April, 2010

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Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?

Both Sides of the Table

I recently did a post for startups on understanding sales people. A few people have asked me to try and define the perfect startup organization chart. I don’t believe that one exists. Every team configuration is different. But I do have more insight into understanding your startup team. This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent.

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Startup Development

SoCal CTO

I’ve come to realize that I have lots of posts around startup software development scattered around in different posts. Thought it would be good to capture them in one spot and also include links to related posts from other sources. Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything Startup Software Developers Symptoms of a Weak Development Team Technology Roles in Startups Startup CTO or Developer Part-Time CTO Technology Advisor CTO Founder Acting CTO Software Developm

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Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model

Steve Blank

Startups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank. At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think I know how to fix it.” He took a deep breath, looked around the boardroom table and then proceeded to outline a radical reconfiguration of the product line (repackaging the products rather than reengin

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Not disruptive, and proud of it

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

I remember "disruptive" when it was called "paradigm shift." That phrase died during the tech-bubble along with "portal" and "think outside the box," yet the concept has returned. Don't follow along. When I get pitched — usually by someone raising money — that they "have something disruptive," a little part of me dies. You should be worrying about making something useful, not how disruptive you can be.

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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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I Knew Bill Gates When He Was a Regular Guy

Startup Professionals Musings

Sometimes I like to drop the comment socially that “I knew Bill Gates back when he was a regular guy.” I know that dates me a bit, but it also shows that I have been hanging around startups for a long time. The honest truth is that I worked with Microsoft then from my “safe” perch in big IBM, during the early days of the IBM PC. At that time I couldn’t imagine a startup succeeding that was first called Traf-O-Data to process raw traffic data into reports, later changed to Microsoft to sell Basic

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Hacking Innovation Education in New York

This is going to be BIG.

Business plan competitions are the air guitar championships of the startup world. This is the case when the requirements of these events don’t actually include building a real business or product. I mean, you don’t have to build an actual business—you can just mimic the movements and demonstrate something that looks like a startup on paper, without any of the necessary risk taking, lessons learned or even a fraction of the effort—all the stuff that investors like to see.

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More Trending

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Rally Acquires AgileZen

Feld Thoughts

How could you not fall in love with a company named AgileZen ? Today, Rally Software – a company I’ve been an investor in since 2003 – announced that they have acquired AgileZen. If you are an Agile software development shop, or follow ALM, Rally just added Kanban to the mix. This is the second acquisition Rally has made – the other was 6th Sense Analytics which they acquired at the beginning of 2009.

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Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond"

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 4, 2010 Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Kent Beck will give the opening keynote at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. Our mystery keynote is now revealed and I couldnt be more excited. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. To his credit are Extreme Programming , jUnit, patterns, TDD , the list goes on.

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Maybe not so much with the "optimization"

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

In the quest for optimization, A/B tests, metrics, and funnels, we're in danger of losing the fun and value of creative work. When we demand overwhelming customer outcry before committing to the slightest product change, we're in danger of losing the value of creating a cool feature that takes too much effort but people just love. When we do the minimum necessary to get the job done, we're efficient but not thrilling.

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Twitter Link Roundup #34 – Design, Copywriting, Marketing, Small Business, Social Media And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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 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! 2000+ Illustrator Symbols for Illustrators and Animators – [link].

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No wonder people hate developing for Blackberry

This is going to be BIG.

Boy did I have an epiphany last night. Every time I talk to a mobile developer, they complain about what a pain in the ass it is to develop for Blackberry—given that so many of the device/carrier combinations require customizations. On top of that, numbers for app downloads on Blackberry trail other platforms. Yesterday, I figured out why. A friend of mine asked me how she could get Twitter on her Blackberry.

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The @TWTFelipe Story – A Tale of US Visa Policy Gone Awry (#startupvisa)

Both Sides of the Table

“Staple green cards to the diplomas of foreign students who graduate from any U.S. university in math or science&# (Thomas Friedman). I’ve been meaning to write this post since September of last year when Brad Feld first wrote about the The Founders Visa Movement. I commented briefly on his blog and made a mental note to write a blog post.

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Are Storytellers The Best Programmers?

Feld Thoughts

As Fred Wilson likes to say, often the best content for blogs is in the comments. In this case, it was in an email I got from Boaz Fletcher in response to my post Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers. Boaz made a very interesting observation: “As for learning how to code, I think good storytellers make the best programmers. I used to freak prospective employees out by having them write a story for me instead of the “what’s wrong with this code?

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Plerts Combines Check-Ins With Medical and Safety Alerts

Austin Startup

Austin-based startup Plerts recently released a service application that leverages check-in technology to enhance one’s safety and security. Users are enabled to select people from their social graph to become part of one’s safety alerting system. If you are in danger or miss a check in people in your safety alerting system are notified via text and email.

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Know and avoid “time bankruptcy.”

Berkonomics

Time bankruptcy results from the deliberate over-commitment of core resources. . I created the term “time bankruptcy” almost thirty years ago when the computer software business was young, and I was a software developer building a young company based upon quality first. Asked to speak at a number of software industry events, I found my voice and immediate audience understanding as I described variants of the following problem to my audience.

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Twitter Link Roundup #34 – Design, Copywriting, Marketing, Small Business, Social Media And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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 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! 2000+ Illustrator Symbols for Illustrators and Animators – [link].

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Rethinking Unvarnished

This is going to be BIG.

I have to admit, when I first saw Unvarnished , the anonymous people review site, I was very concerned. It didn’t really solve a problem I had. In fact, it seemed to create one. I saw it as a problem I now needed to deal with. As soon as I got my invite, I started requesting reviews from people I knew would give me a good recommendation—just so I could pad my score to protect against the inevitable driveby.

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Does the Size of a VC Fund Matter?

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of my series on Understanding Venture Capital. I’m writing this series because if you better understand how VC firms work you can better target which firms make sense for you to speak with. It in not uncommon to see a VC talk about “total assets under management&# as in “We have $1.5 billion under management.&# I don’t really understand why VCs do this since it’s mostly a meaningless number.

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7 Interesting Marketing Lessons from My Broken Dishwasher

Growthink Blog

A couple of days ago, I was unloading the dishwasher. I'm about half way through and came to a dish that just wasn't very clean. Then another one. And so on. Not good. Since then, my wife and I have taken a bunch of steps to fix the problem (I'll tell you about those in a moment). Then, this morning, I started thinking about all these steps, and noticed some interesting marketing lessons.

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Microventures Offers P2P Investment Platform

Austin Startup

Entrepreneurs in the central Texas region have good reason to be excited this week. Not only has Austin been recognized repeatedly for the relative strength of its local economy in recent weeks , but on Monday, Austin-based Microventures launched its new site for peer-to-peer venture funding. The site takes the form of a marketplace where startups can submit their companies for funding, and investors can choose to invest anywhere between $250 and $5,000.

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Can a California company have unpaid interns?

Startup Company Lawyer

(The following is from a WSGR client alert.). On April 7, 2010, the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) issued an opinion letter addressing the requirements employers must meet in order to have unpaid interns in compliance with California law. Although widely published news reports, including a recent New York Times article analyzing the DLSE’s April 7th opinion letter, have raised hopes that California is relaxing its position with respect to the permissibility of un

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Twitter Link Roundup #37 – Design, Copywriting, Marketing, Small Business, Social Media And More

crowdSPRING Blog

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 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! Understanding and the Meaning of Color Within Design – [link].

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Hire each employee as if your survival depends upon it.

Berkonomics

Second to visionary leadership, this is your most important job. . Many of us go through the motions of hiring to fill a position, trying to use our intuition and skills to find the best candidate for the job. Sometimes we use consultants or recruiters; many times we use internal talent to fill most positions. . And over the years, we students of business success have learned that there is a science to the hiring process that continues through the life of an emplo

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This Week in Venture Capital – Episode 2

Both Sides of the Table

I was on This Week in Venture Capital (TWiVC) again this week with Jason Calacanis. He’s considering making me the permanent co-host so if you enjoy any of this episode or want to see me on the show on a more regular basis please Tweet @jason and let him know (he asked for direct feedback). I’m loving doing the show and I think that Jason and I have pretty good banter and rapport.

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The Terror of Firsts

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← My Podcast Launches Today: “Startups for the Rest of Us&# I Need Your Help! Which Book Would You Be Most Likely to Buy? → The Terror of Firsts Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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Bazaarvoice Inks Deal with “The Google”

Austin Startup

The annual Social Commerce Summit created by Bazaarvoice seems to just get better year after year. The attendance grows higher, the clever marketing continues to pour out, and the announcements are big. So what could get bigger than an announcement about a new product , and a search deal with Google ? Bazaarvoice announced that is has partnered with Google to share high-quality product review content from Bazaarvoice client sites on Google Web Search, Google Product Search, and Google AdWords ad

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No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers – Business Plans versus Business Models

Steve Blank

No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy. Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke. I was catching up with an ex-graduate student at Café Borrone , my favorite coffee place in Menlo Park. This was the second of three “office hours” I was holding that morning for ex students. He and his co-founder were both PhD’s in applied math who believe they can make some serious inroads on next generation search.

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12 Questions: Meet Jeff Quigley (Canada)

crowdSPRING Blog

In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.

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Haste makes waste; but to lag is to sag.

Berkonomics

Here we examine the relationship between time, quality and competitiveness. If you are getting the impression from these many insights that complex relationships cause simple problems, you are right. We have heard the “haste makes waste” ditty since childhood. There is little need to reinforce the obvious. On a larger scale, there are epoch stories of giant companies eating massive losses in a recall of product, often based upon limited testing before release.

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This Week in Venture Capital – Episode 4

Both Sides of the Table

Today we had another episode of TWiVC – you can watch the episode here. This was the first episode where Jason wasn’t on the show, which gave me the chance to have another VC on the show to discuss deals. This week’s guest was David Travers from Rustic Canyon Partners. Rustic Canyon is an LA-based, but geography-agnostic VC that is currently investing from a $200 million fund.

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My Podcast Launches Today: “Startups for the Rest of Us”

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← “Startup Website Reviews&# Screencast Series Has Moved to StartupLens.com The Terror of Firsts → My Podcast Launches Today: “Startups for the Rest of Us&# Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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100% in the clouds

deal architect

It is such a contrast to see some folks still debate about whether clouds are “secure” and “scalable” when at the other end of the spectrum I talk to clients who talk about “we are 60% in the cloud, and. Tags: Cloud Computing, SaaS.

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Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups

Steve Blank

This week I’m at the California Coastal Commission hearing in Ventura California wearing my other hat as a public official for the State of California. After the hearing I drove up to Santa Barbara to give a talk to a Lean Startup Meetup. The talk, “ Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups &# summarized my current thinking about startups, how and why they’re different than large companies and for good measure threw in a few thoughts about entrepreneurial education.

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12 Questions: Meet Jeff Quigley (Canada)

crowdSPRING Blog

In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.

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Is the incompleteness of your application hiding behind the term.

Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

Skip to content Follow: RSS Email Twitter Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli On building profitable web applications Home Contact me Creations Blog Books Entrepreneurship & Startups General Online experiments Programming tips and tricks Startup tips and tricks Tags incompleteness , lazyness , simplicity Is the incompleteness of your application hiding behind the term ‘Simple’?

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Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of my startup advice series. This post isn’t going to be popular. I’m sure of that. That’s OK. It’s still important advice for startup founders and something that I’m passionate about. And I care more about the debate than trying to be popular. And it’s important because it’s true. I never hire job hoppers.

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