS Products

YFS Magazine

Software as a Service (SaaS) provides an alternative for the.

Product 61
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How I Invest

Both Sides of the Table

I was speaking recently to the team at NuOrder , an LA-based company we’re an investor in about “realism in startups” — an impromptu talk I have given to any of our portfolio companies who ask. During the Q&A I was asked about how I make investment decisions in early-stage businesses. I was asked again in an LP meeting later in the week and then again at a founder breakfast gathering we hosted yesterday.

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NetSuite and the Year of the Vertical Cloud

deal architect

I wrote in January I expect this to be the year of the vertical for cloud applications. There are too many horizonatal cloud apps in accounting, hr and crm, not enough in industry specific functionality. Every event I have gone.

Vertical 236
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4 Startup Lessons I Learned From ‘SimCity’

YoungUpstarts

by Zach Ferres, the CEO of Coplex. Dad always limited my time on video games to two hours a day. Little did he know, all that SimCity would end up being more important than my math homework. My accounting class in college was so focused on memorizing financial ratios that the actual meaning of them was lost. I don’t remember much of college accounting — but I vividly remember this report I used to get from SimCity as a little dude.

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6 Principles For Overcoming Entrepreneurial Adversity

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur knows what it’s like to face adversity. It comes with the territory, and includes cash-flow challenges, fickle customers, belligerent investors and unpredictable economic downturns. The best entrepreneurs tackle these one at a time without losing their stride or their passion and many secretly get their highest satisfaction from overcoming an impossible problem.

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A Letter to My Son on Becoming Independent

Both Sides of the Table

L’dor Vador Jacob. May 21st 2016. It is the day that you mark an important occasion, your Bar Mitzvah. And I want to stop on that thought — “mark an occasion.” My first-cousin Sam, who came from Dallas said it best. “I made sure to be here even though it’s easier to just skip travel because there are so few occasions in life where the whole family gets together and I wanted to be a part of that.

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SapphireNow: Too Little, Too Late?

deal architect

I was in California last week relishing NetSuite’s SuiteWorld – and its two decades of cloud maturity and growing industry functionality as I summarized here. I happened to see a 8 page color SAP insert in the Wall Street Journal.

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Business Liability 101: What You Need To Understand About Risk And Your Business

YoungUpstarts

By Ryan Hanley, Vice President of Marketing at TrustedChoice.com and author of “ Content Warfare “ Business liability and risk apply to each and every business in each and every avenue. No matter what your business is, there is some form of risk management needed, or liability to properly understand. It’s critical to comprehend the exposures your business will face, what helps and doesn’t help, and the best techniques to employ when it comes to risk management.

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8 Ways To Prevent Burnout While Running A Startup

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.

Startup 145
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Introducing Snapstorms.com. Why, oh, why Snapchat?

Both Sides of the Table

For the past few months I’ve been doing nearly daily “Snapstorms” or short videos with startup advice released on Snapchat. Today I’ve made all of them available on Snapstorms.com. Among the most comical things to me in the past few years is just how much it annoys some people that I use Snapchat. Not since the initial popularity of Twitter in 2007 has a product so befuddled people.

Video 200
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SAP, Apple and Microsoft

deal architect

I believe every vendor should be proud of successful customers. Both Apple and Microsoft use SAP in different parts of the enterprise. With recent partnering announcements with Apple, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella making an appearance at SapphireNow, I have.

Partner 170
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Give Your Customers An Unforgettable Experience

YoungUpstarts

No matter how innovative your product is or how great your staff are, your business depends on your customers. If you didn’t have any customers, you wouldn’t make any sales. No sales, no revenue, no business. Because the people you sell to are such an important factor, you need to be doing everything you can to make their experience with you a positive one.

Customer 140
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7 Entrepreneur Attributes You Need To Lead The Market

Startup Professionals Musings

There are a few entrepreneurs who seem to always be ahead of the rest, and are able to sense where the market is going tomorrow. Investors reverently call this the ability to “see around the next technology corner,” and fight for a place in line to put their money down. Everyone wants to support the entrepreneur with the courage to make bold decisions, and can make it happen.

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What If Self-Driving Cars Actually Increase Car Ownership?

Agile VC

Conventional wisdom is that when self-driving autonomous passenger cars arrive, they’re likely to decrease individual ownership of cars. If there’s a liquid supply of cars that can operate autonomously, one needn’t own a car… you could simply summon one on-demand from a fleet run by [Uber, Google, Apple, Ford, etc] and pay per use or subscription or whatever economic model emerges.

Framework 133
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Book: Startup Rising

Feld Thoughts

On my vacation a few weeks ago, I read Chris Schroeder ‘s book Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East. It was outstanding. I had dinner with Chris recently in Boulder. We were introduced by our joint friend Ben Casnocha. Chris made the effort to come visit me in Boulder, which I always appreciate as it’s a way for me to be completely in the moment for an extended period of time when meeting someone new.

Startup 133
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[Sponsored] Ctrader Platform Becoming More Popular

YoungUpstarts

This new Spotware trading platform offers so much for forex traders and allows you to find ctrader forex broker that can ensure you make the best choices. cTrader trading platform for Forex customers is revolutionary and is the very first to use a HTML5 interface and of course the latest technologies to ensure trading is smooth, fast, and easy to use.

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Find Your Sweet Spot To Excel As An Entrepreneur

Startup Professionals Musings

Finding your sweet spot as an entrepreneur needs to start with a meaningful personal purpose that is also a business opportunity. Some people are so passionate about a cause that they forget to consider the lack of business potential, while others are so enamored with profit that they jeopardize their ethics. Both ends of this spectrum fail to bring long-term satisfaction or success.

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10 Social Media Terms That You Must Know!

Brandanew

Every field is loaded with jargons. Social media like most other fields is full of terminology that sometimes you’re even embarrassed to be asking about, because these are used so much. Not knowing the meaning of a few unique social media terms can hinder your very understanding of the issues you face. While it is not possible to cover all of it in one post, we are listing out ten important social media terms and buzzwords that will help you navigate through this world.

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Thoughts from the road: building startups and collective ambition outside Silicon Valley

Version One Ventures

Just a few years ago, if you wanted to do something big, you needed to go to Silicon Valley. It meant frequent flights or moving your company to San Francisco to raise money from Bay Area VCs. Times are changing, and these geographical barriers are beginning to break down. Waterloo has another unicorn with Kik. Toronto has become a hub for the blossoming machine intelligence market.

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Why Most Startup Companies Fail Within the First Five Years

YoungUpstarts

What is an entrepreneur? The definition of an entrepreneur via Webster’s Dictionary is, “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.” When beginning to start up a new company, one must further define what exactly those risks are. While these risks can be scary, they can also be very rewarding if properly handled.

Startup 124
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Hiring A Business Coach Is A No-Brainer

YFS Magazine

Contrary to the suggestion that asking for help is a sign of weakness, hiring a business coach could be one of the best things you will do for your business.

Hiring 109
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How To Be A Thought Leader And Tell Your Story

Brandanew

Recently, I attended the Qualtrics organized CX week, where I heard author Fernando Pizarro speak on how to be a thought leader and tell your story. Some of his thoughts were very interesting, and I am urged to note them down sharing my own thoughts in the process. If you’re a B2B or a B2C business trying to create a personal brand and figuring your way out to tell stories that you care about, this will come in handy!

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RideAustin Turns TNC Lemons into Lemonade

Austin Startup

Proposition 1 failed and Uber and Lyft left town. Business is down at restaurants and bars and it sometimes takes 45 minutes to get a taxi… Continue reading on Austin Startups ».

Austin 91
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How To Create An Effective Tele Sales Team

YoungUpstarts

Telephone sales agents are the backbone of many organisations. These guys cold-call prospective customers to generate leads for the business, as well as handle incoming calls from new and existing customers. They are the first contact for customers, so you need them to be good at their job. Clearly sales agents need to be motivated and well trained, but there are other things you can do to improve results from your telesales people.

Sales 113
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Shooting Your First Video: The Best Video Marketing Advice You’ll Ever Read

YFS Magazine

"Nowadays, the play button is becoming 'the most compelling call-to-action on the web.'" Video is taking over social media!

Video 113
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Taking My Running Up to Another Level

Feld Thoughts

I spent the day yesterday with Seth, Ryan, and Jason at our quarterly offsite. We finished, as is our tradition, with dinner at Frasca, which involved a lot of wine. I rarely drink wine anymore as I never feel good the next day (I’ve switched to mostly drinking scotch.) But Frasca is a special place and the wine choices I end up with when I’m with my partners are spectacular.

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The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Software Company

Up and Running

Since the term “cloud computing” was coined in 1996—at least as we have come to understand its meaning—the software as a service industry has exploded. In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. If you want a slice of the pie, there isn’t a better time to get involved.

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6 Tips For Managing Millennial Sales Representatives

YoungUpstarts

by Geoff Winthrop, Executive Vice President and Partner at Acquirent, LLC. Millennials continue to enter the workplace in record numbers, a talent-rich resource for prospective sales representatives. However, sometimes managing millennials, takes a little extra “care and feeding” in order to get the most from these young men and women. The good news is, they’re naturals when it comes to multitasking, workplace collaboration and social selling.

Sales 113
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If you’re not always improving you’re going backwards

The Equity Kicker

On Tuesday morning I went to see legendary VC Sir Mike Moritz give a talk to launch his new book Leading – thank you Felix for inviting me. Sir Mike has spent time with lots of very successful business leaders over the years and has recently been asking himself what separates those who’s companies stay at the top of their field for multiple decades and those who’s success is more fleeting.

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The Next Reboot VC Bootcamp

Feld Thoughts

Signups are open for the second Reboot VC Bootcamp happening January 19-22, 2017. It will – once again – be at my house in Longmont, Colorado. If you are interested, here are some reactions to the first Reboot VC Bootcamp. The post The Next Reboot VC Bootcamp appeared first on Feld Thoughts.