Sat.Mar 09, 2013 - Fri.Mar 15, 2013

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Investors, MVPs and Evidence of Traction

SoCal CTO

Yesterday, I was talking to a startup founder about their MVP and they said something that finally got me to write this post: "I have a few investors interested but they want to see a product." In Building Your MVP as a Non-Technical Startup Founder , I mentioned that before you build your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), you need to be really clear on your purpose.

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Top 5 quantified self apps for entrepreneurs

The Next Web

This is a guest post by Chris Hollindale, co-founder and CTO of Hasty. Hasty is a seed-funded stealth startup whose mission is to improve the health of humanity. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably measuring everything you possibly can about your business and your product. It’s how you improve things – you build, you measure and you learn. Why then, should you not take this same approach with yourself?

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Can App.net Make It? On Dalton Caldwell’s Talk At SXSW.

YoungUpstarts

by Garrett Heath. In the age of the advertiser supported social network, one person is trying to flip the script and create a paid social network. Dalton Caldwell, founder of App.net spoke at SXSW with a session called “ Is There An Alternative To Ad-Supported Social Networking? “ From the onset of the session, Caldwell emphasized that App.net is an experiment without a clear answer if it will work or not.

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Lean Business: Capacity Management, Overhead, and Your Business

crowdSPRING Blog

Many smaller companies that provide creative services struggle every day to manage their capacity and their overhead. Because, as in many other industries, business is cyclical, these smaller agencies, design shops, and marketing firms tend to exist on boom/bust cycles throughout the year. In the creative industries this is an everyday fact of business: overhead is constant, but revenue ebbs and flows throughout the year; some months there are so many clients and so much business that these serv

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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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The Importance of Benevolent Dictators

Both Sides of the Table

I believe that groups coming together to make tough decisions driven by consensus tend to make poor decisions. This is especially true in startups where speed matters and where there is a need to constantly calibrate direction and where these decisions can have existential outcomes. Should you increase your burn rate by adding 2 senior hires who will help you ship faster or sell more but then have less time for fund raising?

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You’re no longer a startup…so now what?

The Next Web

This post is presented by FedEx. Congratulations! If your startup has made it far enough to expand and still keep its doors open, then you have already passed one of the biggest entrepreneurial challenges that exist. However, the success of your company is not set in stone, so it’s best to not rest on your laurels and expect all of the growth you’ve experienced to continue exponentially.

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More Trending

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My Criteria for Investing in Startups

Diego Basch

Whether I like it or not I’m an angel investor , even though I prefer a different label. I don’t want to picture myself as a has-been who doesn’t have the fire to build another company. A lucky bastard who plays Fantasy Football with money that other people would use to educate their kids, buy a car, pay debt. While that may be true, I invest in startups because I need to feel useful.

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Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks

Both Sides of the Table

This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise. Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled for inches?

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The Seven-Year Itch

deal architect

I think about getting to Austin for SxSW each year. I have many friends in that city – Bill Hopkins, Hank Jones, Charlie Wood – that I don’t see for years. And of course to rub shoulders with some of.

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8 Steps to a Startup That Can Transform the World

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur has an idea for transforming a market with innovative new technology, or transforming society with a new process. But unfortunately, most of these ideas fail at the execution level, or are not truly innovative. Entrepreneurs who have been really transformative, like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, seemed to know how to deal with all the right elements.

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Singapore’s ClearBridge BioMedics Raises $9 Million Series B

YoungUpstarts

Cancer research and treatment may just have gotten a shot up the arm – Singapore-based Clearbridge BioMedics has just announced that it successfully closed a S$9 million Series B financing round led by Vertex Venture Holdings Ltd, the wholly-owned VC arm of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings. Other investors in this financing round include SPRING Seeds Capital , Clearbridge BSA and Lu Yoh Chie of Biosensors International , and existing shareholder BioVeda.

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Bolstering the Partner Ranks at GRP

Both Sides of the Table

It is with great pleasure that I can finally announce that we have added Greg Bettinelli as a partner at GRP Partners. If you don’t already follow him on Twitter please click link and follow. You won’t regret it. The guy has knowledge. It is the first time in 6 years that we’ve expanded the partnership. So why Greg and why now? I first met Greg about 4 years ago or so.

Partner 360
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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Kevlar Rooms for Space Solar GeoEngineering Snow Antidote Seth Godin on the Creative Entrepreneur Technology at the Grammys Scaling Big Data talent The Big Data of Ancient Languages The Big Data of BGI’s Genomics.

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Entrepreneurs are Starting Young and Learning Fast

Startup Professionals Musings

I continue to see stories of really young entrepreneurs, like this article on Business Insider , with pre-teens as young as 9 years old who make millions more than their parents. This makes me wonder what starts that entrepreneurial drive in kids, and how early parents and schools should start teaching the basics. There are already a couple of good books out there for youth entrepreneurs, such as one from my friends Adam and Matthew Toren, Kidpreneurs: Young Entrepreneurs with Big Ideas.

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6 Good Reasons To Enter A Startup Competition

YoungUpstarts

by Daniela Baker. Entering a business startup competition like the NYSE Big StartUp Competition or the i.e. Start-Up Competition is a ton of work for a new entrepreneur. Preparing for it takes time and money. But there are some really excellent reasons to enter a startup competition. Here are just six: 1. You might win! Let’s just get this one out of the way at the start: The reason you enter most competitions is that you might actually win.

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Does your product pass the toothbrush test?

Version One Ventures

Photo credit: Wade Brooks Repeat usage is one of the most important success factors for building a large, stand-alone company. It’s hard to grab people’s mindshare and create a loyal user base when people only need to use your product or service occasionally. One of the best metaphors I’ve come across to describe this reality is Google’s “ toothbrush test ” – where Larry Page insists that new products must be important enough that people will use them at least twice a day.

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Lean in many different directions

deal architect

Kudos to Sheryl Sandberg on her new book. She is a great role model to my daughter and a number of other young ladies. But a reality check comes from freshman US Senator Mazie Hirono "I'm a woman. I'll be.

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10 Entrepreneur Quotes Leading to Hiring Mistakes

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup with any traction quickly reaches a point where they need to hire employees to grow the business. Unfortunately, this always happens when pressures are the highest, and business processes are ill-defined. At this point you need superstars and versatile future executives, yet your in-house hiring processes and focus are at their weakest.

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[Interview] QlikView’s Donald Farmer On Gamifying The Workplace

YoungUpstarts

QlikView’s VP for Product Marketing Donald Farmer happened to be in town when software company QlikTech held its QlikView Business Discovery World Tour last week, where it showcased its business intelligence and data discovery platform and featured various partners implementing its solution, including Deloitte and Google. We managed to catch the renown data scientist – who spent almost ten years in Microsoft prior to joining QlikView working on a wide range of technologies, leading projec

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Small Business Public Relations and SEO Can Fix a Bad Reputation

Rembrandt Communications

What are you doing to boost your credibility and sales? Are people saying bad things about your small business online? Do negative comments appear at the top of the search engines when you do a search for your business name? Well, instead of sitting back and watching your sales and credibility decline, take action! Small [.].

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The Cloud as Industry Unconsolidator?

deal architect

Over my technology career I have watched with concern that the smartest IT, sourcing and legal executives who keep checks and balances on their product supply chains, labor unions etc have not done the same with their technology suppliers. How.

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How to Minimize the Red Tape and Taxes of a Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

One of the first questions that I get from many entrepreneurs is “How should I set up my company to minimize my setup costs, tax liabilities, and risk of lawsuits?” The answers are different in every part of the world, but the parameters here in the US should give you the considerations you need in any environment. I’ll offer you a few simple rules of thumb.

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SAP Opens Its Fourth APAC Co-Innovation Lab In Singapore

YoungUpstarts

(L) Dr. Axel Saleck, Vice President, Global SAP Co-Innovation Labs Network, and Bronwyn Hastings, Senior Vice President, SAP Ecosystem and Channels, Asia Pacific Japan. Bangalore. Shanghai. Tokyo. And now Singapore. German enterprise software company SAP AG yesterday launched in Singapore its fourth SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) in Asia Pacific, a space offering a hands-on environment for SAP, partners and customers to work together on current and future technologies.

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Do You Need A Board Chairman?

Feld Thoughts

I’ve been on a lot of boards. I’m still on a lot of boards. And I’ve been thinking about boards a lot as I work on my next book Startup Boards: Recreating the Board of Directors to Be Relevant to Entrepreneurial Companies. I used to think every board needed a chairman and early in my investing career I was often this chairman (or co-chairman).

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The Empire Strikes Back

deal architect

One of the aha’s I took away from the MIT Sloan Analytics event a couple of weeks ago was how various sports are not giving up on their “brick and mortar” – their stadiums inspite of growing fan preference to.

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Big Data, Big Ideas: A Recap of Lightspeed’s Big Data Drink ‘N Sync Event

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Last week, Lightspeed Venture Partners and the Amazon Web Services team brought together top technologists, startups, students, former Lightspeed Summer Fellows and venture capitalists to discuss how big data trends are impacting companies today. Companies like Boundary , DataStax , Delphix , EdgeSpring , MapR Technologies and Qubole – all working on innovative solutions in big data spanning the underlying infrastructure to analytics – were also in attendance, sharing their insight with others l

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Getting Better At Email

YoungUpstarts

by MaryAnn Bekkedahl, co-founder and president of theSwizzle. Do you ever wonder how we functioned before email? At work, at home, or on the go, a vast majority of us can’t go 30 minutes without sending, receiving or reviewing our emails (I’m guilty of checking through the night, too). For many highly-connected people, the allure of opening up an inbox isn’t just a necessity, it’s becoming an addiction.

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Book: How Will You Measure Your Life?

Feld Thoughts

While FAKEGRIMLOCK and all of the humans he has let survive are hanging out at the TechStars SXSW party, I’m at home with Amy, buried in a snowstorm, reading. I haven’t read much this year – I’ve been overwhelmed with work and writing and haven’t had much energy for reading. Which is dumb, since I love to read, and it’s an important way I discover new things and think about things I’m interested in.

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Tell me who you are. Who you really are.

The Next Web

Last week we finished building the foundation of your brand (here’s Part I and Part II in case you missed it). Having a solid brand identity helps in three ways. First, it allows everyone on your team to get on the same page and understand your vision. Second, it’s a guide for the future and reminds you what you stand for. Last but not least, it allows you to engage with people and leave a lasting impression.

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You made a mistake. Now what?

Life Beyond Code

Everyone (no exceptions) makes mistakes and most people don’t know how to deal with themselves after they made a mistake. I was one of them and I am still learning. For a long time, I used to have a roller coaster ride when it came to how I dealt with myself every time I made a mistake. Sometimes I was proud of myself with the finesse of my post-mistake-behavior but most of the time, I simply would wreck myself with internal blame and internal shame.

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Tips For Going Green For St. Patrick’s Day

YoungUpstarts

By Liam Supple, Product Marketing Manager, SingleFeed. There’s never been a better time to go green. Global warming is our reality, and planet Earth’s resources are being consumed by a swelling population. Waste is piling up. Join the St. Patrick’s Day festivities and wear something green – and consider the following tips to make sure your business is green too: 1.

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Startup Life Interview With Sandy Grason

Feld Thoughts

I’m in San Antonio, in a rush to go participate in the Global Accelerator Network monthly call, where I’m talking with Richard Florida (the brilliant creator of the concept of the creative class) about Startup Communities , followed by a full day at TechStars Cloud and – well – I need a shower because I got to my hotel room at 12:30pm and I smell kind of like Huck from Scandal.

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Tips for the Kiddie Table: What to do when you didn't make that list or get that invite

This is going to be BIG.

When I was 13, they split up my Little League into the "A" Team and the "B" Team. I got put on the "B" Team, mostly because I sucked. I didn't suck as bad as some of the other kids--I tried to swing, wouldn't swing over my head, but I certainly never really hit the ball. The team was terrible--we went 0-14--but I took it upon myself to really work at my hitting, learn how to play other positions, and try my hardest.

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Google Reader closing on July 1st

The Equity Kicker

Google announced yesterday that it is shuttering eight more products, which makes it 70 they’ve closed down since they started their cull in 2011. I’m sure this is the right decision for them, and I applaud their focus and desire to do a small number of things well but Google Reader was part of the list this time and I worry about what this closure means for bloggers and power blog readers.

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ZLango Becomes Lango, Revisualizes Mobile Messaging

YoungUpstarts

The proliferation of mobile messaging applications has pretty much taken the world by storm. There’s been all kinds of innovation in the space such as group chatting functions, cross platform messaging, and video chatting amongst others, threatening the traditional short message service (SMS) offered by telecommunications providers (and their revenues).

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LazyHusband at SXSW

Feld Thoughts

I’m not at SXSW this year. I sort of miss it, but not really. Last year I cancelled at the last minute (the day before – I was already in San Antonio at TechStars Cloud) to come back to Boulder after Amy fell and broke her wrist. This year I just didn’t feel like I had enough extrovert reserves in my tank to deal with it. I stayed home and am hanging out at my house in Eldorado Canyon enjoying what looks like at least 12 inches of snow in the last 12 hours.

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