Sat.Dec 13, 2014 - Fri.Dec 19, 2014

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Upfront Ventures Raised New $280 Million Fund

Both Sides of the Table

'Whew! We’ve been dying to tell you all for a while that we had raised a new venture capital fund and of course given SEC filing requirements the story was somewhat already scooped by the always-in-the-know Dan Primack a few weeks ago. We raised $280 million. Our last fund was $200 million but as you may already know since we raised that fund we added new partners Greg Bettinelli and Kara Nortman and Venture Partner Hamet Watt – all of whom are busy looking at new deals for the firm

Las Vegas 396
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10 Actions That Highlight You As A Business Leader

Startup Professionals Musings

'People who have been followers too long as an employee don’t realize how hard it is to be a leader. Every new entrepreneur has to initiate the right actions to be perceived as a leader in their chosen business domain by their team and by their customers, or the road to success and satisfaction will be lost along the way. Driving these actions are some basic principles that entrepreneurial leaders, such as Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and Evernote CEO Phil Libin, seem to have learned early.

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5 Lies CTOs Tell To Feel Better About Coding

YoungUpstarts

'by Jinesh Parekh, CEO of Ruby on Rails consulting shop, Idyllic Software. Hey there, you amazingly resourceful person. You’re doing everything. You’re coding, testing, fixing issues and managing people. Cheers to you! Or not. You’re the CTO. And you shouldn’t be coding. Wait. Before you berate me, I did not say you shouldn’t know how to code.

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The Best Free Apps and Online Tools for Entrepreneurs and Obsessive Collectors

Up and Running

'As we head toward the new year, you’re likely thinking about setting goals and getting things organized. To help you prep, I’ve collated a list of tools—for both web and mobile devices—that have helped me and others get things done, save time, and work more productively. I should preface this list by saying that I have not included “to do” apps primarily because everyone else does, because there are so many of them, and because they’re all pretty much variations of one another.

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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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Our 2014 in review

Version One Ventures

'Just like last year , 2014 has been busy and eventful here at Version One. We added 8 new companies to our portfolio: Clio , a cloud-based practice management platform for the legal industry; Dwellable , a mobile-first vacation rentals marketplace; HandUp , a donation platform that lets you give directly to a person in-need; Mattermark , an analytics platform for investing, partnering, selling and marketing; Shippo , an e-commerce shipping solution; and 3 startups that have yet to announce th

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Need Working Capital? Check Out Online Loan Options – By Meredith Wood Of Fundera

Mike Michalowicz

'If you own or run a small business, there is a large chance that at some point in your business’s lifetime, you are going to need capital to fuel growth. It’s one of the highest priorities, as well as largest obstacles , for small business owners. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and cash flow is their lifeblood. When they need cash to run and grow, they should be able to access it.

More Trending

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Public Relations Tips for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs [Webinar Recap]

Up and Running

'To grow a business, most entrepreneurs know that they should be implementing PR strategies. But where do you start, and what are the best approaches to public relations for an entrepreneur? For this webinar, we were joined by Jennefer Witter, CEO and founder of the Boreland Group, and author of the new book, “The Little Book of Big PR: 100+ Quick Tips to Get Your Small Business Noticed.” We recently featured an excerpt from her book, which offers even more great tips on networking f

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Oracle: Time for some respect

deal architect

'Oracle is skirting with a market valuation of $ 2oo billion. Wall Street is gushing. Whatever. I am not writing this to join their praises – I have never judged companies purely on their financial performance. I am more impressed.

Valuation 376
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What Future for Accelerators?

Both Sides of the Table

'Accelerators have had quite a good run the past 5+ years. Not just Y Combinator and TechStars but a host of other accelerators across the country. I have been involved with a high profile one in Los Angeles – Launchpad LA – and we’ve decided to make a shift so I thought this was a good time for reflection. My good friend Adam Lilling and I started Launchpad more than 5 years ago .

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10 Incentives For Entrepreneurs To Bootstrap Their Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

'I’ve always wondered who started the urban myth that the best way to start a company is to come up with a great idea, and then find some professional investors to give you a pot of money to build a company. In my experience, that’s actually the worst way to start, for reasons I will outline here, and also the least common way, according to an authoritative survey of new startups.

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It’s Not All Progress in the World of Business—Although We’re Making Strides

Up and Running

'The sitting Supreme Court members. Which venture capitalist thinks that middle-income workers aren’t making enough overtime? What recent Supreme Court decision could affect your manufacturing business? From a summit on media in the Middle East to a huge new funding opportunity for aspiring entrepreneurs in Nigeria, here are fascinating business news stories from the U.S. and around the world.

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SAP Nation Excerpts: Chapter 1The Customer Pivot

deal architect

'Amazon has SAP Nation on the Kindle and in softcover. Over the next few weeks the book will be available in other print and eBook formats. As I have done with my other books, I plan to excerpt here about.

Customer 271
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The wrongness of relativism

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'Instagram had 13 employees when they sold for a billion dollars. Was there any startup founder who didn’t feel depressed when that happened? Yes, depressed. All those years of toil and sacrifice, the pain of scaling a complex organization and a complex product, scratching and clawing for revenue growth month after month, and you’ll never have that sort of exit, and 26-year-old Kevin Systrom did it in only 2 years, with 13 buddies, with $0 in revenue, never having had to worry about

Metrics 246
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10 Tough Quandaries That Lead Entrepreneurs Astray

Startup Professionals Musings

'Most entrepreneurs struggle with many startup Founders dilemmas in building their business, and these key dilemmas are probably the biggest source of pain and failure for the entrepreneur lifestyle. People may jump into the lifestyle to be their own boss, achieve great wealth, start a new trend, or all the above. The dilemma is that these goals are usually mutually exclusive.

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Three Reasons Why The Affordable Care Act Is Great For Entrepreneurs

YoungUpstarts

'by Rick Lindquist, co-author of “ The End of Employer-Provided Health Insurance: Why It’s Good for You and Your Company “. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is inspiring innovation. By making individual health insurance accessible and affordable, it has knocked down one of the greatest barriers to entrepreneurship. Budding entrepreneurs no longer need to worry about where they are going to get health insurance — or how they’re going to offer it to the talented people who can help them get their sta

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Vertical Vroom Vroom

deal architect

'Infor’s continued focus on micro-verticals and deploying them in the Amazon cloud is starting to pay off.

Vertical 304
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NextView’s 2014 Year in Review: New Additions, Big Launches & More

View from Seed

'We wanted to take a quick moment to thank the founders and teams who made 2014 a successful year, as well as outline some of the exciting happenings from NextView Ventures in 2014. 2014 Year in Review. This past year was nothing short of packed for NextView, from announcing our second fund to several acquisitions (TapCommerce to Twitter, GrabCAD to Stratasys, Directr to Google), three late-stage fundraises (InsightSquared, Swipely, and thredUP), to hiring our first employee (Jay Acunzo, i.e. me

Portfolio 189
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The Discipline Of Execution Defines An Entrepreneur

Gust

'TED Conference image via Wikipedia. When entrepreneurs come to me with that “million dollar idea,” I have to tell them that an idea alone is really worth nothing. It’s all about the execution, and investors invest in the people who can execute, or even better, have a history of successful execution. Execution is making things happen, and for startups it usually means making change happen, which is even more difficult.

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How Successful Companies Utilize Technology

YoungUpstarts

'by Jessica Oaks. It’s no secret that technology plays a pivotal role in how businesses conduct daily operations and market themselves. The most successful companies are leveraging technological advancements to their advantage by interpreting data to strategically build a customer’s purchasing experience, improving life with innovation, and increasing brand visibility via digital platforms.

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The Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy

Feld Thoughts

'I’ve had a powerful exchange via email with Mario Cantin over the past few days. He pointed me to a post he recently wrote titled Empathy is feeling *with* others and an amazing three minute RSA Short video on The Power of Empathy by Dr BrenĂ© Brown. It’s stunning crisp and enlightening. Amy and I are huge believers in empathy. In our book Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur we come back to this idea over and over again as one of the biggest

Video 164
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Building your user engagement pyramid

Version One Ventures

'One of the first blog posts that Boris shared with me when I was starting out is “ Don’t forget your logged out users ” by Fred Wilson. Fred notes that with many social platforms, a huge number of their regular users don’t actually login because they are able to derive value from their services on a “logged out basis”. As a result, he advises entrepreneurs to build services for those users that lead to more engagement, ultimately motivating them to log in.

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The Discipline of Execution Defines an Entrepreneur

Gust

'When entrepreneurs come to me with that “million dollar idea,” I have to tell them that an idea alone is really worth nothing. It’s all about the execution, and investors invest in the people who can execute, or even better, have a history of successful execution. Execution is making things happen, and for startups it usually means making change happen, Read more >.

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[Infographic] Why Running A Company Is The New Retirement

YoungUpstarts

'Despite the slew of technology startups with their bevy of extremely young founders, when it comes to entrepreneurship or running a company youth can be overrated. Interestingly, statistics show that the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity in the past decade has actually been among 55 to 64 year olds, with more than 1 in 3 new businesses started by an entrepreneur aged over 50 – one could say that old is the new young!

Founder 179
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How fitness apps and wearables can impact your performance at work

The Next Web

'Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, speaker and freelance writer. This post originally appeared on the SumAll blog. In a pair of recent studies, the CDC called attention to two alarming trends. Americans are not getting nearly enough exercise and a majority fall many hours short of the recommended amount of sleep. Not only is this bad for our health, it harms our productivity as well.

Web 164
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Solve Your Gmail Contacts Problem

Feld Thoughts

'I live in Gmail. Gmail Contacts has been lame for a long time. Within an email, it’s even lamer on the right side bar, especially since it could be so amazingly useful. FullContact has just released their FullContact for Gmail product. It’s a free download in the Chrome Store. I’ve been using it for about six months since and it’s just awesome.

API 149
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The first 6 months at Envato

Scalable Startup

'I’ve been spending a lot of time in the WorPress as a development platform world lately. I’m finding many business advantagesb in this world for a group of websites I am building to bootstrap a few “baby startups” in areas I’m already interested in – #travel, #classic-cars, #SaaS #Art sales, #techjobs, etc. What this has done for me is vastly increase my interest in tactical data driven marketing on the web – #growthhacking, #contentmanagement, #agile i

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5 Unusual Start-Up Ideas For The Driven Entrepreneur

YoungUpstarts

'In the ever-changing, always-evolving world of entrepreneurship, one hard truth remains consistent: you have to be different to be successful. Whether it’s taking something popular and giving it a unique twist or creating something completely original and brilliant, entrepreneurs rarely make it unless their business concept has something unusual about it.

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5 common mistakes guaranteed to screw up your PR strategy

The Next Web

'Conrad Egusa is the CEO of Publicize. He is happy to connect on LinkedIn here. Successful people know how to learn from their own mistakes. Really successful people know how to learn from the mistakes of others. Here are some of the most common PR blunders that you can learn to avoid in the first place. 1. Taking the press for granted PR requires a concerted effort.

PR 162
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Two New Techstars Programs – Mobility/Detroit and Techstars++/Mayo Clinic

Feld Thoughts

'I’m fascinated with Detroit. When I was there in October 2012 with my partners Ryan and Jason to run the Detroit Marathon we talked about the idea of getting more involved there in some way. Jason grew up in Detroit and has lots of stories there. He goes back regularly to visit his parents and Ann Arbor where he went to school. Since we were there, I’ve read a few books on Detroit and many articles that popped up about it’s downfall along with some of the entrepreneurial activ

Detroit 145
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One blind spot to avoid in your quest to be true to yourself

Life Beyond Code

'You would have heard (generally from motivational speakers) about the need to be true to yourself. Common terms used are: Be yourself. Be true to yourself. You can only be yourself, everybody else is taken. Be You. I can go on and also I agree with most of the statements but with a caveat. If you want to feel good about yourself and exercise freedom of speech or freedom of expression then go ahead by all means.

IPO 143
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7 Startup Entrepreneurs On How To Attract Top Talent

YoungUpstarts

'by Philip Acuña. As a start-up, it’s seemingly impossible to compete with the Facebooks and Googles of the world, who can offer six figure salaries to the talented professionals you’d want on your team. Because of that asymmetry, it can often be more important to create novel ways of attracting top talent to a new company, than it is to obtain operational funding.

Colombia 169
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Tech support through the ages

The Next Web

'This post is brought to you by Rackspace , the #1 managed cloud company. A casual search on YouTube reveals a wealth of funny—and sometimes cruel—stereotypes of tech support professionals. We recently made a promotional video that poked gentle fun at the various ages of tech support, from the 1960s until now. It also highlighted the value of what Rackspace calls Fanatical Support.

America 161
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Jerry Colonna and Rand Fishkin Discuss Depression and Entrepreneurship

Feld Thoughts

'Jerry Colonna spent a few hours with me and Amy on Saturday at our house. Jerry is one of our closest friends on this planet so any time we get time with him is a treasure for us. It was a cold-ish, snowy, gloomy Colorado early winter day. Amy and I were pretty off-balance due to my blood clot so it was especially nice to be with him as he always helps rebalance us.

Colorado 140
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Target Marketing 101 [Infographic]

Up and Running

'The term “target marketing” has been around for decades, but that doesn’t mean that everyone knows what it is or how to apply it to their business. If you’re just starting out, or if marketing your business has been something that you do without fully understanding it, then getting a grasp on target marketing will be really valuable.

Marketing 139
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Holiday Marketing – Plan For Your Best Year Ever

YoungUpstarts

'by Diana Ennen, President of Virtual Word Publishing and author of “ Virtual Assistant, The Series: Become a Highly Successful, Sought After VA “. Tis the season to go marketing, fa la la la la … la la la la. Why do most love holiday marketing so much? Because it’s a great way to go into the New Year with more clients and more sales and at the same time, connect on a deeper level with your clients and potential clients.

Marketing 158
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A scaling playbook for entrepreneurs: Hiring for growth

The Next Web

'Henry Kim is the president and co-founder at Symphony Commerce. Generally speaking, entrepreneurs are great at creating something from nothing. We are ideas people, and good at getting them off the ground through laser focus on product concept and development as well as early cultivation of a network of investors, customers and employees. But that’s just square one – how do entrepreneurs grow a company from there?

Hiring 140