A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
OCTOBER 11, 2010
This is Part 5 of the 5-part series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches. Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he'll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Then he'll describe his cutting-edge platform — cloud-based, scalable, distributed version control, continuous integration, one-click-deploy.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 12, 2010
A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. Even if you don’t have “direct&# sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale&# including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development. So I hope these posts will be useful to all and not just those who need road warriors.
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SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 11, 2010
This month’s big question is Examples of Big Impact from Technology and I’ve taken it as an opportunity to go back and look at the elements of different projects that I’ve worked on over the years that have had a big impact. In this post, I’m going to focus on a common model that has been part of several of the highest impact projects. At it’s core, the model is pretty simple: Guide through setting meaningful personal goals Teach how you can hold yourself accountable to those goals Help the user
This is going to be BIG.
OCTOBER 10, 2010
Every business person with a dollar and a dream these days thinks they’re a technical co-founder away from interweb stardom. It’s great if you can find one—but even if you can, I’m not sure it’s always the best move. That’s counter to what I used to think before, but I’ve done some more thinking about it. The reality is, a lot of the stuff being built now isn’t rocket science.
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
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 11, 2010
(I am often asked to explain how to apply Lean Startup approaches to domains beyond software. In order to answer, I have taken to drawing a two-axis diagram. On one axis we have the degree of market uncertainty for a given industry. For "cure for cancer" type businesses, there is no question about who the customer is and what the customer wants, and therefore there is no market uncertainty.
crowdSPRING Blog
OCTOBER 14, 2010
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!
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
ReadWriteStart
OCTOBER 13, 2010
Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup , the new book by David Cohen , founder and CEO of TechStars, and Brad Feld , managing director of Foundry Group, came out this week, and the authors are in the middle of a fast-paced tour around the U.S. The impetus behind the year-long book project, according to Cohen, was "to try to capture the phrases that seem to be repeated often in the context of the program.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 12, 2010
C yber attacks like the recent Stuxnet Trojan saga can be very costly for companies. The bad news are that such a attacks are on the rise. The good news are that there are tools out there that can protect you from such threats. Earlier this week YL Ventures announced a 7-figure USD investment in Israel-based Seculert , a new non-intrusive Security-as-a-Service that comprehensively detects cyber threats affecting corporate networks.
Software By Rob
OCTOBER 14, 2010
Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← The #1 Goal of Your Website – Slides from my Business of Software Talk Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.
Austin Startup
OCTOBER 12, 2010
On October 14th Tech Ranch will be hosting a Venture Pitch event, where 10 entrepreneurs will be pitching their idea to a panel including a potential customer, a proven entrepreneur, and a seasoned investor. One of those entrepreneurs is Brian Moeskau. We asked him to tell about the Venture Forth program and his preparation for pitching. Brian is an independent software developer, entrepreneur and proud Longhorn.
Ben's Blog
OCTOBER 14, 2010
“Concrete shoes won’t help in the river. I don’t care if you is Michael Phelps my n*&#a”. —Lil’ Wayne. The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs.
Both Sides of the Table
OCTOBER 13, 2010
You know the type. You see them on Twitter, Facebook or Plancast plotting out their next 12 conference. You see their Tweets from airports across the globe. Look at me! I’m in Spain! Now I’m in France. Next week I’m speaking in Cabo San Lucas! They are professional conference attendees. They are CEO’s addicted to the schmoozing.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 13, 2010
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation. Pearl S. Buck. Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successful and you’ll hear a familiar list of adjectives; agile, tenacious, resilient, opportunistic, etc. What you don’t hear is that often they didn’t know any better.
Software By Rob
OCTOBER 12, 2010
Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Your Market is Smaller Than You Think Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding → The #1 Goal of Your Website – Slides from my Business of Software Talk Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 15, 2010
A common question I get is “How do I get a bank loan to fund my startup?” The default answer is that it probably won’t happen, because most banks just don’t make bank loans to startups. The failure rate is just too high, and startups typically don’t have the assets or revenue stream to back up the loan. That’s why angel investors are so sought after by entrepreneurs.
Professor VC
OCTOBER 11, 2010
ProfessorVC. The last blogger in Silicon Valley. Monday, October 11, 2010. Is There Any Truth in "The Social Network"? Got around to seeing The Social Network this past weekend. While the flick has gotten rave critical reviews (93% on Flixster), the question of what percentage of the movie is true has also gotten a lot of discussion in the blogosphere.
Campus Entrepreneurship
OCTOBER 11, 2010
One of my student teams is working on a business plan for a campus mapping application company. Their ideas are fascinating and I look forward to seeing their output at the end of the semester. The Wired Campus blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece on various location driven applications and how they are being used in and around campuses.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 11, 2010
At a talk I gave recently to a room full of first year graduate business school students, I was asked “what motivates me.&# Before I answered, I felt compelled to explain what intrinsic motivation is and used the following example to describe it. “Tonight, I’ll spend about 90 minutes talking to y’all. I’m doing it because I enjoy it and I learn from it.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 14, 2010
It seems like many entrepreneurs are becoming so technology addicted to their iPhones and email that they forget to listen to what their customers want, or even forget to ask. Attention spans have compressed to seconds, and face-to-face conversations, with the hugely important body language, are avoided in favor of texting and anonymous Internet surveys.
Rembrandt Communications
OCTOBER 12, 2010
I’m swamped with new client work, optimizing Web sites and SEO copywriting this week, so I’ll keep it short. But I wanted to share a question with you that I’m asked often: How often do I need to update my website? Well, the answer is, if you have not updated your website in the last [.].
ReadWriteStart
OCTOBER 14, 2010
At today's roundtable we had some intensive discussions around market sizing and its impact on financing. You have heard, I am sure, that venture capitalists only invest in very large market opportunities - $500 million to $1 billion. But you have, perhaps, heard less specific discussions on what angel investors are looking for. Well, some angel investors are looking for exactly the same thing as what VCs are looking for.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 9, 2010
Now that Do More Faster is out and I appreciate how hard it is to write and publish a book, I read every book through a different (more appreciative) lens. This morning, I spent three hours on the coach and plowed through Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 13, 2010
If you are looking for an outside investor, you need to know how they see you. Different types of investors look for startups at different levels of maturity. If your startup is at the wrong stage for the investor you are approaching, the courting is a waste of time for both of you. For instance, if your company is only a few weeks old and you have zero customers and your product offering is still in design, don’t expect someone to hand over $10 million to fund your efforts.
This is going to be BIG.
OCTOBER 15, 2010
Consumer web services rarely win on features. In fact, it hardly even makes sense to think about them in that way. Did any of Facebook's 500 million users do a side by side feature comparison of Facebook and MySpace to decide where they were going to spend their social time online? I doubt it. Yet, the product that is Facebook is an amalgamation of a set of feature implementations that clearly amounted to more than the sum of its parts.
ReadWriteStart
OCTOBER 12, 2010
Investment research firm CB Insights has released its report on the third quarter of 2010. And the report is very much a mixed bag: overall funding dollars are down, but the number of deals is up. And seed funding in particular, according the report, is strong. VC funding dipped to $5.4 billion in the third quarter of this year, a five quarter low. But deal activity recorded its second highest tally in 8 quarters.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 14, 2010
Simplification and iteration are two key themes that repeatedly show up in the stories from Do More Faster. Today I’ve been watching a real-time case study of those two themes unfold from our portfolio company BigDoor. The guys at BigDoor are trying to build a platform that powers game mechanics for any site or app, and they recognized early on that this isn’t as simple as just adding badges to your site and calling it good.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 9, 2010
By Roger S. Robinson, Ph.D. Can an intangible like a company’s culture make a difference in your business? That is a tough question. After all what is culture? And can it impact your bottom line? The concept of culture really entered the world of business through Peters and Waterman’s “ In Search of Excellence.” They defined it in terms of successful organizations permeated with strong and sustaining systems of beliefs.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 14, 2010
I sraeli startup MySupermarket , UK’s independent grocery shopping and comparison site, has completed a new round of investment of $7.4 million, led by Greylock and Pitango. The company has raised $22 million to date. Along with the announcement of the founding Mysupermarket has also made some significant changes in its managament team, by adding Alon Bloch as CEO, replacing the founder Amir Ofer.
onstartups.com
OCTOBER 15, 2010
Naming a startup is hard. Very hard. On the one hand, the pragmatic entrepreneur thinks: “I shouldn’t be wasting time on this — for every successful company with a great name, there’s one with a crappy name that did just fine. It doesn’t seem like a name has much influence on the outcome at all. I’m going to get back to writing code.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 11, 2010
Sunday morning I read The Power of Less by Leo Babauta. I’m a big fan of Leo’s Zen Habits blog (I was turned onto it a few months ago by Amy ) and I had high hopes for the book. It delivered. Several times a week I hear from a friend or colleague that he or she is overwhelmed with the amount of stuff going on in their world. Occasionally someone ends up in my office in tears as they struggle to make sense of the madness that has become their life.
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 12, 2010
By Akira Hirai We can measure success in many ways. In business, one important measure is the value of the company. That’s because a company’s value is a composite of all of the quantitative and qualitative factors that comprise a company: revenues, expenses, risks, growth prospects, quality of the management team, competitive advantages, strength of the intellectual property, and so forth.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 13, 2010
T he latest IVC Online Report is out and Q3 results are in: 96 Israeli high-tech companies raised $341 million from venture capital funds and other venture investors – both local and foreign – in the third quarter of 2010. Koby Simana, CEO of IVC Research Center, said: “The data suggest a slow recovery in the local high-tech sector’s ability to raise capital.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
OCTOBER 10, 2010
Today Leslie is talking about productivity, revealing to you what tasks he has stopped doing in his business and what three core tasks he is now focusing most of his time on so he gets rapid results. If you’re not getting things done, reading this article will help you prioritize. When it comes to growing an online business, it is easy to think that you should be able to do everything.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 10, 2010
One of the events on our Do More Faste r book tour will be something we are calling Angels in the Architecture. Mike Platt from Cooley (one of our book tour sponsors) came up with the idea of doing an hour long session with a panel of entrepreneurs, angel investors, and VCs discussing the dynamics between angels and VCs. Having been all three, I find this a particularly important topic and it’s something we spend a lot of time discussing at TechStars in the third month as the teams gear
Startup Professionals Musings
OCTOBER 11, 2010
If you are an entrepreneur these days, or trying to grow an existing business, everyone is telling you that you need to use social media. There are many ‘experts’ out there telling you how to do it, or even offering their services. But very few are talking about how to measure your results, and the right metrics for optimizing your marketing environment.
VC Cafe
OCTOBER 12, 2010
C rowdsourcing is a beautiful thing but question and answer engines not always deliver. The usefulness of the answer usually depends on the knowledge and availability of the respondents. When it comes to caliber and depth Quora , the fast-growing Q&A site started by a former Facebook Co-founder, delivers. I asked a simple question: “ What are the top startups in Israel 2010?
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