Sat.Feb 14, 2015 - Fri.Feb 20, 2015

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Be Careful About Being a Meddling Startup CEO

Both Sides of the Table

'*. I recently wrote a post talking about how some VCs meddle in operating company decisions or some executive teams are too reliant on VCs to jump in and make hard calls for them. Fred Wilson also wrote on a similar topic in his usual more succinct manner , with a great quote being: “One thing I know for sure is that those who advise and invest in startups cannot and should not meddle in the day to day decision making.

Startup 276
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Angel Investors Skip Startups With No Profit Motive

Startup Professionals Musings

'Angel investors and venture capitalists don’t make equity investments in non-profits. The simple reason is that it’s impossible to make money for investors when the goal of the company is to not make money. Yet as an active Angel investor, I still get this question on a regular basis, so I’ll try to outline the considerations in common-sense terms.

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Seven 21st Century Learning Skills Every Adult Should Learn Now

YoungUpstarts

'by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization “. Maybe you graduated top of your college class. Maybe you have an MBA and complete the Saturday edition of the New York Times crossword in one sitting. Maybe you pride yourself on your ability to correct your colleagues’ grammar and email typos.

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The 7 Key Metrics Every Business Owner Should Monitor

Up and Running

'Did you know that 28% of businesses fail due to problems with the financial structure of the company? This includes keeping poor accounting records. If you don’t understand your key financial metrics, you have no way of monitoring your business’s health—and you risk mingling assets, incurring penalties for filing taxes late, overlooking expenses, and running into difficulties paying bills and employees, just to mention a few!

Metrics 115
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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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Pantheon for Agencies

Feld Thoughts

'When your website crashes on launch day it really sucks. It’s ridiculous to me that that still happens today as a regular course of business. Every time a marketing team works with a web design firm, there is the usual painful and broken handoff between the outside agency and the technical operations of the client which culminate on launch day. So many things have to go right for your launch to be flawless: server configuration, load testing, and deployment.

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A Recently Exited Founder on Surviving the Contradictory Role of Startup CEO

View from Seed

'This is a guest post from Rob May , a co-founder and CEO of Backupify , which raised $19.5M and sold to Datto in late 2014. Below, he gives an honest take about what he’d do differently and what he’d do again as a startup CEO. (Disclosure: NextView was not an investor in Backupify.). In 2010, we were recruiting for a Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Backupify, and it was clear that many of the people I was interviewing wanted the CEO role.

Founder 263

More Trending

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SAP Nation ExcerptsThe Simplification Illusion

deal architect

'As I have done with my other books, I am excerpting about 10% of the book for my blog readers. Previous excerpts have been from the case studies in the book. The next few will focus on historical trends presented.

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Great Entrepreneurs Sell Solutions, Not Technology

Startup Professionals Musings

'Even though I love technology, I always cringe when an entrepreneur starts his investor pitch to me by touting his new technology. They have forgotten that new technologies are perceived by most customers as causing more pain than the problems they eliminate. I chastise these startups to highlight the solution created by the technology, rather than highlighting the technology.

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Life Science Startups Rising in the UK

Steve Blank

'Stephen Chambers spent 22 years in some of the most innovative companies in life science as the director of gene expression and then as a co-founder of his own company. Today he runs SynbiCITE , the UK’s synthetic biology consortium of 56 industrial partners and 19 Academic institutions located at Imperial College in London. Stephen and SynbiCITE , just launched the world’s first Lean LaunchPad for Synthetic Biology program.

Lean 221
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8 Online Businesses Disrupting Their Industry

YoungUpstarts

'by Patrick Smith, Housesimple. Often the only way for companies to establish themselves in a market is to do something innovative and take the shine off their competitors. Although this might seem difficult, there are plenty of new businesses that have done just that and managed to carve out a place for themselves in what are often saturated markets.

Las Vegas 149
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NASSCOM: More Moore, less ABAP

deal architect

'My friend Phil Fersht was at the annual Nasscom event in Mumbai last week and wrote “More MBA, less ABAP is the recipe for India’s digital success”. There is much to like in what he says, but I would go.

Offshore 203
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8 Insights For Startups To Attract Angel Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

'Most entrepreneurs have found by now one or more of the many popular crowdfunding sites , and have the name and contact information for at least one of the big venture capital firms. But many have no insight or connections to the ethereal angel investment community, which actually funds more startups then all other venture sources combined (over $25 billion annually).

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Our Investment in Konekt: Picks & Shovels for the IoT Gold Rush

Agile VC

'Today Konekt announced their $1.3M seed round. We were pleased to lead this round along with a great group of other co-investors. And I’m excited to collaborate with co-founders Ben Forgan and Patrick Wilbur as they build their IoT connectivity platform. Konekt is creating a turnkey platform for makers of internet connected devices to integrate cellular connectivity.

Cofounder 141
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Reduce Your Office Printing Costs In Seven Simple Steps

YoungUpstarts

'Printing and copying are often seen as some of the unavoidable costs of running an office. Whilst the importance of printed files and documentation remains, there are a number of ways to reduce the costs (and environmental impact) of printing. Here, we explore seven simple steps to reduce your office printing costs today: 1. Implement Duplex Printing.

Cost 125
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The art of the possible

deal architect

'The Preface to SAP Nation starts with “I first thought about writing this book five years ago.” In the weeks since the book has come out, I have had a chance to spend a bit more time on my innovation.

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How To Take Your Idea From A Startup To A Movement

Startup Professionals Musings

'To build a startup, entrepreneurs need a laser focus on providing an innovative solution to a real problem. Once they achieve that initial traction, the focus needs to change for quicker growth. Most entrepreneurs dream of achieving the exponential expansion of a Google or Amazon, but few investor pitches I see outline any strategy beyond simple marketing to make this happen.

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9 apps that can change the way you work

The Next Web

'Although we all fume at our phones and computers sometimes, technology really is incredible. It has changed the way we work, making it faster, easier and cheaper than ever to do business on a global scale. But with a new year in front of us, productivity is top of mind for entrepreneurs, as is doing away with technology that is no longer cutting it at work.

Global 131
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“Tell Me About Yourself”: How To Put Together A 90-Second Answer To This Interview Question

YoungUpstarts

'by Peter K. Studner, author of “ Super Job Search IV: The Complete Manual for Job Seekers and Career Changers “. If you’re a job seeker, you can bet you’ll run into the request, “Tell me about yourself.” And you can also bet that your interviewer isn’t looking for an answer like, “Well, I’m a Pisces, I like to read sci-fi novels, and I have a pet rabbit named Sesame.” (If only it were that easy, right?

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Need a Good Reason to Start a Business? Here are 30.

Up and Running

'Are you toying with an idea for a business? A lot of people think about starting a business, but for whatever reason the idea never becomes a reality. If you’re an entrepreneur who is on the fence about starting a business, we have the encouragement you need to take the first step. We asked 30 business owners to offer persuasive reasons for entrepreneurs to launch a business: The post Need a Good Reason to Start a Business?

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Smart Entrepreneurs Use Resource Constraints To Win

Startup Professionals Musings

'Most entrepreneur that fail are quick to offer a litany of constraints that caused their demise – not enough money, time, customers, or support from the right players. Ironically, as a startup investor and mentor, I have seen too many failures caused by just the opposite – too much money spent too soon, taking time to get product perfection, and assuming customers will wait.

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What is Content Strategy, Anyway?

Rembrandt Communications

'3 Tips to Make Your Business Words Boost Sales According to the Content Marketing Institute’s “BtoB Content Marketing 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America,” “70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did one year ago.” And for good reason. Good content increases online awareness, brings people to your site and boosts sales. […].

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Returning To The US After Being Deported – Impossible Or Difficult?

YoungUpstarts

'Returning back to the United States of America after having been deported is not only a difficult proposition but it’s also a complicated process. However, that doesn’t mean that it is impossible. Actually a foreign national who has been ousted from the US will find it difficult to get yet another green card or visa that will allow him to reenter the US.

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Customer success is important, but sometimes it’s just too late

Version One Ventures

'In recent years we have seen a big focus on establishing customer success teams across the SaaS B2B industry. The goal is about both (initial) conversion and (subsequent) retention. Make sure your customer understands and is as successful as possible in using your product, and your conversion rate will go up and your churn will go down. There’s no doubt that customer success plays a vital role, but there’s also a huge number of customers they will never reach, no matter how strong your customer

Customer 122
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The First Board Meeting

Feld Thoughts

'Do you remember your first board meeting? I do. Well, I sort of do, kind of, maybe. Danielle Morrill of Mattermark memorialized her first board meeting on the web in her post Post Series A Life: Reflecting on Our First Board Meeting and What It’s Like Working with Brad. It’s a detailed view of her expectations leading up to the first board meeting we had along with the blow by blow from her perspective of the board meeting.

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Getting development and business teams on the same page

The Next Web

'This post is brought to you by Jama Software – reinventing product delivery by changing how products are conceived, built and launched. Why is it that engineering and business teams have so much trouble syncing up? You would think that, within the same company, everyone is always aligned around the same goals. The reality, however, is that teams spend way too much time fighting each other for budget, resources, and leadership opportunities.

Developer 119
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3 Tips For Funding Your Small Business

YoungUpstarts

'By Hunter Hoffmann, Head of US Communications at Hiscox Small Business Insurance. Getting enough money to start a small business is the first, and often most daunting, task aspiring small business owners face. Sixty-five percent of small business owners believe finding financial funding for a new business is difficult according to Hiscox’s DNA of an Entrepreneur study.

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How to Use Google and Facebook for Customer Segmentation

Up and Running

'What is customer segmentation? Customer segmentation allows businesses to target specific groups of people so that they can reduce risks and sensibly allocate their marketing resources. It is a grouping together of your customers based on demographics, behavior, and so on. The creation of user personas can aid marketing activities, allowing you to appeal to the right group of people, which is great for advertising and content marketing.

Customer 110
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The Agony and Ecstasy of Selling My First Company

Feld Thoughts

'Several years ago, Alex Iskold wrote a great overview of What It Is Like To Sell Your First Company. I thought it was a great description and encourage every entrepreneur who has never been through the sale of a company to read it. Rereading Alex’s post inspired me to write my first person account of selling my first company. I’m sure I’ll get stuff wrong since it was over 21 years ago (I was 27.

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Building the Sales Machine Event: Bryan Rutcofsky from Yext

Eric Friedman

'We recently hosted another Building the Sales Machine event at Foursquare HQ and it was great to see so many people working on building sales and revenue from NYC and other great places. A big thanks to Bryan Rutcofsky from Yext for coming out for a great Q&A session about the early days, and getting tactical for the audience about how to build and retain a sales team.

Sales 108
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6 Ideas To Engage Your Customers Emotionally

YoungUpstarts

'By Dianna Booher, author of “ What More Can I Say?: Why Communication Fails and What to Do About It “ When customers identify with you emotionally, you have a greater opportunity to influence them. As with family and friends, when they know you more intimately, they care more deeply and trust you more fully. Consider these ideas to strengthen the emotional connection: 1.

Customer 166
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A first-time founder’s guide to term sheets: Equity investments, continued

The Next Web

'Andrej Kiska is an Associate at Credo Ventures. If you haven’t read the first part on equity term sheets, I strongly recommend doing so before moving on. For a general introduction to term sheets and the trade-off between high valuation and complex investment structure, please refer to the introductory post to the guide. Let’s dig into the remaining set of terms entrepreneurs can typically find in an equity-round term sheet, which the first post didn’t cover.

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Our Investment in Konekt: Picks & Shovels for the IoT Gold Rush

Agile VC

Today Konekt announced their $1.3M seed round. We were pleased to lead this round along with a great group of other co-investors. And I’m excited to collaborate with co-founders Ben Forgan and Patrick Wilbur as they build their IoT connectivity platform. Konekt is creating a turnkey platform for makers of internet connected devices to integrate cellular connectivity.

Cofounder 100
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5 Benefits of Linking Job Descriptions to Performance Reviews

Up and Running

'Job descriptions are at the root of great employee management. Build a valid description and you’ve aced HR 101. To an experienced HR practitioner, this seems wholly intuitive: Job descriptions have the power to inspire positive employee engagement and solve a wide range of employee problems, even before they arise. These descriptions are the basis of job-content understanding between boss and employee.

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Startup Funding Sources You Want To Consider

YoungUpstarts

'Finding funding sources is important for so many startups out there. It is not that easy to find people that are interested in making an investment. This is due to the fact that we are faced with various opportunities that are available and the investors do have many startups to consider at the moment. Making them choose yours is not at all difficult.

Startup 164
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The #vcbcc List

This is going to be BIG.

'Two things ain''t nobody got time for: 1) That. 2) Keeping track of all of the various criteria and foci of the hundreds of potential co-investors you could have in a seed round. Especially not as a one partner fund. Given that I often help my companies finish fundraising by introducing them to other investors, I wind up making a lot of intros. Keeping up with who does extra stage, what defines too early, who will only do B2B, consumer, etc., is a huge pain in the ass.

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Stopping A/B Tests: How Many Conversions Do I Need?

ConversionXL

'A/B testing is great, and very easy to do these days. Tools are getting better and better. As a result, people rely more and more on the tools. As a result, critical thinking is much less common. It’s not fair to just blame the tools of course. It’s very human to try to (over)simplify everything. Now the internet is flooded with A/B testing posts and case studies full of b t data, imaginary wins.