Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 8, 2012
Many aspiring entrepreneurs are looking to the Internet as an opportunity to get rich quick, instead of a place where you can start a business you love, for very little capital and minimal technical expertise. The reality is that if you build a business you love, you may in fact make big money, but if you start a business to get rich, you will probably fail.
Agile VC
JUNE 5, 2012
How to Evaluate Firms for a Seed VC. How To Think About The Future. Home. About Me. AGILEVC My idle thoughts on tech startups. The Difference Between Apple & Facebook. June 5, 2012. Apple and Facebook are both platforms , in the sense that their software and user networks are utilized by countless software developers to build their own businesses.
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YoungUpstarts
JUNE 8, 2012
By Michael Levin. As the publishing industry gathers in New York for its annual trade show, BookExpo America , they’re discussing everything except the one piece of information authors crave: how many books they actually sell. There is no equivalent of gold records in the book publishing industry. That’s because sales numbers are almost impossible to come by, and the numbers you can track down simply cannot be verified.
Gust
JUNE 5, 2012
Nothing tells a truth better than a good story. Especially when it’s true. Read Mark Suster’s Never Negotiate Piecemeal. Here’s Why on his Both Sides of the Table blog for a good read and a good lesson. He tells the story of his baptism by fire in startup-dom, a series of negotiations including office rent, sublet, getting people on board, getting the media to care, dealing with recruiters, dealing with the tech prima donnas, and (a favorite of many) “dealing with pesky VCs.&
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
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 5, 2012
Companies today are paranoid, afraid that even their friends will steal their business. Yet a creative collaboration with your biggest competitor may be the best opportunity for revenue and survival. But remember that “dancing with the wolves” can also get you eaten for lunch. You have to take the risk, but keep your wits about you. Your goal is “ coopetition ” - to find a way to partner with your competitor in such a way that both parties can substantially benefit from the other's resources - w
ReadWriteStart
JUNE 6, 2012
Founding your startup with your closest buddy might seem like a dream scenario. Here's how to keep it from turning into a nightmare of dashed hopes and broken friendships. “We should start a business doing (fill in the blank)!”. Who hasn’t brainstormed with their friends trying to come up with the next great million-dollar idea? It’s easy to find inspiration when you’re hanging with a close friend (maybe downing some beers) and since you both see eye-to-eye on almost everything, you can change t
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Gust
JUNE 3, 2012
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.
This is going to be BIG.
JUNE 4, 2012
The person who is sitting across from you in the conference room, more and more often, doesn't look like you. Neither does the person who gets off at your subway stop. The PTA Board is changing, too. This doesn't sit well with most people, but not because they're bad people. It's because we are pattern matchers. If you live in a city, you're probably more used to this change than most--but you would be lying if you have never, ever in your life had a moment where you paused because someone was d
Lightspeed Venture Partners
JUNE 4, 2012
'I’ve posted in the past about how Big Data + Machine Learning is disrupting lending , and about how this disruption in financial services often comes from below , from startups targeting the unbanked. The Economist notes that big data + machine learning is changing underwriting at even big insurers : At least two big American life insurers already waive medical exams for some prospective customers partly because marketing data suggest that they have healthy lifestyles, says Tim Hill of M
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 3, 2012
Debunking conventional wisdom that human beings are rational and logical beings, “ Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions ” by behavioural economist Dan Ariely provides an entertaining and enlightening read in the market-tested tradition of authors like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics series) , Malcolm Gladwell , and Ori and Ron Brafman (Sway).
deal architect
JUNE 5, 2012
When I interviewed Sukumar, CIO at Cognizant for my book last year, he teased me with his vision of “social design,” and his quest to deliver 500 percent productivity on Cognizant projects. I wanted to profile a lot more in.
Steve Blank
JUNE 4, 2012
This is a guest post from Jerry Engel, the Faculty Director of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (and the Founding Faculty Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley.). ———– The 99%. As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C.
Duct Tape Marketing
JUNE 8, 2012
One of the greatest things about technology is that it can make us more efficient, allow us to automate interactions, be on every corner and remain open twenty-four hours a day without the need for a human attendant. thisisbossi via Flickr CC. And, it can wall us off from our customers and prevent us for building the kinds of relationships that help us get better at what we do, help us understand the true needs of our customers and help us build the kind of community that can sustain us through
Rob Go
JUNE 7, 2012
There is a dark cloud over the internet sector due to the weak performance of the Facebook IPO. It’s not horribly dramatic by any means – Facebook is clearly an important company (even if it’s not worth $90B+). But a lot of entrepreneurs and investors were hoping for a really strong showing to drive more liquidity in the market and continue the surge in hype around internet companies (both start-ups and later stage companies).
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 4, 2012
Business success begins in the mind of the startup founder and his team. A winning startup is a team of entrepreneurs who build and run the business as an extension of who they are, rather than some extrapolation of the Google or Facebook model. It’s not so easy to fake the important attributes when the going gets rough. So before you risk it all by jumping into a startup, do a reality check on your own mind to see if you can find a majority of the following attributes, summarized from the book
deal architect
JUNE 6, 2012
On the flight over to the HP Discover event this week, I read Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine and he describes how 3M with over 50,000 products uses “conceptual blending”. 3M “regularly rotates its engineers, moving them from division to division. A.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
JUNE 5, 2012
This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. Adventurous Advertiser writes: I’m ready to spend my first $1000 on something other than AdWords. There’s lots of options and I don’t know where to start.
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 6, 2012
Some of us may think that the city we live in is incredibly boring with very few things to do – many of my own compatriots in Singapore feel this way – but the truth to it is that there are a lot of activities available around us we may enjoy participating in that we’re simply not aware of. And that’s where many social discovery apps come in, trying to help us find interesting things to do.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 7, 2012
A “downer” is defined here as someone who seems to dwell on the negatives of every business challenge, and loves to highlight bad news or potential problems. No matter how smart or experienced this person may otherwise be, things must change or they will kill your startup. I’m not talking about someone who has an occasional bad day, but rather people who when asked, “How are things?
deal architect
JUNE 6, 2012
Part 2 in a 5 part series from Sukumar Rajgopal, CIO at Cognizant. The kick off column was here. “We were really intrigued when we heard Cognizant’s Malcolm Frank and industry guru Geoffrey Moore discuss the enterprise/consumer IT divide. They.
Rembrandt Communications
JUNE 6, 2012
You’ve seen the bundled services for Internet, phone and television which can often save you a lot of money. Well, today you’ll also see a lot of these “bundled” services for search engine optimization, or SEO. With the tough economy, many businesses are trying to branch out and offer customers unique packages at a discount. [.].
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 6, 2012
Don’t we all go “aawwww…” at the pictures of all those cute and cuddly pets our friends put up on their Facebook walls? Don’t you go gaga over Boo , the world’s cutest dog, whose Facebook page has over 4 million friends? OK, maybe not all of us. For those who’d rather not have pictures of animals flooding our timelines, here’s a tip: introduce pet-owning friends to Aiiooo ( www.aiiooo.com ), a fully-fledged social network for pets.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 2, 2012
Based on my own experience and feedback from friends, every investor is approached by at least ten entrepreneurs with a “hot idea” for a new business, for every one who has a real “plan” for a new business. That’s why I often say that ideas are worth nothing, until they are put in the context of a business plan and real people committed to executing the plan.
deal architect
JUNE 7, 2012
Part 3 in a 5 part series from Sukumar Rajgopal, CIO at Cognizant. The kick off column was here. Part 2 is here. As described in the previous post, our goal was to produce a OneClick timesheet. This proved to.
For Entrepreneurs
JUNE 6, 2012
Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm with a strong focus on SaaS, has surveyed a 70 SaaS companies with very interesting results. There is some great data on topics such as growth rates, cost of customer acquisition, churn/retention, expense models, capital efficiency, etc. The full survey, which was put together by David Spitz and his team [.].
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 8, 2012
So you’re looking to gain some practical industry experience during term break or to find out if the industry you’re eying is really worth joining. An internship may be what you need. Employers are definitely keen to have you and internships are proven to have a better chance of landing you a full-time job offer, as long as you meet what they want in interns.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 6, 2012
Customer service has always been reactionary, meaning someone to wake up and answer website email requests. That’s just not sufficient to hold today’s fickle, less loyal, and ready to jump customer. Great startups are getting ahead of the game with “anticipatory customer service,” like providing smart phone access to product and account data to head off complaints.
deal architect
JUNE 8, 2012
I first met Larry Ellison, briefly, in 1997. I have watched him infuriate competitors, drive analysts to drink, generate more quips than all boring tech execs put together. Over those 15 years I have also learned to look beyond his.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 5, 2012
My friend Chris Moody , the COO of Gnip, has another guest post up today titled Startup Culture: Values vs. Vibe. He’s written about this in the past on his blog, but we both thought it was worth reposting. Enjoy – and comment freely, especially if you disagree or have constructive feedback. I hear some form of the following question frequently from founders that are starting to have early success: “How do we hire a bunch of new people and grow the company quickly without losin
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 4, 2012
by Teddy Reynolds. It is common wisdom that few small businesses survive past the first two years, and fewer still make it past the five year mark. The common wisdom does tend to exaggerate the actual rate of failure, which was quantified by the Small Business Administration as a 30 percent failure in two years and just under 50 percent failure rate after five years.
Startup Professionals Musings
JUNE 3, 2012
Most entrepreneurs start their company with the highest of ideals, and wouldn’t dream of building one with a culture of indifference or downright unethical behavior. Yet all too many succumb to the pressures of survival, driven by demanding investors in a cutthroat competitive environment. How does a Founder recognize the warning signs, let alone know what to do about it?
deal architect
JUNE 5, 2012
“The advertising industry is evolving and growing at an incredible pace, moving increasingly toward online and IP-served platforms, which dramatically increases the importance of software for this industry,” Guess what: Steve Ballmer of Microsoft said that in 2007 when they.
ReadWriteStart
JUNE 5, 2012
The dreaded pink slip - it’s still an all-too-common occurrence in America today. Despite an economy that appears to be on the road to recovery, there are still too many Americans being laid off every day. So what are we going to do about it? Most unemployed Americans have only a few options. Most spend their days applying for jobs, not just because they need the opportunity to work and earn a living, but also because job searching is a prerequisite for collecting unemployment compensation.
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 4, 2012
While hard work isn’t a guarantee of a successful business or a million dollar paycheck, it certainly doesn’t hurt, and there are plenty of real-life examples of that. Many top executives didn’t start off in high-paying, respected positions with an MBA in hand — far from it, in fact. These enterprising minds worked their way up to the top, quite commonly beginning their careers working in mailrooms or in positions at the very bottom of the corporate ladder.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 3, 2012
Amy and I just spent an incredible week in Reykjavik, Iceland. This was our first time here and everything was awesome – the people, the food, the weather, the hotels, the weather, the people, the food, the people, the weather – you get the idea. Bala Kamallakharan was our host and the founder of Startup Iceland. He’s got a great post up titled Startup Iceland 2012 – Done!
deal architect
JUNE 8, 2012
The last part in the series from Sukumar Rajgopal, CIO at Cognizant. The kick off column was here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here and here is Part 4 “We started envisioning the Meeting Concierge app to streamline.
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