Sat.Feb 23, 2019 - Fri.Mar 01, 2019

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Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth

abovethecrowd.com

(*) Benchmark is/was an investor in companies labeled with the asterisk. In 1776, Adam Smith released his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , in which he outlined his fundamental economic theories. Front and center in the book — in fact in Book 1, Chapter 1 — is his realization of the productivity improvements made possible through the “Division of Labour”: It is the great multiplication of the production of all the different arts, in consequence of the

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There’s only one real world

Start Up Blog

It’s very hard to understand the consequences of something when you can’t touch it, feel it and experience it in the physical form. Many of our virtual experiences seem displaced from a physical reality. It’s as if it didn’t really happen, that it’s only information and information isn’t real. Digital privacy fits neatly inside this parable.

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Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Startup strategy is like Kung Fu. There are many styles that work. But in a bar fight, you’re going to get punched in the face regardless. I can only teach you my style. Others can only teach you theirs. This is my style. “MVPs” are too M to be V. They’re a selfish ploy, tricking people who thought they were customers into being alpha testers.

Restful 202
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Viral Marketing And Word-of-Mouth Require Investment

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 long time ago that viral marketing does not equal word-of-mouth.

Viral 268
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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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8 Business Trends That Will Make Waves In 2019

YoungUpstarts

Technology has been one of the essential elements that makes a business more effective and successful. It changes continuously, adapting to advancements and innovations in order to constantly improve. In business, the primary driving force is to be able to accommodate the needs and demands of society. Here are eight business trends that you need to watch out for and will continue to grow this year: 1.

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28 Entrepreneurs Share Their Tips and Tricks of Staying Motivated

Hearpreneur

When the going gets rough in business, you’ll need motivation to keep moving. Motivating yourself can be hard but practicing consistent habits such as reminding yourself of why you started can be a major boost. A network of friends and partners can also serve as a great assurance and reminder that you’re not walking. Here’s the various ways entrepreneurs and business owners stay motivated in business. #1- Celebrating the little wins.

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Your Website’s User Experience (UX) Directly Impacts Your Bottom Line

YFS Magazine

A well-designed user experience (UX) could raise your website’s conversion rates by 400 percent. Here's what every online business needs to know.

Design 76
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The coming Enterprise Software Hurricane

deal architect

In interviewing SAP customers for the upcoming book, I ended up classifying them broadly into four groups. I termed the first three: a) Risk-takers who are trying out new Leonardo ML or IoT projects, developing new functionality with its Cloud.

Software 329
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Capital Factory + E-Capital Summit $100,000 Cleantech Investment Challenge

Austin Startup

In recent years, the world has continued to improve energy usage, waste management, and reduce environmental pollution?—?with innovative solutions coming online every day. Technology isn’t the answer to all of our problems, but it’s hard to imagine how we can progress without it. Capital Factory has teamed up with EarthX , an international nonprofit dedicated to helping create a sustainable future worldwide, to give one tech startup a $100,000 investment and direct exposure to cleantech industry

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Email Copywriting 101: Five Steps to Better Converting Emails

ConversionXL

“Email marketing is dead.” That’s what a digital marketer told me while trying to sell me his messenger bot software. But email isn’t going anywhere. Customers who buy through email spend 138% more than those who don’t sign up for email offers. And email marketing has an ROI of 28.5% compared to 7% for direct mail. If you’re unpersuaded by statistics, also recall that: If you own your email list, you pay nothing to reach subscribers.

Email 133
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How to Start a Successful Photography Business: The Complete 10 Step Guide (2019)

crowdSPRING Blog

As the price of high-quality cameras has continued to fall, the art and craft of photography have flourished. For many people, photography isn’t just a way of capturing a memory. Photography is a fulfilling way to express yourself. It’s a way to interpret the world and make the invisible visible. And for many, it’s a way to make a living.

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Transcript of Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work

Duct Tape Marketing

Transcript of Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work 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: Everybody loves best practices. Give me an example. Give me a template to follow. Well, I think that that practice leads to mediocrity.

China 62
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Opportunity Hub Partners with Capital Factory To Bridge Opportunity Gap

Austin Startup

Pre-swag surf group photo of HBCU@SXSW students and Spike Lee at Capital One House Over the past several years, tech communities across the United States have attempted to make significant progress towards increasing diversity and inclusion in their industries. Although positive steps have been made, the headway appears to have stagnated or even worsened in some companies and cities.

Partner 55
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High Functioning vs. Low Functioning Startup Boards

Both Sides of the Table

I’ve sat on many boards over the past 2 decades and seen my share of high-functioning boards and low-functioning boards. Here are some observations I have from this exposure: If a company moves from strength-to-strength with predictable outcomes, easy financings, low staff turn-over, limited competitive threats then the composition of the board probably doesn’t matter as much.

LP 269
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8 Strategies For Winning As A Freelancer Or Employee

Startup Professionals Musings

A big trend in business these days is hiring freelancers or contract personnel for the duration of a project, rather than permanent staff. According to a recent poll , contractors and freelancers could make up half of the American workforce within a decade. Yet I find that few of today’s workers realize that succeeding as a freelancer requires a whole new focus on “marketing” yourself.

Employee 246
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Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work

Duct Tape Marketing

Questioning Best Practices to Do Great Work written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Jay Acunzo. Podcast Transcript. Today on the podcast, I speak with author, keynote speaker, and founder of Unthinkable Media , Jay Acunzo. Acunzo began his career at tech giants, including Google and HubSpot, and he now travels the world as a public speaker and the creator of documentary series about people who do great work, which he builds with B2B brand clients.

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SXSW Startups: New Age Meats

Austin Startup

New Age Meats cofounders Brian Spears and Andra Necula The Forrest Four-Cast: March 1, 2019 Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.

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Stop the speculation, folks

deal architect

Amazon has just started to take advance orders for the eBook version of SAP Nation 3.0. It shows release date of April 15, but we are trying to get it out by March 31. The print version should also be.

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5 Keys To Career And Business Success For Introverts

Startup Professionals Musings

In this age where every person feels the need for a relationship with people they do business with, introverts like me might seem to be at a distinct disadvantage. Most of us just don’t have the urge to proactively get out and talk to new people, face-to-face, online, or through an app. This is equally hard at work, especially when many of our peers may be remote, anywhere in the world.

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How to Stop Your Board Meeting from Going Down a Rat Hole

Both Sides of the Table

Photo by Filipe Delgado from Pexels We’ve all been in meetings that get off track?—?sinking ever down the proverbial “rat hole,” from which rescue feels impossible. How does it happen? And how can you avoid it? This is part of a series on Managing Boards. In my last post I wrote about board preparation before the meeting and frankly this can be applied to any type of meeting.

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Tips For Starting Your First Business

YoungUpstarts

If you’re planning on starting your own business for the first time, don’t let the statistics put you off. As the saying goes, it’s better to fail than have never tried. Skill vs. Luck in Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital: Evidence from Serial Entrepreneurs , a Harvard paper, noted that first-time entrepreneurs have an 18 percent chance for success, but by following these tips you can help increase those odds whether you plan to launch your startup in Edmonton , Vancouver, Boston or anywhere

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Microsoft - a perennial "underachiever" in enterprise apps

deal architect

It's tough to argue with Microsoft - after all, it was at least briefly, the world's most valuable company late last year. CEO Satya Nadella is getting all kinds of kudos. "Whatever they're paying him, it's not enough," former Microsoft.

Software 191
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6 Misconceptions Plague True Social Entrepreneurship

Startup Professionals Musings

An entrepreneur lifestyle that continues to gain in popularity these days is being a “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to provide solutions to social issues On the surface, this sounds like entrepreneurs who want to build a non-profit organization.

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After Organic – The Next Multi-Decade Food Megatrend

View from Seed

We are entering a really interesting phase in the food industry that I think most people don’t fully realize. For the last 20+ years, the dominant trend among grocers, restaurants, packaged food and beverage companies and others have been a market shift towards natural and organic products. What started as a niche movement has permeated all corners of the food and beverage industry, and has been a major strategic priority for large CPG companies and restaurant chains for the last two decades.

eCommerce 168
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How to Prepare for a Board Meeting to Make Sure you Crush It

Both Sides of the Table

Most board meetings are administrative updates that accomplish very little other than inform board members about the performance of the company since the last board meeting. That’s certainly one function of every board but if your board is your “brain trust” and the people you can most use as a sounding board to help you make the toughest decisions in your company and if its the one group truly privy to your most confidential information and your hardest choices then it’s a shame if you don’t ge

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The New York Times still does not get it

deal architect

In 2006, I asked the question "Is the media biased?" I wrote "No this is not about being liberal or conservative. This is about how little MSM covers business technology as against consumer oriented technology. New York City is home.

New York 170
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If Your Passion Is Saving The Environment, Start Here

Startup Professionals Musings

Although I hear more and more about “global warming,” and the many ways we are destroying our environment, I still don’t see many global business winners in this space, comparable to Facebook and Amazon. Al Gore, by just talking about it, still seems to be leading the way in monetization, having amassed an estimated net worth reported recently as around $300 million.

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Advice On How To Make Your First Analytics Hire

View from Seed

Recently, I’ve been working with a few of our portfolio companies to help them think about how to recruit and interview their first analytics hire. As the former Head of Product at Blue Apron where I also built and led our Analytics & Data Science team (I know enough SQL to be dangerous), I have an intuitive sense for the “when” and “what” of this role.

Analytics 149
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Foreign Exchange Hedging For International Businesses

YoungUpstarts

Hedging is a term that is used quite often when it comes to matters related to investing. In the simplest of terms, it means taking measures against putting all your eggs in one basket. This is important because if in the event that basket falls and the eggs break, you will have a safety measure that will protect you from losing all your eggs at once.

Portfolio 138
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How to Build a Successful Startup Ecosystem in your City

Feld Thoughts

I participated in a one hour Crowdcast yesterday with Techstars and 43 North about How to Build a Successful Startup Ecosystem in your City. Some of the thoughts from my upcoming book The Startup Community Way are in the hour, along with a bunch of things Techstars is doing around this initiative. powered by Crowdcast. If you are in a city somewhere in the world working on developing your Startup Community and are interested in learning about the new Techstars Startup Ecosystem Development produ

Startup 151
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Here are the 5 hottest startups in Hungary

The Next Web

By Gianluca Bellan and Andrea Hak Hungary is a startup hub on the rise. You’ve no doubt already heard of Prezi, the country’s first unicorn, which ended the reign of boring presentations globally by making them more engaging and interactive. The company now has over 100 million users, raised $72.8 million in funding and made its first acquisition in 2017.

Hungary 153
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Learn from our nightmare: tips to prevent getting hacked

Version One Ventures

Here at Version One, we had two nightmarish weekends in early February when our accounts were hacked by pretty sophisticated and aggressive hackers. As we’ve since learned, hackers love weekends, because it’s a time when targets may not realize the hack right away and the customer service at service providers is limited. But thanks to very immediate help from Google, Twitter and other organizations, we were able to regain control of our accounts pretty quickly.

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Top Emerging Startup Industries For 2019

YoungUpstarts

by Pamela Webber, Chief Marketing Officer at 99designs. From Instagram agents and personal coaches, to drones, bot doctors and AI-driven healthcare, the hottest emerging industries of 2019 tap into a wide range of technology and personalization trends. We analyzed data from thousands of creative projects completed on 99designs to identify and chart some of the sectors experiencing extraordinary growth and are on track to become the new norm by 2020.

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How My Mother Helped Me Become The Entrepreneur I Am Today

YFS Magazine

From an early age, my mom taught me five things children needed to learn to become a successful adult. They became my life concepts for leadership.

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Here are the 5 hottest startups in Austria

The Next Web

By Marta Dawydzik and Andrea Hak Ahhh Austria. The birthplace of Mozart, ski resorts, schnitzel, and Schwarzenegger. But besides the snow and the food, Austria is also home to a young but vibrant startup scene. Although it’s relatively new on the startup map, Austria has already produced a number of success stories, like Runtastic which was acquired in 2015 by Adidas for $240 million.

Austria 142
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How to Be a Good Board Member

Both Sides of the Table

I have been writing a series on how startup boards get selected, who sits on them and what to avoid. I will also delve into how to prepare for them, how to make the meeting effective and how to best follow up to make sure people take action. Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash In response to one of my posts I saw this great Tweet by Bilal Zuberi and it resonated.

Cofounder 251