A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JANUARY 10, 2011
Here’s a simple question, often asked when designing software but more useful when you’re designing your marketing and sales pitch: How are people doing this today without you? Sounds obvious; I want to take it a step further, like this: Ignoring most of your potential market , how are expert, power-users doing this today, without your software?
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 28, 2011
Cash is the fuel of every startup. Your burn rate is the rate at which that money is being spent, and allows an estimate of how long you can go before refueling (runway). That refueling is when you will need more investment, or when you will break even and begin that steep profitable growth curve. Investors look at your burn rate to see how efficient and effective you are at running the business.
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Steve Blank
JANUARY 4, 2011
I spent two weeks of December in Chile as a guest of Professor Cristóbal García, Director of EmprendeUC at the Catholic University of Chile , which just signed up a 3-year collaboration partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program , spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile Development, and at a Conference in Patagonia supported by the Ministry of Economy’s Innovation Divisi
ReadWriteStart
JANUARY 18, 2011
Right now there are a lot of reports about large companies in the Valley not being able to find the talent they need. There are also a lot of reports about companies bending over backwards financially to retain the people they have. But what I found working for a large Valley corporate in the last few years is that it is not hard to find talent. The real problem is that companies are not ready for new talent.
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
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 26, 2011
Whether you’re an entrepreneur opening your first restaurant or a seasoned business owner with many years of experience in the restaurant industry, you face many challenges. Among the most important of these challenges is your restaurant’s website. A strong web design can help a restaurant to more effectively market itself, can help convert visitors who find the restaurant by searching, for example, on Yelp, shopping for a deal through Groupon, or searching on Google or Bing.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 2, 2011
Back in the 60’s, JFK make a bold proclimation that we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The details of exactly how this was going to happen were a bit sketchy, but having a big hairy audacious goal galvanized the innovation community into achieving something spectacular. In today’s world, one of the bottlenecks we have to innovation is the lack of software development talent.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Startup Professionals Musings
JANUARY 24, 2011
Lack of confidence in your self, your product, and your startup is a surefire recipe for disaster. At the other extreme, too much confidence or arrogance can kill you just as fast. It’s always painful when a startup fails, but as a mentor to founders, I would hope that you can learn from these failings and not stumble on the same issues. I’ve written about these before, but since I see them so often, I thought it might be worth reiterating: “Business plans are for dummies.
Steve Blank
JANUARY 25, 2011
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of the problem increases exponentially with the success of the company.
ReadWriteStart
JANUARY 28, 2011
Garage48 Helsinki , the largest hackathon in the Nordics, took place last week. It gathered 120 hackers from Finland, Estonia and Latvia under the same roof and challenged them to go from zero to demo in 48 hours. Sixteen startups were created during the weekend. Together with Osma Ahvelampi (CTO, Sulake ) and Teemu Kurppa (co-founder, Jaiku ), I was a mentor to those teams.
Feld Thoughts
JANUARY 10, 2011
Congrats to my friends at Avalon Ventures on raising their new $200 million fund. I’ve been friends with and co-invested with Rich Levandov , one of Avalon’s partners, since the mid-1990′s, most recently in Standing Cloud , Zynga , and NewsGator. I’ve gotten to know several of Rich’s partners over the past few years and recently had a wonderful Do More Faster book tour dinner hosted at Avalon’s San Diego office by Kevin Kinsella (a fellow MIT-grad turned VC.
Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 10, 2011
This week, the startup tribe from Harvard Business School is making their annual trek to Silicon Valley. They’ll hear from a variety of experts and get to see many startups firsthand. While they’re here, I’m sure they’ll be received warmly. But I don’t think they’d be too happy to hear what gets said about them when they leave the room. It’s a common refrain around Silicon Valley to disparage the role of MBA’s in entrepreneurship.
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 19, 2011
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 logo design , web 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!
Occam's Razor
JANUARY 24, 2011
Regular readers of this blog will recognize that I suffer from OOD. Outcomes Obsession Disorder. I am seeing a therapist for it. The way OOD manifests itself is that in every website and web business I work with I am obnoxiously persistent in helping identify the desired outcomes of the site / business before I ever log into their web analytics data.
Steve Blank
JANUARY 19, 2011
Over the last 40 years the U.S. has evolved an entrepreneurial ecosystem with two of the most unlikely partners – venture capital investors and technology entrepreneurs. This alliance has led to an explosion of technology innovation, scalable startups and job creation. Tied at the hip, VC’s and entrepreneurs take large risks together. VC’s invest in startups with minimal tangible assets and no certainty about the product’s viability, market size or customer adoption.
ReadWriteStart
JANUARY 13, 2011
We started this week's One Million by One Million roundtable with a discussion of online advertising trends, looking at them from the perspective of cost-effective customer acquisition and brand building, as well as entrepreneurial opportunities. You can find more on the topic on my blog at Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade. While on this topic, I want to particularly emphasize the social media advertising trend, and my observation that the infrastructure to measure, analyze, optim
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
JANUARY 10, 2011
Press play to begin streaming the audio or right click the text link and choose save as or save link. Download the MP3 [ 59 Minutes - 28 MB ] Many a time I’ve received a question from a person who has English as a second language, regarding their options for writing a blog and whether they should focus on English since most success stories seem to be from English websites.
Startup Lessons Learned
JANUARY 18, 2011
(One of the common questions I hear is how to reconcile design and user experience (UX) methods with the Lean Startup. To answer, I asked one of my favorite designers to write a case study illustrating the way they work, taking us step-by-step through a real life redesign. This is something of an IMVU reunion. The attendees at sllconf 2010 were wowed by Food on the Table's presentation.
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 12, 2011
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 logo design , web 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!
Lightspeed Venture Partners
JANUARY 14, 2011
'There is a great thread over on Quora answering “ what are the most common mistakes first time entrepreneurs make ?” The current top rated answer is from Siqi Chen , one of the co-founders of Serious Business. We funded Siqi and Alex Le at Serious Business. I’ve reproduced Siqi’s answer below but it is worthwhile to follow the link to Quora to read other answers, and the comment thread on Siqi’s answer.
Steve Blank
JANUARY 27, 2011
Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship? I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr , (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 28, 2011
Texting has become an integral part of mobile communications for most people--so much so that it has replaced a lot of voice calls. Why call when you can just send a quick text? Yet there are signs that texting's days are numbered. To be clear, the desire to send and receive short messages isn't going away--but the need to send them via the SMS protocol may become extinct.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
JANUARY 21, 2011
Sunil contacted me asking if he could apply to become a columnist on Entrepreneurs-Journey. I asked him what are the highlights of his “career&# as an entrepreneur so I could be confident in his credibility and he had stories to tell that we could all learn from. It turns out Sunil has done a few things. As you will see in this introductory article, he has plenty of experiences making money in different ways.
The Startup Lawyer
JANUARY 10, 2011
Dallas-based Tech Wildcatters is set to launch their 2nd class and will stop accepting applications January 16th. Their inaugural class of 5 companies raised over $4,000,000 in funding through two venture and two angel rounds. Tech Wildcatters is a startup accelerator that offers up to $25,000 and 12 weeks of hands on mentorship. Here’s what they look for in a startup: -2 or more founders (there’s way too much work for just one person).
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 26, 2011
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 logo design , web 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!
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 31, 2011
This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. One of the most common questions that entrepreneurs who meet me for the first time like to ask is, “Do you miss being an entrepreneur? Aren’t you ever tempted to go back and do it again?”. The obvious answer is yes. When it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. I guess it’s kind of like crack (not that I know from experience).
OnlyOnce
JANUARY 2, 2011
Macroeconomics for Startups. I’m not an economist. I don’t play one on TV. In fact, I only took one Econ class at Princeton (taught by Ben Bernanke, no less), and I barely passed it. In any case, while I’m not an economist, I do read The Economist , religiously at that, and I’ve been reading so much about macroeconomic policies and news the past 18 months that I feel like I finally have a decent rudimentary grip on the subject.
This is going to be BIG.
JANUARY 9, 2011
Five years ago, I started nextNY with the idea that it would be participant driven--that the community would take an active role in managing itself. I think that we've done a decent job with that, and we have a number of examples of individuals who have used it as a leadership platform, but it isn't as much of a leader factory as I had hoped. With that in mind, I tried to come up with a structure and set of incentives to make it easier for new up and coming faces in the crowd to step up and make
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
JANUARY 20, 2011
Living in Brisbane last week was a little bit different. I’m not entirely sure what the news coverage was like overseas, however I do know many of my readers aware that we have had a little flooding problem in my city, the third largest in Australia. Needless to say it was, and still is huge news, and it caused major disruption to the lives of people in my home town.
Babbling VC
JANUARY 27, 2011
My number one development to watch online is the growth of the reputation graph. If you want some background on this, read these blog posts from Jon Bischke here and here. My take on this is that it's a mix of reputation management as well as online identity management. . We all know that our "presence" online continues to grow and at the same time, your reputation online is becoming ever more important.
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 5, 2011
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 logo design , web 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!
deal architect
JANUARY 25, 2011
Prof. Tom Malone of MIT wrote the seminal book The Future of Work in 2004. When I interviewed him for my book about ways work has changed in the years since, he honed in on the phenomenon of communities and.
Ben's Blog
JANUARY 19, 2011
Sittin’ up drunk shuffling thoughts. Got paper but I’m lost. Losing focus what a n#%$a still hustin’ for? My seed is straight the family’s settled. Idle time get the man in trouble. —Nas, Suicide Bounce. One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO ever makes is whether or not to sell her company. Logically, determining whether selling a company will be better in the long term than continuing to run it stand-alone involves a huge number of factors, most of which are speculative or unknown.
Both Sides of the Table
JANUARY 23, 2011
One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask about when they raise a little bit of money or are getting close to launching their first product is whether they should hire a PR firm. There is obviously no black-or-white answer, but I’ve tried everything from working a large international agency, to hiring in-house people to doing it myself.
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak
JANUARY 27, 2011
A couple of months ago Gideon Shalwick hosted a webinar with Leon Jay , the founder of FusionHQ. I promised a recording of the webinar and I finally have it for you. Here is the page were you can watch the full webinar replay – FushionHQ is an internet marketing tool that makes it a whole lot easier to do the following things - Create pages like landing/squeeze pages, video landing pages, opt-in forms and sales pages with text and/or video using a simple WYSIWYG editor.
Babbling VC
JANUARY 5, 2011
I recently watched the movie Exit Through the Gift Shop from well known artist Banksy. I got a kick out of this film for multiple reasons having liked Banksy's artwork for years now. What most amused me though is how well it goes about making you question what celebrity is and how much you can achieve by becoming famous. The key point for me is questioning whether you really need to be creative and innovative above and beyond being famous.
crowdSPRING Blog
JANUARY 11, 2011
Later this month President Obama will deliver the annual State of the Union address. In the address the President will discuss the relative strength of our economy, our institutions, and our relationships with other nations and our current standing in the world. I thought it appropriate , at the beginning of this new year, to do the same. But instead of a discussion of our nation’s current situation, I wanted to have a look at the state of crowdsourcing – as an industry, as professio
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