Sat.Jan 28, 2012 - Fri.Feb 03, 2012

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Web Second, Mobile First

Both Sides of the Table

Fred Wilson wrote two posts in 2010 that were very influential with the startup community. The titles were: Mobile First, Web Second. Mobile First, Web Second (continued). If you’re in the minority that never read them – you should. I know that they really impacted an entire cohort of startups because every company that was coming to pitch me businesses was (is) saying, “I’m a ‘mobile first’ company.” Part of the beauty of blogging that in two sittings F

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Social Media is a Boon to Startups Who Do It Right

Startup Professionals Musings

If your startup can’t be bothered with social media, or has no plan to take advantage of it, then you are definitely at risk these days. But simply jumping in is not enough. Before you start spending money and time being a user, you need to understand how it can help you and your business. Using it randomly or incorrectly is a waste of your precious time.

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Lessons from Facebook on Recruiting Elite Engineers

David Teten

Following is a guest post from ff Venture Capital winter intern Max Segan , a Colgate senior majoring in computer science, who is starting at Facebook this summer as a software engineer. From our perspective, Facebook is both our friend (training hundreds of talented future entrepreneurs) and enemy (competing with our portfolio companies for top talent like Max.

Engineer 138
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How to Start A New Business in Less Than 50 Hours

ReadWriteStart

Just about every weekend someplace on the planet a peculiar series of meetups is happening called Startup Weekend. The idea is to bring together a group of people, many of whom have never set eyes on each other before, to form new ventures, many of which are tech-related. So far the model seems to be working: each weekend on average has produced two or three companies.

St. Louis 135
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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 Hacker Way

Startup Lessons Learned

I don't normally comment on the day's news, but I want to make an exception today to share something from Facebook's S-1 filing. Over the next few days, astronomical amounts of attention are going to be paid to Facebook's incredible business results: the 800+ million active users, the $3.7 billion (!) in revenue, and their growth rates, too. I hope at least some of that attention will be paid to the culture and process that made those results possible.

IPO 168
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Anatomy of an Innovation-friendly School

This is going to be BIG.

University research is a big business for many schools. It certainly worked out pretty well when Stanford licensed the search technology that Larry and Sergei had been working on back to them at Google. They netted more on that deal than Fordham has in it's whole endowment (but still, go Rams!). On top of that, most of a school's major donors are likely to be entrepreneurs in some way.

Incubator 116

More Trending

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Capital Innovators Graduates First Class of Entrepreneurs

ReadWriteStart

Tonight in downtown St. Louis the second group of companies to be funded by Capital Innovators will be announced. These will receive $50k in seed funding, free office space and credits toward other useful services as part of their acceleration program. We wrote about their innovative program last fall. Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs.

St. Louis 118
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Why Software Development Estimations Are Regularly Off

Diego Basch

Some people believe that carrying out a large software project is like building a bridge. You look at your past projects and use the data to estimate the time and resources needed. This view has been debunked decades ago; this analogy was frequently seen as an aspiration for the future when I did my Master in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in the late nineties.

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10 Leasing Tips Every New Business and Startup Should Know

Up and Running

10 Leasing Tips Every New Business and Startup Should Know. By Michael Lockwood, President of TEQlease Capital. While startups and new businesses may already realize the many benefits of leasing their equipment, including conserving their cash and significant tax benefits, they also need to carefully research their equipment financing needs before signing the dotted line.

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Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?

Ben's Blog

Man, have you ever really wondered. Like why are we here? What the meaning of all this? —Outkast, Church. Since Marc and I founded Andreessen Horowitz three years ago, we have raised $2.7 billion. That statement begs a few questions. The two most obvious are: Why did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money? How did such a new venture capital firm raise so much money?

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Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed: Mark Zuckerberg (Words of Wisdom)

Scott Edward Walker

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series entitled “ Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.” Each week, we post a short video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics to help entrepreneurs succeed. This week, in celebration of the filing of Facebook’s S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission , we again present Mark Zuckerberg , co-founder of Facebook and indeed an amazing, inspirational entrepreneur.

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The realities of Insourcing

deal architect

I recently heard Vice-President Joe Biden talk about bringing jobs home – what the administration is calling “Insourcing” – and had a deja vu moment. It was 2004 or 5 in a Bangalore hotel bar. It was way past bedtime.

Global 231
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Praise Where Praise is Due

Up and Running

It all started with a simple email exchange. The final mail was short and to the point ‘ thanks for the great customer service, sadly it is unusual.’ It got me thinking. For me the exchange was pretty straight forward. A customer had emailed in with a query. I was in early, before the customer service team had arrived and I logged in to our email management tool.

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How to Find the ‘Star Performer’ in Every Employee

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup and every big business wishes that all their employees were star performers, but wishing doesn’t make it happen. Some coaches and leaders seem to have the magic for bringing out the best in everyone. Research has shown that it isn’t magic, but a focus on engaging people in their work, so that their work triggers the same emotions as play does for you.

Employee 241
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Scars

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The skin between my second and third finger on my left hand has been dry and flaky since middle school; no one knows why. I have a scraggly patch of hair on my right calf from when I scraped off a swath of skin in an Ultimate Frisbee tournament. (I made the catch for the score. My wife asked “Was it worth it?”) We all have scars. The interesting ones aren’t physical, and are more subtly revealed.

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Burning Question: What makes an event memorable?

deal architect

As I start to line up speaking later in the year around themes in my new book, I was reminiscing this weekend about the many industry events I have been fortunate to be part of. Plenty of gorgeous resorts and.

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True Story: How Bplans.com Started in 1995

Up and Running

January of 1995. Few people knew of the Internet, Mozilla, and the world-wide web. The so-called “Internet” had existed for years, but seemed to the rest of us (anybody outside of a few spook havens and ivory towers) like a nerdy background utility for emails. And I started bplans.com. I hope you’ve noticed big changes at bplans.com lately: more information, more tutorials, and better organized, making what you’re looking for easier to find.

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8 Key Elements Make Your Business Transformative

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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Three Magical VC Pitch Questions

Genuine VC

There are plenty of places throughout the blogosphere which talk about the typical VC meeting, delivering both advice and tips. (In that corpus, a while ago I blogged about seven mistakes that entrepreneurs often make during a pitch session.) Along those lines, I think the proverbial 12-slide deck helps provide structure to a conversation where a multitude of information needs to be communicated in a short (often an hour or less) period.

Forecast 215
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The Stanford Innovative CIO program

deal architect

David Smoley, CIO of Flextronics and Brian Lillie, CIO of Equinix are leading along with Stanford Business School faculty a very interesting 4 day offering for senior executives about innovative uses of technology. The brochure is attached below or you.

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[Infographic] Redefining Action Hero: Why Bill Gates Is Better Than Batman

YoungUpstarts

If you’re like most people, you’d probably worship the late innovative Steve Jobs over nerdy, geeky Bill Gates. But wealthy Gates, with his philanthropic work, is destined to end up in the list of the most philanthropic persons – alongside luminaries such as Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet and John D. Rockfeller. From a commitment to eradicating polio to improving the U.S. education system, Gates’ philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation surely positions him as a

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Scaling a Business by Cloning Yourself is Tough

Startup Professionals Musings

Many writers have outlined the critical success factors for product companies, like sell every unit at a profit, patent the design, and continuous product improvement. But recently I was asked about success factors for services startups, and I quickly realized that there is very little published to help the thousands of startups that fall in this category.

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Link Post (weekly)

Venture Chronicles

Beware: Alternative Certification Is Coming – Innovations – The Chronicle of Higher Education. tags: blog education. Ten Things You’re Not Allowed to Say at Davos – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review. tags: blog davos. Facebook’s Sandberg Gently Warns Europe About Privacy Rules – NYTimes.com. “Concerned about privacy?

Europe 32
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Why software is eating the (technology) world

deal architect

I must admit ever since my research for The New Polymath where I presented a whole variety of multi-dimensional case studies, I groan when I see a pure-play software, hardware or telecom company or executive talk about dominating the world.

Software 210
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How to Evaluate Your Leadership Style

YoungUpstarts

by Ken Blanchard, co-author of “ Great Leaders Grow: Becoming a Leader for Life ” Today, I’m going to give a short, one-question quiz. Here’s the question: How do you rate as a leader? I don’t ask this question flippantly. It is a question I’ve asked countless people at the leadership seminars we conduct. As leaders, most people rank themselves as being very close to a minor deity or at least Mr. or Ms.

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Good Business Writing is Not a Mark Twain Novel

Startup Professionals Musings

In the world of business, you only get one chance for a great first impression. The stakes are high – you are asking an investor for money, a customer for an order, or another executive for a partnership. Badly written letters, long rambling or emotional emails, or an obvious lack of spell checking will brand you as a poor business risk before the message is even considered.

Audience 224
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What Makes An Awesome Board Member?

Feld Thoughts

Over the past two years I’ve been struggling mightily with the dynamics of “classical VC funded board of directors” and how these boards work. When I hear a VC say “I’m an active board member” it gives me the same nauseous feeling I get when someone says “I’m a value added investor.” I’ve been on some awesome boards, some terrible boards, and everything in between.

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Innovation is a game of fractions

deal architect

As we get ready for the big game, I listened to Al Pacino’s speech in Any Given Sunday. And it occurred to me if Coach was talking about innovation, he would substitute fractions for inches. Think about it. Innovation is.

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Where’s the Loyalty?*$!

YoungUpstarts

by Jeremy Kingsley , president of OneLife Leadership. Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today. No longer do people join a company and devote the rest of their working lives to it. Companies are, of course, not exactly known for offering up thirty or forty years of employment, a gold watch and pension plan. Times have changed.

Georgia 157
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Who is an Entrepreneur?

Life Beyond Code

It’s hard to “box” an entrepreneur as there are so many different kinds of them. However, there are several characteristics that will make it easy to spot one. I have picked 11 really good definitions of an entrepreneur. Here they are (in no particular order). #1 Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. “An entrepreneur is someone who does not expect compensation until he has created value for someone else.”. #2 Jean-Baptist Say, French Economist. “Entrepreneur is someone who tak

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A Flying Fuck

Feld Thoughts

It’s Monday and I’m back in Boulder after being on the east coast for three weeks. My partner Jason Mendelson got me possibly the best remote control toy ever. Even though I’d love to stick around Boulder all week, I’m heading to DC tomorrow and then NY for a day. Oh well.

DC 129
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Resolutions so far so good

deal architect

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to post an average of 1.25 innovation posts a day on the New Florence blog. January has ended with 50 posts, so about 1.6 a day! Nice going, with assists from guest posts.

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[Singapore] Business-Focused Reality TV Show Angel’s Gate To Air Next Week

YoungUpstarts

Most of us would never have guessed reality TV shows built around businesses and budding entrepreneurs could work, but shows like The Apprentice , Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank have proven that there is interest in business-focused reality programs. Soon, Asia will get one of its own – Angel’s Gate is set to air on Singapore-based broadcaster Channel NewsAsia from next week.

Singapore 156
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Who is an Entrepreneur?

Life Beyond Code

It’s hard to “box” an entrepreneur as there are so many different kinds of them. However, there are several characteristics that will make it easy to spot one. I have picked 11 really interesting quotes about an entrepreneur. Here they are (in no particular order). #1 Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. “An entrepreneur is someone who does not expect compensation until he has created value for someone else.”. #2 Jean-Baptist Say, French Economist. “Entrepreneur is someone wh

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How to Focus Your SEO Efforts

Rembrandt Communications

Overwhelmed with SEO Options? There are many choices available when it comes to search engine optimization, or SEO, and you probably have many questions: Should you do your own SEO or hire a firm? Is SEO worth it? Will you be able to get to the top of the search engines? With all of the [.].

SEO 113
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The Four Seasons

deal architect

I heard Prince this morning “Seeing that I was doing close to nothing…but different than the day before” And it struck me how dated he sounds: how can you be bored in this day and age? Earlier in week, I.

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