Sat.Jul 28, 2012 - Fri.Aug 03, 2012

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Massacre at IBM

Steve Blank

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant. They’ve done it for more than 400 companies ranging in size from 200 hundred starts-ups, one of whom was Citrus Systems that became Citrix, to IBM.

San Jose 256
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Dual Founders Manage Technology Startups Better

Startup Professionals Musings

I often hear the qualms of business-smart but non-technical entrepreneurs, wondering if they really have a chance in this high-technology marketplace. I tell them that if their idea or solution is technology intensive, they clearly need technology strength on the team. Then the question becomes “How do I evaluate and attract the best technical talent?

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Human Engineering and Emotional Intelligence for Startups

VC Cafe

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups. ( Wikipedia ). human engineering VC Cafe Photo credit: By imaginedhorizons (Flickr). On “ Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed “, a research by Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that “ 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “ human engineering ,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lea

Engineer 145
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Your brain peaked when you were twenty–what to do?

The Equity Kicker

This is one of my occasional health related posts. The next area of focus for me as I seek to slow the process of ageing is the brain. Physical fitness is a pre-condition for mental longevity, so I was right to start there, but the statistics (such as they are) on the physical decline of the brain after the age of twenty make for terrifying reading.

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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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Social Discovery Is Pushing Search and Social Closer

www.readwriteweb.com

Home. Sections. Web. Start. Biz. Enterprise. Cloud. Hack. Mobile. Archives. Videos. Reports. The Talent Wars. Six VCs Speak Out. Online Communities. Big Data. The Social Layer. Cloud Computing. Augmented Reality. Real-Time Web. Community Management. ReadWriteWeb. Featured Sections: Mobile. Get the newsletter. Social Discovery Is Pushing Search and Social Closer.

Search 60
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Co-founder meetup tonight at Capital Factory in Austin

SiliconHills

One of the keys to a successful high tech startup is the team backing the venture. And solo-entrepreneurs can find it difficult finding a technical cofounder in central Texas where people with technical skills are in high demand. Other startup founders are looking for partners with different skills such as marketing, sales and business development. [.].

More Trending

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Is Media Manipulation the New Media Relations

Duct Tape Marketing

Join me for a Google+ Hangout live streaming to YouTube at 1:30pm ET today for: Media Manipulation – fact or fiction – a frank conversation with Ryan Holiday (@ryanholiday), author of Trust Me I’m Lying – Confessions of a Media Manipulator and Peter Shankman (@petershankman), VP, Small Business Evangelist at Vocus. You can tune in by going here at 1:30 ET – [link].

Media 72
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VC Evolution: Physician, Scale Thyself.

500hats.com

TL:DR : This post aims to recap significant changes in the venture capital industry over the past ten years, and then make some [biased] predictions as to major forces at play in the next five years. In particular, I hope to highlight some less obvious [r]evolutionary shifts that people outside the industry may overlook. This is a long piece, so if you’re not a fan of inside baseball, skip it.

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Lying on your resume

Steve Blank

It’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the coverup. Richard Nixon and Watergate. Getting asked by reporter about where I went to school made me remember the day I had to choose whether to lie on my resume. I Badly Want the Job. When I got my first job in Silicon Valley it was through serendipity (my part) and desperation (on the part of my first employer.

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Multi-Tenancy: Where are the outsourcers?

deal architect

I was reading Phil Wainewright’s nice note on multi-tenancy “The cloud operates within a service-oriented architecture, where providers achieve economies of scale by delivering their services in volume and operating them from pooled resources.” (italics mine) I drifted off wondering.

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How to Onboard a New Customer With Seriously Profitable Flair

Duct Tape Marketing

One of the best marketing investments a company can make is to spend time and resources on bringing a new customer on in a way that exceeds anything like what they’ve experienced in the past. This is where sale number two comes from and this is how a profitable referral relationship blossoms. photo credit: kenteegardin via photo pin cc. Far too many organizations spend all of their efforts on landing the new client and then immediately move on leaving the customer experience to chance or to Bob

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10 Personal Productivity Mantras For Entrepreneurs

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup founder feels the pressure of the thousands of things that need to get done, all seemingly at the same time. There is just not enough time! The real solution is better productivity and less procrastination, to put you back in control of your business. You need to spend time on important things, as well as the urgent. Many entrepreneurs waste too much time on low-priority administrative tasks, procrastinating on higher priority but tougher tasks, resulting in last minute crises, and

Product 294
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A life-changing challenge: Guided by Pascal’s Wager

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

If the Gartner Group issued a Report on Recommended Behavior of Fortune 5000 Corporations with Respect to the Existence of a Power Beyond our Reckoning , surely they’d back up their ecclesiastical recommendation using a 2×2 diagram where the best place to be is up and to the right. Silly, and yet, that’s precisely what genius mathematician/physicist/inventor/everything-else Blaise Pascal did in his pithy argument for the existence of God: Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wa

Engineer 259
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Am I the only one not upset with NBC?

deal architect

Brent Rose at Gizmodo summarizes the anger many of my tech savvy colleagues feel about NBC for its delayed broadcast of many of the Olympics events (there is a hilarious Twitter account @NBCDelayed which has been tweeting world events years.

Global 268
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Our Investment in One Jackson: Fresh, Yet Familiar

Genuine VC

One Jackson is a new online children’s clothing retailer which is surprisingly fresh – all of its designs were created by independent designers and then curated with love from its community of parents. The results are high-quality fashionable creations at an affordable pricepoint – which look great and are uniquely different from mass clothing brands.

Cofounder 199
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Entrepreneurs Need to Expect and Learn From Failure

Startup Professionals Musings

If your first startup fails, you are about average. Most entrepreneurs fail on at least one attempt. Investors agree that an entrepreneur who has never failed probably hasn’t pushed the limits. What investors look for is not that you never fail, but that you learn from the failure, maintain a positive attitude, and work with integrity on the next one.

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Four Ways To Boost Innovation

YoungUpstarts

We’ve all been stuck in the desert of “been-there-done-that” before. Year after year, our company churns out predictable products and ho-hum services that hardly raises a yawn. The result? Stagnating or declining sales even as our competitors waltz past us with exciting new products that captures the imagination and wows the media.

Singapore 179
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The disruptive British

deal architect

This blog loves disruptive technologies and vendors. They tend to be unpredictable, break the mold. And we love the British with all their eccentricities. And I mean that in an affectionate way. When I arrived in London for a “tour.

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Ubiquitous Computing and the Misguided Frenzy About “Mobile”

Agile VC

i*Pad [eye- pad ] noun – a $700 version of Words With Friends. About 6-12 months ago you could hardly throw a rock in the startup ecosystem without hitting a VC expressing their enthusiasm for “mobile” Now the frenzy about mobile has extended into the mass media and public equity markets, though with trepidation as often as excitement.

Mobile 160
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You are the Best One to Build Your Startup Brand

Startup Professionals Musings

As an entrepreneur, it’s never too early to start selling yourself and your idea. I hear lots of excuses from startup founders, like “I’m too busy,” concern over IP security, can’t afford an agency, and it’s too early. The result is they get no feedback, no credibility, no visibility, and no investors until months later than they expect. I’m definitely not lobbying here for promising things you can’t deliver, or hiring a publicist before your first programmer.

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The ‘Moneyball’ Approach To Business Hiring

YoungUpstarts

by J. Allan McCarthy, entrepreneur and author of “ Beyond Genius, Innovation & Luck: The “Rocket Science” of Building High-Performance Corporations “ Great coaches take into consideration an athlete’s talent and heart when they’re building a team, but they consider group dynamics, too. It’s not just a matter of getting the fastest, strongest and smartest players on your side.

Hiring 162
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The Real Deal: Bob Ferrari on The Industrialization of Technology Supply Chains

deal architect

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well. This time it is Bob Ferrari, a top notch supply chain and enterprise software industry analyst. He is the Founder and Executive Editor.

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Want Your Startup to Succeed? Stay Home

ReadWriteStart

A new study shows that startups do better when they’re launched in the place where their founders were born or have lived for a long time. Makes sense, but the reasons why are surprisingly complex and modern. Our first guess was that the key to startup success is the founder’s ability to go to their parents’ house to cadge a hot meal. And that’s not entirely wrong.

Idaho 165
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Many Confuse Sense Of Urgency With Sense Of Emergency

Startup Professionals Musings

In business and startups, a “sense of urgency” is a good thing. Yet many entrepreneurs confuse this with a “sense of emergency,” which insidiously saps the life from their business. Urgency comes from a greater purpose focused outward, to make good things happen, while handling emergencies is a reactionary inward approach to saving ourselves from the daily crisis.

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Taking Your First Gen Y Steps Down The Career Path

YoungUpstarts

by Kyle Lagunas, HR Analyst at Software Advice. Summer is underway, and another group of “Trophy Kids” (Gen Y) preparing to leave their jobs at your local coffee shops and retail stores to join the ranks of the professional workforce. They have big plans and high hopes, but as many twentysomethings can attest, a diploma doesn’t guarantee success. A few of us have learned the hard way that there are some things that college simply can’t prepare us for.

Agile 158
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Olympic Innovation Series Part 2

deal architect

The first set was here. More posts starting with the Opening Ceremony last Friday. The biomechanics of Usain Bolt NBC Olympics – by the numbers The “Fast Pool” at the London Aquatic Centre The Amazing Olympic Cauldron 64,000,000 Points of.

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Google Acquires Wildfire, Will Now Sell Facebook And Twitter Marketing Services [Update: $350M Price]

Scalable Startup

Reblogged from TechCrunch: Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+.

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Location-Based Services in B2B Offer Better Return

Startup Professionals Musings

These days, I’m hearing more and more that Location-Based Services (LBS) are entering the mainstream for mobile users, but I’m not sure why. So far, it’s been just another mobile phone app that tells people where their friends are ( Foursquare and Facebook Glancee ). Marketers see it as a better way to target customers, but the current consumer offerings have been slow to deliver.

B2B 206
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[Infographic] Google Yourself

YoungUpstarts

Have you ever tried Googling yourself? You should. And you may be surprised with what you find. Every time we volunteer more information about ourselves online through the use of various social media profiles, the more we reveal about ourselves to the world. But some of that information we may have preferred to have kept private. The truth is, once we put personal information online, we have little control over it, how it is used, and how long it stays available in cyberspace.

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More New Renaissance

deal architect

on the innovation blog Junaio – Augmented Reality Browser A young Polymath The Orbitz recommendation engine The iBathroom Next-gen wildfire fighting Google Glass at I/O.

Engineer 207
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How to Reduce Your Budget and Reduce Startup Risk

Gust

One of the biggest myths I still see in the community of new entrepreneurs is the assumption that “All I need is a good idea, and some investor will give me the big money I need to build the business.” In reality, investors fund good business plans, not big dreams. It’s all in the execution. A related myth is that it takes a lot of money to start a business.

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Signaling Pricing Expectations Early in Seed Investment Discussions

Genuine VC

As more transparency to seed-round funding transaction details have emerged, especially with the advent of Angelist and accelerator programs (which both educate and even sometimes set terms & structure for graduating companies), I’ve noticed an increasing number of entrepreneurs signal pricing expectations much earlier in the seed fundraising process.

Valuation 136
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Arts Graduates – Supplement Your Degree With A Masters In Management

YoungUpstarts

In today’s challenging economy, many undergraduate students with an arts background often find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to landing a career in business. Anthony P. Carnevale, lead author of the report “The College Payoff”, reveals that bachelor’s degree holders of liberal arts degrees are most likely to be at a disadvantage when finding a job and having earning power. “The truth is that if you get a liberal arts degree, there are a smaller and smaller set of o

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The Innovation Serengeti

deal architect

Have you been to Kenya or Tanzania during the annual wildebeest (and zebra and others) migration? It is an amazing sight to see the thundering herds seek out greener pastures. The New Florence blog feels as dynamic. Through July, there.

Tanzania 191
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Save the Date: December 3, 2012

Startup Lessons Learned

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein , co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference this fall. Big news! We’ve got a date and venue for The Lean Startup Conference : December 3 - 4, 2012 at the InterContinental San Francisco. We’ll open registration in a couple of weeks and if you ’d like to be the first to know when tickets go on sale--along with a shot at the lowest ticket price--we encourage you to sign up here for our short, friendly emails.

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Fundraising Recommendations for Startups (Part I)

VC Cafe

I've been contacted by several members the VC Cafe Network on LinkedIn who are asking for assistance in fundraising for a web startup or a mobile app. I'm writing today to share my recommendations. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]. I've been contacted by several members the VC Cafe Network on LinkedIn who are asking for assistance in fundraising for a web startup or a mobile app.

Startup 153