View from Seed
MARCH 19, 2015
'If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” Startups launched around seemingly mundane, insular problems glow about their abilities to change the world.
Steve Blank
MAY 19, 2015
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. These shortcuts add up and become what is called technical debt. And the size of the problem increases with the success of the company.
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Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 19, 2015
Business leaders have many tasks to accomplish and prioritizing stuff can be hard. Yesterday I wrote about the need to “ do fewer things, more often ” in which I described that frenzied world we live in and why the shiny objects and distractions stop us from living up to our true potential. Today I’d like to give that advice in more tangible terms and with a framework to think about your tasks – the funnel.
The Next Web
JULY 10, 2015
The goal of agile programming is to provide early and continuous delivery of valuable software. But it’s not so easy to implement methodologies that can deliver on the agile promise, and the blame typically lands on people: they’re just not the tech elite. Agile is an iterative software development methodology, as opposed to the more linear traditional methods.
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
AUGUST 31, 2015
The following is a guest post by Kirsten Cluthe and Ritika Puri from The Lean Startup Conference team Wondering what’s new in the Lean Startup community? With hundred of thousands of global practitioners, the supply of ideas and best practices is endless. What’s more challenging is finding the right information that will influence positive change within your organization.
ConversionXL
AUGUST 17, 2015
There’s a philosophical statistics debate in the optimization in the world: Bayesian vs Frequentist. This is not a new debate; Thomas Bayes wrote “ An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances ” in 1763, and it’s been an academic argument ever since. Recently, the issue has become relevant in the CRO world – especially with the announcement that VWO will be using Bayesian decisions (Google Experiments also uses Thompson sampling , which is informed by a Bayesian pers
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
David Cohen
SEPTEMBER 29, 2015
Alex King recently passed away after a two year battle with cancer. Alex was not one of my closest friends, but his passing hit me very hard. I was riding in a car from the airport yesterday when I got the news from his wife, and I just started crying. I got to know Alex because he was a mentor in Boulder in the early years of Techstars. He totally leaned into mentoring startups and never for a moment asked what was in it for him.
Version One Ventures
SEPTEMBER 16, 2015
Back in July, we wrote about network effects in marketplaces and social platforms and how they are critical to defensibility. In the post, we talked about the difference between direct and indirect network effects, and how they may or may not relate to virality. Since then, we have been further developing our investment thesis on social platforms and want to add more nuance to the discussion.
OnlyOnce
JANUARY 20, 2015
'ReturnShip Program. Today is a very exciting day for Return Path as we launch a new program we have been cooking for more than a year called the ReturnShip program. (Sometimes the name of our company comes in handy.). Return Path has always had a significant commitment to building a strong and diverse organization as well as supporting and encouraging women to pursue careers in technical environments.
Start Up Blog
JULY 2, 2015
If you haven’t already realised, cars are no longer machines, but rolling computers. This also means that cars will move from being powered by fossil fuel engines to electric motors. It’s already started, and it is going to happen much more quickly than we anticipate. I’d go as far to predict that there will hardly be a petrol car on the road in 10 years.
View from Seed
APRIL 30, 2015
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt. What is it, and how should founders think about it? As a startup grows, venture debt becomes a viable option to continue that growth.
Steve Blank
MAY 6, 2015
I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. Unfortunately the Build, Measure, Learn diagram is the cause of that confusion. At first glance it seems like a fire-ready-aim process. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups.
Jeff Hilimire
OCTOBER 8, 2015
Wow. I’m just finally getting my feet back under me after the inaugural 48in48 event last weekend. When I first conceived of this event over a year ago, I never envisioned it would be so successful. The amount of support and passion that people showed was awe-inspiring, and we did it! We built 48 nonprofit websites in 48 hours! I’ll be sharing more details soon, but I thought I’d start with sharing the weekend via some pictures I took along the way.
Diego Basch
APRIL 26, 2015
A few days ago a neighbor in her eighties offered me a piece of advice regarding my six-month old son: “start a college fund.” For some reason it sounded to me as if she’d told me there’s a great future in plastics. I have no intention of starting a college fund for my son, and this post is an attempt to explain why. When I entered the workforce in the early nineties I had only one tool to increase my chances of getting the job I wanted: my resume.
Startup Lessons Learned
MARCH 13, 2015
'We live today in a golden age of writing and resources for entrepreneurs. There are books on most (but not yet all) of the critical topics about startups, and of course a massive amount of information on blogs and Twitter. Elite VCs - from Brad Feld to Reid Hoffman to Peter Thiel - write books and tweet constantly (or at least one does). As the ecosystem develops, this information is getting more and more specialized, which is awesome.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 4, 2015
Understanding what consumers want, what consumers need and why is a crucial part of conversion rate optimization. Earlier this year, BrandShop released the results of the 2015 Digital Consumer Preferences Survey , which revealed in no uncertain terms that consumers want (and need) buying online directly from brands to be easier. Why do consumers, despite the rise of eCommerce, find buying online difficult?
Duct Tape Marketing
JUNE 24, 2015
5 Ways Writing A Book Will Supercharge Your Online Presence written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. Let me tell you right off the bat, writing and publishing a book is a lot easier than you think. In September of 2014, when I became a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant, I provided a list of ten reasons why joining the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant network is a no-brainer for digital agencies.
Both Sides of the Table
AUGUST 20, 2015
VC funding. Our perspectives on the topic wax and wane with market cycles. We love capital efficiency until we love land grabs until we abhor over funding until we get huge payouts and ring the bell for more funding until we attract every non-VC on the planet to invest in startups until it crashes and we start the cycle all over again none the wiser.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
DECEMBER 8, 2015
Does it feel like everyone is working very hard, all the time, and yet not accomplishing as much as everyone would like? Maybe this is why. Suppose a web server is running at 50% of its full capacity. Browser traffic doesn’t arrive in regular, smooth amounts; it comes in spurts and occasionally large spikes. Because the server is under-utilized, when a spike arrives there are spare resource to deal with the increase.
Agile VC
JUNE 17, 2015
I’ve observed what may be an emerging trend, at least in some startups, that I find somewhat unsettling. It has an impact at an individual level, a company level, and an ecosystem level. This is not an easy topic to discuss without coming off like a jerk or a crusty old dude, so I wanted to share two quick stories about my own career below. But I think it’s important to discuss, particularly given today’s heady environment for startups.
Brandanew
SEPTEMBER 17, 2015
Digital marketing has gone under some major makeovers over the last few years. From something that was associated only with eCommerce platforms to becoming an increasingly important medium for creating a brand name across industries. But as a digital marketer, how do you keep up with these ever changing trends? Here are some marketing predictions for your brand success in 2016.
View from Seed
MARCH 3, 2015
'Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast. NextView Ventures: Thinking back to before anyone knew HubSpot or the company was headed towards an IPO, where did you even start to market the company?
Steve Blank
JUNE 26, 2015
I’ve been working with large companies and the U.S. government to help them innovate faster– not just kind of fast, but 10x the number of initiatives in 1/5 the time. A 50x speedup kind of fast. Here’s how. —– Lean Innovation Management. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute.
YoungUpstarts
FEBRUARY 23, 2015
'by Anthony Johnson, founder and CEO of American Injury Attorney Group. Nobody likes the sound of an abrupt morning alarm dragging you from a blissful slumber and shoving you unmercifully into a new day. This type of rude awakening virtually guarantees that any side of the bed you wake up on will be the wrong one. Even if you love what you do, the temptation to hit the snooze button can be difficult to resist, especially when you didn’t get a healthy amount of sleep.
Gust
SEPTEMBER 2, 2015
By Paula Taas, Founder Institute. You’ve created an amazing founding team, you’ve built a brilliant product that has been gaining a lot of traction, and now you’re looking to expand your company. How do you continue to build your business? By searching for a lead investor in your next funding round. The lead investor is the first step in Read more >.
Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 14, 2015
'Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of entrepreneurs experiencing pushback to the concept of minimum viable product. Their teams may disagree about what a product should look like, who the customer is, and which distributors to work with, but one thing they can all agree upon is: “We build high-quality products in this company. We wouldn’t even know how to go about building something ‘minimally viable.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 5, 2015
Email marketing is one of the fastest ways to drive sales of any online channel. Think about it… What other channel can you launch something and drive sales immediately? But the biggest challenge most businesses face is they don’t have an email database (which I’ll interchangeably refer to as a ‘list’) big enough to see the benefits of email. Why the ‘traditional’ method of growing an email database doesn’t work.
Duct Tape Marketing
APRIL 28, 2015
5 Relatively Simple Steps to Dominate Local Search written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing. If you do business mostly in your town, your marketing efforts must be hyper focused. You’re only targeting a very select group of people so, when those people go out there looking for a business in their community, you want to show up, right?
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 22, 2015
'Five-and-a-half years ago I first met Chamillionaire at a tech conference in LA. I saw him on stage at the event talking about how he used social media to engage audiences. This was 2009 and his understanding of audience engagement was far beyond anything I was hearing from most people at that time. I reached out after the event to learn more. We started hanging out a bit and discussing technology and entrepreneurship.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 27, 2015
'Have you ever finished something and thought to yourself, “That didn’t need to take an hour?” In my world, I have an endless stream of requests to do something for an hour. I just looked at my calendar for the next two weeks and almost everything that someone else scheduled and invited me to is for an hour. In contrast, all of the things I (or my assistant) have scheduled are for 30 minutes.
Agile VC
JANUARY 21, 2015
'Note: This post also published at NextView’s blog for seed stage companies The View From Seed. The startup ecosystem is often full of hyperbole, which is perfectly understandable when you think about it. A population of founders, employees, investors, advisors, and others all aligned in trying to build large disruptive businesses is naturally prone to lofty, even over-the-top language.
Brandanew
AUGUST 25, 2015
Earlier in May, I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It was an exceptional visit. It prompted me to visit Arles and St. Remy where Van Gogh lived and created his wonderful masterpieces. Brands that connect not only make us feel good in the moment, they also make us react emotionally. The Van Gogh museum has this effect on a lot of people who visit it- offline or online.
View from Seed
APRIL 28, 2015
Ed. note: In 2013, Rob Go published a flowchart articulating his VC decision making process. Below, we’ve updated that graphic with new information in order to stay current and provide more context and transparency around each node. At NextView, we hold regular team offsites to step back and think about how we do everything from invest in seed-stage companies to create better platform initiatives in support of the Boston and New York startup ecosystems.
Steve Blank
MAY 1, 2015
Thibault Duchemin and his team applied for our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley in 2014. We accepted them because it was clear Thibault was driven to solve a very personal problem – he grew up in a Deaf family, the only one who could hear. His team project was to provide automated aids for the hearing impaired. Here’s his story. ——-. Lean LaunchPad: A Year After.
The Next Web
OCTOBER 30, 2015
When you have launched a startup or prototype, one of the most important strategies to prove is your business concept and gaining early user traction. If you’re like most startup founders, you don’t have much money, nor do you have enough money to hire a PR agency. However, to become a great entrepreneur means you have the inquisitiveness to look elsewhere to get your startup liftoff.
Gust
AUGUST 17, 2015
With all the news about hundred million dollar rounds and billion dollar valuations, it can be hard not to look at the world of entrepreneurship and angel investing as a thrilling ride that only has one stop: success. But to be a successful entrepreneur or serious angel investor, you must have a realistic understanding of the startup failure rate and Read more >.
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