March, 2011

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9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month

Both Sides of the Table

This post originally appeared on TechCrunch. I’m a very big proponent of the “lean startup movement&# as espoused by Steve Blank & Eric Ries. The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do.

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Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions

SoCal CTO

I talk to roughly 2 or 3 new startups every week who need advice from an experienced CTO. Many of the founders of these companies are surprised to learn that I'm willing to review what they are doing (maybe an hour) and get on the phone for an hour with them and provide free advice. Generally I can provide quite a bit of help in that brief time. And I try my best to point them to resources that can help them longer term.

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Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job

Steve Blank

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. George Bernard Shaw. Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. I’m beginning to suspect this assumption may be wrong.

Agile 332
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Eight Key Problems Every Startup Should Anticipate

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting a business is a lot like starting a marriage. At first, all parties are in dreamland, with a vision of changing the world, having lots of fun, and raking in the profits. But all too soon, reality sets in. Product development is stuck at that 90% mark, a key person leaves, and customers are talking but not buying. In his book Reality Check , Guy Kawasaki summarizes some of the key issues.

Startup 245
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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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The Law on Fonts and Typefaces: Frequently Asked Questions

crowdSPRING Blog

The right typeface is often the key to a great logo, graphic or web design. But there’s much confusion and misinformation about typefaces, fonts and the law. Many people do not understand the law governing the use of typefaces and fonts. Others incorrectly assume that they can freely use any typeface or font for any project. When you purchase a commercial font, you are purchasing a license to use the font software.

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Spotlight on Latin and Central America

ReadWriteStart

For this week's One Million by One Million roundtable, we turned the spotlight on Latin and Central America. One of the things I have enjoyed tremendously about 1M/1M is its distinctly international nature. Over the years, we've had entrepreneurs from all over the world attend and pitch, and I'm delighted to see that we're propagating the methodology and the platform far and wide. 1M/1M and ENTREPRENEUR JOURNEYS represent my attempt to capture the tribal knowledge accumulated in the private live

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Free Startup CTO Consulting Sessions

SoCal CTO

I talk to roughly 2 or 3 new startups every week who need advice from an experienced CTO. Many of the founders of these companies are surprised to learn that I'm willing to review what they are doing (maybe an hour) and get on the phone for an hour with them and provide free advice. Generally I can provide quite a bit of help in that brief time. And I try my best to point them to resources that can help them longer term.

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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship. In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots.

Lean 298
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Should Startup Founders Keep Their Day Job?

Startup Professionals Musings

Many entrepreneurs I know feel guilty about not quitting their day job when initiating their startup, worrying about not giving their all to an employer, juggling the multiple roles, or even a legal conflict of interest. I’ll try to offer some guidelines to address these issues, but I generally recommend you keep the day job until your new company is producing real revenue.

Founder 233
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Does Moore’s Law Suddenly Matter Less?

Feld Thoughts

A post in the New York Times this morning asserted that Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law. It’s a short post, but the money quote is from Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington: “The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said Edward Lazows

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Twitter Link Roundup #76 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing 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 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!

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The Magic Midnight Mind Meld

Both Sides of the Table

The most common questions I’ve gotten over the past week have been a variant of: Was SXSW worth it? Was it just one big party? Should I go next year? Why do your eyes still look so bloodshot? (And I’ve learned a new term, I arrived home with SxSARS). As you may know I outlined my rules for maximum impact at events / conferences before SXSW began.

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Genius, Power, and Magic

Growthink Blog

Businesses that sell do 5 things very, very well: #5. They Are Cause, and Not Money, Driven. Highly valued companies are culturally cohesive and have causes beyond money that motivates them. Take a look at the famous mission statements below and how these company’s iconic brands align with them: Google: “ To make the world's information universally accessible and useful " Facebook: “ To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected " Zappos: “ To provide the best cust

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Honor and Recognition in Event of Success

Steve Blank

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.&#. Attributed to Ernest Shackleton. In 1912 Ernest Shackleton placed this ad to recruit a crew for the ship Endurance and his expedition to the South Pole. This would be one of the most heroic journeys of exploration ever undertaken.

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Most Startups Get No Professional Investor Cash

Startup Professionals Musings

Money to build the business is the number one challenge for most startups. Don’t believe the urban myth that you can sketch your idea on a napkin, and professional investors will throw money at you. In reality, only 3 out of 100 companies who apply are successful with Angels, and the success rate with VCs is even lower. A large percentage of startups never apply to either.

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Return Path Joins The NCWIT Workforce Alliance

Feld Thoughts

My long time friend Matt Blumberg , the CEO of Return Path , wrote a blog post today titled A New Kind of Partnership for Return Path. In it he talks about his recognition, as Return Path has grown (they are now around 250 people), of the gender imbalance in the software engineering team (women are around 15% of total engineering team. He knew about NCWIT from my role as chairman and Matt and his team decided to join the NCWIT Workforce Alliance to engage in helping address this issue.

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Twitter Link Roundup #77 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing 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 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!

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One Man’s Signal is Another Man’s Noise

Both Sides of the Table

After the weekend kerfuffle over AngelList I was reading Brad Feld’s post on Signal vs. Noise. It’s apropos because there is so much noise these days with email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, web shows, etc. that it’s sometimes hard to know when to pay attention and when to keep your head down. Mostly during the day I’m in meetings or doing work.

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The Difference Between Mo Ibrahim and Mo Gaddafi

Growthink Blog

Last week I flagged the shocking and even depressing statistics that most entrepreneurs - holding constant for socioeconomic factors - make less money, work more hours and suffer more work-related stress - than their employed counterparts. And when we combine these statistics with those that show a very incredibly low percentage of startups and small businesses ever attaining meaningful profitability, it is remarkable that people ever dream to be entrepreneurs and start businesses at all.

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What the AngelList Debate Means for the Future of Startup Investing

ReadWriteStart

Over the weekend there has been some controversy surrounding AngelList , the network that connects startup entrepreneurs and investors. Before AngelList, investment dealflow was private and networks revolved around a few connected angels and VC?s. Since the angel network was created, transparent angel investing has exploded and entrepreneurs from any background can get funded.

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Startups, Check Your Budget For Viral Marketing

Startup Professionals Musings

Every time I challenge a business plan with little or no budget for marketing, I get the answer that they will be using “viral” marketing, which costs nothing. The founder explains that the product is so “buzz-worthy” that usage will spread rapidly through word-of-mouth only, meaning people loving it and recommending it to their friends. First of all, Seth Godin pointed out a couple of years ago that viral marketing does not equal word-of-mouth.

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The Truth (And Myth) About Passive Income

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

There are few words in an online entrepreneur’s vocabulary that are more seductive than Passive Income. The term is widely used by multilevel marketers and savvy entrepreneurs across the web to close sales on eBooks and training programs for one simple reason: the vision (of sitting under a palm tree while your bank account effortlessly collects money) sells.

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Twitter Link Roundup #80 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing 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 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!

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Picking a General Partner

Ben's Blog

The silence, the dark, the mind, so fragile. The wish, that the streets, would have took you, when they had you. The days, the months, the years, dispair. One night on my knees, here it comes, the prayer. —DMX, Who We Be. In my career, I have never seen a position in any industry with more varying criteria than General Partner at a venture capital firm.

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Industry Change May Mean Forgetting Old Business Models

The Entrepreneurial Mind

The music industry has been going through pretty rough times over the past several years. The disruption that has occurred is due to the Internet and other technological breakthroughs, fundamental changes in customer behavior and a chronic recession. It has been beating down the leading companies that once dominated every aspect of the music we heard and how we heard it.

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Imagine K12 Launches a New Incubator for Ed-Tech Startups

ReadWriteStart

A new incubator program, Imagine K12 , launched today in Palo Alto aimed specifically at building entrepreneurship in the education space. Founded by three Silicon Valley veterans - Tim Brady, Alan Louie, and Geoff Ralston - Imagine K12 will support early stage ed-tech startups through a funding and mentorship program. Describing itself as "unabashedly inspired by Y Combinator," Imagine K12 will bring that YC model of business and technology development to education technology.

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The mature cloud

deal architect

I had a chance to catch up with the Workday team about their integration cloud. What impressed me the most was they could have been hyping the middleware technology they acquired with Cape Clear 3 years ago, but waited for.

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I Quit My Job And Lived To Tell

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

I’d like to introduce you to Nacie Carson , who a few years ago took the leap, leaving the perceived safety of full time employment to become an entrepreneur. She has since built up a client base and worked hard to establish an online brand that has paid dividends. Like many of us, Nacie has strived to establish online income streams as close to passive when possible, derived from her abilities as a writer.

Salary 104
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Twitter Link Roundup #78 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing 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 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!

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New Rules for the New Internet Bubble

Steve Blank

Carpe Diem. We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can startup do to take advantage of them?

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The Best Entrepreneurs Have Some Common Traits

Startup Professionals Musings

At some point in their life, hopefully everyone strives to be the best in their chosen profession. Most people think that being the best requires more intelligence, more training, and more experience. In reality, in business or even in sports, the evidence is conclusive that it is as much about how you think, as what you do. I saw this illustrated well recently in a sports excellence book called “ Training Camp: What the Best Do Better Than Everyone Else ”, by Jon Gordon.

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Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest

ReadWriteStart

This week's One Million by One Million roundtable was our 75th session, and we worked today with three entrepreneurs from the Midwest region of the United States. Our co-host for the program was TiE Midwest, based in Chicago. First up, Priyanshu Harshavat, from Evanston, Illinois, presented Socioclean , a service for cleaning up your reputation on social networks.

Illinois 114
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I’m sticking with Disqus. Here’s Why

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve written before about my love for Disqus. I’m not an investor – I just love the product. So now Facebook has a new commenting system. They’ve been around for a while and when they first announced this initiative I knew the day would come when people would start saying, “should I replace Disqus?&# I started telling people privately that I thought Google should buy Disqus for the same reasons Facebook wants to own commenting in the first place.

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What I Learned From Lee McIntyre’s Instant Internet Lifestyle Workshop

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Ever since I started in Internet Marketing back in January of 2008, I’ve come across a ton of Internet Marketers who teach all kinds of topics relating to growing an online business. I’ve signed up for a bunch of mailing lists and have received all kinds of info from these guys, including a bunch of Spam. At a certain point, I decided to cut most internet marketers off.

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Startup Exercise: What can’t be solved with money?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Some problems in business can be solved with money; many cannot. When you’re pitching to an investor, one of the best things you can do is to show how the important problems facing your business are those that can be solved with money, because money is what they’re providing. Even if you’re not pitching this is a useful exercise, because if you’re good at the things money can’t buy, you’ll remain competitive even when confronted by a well-funded competitor.

Startup 283
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BYOT Bring your own technology to work?

deal architect

Last week I wrote “After Sunday night with home based technologies, it is quite a let down to go in to work technologies on Monday morning.” This week I read about a Unisys poll about bringing the Sunday night experience.