Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of entrepreneurs experiencing pushback to the concept of minimum viable product. Their teams may disagree about what a product should look like, who the customer is, and which distributors to work with, but one thing they can all agree upon is: “We build high-quality products in this company. We wouldn’t even know how to go about building something ‘minimally viable.
Occam's Razor
JANUARY 12, 2015
'The world of digital analytics seems to be insanely complicated. And, yes, some of it is. Third-party or first-party cookies anyone? And, are we tracking people, devices, web browsers or whoknowswhat? But it is a lot less complicated than you might believe. No. Really. A lot less complicated. I led a discussion the other day with a collection of people who were brand new to the space and some who were jaded long-term residents of Camp Web Analytics.
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SiliconHills
JANUARY 16, 2015
'By LAURA LOREK Reporter with Silicon Hills News For three months Josee Farmer drove daily from North Austin to San Antonio to learn how to become a web developer at Codeup. “It was totally worth it,” Farmer said. She recently relocated from North Carolina to Texas and she wanted to get into the technology industry. […] The post New Web Developers Debut at Codeup’s Demo Day appeared first on SiliconHills.
Rob Go
JANUARY 12, 2015
'As an early stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction? I posed this question on Twitter in Dec and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high. And as a firm, we generally believe that there isn’t a “sub-prime” market for VC.
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
View from Seed
JANUARY 13, 2015
'“As a seed-stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction?” I posed this question on Twitter in December and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high. And as a firm, we generally believe that there isn’t a “sub-prime” market for VC.
deal architect
JANUARY 11, 2015
'The CTO role is a critical one in most technology vendors. Not so much, if you ask executive recruiters, in the corporate world. To me, it is a case of poor titling. The CTO is the VP of R&D or.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 10, 2015
'Every entrepreneur I know can’t find enough hours in a day to do the good things they want, and yet they often find themselves saying yes to new requests. Perhaps because they are optimists by nature, or they just hate to disappoint others, they end up hurting their health, credibility, and effectiveness by not being able to deliver on everything they promise.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JANUARY 13, 2015
'Early in a company’s life, you don’t know anything. Often your best estimate of any metric or market behavior or business model component is at best accurate within a power of ten, for example “expected conversion rate between 0.5% and 5%” or “cost to acquire a customer between $50 and $500″ or “average monthly revenue per customer between $20 and $200.” Estimating with these extremely wide ranges can be surprisingly useful.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 14, 2015
'by Lewis Robinson. In the United States, successful entrepreneurs come from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and therefore bring different skill strengths to the table when viewing the overall contribution that they make to an organization or effort. Just the same, it is possible to look at soft skills and find commonalities where executives that have the requisite tool set will typically outperform others.
deal architect
JANUARY 12, 2015
'Business Solutions magazine, focused on VARs, showcases its annual “Best Channel Vendors” list in its January issue. If Rip Van Winkle were to wake up from his 20 year slumber he would be shocked to not find IBM or Great.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 11, 2015
'Investors will tell you that they love to put money into startups that are scalable, and ready to scale. But what does that really mean? Simply stated, it means that your business has the potential to multiply revenue with minimal incremental cost. Ready to scale is when you have a proven product and a proven business model, about to expand to new geographies and markets.
Genuine VC
JANUARY 15, 2015
'As an entrepreneur, if you’re running a venture capital fundraise effectively, you’re treating the process like a sale process: identifying a set of prospects to fill the top of the funnel, cultivating those relationships over a series of meetings, then narrowing down to a handful of contender firms who will ultimately make an offer to invest with a term sheet.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 16, 2015
'by John Sollars, managing director at StinkyInk. Print is an effective means of marketing, yet, today, many opt for digital methods of advertising. Older businesspeople pledge allegiance to proven methods of the past, yet modern marketers neglect older methods such as print. The smartest businesspeople use old and new methods to engineer a successful and profitable advertising campaign.
deal architect
JANUARY 13, 2015
'Nearly half the book is customer case studies. They profile 12 strategies across four groupings of customers A) Un-adopters B) Diversifiers C) Pragmatists and D) Committed. They include perspectives from C-Level executives of leading enterprises including: ABS-CBN AstraZeneca Big Hearts.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 16, 2015
'Many experts are certain that successful entrepreneurs are the ones with the most inspiration (passion and dream), while others will assert that it’s about more perspiration (working harder). In my experience, both are always required in heavy doses. There are no “can’t fail” shortcuts or “get rich quick” scenarios. That’s why all those so-called million dollar ideas I hear about as an investor don’t get me excited, and entrepreneurs find that working twenty hours a day often generates nothing
Scalable Startup
JANUARY 15, 2015
'This discussion began last week and has fostered some great comments and resources… Offshore resources/Europe company for U.S. web development projects. Tom Nora Startup Whisperer, Web Market Development. I’m a startup growth consultant who started a digital marketing + web development agency due to such high demand from my startup clients.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 16, 2015
'by Emily Smith, m arketing strategies associate for The Label Company. Designing a food product label, which captures the attention of your target customers, is exciting as well as challenging. You need to create an attractive design that reflects the food’s essence and your company’s identity. The challenging job for you is to craft a marketable design, which makes your food item stand out of the crowd, and fetches sales.
Rembrandt Communications
JANUARY 16, 2015
'It’s time to review your entire, marketing plan! The days of working in silos are over. Online information ties all sales and marketing activities together. If you have independent teams for social media, search engine optimization (SEO) content strategy, public relations, video, mobile, sales, and more that work in silos, you are losing new customers […].
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 15, 2015
'Why do startups fail? They run out of money, of course. That''s an oversimplification and actually it''s more the result than the root cause. A lot of times, it comes down to failing to produce results, and enough of them. What I''ve realized recently, though, is that smaller, faster results are key--and it doesn''t always matter whether those results are good or bad.
Up and Running
JANUARY 13, 2015
'It’s that time again—when we thank our customers for their business this past year and encourage them to stick with us throughout the next. But how can we do this in a more personal, human way than automated thank you emails? Nine entrepreneurs from YEC share their simple but effective ways to show appreciation for their best customers. 1. Meaningful gifts.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 13, 2015
'As business networks become more sophisticated and require high bandwidth connectivity, many companies are choosing dark fibre to help them meet their dynamic needs. Dark fibre refers to fibre optic cables that have already been laid out but they are not in use. If your company is considering this solution there are 5 things you need to know about dark fibre: Dark Fibre is Most Suitable for Growing Companies.
The Next Web
JANUARY 10, 2015
'Sean Kim is the creator of The Growth List, helping you create a business around your lifestyle. This post originally appeared on AccelBlog. Many of you have probably heard of Google Analytics already. It tracks the basic website activities of your blog/website, such as unique traffic, traffic channels, visitor demographics, and more. Sure, this is great information to get an overall understanding of our users.
Scalable Startup
JANUARY 12, 2015
'I recently completed a short term project with ReviewInc (RI), an online review management platform for businesses to mange and enhance their review process. RI is a small Los Angeles are company that’s been in business for about 3 years with a couple of major pivots under their belt. My role was to analyze all aspects of the company and then find their unique opportunities to “take it to the next level” It opened my eyes to the fascinating ( never thought I’d say that a
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 13, 2015
'If you are in Boulder and you haven’t heard of Linda Rottenberg, you are in for a treat. She’s the founder / CEO of Endeavor and recently joined the board of Zayo. Dan Caruso, the CEO / co-founder of Zayo is hosting an event tonight at eTown Hall interviewing Linda about her new book Crazy is a Compliment. I read the book last night. After a long Monday, I realized I had three physical copies on my desk at home (that had come from different friends) and I still hadn’t read it
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 13, 2015
'by Alicia Lawrence, WebpageFX . The days of searching for serious investors willing to contribute large amounts of money to your start-up may be drawing to an end. Lately, especially in 2014, startups have seen great success with turning to the masses — to individuals willing to donate small amounts of money on a massive scale. Known as crowdfunding, the phenomenon is likely to grow in the coming years.
The Equity Kicker
JANUARY 12, 2015
'Ursula le Quin’s writing on where writers get their ideas from throws light on the age old question of whether entrepreneurs are born or made. The short answer is a bit of both. On the ‘secret’ of being a writer Le Quin says: The “secret” is skill. If you haven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets.
Version One Ventures
JANUARY 12, 2015
'When entrepreneurs are thinking about an exit, they typically wonder if they should hire an investment bank to help with the process. Will a bank bring in new buyers and better terms, or will you just be sinking money into the bank’s coffers? Since I’m often asked about the process, I thought I’d break down my advice on when and how to hire an investment bank.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 16, 2015
'Yesterday at the end of the day I was sitting in Greg Gottesman ‘s office at Madrona catching up on email before dinner. Greg walked in with Ben Gilbert from Madrona Labs. We started talking about sci-fi and Greg said “Are you into Ingress ?” I responded “Is that the Google real-world / augmented reality / GPS game?” Greg said yes and I explained that I’d played with it a little when it first came out several years ago since a few friends in Boulder were into
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 13, 2015
'The world’s leading tech companies don’t only seem to be spearheading technological innovation, but also tend to be the ones who are leading when it comes to providing staff welfare. After all, haven’t we all heard about how well Google feeds their employees, or that employees in Facebook don’t exactly need to call in sickies?
The Equity Kicker
JANUARY 13, 2015
'I just watched a great Ted talk by Julian Treasure on how to speak so people will listen. It’s embedded below so you can watch the whole thing (highly recommended) but the takeaways so you can remember easily after watching are seven ‘deadly sins’ to avoid: gossip. judging. negativity. complaining. excuses. lying. dogmatism. and for things to do more of: be honest (clear and straight). be authentic. have integrity (be your word). have love for the listener (genuinely wish them
Up and Running
JANUARY 16, 2015
'Image via Warby Parker, of a child who received donated glasses. As we begin the year, it’s always helpful to look back and reflect on the things that went particularly well. While it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes, there’s a lot to be said for emulating ideas that work. These businesses all share key qualities that make them admirable, including innovation, sustainability, creativity, and social responsibility.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 12, 2015
'Strong AI has been on my mind a lot lately. We use weak AI all the time and the difference between then two has become more apparent as the limitations, in a particular context, of an application of weak AI (such as Siri) becomes painfully apparent in daily use. When I was a student at MIT in the 1980s, computer science and artificial intelligence were front and center.
YoungUpstarts
JANUARY 15, 2015
'by Edward D. Hess, author of “ Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization “. Dell. 3M. Motorola. General Electric. They are just a few of the organizations that have embraced Lean and Six Sigma over the past couple of decades. And no wonder. There’s something so appealing, so elegant , about the concept that drives these systems: Take what we already know, replicate it, improve it, and repeat.
The Equity Kicker
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Over the last couple of days a lot of people have been linking to Jerry Neuman’s great essay on the history of venture capital. It’s US focused, starting when the venture industry started in the 1970s and analysing all the up and down cycles of investment and returns since then. It’s a long read, but highly recommended if you are a student of the industry.
SiliconHills
JANUARY 15, 2015
'The Geekdom Fund has successfully raised $2.96 million to invest in tech startups. “We raised money locally to put into tech startups here and around the country,” said Michael Girdley, who is one of the partners heading up the new Geekdom Fund. The other Geekdom Fund partners are Don Douglas, Cole Wollak and Mike Troy. […] The post The New $3 Million Geekdom Fund Invests in Tech Startups appeared first on SiliconHills.
Mike Michalowicz
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Whether you’re selling something that costs $1000 or $100,000, putting together a compelling proposal is time consuming and can be intimidating. Writing that proposal, though, and taking the time to do it right, may be the most productive use of your time. Don’t make the mistake of carelessly throwing a whole lot of facts and figures at a client and hoping you will magically walk away with a sale.
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