Sat.Mar 07, 2015 - Fri.Mar 13, 2015

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Why Only 13 Percent of Companies Successfully Execute Their Strategies

YoungUpstarts

'by Dan Prosser, author of “ Thirteeners: Why Only 13 Percent of Companies Successfully Execute Their Strategy – and How Yours Can Be One of Them “ It happens again and again. You come up with a viable strategy that you believe will “fix” your ailing company. You hold lots of employee meetings to talk about it. Maybe you leave fired up with enthusiasm, or maybe you harbor a nagging sense of doubt — worried that perhaps you just have the wrong people.

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Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs - from Guy Kawasaki

Startup Lessons Learned

'We live today in a golden age of writing and resources for entrepreneurs. There are books on most (but not yet all) of the critical topics about startups, and of course a massive amount of information on blogs and Twitter. Elite VCs - from Brad Feld to Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel - write books and tweet constantly (or at least one does). As the ecosystem develops, this information is getting more and more specialized, which is awesome.

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17 Venture Capital Blogs You Should Be Reading

Up and Running

'Whether or not you’re raising money for your business, getting advice from venture capitalists can be invaluable. But, getting in the doors of a Sand Hill Road VC in Silicon Valley can be an incredibly difficult undertaking. Fortunately, many of the top VCs share their thoughts on their blogs and are full of advice for startups, both big and small.

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A Lesson In Horrible Service (A Review of Simplify Commerce)

Mike Michalowicz

'My experience with Simplify Commerce exemplifies the most important lesson in customer service: pick up the phone. Make sure you employ this lesson in your own business before its too late. First a little background. I started a new business this past summer to help accountants and bookkeepers stand out in their extremely competitive industry. Just like any start-up, we set up our new office, hired our staff, and configured our e-commerce components.

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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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Autonomy vs. Leverage

SVPG

'Virtually every leading tech company has jumped on the empowered, dedicated/durable, cross-functional, collaborative product team bandwagon, and I think things are much better for it. I don’t see very many companies that are still using the old models (primarily the pool model). The results speak for themselves, but I attribute most of the benefits to the increased level of motivation, and true sense of ownership, when teams feel more in control of their own destiny.

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Branding, VCs and the ‘Uncanny Valley’

Hunter Walker

'“The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of aesthetics which holds that when features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some observers.” – Wikipedia. While the term is most often applied to robotics or 3D animation attempting to mimic people or animals, I want to stretch a bit here and talk about the Uncanny Valley of Branding.

More Trending

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How to Use Marketing Automation Throughout the Customer Journey

Duct Tape Marketing

'How to Use Marketing Automation Throughout the Customer Journey written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. Today’s Guest Post is by Sarah Burke – Enjoy! The customer’s journey is often defined in 3 stages: Awareness, consideration and decision. For small business owners and marketers, keeping track of each and every customer, and where they are in this journey, is one of our biggest struggles.

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Fear of Failure and Lack of Speed In a Large Corporation

Steve Blank

'I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a culture that fears failure. A failed project is considered a negative to a corporate career. As a result, few people want to start a project that might not succeed.

Widget 260
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Advantage SaaS: Game, Set, Match

deal architect

'My friend Josh Greenbaum writes Implementing SaaS: If it’s easy, it’s because you’re not trying He makes the case SaaS is an complex as on-premise, may be even more so. He cites The other way you can tell that complexity.

Matching 237
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How to Do Research on VCs (Written by a VC)

View from Seed

'In a typical first meeting between a VC and team of co-founders, the investor typically ends up asking more questions than the founders. Here at NextView, we (like all good VCs) encourage founders to ask questions they may have of us, but it’s just the nature of the interaction: We spend the majority of the time talking about the founders’ startup, not the VC firm.

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Startups Need Great Execution More Than Great Ideas

Startup Professionals Musings

'A popular approach for aspiring entrepreneurs these days seems to be to corner anyone who will listen, with a pitch on their current “million dollar idea.” The initial monologue usually ends with the question “How much money do you think this is worth?” In my opinion, ideas are a commodity, and are really not worth much, outside the context of a visionary leader who can execute.

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What Startups Need To Know About Business Valuation

YoungUpstarts

'by Janet Chase, Kaufman Rossin. With the daily demands of running a business along with the financial pressures and challenges inherent in early-stage companies, a business valuation may not be the first thing an entrepreneur thinks of when he awakes each morning. But it’s an important consideration, especially for companies that plan to offer alternative compensation such as employee stock options, which will usually require a 409A valuation.

Valuation 184
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Unfortunate timing? Au contraire

deal architect

'John Appleby posted this review of my book on Amazon “SAP Nation tells the story of SAP, with some customer stories. Whilst most of the information is in the public domain, Vinnie shares some amusing anecdotes. Unfortunately the book tails.

Customer 235
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Startups: Let’s talk about depression

The Next Web

'Erik Torenberg is Product Hunt’s first hire. This article originally appeared on Medium. Anxiety. Depression. Burnout. We don’t really talk about it. Many people go through it, but most people suffer alone. We want to kickstart a conversation in tech around stress and mental health, and to create a space where it’s okay for people to feel depressed and to talk about it.

Startup 131
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When Does An Entrepreneur Become A Business Owner?

Startup Professionals Musings

'According to most definitions, an entrepreneur is one who envisions a new and different business, meaning one that is not a copy of an existing business model. Many entrepreneurs have a passion and an idea, or even invent a new product, but are never able to execute to the point of creating a startup. Even fewer are able to grow the startup into a viable business.

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Nine Career-Damaging Bad Listening Habits And What You Can Do About Them

YoungUpstarts

'by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization “. Today, it seems “busyness” is the measure of success. We power through our emails, conference calls, and business lunches at breakneck speed. Unfortunately, all this frantic activity has taken a toll on our patience. The result is that we no longer stop to listen to one another—how can we when we’re all so busy and important?

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Enterprise Software Spring Training

deal architect

'Throughout March, in NDA settings and at more formal events, I am getting a chance to talk to executives at E2Open, Infor, Microsoft. NetSuite, Oracle, Plex, Rimini Street, UNIT4 and Workday. As with all the spring games being played all.

Software 183
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The First Real Intersection of Music and Virtual Reality

Feld Thoughts

'In 1995 I made a seed investment in a tiny company called Harmonix founded by two guys, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy. After one meeting with them I knew I wanted to be part of their journey and made one of my early $25,000 angel investments. The journey they went on as founders and a company was amazing. A big part of it was captured in what I think is one of the best long form magazine articles ever about the history and drama of building a company – Just Play in Inc.

Algorithm 127
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How To Be An Entrepreneur Who Can See Around Corners

Startup Professionals Musings

'Every entrepreneur realizes that change is now the norm, and they have to adapt their business quickly to survive and prosper. In fact, the best entrepreneurs seem to see breakthrough changes coming even before they really happen, and are able to turn them into huge new opportunities. In the trade, this rare capability is called the ability to see around corners.

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How To Avoid Distractions When Working On Your Startup Idea

YoungUpstarts

'by Anand Srinivasan, founder of LeadJoint.com. One of the key ingredients to starting up your own business is the ability to see a solution to everyday problems you face in your industry. The trouble however is that this ability to come up with solutions does not stop once you set your foot in a business – the ideas just keep coming. And they may all seem like the next big thing that you should definitely jump into.

Startup 154
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Spring Your Business Forward!

Rembrandt Communications

'Are your processes, BtoB and BtoC content and team ready for sales to flourish? It’s finally time to spring forward. You are more than ready to shed the winter doldrums and get your business fired up for the warmer months ahead. But how exactly do you spring forward for the best results? Well, here are […]. The post Spring Your Business Forward!

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Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors

Feld Thoughts

'When I wrote Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors with Mahendra Ramsinghani, our goal was to help entrepreneurs understand how to create an excellent board of directors, manage it effectively, and get optimal value out of it. This was challenging to do, as the topic of boards can be boring. Based on the feedback we’ve gotten, including consistently positive reviews on Amazon, I feel like we accomplished that goal.

Founder 127
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8 Questions To Help Set Expectations With Investors

Startup Professionals Musings

'One of the big questions that every entrepreneur struggles with is how much funding they should request from investors in the first round. They know from forums such as Shark Tank on TV that asking for either too much or too little will derail credibility in the eyes of the investor, and leave the entrepreneur with no money and a struggling startup.

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SEO News: Google Gets Serious About Mobile Search

YoungUpstarts

'On February 26, 2015, Google announced changes designed to “help users discover more mobile-friendly content.” The company stated that the changes would help Google adapt to what its users expect from a mobile search. If your business website isn’t mobile-friendly, you could start paying for it in the search results. Fortunately, you have until April 21 before the changes go into effect.

SEO 152
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SXSW 2015

Startup Lessons Learned

'I''m excited to be speaking at SXSW for the first time in two years. On March 16, I''ve promised to talk about " Everything Eric Ries Has Learned Since 2011 " - the ways the Lean Startup movement has grown and transformed since I published The Lean Startup. I''ll also be officially announcing the launch of the Kickstarter campaign that I teased a few weeks ago.

Lean 122
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The new rules of content monetization

The Next Web

'Matthew Capala is an Internet entrepreneur, SEO strategist, speaker, and author. He is the founder of Alphametic, an organic growth accelerator, and SearchDecoder. Mathew is an Adj. Professor at NYU, and is the author of Amazon-bestselling book, “SEO Like I’m 5.” Content monetization in 2015 involves learning new ways to distribute and market content so that you can reach incremental buyers and leads on platforms that offer a large number of engaged users who are there for one reason: to buy pr

SEO 120
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5 Keys To Raising Ethical Standards In Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

'Many people seem to have the sense that ethics are spiraling downward in business, and unfortunately most startup professionals and entrepreneurs I know don’t believe they can make a difference. They don’t realize that if they don’t take an active role in the solution, they really become part of the problem. I do believe that most business people want to do the right thing, but many just don’t have the skills to develop an unemotional ethical position, or confidence to act on their ethical beli

Startup 200
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Modern Startups: How To Grow A Green Business From The Get Go

YoungUpstarts

'by Scott Byrom, head of commercial for domestic energy at UKPower.co.uk . It’s not easy task to launch a new business in 2015. Modern startups have to follow a whole new set of rules that entrepreneurs even a decade ago did not need to worry about. Amidst rising fuel prices and concern about the impact of human activity on the environment, the UK government has enacted strict regulations on future carbon emissions in the country.

Green 147
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How to spark demand when creating a new market space

Version One Ventures

'When it comes to market opportunities, you can either build a better product in an existing market, or create a brand new market altogether. In the first case where the product category and market are mostly defined, the playbook is relatively straightforward. Potential customers already know they have a need and are actively looking for a solution.

Demand 118
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Apple and Women in Information Technology

Feld Thoughts

'There was plenty of Apple news yesterday, but the one that lit me up was the announcement that Apple is partnering with the National Center for Women and Information Technology to help create a broader pipeline of female technology workers. I’ve been chair of NCWIT since 2006 and have worked closely with Lucy Sanders, the founder and CEO. I’ve learned an amazing amount from her, and NCWIT, about the dynamics around women in information, the challenges we collectively face as an in

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Highfive will change the way we work together

Lightspeed Venture Partners

'Highfive will change the way we work together. Arif Janmohamed, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partner. “Please enter your 9 digit meeting code and hit pound.”. “Sorry, that passcode is incorrect.”. “Please enter your 9 digit meeting code and hit pound.”. “At the tone, please announce yourself and hit pound.”. For over a decade we’ve had to deal with an antiquated, frustrating model for running remote meetings and video conferences.

Cofounder 117
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How Does The Business Card Help The Small Business?

YoungUpstarts

'Business cards have been around for a really long time and they do have that unique ability of making a really strong impression on the customers. When referring to the small businesses, there is this growing trend of not printing these cards since there is the general belief that they are not going to help. This is definitely incorrect and you should realize that the small business does have various advantages associated with the business card.

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8 Quick Tips on How to Establish Business Credit and Get Financing

Up and Running

'Have you ever been denied for business financing? If so, you’re not alone. More than 50% of small business owners who apply for financing get nothing. Personal and business credit scores are the primary cause for denial. If you haven’t taken the time to establish strong business credit, now is the time to start. I know from experience—in 2005, I received a rejection letter for business financing.

Finance 117
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Know Thyself

Feld Thoughts

'I recently did a 10 minute video interview with Clint Bowers of VOLSTA. I like to do about one a month with someone I’ve never heard of before for two reasons: (1) to help them out with their content / business and (2) to learn from the questions that are on their mind and the words that come out of their mouth. I never prepare or look at the questions in advance – it’s all extemporaneous.

Video 114
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How to get more from your product development teams

The Next Web

'This post is brought to you by Jama Software – reinventing product delivery by changing how products are conceived, built and launched. When you’re managing product development for large, complex organizations, employee engagement can be a major challenge. Facing many moving parts to a project, engineers and product team leads have no choice but to focus on what’s in front of them in terms of their specific tasks and immediate deadlines.

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Is Bootstrapping Hindering Your Business Competency?

YoungUpstarts

'by Anand Srinivasan, founder of LeadJoint.com. While most of the startup blogs and magazines focus on the VC fundings and their million dollar valuations, the truth is that a whopping majority of entrepreneurship stories are never shared. These are the little known bootstrapped start-ups that continue to operate through debt and personal savings.