Sat.Jul 06, 2013 - Fri.Jul 12, 2013

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Internet Entrepreneurs Think Beyond Get Rich Quick

Startup Professionals Musings

'Many aspiring entrepreneurs are looking to the Internet as an opportunity to get rich quick, instead of a place where you can start a business you love, for very little capital and minimal technical expertise. The reality is that if you build a business you love, you may in fact make big money, but if you start a business to get rich, you will probably fail.

Internet 263
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How to Know When to Sell vs. When to Market to Customers

Both Sides of the Table

'This is final part of a series that describes a sales methodology for technology companies or frankly many other types of companies, too. We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. Pain. Unique Selling Proposition. Compelling Event. Champion. Key Players such as enemies, sages and blockers.

Customer 324
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Why Every Company Needs A DevOps Team Now

Feld Thoughts

'An increasing number of companies we are investors in are focused on DevOps. A year or so ago I read an early draft of a new book titled The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. I really enjoyed it and asked Gene Kim, one of the authors to write a guest post on DevOps. He wrote it a while ago and it has sat in my draft queue waiting for the perfect moment to emerge.

Phoenix 175
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Be The Boss Of Your Business Even In Tough Times

YoungUpstarts

'by Justin Kemp. Whilst this generation is undergoing major progress in terms of science and technology, it is also suffering from economic instability. The every shifting ground on which businesses stand on are beginning to affect them in enormous ways; hence forcing them to come up with new strategies to incorporate with their working system. Nonetheless, applying and reapplying strategies whenever a crisis does occur will exhaust you and diminish your productivity.

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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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Twitter Link Roundup #187 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, 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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Intelligence and rational thinking are not the same

The Equity Kicker

'I’ve long been convinced that raw intelligence as measured by IQ is not reliable predictor of effectiveness at work. I’ve seen too many ‘clever’ people who are ineffective. Some of the time it’s down to personality – people have the right answer but can’t bring their team or company with them – but even allowing for that, supposedly smart people make bad decisions a surprising amount of the time.

Developer 136

More Trending

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How to Create a Perfect Customer Experience

Duct Tape Marketing

'Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Peter Sandeen – Enjoy! photo credit: OutofChicago. If you’re not getting the customer referrals or repeat business you hoped for, something’s wrong. Maybe your product doesn’t deliver the benefits customers expect. Maybe your service doesn’t meet the standards they expect.

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How Do You Grow Your Business With A Side Venture?

Up and Running

'As your business grows and begins to make a name for itself within your industry, you might need to start making decisions about which path toward further growth to follow: Is it better to continue to concentrate on your main business, or should you focus on certain aspects of your company and grow those as their own ventures? Going with the latter option can be a risky decision, as you are essentially creating a sub-company underneath your main business, but it could also make it easier to fin

LLC 78
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Don’t Give Away Your Board Seats

Steve Blank

'I had a group of ex-students out to the ranch who were puzzling over a dilemma – they’ve been working hard on their startup, were close at finding product/market fit and had been approached by Oren, a potential angel investor. Oren had been investing since he left Google four years ago and was insisting on not only a board seat, but he wanted to be chairman of the board.

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Scaling Sales: From Craft to Machine

Seeing Both Sides

'I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . In every start-up, finding initial product-market fit is a magical moment. Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

Sales 50
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A different side to Larry Ellison

deal architect

'The mention of Rafael Nadal in this Bob Evans post reminded me of a short section I had written for a book but not published before. It is about Barcelona''s legendary school, La Masia which graduated 7 of the Spanish.

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278
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3 Good Reasons Why Non-Profits Need Better Budgets

Up and Running

'I am a non-profit board member, and I will tell you: For the most part, I pull my hair out at board meetings when we get to the budget. Usually there is a series of QuickBooks reports, presented in PDF, in teeny-tiny font. The line items don’t always make sense, and it is often very hard to tell if a particular initiative is actually financially healthy for a non-profit.

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An Entrepreneur Platform To Put You Above the Crowd

Startup Professionals Musings

'The space for startups is more crowded than ever. First of all, it’s now international, so you have startups from every country in the world competing for your customer’s attention and their business. Then there is the Internet, delivered through every media, including your smart phone, where the volume of data spewing out is like a new Library of Congress every 15 minutes.

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4 Necessary Small Business Resources And The Creative Approach To Get Them

YoungUpstarts

'by Natalie Gonzalez, co-founder and head of marketing and social media at Chatalog. Small businesses are the economic engine that drives the U.S. economy, with more than 27 million small firms providing 60 to 80 percent of the new jobs in our country. New survey data from Constant Contact® , Inc. found that 59 percent of small businesses believe it’s harder to run a business today than five years ago.

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(First Annual?) List of Go-To Early-Stage Service Providers in the NextView Ventures Boston Portfolio

Genuine VC

'Recently, we surveyed our Boston-based NextView portfolio Founder/CEOs asking them about which service provider firms they’ve been using. The goal was to assemble data in order to share it back to our portfolio companies (especially the newer ones) so that they didn’t have to recreate the wheel in determining a short-list of firms to talk to when evaluating new options.

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3 Good Reasons Why Non-Profits Need Better Budgets

Up and Running

'I am a non-profit board member, and I will tell you: For the most part, I pull my hair out at board meetings when we get to the budget. Usually there is a series of QuickBooks reports, presented in PDF, in teeny-tiny font. The line items don’t always make sense, and it is often very hard to tell if a particular initiative is actually financially healthy for a non-profit.

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5 Startup Culture Crises That Need Immediate Action

Startup Professionals Musings

'Most entrepreneurs start their company with the highest of ideals, and wouldn’t dream of building one with a culture of indifference or downright unethical behavior. Yet all too many succumb to the pressures of survival, driven by demanding investors or a cutthroat competitive environment. How does a Founder recognize the warning signs, let alone know what to do about it?

Startup 258
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5 Reasons Business Owners Are Hiring Online Grads

YoungUpstarts

'by Charlotte Benedict. Just over a decade ago, choosing to attend an online university might have meant having to explain to employers that your degree was just as legitimate as one earned on a traditional campus. As with any new technology, employers were often skeptical of online degrees and concerned that the level of education was not as rigorous or meaningful as education attained through traditional programs.

Hiring 230
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SEO Is Not About Keywords

Rembrandt Communications

'Are You Following These 6 SEO Guidelines for Search Engine Optimization Success? If you think SEO, or search engine optimization, is just a buzz word and a matter of adding keywords to your site to increase traffic, you are wrong. Search engine optimization is a big part of your overall, content-strategy program tied directly to [.].

SEO 178
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Why being a VC sucks. Advice to anyone who wants to get into venture capital.

This is going to be BIG.

'I probably get around a dozen e-mails a week asking me how to get into venture capital. On top of that, anytime I talk to anyone who wants to get involved in startups but isn''t sure what they want to do, inevitably, I hear, "And then I was thinking maybe I should look into venture capital, too.". I usually direct people to this post --still hanging atop the search rankings for " How to be a VC analyst" years later.

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Startups Can’t Survive With ‘Downers’ on the Team

Startup Professionals Musings

'A “downer” is defined here as someone who seems to dwell on the negatives of every business challenge, and loves to highlight bad news or potential problems. No matter how smart or experienced this person may otherwise be, things must change or they will kill your startup. I’m not talking about someone who has an occasional bad day, but rather people who when asked, “How are things?

Startup 254
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Outdoor Patio Ideas For Your Office

YoungUpstarts

'by Angelo Digangi, a Home Depot sales associate. The key to productivity in the office is stepping outside of it every once and a while. If your employees are stuck inside all day, they will begin to feel burnt out and won’t be able to think as clearly. Building an outdoor patio area where your workers can take a breather will do a lot to increase both office efficiency and morale.

Chicago 165
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Don’t Let Fear Dominate Your Thinking

Feld Thoughts

'I’m doing a one hour CEO roundtable on an “about weekly basis” with each of the Techstars classes. Yesterday I did a face to face with the Techstars Boulder CEOs (they are across the hall from my office) and then I did my meetings with the Techstars Chicago CEOs and the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator CEOs by video conference. This is a new experiment for me.

Chicago 151
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Your city doesn’t have a startup community? Start one!

The Next Web

'Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Aaron Pitman , an angel investor and founder and partner of RA Domain Capital. You don’t have to be located in Silicon Valley to take part in a great startup community. Conventional wisdom told entrepreneurs it was necessary to live in one of the central hubs if you wanted your business to thrive. This is especially true for entrepreneurs with newborn tech businesses they want to see grow up big and strong.

Community 153
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How to Make a Real Social Media Customer Connection

Startup Professionals Musings

'As I visit the websites of many startups, as well as more mature businesses, I still too often see a “contact” page offering nothing but a sterile form for customers to submit, never to be heard from again. Social media connections, if they exist, are buried elsewhere or reserved for monitoring purposes only. Social media is here, and is the preferred mode of communication by a large segment of your customers, so make it a positive differentiator for your business.

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[Infographic] The Best And Worst Intern Candidates

YoungUpstarts

'Interns are a mixed bag, really – many are decent, some of them are quite mediocre, a handful reveal themselves to be downright rubbish while a few can turn out to be absolute gems. For business owners, it is crucial to be able to identify the talents who are worth cultivating – some interns can really turn out to really add value to the organization.

Hiring 165
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How’s That No Travel Thing Working For You?

Feld Thoughts

'I stopped travelling mid-May (I arrived home in Boulder from San Francisco on 5/17). I’ve decided not to travel at all for the rest of 2013, except for three personal trips (my parents 50th anniversary, Amy’s birthday, and my birthday.) After travelling 50% – 75% of the time for the last 20 years, I needed a break. It has been awesomely mindblowingly great to not travel.

Mezzanine 151
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Key investment themes

Version One Ventures

'Every venture capital firm narrows its investment focus one way or another…perhaps by geography, sector, and/or stage. In some cases, it’s the result of conscious planning; in other cases it’s a natural evolution as a fund starts making investments. For example, at version one ventures, we’re focused on early-stage (seed and Series A) opportunities in e-commerce, SaaS, and marketplaces/platforms across North America.

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Why Would a Business Avoid any Internet Presence?

Startup Professionals Musings

'These days, if your startup does not have an Internet home base up and running, you are not ready for business or potential investors. Customers go there to check on the details of your offerings and verify that you are not a scam, investors look there to check out your management and sales approach, and suppliers expect to find contact information.

Internet 247
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Surviving The F-Word

YoungUpstarts

'By Russell Holcombe, CEO of Holcombe Financial and author of “ You Should Only Have to Get Rich Once “ The reality of entrepreneurship is not success, but failure. The majority of small businesses don’t make it past the first five years and most entrepreneurs must proceed with their career working for someone else. Having witnessed more failures than I care to remember, my suggestion is not to give up, instead incorporate some helpful principles into your entrepreneurial journey to

Atlanta 165
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Pre-Order Startup CEO, The Newest Startup Revolution Book

Feld Thoughts

'Pre-orders for the new book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, are available now on Amazon. Matt, who writes the awesome blog Only Once (which stands for “you can only be a first time CEO once”) has put a herculean effort into writing an amazing book while running a very large company.

Startup 141
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How To Figure Out Your Competitors Revenue

Mike Michalowicz

'Analyzing your competitor’s revenue is a helpful tool in measuring your own progress and potential. Duh. It’s not rocket science. You won’t beat ‘em if you can’t find the finish line. So how much are your competitors taking – or raking – in, and how the hell do you find out? If your competitors are public companies, than you get to read all about their top line and bottom line in the annual audit report available to investors.

Revenue 156
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Crowdlending for Entrepreneurs Is Finally Here

Growthink Blog

'What Is Crowdlending? In brief, Crowdlending is when individuals lend you money. This is important because oftentimes banks don''t want to lend money to entrepreneurs and small business owners. Crowdlending eliminates the banks as an intermediary and allows individuals to lend money to other individuals. Another name for Crowdlending is "peer to peer" lending.

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[Singapore] Hotel Reservation Services Opens Regional HQ

YoungUpstarts

'Cologne, Germany-based Hotel Reservation Service (HRS) , the leading hotel portal in Europe for business and private travelers, late last month announced its official expansion in the Asia Pacific with the opening of its regional headquarters in Singapore. Although the HRS office in Singapore has been operating for the past year, its designation as regional headquarters signals its recognition of the region as a high-growth market, especially with Singapore as a key MICE (meetings, incentives,

Singapore 158
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Special Boulder Event – Bill Aulet from MIT and Me on Friday 7/19

Feld Thoughts

'On Friday July 19th, I’ll be hosting Bill Aulet in Boulder to discuss his new book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Lessons To A Successful Startup. Bill, the managing director for the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, is a close friend and amazing thinker on entrepreneurship. The book is a result of many years of his work and thinking on creating and scaling startups.

Software 121
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You Grow By Saying No

Mike Michalowicz

'Steve Jobs was once asked what he was most proud of in his career. He didn’t say it was the iPod. He didn’t mention the Mac. He didn’t even hint at Apple, NeXT, iTunes, or Pixar. He said that he most proud of all the great opportunities he said no to. Successful entrepreneurs have the discipline of focus. They cater to and focus on their one thing.