2009

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What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of my Startup Advice series. I had a picture in the office of my first company with the logo above and the capital letters JFDI. (In case it’s not obvious it’s a play on the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.&# ) I believe that being successful as an entrepreneur requires you to get lots of things done. You are constantly faced with decisions and there is always incomplete information.

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Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

In the last post I beat you to death about ditching your business plan but failed to provide an alternative. Okay okay, "Planning == Bad," but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what's worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues.

Startup 315
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Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything

SoCal CTO

I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations. If I’m being asked to do startup software development, I’m going to push fairly hard on key questions that the startup needs to have answered before

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (22) E.piphany (6) ESL (7) Family/Career (21) Market Types (9) Marketing (17) MIPS Computers (1) Rocket Science Games (7) Secret History of Silico

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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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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Embrace technical debt Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Yet, especially in times like these, it’s easy to rail against the badness of being in debt; it’s a very human feeling. Remember Hamlet? LORD POLONIUS: Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

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Cracking The Code: Building Your SaaS Sales Compensation Plan

Cracking the Code

Cracking The Code. Thoughts from a Venture Capitalist on Software, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Internet and more. Thursday, January 22, 2009. Building Your SaaS Sales Compensation Plan. Compensating the sales force is a difficult task and the key is usually to keep things simple, so that each sales rep knows what he needs to optimize to make more money at the end of the quarter.

More Trending

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Transitioning from Developer to Software Entrepreneur

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← The Future of the Web is Small, Academic Earth, Beatles Rock Band, Top Developer Blogs, et al. Startup Marketing Advice, “Failure,&# Things I Learned the Hard Way, and more… → Transitioning from Developer to Software Entrepreneur Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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What type of entity should I form?

Startup Company Lawyer

C corps, LLCs, and S corps differ significantly in the areas of taxation, ownership, fundraising, governance and structure, and employee compensation. Almost all technology startup companies that I work with are C corps. Any company that raises venture financing will need to be a C corp in order to issue preferred stock. If founders want the benefit of flow through tax treatment with respect to losses prior to an outside financing, an S corp election may make sense as long as there are no enti

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Entrepreneurs on Twitter

Altgate

@altgate Startups, Venture Capital & Everything In Between Skip to content Home Furqan Nazeeri (fn@altgate.com) ← Directory of Blogs by Entrepreneurs Successories’ New Line of Posters for Venture Capitalists → Entrepreneurs on Twitter Posted on June 7, 2009 by fnazeeri [update 11-9-2009] Twitter added a new feature for lists so I created this list here.  I've been wondering how the previous list of entrepreneur bloggers I posted maps to Twitter so I redid the list (

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Fighting an Asymmetrical Cyber War– Why We Need to Take A Different Approach

Pascal's View

The current issue of Foreign Affairs features an important essay by Wesley Clark and Peter Levin (see bios below), Securing the Information Highway- How to Enhance the United States’ Electronic Defenses. General Clark and Mr. Levin not only succinctly summarize the fact that America remains “an easy target”, especially for “electronically advanced adversaries”, they spend a considerable amount of time on the topic of supply chain assurance and the massive challenge

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Are Business Plans Still Necessary?

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice. I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0 craze. There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 wares. Ajax was the new buzzword and many companies went overboard.

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Don't write a business plan

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

"You need a business plan" is the mantra of MBA types. As they say , businesses don't plan to fail, they fail to plan! Who could argue with such a clever turn of phrase? Let's do some quotes: "Without a business plan, how will you know whether you can make a profit?" ( source ). "A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections.

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Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California

SoCal CTO

Great post by John Shiple. He talks about a bunch of the different networking events that occur in Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California. In his post, he mentions the following events / event organizers, and you should visit his post for a bit more on each of them. LA CTO Forum Dealmaker Media Digital Family Reunion Startups Uncensored Social Media Club, LA Twiistup Mindshare LA LA Hadoop Meetup Dorkbot Geek Dinners LA Cloud Computing LA Web Application Developers LA PHP Developers

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Someone Stole My Startup Idea – Part 2: They Raised Money With My.

Steve Blank

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (22) E.piphany (6) ESL (7) Family/Career (21) Market Types (9) Marketing (17) MIPS Computers (1) Rocket Science Games (7) Secret History of Silico

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Why Continuous Deployment?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 15, 2009 Why Continuous Deployment? Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. My previous startup, IMVU , has used this process to deploy new code as often as an average of fifty times a day.

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ProfessorVC: Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?

Professor VC

ProfessorVC. The last blogger in Silicon Valley. Thursday, November 19, 2009. Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught? I attended the annual LP meeting for a venture capital firm this week and got into a discussion about the above question. Seems like a good question to ponder given that I spend several hours each week as a professor of Entrepreneurship. At a high level, I definitely agree that being an entrepreneur and being in school dont necessarily mix.

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Trust, But Verify

Seeing Both Sides

  A lot has been written in the last week about the scandal at Canopy Financial , a venture-backed, high-flying start-up that attracted $75 million in capital at increasingly higher prices from top-tier firms, only to come crashing down in a dust of rubble and fraud.   The VC community suffered a very similar scandal at Seattle-based Entellium last year, but few reporters seem to remember that one, perhaps because it wasn't located in the heart of Silicon Valley as Canopy was. &#

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How to Compete Against Open Source Competition

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Startup Marketing Advice, “Failure,&# Things I Learned the Hard Way, and more… Why “Luck&# is a Terrible Marketing Plan for Your Startup → How to Compete Against Open Source Competition Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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Brand Measurement: Analytics & Metrics for Branding Campaigns

Occam's Razor

One of the ultimate excuses for not measuring impact of Marketing campaigns is: "Oh, that's just a branding campaign." Admit it, you've heard it. I suspect you've even used it liberally!! : ). Before we go any further I must clarify that I love branding campaigns just as much as the next guy. I love campaigns that Visa runs.

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Some Practical Advice on Executive Compensation at Startups

Altgate

@altgate Startups, Venture Capital & Everything In Between Skip to content Home Furqan Nazeeri (fn@altgate.com) ← 2009 Startup Executive Compensation Survey Results More “Open Source&# Legal Tools → Some Practical Advice on Executive Compensation at Startups Posted on December 17, 2009 by fnazeeri Because it's that season (bonus season, not holiday season) I've been getting questions about executive compensation from friends.  But today I got an interesting ques

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Lessons from Joost

BeyondVC

I am not going to rehash Om Malik's excellent summary of "What went wrong with Joost" but I did want to dive deeper into a few points. As I have always said, raising too much money can be a curse and not a blessing. Here is an excerpt from my post in 2006 Trust me, I love having well capitalized companies. However, having too much money can be a curse, not a blessing.

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WTF is Traction? A 6-Step Relationship Guide to VC

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of my ongoing series “Pitching a VC&# – the outline is here. You’ve pitched several angels and VC’s. Everybody seems to like you but nobody seems to be getting out their checkbooks. Most of them are telling you that they just need to see a bit of traction before they’d be prepared to invest. Your friends and advisers tell you that this means you need revenue because in this economy VC’s will only fund businesses with revenue.

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Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model

abovethecrowd.com

[Follow Me on Twitter] I like to think of myself as an aficionado of business disruption. After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent. One of the most successful ways to do this is to change [.].

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Startup Metrics

SoCal CTO

A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. Normally, when I am talking to the founder of any startup trying to figure out what they need to do, one of the things I always try to do is understand their business at its core.

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Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development

Steve Blank

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (22) E.piphany (6) ESL (7) Family/Career (21) Market Types (9) Marketing (17) MIPS Computers (1) Rocket Science Games (7) Secret History of Silico

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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Of all of the insights Ive contributed to the companies Ive worked at over the years, the one I am most proud of is the importance of working in small batches. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few.

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The Case Against FREE

K9 Ventures

I’ll start by admitting up front that the purpose of this post is to hopefully incite a discussion, to start a fire, and to get you, and your startup to think really hard about what your business model should be. The title for this post ‘The Case Against FREE’ is a throwback to Chris Anderson ‘s cover story in Wired Magazine titled Free: Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business , but, this post isn’t really intended to be a blow-by-blow rebuttal of Chris Anderson’s

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As Management in a Start-up, It's You Who Has to Decide

Babbling VC

This post is very much directed at early stage companies in Germany as this is where I'm seeing it the most. Too many entrepreneurs are scared to take decisions. They are too often looking to their VC's to get consensus. I've seen this case both in portfolio companies where we've already invested as well as from targets we are considering for investment.

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Passion as a Competitive Advantage

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Debt, Equity and a Third (and Fourth) Thing that Might Work Better Book Recommendations – The Best Marketing Books of All Time → Passion as a Competitive Advantage Micropreneurship , Software Development , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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Standard Metrics Revisited: #6: Daily, Weekly, Monthly Unique Visitors.

Occam's Razor

Do you have a sneaking, yet unshakable, suspicion that your Web Analtyics Vendor is sometimes just trying to mess with you? Guess what? It's true! All web analytics tools have a smattering of metrics and key performance indicators that were created just because someone decided it would be cute to add / subtract / multiply / divide some numbers.

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When do I need to incorporate a company?

Startup Company Lawyer

[It's been awhile since I wrote anything. I am giving a presentation to some of the founders in TheFunded Founder Institute on incorporating their companies, so I thought I would recycle some thoughts.]. Founders of startup companies often wait to incorporate a company until they are confident that their concept is viable or fundable. At some point, however, an entrepreneur will need to formally incorporate a company.

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Washers, dryers and secret sauce - why naming your technology is important

BeyondVC

Our washer and dryer was on the fritz today, and as I started to do some research on large capacity stackable units I started to get overwhelmed with all of the new terminology and features. After all, isn’t a washer a washer and a dryer a dryer. How many different combinations and features could there be? As I dug deeper I found myself thinking about these appliances less from a consumer’s viewpoint and more from a marketing one and appreciating how these various companies could make a commo

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Choose Your VC Investor Carefully

Both Sides of the Table

Beware of VC Seagulls, who shit on you and then fly away (or worse yet leave you with Red Herrings). This is part of my ongoing series Startup Advice. I write this post as a warning to pick your VC’s carefully. I like to say to first-time entrepreneurs, picking a VC is more permanent than marriage. If you pick the wrong spouse at least you can get divorced.

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What Is Really Happening to the Venture Capital Industry?

abovethecrowd.com

[Follow Me on Twitter] Many are speculating that the year two thousand and nine represents a fundamental turning point for the venture capital industry. Some are arguing that the industry is in dire straits after years of poor performance. Others have argued that the math simply does not work for the industry’s current size. Another theory suggests that permanent challenges with the IPO [.].

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Successories' New Line of Posters for Venture Capitalists

Altgate

@altgate Startups, Venture Capital & Everything In Between Skip to content Home Furqan Nazeeri (fn@altgate.com) ← Entrepreneurs on Twitter If Entrepreneurs Really Told the Truth… → Successories’ New Line of Posters for Venture Capitalists Posted on June 9, 2009 by fnazeeri Not really, but I had to chuckle when I saw this.  Of course like any good joke, there is enough truth to these to be funny.

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Can You Trust Any vc's Under 40?

Steve Blank

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (22) E.piphany (6) ESL (7) Family/Career (21) Market Types (9) Marketing (17) MIPS Computers (1) Rocket Science Games (7) Secret History of Silico