crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 28, 2010

Inspiration: Book Cover Archive – [link]. Angel-Backed Companies More Likely to Succeed, Says Harvard Study – [link]. What Start-Ups Can Teach Big Companies – [link]. These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more!

Social Media 91

Social Media Small Business Design Media 91

SoCal CTO

MARCH 22, 2007

Tag Memes - Someone posts a question and "Tags" five people to give their response. Certainly my LinkedIn profile provides a better public profile for me. See Five Things Meme as an example. Blog Hub - A central blog provides a place where the topic is raised and comments are collected and bloggers post. in Computer Science.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Southern California Los Angeles CTO Hire 150

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. That told us which publications they relied on for news about graphics boards: the three publications that mattered, MacWorld, MacUser and MacWeek became marketing’s highest priority.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

He was the professor who helped his students Bill Hewlett and David Packard start a company in 1939. Just the Beginning The public history of Terman’s involvement with the military ends when he returns back to Stanford at the end of the war. In World War II he headed up something called the Harvard Radio Research Lab.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

www.readwriteweb.com

MARCH 7, 2011

Since most companies have little to no revenue, who else has already invested in the deal is heavily weighted to prove value. In this approach, you take your competitive advantage (your market-specific knowledge) and invest heavily in a few companies you know well. Follow McCann on Twitter @Mccannatron. social proof? on AngelList.

Technical Review 50

Technical Review Due Diligence Startup Angel Investor 50

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

www.greenhornconnect.com

OCTOBER 3, 2011

Share with 1 click: All entrepreneurs face the question: “when should I form a company?” So the short answer is: the sooner the better; but here are five telltale signs it’s definitely time to form a company. 3) You’re signing contracts with other companies. 2) You’re hiring employees. are not met.

IP 40

IP Intellectual Property Limited Liability Company Boston 40

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I remember presenting our ideas for Marketing Automation to one VP of Marketing in a large Silicon Valley company. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.” This time it was serious. Are These Your Slides?

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

The Next Web

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

And with Facebook following a similar path via their Public Feed API service announcement, an incredibly accurate picture of what’s happening on the Web might be possible in the near future. Of course, that’s provided Facebook’s Public Feed data will be available to more than just a handful of publishers. Tools that can help.

SEO 136

SEO Audience Chad API 136

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. A company called Avid had introduced a $50,000 Mac-based professional broadcast video editing for two years earlier.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

devver.wordpress.com

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

Tim keeps a journal which he updates, tags, and adds ideas. Ben and I keep a wiki, which has grown to be an incredibly useful resource and was the initial starting point for our last two companies) Ideas should have an “Aha! After starting a few companies you know how hard it is to really bring something to market.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Part-Time VPE Architecture Ruby 40

trada.com

APRIL 7, 2010

Notably VentureBeat cited that five of the 26 companies that presented at Y Combinator Investor Day were still in stealth mode. Of course, there are exceptions to this, so I’m not making a blanket statement that the every company should do things this way. We’ve been in stealth mode at Trada for almost 18 months now.

Stealth 40

Stealth PPC Advertising Conversion 40

www.geekwire.com

JULY 10, 2012

In fact, interest was so high in Madrona’s latest fund that the backer of companies such as Farecast, Isilon and Amazon.com had to place a limit on how much money it wanted to raise. It found that sixty-two out of 100 venture funds it worked with failed to exceed returns available from the public markets, after fees and carry were paid.

Venture Capital 42

Venture Capital Seattle Cofounder Software Engineering 42

VC Cafe

DECEMBER 12, 2011

Serendip has been in private alpha since August 2011 and according to a Twapper Keeper Hashtag archive I set up one and a half days ago roughly 1400 listeners tweeted 500 unique URLs with the hash tag #Airing. According to LinkedIn the company was founded in late 2010 and has five employees, including the two co-founders.

Curation 100

Curation Cofounder Algorithm Lean 100

www.forentrepreneurs.com

FEBRUARY 2, 2010

that will cost the company significant amounts of money. Most of the public companies like Salesforce.com, ConstantContact, etc., Banks and wireless phone companies ignore this rule, but they have access to tons of capital.) Tagged with Business Model , CAC , Inbound Marketing , Low Cost Sales Model , LTV , Sales 2.0.

Acquisition 103

Acquisition Cost Customer Entrepreneur 103

blogs.computerworlduk.com

JANUARY 15, 2011

Contact Author Email : Simon The End Of The Road For Web Services A decade of corporate politics by the big software companies is finally over as WS-I shuts up shop and gets folded in to OASIS. Fine work, and many lessons learned , but sadly irrelevant to most of us. Goodbye, WS-I. Follow me as @webmink on Twitter and Identi.Ca

Web 51

Web Open Source Architecture Internet 51

www.peterdrew.net

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This coder works for my company and is available to be used, but via my company only of course. Tags: startupcto. I can put to you, about 80% of the time, people Ive met online who ive put in touch with any of my coders and always asked them to do work for them directly without going through me. test it against many coders.

Web Development 40

Web Development Coder Web Developer 40

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2010

Socialware is emerging from stealth mode, and being increasingly public about its products and services. The company has been funded to date by some incredible investors, including G-51 Capital, Silverton Partners, and Maples Investments. Companies and partners win by leveraging innovative technologies that are freely available.

Social Network 59

Social Network Chad Stealth Aggregator 59

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

You’ve built a sales organization and company that’s burning cash before you know if you have demand for your product or a repeatable and scalable sales model. Looking ahead to the product launch, the marketing group hires a public relations agency to refine the positioning and to begin generating early “buzz” about the company.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

dashes.com

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Or some big companies just have a boilerplate NDA that they throw in front of people as a matter of course. Which is a little ridiculous, because if someone did rip your thing off, what could be better publicity for it than the ensuing controversy? 6A deserves credit for that; pretty much any other company wouldnt have made the effort.

NDA 52

NDA Technical Review Non-Compete San Francisco 52

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

Reply steveblank , on May 2, 2009 at 10:17 pm Said: Alan, As I’m retired, I don’t do many public talks, the ones I do are usually a payback to a guest speaker in my class. If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. It starts at ~40:30 in the video.

Customer Development 139

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 139

Software By Rob

OCTOBER 6, 2009

The hard part turned out to be plugging away on marketing, maintenance, polish and new features after the public launch. Thomas: The most surprisingly long-running task turned out to be setting up the company infrastructure – ie. Thomas: Developing and launching the initial product was actually the easy part. at 2:21 pm [.]

Software Review 40

Software Review Software RSS Software Developers 40

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

We plan to have the many large dishes assembled for Moon Bounce, connected with live feeds on line, so EME, so the public will be able to be listened to from the web. I’ll try to mix the topics up during the week. BTW, keep the comments coming, they’re read and appreciated.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 120

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

MARCH 10, 2010

You will find plenty of articles on SEO in my archives under the SEO category if you’re keen for study materials. Will Swayne and his company, Marketing-Results.com.au , helped manage all the conversion testing for my business in 2008. The fundamentals are still the fundamentals. Yaro Starak. Throwing In The Kitchen Sink.

SEO 76

SEO Engineer Search Software Review 76

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Concept and Seed Stage In the Concept and Seed Stage, founders capture their passion and vision for the new company and turn them into a set of key ideas, which quickly becomes a business plan, sometimes on the back of the proverbial napkin. The first thing captured and wrestled to paper is the company’s vision.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters&# memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show. For a small company this is like throwing your tradeshow money on the floor. A company must pick the one or two top goals or nothing useful will happen.

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 178

www.readwriteweb.com

OCTOBER 7, 2007

But when done well it can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much (if any) equity - or bankrupting themselves. So, what does it mean to bootstrap a company? There are a couple of good reasons a company should consider bootstrapping its market entry. Why bootstrap?

Bootstrapping 41

Bootstrapping Offshore Startup EC2 41

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 10, 2010

Since some of my portfolio companies (@ crowdflower , @ twilio , @ dnanexus , @ highlightcam , and most recently @ cardmunch ) have been using Twitter more, I’ve been thinking about how startups should use their Twitter accounts. What matters is how the company handles this downtime. It’s become a channel. We know this.

Startup 93

Startup Channel Audience Search 93

www.readwriteweb.com

NOVEMBER 30, 2010

In particular, he outlines why a public cloud infrastructure has certain advantages compared to building out a data center. Cloudscaling works with telecommunications companies, service providers, and enterprises to build Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments. He gives advice for those that wish to follow in Netflixs path.

Web 56

Web Tampa Cloud API 56

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

If you are an immigrant founder who has helped build a company that has created jobs in the US, we need you to tell your story. Or, if youd prefer to do it by video, you can upload to YouTube - just use the "startup visa" tag. Or, if youd prefer to do it by video, you can upload to YouTube - just use the "startup visa" tag.

San Francisco 118

San Francisco DC Startup Lean 118

Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

MAY 2, 2009

Trial with TimeSvr Recently, a new company generated some buzz online, TimeSvr. More than half of them are actually companies specialized in outsourced development. Reply Lawrence Perry permalink The Virtual Personal Assistant can be the perfect assistant for companies. I stopped the trial after the three days.

Ruby 28

Ruby Australia Virginia API 28

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

It is about when in the life of your company you do the spending. In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Altgate

JULY 14, 2009

The company leverages proprietary technology developed commercially and through NIH grants over the past decade to bring a unique solution connecting hospitals to the drug and diagnostic discovery programs within life science companies. The management team includes seasoned entrepreneurs with backgrounds in healthcare and IT.

Boston 31

Boston Venture Capital Technology Programming 31

Altgate

DECEMBER 7, 2008

It means that guys like Mark Cuban were not simply lucky for starting a streaming video company in 1995 and selling it to Yahoo for $6 billion in 1998. Did you know that Cuban’s first startup was a computer systems integration company he founded in 1983 and sold to CompuServe for $6 million (pocketing $2 million after tax in the deal)?

Venture Capital 44

Venture Capital Marketing Dilution Government 44

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

The second series of posts, the rise of “ Spy Satellite Valley ,” starts in 1956 with two game changing events– one very public – the valley’s first semiconductor company and one very, very private – the valley as the home of the first optical and ELINT spy satellites and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 153

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers. By now, nothing surprised me.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

Altgate

DECEMBER 22, 2008

The basic gist is that the state of the public markets has little if any effect on entrepreneurial value creation. You know how when you’re benchmarking public equities the data sets always leave out performance from the 1929 crash and most of the following decade? Bookmark the permalink. Bookmark the permalink.

Europe 28

Europe Washington Venture Capital Equity 28