Sat.May 28, 2016 - Fri.Jun 03, 2016

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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Weeks 8 and 9

Steve Blank

We just held our eighth and ninth weeks of the Hacking for Defense class. Now with over 917 interviews of beneficiaries (users, program managers, stakeholders, etc.), the teams spent the last two weeks learning what activities, resources and partners they would need to actually deliver their solution. And they’re getting a handle on what it costs to build a company to deliver it.

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Why Web Presence Is A Necessity For Your Business

YoungUpstarts

There is no business or company who doesn’t have a website as it has become the most favourable marketing plan for everyone. Having a website doesn’t mean you will succeed in your business. Your website has to be decent and clean for your customers to navigate through the website easily. But, if your website is not up to the mark, that means having a below par website would just ruin marketing plan.

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How to Start a Bed and Breakfast

Up and Running

It’s an image that puts you in an instant state of relaxation—a roaring fireplace in a cozy rural bed and breakfast, sharing stories with fellow travelers while enjoying a glass of brandy or your favorite red wine. The romantic notions so closely associated with a bed and breakfast have made owning one a popular dream for many people. This is one of the reasons the bed and breakfast (B&B) industry has grown so significantly in recent years.

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15 Entrepreneurs Share Their Favorite Inspirational Business Quote

Hearpreneur

Share André Gide wrote that,”Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Quotes are an important part of motivation, though many of them are repeats of another turn of phrase. Business owners are particularly partial to famous quotations. Reading a motivational speech from a business legend or famous creative mind can give you a spark.

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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 Most Important Metric for Customer Success – Part 2

Guy Nirpaz

I’ve written recently that MAU and DAU are the most important metrics for Customer Success. I’ve received in an email with the following comment: “ How does MAU and DAU, which measure interactive consumption of a service, are applied to products and services that are inherently revenue share models such as Ad-Tech and Fin-Tech?” That is a great question and I’d like to answer it in this post.

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Three Ways To Best Protect Your Business’ Data During Hurricane Season

YoungUpstarts

by Bryan Gregory, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Aldridge. Hurricane season is fast approaching and this year’s forecasted storm activity is abnormally high. The Weather Channel predicts 2016’s season will include 14 named storms and eight hurricanes, three of which are likely to be a category three or higher. The spike in activity is a concern for anyone positioned within the storms’ potential landfall regions, but it’s especially alarming for small businesses whose operations an

More Trending

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Local SEO Tips For Small Business Owners

Duct Tape Marketing

Local SEO Tips For Small Business Owners written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Phil Singleton. No matter what you are selling – hardware to legal services – people are looking online. When someone turns to a search engine to find a source locally they intend to buy – perhaps today! Any business that wants to thrive locally must get very, very good at local SEO.

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Stop Generating Ideas & Start Solving Problems [Traction #24: Nadia Boujarwah, Dia&Co]

View from Seed

Startups are exciting for any number of reasons, not least of which are all the fresh new ideas for products and various approaches to doing the work. But we forget that building successful startups is not actually about coming up with ideas. Instead, it’s about finding problems, figuring out whether they truly matter (and to how many people), and working hard to solve them.

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Can Too Much Bootstrapping Be Bad For Business?

YoungUpstarts

Image credit: Bootstrapping from Shutterstock. by Anand Srinivasan, founder of LeadJoint.com. Looking at the startup scene through the lens of TechCrunch or VentureBeat, one may not be faulted for assuming that securing VC capital is the default way to raise a business. Yet, a study from the Kauffman Foundation reveals that less than 1 percent of startups actually receive VC funding.

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Coasting towards 5,000 innovation posts

deal architect

I just checked the New Florence index and we are at 4,960 posts. We should cross 5,000 by middle of July at the current pace. The first post on that blog was on March 7, 2005. Back then, I was.

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How To Take Your Idea From A Hobby To A Business

Startup Professionals Musings

As a startup investor, I often see business proposals looking for funding that really look like expensive hobbies looking for donations. I recognize that entrepreneurs tend to substitute vision and passion for formal processes, but no discipline or process in building something new is a sure way to spend money, rather than see any return and build a self-sustaining business.

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Why Are Keywords Important For Your Social & Content Strategy?

Brandanew

Whenever you build a website or write a blog, the first thing you get to hear is that the focus must be on keywords. One must do a lot of research to find the right keywords and one must insert them in the content without appearing spammy. But why are they so important for your social and content strategy? Even after all these years and after so many technological breakthroughs in the field of internet and e-Commerce, keywords remain the bedrock of online business.

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4 Creative Ways To Finance Your Growing Business

YoungUpstarts

by Krista Morgan, CEO and co-founder of P2BInvestor. Anyone who has managed a growing business will tell you that there is a big difference between profit and cash flow. Your business may demonstrate healthy annual gains on paper, yet struggle to meet the day-to-day operational bills. Similarly, it’s possible to run a business that doesn’t make money for a few years but is growing.

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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford – Lessons Learned Presentations

Steve Blank

Note: If you’re viewing this post on the website WordPress autoplays all the videos simultaneously. Turn off your audio. Then… Scroll down and manually pause the videos until you’re ready to play them. Then turn your audio back on. We just held our tenth and final week of the Hacking for Defense class. Today the eight teams presented their Lessons Learned presentations.

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The Best Entrepreneurs Learn To Stay Ahead Of Change

Startup Professionals Musings

Aspiring entrepreneurs who rely only on traditional learning vehicles (teachers, classrooms, and risk-free practice) are doomed to failure in anticipating change today. Either they are never really ready to commit, study an opportunity until it has passed, or fail with tools and techniques from a bygone business era. The Internet and the current information wave have changed everything.

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Top 5 Reasons Why Your Content Marketing Campaign Failed

Brandanew

Content Marketing ’s true worth was emphasized by Bill Gates when he said, “Content is king.” Since 1996 when this statement was made by one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, the three words have gone really, really viral. Whether the true essence was understood or not, the sentence spread like wildfire. Maybe that is one of the reasons why almost every brand created a content marketing campaign initiated by a blog but gradually they posted less and less, eventually abandoning the id

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Use Desktop Management To Stay Focused 

YoungUpstarts

By Lea Schneider. While you might get a laugh from some over the saying, “A cluttered desk is the sign of genius,” I’m pretty sure you won’t get a laugh from everyone. As a professional organizer, I’ve been hired by bosses to help employees learn organization. I’ve seen firsthand the reaction from clients and the frustration of co-workers. To the person who ends up apologizing on your behalf, your clutter isn’t funny.

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What Your Opportunity Slide is Missing – Make Investors Believe

For Entrepreneurs

This article is part of our series “Pitching to Investors” that shares real examples and practical advice from the Matrix General Partners on creating your pitch deck. The intro to the series is here: Five Ways to Nail Your Pitch and Win Over Investors. Our goal of this series is to help entrepreneurs nail their.

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Every Startup Gains From An Incubator Or Accelerator

Startup Professionals Musings

A question I often get as an adviser is whether or not to join a business incubator or accelerator as a way to move forward faster and smarter and increase the odds of business success. The simple answer is always yes, but like any other resource, finding the right one depends on your implementation stage, your own expertise, and what’s available in your geographic area.

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Debunked! The Top 3 Myths About Promoting A Business

Rembrandt Communications

As seen in Silicon Valley Globe… Create sales with the right content, SEO and PR moves If you are a new business-owner, companies bombard you with latest, SEO content-marketing applications, PR services and products. They promise to promote your business and increase sales overnight. And if you don’t have experience with search engine optimization or […].

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Starting A Profitable Recycling Business

YoungUpstarts

by Erich Lawson, online marketing manager at Northern California Compactors, Inc. Over the past decade, consumers have become more sensitive about their contribution to environmental degradation through waste. As such, a growing number of consumers are turning to products made from recycled or recyclable materials. Such products offer them a way to help conserve the environment.

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How we grew our website traffic by 5,000% in 3 months (with zero advertising)

The Next Web

554. That’s how much monthly website traffic we had to our website three months ago. 20 visitors a day may sound encouraging if you’re starting a personal project, but when your goal is to build a successful business with a team counting on you… Well, you’re probably screwed. And if we continued at that pace, we would’ve been. So what did we do? After a few minutes of panic, we got down to reality, and started experimenting with any possible source of traffic to our website.

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It’s Never Too Early To Start Selling To Customers

Startup Professionals Musings

Savvy entrepreneurs start testing their ideas on potential customers even before the concept is fully cooked. They have enough confidence in their ability to deliver that they don’t worry about someone stealing the idea to get there first, and they don’t forget to listen carefully to critical feedback. They become walking public relations machines for themselves, as well as their idea.

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The slowdown in equity financing is changing venture debt too

Version One Ventures

Debt funding is an interesting option for start-ups in two scenarios: you can increase your funding base while times are good in order to maximize growth or you can use it stretch your runway when equity raises are tougher (or you don’t want to price your equity). But as the equity funding market is cooling down, we see the impact rippling over to the venture debt market as well.

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[Infographic] How Money Moves: The Many Paths Of Currency

YoungUpstarts

The life of money is an interesting and intricate cycle. Currency, whether electronic or physical, is constantly moving throughout our economy, our bank accounts, and our wallets. Everyone participates in this cycle by spending money. Learning about the life cycle of a dollar bill or the 12 Federal Reserve banks in the United States provides an inside look at how currency works.

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Data First vs Data Second

A Crowded Space

tl;dr: ——– I’ve talked with many VCs over the past couple years that describe themselves as “data-driven.” That term has always confused me a bit. I’ve never thought of myself as data-driven, but obviously I look at lots of data about every potential investment we consider - CACs, LTVs, NPS scores, Cohorts, Marketplace Liquidity, etc.

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Test Startup Urges As An Intrapreneur, With Caution

Startup Professionals Musings

Believe it or not, even large and mature companies often initiate entrepreneurial efforts inside their own companies, and they look for employees who have the right attributes to make this happen. If you want to explore the world of an entrepreneur, without jumping ship, this would be the way to do it. Entrepreneurs working inside big companies are called “intrapreneurs.

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Winning and Losing

This is going to be BIG.

Most of life isn't clear victories or losses. It's something in the middle. It moves forward, or sometimes sits still, but, for most of us, it's never really that terrible or fantastic. And even when it is terrible, it's not the end of the world, and when it's fantastic it's not exactly perfect. That's why it's really hard to see someone's truest self.

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4 Branding Mistakes You Need To Avoid

YoungUpstarts

Branding is an integral part of any business, but it’s something that many startups overlook or give little thought to. But not making the look of your company a priority can be damaging to your business. Branding can help you stand apart from your competitors, while also attracting new customers. It creates a more professional and cohesive feel that can be used on elements such as your business cards and website.

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How to Write a Business Plan for an Artist’s Business

Up and Running

“But how can I write a business plan? I’m an artist.” He was one of my favorite students in the class I used to teach on starting a business. He had a delightful way of challenging assumptions, occasionally on the basis that art, by its very nature, was above—or perhaps immune—to cash flow. As a student, he was engaged, intelligent, and eager to learn; so yes, he was one of my favorites.

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The secret behind VC partnerships.

Hippoland

I was talking with a Sand Hill VC the other day. They do Series A deals. “We don’t have a consensus model here. If someone on the team loves a company, we’ll do the deal. But conversely, if someone on my team really hates a deal I love, I would probably back away. As much as possible, we want to have a united front here at our firm.” This was a really telling statement and confirmed what I’ve known all along now as a VC but was clueless about when I was an entrepreneur.

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Alignment before freedom

The Equity Kicker

There’s a big multi-decade trend towards giving employees more freedom over how they spend their time. There are two drivers. Firstly, as the world changes faster and faster, quick response to new situations has become more of a competitive advantage and companies that empower front line employees to make decisions are winning over companies that have to wait for management to decide.

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Is A Company Car A Good Idea For Your Business?

YoungUpstarts

Lots of business have company cars, but are they always worth the hassle? The first thing to note is that every company is different, and so every firm will have a different interpretation. However, there are a few generic principles that apply to almost every business. The trick is to analyse the pros and cons and come to an informed decision. To help you make that decision, you can find the positives and negatives of a company car below: Cost The Company A Lot Of Money.

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9 Strategies to Increase Your Food Truck Revenue

Up and Running

Here in Portland, Oregon, you can’t swing a stick without hitting half a dozen food trucks serving up a range of delicious options. The craze for mobile eats has been on the rise. Between 2008 and 2014, industry revenue increased at an annual rate of 12.4 percent. While momentum has slowed slightly, food trucks continue to be a profitable restaurant business model.

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4 hiring lessons I learned founding a startup

The Next Web

So you’ve founded a startup. Congrats! Now it’s time to hit that stack of resumes. You might think that you have better things to do as a founder, like raising funding, securing partnerships, and generally being the face of the company. But your number one job is to build a successful company, and you do that by hiring the right people. It can be intimidating.

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Writing, Running, and Reading

Feld Thoughts

It’s summertime and Snoopy is happy. I’m happy also. Summer is my favorite season. I’ve always been at my most creative in the summer and some of the profound life experiences that influenced me happened during the summer. When I was a pre-teen, summer meant tennis. Endless tennis. Eight+ hours a day in the Texas heat except for the three weeks I went to Camp Champions.

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