April, 2019

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The Truth About the Scooter Economy?—?An Insider’s Perspective

Both Sides of the Table

The Truth About the Scooter Economy?—?An Insider’s Perspective “Bird Zero” that are custom designed by the company There is a story arc of the electric scooter market that took the world by storm in 2018, was second-guessed late in the year and has quietly re-emerged as a powerful force of growth where few really appreciate the speed and scale of what has happened.

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As The Leader Of Your Company, It Pays To Be Emotionally Intelligent

YoungUpstarts

by Scott Schulte , vice president and senior benefits consultant at Sonus Benefits. Gone are the days of absentee leadership or CEOs who operate out of sight or behind the scenes. No, today’s executives are highly connected and visible to their employees, due in large part to the ever accelerating pace of business. Leaders must make a growing number of decisions about the direction of their companies, and these decisions deeply affect their employees’ daily lives.

St. Louis 197
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5 Startup Cost Realities Most Founders Underestimate

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Flickr by Phil Gyford Starting a new venture still costs real money, even though the entry price has come down dramatically in last few decades. For example, I come from a software background, and back in the early PC days, it could easily cost half a million dollars for a team of professionals to produce a commercial product. Now, with powerful high-level tools and open source software, winning smartphone apps can be built by a good hacker for a few thousand dollars.

Cost 264
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The “Curse of Knowledge”: How Expertise Can Hurt Marketing

ConversionXL

Marketers are intimately familiar with their industry and product. But that familiarity isn’t always an advantage. Often, they unknowingly overwhelm or confuse the same visitors they seek to persuade (with long, jargon-filled product pages, for example). Your knowledge, in other words, can become a curse—a barrier that keeps you from communicating what customers care about in language they understand.

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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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24 Entrepreneurs Explain What They Love About Being An Entrepreneur

Hearpreneur

Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any “job” they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your “job” can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.

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How Sin-Mei Tsai, Shippo’s VP of Engineering, Defines Code Quality

Version One Ventures

Six weeks ago, we kicked off a new series where we profile an awesome operator in our network to learn about his/her work and contributions to his/her organization and community at large. Our inaugural guest was Bala Subramaniam and we asked him three questions on marketplaces. This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo , a Version One portfolio company.

More Trending

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Business and Education: How Nanodegrees Are Changing Things

YoungUpstarts

Nanodegrees are the new face of education and career training. While a four-year-degree can never hurt, businesses are more interested in your on the job skills than whether or not you finished all your gen ed classes. Online learning sources that provide technical education taught by industry experts in very specific areas have gained popularity as a proven career path to high paying positions in business, web development and design and information technology.

Portfolio 153
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Why It Pays To Focus Your Business On A Narrow Niche

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Picpedia Everyone in the business world has heard of the old bestseller by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “ Crossing the Chasm ,” but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers. Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a star

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First Impressions Matter: Why Great Visual Design Is Essential

ConversionXL

People make snap judgments. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person. Websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (ms) (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll stay or leave. This number comes from specific studies. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web homepages presented for 500 ms each.

Design 132
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Why SWOT Analysis Belongs in Your Business Plan

Up and Running

Why add a SWOT analysis into your business plan and the strategic planning process? I believe in it because the SWOT phase was vital to my planning process as I grew Palo Alto Software from zero to over $5 million in annual sales. If you’re not familiar with the SWOT matrix, it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Read more about what it is and how to do your analysis , and download our free SWOT analysis template to help you get started.

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4 Ways Early Stage CTOs Can Learn to Roll With the Punches

ReadWriteStart

There’s always a tinge of “TBD” that accompanies the role of an early stage startup CTO. There’s a reason the position comes with that “up in the air” feeling. Early stage companies can’t immediately hire someone with the tech and executive know-how needed to handle the job. Most startups appoint a lead developer or some other tech go-to […].

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Your World in 2030

Start Up Blog

Ten years is not a very long time, but in a world of exponential technology, a lot can happen. So I thought I’d provide some predictions for the world by 2030. Thirty of them, to be precise. Let’s call it 30 for 2030. Sure, some of the ideas below might seem like science fiction or fantasy, but so was much of the technology we take for granted today.

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5 Easy Strategies For A Successful Email Marketing Campaign

YoungUpstarts

Digital Marketers can’t get enough of email marketing, and for good reason too. Reports valued the ROI of email marketing at 44:1 in 2016 – $44 dollars of value for every $1 spent. While the ROI has slightly decreased in 2018 to 38:1, it is still arguably the leading digital marketing strategy and an important focus of every successful business.

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6 Settings When Ready-Aim-Fire May Doom Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Flickr by Shawn Wolfe I know entrepreneurs who have suffered from premature execution often associated with the ready-fire-aim quick-to-market approach. Yet I believe that many more have benefited from this approach, especially in early startup stages. If your product is highly innovative, and speed to market is critical, you won’t get it right the first time anyway, no matter how cautiously you plan.

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Search Intent: How to Analyze and Optimize Your Site

ConversionXL

What answer is a searcher looking for? For sustainable, valuable search traffic, you’d better provide it. Satisfying search intent is Google’s fundamental goal. But algorithms haven’t always kept pace. Proxies like backlinks and keywords have long been—and still are—stand-ins for the likelihood that a web page will satisfy user intent. Optimizing for intent is the long play, for Google and your site.

Search 126
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Nando Caporicci: How Blockchain Outperforms Financial Institutions

The Startup Magazine

By now, it is very likely that nearly all investors have heard about blockchain at some point. After all, it has been over two years since the unexpected spike in cryptocurrency values took the world by storm. And although the current prices are nowhere near the previous levels of success, the market of decentralized assets is as strong as ever. For the vast majority of people, including the ones who do not have any investments in this industry, the developments in the field of cryptocurrency ar

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What Is the Role of the Nomination Committee?

Board Effect

In light of increasing corporate responsibilities, corporations and nonprofits are starting to see that they need to revisit many of the traditional responsibilities they’ve had in the past. With so much change evolving in the corporate arena, this is a prime time for companies and organizations to evaluate regulations at every level, assess customer and workforce demographics, and evaluate business models.

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What’s Included in a Perfectly Optimized Homepage?

Duct Tape Marketing

What’s Included in a Perfectly Optimized Homepage? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. When you’re trying to get your business noticed online, you need to create a website that stands out. While your site must have a great user experience and make it clear to visitors what your business does, you must also be sure it’s optimized to keep search engines happy.

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16 Design Symbols Your Business Can Use to Improve Its Brand Identity

crowdSPRING Blog

Symbols are one of the earliest forms of written communication. From cave walls to hieroglyphics to the printed word as we know it today, symbols are a powerful way to communicate concepts at a glance. The ability of symbols to convey information, culture, and identity has made them an invaluable part of our shared visual language. This is true not only in popular culture but also when it comes to business.

Design 88
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Drama in enterprise computing

deal architect

Ray Lane, a top-notch tech executive and investor over decades, said this about my new book "Don't be fooled by the title—the book is not just about SAP. It's about drama in enterprise computing." I then used "drama" in the.

Cloud 374
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Are MBA Founders More Diverse?

View from Seed

Original research on gender diversity and fundraising amongst HBS founders. Historically, there has been a general bias against MBA founders — a skepticism around their grit and hustle. The taboo has largely faded, though, as many MBA-founded startups have bubbled to the top, and we at NextView even validated that there is no conflict between attending business school and founding a company with a previous blog post about Harvard MBA founders.

Founder 272
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5 Investing Ideas from only experienced stock day traders

The Startup Magazine

When you are looking to trade stocks and shares online, what better a type of person to ask than one that is experienced, and that can give you valuable online trading tips and advice based on that experience?! When you are first entering the stock market, your initial goals may include thoughts of “how can I get rich and generate wealth as quickly as possible?

Stock 90
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The Five Keys to Effective Board Meeting Agendas

Board Effect

If you’re going to take time out of your day to attend a meeting, whether it’s a formal meeting or an informal meeting, you’ll want it to be as productive as possible. Meetings that lack a solid structure can easily get off track and amount to a lot of talk with no action. Brainstorming sessions and active discussions are good things, but when that’s all they are, it feels like a waste of valuable time for many people.

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How to Turn Your Product Idea Into a Business

Duct Tape Marketing

How to Turn Your Product Idea Into a Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Jules Pieri. Podcast Transcript. Today’s podcast guest is Jules Pieri. She is the founder and CEO of The Grommet and the author of the book How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas Into Products That Build Successful Businesses.

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3 Ways To Ensure Your Start-Up Takes Off

YoungUpstarts

We all know that starting a business is hard work, and growing it is even harder. Every step has to be thoroughly thought out, because if you miss even one, it could mean everything. New businesses are started all the time, but only a few of them last beyond five years. Now that the internet has fostered such an accessible and easy way for people to connect and run their own start-ups, competition has skyrocketed.

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Tom Bogan – The Importance of Being Agile

deal architect

Tom Bogan is CEO of Adaptive Insights, a company whose business planning cloud automates previously manual planning tasks—for finance, sales, and workforce planning—and supplements those capabilities with enterprise-scale reporting and analytics. Tom joined Adaptive Insights when it was at $40.

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6 Tips to Boost Workforce Engagement and Motivation

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Wikipedia The challenge for all of us in business is to improve competitiveness by improving employee productivity and reducing costs. According to Gartner , one of the biggest drags on productivity is employee engagement, still hovering around 30 percent, and costing our businesses over $450 billion per year. I believe the only way to improve engagement is to make work more satisfying.

Dividend 241
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Back to The Future: Power of SMS-Native

View from Seed

It is the one message-space on your phone that you always pay attention to: SMS text messages. Not just “messaging” broadly, as there are numerous apps where people send and receive communications & messages. Couple that noise with the flurry of AI/messaging startups from a few years back (set off by Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition), in conjunction with app developers’ notification euphoria… all of which have resulted in a state on our mobile phones where “ our brains being overloaded with

SMS 207
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What Is the Difference Between Leadership and Management for a Nonprofit?

Board Effect

The former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee , said: “A leader is the one who can outline the broad vision and the direction, and say here’s where we are going to go, here’s why we need to go there, and here’s how we are going to get there. A manager is the one who actually gets up under the hood and tunes the carburetor.”. There are those who use the words “leader” and “manager” interchangeably, but their meanings are distinctly different.

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7 Reasons Why Proposal Software Will Boost Your Sales

Duct Tape Marketing

7 Reasons Why Proposal Software Will Boost Your Sales written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. You’re probably well aware of how important business proposals are to getting clients and winning new business. If you’ve been writing a lot of them, you may have thought about investing in proposal software to make the process easier. However, is proposal software really all that great compared to writing the proposals yourself?

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3 Tips for Navigating Stakeholder Relationships Every New C-Suite Executive Needs To Know

YoungUpstarts

by Alisa Marie Beyer, CEO, LemonTree Partners. Congratulations! You’ve just been promoted into the C-suite executive position of your dreams, and you’re undoubtedly proud and excited. You’re also undoubtedly busy. New executives always have a lot on their plates. For any newly established C-suiter, taking on all of these tasks and getting started in their new position is a critical time.

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SAP Nation 3.0 Excerpts: Chapter 8 - Bystander Customers

deal architect

My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my.

Customer 273
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7 Steps To A Winning Social Media Marketing Campaign

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Pixabay Most startups, and many big businesses, still don’t have a clue on how to use social media productively for marketing their business. They randomly churn for hours a day on a couple of their favorite social media platforms, with little thought given to goals, objectives, or metrics; and ultimately give up and fall back to traditional marketing approaches.

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Why Do Consumer IPOs and B2B IPOs Get Treated Differently?

View from Seed

2019 is off to an exciting start for IPOs of VC-backed startups. In just the last month or so we’ve seen Lyft go public ( my analysis of the company’s S-1 here ) and more recently, Zoom and Pinterest. Zoom is a B2B company Pinterest and Lyft are obviously B2C companies. All three have different business models… SaaS, media/ad, and consumer transactional.

IPO 180
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How to Run a Meeting With Robert’s Rules of Order

Board Effect

If you’re a Type A person who likes to have a place for everything and have everything in its place, you’re happy to attend a well-organized meeting. If you’re a Type B person who has a place for almost everything and everything is sort of in its place, you probably like well-organized meetings as well. Organized meetings that have well-enforced rules take the confusion out of who gets to speak first and what comes next on the agenda.

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Transcript of How Reducing Friction Increases Revenue

Duct Tape Marketing

Transcript of How Reducing Friction Increases Revenue written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Back to Podcast. Transcript. This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order. John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush. It is our go-to SEO tool for doing audits, for tracking position and ranking, for really getting ideas on how to get more organic traffic for our clients competit

Revenue 57