2013

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The One Word That Shouldn’t Exist in an Entrepreneur’s Vocabulary

Both Sides of the Table

'No. The one word the best entrepreneurs never accept. I said it. Now let me walk you through a broader story because avoidance of the word in and of itself will seem cliche. Stay with me. When I was little I had a role model for entrepreneurship – my mom. She was a natural leader. She was president of the UJA in Sacramento. From this I saw civic involvement and leadership first hand.

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Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate

Steve Blank

My friend Ron Ashkenas interviewed me for his blog on the Harvard Business Review. Ron is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting , and is currently serving as an Executive-in-Residence at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective. For what I had thought were a few simple ideas about taking what we’ve learned about startups and applying it to corporate innovation, the post

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How much does it cost to build the world’s hottest startups?

The Next Web

'Could $100,000 and the right developer skills make you an overnight billionaire? How much does it really take to build a product like Twitter or Instagram? With mobile development agencies and product incubators on the rise and more corporate “labs” spinning out each day, there’s no shortage of talent to help you build the next great Web or mobile app.

Cost 168
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Courting Content, Not Controversy

Startup Lessons Learned

'This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference —which starts in just over two weeks—is to help entrepreneurs learn absolutely useful things from each other. For our participants to stay open to the unique ideas we’re presenting and to share the advice they each have, we need an environment that’s dynamic, professional and respectful.

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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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Building smarter software: Proactively deliver insights

For Entrepreneurs

'Three years ago I spent a lot of time looking at SaaS business intelligence companies. I loved what I saw in the demos: easy data connections, slick looking graphs, powerful drill down tools and custom dashboards made the tools look like no-brainers. And then I began my diligence calls. All of these bells and whistles […].

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How to pitch to investors in 10 minutes and get funded

Up and Running

I know what it’s like to pitch to investors – both angels and venture capitalists. I’ve raised close to $1 million from angel investors for my previous technology start-ups. Sometimes you only get 10 minutes to pitch your business opportunity to the investors (or less in some cases). Below is a format I’ve successfully used, as well as helped many other first-time start-up CEOs raise investment capital.

More Trending

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Selecting Your Investors

OnlyOnce

'Selecting Your Investors. Fred Wilson has been a venture investor and director in Return Path since 2000, first with Flatiron Partners and then with Union Square Ventures. We’ve been through a lot of wars together. In a couple of weeks, he and I are team-teaching a class in Entrepreneurship at Princeton, and the professor gave us the assignment of writing two pairs of blog posts to tee up discussion with the class.

Valuation 133
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How to Use Social Media To Drive Sales

ConversionXL

According to a report by Nielsen on social media Americans spend three times more time on social media than reading their e-mail. 7.6% of online time is spent reading e-mail and 23% on social. The juicy bit of the study is that more than 70% of social networks users shop online. That’s ~12% more than the average person. These stats make a good case that if you and your brand is active on social networks, you can get rewarded – if you do it right.

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Frameworks Round 4

TechEmpower

'We’ve posted Round 4 of our ongoing project measuring the performance of many web application frameworks and platforms. As with previous rounds, the developer community has contributed several additional frameworks for Round 4, bringing the total to 57! This round adds Bottle (Python), Dancer (Perl), Kelp (Perl), MicroMVC (PHP), Mojolicious (Perl), Phalcon (PHP), RingoJS (JavaScript), Spark (Java), and Wai (Haskell).

Framework 552
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Why and When to Learn to Program

Spencer Fry

I can only share with you what worked for me. Everyone learns differently. The only thing without a doubt that holds true for everyone learning to program is that you must deeply want to learn. Need to learn. If you go about passively learning then you'll get frustrated and give up as soon as it starts get tough. A few hours a week isn't going to cut it.

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How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email

Both Sides of the Table

'We all get a lot of email. And we send off scores of them, too. For important emails we hope for replies or action. If you do the math on the number of inbound emails you get multiplied by the time it would take to read them all and respond to those that expect a reply you would be astounded. It is simply unmanageable. Yet some simple techniques can help massively improve your ability to get people to take action on your important emails.

Email 415
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Failure and Redemption

Steve Blank

“What’s gone and what’s past help. Should be past grief.” William Shakespeare - The Winter’s Tale. We give abundant advice to founders about how to make startups succeed yet we offer few models about dealing with failure. So here’s mine. ——– In my experience, living through failure has 6 stages: Stage 1: Shock and Surprise.

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How to launch a startup without knowing a line of code

The Next Web

'Tal Raviv is the co-founder of Ecquire. This post was originally published on OnStartups. There is an unspoken rule: to launch a startup, you need to build a product, and to do that you need someone that can write code. Whether that means chasing down a technical co-founder, learning to code, or even building that “Lean MVP” – the conventional wisdom is that without tech abilities you’re nothing more than a dude (or dudette) with a Powerpoint.

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How to Get Picked as a Speaker for The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

'This post was written by Sarah Milstein, co-host of The Lean Startup Conference. We’re looking for speakers for the 2013 Lean Startup Conference. Last week, we announced that our short application form was live. Today, we’re following up with answers to frequently asked questions we’ve received since then , because the answers will help your app lication succeed.

Lean 165
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Software Development Estimates, Where Do I Start?

Diego Basch

'For some reason many people discuss the problem of estimating software development timeframes without properly understanding the issue. There is a famous answer on Quora that exemplifies this. Lots of people like that story, even though it’s inaccurate and misguided. “Software development” is such a huge endeavor that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about estimates without an understanding of the kinds of problems software can solve.

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Through the Looking Glass: Hiring Sales People

Ben's Blog

'He’s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood. Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good. —Run DMC, Peter Piper. Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different than engineers and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.

Hiring 78
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Do Job Specs Matter?

Seeing Both Sides

Today's post is brought to you by my friend, Paul Blumenfeld , a recruiter who is one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to hiring processes. Since the topic is so fundamental to the company-building process, I am pleased Paul agreed to share his thoughts. When my wife and I got engaged, we had barely clinked champagne glasses when a friend asked when we would be visiting Crate and Barrel to register for wedding gifts.

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5 New Realities of SEO

Duct Tape Marketing

'5 New Realities of SEO written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing Back in the day, SEO was more technical and less, well, semantic. Now I realize that for most a term like semantic query relevancy might as well be the name of computer programming language, but the fact is Google’s customers, the searcher and the advertiser, are no longer content with results based on related page keyword content.

SEO 78
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The unprofitable SaaS business model trap

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'Marketo filed for IPO with impressive 80% year-over-year growth in 2012, with almost $60m in revenue. Except, they lost $35m. WTF? It’s not impressive when you spend $1.60 for every $1.00 of revenue, force-feeding sales pipelines with an unprofitable product. Don’t tell me this is normal for growing enterprise SaaS companies. I know the argument: The pay-back period on sales, marketing, and up-start costs is long, but there’s a profitable result at the end of the tunnel.

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Key Techniques From Startup Leaders Who Get-It-Done

Startup Professionals Musings

'The universal challenge of every startup founder is to get everything done that needs to get done, and still have a life. Even outside of business, everyone wants to accomplish more, while working less. I’ve been a student of these techniques for some time, but some time ago I saw a great summary that seems to pull all the key principles together. Stever Robbins, known on the Internet as the Get-It-Done Guy, outlines his strategies in his book “ 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More.

Startup 334
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[Infographic] Inside The Mind Of A Startup Entrepreneur

YoungUpstarts

'What makes an entrepreneur tick? Perhaps the better question is – what kind of leader makes the best entrepreneur? After all, startups are fast paced, small, and ever-morphing, which means it takes certain type of person to help make things succeed. Here’s a look at what a founder should be able to do: Development. Write Code. Build a server.

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A Post Startup Execs Should Forward to Your Spouse or Partner. 12 Tips for Making it Work

Both Sides of the Table

I recently wrote a post about how to manage relationships when you’re at a startup or are busy executive. It was based on an excellent book I had just read by Brad Feld & Amy Batchelor (his wife). I had images in my brain of all of the stresses I had placed on my wife in the heyday of my startups. We once took a “vacation” in Spain with Tania’s parents but we were in the midst of an M&A transaction so this photo is how my wife & her family remember me on that

Partner 418
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A New Way to Look at Competitors

Steve Blank

'Every startup I see invariably puts up a competitive analysis slide that plots performance on a X/Y graph with their company in the top right. The slide is a holdover from when existing companies launched products into crowded markets. Most of the time this graph is inappropriate for startups or existing companies creating new markets. Here’s what you need to do instead. ——-.

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30 tips for avoiding startup failure, from successful founders

The Next Web

'Toying around with the idea of starting a company? Worried about things that may go wrong or making the wrong decisions? Did you just start a company but are concerned about how you are doing things? You are not alone, and you definitely are not in unchartered waters. There are not only many thousands of people just like you who are working on starting their own company or have just launched their company, but there have been thousands of people who were once in your shoes who’ve gone on to gro

Cofounder 164
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The Lean Startup SXSW 2013

Startup Lessons Learned

We're back! Once again, along with my partners at 500 Startups, we are proud to present the most substantive track at SXSW: [link] There was a running joke last year that "the Lean Startup track was the only place at SXSW you couldn't get out of the building." That's because the room we were in was so packed, the only way to stay for the next session was to refuse to give up your seat.

Lean 165
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Equity basics: vesting, cliffs, acceleration, and exits

The Startup Toolkit

false As a cheatsheet, the “normal” equity structure is: Founder terms: 4 year vesting, 1 year cliff, for everyone, including you. Advisor terms ( 0.5–2.0% ) : 4 year vesting, optional cliff, full acceleration on exit. Getting equity structures right. When it comes to equity terms, there are only 3 things to understand: vesting, cliffs, and acceleration.

Vesting 56
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Through the Looking Glass: Hiring Sales People

Ben's Blog

'He''s a big bad wolf in your neighborhood Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good —Run DMC, Peter Piper. Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different than engineers and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.

Hiring 77
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Boston Unicorns

Seeing Both Sides

'Last week, I used Aileen Lee''s excellent TechCrunch article on Unicorns as a jumping off point to analyze the role of the MBA in creating these unusually valuable companies. This week, I want to take a local lens and analyze these special companies that have been created in Boston. As was the case last week, I was ably assisted by HBS 2nd year MBA student Juan Leung Li.

Boston 55
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The 5 Fastest Ways to Get More Referrals for Your Small Business

Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Andy Sernovitz – Enjoy! photo credit: woodleywonderworks via photopin cc. Most small businesses will tell you their new customers come through word of mouth, but very few can tell you how those referrals happen or where they come from. But, it’s not magic and it’s not an accident.

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An eBook pricing model that resulted in $100,000 in sales

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

'This is a guest post by Nathan Barry, in response to two other posts that previously appeared on this blog. Nathan is the author of Designing Web Applications , The App Design Handbook , and Authority: A Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing. His most recent company, ConvertKit , makes email marketing suck less. How you price a product can have a radical impact on the revenue you make from it.

Sales 335
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Frameworks Round 2

TechEmpower

'Last week, we posted the results of benchmarking several web application development and frameworks. The response was tremendous. We received comments, recommendations, advice, criticism, questions, and most importantly pull requests from dozens of readers and developers. On Tuesday of this week, we kicked off a pair of EC2 instances and a pair of our i7 workstations to produce updated data.

Framework 559
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4 Necessary Small Business Resources And The Creative Approach To Get Them

YoungUpstarts

'by Natalie Gonzalez, co-founder and head of marketing and social media at Chatalog. Small businesses are the economic engine that drives the U.S. economy, with more than 27 million small firms providing 60 to 80 percent of the new jobs in our country. New survey data from Constant Contact® , Inc. found that 59 percent of small businesses believe it’s harder to run a business today than five years ago.

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How Open Should a Startup CEO be with Staff?

Both Sides of the Table

'CEO transparency. It almost sounds uncontroversial. A CEO should tell her staff everything! Right? Right?!? Of course not. It’s a hard topic to write about because it’s almost an accepted norm that total transparency is good. It is not. For starters let me use “CEO” as a proxy to include her “inner circle” which might mean co-founders or might just mean senior execs of the business.

Startup 417
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How to get meetings with people too busy to see you

Steve Blank

'Asking, “Can I have coffee with you to pick your brain?” is probably the worst possible way to get a meeting with someone with a busy schedule. Here’s a better approach. —— Jason, an entrepreneur I’ve known for over a decade, came out to the ranch today. He was celebrating selling his company and just beginning to think through his next moves.

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Blogging is the new resume: Why less is not always more

The Next Web

'Ryan Hoover is the co-creator of Product Hunt , creator of Startup Edition , and instructor at Tradecraft. Follow him at @rrhoover or visit his blog to read more about startups and product design. Can we all agree resumes are crummy? Can you really communicate your life’s accomplishments and skill-set through an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper? Does anyone even read your resume anyway?

Stealth 167
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Getting Engineers into the Lean Startup Cycle

Startup Lessons Learned

'Guest post by Lisa Regan On August 20, Eric will sit down with developer and Hut8Labs co-founder Dan Milstein for a webcast you can join to discuss “Getting Engineers Into the Lean Startup Cycle.” This conversation will be a great opportunity for engineers and engineering managers to learn more about implementing Lean Startup ideas. It’s also for founders who want to think about how engineering and the rest of the business team can realign around a shared set of goals.

Lean 167