April, 2020

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The Shift from FOMO to FOLD in Early Stage Investing

View from Seed

For the last several years, the early stage investing market was driven largely by the F ear O f M issing O ut, AKA FOMO. This led to a number of repercussions that most VC’s have lamented during this time, including higher prices, larger rounds, shoddy due diligence, and many companies raising large sums of venture capital that probably aren’t suited to VC funding.

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6 Realities To Evaluate Your Outsourcing Alternatives

Startup Professionals Musings

If you have a software development background like mine, I’m sure you often get questions about when to outsource, versus building the solution in-house. The same applies to manufacturing and almost any process these days. Outsourcing is defined as contracting the work to another company, usually located in a developing country, like India, China, or Eastern Europe.

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In a Crisis – An Opportunity For A More Meaningful Life

Steve Blank

Sheltering in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, my coffees with current and ex-students (entrepreneurs, as well as employees early in their careers) have gone virtual. Pre-pandemic these coffees were usually about what startup to join or how to find product/market fit. Though in the last month, even through Zoom I could sense they were struggling with a much weightier problem.

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Resilience and leadership during crisis: A conversation with Alex Shootman, CEO of Workfront

deal architect

Alex Shootman, CEO of Workfront is one of my favorite tech execs because he is always positive - and that in an authentic way. I had enjoyed his book, Done Right (my review here) because he had so many examples.

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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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Retail 4.0 – Tips If Your Retail Business Is Struggling

YoungUpstarts

It’s true that right now is a tough time to be in the retail industry. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, most of the United States is in a lockdown and many businesses have had to close. If you’re a retail company that gains the majority of your business from people walking into your storefront and walking out with your product, then this puts you into a tough spot.

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10 Reasons You Don’t Qualify for an SBA Disaster Loan

Up and Running

Maintaining your business through the coronavirus crisis has likely led you to cut costs, revise your sales projections, and potentially seek out a loan to help you stay afloat. Luckily, the SBA has created a separate COVID-19 Disaster Loan, with less stringent eligibility criteria and a streamlined application process to hopefully make more funds available for more businesses. .

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10 Keys To Results With Social-Local-Mobile Marketing

Startup Professionals Musings

The world of marketing is changing faster than technology these days. Winning entrepreneurs have long since supplemented conventional print and video “push” marketing with digital online interactive “pull” marketing, and a while back added social-local-mobile ( SoLoMo ) to the mix. Mobile and global are driving all of these in innovative new ways to grow your business.

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How to Choose the Best Project Management Software for Your Business

The Startup Magazine

Many fail to understand the importance of project management in meeting key business goals. After all, even those who work on a given project may not see the complexity of tasks involved in the broader effort. Managing employees, time and budget are the primary concerns, but among that, keeping track of every little detail is a concern for project managers.

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Launching A New Website? Top 5 Web Design Trends You Need To Know

YFS Magazine

Launching a new website? Here are five website design trends the 99designs community forecasts to dominate web design this year and beyond.

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What Do I Do If My Business Runs Out Of Cash?

YoungUpstarts

by LJ Suzuki of CFOshare. First, take a deep breath. Exhale. Do it again. Count 6 things in the room around you: computer, a glass of water, my bookkeeper looking panicked…. Once you have achieved a calm headspace, take a survey of your cash position: How much cash is left? Is it enough to cover payroll? If no…. When is the next payroll due? If you answered “no” to #2, you need to scramble to get cash in time for #3.

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Cash Flow

Up and Running

What is Cash Flow? Cash flow measures how much money is moving into and out of your business during a specific period of time. Broadly speaking, businesses bring in money through sales, financing, and returns on investments—that’s cash flowing in. And they spend money on supplies and services, as well as utilities, taxes, loan payments, and other bills—that’s cash flowing out.

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5 Signs that You are Ready to Scale Business and Deploy Innovation

ReadWriteStart

The entrepreneur’s path is challenging and exciting. It requires your full commitment and a sincere desire to scale business as you evolve too. It is a continuous process of stepping beyond your own limits and bringing innovation for the world to see. The moment when you start feeling your limits often means that you are close to your individual breakthrough and business growth.

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10 Strategies To Make You A Lucky Winner In Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Did you ever wonder why some entrepreneurs always seem to have all the luck and success, while others never seem to catch a break? As an angel investor, I quickly learned that luck has very little to do with it, and I now look for some personal characteristics and leadership styles that separate the potential winners from the losers. These differences are the reason that investors say that they invest in people, rather than ideas.

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How To Pick The Translation Service Your Startup Needs

The Startup Magazine

According to the US Small Business Administration, startups and small businesses numbered around 30.2 million in the United States in 2018. That number accounts for about 90% of the total number of businesses in the United States. For most of these businesses, there’s usually staffing problems due to limited resources, which means one has to source for alternative services at the best price.

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Thoughts on the State of DeFi

Version One Ventures

The last couple of weeks have been quite a test for cryptocurrency markets in general and DeFi in particular. On Black Thursday (March 12), BTC/ETH prices declined by ~50% and DeFi’s flagship project, MakerDAO, ended up with ~$5 million USD in unbacked DAI. You can read Tom Schmidt’s excellent postmortem of what happened here. This event was a powerful reminder that while DeFi is extremely exciting in the long-term, it’s still very much in the early adopter experimental phase.

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5 Tips To Help You Lead And Experiment During COVID-19 

YoungUpstarts

by Melanie Parish, MCC, author of “ The Experimental Leader: Be a New Kind of Boss to Cultivate an Organization of Innovators “. These are crazy times we are living in. As a leader, during COVID -9 (or any crisis) it can be hard to find your feet and to feel confident in your path. You may feel inadequate, unsure and out of your depth. That is to be expected.

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10 Ways to Stay Productive While Working Remote

Up and Running

For many of you, it’s likely that you’re just finishing up your fourth or fifth full week working from home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Working remotely, especially for your first time, can be challenging to adjust to. Stationed in the comfort of your recliner with the fridge just a room away is appealing, but it has its drawbacks. Endless texts, calls, and remote meetings, children or pets wanting to play, and countless other distractions can make it difficult to separate your home l

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Nonprofit Virtual Board Meeting Pro Tips From a BoardEffect Client

Board Effect

On April 2, 2020, Mitch Johnson co-presented a webinar on “Best Practices for Virtual Board Meetings During COVID-19,” along with Dottie Schindlinger, Executive Director of the Diligent Institute, and a founding team member of BoardEffect. In this blog post, Mitch shares his insights on several of the questions asked by the audience of over 700 webinar participants.

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8 Brand Models To Attract Your Perfect Fit Customer

Startup Professionals Musings

Attracting the right customers is the key to success in business, whether you have a new startup or a mature enterprise. In my role as an advisor to entrepreneurs, I often see struggling businesses trying to be too many things for too many people, resulting in customer confusion, initiatives executed poorly, and high costs, few customers, and slow growth all around.

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Why Entrepreneurs Must Learn to Love Paperwork  

The Startup Magazine

Entrepreneurship is the dream of many people who want to bring big ideas to life and turn startup ventures into massive industry powerhouses. But it’s also about business paperwork. There will be plenty of it early and often during your entrepreneurial journey, but rather than look at it as a headache you should consider the many ways in which it will help protect you, your family, and the company as a whole.

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The novel coronavirus could accelerate digital healthcare

Version One Ventures

It’s been over five years since my friend Jonathan Libov and I wrote a blog series on digital healthcare. I revisit these posts every so often – most recently, when I wrote the 2020 edition of our areas of interest in healthcare. Each time I go back, I’m reminded that despite so much development in digital healthcare technology and infrastructure, we have yet to see mainstream scale. .

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Technical Signs Of A Well-Managed Business

YoungUpstarts

Modern businesses rely on technology to support their operations. Recent studies concluded that over 80% of business-related information and other resources are now stored in the cloud. The availability of cloud infrastructure through services like AWS and GCP means even home businesses can leverage the power of cloud computing to streamline business processes.

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Turn What-if to What-Now: The Importance of Scenario Analysis

Up and Running

We used to call it “what-if” but today it’s known as “scenario analysis.” It’s been a favorite management tool of mine since my time as VP for a market research firm, and it’s a method I used for decades growing a software company from zero to well over $10 million in annual sales. Today, with the COVID-19 crisis upon us, it’s the best way to move forward through rising uncertainty.

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Top Java Engineers Attracted by DHL ESS, the first and only DHL Freight R&D team based in Sofia, Bulgaria

Transformify

Most people associate DHL with logistics, and few are aware of the fact that DHL ESS team develops Enterprise Software Solutions. What is even more interesting is that DHL Freight opted to base its first and only R&D team in Sofia, Bulgaria. " DHL ESS plays a fundamental role in the Freight Transformation program, aiming at harmonize the existing operational, financial and reporting processes and replace the legacy systems with state-of-the art standards operating procedures and technolo

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10 Keys To Limiting Your Startup Story To Ten Minutes

Startup Professionals Musings

The average length of a funding pitch to angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from fellow investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.

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Driving Innovation with Business Testing

Duct Tape Marketing

Driving Innovation with Business Testing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Alex Osterwalder. Today on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with business theorist, author, and speaker Alex Osterwalder. Every business wants to be innovative, but smart innovative ideas can’t be pulled out of the ether.

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What’s Missing From Zoom Reminds Us What It Means to Be Human

Steve Blank

Over the last month billions of people have been unwilling participants in the largest unintentional social experiment ever run – testing how video conferencing replaced face-to-face communication. While we’ve discovered that in many cases it can, more importantly we’ve discovered that, regardless of bandwidth and video resolution, these apps are missing the cues humans use when they communicate.

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How To Use Staff Scheduling Software To Increase Your Productivity

YoungUpstarts

Advancements in technology have made virtually every aspect of our lives easier. In both our work and personal lives, we wield smartphones to do things faster and more efficiently, from ordering shopping to scheduling appointments, paying bills and creating invoices. It’s become so easy to manage our affairs in the digital realm that we rarely stop to appreciate just how easy it is.

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8 Things You Need To Start a Business During a Recession

Up and Running

Recessions, or even a volatile market like we’re currently experiencing due to COVID-19 , are difficult times. There’s a great amount of uncertainty, people losing their jobs, and a direct hit on cash flows that can place businesses in dire straights. But it doesn’t have to be all bad. . Current businesses are finding ways to pivot their business models, revisiting their budgets, and developing new forecasts to minimize their burn rate and maximize their available cash runway.

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Workday continues its innovations in Analyst Summits

deal architect

A decade ago, Workday pioneered with its Technology Day format. I wrote back then "Few vendors have the guts to be open to such a smart and opinionated bunch as Workday was during its Technology Day yesterday. Like a marathon.

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10 Stumbling Blocks To Innovative Business Thinking

Startup Professionals Musings

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who think the most creatively, not only in their initial product or service, but more importantly all through the stages of growth from startup to maturity. But even the best of them can easily slip into some bad decision habits that limit or hurt their business, due to natural human tendencies and the pressures of business challenges.

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Why Great Leaders Stay Curious (And How to Do It)

Duct Tape Marketing

Why Great Leaders Stay Curious (And How to Do It) written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Michael Bungay Stanier. Today’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Michael Bungay Stanier, author, speaker, and founder of Box of Crayons. Bungay Stanier’s book The Coaching Habit is the best-selling coaching book of this century—having sold over 700,000 copies—and has pushed the concept of coaching in business and leadership into the mainstream.

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Customer Discovery In the Time Of the Covid-19 Virus

Steve Blank

With in-person classes canceled, we’re about to start our online versions of Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Oceans (and here ). The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building?

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The Future Of Retail And America In The Post-COVID World

YoungUpstarts

by Erik D. Rosenstrauch, Founder and CEO of FUEL Partnerships. In approaching the COVID-19 crisis from the marketer’s perspective, the question is how, not if, the world will change when the restrictions are lifted. My intuition relies on what marketers believe and researchers have proven – the repeated behavior learned during this several month crisis will form new consumer habits.

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Hard Decisions Require Empathy

Both Sides of the Table

In the past two weeks we have entered perhaps to most surreal experience in any of our lives. I think intuitively many of us believe it may be a more lasting impact than just “60 days at home,” which is why we almost have a nervous laughter when we call (Zoom!) somebody we haven’t spoken to since before the crisis and acknowledge how bizarre we all feel right now.

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The New Normal: A conversation with Mike Laven, CEO, The Currency Cloud

deal architect

I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes.

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