September, 2016

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Thinking About Starting A Creative Agency? Here’s What You Need To Know.

YoungUpstarts

by Claudia Elliott, head of content creation at internet marketing consulting agency Deep End. The life of a creative freelancer is challenging. You have no choice but to do everything yourself. And unfortunately, this can often have a negative impact on your business. When you are a one-man show, you are responsible for doing administrative work, sales, design, development and so much more.

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How To Counter Criticism Of Your Million Dollar Idea

Startup Professionals Musings

In business, and in your personal life, the ability to anticipate and overcome criticism is one of the biggest differentiators between leaders, who make things happen, and followers, who may have great ideas but never seem to get things to go their way. In fact, leaders are not remembered for their dreams, aspirations, or intentions – they are remembered because they achieved results.

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Introducing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to New York City Tech

View from Seed

New York City is a dream but can also be a navigational nightmare, equal parts crammed circus and rat race mixed at warp speed. This holds for the city’s tech sector. NYC Tech is bursting at the seams with nightly networking events at floors and floors of co-working spaces. We do not suffer a lack of tech activities. At the same time, the perception of our ecosystem as an insider’s game can often be self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating – creating a walled garden that can’t be breached.

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6 Marketing Tips that Can Make Lead Generation Easy

Brandanew

A lot of people have problems with marketing because they often don’t understand it all too well. The whole world of marketing can be confusing. Pitching your business services and products in the structured way can make a huge difference to your bottom line. A correctly set-up marketing network can make lead generation easy. Here are some tips to help you learn how to get started!

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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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Creative Destruction Lab West: Helping create the next generation of entrepreneurs

Version One Ventures

Very often, start-ups fail at the earliest stages. They might get the wrong advice at a critical point, or they can’t raise the first hundreds of thousands of dollars required to move from prototype to initial product. This problem is relatively minor in large, vibrant ecosystems like Silicon Valley, but can be more pervasive in smaller locations that lack the depth and breadth of experienced start-up advisors and angel investors.

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In Hardware, You're Only as Good as Your Next Product: See goTenna

This is going to be BIG.

When hardware maker Quirky went out of business, Ben Einstein at Bolt had this to say : "A good company builds one product, learns from its customers, and iterates to make that product exceptional. Each step in the process is designed to refine a product and find the often elusive “product/market fit” that is the basis for all successful startups. Imagine if Apple built the first app-free iPhone and then moved on to the Apple Watch, or GoPro only sold one version of its camera and then decided t

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Join me at Terrapinn Trading Show New York, October 6, NYC

David Teten

I’m honored to chair the quant and big data stream of the upcoming Terrapinn Trading Show, New York, October 6, NYC. This is a large conference focused on quant and automated investing, big data, and High Performance Computing. We expect over 400 people. Among the speakers are: Aaron Brown, Chief Risk Officer, AQR Capital Management. Fabio Mercurio, Head of Quantitative Analytics, Bloomberg LP.

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The Robots Are Coming for Investment Bankers, Not Just Truck Drivers

Hunter Walker

The whole process had taken just a few minutes. Generating a similar query without automation, he said, ‘‘would have taken days, probably 40 man-hours, from people who were making an average of $350,000 to $500,000 a year.’’. Fascinating New York Times article of the impact an analytics startup called Kensho is having in investment banking. High frequency trading driven by algorithms have dominated the transaction side of public markets and it makes sense to see software crawl (literally in this

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Uncertainty: startups’ unfair advantage

The Equity Kicker

I just read a review of a new Wiley book Design a better business which argues that: better businesses are ones that approach problems in a new, systematic way, focusing more on doing rather than on planning and prediction. For them, of course, the point is that design thinking is that ‘new, systematic way’, but this sentence made me think of startups, where the emphasis is very much on doing rather than planning.

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14 Signs Your Website Is Causing You To Lose Sales

YFS Magazine

Here's a look at 14 tell-tale signs that your website is need of a refresh.

Sales 97
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The Optimizer’s Guide to Conducting User Interviews & Analyzing the Data

ConversionXL

As an optimizer, you might be thinking that user interviews fall outside your role. Or, perhaps, that they are a “nice to have” on the qualitative conversion research checklist. Worse, you might be conducting and analyzing user interviews with an “I’ll just wing it” mindset. User interviews are more complex and important than most optimizers realize.

Design 57
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How To Grow Your Young Business Online

YoungUpstarts

Every new business has its own share of teething troubles. And, ensuring a consistent growth is definitely one of them. Online marketing can not only help you get past the initial hurdles but also enable your business to survive and grow consistently in today’s increasingly digitalised world. However, if you’re just getting started, setting up an online presence for your business can be just as challenging, especially considering the fact that in the online space, you no longer compete with busi

Dividend 101
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How To Turn An Email Subscriber Into A Loyal, Paying Customer

Duct Tape Marketing

How To Turn An Email Subscriber Into A Loyal, Paying Customer written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. “The money is in the email list”. This has become the mantra of marketers everywhere. In fact, most experts agree that an email subscription list is the most powerful tool in your arsenal. But, building a subscription list is just the start.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 41: Chris Schroeder and Andy Cunningham

Steve Blank

There are only two emotions in startups — utter ebullient enthusiasm and outright terror. Here’s the big thing about tech companies: They all believe that if they build it, the world will come, but it doesn’t really work that way. The reality distortion you create is imperative to be able to believe what you’re doing, and get the people around you to believe what you’re doing.

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What to Make of Andreessen Horowitz’s Returns?

Both Sides of the Table

Rolf Winkler wrote a piece in the WSJ about A16Z’s returns in which he says they “lag behind Sequoia, Benchmark and Founders Fund.” Scott Kupor of A16Z responded with a comprehensive overview of valuation methodology in a post that while accurate feels more targeted at sophisticated Limited Partners (LPs) who invest in funds. Let me offer you an insider’s take.

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How $10 and the iPhone 7 Earned This Startup 1.5 Million Visitors in a Day

crowdSPRING Blog

Image credit: Apple. When Apple held their Special Event keynote on September 7th, their live video stream garnered the highest-ever video traffic for an Apple event. In the days following the announcement, almost every technology publication, blogger, and influencer posted some kind of content related to the new iPhone. The phone’s release took over the news cycle again 9 days later, with reviews, guides, and commentary dominating the front page of most news outlets and technology websit

Viral 48
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Sparking all kinds of discussions about man and machine

deal architect

They say the modern day author is cursed because he/she has to compete with short attention spans and many competing forms of content. I say the modern day author is, in reverse, blessed with all kinds of instant feedback. Imagine.

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How e-Commerce Fashion Sites Can Increase Their Sales With Small Changes

YoungUpstarts

Sometimes power lies in small things. And one of the areas in which this adage is completely true is ecommerce website. Ecommerce fashion sites have a lot at stake when it comes to sales and online reputation. A small lapse can not only dent their reputation but also decrease customers and sales. Conscientious designers and owners will pay a lot of attention to the principle and content while creating their websites but there is room for even more sales to come in with a few small changes.

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Entrepreneurs Need The Right Mindset Before Products

Startup Professionals Musings

As an Angel investor and a mentor to aspiring entrepreneurs, I’m always disappointed to see founders who seem stressed out most of the time, and more annoyed than energized by the abundance of challenges they see in building their startup. The entrepreneurial lifestyle is a tough one under the best of circumstances, and it’s one you have to love in order to succeed.

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The Innovation Insurgency Scales – Hacking For Defense (H4D)

Steve Blank

Hacking for Defense is a battle-tested problem-solving methodology that runs at Silicon Valley speed. We just held our first Hacking for Defense Educators Class with 75 attendees. The results: 13 Universities will offer the course in the next year, government sponsors committed to keep sending hard problems to the course, the Department of Defense is expanding their use of H4D to include a classified version, and corporate partners are expanding their efforts to support the course and to create

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Why I Backed a 24-Year-Old Trying to Assess Human Potential

Both Sides of the Table

Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar ’s startup Imbellus , a company designed to assess human potential and ultimately change the way we teach children. We led a $4 million investment along with Thrive Capital, GLG and Sound Ventures. The news blogs will cover the what, how and how much but I want to focus on the “why” and try to be instructive of what I think makes for a great A-round startup.

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How $10 and the iPhone 7 Earned This Startup 1.5 Million Visitors in a Day

crowdSPRING Blog

Image credit: Apple. When Apple held their Special Event keynote on September 7th, their live video stream garnered the highest-ever video traffic for an Apple event. In the days following the announcement, almost every technology publication, blogger, and influencer posted some kind of content related to the new iPhone. The phone’s release took over the news cycle again 9 days later, with reviews, guides, and commentary dominating the front page of most news outlets and technology websit

Viral 48
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Darwin on demo: Workday Rising

deal architect

I saw Panera Bread present eye-popping stats at Workday Rising - 65,000 hires a year with rapid growth and 90% staff turnover and yet, on-boarding expectations of less then 24 hours.

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Catering Carefully For Circumstance: Building A Business Contingency Plan

YoungUpstarts

It is often a great moment when the business plan and the marketing actions taken have begun to take off. The revenues increase, and the public are becoming more aware of the brand and this is reflected in a great online presence. And other companies are wanting to get into bed with you. But what happens when the opposite occurs? When you’ve spent so long implementing a marketing ploy and it doesn’t seem to take off at all?

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7 Tips To Achieve Entrepreneur Work-Life Balance

Startup Professionals Musings

A common request I hear from aspiring entrepreneurs is for an assessment of their latest idea. I don’t even try to assess things at the idea level, since I can’t read minds. I can assess execution plans, if you have any. Yet I believe that business success is more a function of the person than the idea or the plan, so the best idea is one that is a best fit for you, and only you can assess that.

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Working Hard is not the same as working smart

Steve Blank

Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies. The number of hours worked is not the same as how effective they (and you) are. I had been invited by Rahul, one of my students from long ago, to stop in and see how his startup was doing. Actually startup would be a misnomer as Rahul had built a great company, now over $50M in annual revenue with hundreds of employees.

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How to Tell Google What Your Content Means

Duct Tape Marketing

How to Tell Google What Your Content Means written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Search engines love content. That’s what they eat all day long, and they use HTML code to figure out what all those web pages say. The problem is that sometimes they don’t know what you mean by what you say. Have you ever done a search for a product or service and find the occasional odd result mixed in with what you thought you were looking for?

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How $10 and the iPhone 7 Earned This Startup 1.5 Million Visitors in a Day

crowdSPRING Blog

Image credit: Apple. When Apple held their Special Event keynote on September 7th, their live video stream garnered the highest-ever video traffic for an Apple event. In the days following the announcement, almost every technology publication, blogger, and influencer posted some kind of content related to the new iPhone. The phone’s release took over the news cycle again 9 days later, with reviews, guides, and commentary dominating the front page of most news outlets and technology websit

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Burning Man-Machine: Automation gone awry

deal architect

In writing my book, Silicon Collar, I saw plenty of examples of how machines make human workers safer, smarter and speedier. I also became more aware of poor implementations where the man-machine balance is broken and leads to worker and.

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5 Steps To Align Your Core Values With Your Daily Practices

YoungUpstarts

by Michael Manning , chief relationship officer at Rocksauce Studios. No matter your age, just about everybody loves the Beatles. But can your company learn from the Fab Four’s success? Of course, John, Paul, George, and Ringo had the swinging outfits and the screaming fans. But up until the very end, they also shared a key element that helped them stay together as a collective.

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8 Attributes That Still Make Superstars In Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Superstars in business are the ones who get things done, not the ones who work the most hours or are always busy. Whether it be in a startup or a large enterprise, everyone can name those few individuals who stand out as unstoppable, and always seem to be in the forefront of results. Yet if you think about it, it’s not always clear how they do it, or what it takes to be like them.

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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 42: Sunny Shah and Curt Haselton

Steve Blank

We as researchers go in with a bias – that obviously these guys want our technology – but that is not the case for a lot of customers. What you think about your technology is great, but at the end of the day you’re not the one buying it. It was intimidating from day one. I am good with doing research and doing experiments but talking to customers is not my forte.

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Convenience as a Service

Venture Chronicles

I hate going to the gas station. It not a painful experience but it’s never convenient, it’s one of those things that I’ll do at odd hours to try to make it as painless as possible. For a few months now I have been using Filld. This startup has a fleet of roaming gas delivery trucks that will show up between 9pm and 4am to fill your car for you.

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Is Your New Product a Solution Searching for a Problem?

Small Business Force

In other words, people don't pay money for a solution unless it solves their problem. As Theodore Levitt, economist and Harvard Business School professor, so perfectly put it: "People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole." In this time of great technological innovation, no matter how cool or dazzling a new product might be, at the end of the day, if ain’t solving a customer problem or addressing a customer need, nobody is buying it!

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Oracle: Time to push the pedal on cloud apps

deal architect

Larry Ellison joked at Oracle OpenWorld he was told Fusion applications would be developed in 4 years. They have taken over a decade. Snicker all you want. The flip side of that is Oracle started developing cloud apps years before.

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Some Top Shopping Cart Best Practices

YoungUpstarts

Building customer loyalty can be greatly enhanced through shopping cart systems. You want to minimize distractions, enhance the demonstration of value and convince customers your inventory is the solution they need. While it’s going to require significant due diligence, including researching top ecommerce cart software and support, here are a few practices you can use to keep customers coming back.