Sat.Mar 26, 2011 - Fri.Apr 01, 2011

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9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month

Both Sides of the Table

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement&# as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

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Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job

Steve Blank

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw. Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

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Twitter Link Roundup #80 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Genius, Power, and Magic

Growthink Blog

Businesses that sell do 5 things very, very well: #5. They Are Cause, and Not Money, Driven. Highly valued companies are culturally cohesive and have causes beyond money that motivates them. Take a look at the famous mission statements below and how these company’s iconic brands align with them: Google: “ To make the world's information universally accessible and useful " Facebook: “ To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected " Zappos: “ To provide the best cust

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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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How to get an exciting job at an awesome startup in less than a month

This is going to be BIG.

I take a ton of meetings with people asking me about opportunities in our portfolio. For a lot of people, I feel like I’m the one being asked to do the work of finding them something. For a select few people, they understand that startups need a lot of help, and fall in love with the people who are motivated and show that they can offer help right off the bat.

Portfolio 118
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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Microsoft's $100K India Startup Challenge Grant

ReadWriteStart

At this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we announced our collaboration with Microsoft around a $100,000 grant that they are offering to four Indian entrepreneurs as follows: A $40,000 grant each to two entrepreneurs, one in Mobility and one in Cloud Computing; and a $10,000 grant to two entrepreneurs, also one in each of those two categories. 1M/1M will be working with Microsoft in helping entrepreneurs prepare for these grants.

India 119

More Trending

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Video: Why is a business plan important?

Up and Running

Tweet I’ve been working with the team at Palo Alto Software on a series of videos to help you with business planning. This video answers the question “Why is a business plan important?&#. Transcript. So let me take a minute and talk to you about why I want you to do business planning. Because you’re going to use it to run your business better.

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What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

Ben's Blog

It’s f@#ked up when your mind’s playin’ tricks on ya. —The Geto Boys, Mind Playing Tricks on Me. By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check.

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The mature cloud

deal architect

I had a chance to catch up with the Workday team about their integration cloud. What impressed me the most was they could have been hyping the middleware technology they acquired with Cape Clear 3 years ago, but waited for.

Cloud 324
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Guess How Long Overnight Success Really Takes

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination. I was reading an article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”.

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Napkin Entrepreneurs

Steve Blank

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. Martin Luther King, Jr. The barriers for starting a company have come down. Today the total available markets for new applications are hundreds of millions if not billion of users, while new classes of investors are popping up all over (angels, superangels, archangels, and even seraphim and cherubim have been spotted.).

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Strengths Finder 2.0

entrepreMusings

I recently completed the test in Strengths Finder 2.0 which can be bought on Amazon for around $12 ( StrengthsFinder 2.0 – Link to Amazon). It was recommended to me by a long time friend who works at Texas Instruments. His team took the test at his work so I bought it for our Operations/Admin team at my work since I thought it would be a fun way for us to understand each others strengths.

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Best deal I ever negotiated

deal architect

In the $ 10+ billion of technology contracts I have negotiated for clients over my career, I have been known to do some creative terms and conditions. But I am really proud of what I just negotiated for myself this.

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How to Recognize Dysfunctional Startup Leadership

Startup Professionals Musings

Founders almost always cite lack of money as the reason for failure, but if you look deeper, I believe the reason is more often about dysfunctional people and leadership. Sometimes it comes right back to the founder, in terms of a malaise often called “Founder’s Syndrome.” A few years ago I was intimately involved with a promising startup that taught me about this issue.

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Are You Using These 3 Key, SEO Items in Your Copy?

Rembrandt Communications

You have your cup of coffee, your laptop and a quiet space to work. You are ready to write the copy for your Website. But then, the white screen stares at you. You have a thought…. No, that’s not good enough… more staring at the screen… Ugh… writer’s block! Well, most of us have been [.].

SEO 150
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Entrepreneurship's Unclear, Unsanctioned Path

ReadWriteStart

Tara Hunt's recent talk at TEDxCorcordia is available online, and we've pasted the video below. It's a pretty frank and inspirational talk about the investment - and no, not the financial investment - that entrepreneurs must make. Hunt ( @missrogue on Twitter) is the co-founder of the shopping data startup Shwowp , and in her TED talk, she talks about some of the struggles necessary in building a company, in convincing others of its potential, and of moving forward.

Cofounder 138
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What keeps you grounded?

deal architect

I enjoy catching up with Chris Jablonski who writes about emerging technology at ZDNet. In a recent conversation, the thoughts drifted to the relentless barrage of PR both of us get about “innovative” new start up products. Just this week.

PR 253
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A Successful But Unsatisfying Startup is a Failure

Startup Professionals Musings

It’s sad when the startup is “successful,” but the founder still feels totally unsatisfied. I see it happening all the time. The business is a winner, but the family or other relationships are broken by the stress. Or the entrepreneur started down this path to be their own boss and change the world, but find they are now answering to many more people, with nothing really changed.

Startup 231
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Jobs Jobs Jobs

Feld Thoughts

A bunch of our portfolio companies are hiring. Just today, I got emails about new job pages at Cheezburger (Seattle and NY), SendGrid (Boulder and LA), and Attachments.me (Bay Area). But the growth is everywhere – Zynga (throughout the US), AdMeld (NY, London, Berlin), Fitbit (Bay Area), Gnip (Boulder), Oblong (LA), Trada (Boulder), and – well – most of our other portfolio companies.

Seattle 132
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Is "Stealth" the Best Way to Build Your Business?

ReadWriteStart

I'm just returning from another really great year at SXSW. It's always fun to meet up with so many new and old friends in just a few days in Austin. Beyond that, one of my favorite thing is bumping into so many entrepreneurs I've never met who are working on interesting problems. However, this year I met a concerning number of entrepreneurs who wouldn't tell me anything about their business.

Stealth 126
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Of Serendipity

deal architect

I recently met with a group for the first time and one of them said “ Good to meet a fellow Foreigner fan”. To my puzzled look, he pulled out a copy of my book and pointed out I had.

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6 Tips for Services Startups When Profits Plateau

Startup Professionals Musings

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Yet they still haven’t achieved a healthy growing profit, even though this was one of the main reasons they went into business for themselves in the first place.

Startup 230
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That Was The Best Tuna I’ve Ever Had

Feld Thoughts

I had a really fun night in Montreal at the opening dinner for the C100 Conference that I’m speaking at tomorrow. The dinner was put on by Accelerate MTL and included some friends as well as a bunch of new people I met tonight. Dinner was really well done. I sat next to Howard Lindzon who teased and entertained me all night long. Dinner was a pre-set menu so I ordered the non-meat choices and didn’t think twice about it.

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Facebook Partners with Seedcamp to Support European Social Startups

ReadWriteStart

Seedcamp , often described as the European equivalent to Silicon Valley's Y Combinator , has announced a partnership with Facebook to help support socially-oriented startups. The partnership means that Seedcamp participants get product, technical, and design support, as well as early access to beta programs on the Facebook platform. Seedcamp says that many of its companies are already work closely with the Facebook platform, and the closer partnership will give those startups a boost.

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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog The EPA RadNet Robonaut2 Color Labs: Turning strangers into friends? “Goldilocks” Mid-sized Solar Projects Microsoft search engine for human body Insurance innovations.

Engineer 186
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Women In Business Catch Up After The ‘Mancession’

Startup Professionals Musings

It looks like women have caught up with men in numbers in the workplace. For the first time in history, women in the USA now outnumber men in the workforce, and there are now more women in supervisory positions than there are males. The question is whether they will handle the downside of working any better than men. According to an article by Ella L.

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A New Amazing Deal: Web Hosting For Entrepreneurs

Feld Thoughts

It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time for another Brad Feld’s Amazing Deal. I can’t help myself – it feels so satisfying to be a deal huckster. This week’s deal is for one year of web hosting from Cloud Jolt. Cloud Jolt is a hosting company focused on the tech entrepreneur. If you are in the market for a new host, thinking of starting a web company, or need to expand your blog, you should give these guys a try. $39 gives you a year of hosting, which saves you

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Access, Aggregation, and Other Big Data Challenges for Startups

ReadWriteStart

In some ways, the term "big data" belies the challenges that startups face in tackling the subject. That adjective "big" tends to get a lot of the attention, often at the expense of the noun "data." In other words, we spend a lot of time talking about issues of the quantity of data and less time addressing issues of quality. Some of those issues were addressed today at Web 2.0 Expo when Factual CEO and founder Gil Elbaz gave a talk on the challenges of big data.

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Selling to Underserved Markets

Up and Running

Tweet Patrick McKenzie , the founder of Bingo Card Creator , recently gave a talk at the Business of Software conference about selling software to underserved markets. Patrick’s message, while focused on software, is universal: Why do we suck at selling to women? Because we suck at selling to pretty much everyone. — Patrick McKenzie. The marketing message for your product – software or not – can’t be focused on features alone.

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Business 2011 - Optimism, But Heed the Lessons

Startup Professionals Musings

Even though it has been a long haul, it’s nice to see some optimism surfacing in 2011. Just yesterday, a new study “ The PNC Economic Outlook: Survey of Small & Middle-Market Business Owners ” was published. It shows a return to cautious optimism compared to this past Autumn and much improvement from the record-high pessimism of two years ago. According to earlier studies from Forbes Insights , many entrepreneurs feel the lessons learned during the past couple of years have not only helped t

SBA 224
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I Love My Weeks Off The Grid

Feld Thoughts

Amy and I spent the last week at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona. It was awesome. I was tired and needed a break. I also needed a focused week to finish the final draft of Book #2 ( Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC ) that I’m writing with my partner Jason Mendelson. The submission date is March 31st and I think we are going to be three days early.

Tucson 118
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GroupMe just killed the one way mobile alert: Brands and the mobile conversation

This is going to be BIG.

Give me your phone number and I’ll text you about my brand. You can’t text back and you’re going to have a heck of a time passing it on. Who forwards text messages? Sound interesting? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Now imagine that I’m a Mets fan. (Ok, so I am… but it’s really kind of unbelievable given the way things have gone, so you might have to just imagine it…) I don’t go to games by myself.

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Lean Marketing: Five Cheap Ways To Market Your Startup

crowdSPRING Blog

Every startup wants to get attention for their product or service. But it’s not easy for a young company to get attention, and can often be very expensive. In this short video, I offer five suggestions to help you get attention for your startup. Do you have other suggestions of ways startups can get attention for their product or service without spending a ton of money?

Lean 108
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5 Fun Ways to Market Your Business on Facebook

Up and Running

Tweet If you are using Facebook personally or are still one of those rare people who aren’t part of what compares in size as being the 3 rd largest country in the world, you might want to consider “playing” with some fun techniques here to market your business. Of course to start with you will need to create a Page for your Business if you haven’t already.

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Time For A New Phone System For Foundry Group

Feld Thoughts

We’ve decided to implement a new phone system in our office. When I posted about our search for our video conferencing system , we got a ton a great feedback so I’m once again looking for your help. We’ve been using an older version of Cisco’s Call Manager (VoIP based) that we’ve had for the past decade. While it has worked flawlessly and has a ton of bells and whistles, we simply do not use them.

Search 117
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Cry My Beloved Cincinnati

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

I’ve resisted writing this post. I have friends and family in Cincinnati and I don’t want them to think any less of me for criticizing my hometown. Still, I’m compelled to say how baffled and disappointed I am over the lack of support for the proposed Streetcar. Readers who come here for innovation stories, rest assured, [.].

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